An unpublished manuscript: The Chicago Forty Two gang alias Sholto or Kip gang

Working for the Institute for Juvenile Research and its Sociology Department (Chicago), Saul Alinsky set out to collect autobiographies of a gang whose real name was the Forty Two, the intended title of the book was Companions in crime. It was the first time that the Department chose to work on an Italian gang in the Near West Side. Saul Alinsky collected a large amount of life stories, interviews with parents and police documents; a book based on the gang material was to be published at the University of Chicago Press, but it never came out. The outline was ready and was to be similar to the Jack Roller and the Natural history of a delinquent career with experts’ writings inducing thus, the sandwich effect James Bennett had already mentioned in Oral History and Delinquency.

The autobiographies of the gang members are quite different from one another: the shortest is 40 typed pages long, and the longest is over a hundred pages. The 14 biographies we have studied show two high points related by several members: the first one, when they are still young teen-agers and are robbing things from their own school, the Jackson school, they eat preserves together in the school kitchen, the second high point quoted by many older boys mentions a famous Saturday night when they are having a gang shag with Broads on the school campus.

The life story is not the best methodological tool for a group observation, nevertheless it was the first time the IJR tried to study a gang as a whole; later on they studied two groups of brothers: Brothers in Crime and the Bartzon Brothers, the latter still remains unpublished.