Who knew that so many major gangsters once lived in Oak Park and River Forest?
Mob historian and author John J. Binder does, and he shares that knowledge during There Goes the Neighborhood tours. The next two-hour tours take place at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. July 8, starting at the Oak Park Visitors Center.
Participants will ride on a bus to view the exteriors of 14 Oak Park and River Forest houses once owned by major hoodlums. They will learn about these houses and gangsters from an authority on the subject. Binder is the author of “The Chicago Outfit” (2003), which details the history of the mob in Chicago from the late 1800s to 2003; and “Al Capone’s Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago during Prohibition” (2017).
The River Forest resident has additional insider information about those homes because he has actually been inside 10 of them.
“I was always interested in this part of history,” Binder said, noting that he originally read what other people wrote about major hoodlums. “I got much more interested around 1991 and quickly jumped to the other side of the fence,” he said. That led to the publication of his first book, “The Chicago Outfit.”
Binder has done extensive research on the topic. “I worked on photos and photo identification. I’ve dug heavily into newspaper archives,” he said, in addition to other sources.
Through his research, Binder discovered, “A lot of things that are seen as facts are more towards mythology or misconception,” he said. “For example, the number of members of the major bootlegging gangs in Chicago is actually fairly low compared to what one would have thought or would have expected.”
Oak Park and River Forest weren’t the only suburbs inhabited by mobsters years ago. “There were also a number of them in the adjoining suburbs, like Elmwood Park and Melrose Park, Cicero, Berwyn,” Binder reported.
They clustered in those areas for a reason “that’s important to the rest of us, too,” Binder said, because it’s “a short commute to work.” The western suburbs were convenient to their bases of operation.
“It was a question of income level, too,” Binder added. “The higher income guys could generally afford nicer places in either Oak Park or River Forest.”
Binder described the There Goes the Neighborhood tours as “essentially a two-hour-plus deep immersion in the history of organized crime in Chicago from Prohibition to the 1980s or even beyond. I talk the entire time. I talk about these guys, their careers, what they did, their world, the house, their family.”
Binder encourages people to ask questions and gets a wide range of them from tour participants. “Sometimes it’s a follow-up on something I said about this guy’s life or career,” he said, “or much broader things like about this movie they saw or what this book says, or they’ve heard that the Kennedys were tied to the Chicago mob.”
There’s no walking on these tours. Participants ride in a bus that seats 44 people. Advance reservations are encouraged because the tours sometimes sell out.
There Goes the Neighborhood tours
When: 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. July 8; also Sept. 16 and Oct. 14
Where: Leaves from the Oak Park Visitors Center, 1010 Lake St., Oak Park
Tickets: $30; $27 for veterans and seniors
Information: 708-848-1500; www.visitoakpark.com
