I heard Trustee Shields remark last year that Riverside history was not only about Olmsted. He pointed out that the Chicago Crime Commission had roots in Riverside. I decided to look into this.
I found we had a long-time resident, Virgil Peterson, who was the second head of that commission.
He came to this area to study law at Northwestern. In 1931 he joined the FBI. He was chief aide to the agents in charge of the Dillinger case, Melvin Purvis, and Sam Cowley, who was later killed by Pretty Boy Floyd.
He went on to head the St Louis and Boston FBI offices. From there, he was recruited by the Chicago Crime Commission. He was one of a very few people responsible for precipitating the Kefauver hearings, before which no one accepted the existence of organized crime. He was the foremost expert in the US on organized crime, and had the first database of such figures.
His concern was not confined to the Cosa Nostra or ethnic Italians or Sicilians, but was focused on the intimate relationship between criminals and the political structure of Chicago, the County, and indeed, the United States. He implicates Harry Truman as a force in the shocking early parole of the top-ranking Chicago gangsters who shook down Hollywood, which episode occasioned the suicide of Frank Nitti, another resident of Riverside.
His return to Chicago was in 1942. Nitti, then resident, took his life in 1943. One of the things I am interested in is when Virgil Peterson moved into Riverside. One wonders what an encounter with neighbor Nitti might have been like, if it happened.
He died here in 1989, and apparently had 100 rose bushes.
His absolutely fearless book about the Chicago political-criminal structure is Barbarians in our Midst, 1950. He is an excellent writer. In 1983, he wrote a The Mob, a history of the New York mob. He was an extraordinary man of great courage and integrity.
For some reason, he never wrote that I have discovered about the Dillinger case, which appears also to be shrouded in some controversy.
I wonder if anyone out there knows his descendants or any person in-town anecdotes about him, or indeed anything.