Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Page 21

  A week after the McSwiggin murder the Chicago Tribune reported: "The police have no more actual evidence as to the motives of the shooting and the identity of the killer than they did when it happened." The Carlstrom grand jury reaffirmed this. According to a review of its investigation, "A conspiracy of silence among gangsters and intimidation of other witnesses after a murder has been committed, immediately operates and there is an element of fear involved because anyone who does aid the public officials by giving facts is very likely to be 'taken for a ride.' . . . Notwithstanding every effort has been made to solve the murder of William H. McSwiggin, it has been impossible for the jury to determine guilt or to ascertain the guilty parties in that case. Silence and sealed lips of gangsters make the solution of that crime, like many others, thus far impossible."

  But on the day the Tribune ran its story Crowe, who seldom hesitated to prosecute a case in the newspapers, issued the following statement to reporters: "It has been established to the satisfaction of the state's attorney's office and the detective bureau that Capone in person led the slayers of McSwiggin. . . . It has also been found that Capone handled the machine gun, being compelled to this act in order to set an example of fearlessness to his less eager companions."

  The dead man's father, Sergeant McSwiggin, told reporters, "I thought my life work was over, but it's only begun. I'll never rest until I've killed my boy's slayers or seen them hanged. That's all I have to live for now."

  He undertook a private investigation of his own. When an auto thief, Theodore Thiel, was extradited from Detroit on suspicion of complicity in the triple killing, the old policeman went to the jail and pleaded with him, tears in his eyes, "Tell me who killed my boy."

  "I wish I could help you," said the prisoner.

  "You can't help me," said the policeman. "They killed me, too, when they killed my boy. But you can help yourself by talking. You may not have known my boy was in that automobile when you tipped it off to Capone. But we know you did tip it off and we want you to tell."

  Thiel appeared to weigh the consequences of telling whatever it was he knew.

  "Think it over tonight," the policeman urged him. "We can do you some good in those automobile cases. Capone can do you no harm. We'll talk again tomorrow."

  The plea failed.

  Sergeant McSwiggin eventually named as the four killers of his son Capone, Frank Rio, Frank Diamond and a Cicero bootlegger, Bob McCullough, and as the accomplices who directed them to the victims, Eddie Moore and Willie Heeney. An oath of secrecy, he added, prevented him from revealing the source of his information.

  Crowe's deputy raiders, meanwhile, inflicted costly damage upon Capone's suburban empire. It was a low point in his fortunes. He owned or controlled twenty-five of the thirty-three resorts that the raiders overran, smashing slot machines, roulette wheels and crap tables, beer barrels, cases of liquor and drums of alcohol by the hundreds, arresting the girls, and hauling away safes full of cash and ledgers. They partially wrecked Capone's biggest brothel, the Stockade. The next night three carloads of Forest View vigilantes completed the destruction. Emboldened by the West Suburban Citizens' Association, they set fire to the place. The local fire brigade arrived, but only to make sure the flames didn't endanger any neighboring homes. They didn't, and the brigade stood around idly watching the brothel burn to the ground. "Why don't you do something?" a Caponeite asked. "Can't spare the water," replied a fireman. Deputy Chief Stege laughed when he heard of it. "Investigate?" he said. "I should say not. No doubt the flames were started by some good people of the community." Said the Reverend William H. Tuttle of the Citizens' Association: "I appreciate the wonderful news. I am sure no decent person will be sorry."

  The most interesting seizures made by Stege and his men were the ledgers. In addition to the weekly earnings of each whorehouse em ployee, they showed the yield of every installation from the quarter-inthe-slot player pianos to the chuck-a-luck tables as well as the amount (usually 10 percent) paid for protection. For example, the page of a ledger found at the Barracks, a small Burnham dive, covering the week beginning September 6, 1925, read as follows:

  The Stockade netted almost three times as much, and the total weekly average of all twenty-five Capone resorts came to about $75,000 or close to $4,000,000 a year.

  The Hawthorne Smoke Shop, too, was raided and the books found there taken to the state's attorney's office, where they remained unexamined, gathering dust for four years.

  The federal grand jury sitting in Cicero began to uncover evidence with a possible bearing on the McSwiggin case. Immediately after the murder, federal agents learned, Cicero policemen visited every saloon in town, appropriated a few bottles of beer, and warned the saloonkeepers (in the words of one of them) : "There's going to be a big investigation. Don't tell anybody anything. If you open your face, these samples go to the prohibition office and your prosecution under federal statutes is certain."

  On May 27 the federal jury indicted members of both the Capone and O'Donnell gangs, specifically Al and Ralph Capone, Charlie Fischetti and Peter Payette, the three O'Donnells and Harry Madigan. The charge was conspiracy to violate the Volstead Act.

  The search for the fugitive Capone took the Chicago detectives to New York, to the woods of northernmost Michigan and to Couderay, Wisconsin, where he had recently acquired a country estate for $250,000 and raised a lookout tower near the main house with emplacements for machine guns. They found no trace of him.

  The O'Donnells were captured in Chicago or surrendered-the point was never cleared up-the same day the federal jury indicted them, and Chief Schoemaker took them directly to the state's attorney's office instead of to police headquarters. This breach of normal procedure gave rise to the suspicion that the brothers had been arrested according to a prearranged plan and given ample time to fabricate their stories. They refused to testify before the grand jury until threatened with jail for contempt of court. They then set forth their version of the events of the night of April 27. For the first time they mentioned bulletproof vests as the reason McSwiggin went to Cicero. They were not with him at the fatal moment, they swore. He was carried afterward to Klondike's house, by whom they would not say. Nor did they have any explanation to offer of how the bodies of McSwiggin and Doherty came to end up in a Berwyn prairie.

  The state authorities took no further action against the O'Donnells, and the federal charges for liquor law violations, after pending two years, were dropped.

  The Illinois law limited the life of a special grand jury to one month. If the investigation were to continue, another jury had to be empaneled. The Carlstrom jury disbanded on June 4. In its concluding report it absolved McSwiggin of any wrongdoing and accepted the story of the bulletproof vests. (Crowe described his assistant's evening with gangsters as a "social ride.") The jurors surmised, probably correctly, that "the murderers had no knowledge of the identity or position of the young man. . . ." The report acclaimed the state's attorney for his vigorous prosecution of the case and denounced his detractors: "Baseness and pernicious criticism by groups of persons or newspapers when actuated by malice or political motives only result in aiding and encouraging crime and criminals. And it is deplorable that prominent citizens in public life make criticisms which are published in the press, as in the cases of Mr. Harry Eugene Kelly and Coroner Oscar Wolff, which statements when called before the grand jury they failed in any manner to substantiate."

  As for the basic causes of crime in Cook County, the alliance of politicians and gangsters was not among those the jury enumerated. Overstating the obvious, the report named as the main causes the profit to be made from bootlegging and the ease of obtaining firearms. The report ended on a complacent note:

  On the whole, a review of the years gives no special occasion for alarm at the present moment. Crime, in volume and type, wheels and rotates in cycles. In the last thirty or forty years there have been periodical outbursts of gang activities in the criminal groups. The one through which we are no
w passing has been peculiarly vicious and has produced many murders by gangsters because the stakes played for have been great. Gang after gang has been wiped out by internecine warfare. Remnants of gangs have fled the city and the situation is well enough in hand to encourage the hope that there will be no outbreak on any such scale as in the recent past.

  To still the clamor that greeted the jury's feeble performance, Crowe petitioned Chief Justice Thomas J. Lynch of the Criminal Court to empanel a second special grand jury. It was needed, he said, to investigate vote frauds during the recent primaries, as well as the McSwiggin case. Thus, Crowe again confused and sidetracked the central issue by diffusing the new jury's duties. Under the direction of Charles A. McDonald, a former judge, it made no more progress than the first. A third special grand jury followed. On July 28, toward the end of its equally futile existence, Capone, for whose arrest secret warrants had been issued, reappeared. From Indiana he notified Crowe that he was ready to surrender. As he waited for Crowe's chief investigator, Pat Roche, to pick him up at the Illinois state line, he spoke to reporters. "Some time in the forenoon," he said, "I will go with Mr. Roche to the Federal Building. We have been talking by long distance phone and I think the time is ripe for me to prove my innocence of the charges that have been made against me.

  "It's a bad time to say anything. I've been convicted without a hearing of all the crimes on the calendar. But I'm innocent and it won't take long to prove it. I trust my attorneys to see that I'm treated like a human being and not pushed around by a lot of coppers with axes to grind."

  To a' suburban reporter whose paper had speculated that Capone killed McSwiggin by mistake, thinking he was Hymie Weiss, he said: "Of course, I didn't kill him. Why should I? I liked the kid. Only the day before he was up to my place and when he went home I gave him a bottle of Scotch for his old man."

  Why, then, did Capone flee Chicago after the murder? Because he feared the police would shoot him on sight. "The police have told a lot of stories. They shoved a lot of murders over on me. They did it because they couldn't find the men who did the jobs and I looked like an easy goat. They said I was sore at McSwiggin because he prose cuted Anselmi and Scalise for killing two policemen. But that made no difference. He told me he was going to give them the rope if he could and that was all right with me."

  In his volubility Capone committed an indiscretion horribly embarrassing to Crowe. "I paid McSwiggin," he informed reporters. "I paid him plenty and I got what I was paying for."

  Arriving at the Federal Building, Capone announced: "I'm no squawker, but I'll tell what I know about this case. All I ask is a chance to prove that I had nothing to do with the killing of my friend, Bill McSwiggin. Just ten days before he was killed I talked with him. There were friends of mine with me. If we had wanted to kill him, we could have done it then. But we didn't want to. We never wanted to. I liked him. He was a fine young fellow.

  "Doherty and Duffy were my friends, too. I wasn't out to get them. Why, I used to lend Doherty money. Big-hearted Al I was, just helping out a friend. I wasn't in the beer racket and didn't care where they sold. Just a few days before that shooting, my brother Ralph and Doherty and the O'Donnells were at a party together."

  The day after Capone's return to Chicago he appeared before justice Lynch with Michael Ahern's law partner, Thomas D. Nash. An assistant state's attorney, George E. Gorman, withdrew the murder charge. "This complaint," he said, "was made by Chief of Detectives Schoemaker on cursory information. Subsequent investigation could not legally substantiate the information." Justice Lynch thereupon dismissed the case.

  As Capone sauntered out of the courtroom, beaming, Sergeant McSwiggin, who had followed him there, remarked, "They pinned a medal on him and turned him loose." The old man never recovered from his grief. He was often heard to murmur, "They killed me, too, when they killed my boy."

  No sooner had a fourth special grand jury been empaneled at judge McDonald's request-again, to investigate both vote frauds and the McSwiggin case-than it was distracted by still another issue. On August 6, as two eyewitnesses later testified, Joe Saltis and his chauffeur, Frank "Lefty" Koncil, shot to death a member of the Sheldon gang, John "Mitters" Foley, who had been selling beer in Saltis-McErlane territory. The jurors interrupted their original inquiries to indict the pair.

  The only other accomplishment of the fourth special grand jury was to return indictments against forty election officials of the Fortysecond Ward. The State Supreme Court later quashed them all. Concerning the murder of McSwiggin, Crowe took the witness stand to testify-on what evidence he did not indicate-that his blameless young assistant had been killed by gunmen imported from either Detroit or New York.

  "I know who killed McSwiggin," said judge McDonald in asking Justice Lynch to empanel a fifth grand jury, "but I want to know it legally and be able to present it conclusively. Neither Sergeant McSwiggin nor anyone else has at any time given me or my assistants the name of any one witness who would appear before the grand jury and identify Al Capone or any other person as the murderer."

  Two new clues and two new witnesses had been found, he claimed. "It is necessary to keep the names of the witnesses secret. The moment any of the witnesses learn that they are wanted they disappear, or are even killed." Justice Lynch granted the request on condition that the jury confine itself to the McSwiggin case. It adjourned the first day, pending the presentation of the promised evidence. Neither new clues nor new witnesses ever materialized.

  A sixth special grand jury brought the investigation to a fumbling close in October. Long before, the question of who killed McSwiggin and why had assumed less importance than the panorama of civic corruption that had been unveiled.

  ... the McSwiggin case [said the Illinois Crime Survey] marks the beginning of intense public interest in organized crime.... The killing of McSwiggin dramatized to the public the relation between criminal gangs and the political machine. It is true that the coroner's jury and six grand juries were of no avail in solving the murder of an assistant state's attorney and his two gangster companions, but their findings did convince the public of the existence and power of organized crime-a power due in large part to its unholy alliance with politics. The very failure of the grand juries in solving the mystery of McSwiggin's death raised many puzzling and disturbing questions in the minds of intelligent citizens about the reasons for the breakdown of constituted government in Chicago and Cook County and its seeming helplessness when pitted against the forces of organized crime.

  August 10, 1926-The First Battle of the Standard Oil Building

  SO far the Weiss forces had kept the initiative and struck the hardest blows. They had wounded Torrio and put him to flight, attacked Capone twice and his men a dozen times, killed Tommy Cuiringione. . . .

  Hymie Weiss and Schemer Drucci had an appointment in the offices of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago at 910 South Michigan Avenue, the new nineteen-story Standard Oil Building. They were to meet with Morris Eller, political boss of the Twentieth Ward, who had recently been elected a trustee of the department, and John Sbarbaro, gangland's favorite funeral director, as well as an assistant state's attorney. Drucci was then living in the Congress Hotel, four blocks north of the rendezvous, and Weiss joined him there at about 9 A.M. After breakfasting in Drucci's eighth-floor suite, they set out on foot for the Standard Oil Building.

  The exact nature of their business remained a secret among the parties involved. It called for a payment of $13,500, which Drucci brought with him in cash. He later referred vaguely to a "real estate deal." Whatever the transaction, it was not consummated that morning. As Weiss and Drucci approached the bronze, neo-Italian Renaissance doors of the building, four men bolted out of a car on the opposite side of the avenue and ran toward them with drawn automatics. Weiss and Drucci, shielding themselves behind a car parked in front of the entrance, pulled their guns out of their shoulder holsters. At that hour of the day the block teemed with people hurrying to work.
A bullet nicked an office clerk in the thigh.

  The street emptied as people dived for cover into doorways. The shooting went on, chipping hunks of concrete from buildings and smashing windows, until both sides ran out of ammunition. A police flivver then reached the scene. The attackers raced back to their car. One of them fell behind and the others drove off without him. The police recognized the Capone gunman, Louis Barko. Weiss fled into the Standard Oil lobby. Drucci leaped onto the running board of a passing car, held his revolver to the driver's temple and ordered him to keep going. But before the car could pick up speed, the police had dragged Drucci backward to the pavement.

  At the stationhouse both Barko and Drucci gave false names and addresses. Drucci denied ever having set eyes on Barko. There had been no gang fight, he insisted. "It was a stickup, that's all. They were after my roll."

  August 15-The Second Battle of the Standard Oil Building

  Toward midmorning Weiss and Drucci were traveling south on Michigan Avenue in a sedan. As they came abreast of the Standard Oil Building, a car that had been trailing them close behind suddenly shot ahead, swerved to the right, and rammed them. Bullets from the car smashed all their windows. They jumped out and scampered into the building, firing over their shoulders as they ran. ("A real goddam crazy place!" said Capone's Brooklyn schoolmate Lucky Luciano after a visit to Chicago. "Nobody's safe in the streets.")