The old investigator is bent and frail, and he leans heavily on his walker. But his brain’s still sharp, and it’s full of secrets, a few of which he now wants to tell. “I thought I’d take these secrets to my grave, but I changed my mind,” says Paul Newey, his voice gruff and commanding. “I’m 86 years old now–I don’t have much time left. I want the story out.”
For as long as he can remember, Newey, who grew up in Chicago, wanted to be a fighter in the war against crime. He certainly wasn’t going over to the other side. “My father was a minister and a leader in the Assyrian community here,” hesays. “He was a man of God with a reputation in the community. I didn’t want to do anything to embarrass him.”
He took a job as a uniformed Secret Service officer in Washington, D.C. “I was making 100 bucks a month, and I had to send 25 of that to my parents in Chicago,” he says. “Times were rough.”
Turning to the police or politicians for help was of little use. The mob paid many cops to look the other way, even used them as its enforcers. One of the great open secrets of Chicago–first exposed by muckrakers such as Mike Royko and Ovid Demaris–was that each precinct had its own bagmen raking in payoffs from the illegal action. Every now and then the police, reporters in tow, would stage a high-profile raid, but it was all nudge-nudge, wink-wink. After the publicity faded, the action continued as if nothing had ever happened.
“And so the culture of corruption flourished,” says Newey. “You had to assume that in any given case there was the chance that the fix was in.”
He’d started out as one of the crown princes in the Democratic machine, with the right pedigree for advancement in Chicago politics. His father, Max Adamowski, was a tavern owner and Democratic alderman. The party gave the young Ben Adamowski a cushy job in the clerk’s office, and in 1931, when he was only 25, he was elected to the statehouse as the representative of a Polish legislative district on the northwest side. In Springfield he quickly earned a reputation as a flashy orator; in their book American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley and His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor call him the “Daniel Webster of the West.”
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Of the two, Cain was the more talkative, a humorous storyteller with a slick, streetwise edge. He claimed his real name was Ricardo Scalzitti and said he’d grown up in a poor Italian neighborhood on the near west side. “He let me know how tough he was–how much he knew about the mob and the underworld,” says Newey. He also let Newey know that he wasn’t just an ordinary cop, that he was a renaissance man of superior intelligence, a bon vivant, a master chef, a raconteur who could speak several languages. He said he could tell that Newey and Adamowski were outstanding law officials for whom it would be an honor to work. He said he shared Newey’s passion for counter-espionage and that he was familiar with black bag operations. “He had a way about him–a way of telling you just what you wanted to hear, but in a subtle way, so that if you weren’t paying attention you wouldn’t realize you were being taken,” says Newey. “He started telling me how he was a crackerjack investigator who was unafraid to go after the mob and I should hire them as soon as possible. I said, ‘I can’t hire you without doing a background check, but I’ll tell you what. If you guys are as good as you say you are, you should go on furlough from the city and do this little undercover assignment.’”
