Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Page 18

  When St. John approached his office two mornings later at about eight thirty, Cowan was already at his newsstand. On the northeast corner of Fifty-second Avenue a policeman was standing in front of a cigar store, reading a newspaper. On the opposite corner another policeman was leaning against a mailbox. As St. John reached the middle of the avenue, he saw a big black car heading toward him at top speed. It screeched to a halt a few feet away. Of the four men who jumped out he recognized Ralph Capone and a hoodlum named Pete Pizak. The two others were unknown to him. Capone stood aside, barking commands. Pizak advanced, holding a pistol by the barrel. The second man had a blackjack, and the third swung a woolen sock with a cake of soap in the toe. Wielded by a skilled hand, this last weapon, striking the base of the victim's brain, could kill without leaving a noticeable mark. Neither of the policemen stirred. St. John flung himself to the ground, curled up into a ball, and covered his head with his hands. After the first few blows he lost consciousness.

  In Berwyn the same morning a mayoral election was beginning. Archer St. John, who ran his newspaper all by himself, had announced a special edition that would expose Capone's political alliances. Before he could start the press run, he was hustled into a car at gunpoint, handcuffed, blindfolded, and held prisoner until the balloting ended.

  Robert St. John spent a week in the hospital. When he stopped at the cashier's office to pay his bill, he was told that somebody had already paid it. The cashier described this benefactor as dark and husky with a long scar across his cheek.

  Before returning to his desk, the young editor went to the Town Hall to see Chief of Police Svoboda. He demanded warrants for the arrest of Ralph Capone and Pete Pizak on charges of assault and battery and "John Doe" warrants against his two other assailants. Svoboda was aghast. He could not, he explained, issue warrants against members of the Capone gang. He implored St. John not to embarrass him. If St. John had to swear out warrants, let him apply to the police of another town. But even if he succeeded, what cop would have the nerve to serve them? St. John stood his ground. At length Svoboda seemed to give in. If St. John came back next day, he promised, the warrants would be ready.

  In the morning Svoboda directed him to a room on the second floor. He found it empty. Presently, a bulky figure lumbered through the door, closed it behind him, and turned toward St. John, smiling and holding out his hand. He was impeccably dressed-blue serge suit, blue pocket handkerchief, blue necktie with a diamond stickpin, black homburg and shoes shined to a high gloss. The scar barely showed through the heavy coating of powder. Though they had never spoken, St. John knew Capone by sight.

  The gang leader was all conciliation and flattery. He had heard a lot about St. John and was delighted to meet him at last. He hastened to correct any bad impressions St. John might have. "I'm an all right guy," he said. "Sure I got a racket. So's everybody. Most guys hurt people. I don't hurt nobody. Only them that get in my way." Never would he harm a hair of a newspaperman's head. Newspapermen were too valuable to him. They gave his business the kind of advertising no amount of money could buy. He apologized for the beating. He swore that he had forbidden his men to lay a finger on St. John. Unhappily, Ralph and his companions were homeward bound from an all-night party when they spotted the editor, and anger, stoked by alcohol, had got the better of them. As he talked, Capone produced a wad of greenbacks. It was he himself, he disclosed, fingering the cash, who had paid the hospital bill, but, of course, that hardly compensated St. John for the loss of his time. How much was it worth-five hundred? Seven hundred? A thousand? St. John walked out, slamming the door.

  Soon after, his partner, Carmichael, left for Florida, pleading frayed nerves. The same day Louis Cowan turned up at the Tribune office, swollen with self-importance. His friends, he announced, did not like the story about Ralph in the current issue. The editor gave him a short answer. Maybe, said the little man, St. John didn't realize who owned the Tribune now. Capone owned it. While the editor was in the hospital, Carmichael had sold his 49 percent interest. This St. John could believe, for he had come to mistrust Carmichael, but that his friend, Tom Foss, would have sold his 2 percent, giving Capone control of the paper, he found hard to accept. In Cowan's presence he phoned the third director. Flabbergasted, Foss quoted a note he had received during St. John's absence: "Please make over your shares to Louis Cowan." It was signed "Bob St. John." A forgery, the editor assured Foss, and he entreated him not to let the note out of his sight until they could prove it so in court. Foss groaned. In all innocence he had handed the note, along with his stock certificates, to Cowan.

  When St. John disconsolately hung up, Cowan, whom Capone had named publisher of the Tribune, took a friendlier tone. He reminded St. John that he still had a 49 percent interest in the paper, and Capone wanted him to go on running it. Nobody would interfere. He could keep every penny the Tribune earned. All they asked was a little discretion when reporting the activities of the organization.

  "Well, Mr. Publisher," said St. John, "I guess you and your scar faced friend have won. Say goodbye to him for me." He left Cicero that day, never to set foot in it again.*

  Among the employees later hired by publisher Cowan was Capone's nineteen-year-old brother, Albert John Capone, who went to work in the circulation department.

  Though St. John was defeated, Al Capone had still to contend with the Reverend Hoover and his West Suburban Citizens' Association. On May 16, 1925 (Derby Day), having badgered a reluctant Sheriff Hoffman into taking action against the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, the minister accompanied-in effect, led-a token force of deputy sheriffs, reinforced by the association's most militant members. While they scattered through the building, armed with search warrants, Chester Bragg, a Berwyn real estate broker, stood guard at the front entrance. Thousands of people gathered in the street, hooting and cheering. Presently, Capone, who had spent the night at the Hawthorne Inn next door, elbowed his way through the crowd. It was noon and he had not yet shaved. He wore silk pajamas under his coat. Bragg, who had never seen the burly gangster before, refused to let him pass. "What do you think this is, a party?" he said, as Capone tried to force an entrance.

  "It ought to be my partyl" Capone shouted, and he added four words whose ultimate disastrous consequences nobody could have foreseen. "I own the place."

  Bragg stepped aside with a mocking flourish. "Come on in, Al. We've been looking for you."

  David Morgan, a machinist from Western Springs, went upstairs with Capone to the main room where about 150 customers had been gambling. Under the direction of the Reverend Hoover and a police lieutenant attached to the sheriff's staff, the raiders were dismantling roulette wheels, chuck-a-luck cages and crap tables, preparatory to loading them onto three trucks that had been backed up to the entrance. "This is the last raid you'll ever pulll" Capone yelled at Hoover.

  "Who is this man?" the young minister asked, peering at Capone through his pince-nez.

  "I'm Al Brown," Capone answered, reverting to his favorite alias, "if that's good enough for you."

  "I thought it was someone like that, more powerful than the President of the United States."

  Capone stepped into a back room, took the money and IOU's out of a cash box, and stuffed them into his pajama pockets. He ordered his bookkeeper, Leslie Shumway, to remove the contents of the safe downstairs, but the raiders had already emptied it. One of them happened to be a magistrate, and he filled out warrants charging Capone and eight of his employees with violations of the antigambling laws. Capone returned to the Hawthorne Inn. He reappeared shortly, shaved, powdered, effulgently attired from the crown of his pearl-gray fedora to his white-spatted shoes, and in a pleasanter frame of mind. He drew Hoover aside. "Reverend," he said, "can't you and I get together-come to some understanding?" The minister asked what he meant. "If you'll let up on me in Cicero," Capone explained, "I'll withdraw from Stickney."

  "Mr. Capone," said Hoover, "the only understanding you and I can have is that you must obey the law or get out of
the western suburbs."

  The raiders did not leave the scene unscathed. Capone's thugs, who had been mingling with the crowd outside, broke Bragg's nose with a blackjack. They threw Morgan to the ground and kicked him in the face. Between then and the trial before a judge Dreher, they and their fellow vigilantes were continually threatened. One night four gangsters waited for Morgan in his garage, shot him, and left him for dead. He was a month recovering in the hospital.

  Rather than expose its members to further reprisals, the Citizens' Association decided to participate in no more raids. None of them testified at the trial, and though there was documentary evidence enough to convict the defendants, judge Dreher dismissed the case. Bragg wrote him a scorching letter of condemnation. The judge turned it over to friends of his in the Cicero Town Hall, suggesting that they muzzle troublemakers like Bragg.

  The Hawthorne Smoke Shop underwent no radical change. Half an hour after the raid new gambling equipment and cash reserves had been moved in, and by nightfall it was operating again at full tilt.

  AFTER the honeymoon, while they went house hunting, Angelo Genna and his bride occupied a suite in the fashionable Hotel Belmont, near the lakeshore. Ex-Mayor Thompson lived opposite, and the neighborhood glittered with the domed and turreted mansions of the city's social elite. Like his brother Tony and like Al Capone, Angelo loved bel canto and loved to play host to its exponents from the Chicago Civic Opera such as Tito Schipa, Titta Ruffo, Luisa Tetrazzini, few of whom were too fastidious not to accept his princely hospitality.

  In May, 1925, the newlyweds found a suburban bungalow they liked. The price was $15,000, and on the morning of the twentyfifth Angelo set out in his rakish roadster with the cash to pay it. As he drove south on Ogden Avenue, six blocks from the hotel, a touring car darted out of a side street. In the rear seat (so the police concluded later) sat Weiss, Moran and Drucci; Frank Gusenberg probably drove. Genna tried to outdistance them. Turning the corner of Hudson Avenue too fast, the roadster skidded and crashed into a lamppost. The pursuit car slowed to a stop, the trio in back aimed sawed-off shotguns at their trapped quarry. . . .

  With a stubble-faced Capone among the mourners, Angelo was buried in an unconsecrated plot at Mount Carmel Cemetery, a step from Dion O'Banion's grave.

  On the morning of June 13, less than three weeks later, a double double cross of Byzantine intricacy was played out in South Chicago. The principals were four members of the Genna gang-Mike Genna, Samoots Amatuna, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi-plus the same three men whom the police suspected of having mowed down Angelo Genna. A few days earlier the O'Banionites had approached Amatuna with a promise of rich reward if he would deliver Scalise and Anselmi into their hands. They wanted him to lure the pair to the corner of Sangamon and Congress streets, where they would pick them off from a waiting car. The time was 9 A.M. of the thirteenth. Amatuna, who hated the North Side gang as fiercely as the Gennas did, pretended to accept the offer, then divulged it to the intended victims. In the counterplot that Mike Genna contrived, the hunters became the prey, the snipers became the target., At the appointed time and place Moran and Drucci were waiting confidently in their car (Weiss had business elsewhere) when a limousine streaked by, spewing buckshot. Moran and Drucci, both wounded, managed to fire an answering volley and drive a few blocks in pursuit, but neither they nor their bullet-riddled car were in any condition for further combat. They abandoned the car on Congress Street, stumbled across the sidewalk, spattering it with their blood, and ended up in a hospital where they were weeks recuperating.

  The enemy were bowling south down Western Avenue. At Fortyseventh Street they passed a northbound detective squad car. Its occupants-Michael Conway in command, Harold Olson at the wheel, William Sweeney and Charles Walsh-were in vengeful mood, three of their mates having been slain by gangsters the week before. Recognizing Genna at the wheel, Conway ordered Olson to overtake the speeding limousine. With its gong clanging, the squad car spun around and picked up a speed of 70 miles an hour. At Fifty-ninth Street a truck lumbered out into the avenue, forcing Genna to swerve. He hit a telephone pole. Unhurt, the three men leaped to the road with their shotguns. The squad car screeched to a halt a few feet from them, and the detectives scrambled out, their revolvers drawn. "Why didn't you stop?" Conway shouted. "Didn't you hear our gong?"

  The shotguns answered him. He went down, wounded in the chest. Walsh and Olson were killed. Sweeney, the youngest officer, barricaded himself behind the squad car and fired at the gangsters over the hood. South Western Avenue was an industrial district, and hundreds of factory workers piled into the streets. Factory whistles blew a warning. Riot calls flooded the switchboard of the precinct police stations. The gangsters fled. With Sweeney close behind, a revolver in each fist, they raced across a vacant lot. Scalise and Anselmi ducked into an alley. Alone, Genna turned to face the advancing detective and raised his shotgun. Both chambers were empty. Flinging the gun aside, he ran toward a house beyond the lot. A revolver bullet hit him in the upper leg, cutting the femoral artery. He fell, dragged himself to a basement window, smashed it, and wriggled through. When Sweeney and two policemen found him, he was sitting on the basement floor, blood gushing from the severed artery. In the ambulance carrying him to Bridewell Hospital a guard leaned over him to adjust the stretcher. Genna kicked him in the face, crying, "Take that, you son of a bitch." He bled to death before the ambulance reached the hospital.

  Having lost their hats in their flight, Scalise and Anselmi dashed into a dry goods store on Fifty-ninth Street to buy new ones. The owner, Edward Issigson, his ears still ringing with the din of battle, was suspicious of the bedraggled pair, babbling in a foreign tongue, and he refused to sell them anything. Just then a streetcar rattled to a stop near the corner. The fugitives ran for it. At the same time another police flivver came roaring down Western Avenue. Issigson hailed it and pointed to the two escaping Sicilians. As the streetcar started to move, the police pulled them off the rear platform.

  After Chief of Detectives William Schoemaker had questioned Scalise and Anselmi through an interpreter at the central detective bureau, they were charged with first-degree murder. In a radio broadcast State's Attorney Crowe proclaimed: "These men will go straight to the gallows." He assigned Assistant State's Attorney McSwiggin to the prosecution.

  Capone shed no tears over the deaths of Angelo and Mike. Though the Gennas' participation had been indispensable to Torrio's master plan, their blind greed, treachery and lunatic spasms of savagery made them allies to be handled as cautiously as scorpions. Moreover, they blocked Capone's path to the control of Little Italy and its booming alky industry. For that the minimal requirement was the prestige of high office in the Unione Siciliane, which the Gennas had held ever since Mike Merlo's death. As a non-Sicilian Capone could not qualify for even rank-and-file membership. He proposed to dominate the fraternity through those of its officers whom he could make beholden to him. This precluded the intractable Gennas. In the president's chair, to which Angelo had succeeded, Capone longed to see his own consigliere, Tony Lombardo. It was without regret, therefore, that he watched the dissolution of the clan. In fact, he contributed to it.

  If what an informer from Little Italy told the police can be credited, Mike Genna was doomed that day regardless of how the two skirmishes ended. According to this source, Scalise and Anselmi had secretly defected to Capone and accepted a contract to eliminate Genna. Thus, as Mike drove with them along Western Avenue, after the attempt to kill Moran and Drucci, he was himself being "taken for a ride."

  Bloody Angelo, killed May 25.

  Mike the Devil, killed June 13.

  July 8, Giuseppe Nerone, Il Cavaliere, the disaffected member of the Genna gang who felt that the brothers failed to appreciate his talents, telephones Tony. He has important information for him. Could they meet in front of the Cutillas' grocery store on Grand Avenue? There, at 10:30 A.M., the murder of Dion O'Banion is imitated. As Nerone firmly grasps Tony's hand in greeting, a
figure steps out of a doorway, presses an automatic against Tony's back and pulls the trigger five times. Dying in the County Hospital, Tony murmurs to his mistress, Gladys Bagwell, what sounds like "Cavallaro." The police look for a nonexistent Sicilian by that name instead of Nerone the Cavalier. By the the time they realize their mistake Nerone has been shot to death while being shaved in a North Side barbershop. As for the identity of the man who shot Tony Genna, the police are divided, some suspecting Schemer Drucci, others, one of Capone's executioners.

  As Tony was buried next to Angelo in Mount Carmel Cemetery, one of the mourners, noting the proximity of Dion O'Banion's grave, remarked, "When Judgment Day comes and them three graves are open, there'll be hell to pay in this cemetery."

  The surviving Gennas fled in panic, Jim to his native Sicily, Sam and Pete to hiding places outside Chicago. In Palermo Jim Genna was arrested for stealing the jewels adorning the statue of the Madonna di Trapani and went to prison for two years. All three brothers eventually returned to Chicago; but their power had been broken, and they lived out their days in comparative obscurity, importing cheese and olive oil.

  To Capone's extreme annoyance, his man, Tony Lombardo, failed to capture the presidency of the Unione Siciliane. In the Gennas' absence Samoots Amatuna rallied the remnants of their gang behind him and flanked by two armed proteges, Abraham "Bummy" Goldstein and Eddie Zion, strode into union headquarters and claimed the coveted office for himself.

  The road to the gallows promised for Scalise and Anselmi took a circuitous course. Three months elapsed without trial. Meanwhile, Capone, the Unione Siciliane and what remained of the Genna gang (who never suspected that the defendants had intended to kill Mike Genna) jointly sponsored a campaign to raise a defense fund. Under the personal direction of President Amatuna, collectors solicited contributions among the immigrant families of Little Italy with the plea that the colony's good name was at stake. But the gang leaders had a different reason to be concerned. They knew that their power rested partly on their ability to protect those who served them. To loosen tight purse strings, the collectors used blackmail and blackjacks.