Al Capone, Bugs Moran and their gangs weren’t the only ones throwing lead and terrorizing innocent Chicagoans during Prohibition.
The “dry raiders,” as they were called in Tribune headlines, were nearly an equal danger as they attempted to enforce anti-liquor laws. In their idealistic fervor or opportunistic greed, these men ran roughshod over the citizenry. Gun-toting pastors and eager young men took up the cause, sometimes going on raids with federal agents or branching out on their own. A Joliet minister’s church was bombed, allegedly by bootleggers unhappy with his dry work. A 21-year-old Wisconsin man was sent to prison in February 1928 after shooting a man at a South Beloit roadhouse during an unauthorized raid. The Tribune reported he “had a brief career as a private dry sleuth.”
Further, officials recruited informers to find suspected bootleggers. But these “dry spies” sometimes fingered innocent people, got addresses wrong and used their newfound power to pay back grudges.
One of the most egregious, inflammatory examples of that violent age occurred on March 25, 1929, in Aurora. Under the banner headline, “DRY RAIDERS KILL A MOTHER,” Tribune readers learned about an evening raid gone horribly wrong. Kane County sheriff’s deputies acting on a shaky tip raided the DeKing home, where they found a half-gallon of wine and an angry, armed Joseph DeKing. He ordered them out. Some of the officers left to get help, but some stayed and had a drink of wine with DeKing, his wife, Lillian, and his brother. After the now heavily armed reinforcements returned, things got out of hand. One of the agents hit Joseph in the back of the head with the stock of his shotgun. Lillian, who had been on the phone with a lawyer seeking help, rushed to her husband when he fell. The officer thought she was going for the gun and shot her. DeKing’s 12-year-old son, Gerald, did go for the gun. He shot the officer in the knee.
The impact of the raid was long-lasting, both for the country and the DeKing family. It sparked outrage in Aurora, Chicago and the nation, and coming on top of other dry raider excesses and Prohibition-fueled crime, led to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.
The DeKing family was shattered. Gerald had seen his mother shot and killed, his father beaten. Joseph had lost his wife in a raid conducted by men he knew, based on a tip from a dry spy who said he bought a drink at the house nine weeks earlier. The officer was charged with Lillian’s death, but the case was dismissed.
While the raid is a historical footnote for most, it is a personal and emotion-laden story still for Gerald DeKing’s daughter, Katharine DeKing Johnson, who lives in Aurora. She said Gerald grew up to be an Aurora police officer, partly to see that children were treated better than he was. She said both her father and her grandfather fought for years to restore the family’s reputation.
“My father used to say, ‘When someone says something that is untrue, it’s like tearing up a piece of paper and throwing it into the wind. You can never get all those pieces of paper back. You can never set it right,'” she said. He lived his life trying to correct the belief that “he came from a family of hooligans and that his mother was a rumrunner.” In his pocket, he carried the bullet he shot into the officer’s knee. And every year on the anniversary of his mother’s death, Gerald sent a postcard to that same officer. The note was blank but for his signature and the date: March 25, 1929.
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