Blue Thunder

By R.Z. Sheppard

I, PIG by Jack Muller with Paul Neimark. 159 pages. Morrow. $4.95.

More powerful than Abbie Hoffman! Faster on the guff than Bella Abzug! Able to leap Baron Munchausen in a single bound! It's Supercop Jack Muller, the Chicago letter-of-the-law man who for 25 years has been causing pain and embarrassment to that city's politicians, smug elite and privileged hoodlums.

As he comes through the pages of this snub-nosed autobiography, Muller is one of those literal-minded men who actually believe the law was written to apply equally to everyone. He has ticketed the cars of superior court judges, Governor William Stratton and even Mayor Daley. Once, Muller ticketed his own car which had been illegally parked by a friend. "It's on the level of traffic corruption where you first get your breakdown in law-and-order," says the 52-year-old cop. "If someone can fix a parking ticket with a cop or a judge or a politician, it won't be long before everything else is being fixed all the way to who runs for President of the country."

Muller expects the worst from human beings and has not been disappointed. He once arrested a court clerk in the act of taking a lawyer's bribe right under the judge's nose. He recalls walking into another judge's chambers to find His Honor flagrante delicto with a prostitute he had just acquitted. At a national Democratic Convention, Muller has observed an incumbent President staggering drunk and a naked call girl being thrown out of the hotel room of a prominent favorite son.

So it is with unrestrained pleasure that Muller--who neither drinks nor smokes but freely uses four-letter words --refers to himself with the radical epithet Pig. Having heard Mayor Daley instruct his police to suppress demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention, Muller even understands why the epithet is slung: "Personally, I didn't go for most of the antics of the Conspiracy Eight defendants, but if you've been around the courts as long as I have, you know what the Bobby Scales and Abbie Hoffmans were ranting about. You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see that our judicial system in America is rotten."

Periodic Headaches. Extremism in a good cause? Yes. But Muller's view is totally consistent with his life. The son of impoverished immigrant Jews, he grew up in the '20s on Chicago's West Side. Every trip out of his neighborhood was a patrol through enemy territory. As a child, Muller saw thugs extort money from his mother after threatening to break up her fish store.

Muller learned to hit back--a course of action facilitated by his increasing size and bulk. To hear him tell his adventures, he is a biblical avenger with a charmed life. Armed punks beg for mercy after a dose of his righteous fists. During World War II, he cold-cocks a Navy boxing champion with one punch. Japanese machine-gun bullets buzz between his legs as comrades fall around him. Nearly 15 years later, Muller's luck even holds when he stops a thief's bullet with his skull.

The inoperable fragments have left Muller with periodic headaches. But they are nothing compared to the discomfort he has caused his superiors. Even when transferred to quiet precincts where it was thought he could do no harm, Muller always managed to find a broken law that needed his immediate attention. In 1958, when he ran unsuccessfully for Cook County sheriff, city health inspectors began harassing his father-in-law's bakeries. In retaliation, Muller stationed himself outside the board of health and ticketed nearly every car that rolled out of the parking lot for not coming to a full stop at the street.

What makes Muller run despite constant setbacks? There are numerous psychological pigeonholes, ranging from exhibitionist to martyr complex. None of them, however, seems adequate to contain this proud, resentful man who, for example, can excuse his own excessive hatred of sex perverts by saying "Maybe there's something wrong with me [but] there's a helluva lot more wrong with them."

Unlike most of the people who will read his book, Muller really has seen men and institutions at their very worst. That he spares no middle-class sensibilities in describing what he has observed makes him a source of indispensable embarrassment.

. R.Z. Sheppard

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