Justice & Law Quote by John Gunther

Nostalgia, here, comes with a body count. Gunther opens on a mundane detail - three crime stories on a front page - then swerves into a bracing recalibration: if you think thats bad, you should have seen the old Chicago. The move is classic mid-century reportage: start with the tangible, then widen the lens until the city becomes a case study in American modernity, where corruption is less a scandal than a civic climate.

The line "as full of crooks as a saw with teeth" is doing double duty. Its folksy, almost comic, but the image is also industrial: Chicago as a machine that cuts, chews, and profits. Gunther is writing like someone who has watched urban power operate not through shadowy conspiracies but through systems - precincts, ward bosses, patronage pipelines. The metaphor makes criminality feel structural, not episodic.

Then comes the real intent: demythologizing the gangster-era romance while insisting on progress. "Gaudy days" nods to the lurid spectacle of Prohibition, when vice had branding and public relations. Calling todays crimes "small-time" isnt comfort so much as scale management. He wants readers to understand that the headline churn of violence can coexist with a decline in organized, city-steering criminal governance.

"Gone forever" is the rhetorical gamble. In the post-Capone imagination, America liked to believe modernization and reform had closed the book on machine rule. Gunther feeds that appetite - while slipping in a darker subtext: crooks never left; only their relationship to power changed. The city is still crowded with them. They just dont run the place out in the open anymore.