Theodore Carl Link was born on September 22, 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, the son of Edwin Cary Link, an architect, and Virginia Eliot Cabanne. The second of four children, Link was the grandson and namesake of architect Theodore C. Link, a German immigrant who designed more than one hundred buildings in his career, including Union Station in St. Louis.
Link was enrolled in a few night courses at Washington University.
Link began his career as an investigative reporter in 1924 with the St. Louis Star, where he worked until 1933. From the beginning his stories focused on organized crime. He covered the Cuckoo Gang Wars, and the battles between the Ku Klux Klan and anti-Klan forces in southern Illinois. He likened the gunfights of the Klan war in "bloody Williamson County" to the shootout at the OK Corral, noting in his stories that each of the three Klan incidents claimed more lives than that famous showdown. In a city plagued by street violence, Link discovered the existence of a gang called the Green Ones, which was responsible for almost one killing per day in St. Louis in 1926 and 1927. When Link went to work for the National Lead Company, he investigated a $15 million racket in connection with silicosis claims in the Lead Belt. As a result of his work, many lawyers were suspended and disbarred by the Bar Association. Link worked briefly for both the Globe-Democrat and the Times before joining the staff of the Post-Dispatch in 1938. This made him one of the few men to work for all four St. Louis papers.
Link joined the United States Marine Corps in 1942 and served as a war correspondent and as editor of Chevron. He saw action in the Pacific theater on Guadalcanal, New Georgia, and Guam, and he was wounded at Bougainville in November 1943. He was discharged in 1945.
Upon his return to the Post-Dispatch he resumed his criminal investigations. In the late 1940's, his investigation into gambling turned up the bribery of a prosecutor and sheriff and vote fraud in Kansas City, Missouri, both of which he tied to the Pendergast political machine and the Capone gang. Link's ties to the Shelton gang from his Klan reporting in the 1920's and 1930's led him to new reports on the gang's postwar operations and its links to the Capone gang. This inquiry resulted in an indictment against several Illinois politicians. The threat to politics-as-usual resulted in indictments against Link for intimidation, conspiracy, and kidnapping. The charges concerned his presence at the Shelton's questioning of a fellow gangster in Link's hotel room in Peoria. The Post-Dispatch lashed back with articles by Link detailing gang payoffs to politicians and an editorial claiming the indictment "was a brazen attempt to turn the law against itself. " The coverage of the corruption led to the defeat of the Illinois Republican political machine ten days after the indictments. Both Governor Dwight Green and the state's attorney general lost their bids for reelection, and Adlai Stevenson was elected governor to clean up the system. The indictments against Link were later dismissed by the attorney general.
Link's underworld connections convinced him of ties between gangs across the country. In 1949, his reports exposed the connections between organized crime in St. Louis and groups in Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Louisiana. After a series of articles in 1950 on Miami as the capital of the nation's organized crime, Link was contacted by a Senate investigating committee chaired by Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Later that year, the committee held hearings and questioned witnesses involved in underworld activities. Upon the conclusion of the hearings, Senator Kefauver praised Link, writing, "In numerous instances, the first leads on the connections among the underworld, conniving politicians and corrupt law-enforcement officials were supplied to the committee investigators out of Ted Link's voluminous files. " In continuing to investigate organized crime and public corruption, Link refused to play party favorites. While his target in the Illinois inquiry was a Republican organization, he soon earned the ire of Democrats as well.
In a long series of articles in 1951, Link exposed corruption in the Internal Revenue Bureau (IRB), now the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). He disclosed that a St. Louis company that obtained more than $500, 000 in government loans had made payments to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, William Boyle, Jr. , and to another public official. As a result Boyle resigned and the IRB was overhauled.
Link continued his investigative reporting throughout the remainder of his life, exposing such incidents as Senator Richard Nixon's attempts to fix a financial supporter's gambling debts in Havana and President Dwight D. Eisenhower's battle against efforts by Republican senators and IRB officials to prevent reforms of the St. Louis Internal Revenue office. He wrote stories on renewed gang warfare and union corruption in the 1950's, conditions in the slums, and the Garrison investigation of the Kennedy assassination in the 1960's. Link's reporting was overshadowed briefly in 1960 by stories about his indictment and trial for the shooting death of an intruder at his home. While the story was front-page news for some months and elicited an irate editorial in a suburban newspaper calling for Link to be "muzzled, " the trial resulted in Link's acquittal.
Link's work had a profound impact on both local and national politics. His fame rested on his investigations and publications on organized crime. For his reporting on the Illinois corruption, Link was given a special award for distinguished public service by the American Newspaper Guild. His articles on the corruption in the Internal Revenue Bureau won the St. Louis Post-Dispatch a Pulitzer Prize in 1951. For his service during World War II he was awarded the Purple Heart.
Upon his death the Post-Dispatch called him "persistent, incorruptible and unintimidated a bold reporter but a quiet man. "
On July 5, 1930, Link married June DeVore who divorced him in October 1938, after a brief separation. In 1940, he married Ruth Ferguson; they had two children.
