Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Read online

  September 20-The Siege of the Hawthorne Inn

  Frankie Rio saw through the ruse first. He and Capone were finishing lunch in the rear of the restaurant, facing the windows and Twenty-second Street. The place was packed, every table taken, this being the day of the big autumn meet at the nearby Hawthorne Race Track. Capone and his lieutenant were sipping coffee when they heard the roar of a speeding car mingled with the clatter of machinegun fire. In the silence after the car passed they rushed to the door with the other startled diners. There were no bullet marks, for the gunner had been firing blanks. Rio understood-a decoy to draw Capone out into the open. He flung himself to the floor, pulling Capone down on top of him, as bullets streaked over their heads, splintering the woodwork, smashing glassware and crockery. There were ten cars in the motorcade that had been moving single file behind the decoy car, and gun barrels stuck out of every window like the quills on a porcupine. The attackers took their time. As each car came abreast of the hotel, it stopped while they systematically sprayed the facade left to right, right to left, up and down. Louis Barko, entering the restaurant during the first burst, fell, a bullet through his shoulder. The cars standing at the curb, scores of them belonging to race fans, were perforated by the hail of lead. Clyde Freeman had driven all the way from Louisiana with his wife and five-year-old son. They were still in the car when the gunners opened fire. A bullet ripped through Freeman's hat. Another gashed his boy's knee. Flying shards of glass from the windshield cut Mrs. Freeman's arm and pierced her right eye. When the last carload of attackers stopped before the hotel, a man in a khaki shirt and overalls got out, carrying a tommy gun. He walked calmly up to the entrance, knelt, thrust the gun barrel through the doorway and, setting the mechanism at rapid fire, emptied a 100cartridge drum in about ten seconds. The driver of the lead car sounded his klaxon three times. The man in khaki returned to the rear car, and the motorcade continued in orderly formation along Twenty-second Street toward Chicago.

  The attack had left the restaurant, the hotel lobby and the neighboring storefronts in ruins, but the only human casualties were Barko and the Freemans. As Capone stood up, he showed no fear. His reaction was rather one of awed fascination with the power of tommy guns. He later told his reporter friend Edward Dean Sullivan: "That's the gun! It's got it over a sawed-off shotgun like the shotgun has it over an automatic. Put on a bigger drum and it will shoot well over a thousand. The trouble is they're hard to get."

  When he learned that Mrs. Freeman's injured eye would require major surgery and a long hospitalization, he insisted on paying the entire bill. It came to $10,000. He also paid for repairs to the damaged stores adjoining the Hawthorne Inn.

  Chief of Detectives Schoemaker, who felt sure he knew the identity of at least five of the attackers, summoned Louis Barko to a lineup and in it put Weiss, Drucci, Bugs Moran, Frank Gusenberg and his brothers, Pete and Henry. Barko, observing the gangster code as scrupulously as Drucci had done after the first battle of the Standard Oil Building, swore they all were strangers to him.

  October 4-Truce

  Torrio would have applauded Capone's next move. It reflected his mentor's policy of shared spoils ("There's plenty for everybody") . Repressing his natural urge to kill Weiss, he proposed a peace talk. Weiss agreed to a meeting at the Morrison Hotel. Capone prudently refrained from attending himself. He sent Tony Lombardo as his surrogate and, to placate the enemy, authorized him to offer Weiss exclusive sales rights to all the beer territory in Chicago north of Madison Street, a handsome concession. But the minimum price Weiss would accept for peace was the removal of Scalise and Anselmi. Lombardo phoned for instructions. When he transmitted Capone's answer-"I wouldn't do that to a yellow dog"-Weiss stalked out of the hotel in a fury.

  October 11-The State Street Ambush

  The three-story rooming house at 740 North State Street, kept by a Mrs. Anna Rotariu, had a curious literary association. The property belonged to the prolific crime writer, Harry Stephen Keeler (The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro, Sing Sing Nights and fifty-three others) . He was born and reared in the house and wrote some of his thrillers there, moving away after his marriage in 1919. Next door, at 738, stood the old Dion O'Banion flower shop. William Schofield now ran it, and Hymie Weiss used the rooms above as his headquarters.

  Early in October, a young man calling himself Oscar Lundin, or Langdon, rented lodgings from Mrs. Rotariu. He wanted a room on the second floor, facing State Street, but all the front rooms were occupied. So he agreed to take a back room until one should fall vacant, as it did on October 8. It was a dismal, musty room, small and meanly equipped with a pair of straight-backed wooden chairs, an old oak dresser, a tarnished brass bedframe, a tin food box, a gas ring, a shelf holding a few cracked plates and stained cutlery. But Lundin appeared delighted.

  The same day that he came to Mrs. Rotariu's house a pretty blond woman, giving her name as Mrs. Theodore Schultz and her address as Mitchell, South Dakota, rented a front room on the third floor of an apartment building at 1 Superior Street, which ran at a right angle to State Street, south of the flower shop. Lundin's windows commanded an unobstructed view of the east side of State Street from Holy Name Cathedral to the corner, while Mrs. Schultz's windows overlooked both front and rear entrances of the flower shop. Anybody approaching or leaving the immediate neighborhood in any direction had to pass within close visual range of one or the other rooms.

  Lundin occupied his quarters for only one day. After paying a week's rent in advance, he vanished. Two men, who had been visiting him during his stay, then moved into the room. As Mrs. Rotariu described them, one was about thirty-five years old, wearing a gray overcoat and gray fedora; the other, considerably younger, wore a dark suit and light cap. Mrs. Schultz also vanished after paying a week's rent, and two men, believed to be Italians, took possession of her room.

  Hymie Weiss spent a large part of October 11 in the Criminal Court Building, four blocks from his headquarters, watching the selection of a jury in the trial of Joe Saltis and Lefty Koncil for the murder of Mitters Foley. The trial held a special interest for Weiss, as evidenced by the list of veniremen in his pocket and the list of state's witnesses in a safe back at his headquarters, documents whose later discovery would give substance to the rumor that he had disbursed $100,000 to ensure an acquittal.

  When the court recessed for the day, Weiss left the building with four companions. There was his driver and factotum, Sam Peller; Paddy Murray, his bodyguard and a part-time beer runner; Benny Jacobs, a Twentieth Ward politician and private investigator for lawyers; and William W. O'Brien, one of Chicago's leading criminal lawyers, who headed the Saltis-Koncil defense staff. Four years earlier O'Brien had defeated a move to disbar him for having tried to suborn two assistant state's attorneys. His reputation was further blemished when he refused to name the gangster who shot him in a South Side saloon.

  At about 4 P.M. Peller parked Weiss' Cadillac coupe in front of Holy Name Cathedral, opposite the flower shop, and the five men started across State Street. The swarthy pair in Mrs. Rotariu's room ing house had been waiting for two days, their chairs drawn up to the windows, tommy guns and shotguns at hand. A hundred cigarette stubs littered the floor. The coverlet of the bed on which they had taken turns napping was splotched with black shoe polish. The two men in the side-street apartment had also been keeping vigil since October 9, chain-smoking and drinking wine, but now they saw they were no longer needed. In their hasty retreat they left behind an automatic shotgun and two bottles of wine.

  The date of the construction of Holy Name Cathedral and the Vulgate version of St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (2:10), were carved on the cornerstone-A.D. 1874 AT THE NAME OF JESUS EVERY KNEE SHOULD BOW IN HEAVEN AND ON EARTH. The bullets that poured from the windows of No. 740, as the five men reached the center of the street, chipped off the date and all but six words of the text, leaving

  EVERY KNEE SHOULD HEAVEN AND EARTH.* Ten bullets hit Weiss, killing him almost instantly. Murray, pi
erced through by fifteen bullets, fell dead beside him. O'Brien, with bullets in his arm, thigh and abdomen, dragged himself to the curb. The first policeman on the scene found Peller, shot in the groin, begging people in the swelling crowd to take him to a doctor. Jacobs, bleeding from a leg wound, was supporting himself against a mailbox.

  The killers ran down a back staircase, climbed through a groundfloor window into an alley, and made a clean getaway. The only clue to their escape route was a tommy gun dropped on top of a dog kennel, a block south of Superior Street. Detectives searching the ambush counted thirty-five empty tommy-gun shells and three fired shotgun cartridges. On the bed they found a gray fedora bearing the label of a Cicero haberdashery near the Hawthorne Inn. They also found in Weiss' pockets, along with the list of veniremen, $5,300 and in Paddy Murray's pockets, $1,500. O'Brien was carrying $1,500.

  O'Brien, Peller and Jacobs all eventually recovered, but none had any helpful information to offer the coroner's jury. No trace of the killers was ever uncovered. Nor were the accomplices who rented the rooms for them ever identified.

  While the Sbarbaro embalmers were preparing Weiss' body for burial, Capone in slippered, shirt-sleeved ease, puffing on a rich cigar, received the press at the Hawthorne Inn. "That was butchery," he said in the course of several interviews, as he dispensed cigars and drinks to the reporters. "Hymie was a good kid. He could have got out long ago and taken his and been alive today. When we were in business together in the old days, I got to know him well and used to go often to his room for a friendly visit. Torrio and me made Weiss and O'Banion. When they broke away and went into business for themselves, that was all right with us. We let 'em go and forgot about 'em. But they began to get nasty. We sent 'em word to stay in their own backyard. But they had the swell head and thought they were bigger than we were. Then O'Banion got killed. Right after Torrio was shot-and Torrio knew who shot him-I had a talk with Weiss. `What do you want to do, get yourself killed before you're thirty?' I said to him. [Weiss died at the age of twenty-eight; he was a year older than Capone.] 'You'd better get some sense while a few of us are left alive.' He could still have got along with me. But he wouldn't listen to me. Forty times I've tried to arrange things so we'd have peace and life would be worth living. Who wants to be tagged around night and day by guards? I don't, for one. There was, and there is, plenty of business for us all and competition needn't be a matter of murder, anyway. But Weiss couldn't be told anything. I suppose you couldn't have told him a week ago that he'd be dead today. There are some reasonable fellows in his outfit, and if they want peace I'm for it now, as I have always been.

  "I'm sorry Hymie was killed, but I didn't have anything to do with it. I phoned the detective bureau that I'd come in if they wanted me, but they told me they didn't want me. I knew I'd be blamed for it. There's enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street. I don't want to end up in the gutter punctured by machine gun slugs, so why should I kill Weiss?"

  The rhetorical question brought a growl of disgust from Chief of Detectives Schoemaker. "He knows why," he told the reporters, "and so does everyone else. He had them killed." Chief of Police Collins agreed. It was his contention that when Capone went to New York at Christmastime, he hired more bodyguards, bringing the total to eighteen, and picked four of them to kill Weiss. Asked why, then, Capone remained at liberty, Collins replied: "It's a waste of time to arrest him. He's been in before on other murder charges. He has his alibi."

  A group of Hymie Weiss' boyhood classmates at St. Malachy's School bore his bronze casket with silver fittings to the Sbarbaro hearse. The last rites of the church having been denied him, he was buried in unconsecrated ground at Mount Carmel Cemetery. The floral tributes and general display fell considerably below gangster standards. The only underworld figures of any stature to attend were Schemer Drucci and Bugs Moran, who now jointly ruled the O'Banionites, and Maxie Eisen, the fish and meat market racketeer.

  No important politicians attended Weiss' funeral, but placards fastened to the mourners' automobiles advertised a number of political candidates-JOHN SBARBARO FOR MUNICIPAL JUDGE . . . JOE SAVAGE FOR COUNTY JUDGE . . . KING-ELLER-GRAYDON FOR SANITARY DISTRICT TRUSTEES. . . .

  October 21-The Hotel Sherman Treaty

  The revelations that followed Weiss' death held a disagreeable surprise for Capone. He still assumed Joe Saltis and Frankie McErlane to be his allies. The 200-odd saloons they operated with Dingbat O'Berta had been a major outlet for his beer and whiskey. But it now appeared from the lists of veniremen and state's witnesses found in Weiss' possession that a shift of allegiance had occurred; these supposed allies must have secretly entered into a pact with his enemies. Further investigation by Capone indicated that Saltis had been about to throw his saloon business Weiss' way. Such perfidy would normally have demanded a crushing reprisal, but Capone, in his eagerness to reestablish peace among the gangs and restore territorial boundaries as they existed in Torrio's prime, decided to overlook it for the moment.

  The initial impetus toward peace came this time from Saltis. Terrified of what Capone might do to him, he turned for advice to Dingbat O'Berta, who was awaiting a separate trial for the murder of Mitters Foley. Dingbat consulted Maxie Eisen, whom the underworld respected as a man of rare wisdom and experience. It was Eisen's opinion that Saltis' safety, once he regained his freedom, lay in a general armistice, and he offered to try to arrange it. He went first to Tony Lombardo and asked him to sound out his patron. Lombardo reported back to Eisen the next day: Capone desired nothing so much as peace. After two pourparlers in the office of Billy Skidmore, the ward heeler, court fixer and gambling magnate, the gang leaders and their chief adjutants, thirty men in all, convened at the Hotel Sherman, which stood within the shadows of both City Hall and police headquarters. They came, as agreed, without arms or bodyguards. The Capone delegates numbered, besides Al Capone, his brother Ralph, Tony Lombardo, Jake Guzik and Ed Vogel of Cicero. From the North Side there were Drucci; Bugs Moran; Potatoes Kaufman; Frank Foster, alias Citro, an importer of Canadian whiskey; Jack Zuta, whoremaster and director of the O'Banionites' vice operations; and, from the O'Donnell gang, the brothers Myles and- Klondike. Billy Skidmore and Christian P. "Barney" Bertche, another prominent figure in the gambling world, formerly a safecracker, were present. While loosely affiliated with the North Siders, Skidmore and Bertche each ran his own independent gambling houses. Ralph Sheldon was the only member of his gang on hand, and Maxie Eisen represented the Saltis-McErlane-O'Berta interests.

  Little effort was made to keep the meeting secret. A detective from across the street sat in as an observer. Reporters, though excluded from the meeting room itself, waited in the corridor outside and were apprized of every development. Eisen opened the meeting with an appeal to common sense. "Let's give each other a break," he said. "We're a bunch of saps, killing each other this way and giving the cops a laugh." Capone, who dominated the proceedings as much by the force of his personality as by the size and power of his organization, then submitted a five-point treaty:

  1. All standing grievances and feuds to be buried-a general amnesty.

  2. The renunciation of violence as a means of settling intergang disputes; arbitration instead.

  3. An end to "ribbing" (a common weapon of psychological warfare among gangsters, involving malicious gossip. If A wished to destroy B without risking an open attack, he might tell C that A was plotting against him, thus inciting C to strike first. Or he might feed the press a story about A sure to enrage C) .

  4. No more stealing another gang's customers; no encroachments upon their established territories.

  5. The head of each gang to punish violations committed by any member.

  According to the reapportionment of territory, the O'Banionites were to withdraw from all the sectors they had invaded since O'Banion's death and confine their activities to the Forty-second and Fortythird wards. There and there only they could enjoy exclusive franchises to the sale o
f beer and liquor, to prostitution and gambling. This limitation imposed no great hardship, for the two wards constituted a densely populous business and residential area almost five miles square, stretching east to west from Lake Michigan to the Chicago River and north to south from Belden Avenue to Wacker Drive. The Saltis-McErlane gang was to divide equally with the Sheldon gang a portion of southwest Chicago, roughly three miles square, lying between the lake and the river. Skidmore and Bertche could operate their gambling houses as before, but under Capone's jurisdiction. For the smaller gangs, like Marty Guilfoyle's, Capone made provision out of his holdings. The determination of the O'Donnells' territory he reserved to a later meeting, and in view of their grievous offenses against him it would depend on how scrupulously they observed the terms of the treaty. This left to Capone nearly all Chicago below Madison Street and most of the suburbs, a domain embracing about 20,000 speakeasies and only he and his top executives knew how many roadhouses, gambling dens and brothels.

  "I told them we're making a shooting gallery out of a great business," Capone recalled later, "and nobody's profiting by it. It's hard and dangerous work and when a fellow works hard at any line of business, he wants to go home and forget it. He don't want to be afraid to sit near a window or open a door. Why not put up our guns and treat our business like any other man treats his, as something to work at in the daytime and forget when he goes home at night? There's plenty of beer business for everybody-why kill each other over it?"

  He added reasons of paternal sentiment. "I wanted to stop all that because I couldn't stand hearing my little kid ask why I didn't stay home. I had been living at the Hawthorne Inn for 14 months. He's been sick for three years-mastoid infection and operations-and I've got to take care of him and his mother. If it wasn't for him, I'd have said: `To hell with you fellows! We'll shoot it out.' But I couldn't say that, knowing it might mean they'd bring me home some night punctured with machine gun fire. And I couldn't see why those fellows would want to die that way either."