The Original Ghost Gangsta

In this 77th episode of No Hair, All Heart, host Mookie Spitz explores the strange overlap between personal memory, political power, and the raw force of personality that still shapes America today.

The story begins with Donald Trump, framed not as Mussolini but as Tony Soprano—a figure who thrives less on ideology than on mobster-style charisma and control. From there, Mookie dives back into his own past in 1990s Chicago, where he worked as a secretary at Near North Insurance and found himself orbiting one of the city’s most unforgettable characters: Ira Colitz.

Colitz was the quintessential Chicago ward boss—president of the 42nd Ward Regular Democratic Organization, a former state representative, zoning board insider, and political power broker. He had the corner office filled with photos of himself grinning with heavyweight champs, senators, and mayors. He was remembered as a “Damon Runyon character,” a hustler who could be charming, offensive, and magnetic all at once. Indicted for extortion in the 1970s (and acquitted), Colitz embodied the Chicago political machine: part saloon owner, part legislator, part fixer, all personality.

Mookie recounts lunches with Ira in his Cadillac limo, stories of Near North’s Mickey Siegel staging fake office tours with hired comics, and the surreal day years later when a Chicago Sun-Times obituary seemed to open itself to Ira’s name—a moment that felt less like coincidence than a mystical goodbye. Through these anecdotes, Mookie reflects on how personality, not policy, is the true engine of power—from Colitz’s ward politics to Obama’s charisma to Trump’s mob-boss bravado. What emerges is a meditation on the will to power, the force of charisma, and the strange moments when memory, myth, and magic collide.

Part memoir, part political critique, and part ghost story, this episode is a tribute to Ira Colitz and a reminder that in politics, as in life, clout and character often matter more than laws or logic.

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