Return of the Rub-Out

He was the boss of the teeming 24th Ward, on Chicago's West Side. He was the ward's first Negro alderman. He wore $200 suits, and his friends called him "Duke." He held real estate valued at more than $100,000. He had just leased a shiny new political headquarters, with autographed photos of people like John F. Kennedy on the wall. That was how it was with Benjamin F. Lewis, 53. Everything was going his way. Last week he was re-elected as alderman by a pretty decisive margin--12,189 to 888. It almost seemed as though Ben Lewis had not an enemy in the world. But he did.

Last week, the night after his landslide victory, a couple of women in an apartment near Lewis' new headquarters thought they heard gunshots. But they were watching a TV show called Naked City, a cops-'n'-robbers thriller about New York--and what were a few gunshots more or less? The ladies did nothing. Next morning a janitor went into Lewis' office. On his new carpet lay Ben Lewis, his wrists bound in handcuffs, a dead cigarette in his fingers, and three bullet holes in the back of his skull.

The Iron Ball. Lewis was born in Georgia, moved to Chicago's West Side with his family in the '20s, when the 24th was heavily Jewish.

Through the years, Lewis worked as a clerk in the U.S. Employment Service, became a second lieutenant in World War II, returned to Chicago as a bus driver and began mixing into politics. The 24th Ward was changing character. Negroes were crowding into the neighborhoods and Jews were moving out. Lewis got to know the newcomers; he had gone to work for the city as a housing inspector. More and more, as the South Side slums grew too oppressive for the Negro population, the 24th became their haven--and Lewis their leader. "Ev ery time that iron ball bats down one of those slum buildings on the South Side," Lewis said happily, "20 Negro families move west. Every time that ball strikes, my position as West Side Negro leader becomes much stronger."

A handy man with words, Lewis called the 24th Ward "a socio-economic garbage heap." He was fond of pointing out that "there are 75.000 people squeezed into my ward, more than Joliet or Waukegan, and almost as many as Springfield, Ill. We have the highest percentage of high-school dropouts and the highest percentage of people on relief. We have the highest rate of unemployment, the highest rate of juvenile delinquency and a very high rate of apathy and disillusionment." Lewis even moved actively against the miseries of overpopulation. During his last campaign he had his precinct workers distribute "little packets of mercy," to wit, sample cans of contraceptive foam.

Reward. Why should anyone want to kill such a kindly fellow? At week's end, Chicago had no idea. Mayor Richard Daley offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of Lewis' murderer. Police Superintendent Orlando Wilson, former dean of the School of Criminology at the University of California, vowed "to apprehend and bring before the bar of justice the culprit who committed this dastardly crime. I'm surprised that a killing of this sort would be effected against him."

Meanwhile, Lewis' death would go down as the 977th unsolved Chicago rub-out since 1919.

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