Word: craig
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Colored folks in the sad and seedy rooming houses around Talman Avenue and West Washington Boulevard on Chicago's West Side had long since decided what to do about Ernest Craig: call the cops. Craig, a tall 28-year-old Negro with a thin mustache, a hard eye and a wild laugh, was a bad man to mess around with. He kept a collection of pistols in the two rooms he occupied in a run-down corner house and he was always firing them off or leaning out the windows and pointing them at people...
When a 17-year-old youth named Lawrence Mack knocked on his door one night last week and tried to collect for some cleaning work, Craig ran true to form. He yanked out a pistol. As the youth began to sprint down the street, Craig took a shot...
...Open Up!" The bullet creased the head of a baby in a nearby yard and Craig went back inside his rooms, slammed the door and waited for the inevitable squad car. When the cops arrived he answered their yell of "Open up!" by firing three shots through the door. That started the biggest and noisiest gun battle in recent Chicago history...
More squad cars and more cops hurried up. They began firing pistols and carbines. Craig scuttled around inside the house like a caged animal, firing back in vicious bursts-now from the front of the house, now from the side, now from the back. Glass smashed and tinkled, neighborhood women screamed, bullets hummed and a reckless crowd of 10,000 people began jamming into the street. New police reinforcements arrived, among them the force's top brass. Fire trucks rumbled into the street and turned huge searchlights on Craig's bullet-riddled fortress...
...cops tried a concentrated barrage with carbines, Tommy guns, pistols, and tear-gas guns. When silence fell, Craig began shooting again. Daring policemen ran up, threw flares and gasoline through downstairs windows. Yellow flames began to billow through the house. Fire trucks shot sledging streams of water into the upper windows. But amid the yells, the crackle of fire, and the throb of pumps the cops could hear Craig screaming: "You want me-come...