Calling Jack Muller a traffic cop would have been as wide of the mark as saying Arturo Toscanini was a bandleader. Muller was the famed maestro of the Chicago Police Department, whose prodigious ticket writing made him a folk hero of the 1950s and ’60s to some and a by-the-book zealot to others. Newspapers reported his numbers, just as they would for a sports star.
Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, Muller seemed conditioned to respond to certain stimuli. Spotting a car left under a no-parking sign, he automatically got out his ticket book.
One Sunday, he issued 200 citations on Maxwell and adjacent streets after parking meters were installed amid the pushcarts of Chicago’s Old World market.
It didn’t matter what police district Muller was assigned to, he was sure to find the scofflaws.
Off duty one evening, he ticketed 35 cars for illegal parking in the Loop. He explained to a Tribune reporter that he was bored being detailed to a quiet Albany Park district, watching, “the back end of the rear door of a drugstore” to catch a possible burglar or robber.
On forays downtown, Muller ticketed Mayor Richard J. Daley and Sheriff Joe Lohman for illegally parking adjacent to City Hall. Parking offenders weren’t his only target: when a bystander declined his request to call for a police wagon to transport an offender he’d apprehended on the Near North Side, Muller also arrested him, “for refusing to aid and assist a policeman.”
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Rush Street was his favorite hunting ground. Would-be big shots would pull up to a nightclub and toss their car keys to the doorman who would double-park the vehicle. Word was that district cops got a stipend for allowing the practice.
When he was assigned to that bright-light neighborhood, Muller one day ticketed both the wife of mafia boss Tony Accardo, for an overtime parking meter, and the wife of U.S. Rep. Sidney Yates, for lacking a valid city sticker.
His superiors heard earfuls about Muller from nightclub proprietors and City Hall. But even with a little help from citizens, the department couldn’t get rid of him.
The public’s reaction to Muller’s work was, in fact, often divided. In 1957, 200 Albany Park residents signed a petition asking for him to be removed from their neighborhood, only to have members of an organization in Woodlawn on the South Side say they would love to have him go after scofflaws in their community.
That forced Herbert Burns, the Albany Park police commander, to announce that his officers would meet with petition signers to see what might resolve their beefs with Muller.
“Nearly 40 years in the police department and I get this,” Burns told the Tribune.
The police brass tried to muzzle Muller. Hoping to catching him in a nefarious enterprise, he was shadowed by the department’s internal affairs division. Muller turned the tables and ticketed the undercover investigator for infractions including reckless driving and failure to signal a turn.
Muller was charged with violating the department’s chain of command by bringing his suspicions of cops on the take directly to the superintendent. A court in 1970 ruled the First Amendment entitled him to speak to whomever he wanted.
The police high command was no match for Muller, whose wits were sharpened by a hardscrabble childhood. He was raised in Lawndale, an impoverished West Side neighborhood that Italians and Poles shared, in some cases grudgingly, with Jewish families like his. He played fullback at Marshall High School. As an adult, he weighed 220 pounds and was 6 feet tall, a formable figure when he leaned into a driver’s window and asked to see a license.
But as a teenager, he was jumped by neighborhood ruffians who tore his bar mitzvah suit. He took a couple more blows from his mother when she saw the suit she had scrimped and saved for. She was the family’s principal earner. When she opened a little fish store, a gangster demanded $15 a month for protection. From what? his mother asked. “I haven’t even made $15 dollars profit since I started the store.”
“Well,” the hoodlum said, leaning his full weight against the glass window of our store, “something could happen to your window here.” He pushed harder and harder, until the whole thing cracked and fell in, the glass splintering all over the ice and fish,” Muller recalled in his autobiography “I, Pig.”
“It would take my mother two days and nights to pick out every piece of glass to save just a few of those fish for sale,” he wrote.
During World War II, he survived the Japanese torpedoing of the U.S. warship he served aboard. That cinched Muller’s resolve not to allow other people to control his life.
Returning to Chicago, he took the CPD exam, motivated by a cop’s $2,900 yearly salary. What he saw as a rookie made him determined not to go along with the Police Department’s often corrupt way of conducting business.
“And once you got past that first six months of training, once you were through with the theoretical part, you were gutted almost every hour of the day with the knowledge of the gap between what a cop is supposed to do and what a system makes him do,” Muller recalled in “I, Pig.”
His first assignment looked like dullsville: night shift in a South Side warehouse district populated primarily by rabbits. But one early morning, he heard music coming from a warehouse. Cars were parked alongside it.
Obviously, someone was being paid off to allow this illegal nightclub operation, perhaps a politician and “friendly” cops. The revelers didn’t flinch at the sight of his uniform.
Finding a police call box, Muller requested a police wagon, saying he was taking a prisoner. “‘A prisoner?’ the desk sergeant said. He couldn’t believe it,” Muller wrote.
A cop wasn’t supposed to do that. The joint Muller was targeting paid good money not to be held accountable.
Muller, who loved to defy authority, determined that being a hardworking cop, honest to a fault, would be the best way to frustrate his bosses.
“One thing I’d done on those lonely nights watching rabbits was to start memorizing rules and regulations of the Chicago Police Department, as well as county and state laws,” Muller wrote.
He learned all sorts of legal minutiae, including that it was illegal to shorten a license plate. Cadillac owners and mechanics would nip off a tiny bit to make Illinois plates fit that make’s license-plate holder.
Spotting one such plate on Judge Michael Igoe’s Caddy, Muller signaled it to pull over on Rush Street.
“Say, there’s that fellow Muller,” the judge said to a fellow rider. “Nobody but Muller could have figured out that law.”
The police brass recognized they were better off getting out of his way, no matter how much grief it caused them.
He was, according to most accounts, honest to a fault. When a friend borrowed his car and left it in a spot marked for police cars only, Muller ticketed himself.
On occasion, though, his efforts were laughable. He took a pony named Liberace into custody. Its cart was illegally parked, and as the Tribune reported: “Muller said Liberace had to be restrained from eating the tickets.”
When the department received a restaurant owner’s complaint that Muller was a “psychopathic maniac,” Muller hired a psychiatrist who said he wasn’t. He sued the restaurateur for libel, winning a $15,000 settlement.
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He used his healthy finances to his advantage when a speeder offered him $100 in search of a break.
“I don’t think you can do anything for me.” Muller replied, pointing to his substantial net worth. Then he arrested the motorist for attempted bribery of a police officer.
And so it went for almost four decades, minus timeout for an unsuccessful run for sheriff. His superiors were perpetually baffled. One was asked why Muller patrolled atop a baby-blue motorcycle, wearing a fingertip coat, sporting a red cap, and carrying a shotgun.
“How do I know what he’s up to?” an exasperated Commissioner Timothy J. O’Connor replied. “Maybe he’s in disguise, on an undercover assignment.”
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