Two Hundred Slot Machines on First Street

It was a Friday night in 1946.

The Rock Island Rocket pulled into the LaSalle station in a hiss of steam and diesel, and a thousand Chicagoans stepped off into a small Illinois River town of about 9,500 souls — and zero hotel vacancies for thirty miles in any direction.

They walked four blocks east to First Street, where the neon was already hot. A three-story brick building with a glazed tan exterior dominated the block, lit up so bright the sign could be read from the bridge. Inside, the bar ran the length of the first floor. Punchboards lined the back wall — radios, hunting rifles, kitchen radios as prizes. The racing wire machine clattered nonstop in a corner, calling results from Hialeah, Hawthorne, Bay Meadows. A 50-cent steak dinner came with bread and gravy. A 25-cent chicken dinner came with everything else.

But the steak wasn't the point.

The point was upstairs. A doorless stairway opened straight off First Street, no greeter, no bouncer, no cover. At the top: an ornate round counter bar. A roulette wheel as big as a kitchen table. Fifty-plus slot machines along the walls. Poker rooms behind doors. A bandstand stage where, depending on the week, Donald O'Connor was tap-dancing, George Gobel was telling jokes, or Jack Dempsey was buying drinks for strangers.

Two hundred slot machines, total, across the building. Craps tables. A bookie's "cage" that did thousands of dollars a week in baseball pools alone. A six-piece house band led by a piano player named Herbie Hummer, six nights a week, often until three or four in the morning.

You could not find a hotel room in LaSalle on a Friday night in 1946. Not one. The streets were standing-room-only.

The Chicagoans had a nickname for the place.

They called it Little Reno.

Why "Little Reno"? The name origin no one talks about.

Reno, Nevada had legalized gambling in 1931. Within five years it was the casino capital of the West and the divorce capital of America — a desert town of about 18,000 that punched so far above its weight the locals nicknamed it "the Biggest Little City in the World."

LaSalle, Illinois was 95 miles southwest of Chicago on the Rock Island line, with about half Reno's population, and absolutely none of Reno's legal cover. Slot machines were illegal in Illinois. Casinos were illegal in Illinois. Bookmaking was illegal in Illinois. The state didn't legalize a state lottery until 1974 and didn't legalize riverboat casinos until 1990.

None of that mattered in LaSalle.

By 1940, between 60 and 80 saloons operated inside the LaSalle city limits — roughly one saloon per 120 residents. Most of them had at least one slot machine. A handful had craps tables in back rooms. A solid dozen ran full casino floors with roulette wheels, poker rooms, and house orchestras. The Illinois Valley Manufacturers Club met at the Hotel Kaskaskia. Westclox shipped its luminous Big Ben alarm clocks out by the trainload from the Peru factory two miles west. The Matthiessen-Hegeler Zinc Company smelted the largest tonnage of zinc in the United States from a 160-acre plant on the bluff.

And in the middle of all that quiet industrial productivity, LaSalle ran more open illegal gambling than any town its size in America.

The nickname "Little Reno" came from the Chicago market — the Friday-night clientele on the Rocket train. It was both a compliment and a punchline. The compliment: LaSalle had the same neon, the same craps tables, the same bandstands as Reno. The punchline: it was all illegal, and everybody knew it, and nobody cared.

The Mayor knew. The Police Chief knew. The Sheriff knew. The State's Attorney knew. The newspaper publisher knew. The pastor knew. The schoolteachers knew. Half the wives in town knew.

The deal worked because the locals had decided, collectively, that as long as local men ran the rackets, the rackets weren't really a problem. Gambling was a victimless crime. The slot machines paid for the streetlights. The bookies bought from the local grocers. The casinos hired local musicians. The high rollers who came down on the Rocket left their money in town. Everyone won. Except, occasionally, the housewife whose husband lost a paycheck.

The man at the center of all of it was a stocky Irish ex-streetcar conductor named Thomas J. Cawley.

The Czar of Gambling

Tom Cawley was the son of a coal miner. LaSalle had been a coal town since 1855, when the LaSalle Coal Mining Company sank its first shaft into the bluff above the Illinois & Michigan Canal. By 1884 there were six working shafts in the area, the deepest 452 feet, producing a million tons a year. Cawley's father went down those shafts. Cawley got out — he took a job as a streetcar conductor on the LaSalle-Peru horse-and-dummy line.

He hated it.

In the mid-1920s, Cawley quit the streetcars and went in with another local Irishman, Vincent "Vince" Kelly, on a tiny pool hall and cigar store on First Street. The cigar store was a fig leaf. What they were really selling, from day one, was gambling — pool wagers, baseball pools, the occasional dice game in the back.

Vince Kelly died in 1932. (Steve Stout's Starved Rock Stories, working from oral history in the 1980s, spelled the name "Vice Kelly" — which became the source of a small folk legend that Cawley's partner had been named after the very thing they sold. The Cawley Chicago Commercial Real Estate company, run by Tom's descendant Daniel Cawley, has confirmed the spelling: it was Vince. Vincent. The "Vice" was a transcription error.)

Cawley kept Kelly's name on the door for the next 21 years. Habit, maybe. Sentiment. Or just because "Kelly & Cawley's" sounded like a place. Like an institution. Which, by 1937, it was.

That was the year Cawley took out a bank loan and gut-renovated the cigar store into a full casino. He saw the war coming — Hitler had marched into the Rhineland the year before — and he saw the diversion economy that was going to follow. He built up. Three stories of brick. Glazed tan exterior, designed to take the weather. Three front entrances: two onto the main floor for the bar and the punchboard crowd, and one doorless stairway that led, with no greeter, no bouncer, and no questions asked, straight up to the gaming floor.

For the next 16 years he was — in the Ottawa Republican-Times' phrase, picked up and reprinted across the Midwest — "the Czar of Gambling."

He was famously affable. He played to the room. He wore a good suit. He treated the city's police chiefs as colleagues and friends, and he wrote them checks. (How much, exactly, is not in the public record. The "expensive blessing of local politicians and police officials" is the single most quoted phrase in Stout's account.) He gave instructions to first-time gamblers in a polite, almost grandfatherly way: "Ladies and gentlemen, this game is simple. You just punch a number on the board. If you punch the lucky number, you win the prize."

His one rule, reportedly, was this: if a wife or mother came in with a story about a husband or son blowing the rent money on the slots, Cawley would refund the whole loss without argument — on the condition that the family member never come back to play. He couldn't afford to lose the marriage; he could absolutely afford to lose the bet.

His house band leader, a piano player named Herbie Hummer, ran the bandstand for 16 years. Hummer was hired solo at first to play piano, then around 1939–1940 he assembled a six-piece band. After Cawley's was finally raided in 1953 and shut down, Hummer kept playing piano around the Illinois Valley until his death. He was the most-quoted firsthand witness to the era. His testimony, recorded by Stout before he died:

"Man, those were the days... everyone was having a good time! I was first hired by 'the old man' to play piano by myself and later on, around 1939 or '40, I put together a six-piece band for the club. We played six nights a week and the place was always busy, often to three or four o'clock in the morning. You actually had to fight the crowds on the streets and sidewalks to get from Cawley's place to the Silver Congo Club down the way... The Rock Island Rocket would bring trainloads of folks down from Chicago and you couldn't find a motel or hotel room within miles of LaSalle. Cawley's was a well-known place... I once saw Jack Dempsey and Dizzy Dean there!"

"I often helped 'the old man' count money and man, I'm telling you, it was like lettuce, there was so much of it at times!"

Like lettuce. So much of it.

That's how a 50-cent steak dinner penciled out: when you're counting cash like lettuce, you can afford to give the steak away.

Who actually walked through the door

Cawley was not the only entertainer in the building. He paid for the headliners himself, and he paid well. The men and women who played the bandstand at Kelly & Cawley's in the 1940s included:

Donald O'Connor. Vaudeville-born child star. By the time he played LaSalle, he was a Universal Pictures musical regular working his way toward what would become, in 1952, the most famous tap-dance number in American film history — "Make 'Em Laugh" in Singin' in the Rain. O'Connor was drafted into the Special Services entertainment branch of the Army during WWII. The Cawley engagements, by best evidence, came either just before or just after that service.

George Gobel. Country comedian. Cawley booked him before he was famous. Within a few years of those LaSalle dates, Gobel had his own NBC sitcom, The George Gobel Show (1954), and won an Emmy. He stayed beloved on television into the 1980s — late-period boomer audiences mostly remember him from Hollywood Squares. But in 1947, in a converted cigar store in LaSalle, Illinois, he was just another comic on a small-room bandstand.

Jack Dempsey. Heavyweight champion of the world from 1919 to 1926. He didn't play. He came in and drank. Hummer saw him.

Dizzy Dean. St. Louis Cardinals pitching legend, 30-game winner in 1934, three-time NL strikeout leader. He didn't play either. He came in and gambled. Hummer saw him too.

These names matter because they tell you the truth about what Cawley's was. It wasn't a backwater joint. It wasn't a hick saloon. It was a fully professionalized, nationally-routed entertainment venue that happened to be illegal. Cawley was paying the same booking agents as the Chicago club operators. He just couldn't advertise the venue.

The other joints

Cawley was the biggest, but he wasn't alone. On the same stretch of First Street, and within a half-mile in either direction, the LaSalle gambling district included — by Stout's canonical list — at least fourteen named clubs, each with its own neon and its own crowd:

Tinney's Silver Congo Lounge. Run by William R. "Tinney" Cosgrove Sr. Tinney was a roofer in the 1920s who pivoted into the soft-drink-parlor business in Peru, then into nightclubs as Prohibition ended. The Silver Congo was one of the two biggest competitors to Kelly & Cawley's. Hummer's quote about "fighting the crowds on the streets and sidewalks to get from Cawley's place to the Silver Congo Club down the way" tells you what that block looked like on a Saturday at midnight.

The Cotton Club. Yes — named after the Harlem original. LaSalle had its own. Sometime in the late 1930s a LaSalle proprietor decided to brand a club after the most famous nightclub in America, a Harlem institution that had launched Duke Ellington's career, and apparently nobody pushed back. The LaSalle Cotton Club was on First Street. It had a band. It had bettors. It was, judging by every account, completely unrelated to the Harlem original except in spirit.

Club 359. Address-named, at 359 (presumably First Street). A standard pattern in the era — Detroit had Club 152, Chicago had Club 100, LaSalle had Club 359.

Little Jimmy's Club 109. Address-named again, at 109. The "Little Jimmy" suggests a single-proprietor operation, smaller than Cawley's, neighborhood-feel.

The Gay Mill. "Gay" in the 1940s sense — lively, flirtatious. The name was era-perfect.

The Rose Bowl. Likely had a bowling lane attached, like its Chicago namesake. Likely also had craps.

El Mirador. A Spanish-style name in the middle of small-town Illinois. The kind of branding that says we are exotic, we are different, come spend your money here.

The Stables. Horsey theme. Probably wired heavily to racing.

The Rocket Inn. Named for the train that brought the customers. The most direct possible piece of marketing.

Denny's Tavern. Single-proprietor. The Denny in question is lost to history.

The Twin Bars. Two bars under one roof, presumably.

The Senate. A "respectable" name. The kind of place that wanted to feel like a private club. Probably had wood paneling and the better-dressed crowd.

The Empire. Ditto.

The South Bluff Country Club. Also operated by Tinney Cosgrove. Still exists today as a public golf course at 229 N 2550th Rd, Peru — par 36, 2,851 yards, built 1930. In the 1940s it was Tinney's second venue, a "country club" with all the amenities of one and a back-room operation that distinctly wasn't.

Plus, per R.G. Bluemer's Casino: Glitz, Glamour, and Gambling in the Illinois Valley, the canon includes at least four more whose stories Bluemer dedicated full chapters to: Roda's, the Diamond Horseshoe, the Hawaiian Room, and the Paddock Club.

That's at least 18 named, full-fledged clubs in a town of 9,500 people. Plus the 60 to 80 ordinary saloons. Plus the slot machines that, per Hummer's deathbed testimony, were even installed in gas stations.

Tinney Cosgrove's heartbreak

Of all the operators in Little Reno, the one with the saddest story is Tinney Cosgrove.

Tinney and his wife Mabel Kohr Cosgrove had two sons: Mickey, born 1924, and Dick, born 1927. Through the late 1930s, with the Silver Congo and the South Bluff both pulling cash, Tinney started building.

He was building a movie theater in downtown LaSalle. He was going to call it The Peacock.

The plans were in. The site was being prepped. By 1942, it was probably the most ambitious new construction project anyone had launched in town since the Hotel Kaskaskia opened in 1915.

Then Mickey enlisted.

Mickey graduated from St. Bede Academy in Peru in June 1942. He had been on the golf team. He ran his own service-and-oil station at 4th and Pike Streets in Peru. He was 5'5" and 155 pounds with hazel eyes and brown hair, and he registered for the WWII draft on June 30, 1942, the day after his 18th birthday. He went in February 1943. He was assigned to Company I, 33rd Armored Regiment, 3rd Armored Division — the "Spearhead" division.

He hit Omaha Beach on June 26, 1944, twenty days after D-Day. He fought through the bocage at Hill 91 / Haut Vents in mid-July. He was wounded. He came back to duty August 7, 1944. He crossed the Seine. He crossed the Marne on August 27. He reached the Aisne on August 28.

He was killed in action August 29, 1944, near the Aisne crossings at Pont D'Arcy and Soissons, France.

He was 20 years old.

When the telegram arrived in LaSalle, Tinney stopped construction on The Peacock. The theater was never finished. Mickey's body was not returned home until 1948 — four years later, when the U.S. military finally completed the European repatriations. The funeral was held November 8, 1948, at St. Mary's Catholic Church, departing from the family home at 610 Bucklin Street, with burial at St. Vincent Cemetery in LaSalle. Five of Mickey's Cosgrove uncles served as honorary pallbearers, along with his uncle Louis Kohr.

The Silver Congo kept running. Tinney kept the books, kept the band on the bandstand, and kept his game running until Warren came for everyone in 1953. But there's no record that he ever tried to revive The Peacock. Whatever it was going to be, it died on the Aisne in 1944.

The hotel where the Chicagoans slept (when they could find a room)

The grand hotel of LaSalle was — and is, even in its current shuttered state — the Hotel Kaskaskia at 217 Marquette Street.

It opened in September 1915. The architects were the Chicago firm Marshall & Fox, the same partnership that had designed the Drake Hotel and the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. (Marshall & Fox is the most underappreciated single fact about LaSalle's architectural heritage. The same hands that drew up the Drake — the Drake, where presidents stayed and Sinatra sang — drew up a hotel in a 9,000-person zinc town 95 miles down the Rocket line.)

It was six stories. 107 guest rooms. Red brick. Colonial Revival. Five storefronts on the ground floor. A 250-seat convention hall added in 1923. Sixth-floor club rooms reserved for the Illinois Valley Manufacturers Club. It was conceived by a "Kaskaskia Hotel Group" of seven Illinois Valley elite businessmen who wanted to set, in their own words, "a new mark in the arrangement, construction, and equipment of modern hotels outside of metropolitan cities."

Illinois Governor Edward Dunne was the very first guest at the grand opening.

Confirmed celebrity stays during the hotel's 86-year run include:

• Amelia Earhart
• Spike Jones & His City Slickers (the comedy band famous for "Cocktails for Two" and "Der Fuehrer's Face")
• Amelita Galli-Curci, the Italian operatic coloratura soprano whose voice opened the Metropolitan Opera season for ten years
• Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet during WWII, the man who signed the Japanese surrender for the United States

From 1928 to 1934, the hotel housed the studios of WJBC AM, the first radio station ever licensed to LaSalle, which had launched in 1925 from the Hummer Furniture Store on First Street with a slogan that's worth saying out loud: "Where Jazz Becomes Classic." (Hummer Furniture, by the way, was almost certainly run by relatives of Herbie Hummer, the piano player at Cawley's. The Hummer family was musical, well-connected, and embedded in everything LaSalle did for two generations.)

WJBC moved to Bloomington in 1934 because the Depression had killed its LaSalle backers. The hotel kept the convention business. Through the 1920s, persistent rumors — never confirmed — held that the hotel had a speakeasy operation running during Prohibition. Given that LaSalle was a river town and Hotel Kaskaskia was the most expensive bar in town, those rumors were almost certainly true.

The Kaskaskia is also the most famously haunted building in the Illinois Valley.

Two suicide stories anchor the lore. The first is undocumented but widely told: a young woman in the 1920s threw herself, or was pushed by her boyfriend, from a top-floor window. The bartenders and event staff, for decades afterward, reported phantom heel-clicks moving down empty corridors. The elevator doors, when nobody was on the floor, would open by themselves.

The second is documented: in 1948, a woman jumped from the roof and died. The article ran in the local papers; the death was real.

The hotel closed in 2001 after 86 years of continuous operation. It was briefly used as a senior independent-living facility. In 2003, industrialist Blouke Carus — yes, of that Carus family, the great-great-grandson of zinc baron Edward Hegeler — bought it for one dollar at a LaSalle County sheriff's auction to keep it from being demolished. As of 2026 it sits empty, awaiting a restoration that has been pending for two decades. Marshall & Fox's Colonial Revival columns are still up. The terra cotta is still in place. The ghosts, by all accounts, are still there.

The Rock Island Rocket

The Chicagoans got to LaSalle on a train called the Rocket.

The Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad introduced six lightweight diesel "Rocket" streamliners in 1937 — the first major U.S. railroad to put diesel power on regular passenger service. They were art-deco stunners: streamlined locomotives, plush interior coaches, dining cars, observation lounges, panoramic windows. Air conditioning, which was a borderline-unbelievable luxury in 1937.

The Chicago-to-Quad-Cities run left LaSalle Street Station in Chicago and stopped at Joliet, Morris, Ottawa, LaSalle, Bureau before continuing west. LaSalle was about 95 miles in — an easy two-hour ride from the Loop. You could leave Chicago at 5 PM on a Friday, gamble until three AM Saturday, sleep on the Kaskaskia's top floor, gamble again Saturday night, and be back at your office Monday morning with a hangover and an alibi.

It was the perfect weekend infrastructure for an illegal industry.

Hummer's quote, again, says everything: "The Rock Island Rocket would bring trainloads of folks down from Chicago and you couldn't find a motel or hotel room within miles of LaSalle."

The Rocket service hung on through the 1960s and 1970s in degraded form, renamed the Cornhusker, then the Quad Cities Rocket, until the ICC finally killed it in May 1978. Today the closest Metra service to LaSalle terminates at Joliet, 50 miles east. There have been proposals to extend it to LaSalle-Peru — a feasibility study was completed in 2003 — but as of 2026 there's nothing on the books past Minooka.

If you want to ride the Rocket route now, you have to drive it.

The Chicago Mob, the Wire Service, and the wars Cawley was actually inside of

Here is the part that almost nobody talks about, because almost nobody knows it.

Tom Cawley, when he testified to the Kefauver Committee in October 1950, was asked about his "racing wire service." The committee, examining him through Associated Counsel George Robinson, was astonished when Cawley answered the questions instead of pleading the Fifth.

What Cawley admitted to using was the Continental Press Service — and Continental Press was, by the time Cawley was using it, owned by the Chicago Outfit. The same Outfit Cawley insisted he had kept out of LaSalle.

Here's the timeline almost nobody puts together with LaSalle:

In the 1930s, the dominant national racing-wire service was the Nation-Wide News Service, owned by Moses Annenberg (yes, that Annenberg — father of Walter, founder of TV Guide, and the namesake of the Annenberg School). The wire transmitted minute-by-minute racing results, scratches, jockey changes, post-time odds, photo-finish outcomes from every major track in America to bookies across the country, by Western Union teletype. No serious bookie could operate without it. The Western Union "official" results came delayed by minutes — long enough for a sharp inside-bettor to cheat. Continental was real-time.

In November 1939, under federal pressure (Annenberg was about to go to prison for tax evasion), Annenberg sold the wire service to his longtime operations manager, James M. Ragen Sr., an Irishman from Chicago's Patch neighborhood. Ragen's brother Frank had run Ragen's Colts, one of the most violent street gangs in early-20th-century Chicago history. James Ragen had grown up in the wire-service business. He renamed it Continental Press.

For the next six years, the Chicago Outfit — under boss Tony "Joe Batters" Accardo, with consigliere Paul Ricca, finance chief Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, and political fixer Murray "The Camel" Humphreys — pressured Ragen to sell.

He refused.

In late 1945, the Outfit retaliated by establishing a competing wire service called Trans-American Publishing, run on the West Coast by Bugsy Siegel, who forced bookies to subscribe at $100 a day under threat of physical violence.

In April 1946, a Chicago bookie named Harry "Red" Richmond was gunned down outside his home for switching back to Continental.

On June 24, 1946, James Ragen was driving down State Street in Chicago when a passing car opened fire on him at Pershing Road with a shotgun. He survived the ambush. He was rushed to a hospital and put under 24-hour police guard. From his bed, Ragen named names: he signed an affidavit that if he died, Tony Accardo, Jake Guzik, and Murray Humphreys would be the men responsible.

On August 14, 1946, after a remarkable apparent recovery, Ragen took a sudden turn. He died at 4:55 a.m. on August 15. The autopsy showed traces of mercury in his blood. Someone had gotten past the 24-hour police guard and poisoned him in his hospital bed.

The murder was never solved.

In May 1947, Continental Press was bought by Arthur "Mickey" McBride, who promptly transferred sole ownership to his 23-year-old son Eddie McBride — at the time a college student. Trans-American announced it was shutting down. The Chicago Outfit, by simply replacing Ragen with a friendly figurehead, had achieved total control of the national racing wire by acclamation.

In February 1951, the Kefauver Committee's final report concluded that "The Continental Press national horse track service is controlled by the Capone mob in Chicago." Senator Kefauver called Continental "Public Enemy No. 1." When Eddie McBride was questioned by the committee in Miami, Chief Counsel Rudolph Halley asked him: "You are a complete figurehead and dummy, is that right?" McBride's answer: "I guess you would put it that way if you wanted to." Tom Kelly, his uncle, testified that Eddie's pre-tax income for 1949 had been $692,000 — about $8.7 million in 2026 dollars — for a 23-year-old college kid whose name was on the company.

The whole national wire-service war — the Annenberg sale, the Ragen ambush, the mercury in the hospital bed, the Bugsy Siegel intimidation campaign on the West Coast — was happening in the very same months Tom Cawley was running 200 slot machines in LaSalle and telling local cops the Chicago mob couldn't touch his town.

When Cawley admitted to George Robinson at the Kefauver hearings that he subscribed to a "racing wire service," he was admitting that Kelly & Cawley's was a downstream customer of the most fought-over information pipeline in American organized crime. He was paying kickbacks, in some form, to the very Outfit he claimed he had kept out of LaSalle.

The "we kept the Chicago mobsters out" myth that Stout reports as the local belief is partly true and partly false. Cawley kept the Outfit from putting their people on his floor. He could not keep them from owning his information. Nobody could.

The crackdown begins

The first attempt to shut Little Reno down came in the fall of 1947.

Circuit Court Judge Roy Wilhelm impaneled a special grand jury that returned malfeasance indictments against four Illinois Valley mayors and three police chiefs for failing to suppress gambling. It was the right call by the right judge for the right reason. Within weeks, a different circuit judge — Frank Hayes — threw all the indictments out, calling Wilhelm's grand jury "a disgrace." Wilhelm fired back that Hayes was "abusive."

Nothing happened. The mayors and chiefs walked. Cawley's stayed open.

The second attempt came in the fall of 1949, when the LaSalle-Peru Daily News-Tribune launched an editorial campaign. The publisher hired an investigative reporter in secret. The front-page editorials were unsparing:

"Legitimate business is being strangled by the flow of money to slot machines, crap tables, roulette wheels, lucky jars, horse racing, and houses of prostitution."

The campaign demanded "honest, efficient, and competent government." A few small clubs closed under the pressure. Cawley's didn't. The articles ran their course. The story slipped off the front page.

In December 1949, the Daily News-Tribune building burned to the ground*.

The cause was officially listed as undetermined. Local rumor, never publicly confirmed, was that the fire was retaliation for the anti-gambling articles. No charges were ever filed. No insurance investigation was ever published. The newspaper rebuilt and kept publishing — it survives today as the Shaw Local News-Tribune — but the editorial campaign against Cawley was over.

The third attempt was the federal one.

Tom Cawley, on the record, before the United States Senate

On October 18, 1950, Tom Cawley sat in a closed-session room at the U.S. Court House in Chicago and answered questions from Associated Counsel George Robinson of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce.

The committee was chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, an ambitious Yale-educated Democrat with national-stage ambitions and an eye for camera-ready hearings. (In 1956, Kefauver would lose the Democratic vice-presidential nomination to John F. Kennedy by a hair on a roll-call vote at the Chicago convention. Five years earlier, his crime hearings drew 30 million viewers when they were televised live from New York — schools dismissed students to watch, and the Brooklyn Blood Bank had a 100% surge in donations after they put up a TV in the lobby. The Kefauver Committee was the original true-crime media event.)

Most of the witnesses Kefauver subpoenaed pleaded the Fifth or stonewalled.

Cawley did neither.

He answered the questions. He admitted he ran a gambling operation. He admitted he paid local officials. He admitted he subscribed to a racing wire service. The committee was astonished. The national press picked it up.

In his memoir Crime in America, Kefauver later wrote, with LaSalle clearly in mind:

"The pattern suggested so far is that crime and contempt for the law are big city operations. That is not necessarily so… Had time permitted, I should have liked the Senate Crime Investigation Committee to conduct at least one complete case study of such a small-town operation. The small cities and towns, as has often been said, are the backbone of America. If corruption threatens to take over small towns, it is important that we find out about it and turn the spotlight of exposure upon it, so an aroused public opinion can get to work on cleaning up conditions."

"In many big cities, young people come to maturity with the attitude of contempt for the law, because almost daily they see and hear of instances wherein criminals, through alliances with conniving politicians and crooked law enforcement officers, are bigger than the law. It would be a frightful thing if the same disillusionment should spread to the small-town youngsters of America."

The Senator was, in plain English, pointing at LaSalle and saying: this is what we're afraid of.

The City of LaSalle was humiliated. Officials publicly ordered Kelly & Cawley's shut down. The liquor license was revoked. Cawley kept serving anyway. Within weeks, business was back to where it had been.

He had survived 1947. He had survived 1949. He had survived the United States Senate.

The man who would finally beat him was a 30-something Navy lawyer from a 150-acre family farm 13 miles north of Ottawa.

The man with the stone through his window

Harland D. Warren had grown up on a homestead in Serena Township that his ancestors had settled in the early 1800s. He took his undergraduate degree in business and political science at the University of Illinois, then his law degree from the same school. World War II found him in the U.S. Navy Reserve, serving four years aboard amphibious units and as the Chief Defense Legal Counsel for Navy and Marine Court Martial Defendants at the Charleston, South Carolina, Naval Base.

He was discharged in 1946. He set up his first law practice in Earlville, in partnership with Tom Anderson Sr. While there he secured the non-profit corporation status for the Earlville American Legion (he remained a dues-paying member until his death) and incorporated the Serena Community Fire Protection District, drainage districts under the new 1948 Rural Drainage District Law, and other civic infrastructure that small-town Illinois needed and that nobody was getting paid much to do.

In October 1949 he moved his practice to Ottawa.

In early 1952, fed up with what he was seeing in his own county, Warren won the Republican nomination for LaSalle County State's Attorney and started barnstorming. His campaign promise was unhedged: "Gambling and prostitution cannot exist in a city if the police chief wants to do his job!"

He won the November 1952 election in a walkover. The voters of LaSalle County, who had tolerated Little Reno for 25 years, had decided they were ready for it to be over.

Warren was sworn in. Within minutes — minutes — he was telling every mayor and police chief in the county that the era was over.

A few nights later, at his home in Ottawa, a stone shattered his front window.

It was a warning. He kept going.

He started small. He raided church bingo games. He raided cash-paying pinball machines. He raided local lottery operations. He went into his own social fraternity — the Elks Club in Ottawa — and personally hauled the slot machines out. (The Elks never forgave him. He resigned in protest of his own lodge.)

Then he went after Cawley.

He didn't trust the local cops to investigate. He used his own personal money to hire two private detectives from Chicago. They built the case quietly, under cover, in the early weeks of 1953. (The county later reimbursed him.)

He chose the date deliberately.

Saturday, February 21, 1953

Warren picked Saturday, February 21, 1953 because of the calendar.

Saturday afternoon: banks closed at noon. Sunday: banks closed. Monday: Washington's Birthday. Federal holiday. Banks closed.

If he could arrest Cawley on a Saturday afternoon and force a cash bond — no checks, no personal guarantees — Cawley would spend three nights in the LaSalle County jail.

He led the raid himself, flanked by county deputies. They walked into 641 First Street through the doorless First Street stairway. Cawley's crew, with no advance warning, didn't even have time to swap the working game tables for the worn-out ones in storage.

The deputies catalogued the contents. The list included:

• 2 craps tables
• 1 roulette table
• Multiple poker tables
• Cards and chips
• A bingo barrel
• Scratch sheets
• Racing newspapers
• Form sheets
• Racing cards

While Warren and his deputies worked, the cashier-cage phones on the second floor rang continuously. Cawley's customers in Chicago, Ottawa, Joliet, and downstate were calling in to place bets on that Saturday's racing card.

Warren picked up the phones and answered them himself. Smiling, by every account. Telling Cawley's customers, one by one, that there'd be no bets taken today.

He invoked an Illinois state commerce commission regulation that prohibited the use of telephones for illegal operations. Within a week, the phone company physically removed the lines from the second floor.

The deputies had no arrest warrants for specific individuals. Warren simply asked Cawley and the few employees on the floor to come voluntarily to the county courthouse in Ottawa for formal charges.

They went without protest.

At the courthouse, Warren sprung the second half of the trap.

The judge accepted only cash bonds. Personal checks: refused. Personal guarantees: refused. Property collateral: refused.

It was Saturday afternoon. The banks were closed. They wouldn't reopen until Tuesday.

Witnesses said it was the only time anyone ever saw Tom Cawley angry. He shouted at the reporters in the courthouse hallway:

"I've been in things before, and I've always been able to sign my own bond before! If Warren doesn't think I'm worth the money, he can check my Dunn and Bradstreet rating!"

His Dun & Bradstreet rating, by all evidence, was excellent. It didn't matter. Warren had built the trap to be uncashable on a holiday weekend.

Cawley was visibly shaken. He started calling Ottawa associates. Eventually, someone with enough pull got a small Ottawa bank to open after hours, on a Saturday evening, specifically for Cawley. The cash was produced. The bonds were paid. He and his men were released that night.

But the message had been delivered. Warren, in Stout's phrase, was not bluffing.

Cawley was tried. He was fined "several thousand dollars" for operating a gambling house. (For period context: a new car cost $1,300–$1,500 at the time. A "several thousand dollar" fine was the cost of a new Buick.) During trial, in one of the most quietly damning moments in LaSalle legal history, a high-ranking LaSalle policeman testified under oath, with a straight face, that he had been in Cawley's cigar store many times and had never once seen any gambling take place.

The jury convicted anyway.

After the conviction, Cawley got out. He took the lesson. Another arrest could mean jail time. He sold off the gaming equipment, liquidated the cash, and rolled the entire fortune into commercial real estate, where he was just as successful as he had been at gambling.

His nephew Ryan Cawley, who had worked at the casino as a kid, said later: "When I first started with Tom as a kid, I had no idea that what we were doing was illegal. We also thought that it would last forever..."

Thomas J. Cawley died on January 18, 1961.

The lawsuit nobody remembers

Eighteen months after the raid, on October 13, 1954, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit handed down its decision in Elizabeth Cawley v. Harland Warren, Wendall Thompson and Harold Wensland (216 F.2d 74).

A Cawley family member — Elizabeth — had sued Warren personally, along with his First Assistant State's Attorney Wendall Thompson and the LaSalle County grand jury foreman Harold Wensland, alleging civil-rights conspiracy under the Fourteenth Amendment.

She had been arraigned, jailed, and forced to post bail. Her attorneys were Taylor E. Wilhelm and Patrick Cawley — both of LaSalle. Warren was defended on appeal by Illinois Attorney General Latham Castle.

The Seventh Circuit dismissed the suit. The court ruled that state's attorneys in Illinois are judicial officers and therefore have absolute prosecutorial immunity from civil-rights liability for actions taken in their official capacity.

It became a landmark decision on prosecutorial immunity and was cited for decades afterward in similar civil-rights cases, including Jennings v. Nester (217 F.2d 153) the same year.

The Cawleys had lost in court, in the Senate, and in the press.

They were finished.

What was actually special about LaSalle

This is the part that gets easy to miss in the gambling story.

LaSalle in the 1940s and 1950s was not just an illegal-casino town. It was the unlikeliest mash-up of small-town America in mid-century: a coal-mining and zinc-smelting industrial complex, a transcontinental railroad junction, a German-immigrant intellectual outpost, and a vice district — all stacked into about twelve square miles of Illinois River bluff.

On one block of First Street, from 1937 to 1953: 200+ slot machines, two roulette wheels, four craps tables, sixty-plus saloons, and Donald O'Connor on a bandstand at midnight.

Six blocks away, at 1307 Seventh Street: the Hegeler Carus Mansion — completed in 1876, a 16,000-square-foot Second Empire palace by Chicago architect William W. Boyington (the man who built the Chicago Water Tower, the Joliet State Penitentiary, and completed the Illinois State Capitol). 57 rooms. 10 fireplaces. A dining room table that seats 22. A 7-level structure with a unique parquet floor and hand-painted ceiling in every public room, designed by August Fiedler. A National Historic Landmark since 2007. The basement has what is believed to be the oldest surviving private gymnasium in America — a German-style Turnverein.

In that mansion's first-floor offices, Open Court Publishing Company ran for 80 years — founded by zinc baron Edward C. Hegeler in 1887, edited by Paul Carus (German philosopher and Hegeler's son-in-law), publishing the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, and F. Max Müller. Carus wrote 75 books in his lifetime and is widely credited with introducing Buddhism to the Western world through his 1894 book The Gospel of Buddha. The Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki lived in LaSalle for eleven years working with Carus on Open Court projects.

LaSalle, Illinois has been credibly called "Buddhism's gateway to the West." It's the only town in America that has held that distinction simultaneously with hosting 200 slot machines on its main street.

Mary Hegeler Carus, Edward's daughter, was the first woman to earn a Bachelor of Science in Engineering at the University of Michigan (1882), and the first woman ever legally registered as a student at the Bergakademie Freiberg in Germany (1885). She ran the Matthiessen-Hegeler Zinc Company, which by 1900 was the largest zinc producer in the United States, from 1903 until her death in 1936.

Edward Hegeler instituted an 8-hour workday at his zinc plant in 1885 — nearly a decade before federal law would require it. From the 1880s to the 1910s, while every other American mine and factory was being rocked by violent labor unrest, the Matthiessen-Hegeler Zinc Company had not a single strike. Their first strike came in 1936, after Matthiessen had died.

Two miles west, in Peru, the Western Clock Manufacturing Company — Westclox — was producing Big Ben alarm clocks at a rate of millions per year. F.W. Matthiessen had reorganized the bankrupt company in 1888. The Big Ben patent came in 1908, the alarm clock to market in 1909, and in 1910 it became the first alarm clock ever advertised nationally when ads ran in the Saturday Evening Post. At its peak, Westclox employed over 3,000 people — by far the largest employer in either LaSalle or Peru. The factory campus included gardens, tennis courts, and a bowling alley. One Westclox employee, R.D. Patton, joined the company's predecessor in 1886 at age 13 and was still on the job 50 years later in 1936.

Five miles east, Starved Rock rose 125 feet above the Illinois River — site of Fort St. Louis, completed by Henri Tonti in 1683 under orders from René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the French explorer the town was named for. The state acquired Starved Rock as Illinois's second state park (after Fort Massac) in 1911, after Daniel Hitt — who had bought the land from the U.S. government in 1835 for $85 as Army-service compensation — had sold it to Ferdinand Walther in 1890 for $15,000. Walther had built the original Starved Rock Hotel, a natural pool, a concession stand, and a dance hall on it. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the lodge, stairways, trails, bridges, and shelters that exist today during the 1930s. Today Starved Rock draws over 2 million visitors a year — Illinois's most-visited state park.

Between Peru and LaSalle, in the Hegeler family's old zinc plant, the EPA today runs an active Superfund site — listed on the National Priorities List in 2003 — remediating decades of cadmium, lead, arsenic, mercury, and nickel contamination. The cleanup has touched approximately 1,000 off-site residential properties since 2016. Hegeler descendants Fred and Cynthia Carus still operate LaSalle Rolling Mills on the site today, producing the zinc centers for U.S. copper pennies.

And below all of it, the original anchor: the Illinois & Michigan Canal, conceived by Louis Jolliet in 1673, championed by Abraham Lincoln in the 1830s, completed in 1848 — 96 miles long, connecting Lake Michigan to the Illinois River, and ending in LaSalle. Locks 14 and 15, just south of downtown, were the busy commercial intersection of the upper Illinois Valley in the 1850s. Steamboats from New Orleans unloaded molasses, sugar, coffee, oranges, and lemons. Canal boats from Chicago brought lumber, stoves, wagons, and east-coast clothing. Today, the Volunteer, an 1880s-replica canal boat, still runs mule-pulled rides on the original hand-dug waterway during the summer.

What everything cost

To put Cawley's prices in real-world context, here's what the rest of America was paying in 1950:

Cawley's 50-cent steak was more than half off retail meat. His 25-cent chicken was below the cost of just the bone-in raw bird. He was deliberately losing money on the kitchen. The slot machines made up the difference and then some.

Hummer counted the cash by hand. Like lettuce.

Median family income in 1950 was about $3,319 a year. Eddie McBride, the 23-year-old college kid the Chicago Outfit installed as the figurehead owner of Continental Press in 1947, made $692,000 in 1949 alone — the equivalent of 208 family-years of work, or roughly $8.7 million in 2026 dollars.

The wire service was that profitable.

The trauma that none of this gambling could quite paper over

About 10 miles north of LaSalle, in a town called Cherry, lies one of the deepest scars in Illinois Valley history.

On Saturday, November 13, 1909, the St. Paul Coal Company's Cherry Mine — a brand-new shaft mine, opened in 1905, considered the most modern in the country, electrically lit, declared "fireproof" — caught fire. A coal car loaded with six bales of mule hay was left too close to a kerosene lantern after the electric lights had failed earlier that week. The hay caught. The car caught. The wooden support timbers caught. Workers tried to push the burning car out and only spread the flames. The mine's main fan was reversed in an attempt to blow the fire out and instead set the fan house on fire, igniting the wooden escape ladders and trapping more men below.

Of the 481 men and boys in the mine that day, 259 died.

It was — and remains — the third-deadliest coal mining disaster in American history and the worst in Illinois history. More than 100 women became widows. More than 500 children became orphans. The miners were heavily Italian immigrants, many of whom couldn't speak English. The boys working the mine were as young as eleven.

Twenty-one survivors — known as the "eight-day men" — built a makeshift wall, drank from a leaking coal-seam puddle, and survived eight days underground without food before tearing the wall down to find a rescue party. One died two days after rescue from complications.

The St. Paul Coal Company was fined $630 for nine violations of child labor laws.

The lawsuits and settlements totaled around $500,000 by 1913.

The disaster prompted the Illinois Legislature to pass stronger mine-safety regulations in 1910. In 1911, Illinois passed what would become the Illinois Workmen's Compensation Act — the first of its kind in the United States. The federal Bureau of Mines was created in direct response. Federal child-labor laws followed.

The reason the Cherry Mine matters in the Little Reno story is that it explains the moral arithmetic of LaSalle in 1947. The men who walked into Cawley's on a Friday night had grown up around fathers and uncles and cousins who had gone to work in coal mines and not come home. The town had lived through 259 deaths in a single afternoon. Tom Cawley's father had been a coal miner. Cawley himself had grown up in the LaSalle of those memories.

Compared to what coal had cost the Illinois Valley, an illegal slot machine in the back room of a saloon felt — to the people who built and ran Little Reno — like a low-stakes vice. A victimless crime.

The judgment may have been wrong. But it was a judgment a generation made in the shadow of a real catastrophe. That's the part that's hard to communicate now, when the mines are closed and the union halls are empty.

What you can still see today

The LaSalle of 1947 is mostly gone. Kelly & Cawley's at 641 First Street is now a women's boutique called, in a beautiful piece of historical irony, Kelley Cawley. The Daily News-Tribune has merged into the Shaw Local network. The Rocket Inn is gone. The Cotton Club is gone. The Silver Congo is gone. The Peacock Theater Tinney never finished — gone.

But a surprising amount survives.

Hotel Kaskaskia still stands at 217 Marquette Street. Empty since 2001, but standing. Marshall & Fox's Colonial Revival columns are still there. The convention hall is still there. The 1948 ghost is still, reportedly, there. As of 2026, IDM Hospitality Management has plans to restore it as a boutique hotel and conference center. If that happens, the Drake's architectural sister will once again take guests off the Rocket route.

Hegeler Carus Mansion at 1307 Seventh Street is open to the public Thursdays through Saturdays. Tours run all day. The original Open Court Publishing typesetting equipment from 1887 is in the basement. The Turnverein gym is still there. The hand-painted ceilings are still there. Members of the Carus family are still actively involved with the Foundation. https://www.hegelercarus.org

The Westclox Museum at 320 5th Street in Peru, inside what's left of the original factory complex, has the largest single collection of Big Ben and Baby Ben alarm clocks in the world, plus the original "Tick Talk" employee newsletter archive (1913-1971). It's open for special events and by appointment.

Starved Rock State Park is five miles east. Two million visitors a year can't be wrong. The Civilian Conservation Corps lodge, completed in the 1930s, is still the same lodge. The trails are mostly the same trails.

The I&M Canal Visitor Center at LaSalle ("Lock 16," despite there only being 15 locks on the canal) operates the Volunteer, an 1880s-replica canal boat, for mule-pulled rides during the summer. The original 1855 LaSalle Coal Mining Company shaft foundations are still on the bluff above the canal, overgrown but visible.

The South Bluff Country Club at 229 N 2550th Rd in Peru — the "country club" Tinney Cosgrove ran on the side — is now a public golf course, par 36, 2,851 yards. You can still play it.

LaSalle County Historical Society at 101 E Canal St in Utica has the most concentrated archive of physical artifacts from the era. Open Saturdays 12 to 4.

If you want to walk First Street on a Friday night now, the bars are quieter than they were in 1947. There's no Rocket. The cigar stores are gone. The cards have gone digital and offshore. But the brick is still there. The street layout hasn't changed. And on a clear summer evening, when the sun drops behind the bluff and the streetlights come on, you can still — if you stand at the corner of First and Marquette and squint — make out the ghost of the neon.

It said: KELLY & CAWLEY'S.

It lit up that block, in all directions, for sixteen years.

What it all meant

Tom Cawley believed two things that turned out to be wrong.

He believed that as long as he was loved by his community, paid his cops fairly, treated ruined housewives with kindness, and gave a 50-cent steak dinner with everything, the law would never come for him.

And he believed that by keeping Chicago mobsters out of his physical building, he was keeping LaSalle clean.

He was wrong on the first count because a single ambitious lawyer with a stone through his window can change the calculus of a 25-year arrangement in 90 days, and Harland Warren did exactly that. Warren wasn't loved. He didn't need to be. He was right.

He was wrong on the second count because the Chicago Outfit didn't need to send people to LaSalle. They controlled the racing wire that Cawley needed to run his second-floor book. They had murdered James Ragen with a poisoned mercury injection in a guarded hospital bed in 1946. They had owned Continental Press since 1947. By the time Cawley was sitting in front of George Robinson at the Kefauver hearing in October 1950 talking about his "racing wire service," he was talking about the most fought-over information pipeline in American organized crime — the same one Bugsy Siegel had been forcing on the West Coast at $100 a day. Cawley was downstream. He was always downstream. The Outfit didn't need to put a man on his floor; they had already taken his books.

The third thing — the thing he believed and was actually right about — was that LaSalle was special. It really was. It was a town where, on the same six-block walk, you could lose a paycheck on a roulette wheel and visit the building that had introduced D.T. Suzuki to America. Where a 13-year-old had started working at Westclox in 1886 and was still there fifty years later. Where the world's first nationally-advertised alarm clock came off an assembly line two miles from a mansion that hosted Bertrand Russell. Where Father Marquette had passed through in 1673 and Donald O'Connor had played a smoke-filled bandstand in 1947. Where coal miners' sons had escaped the shafts to run a different kind of risk on the floors above. Where the ghosts of 259 dead boys at Cherry coexisted in living memory with the laughter of trainloads of Chicagoans on a Saturday night.

That part Cawley was right about.

LaSalle was Little Reno.

It was also Buddhism's Gateway to the West. And the largest zinc producer in America. And the home of Big Ben. And Marshall & Fox's smallest grand hotel. And the western terminus of the I&M Canal. And the second state park in Illinois history.

It was all of that at once. For one bright, neon-soaked, smoke-filled, contradictory generation, this small Illinois River town held the entire 20th century inside itself.

And then on a Saturday afternoon in February 1953, a man named Harland Warren walked through a doorless stairway off First Street, picked up a ringing telephone, smiled, and put an end to it.

Sources

• Steve Stout, Starved Rock Stories. Available at the Lock 16 Café Visitors Center.
• R.G. Bluemer, Casino: Glitz, Glamour, and Gambling in the Illinois Valley. IVCC Jacobs Library.
• Canal Corridor Association, "Little Reno of Illinois — Parts 1 and 2." Stories of the I & M Canal National Heritage Area, December 2023.
• Pam Broviak, "In the Olden Days." Cosgrove family genealogy and Mickey's military history.
• Cawley v. Warren, 216 F.2d 74 (7th Cir. Oct. 13, 1954). Free Law Project / CourtListener.
• U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce ("Kefauver Committee"). Final Report, August 31, 1951. HathiTrust.
• Estes Kefauver, Crime in America. Doubleday, 1951.
• Gus Russo, The Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America. Bloomsbury, 2001.
• Crime Magazine, "The History of the Race Wire Service, Part Three" by Allan May.
• TIME Magazine, "Crime: It Pays to Organize." May 14, 1951.
• Wikipedia: Hotel Kaskaskia, Hegeler Carus Mansion, Westclox, Starved Rock State Park, Chicago Outfit, James Ragen, Rock Island Rocket, 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster.
• Crain's Chicago Business, "A tour of the Hegeler Carus Mansion in La Salle, Ill." April 28, 2017.
• Daily News-Tribune (LaSalle-Peru), 125th Birthday Edition, July 19, 1977.
• Spring Valley Bureau County Democrat, "'Silver Congo' A Credit to LaSalle." December 24, 1942, p. 1.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index Historical Tables.
• U.S. Energy Information Administration, gasoline price history.
• Stacker / Bureau of Labor Statistics, "The cost of goods the year you were born."
• City of LaSalle official history. https://liveituplasalle.com/about/history/
• Downtown LaSalle Association, "Little Reno." https://downtownlasalle.org/history/little-reno/
• Northern Illinois University Archives, Westclox Records (RC-116) and Matthiessen-Hegeler Zinc Records (RC-167).
• U.S. EPA Superfund Site Profile, IL0000064782.

This article is part of an ongoing project at Champlin Enterprises to surface the lost histories of small-town Illinois. If you have family stories, photographs, matchbook covers, or memorabilia from the Little Reno era — especially from any of the named clubs — we'd love to talk. Reach out at champlinenterprises.com.

If you found this story interesting, share it with someone who grew up in LaSalle, Peru, Oglesby, Spring Valley, or anywhere along the Illinois River. The local history is richer than almost anyone remembers, and it deserves to be told.

What's the most surprising thing in here for you — that LaSalle was nicknamed by its own Chicago tourists, that Donald O'Connor and Bertrand Russell were both regulars in the same six-block neighborhood, or that the whole 25-year run was finally ended by a guy who started by clearing out his own Elks Club's slot machines?