Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Read online

  In October, 1923, Torrio set in motion a long-matured stratagem. To Cicero he moved a score of his prostitutes, installing them in a house he had leased on Roosevelt Road. As he expected, the local police promptly raided the place and locked up the girls. Torrio opened another brothel at Ogden and Fifty-second avenues with the same result. Meekly, he withdrew. But if he had no clout in Cicero, elsewhere in Cook County there were officials who danced to his tune. Such was Sheriff Peter B. Hoffman. Two days after the Ogden Avenue raid he dispatched a squad of deputy sheriffs to Cicero with orders to impound every slot machine they could find. Vogel got the point: If Torrio couldn't have a whorehouse in Cicero, then nobody could have slot machines there.

  The upshot was a tripartite treaty. Vogel recovered the slot machines along with the assurance that the sheriff's office would not hamper their operation. The O'Donnells won an exclusive beer franchise in several sections of Cicero, and Torrio reaffirmed their authority on Chicago's West Side. What Torrio really wanted for himself did not, contrary to Vogel's belief, involve prostitution. His existing string of urban and suburban whorehouses produced such wealth that it was no great sacrifice to forgo a Cicero addition. He had bigger stakes in view. Upon his agreeing to import no more whores he was granted permission to sell beer anywhere in Cicero outside the territory allocated to the O'Donnells, to run gambling houses there and to establish a base for all his enterprises save the bordellos.

  The treaty infuriated Eddie Tancl, who detested Torrio. He had refused to take part in the negotiations leading up to it. He now proclaimed his intention of buying his beer wherever he chose. His friendship with the O'Donnells, who had been provisioning his saloon, cooled. When they tried to fob off some barrels of needle beer-that is, near beer to which raw alcohol had been added-he broke off all business relations with them. Klondike O'Donnell and Torrio ordered him to get out of town. He laughed in their faces.

  In Chicago, meanwhile, the specter of reform confronted Torrio. The abuses of the Thompson regime had become so flagrant as to preclude Big Bill's chances of reelection. His campaign manager, the ex-medicine man Fred Lundin, was indicted with twenty-three coconspirators for misappropriating more than $1,000,000 of school funds. According to a trial witness, a member of the Board of Edu cation, who had protested in behalf of the public against gross overpayments for school textbooks, Lundin replied: "To hell with the public! We're at the trough now and we're going to feed." The legal team of Darrow and Erbstein kept the accused out of jail, but the stench lingered. Thompson, knowing he was defeated in advance, withdrew his candidacy from the 1923 primary.

  The mayoralty went to a Democrat, Judge William E. Dever, who chose as his Chief of Police, Morgan A. Collins. An hour after the bodies of Bucher and Meeghan had been found, Dever summoned his appointee to a press conference and told him: "Collins, there's a dry law on the nation's books. This town will immediately become dry. Tell your captains I will break every police official in whose district I hear of a drop of liquor being sold." Collins tried hard to dehydrate Chicago. With his encouragement the police went so far as to invade private homes and arrest people for possession of as much as a single bottle of liquor, a crusade that turned the public against them. Dever also issued a proclamation as well meant as it was overoptimistic:

  Until the murderers [of O'Connor, Bucher and Meeghan] have been apprehended and punished and the illegal traffic for control of which they battle has been suppressed, the dignity of the law and the average man's respect for it is imperiled and every officer of the law and every enforcing agency should lay aside other duties and join in the common cause-a restoration of law and order. The police will follow this case to a finish as they do all others [sic]. This guerrilla war between hijackers, rum runners and illicit beer peddlers will be crushed. I am just as sure that this miserable traffic with its toll of human life and morals can be stamped out as I am mayor that I am not going to flinch for a minute.

  How radically the new administration differed from the old Torrio discovered when he attempted to subvert Collins. Through an intermediary he offered him $100,000 a month not to interfere with his Chicago activities. For answer Collins padlocked the Four Deuces. Torrio later offered him $1,000 a day merely to overlook the movement of 250 barrels of beer a day. Collins kept up his attack. In addition to harassing Torrio's Chicago breweries, brothels and gambling dens, his men arrested about 100 gangsters. They closed 200 of Mont Tennes' handbook parlors, forcing him to retire from racetrack gambling. By the end of the year gambling had temporarily ceased to be an important source of the Chicago underworld's revenue. As for vice, the director of the juvenile Protective Association, Miss Jessie Binford, reported:

  There is no doubt that a sincere, energetic effort has been made to minimize commercialized vice in Chicago. Nightly raids inaugurated by Chief Collins have played havoc with the vice ring and broken a majority of the more notorious resorts and driven others to cover. The Collins drive was at first thought to be a temporary purity move for political purposes. In the underworld the appointment of Collins was lauded, but as time passed and his apparent desire to clean the town and keep it clean had reached the underworld, their ranks have been badly shattered. . . . The administration has stopped the vice ring for the time being.. . .

  It occurred to Torrio and Capone that as long as Dever occupied City Hall, they would need a haven beyond his reach. They chose Cicero, and while most of their Chicago establishments continued to thrive-for no reformer could ever completely purge the law enforcement agencies of Chicago-while they maintained homes in the city and spent most of their leisure hours there, Cicero remained their center of operations throughout Dever's tenure. Those who accompanied them or followed them there, charter members of a rapidly growing syndicate, included Ralph and Frank Capone and their cousins the Fischettis; the Guziks; the La Cava brothers, Louis and Joseph; Pete Penovich, Jimmy Mondi, Tony "Mops" Volpi, Peter Payette, Louis Consentino, Frank "the Enforcer" Nitti and Frankie Pope, who had peddled newspapers before he made a killing as a gambler and was hence known as "the millionaire newsboy." Dion O'Banion became an associate in the syndicate's gambling enterprises, as well as in its breweries.

  In the fall of 1923 Torrio decided to rest awhile from his labors, and with his wife and mother he set sail for a sightseeing tour of Europe, leaving Capone to consolidate their gains. He carried abroad more than $1,000,000 in cash, negotiable securities and letters of credit with which he opened accounts in various Continental banks. By the seaside near his native Naples he bought his mother an imposing villa, staffed it with servants, settled a small fortune on her, and left her to end her days in regal pomp.

  It was this munificence, typical of gang leaders, munificence not only to family but to friends and community, that John Landesco, the scholarly chief investigator of the Illinois Association for Criminal justice, cited when explaining the admiration men like Torrio aroused among poor immigrants. "Why should they be outcasts in the opinions of the ignorant, humble, needy, hard-working people around them?" he said. "They are the successes of the neighborhood. The struggling, foreign-born peasant woman sees them in their expensive cars and their fur-trimmed overcoats. She hears they are sending their children to private schools, as Joe Saltis does. She hears them called 'beer barons' and if she can read the headlines in the English language newspapers, she sees them described as 'beer barons' and 'booze kings' in print. The word 'booze' has no criminal significance to her, but the words 'king' and 'baron' have a most lofty significance. About all she knows is that these richly dressed young men are making or selling something that the Americans want to buy.

  "Incidentally, she hears in gossip with another toilworn neighbor that Johnny Torrio, 'king' of them all, gave his old mother back home in Italia a villa with 15 servants to run it.

  "If the robber, labor thug and racketeer, the late Tim Murphy, who was the co-criminal of the gangsters of boozedom, spoke at a 13th Ward meeting in behalf of one of gangdom's political henchmen, th
at did the candidate no harm. For was not a priest sitting next to Murphy on the platform? If some tactless soul asked, 'Is he the Tim Murphy that they said robbed the mails?' the response was deeply resentful. The attitude of the ignorant foreign-born who judged gangdom in the terms of its success would be, first, that it was doubtful whether Murphy did rob the mails and, second, 'What harm did that do us?' Hence the support of Big Tim never hurt Dingbat Oberta, the political henchman of Joe Saltis' gang of beer runners. Oberta gave a stand of colors to the Nellis post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Some of the money of racketeer banquets where Murphy acclaimed Oberta would be given to the same organization.

  "Thus, and in a hundred other ways, the whole issue between good and bad government and good and bad men is befuddled and the sole conviction of the ignorant is that these 'successes of the neighborhood' seem to take vastly more interest in neighborhood matters than men not in the booze racket do."

  In Torrio's absence Capone chose as his Cicero headquarters the centrally located Hawthorne Inn at 4833 Twenty-second Street, a two-story structure of brown brick with white tiles set in the upper facade. He had bulletproof steel shutters affixed to every window, and at every entrance he stationed an armed lookout. Four plaster columns painted green supported the lobby ceiling. On the walls hung stuffed big-game heads. Red-carpeted stairs rose to the secondfloor bedrooms, where Capone and his associates often spent the night.

  Torrio got back from Europe at a critical juncture in Cicero politics. It was the spring of 1924, election time. The Klenha faction, backed by a bipartisan machine, had ruled the town for three terms, but now the Democrats were putting up a separate slate. Boss Vogel, worried lest the fever of reform raging in Chicago under Mayor Dever should infect Cicero, went to Torrio and Capone with a proposition they found attractive: Let them ensure a Klenha victory and they could count on immunity from the law in any enterprise they undertook in Cicero, whoremongering excepted. Here was a challenge calling for combat rather than diplomacy, work for Capone and his brother Frank, whose quiet, bankerlike demeanor masked considerable savagery. With Torrio agreeing to what he considered a necessary evil, Capone borrowed from their Chicago allies shock troops totaling about 200, including a contingent of Ragen's Colts. The opposition did not reject gangster support either, and to their cause rallied the bootleg beer wholesalers eager to arrogate the Torrio-Capone territory to themselves.

  The first casualty was the Democratic candidate for town clerk, William K. Pflaum. Besieging his office on the eve of elections, March 31, the Capone thugs roughed him up and wrecked the place. When the polls opened, a fleet of black, seven-passenger limousines, carrying heavily armed Caponeites, cruised the town, sowing terror wherever they halted. They so far outnumbered the opposition hoodlums that there was never any real contest. They slugged Ciceronians known to favor the Democrats. As a voter waited in line to cast his ballot, a menacing, slouch-hatted figure would sidle up to him and ask how he intended to vote. If the reply was unsatisfactory, the hooligan would snatch the ballot from him, mark it himself, hand it back, and stand by, fingering the revolver in his coat pocket, until the voter had dropped the ballot into the box. Defiant voters were slugged, honest poll watchers and election officials kidnapped and held captive until the polls closed. A Democratic campaign worker named Michael Gavin was shot through both legs and dumped into the basement of a gangster-owned Chicago hotel along with eight other recalcitrant Democrats. Ragen's Colts kidnapped an election clerk, Joseph Price, beat him and kept him gagged and trussed at Harry Madigan's Pony Inn. A policeman was blackjacked. Two men were shot dead on Twenty-second Street near the Hawthorne Inn. A third man had his throat slashed and a fourth was killed in Eddie Tancl's saloon.

  A group of horrified Cicero citizens appealed for help to Cook County Judge Edward K. Jarecki. He deputized seventy Chicago patrolmen, five squads of detectives and nine squads of motorized police and rushed them to the beleaguered town. All afternoon gangsters and police fought pitched battles. The climax came toward dusk. A squad car carrying Detective Sergeant Cusick and Patrolmen McGlynn, Grogan, Cassin and Campion pulled up opposite a polling place at the corner of Twenty-second Street and Cicero Avenue. There, intimidating the voters with drawn automatics, stood Al and Frank Capone and their cousin, Charlie Fischetti. Piling out of their car, armed with shotguns and rifles, the police started across the street. When word of what followed reached Dion O'Banion, he immediately called his wholesaler and ordered some $20,000 worth of flowers. . . .

  During the early twenties the Chicago flivver police used the same type of long black limousine as the gangsters. Since they were no more eager than the gangsters to proclaim their presence, their cars bore no identifying signs, with the result that the hunted were sometimes confused with the hunters. Thus, the trio at the Cicero Avenue polls may have mistaken Cusick and his men for rival gangsters because the moment the squad moved toward them they began shooting. Frank Capone took point-blank aim at Patrolman McGlynn, but the trigger of his automatic clicked against an empty chamber. Before he could pull the trigger again, McGlynn and Grogan gave him both barrels of their shotguns and he fell dead on the sidewalk. Al Capone, fleeing down the avenue, ran into another squad, held them at bay with a revolver in both hands and finally escaped under cover of night. The police never arrested him. They captured Fischetti but speedily released him.

  The obsequies for Frank Capone, attended by such grandees of the underworld as the labor union boss "Dago Mike" Carozzo, the deluxe fence Julian "Potatoes" Kaufman and Hymie Weiss, eclipsed the splendor of even Big Jim Colosimo's funeral. The coffin was satinlined and silver-plated, and O'Banion surpassed himself in the magnificence of his floral compositions. There was a heart six feet high fashioned of red carnations "from the boys in Chicago Heights" and a monumental lyre of lilies and orchids "from the boys in Hammond." The Chicago Tribune, pronouncing the pomp fit for a 'distinguished statesman," reported:

  Before noon the entire interior of the [Capone] house was banked with a profusion of blossoms. When every nook and cranny from the kitchen to the attic had been fairly choked with these delicate tributes, they were heaped up on the front porch and hung from the balcony. In only a few minutes more attaches were obliged to park the floral pieces on the lawn.

  By nightfall the entire terrace was covered with brilliant blossoms.

  Finally the lack of space made it necessary to festoon the trees and lamp posts in front of the house with wreaths, immortelles and hanging baskets.

  In Cicero, as a mark of respect for the slain man, nearly every saloonkeeper kept his blinds drawn and his doors locked for two hours.

  Riding behind the hearse with his family on the way to Mount Olivet Cemetery, his jowls dark with the ritual growth of stubble. Capone could take comfort from the knowledge that his brother had not died for nothing. The Klenha slate won the election by an enormous plurality.

  At the inquest on Frank both Al and Charlie Fischetti declared that they could furnish no relevant information. A year earlier the state's attorney, inquiring into how gangsters obtained permits to carry guns, learned that the Capones got theirs from a Chicago justice of the peace, George Miller. The permits were revoked. Now, in the course of the inquest, it developed that Justice Emil Fisher of Cicero had reissued gun permits to the Capones for "self-protection."

  Eddie Vogel kept his side of the bargain. On May 1, one month after the elections, Torrio and Capone launched, without interference, their first Cicero gambling house. the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, next to the Hawthorne Inn. Managed for them by Frankie Pope, it was primarily a floating handbook operating at different addresses under different names-the Subway, the Ship, the Radio. From time to time the police felt constrained for the sake of appearances to stage a raid. They always gave ample advance notice, whereupon the action would shift to one of the alternative addresses. At the original Hawthorne Smoke Shop an average of $50,000 a day was bet on horse races, and during the first years the house netted more than $
400,000. The number of gambling establishments in Cicero grew to 161. With cappers drumming up trade at the entrance, with whiskey sold inside at 75 cents a shot, wine at 30 cents a glass and beer at 25 cents a stein, they ran full blast twenty-four hours a day every day. Many of them Torrio and Capone owned outright or controlled. In the latter case they kept a lieutenant on the premises both to protect the proprietor against interlopers and to collect their cut, which ranged from 25 percent to 50 percent of the gross. One of these independents, Lau- derback's, at Forty-eighth Avenue and Twelfth Street, catered to some of the country's wildest plungers, with as much as $100,000 riding on a single spin of the roulette wheel. The majority of the gambling dives, as well as of Cicero's 123 saloons, bought their beer, willingly or unwillingly, from the Torrio breweries.

  The only influential Ciceronian who continued to defy Torrio and the O'Donnells was Eddie Tancl. He went on buying his beer whereever he wished. Early one Sunday morning, after an all-night spree, Myles O'Donnell and a drinking companion, Jim Doherty, staggered into Tancl's saloon and ordered breakfast. At a table across the room sat Tancl, his wife, his head bartender, Leo Klimas, and his star entertainer, Mayme McClain. Only one waiter, Martin Simet, was still on duty. The bill he brought O'Donnell and Doherty when they finished breakfast furnished the pretext they were looking for. They loudly complained that he had overcharged them.