Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Read online

  Of the Lexington's ten floors Capone and his entourage occupied the entire fourth, most of the third, and rooms scattered throughout the hotel where they put up their women. When Capone wished to dine in his six-room suite, for which he paid $18,000 a year, the food and wine were brought to him on rolling tables from a fourth-floor kitchen the management had installed for his exclusive use. His private chef, who lived next to the kitchen, partook of each dish and bottle before they were served, a precaution in force ever since the Aiellos tried to have Capone poisoned. At night little Louis Campagna slept on a cot in front of Capone's bedroom door.

  To conceal his comings and goings, Capone devised an escape hatch that necessitated the cooperation of both the Lexington management and the owners of the adjacent office building. Convoyed by half a dozen bodyguards, he would ride the freight elevator to the second floor and slip into a maids' changing room. There a fulllength mirror, hinged at one side to the wall, masked a door that had been cut to Capone's specifications. Swinging aside the mirror, he would step through to the office building and walk down two flights to a side entrance where his car and driver would be waiting.*

  On rare occasions Mae Capone shared her husband's hotel suite, but hardly ever did she accompany him to a theater, nightclub or racetrack. Few members of the gang and still fewer outsiders came to know her. In the tradition of the old-country Italian dons Capone confined the women of his family to a kind of purdah in either his Prairie Avenue or Palm Island house.

  At the time he moved to the Lexington his mistress was a plump, blond, teen-age Greek whom he had salvaged from one of his suburban brothels. He installed her in a two-room suite on the floor above him. When Capone, his family or a member of his gang needed medical attention, they consulted a Dr. David V. Omens, who was also an investor in the Hawthorne Kennel Club, drawing dividends of as much as $36,000 a year. The Greek girl went to him one day, complaining of a genital sore. Owens diagnosed syphilis and began a series of arsphenamine injections. He then urged Capone to take a Wassermann test, but the thought of a needle penetrating his vein and withdrawing blood horrified the gang leader. Neither the doctor's assurance that the pain would be negligible nor his graphic description of the slow devastation inflicted by untreated syphilis could persuade him to it. There was nothing the matter with him, Capone insisted.

  He had been established at the Lexington for three months when Frank Loesch went to him with his plea in behalf of the Chicago voter. Whether Republicans or Democrats won, an honest election was bound to fill the county offices with anti-Thompsonites sworn to crush Capone. It seems at first blush that in acceding to Loesch he acted against his own interests. No doubt vanity played a part. It must have deeply gratified him, this hat-in-hand appeal from the illustrious president of the Chicago Crime Commission. Capone craved admiration and gratitude and continually sought to win them with a show of civic spirit or the distribution of largesse. His munificent gifts to his followers, his ostentatious gratuities of $5 to newsboys, $20 to hatcheck girls, $100 to waiters, his donations of food, fuel and clothing to the destitute-he saw to it that they all were publicized.

  Capone once thought seriously of trying to retain Ivy Lee, the public relations genius who so successfully gilded the public image of John D. Rockefeller. "There's a lot of people in Chicago that have got me pegged for one of those bloodthirsty mobsters you read about in storybooks," Capone complained, "the kind that tortures his victims, cuts off their ears, puts out their eyes with a red-hot poker and grins while he's doing it. Now get me right. I'm not posing as a model for youth. I've had to do a lot of things I don't like to do. But I'm not as black as I'm painted. I'm human. I've got a heart in me. I'll go as deep in my pocket as any man to help any guy that needs help. I can't stand to see anybody hungry or cold or helpless. Many a poor family in Chicago thinks I'm Santa Claus. If I've given a cent to the poor in this man's town, I'll bet I've given a million dollars. Yes, a million. I don't take any credit to myself for being charitable and I'm just saying this to show that I'm not the worst man in the world." *

  But his vanity was not so blind as to betray him into any real peril. The Thompson machine was doomed in any event. Moreover, though Capone might wish it to prevail, he had reason to feel secure no matter how the majority voted. Two administrations had risen and fallen since he came to Chicago. Neither had seriously hampered his operations. Under both he had weathered reform crusades, raids, police shake-ups, grand jury investigations. Officeholders had come and gone; the system remained intact. What had he to fear from a new administration? Capone could afford to grant Loesch's flattering petition, and so there took place what Loesch remembered as "the squarest and the most successful election day in 40 years"-a Republican victory, but a repudiation of Big Bill Thompson.

  In the national elections Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith. The Chicago vote was 650,000 for Hoover, 629,000 for Smith. Soon after his victory, the President-elect visited Miami as the guest of the Southern chain store magnate J. C. Penney. The Penney estate on Belle Isle was not far from Palm Island, a circumstance that gave currency to several indestructible fictions. According to one of these fictions, the sounds of revelry at night from No. 93, of shooting, shouting and females screeching, disturbed Hoover's sleep, and he vowed then and there to crush Capone. According to another persistent version, Hoover was miffed because the newsmen paid more attention to Capone than to him, on one occasion turning away from him in a Miami hotel lobby and flocking to the gang chieftain. It is a fact that early in his Presidential career Hoover ordered an all-out attack against Capone, but personal pique had nothing to do with it.

  Liquor continued to produce the bulk of Capone's profits. The necessity for diversification, however, was a lesson learned early from Johnny Torrio, who saw that Prohibition could not last forever, and he applied it so astutely that even had Repeal come much sooner than it did, he could have recouped a good deal of his loss through other sources. Some were entirely legitimate. The New Orleans pinball machine company, for one, in which he invested as a partner 'of Phil Kastel. He also acquired a 25 percent interest in his favorite Levee nightclub, the Midnight Frolics, where, sealed off from the ordinary customers by bodyguards, he would turn up two or three nights a week to hear *Joe E. Lewis sing "Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long," stamp his feet to the rhythms of Austin Mack and his Century Serenaders, and drink whiskey out of a teacup. He seldom brought women with him, and he never danced.

  But Capone's most profitable alternative to bootlegging was racketeering.

  A "racketeer" [as the Chicago Journal of Commerce described him in its issue of December 17, 1927] may be the boss of a supposedly legitimate business association; he may be a labor union organizer; he may pretend to be one, or the other, or both; or he may be just a journeyman thug.

  Whether he is a gunman who has imposed himself upon some union as its leader, or whether he is a business association organizer, his methods are the same; by throwing a few bricks into a few windows, an incidental and perhaps accidental murder, he succeeds in organizing a group of small businessmen into what he calls a protective association. He then proceeds to collect what fees and dues he likes, to impose what fines suit him, regulates prices and hours of work, and in various ways undertakes to boss the outfit to his own profit.

  Any merchant who doesn't come in or who comes in and doesn't stay in and continue to pay tribute, is bombed, slugged or otherwise intimidated.

  Chicago racketeering involved most consumer goods and services with a consequent rise in prices. The Employers' Association of Chicago estimated the annual cost to consumers at $136,000,000 or about $45 per inhabitant. For example, until Maxie Eisen terrorized 380 West Side kosher butcher shops into joining his Master Jewish Butchers' Association their customers paid 90 to 95 cents per pound for corned beef. To raise the protection money Eisen demanded, the butchers had to increase the price to $1.25.

  Concerning Eisen's depredations in the fish market, a victim named David Walkoff
mustered the courage to tell the state's attorney's office: "In 1925 Eisen came to a store I had on Taylor Street. He had four sluggers with him. He made me close my store because it was within four blocks of another association store. A month later he told me I could return to the fish business by buying an association store at 1016 South Pauline Street. I paid the store owner and had to pay Eisen $300 to return to the association. Two years later I sold the store for $650 and had to pay Eisen 10 per cent commission. I have bought and sold two other stores since then. Each time I bought it was $300 to Eisen for the association and each time I sold it was 10 per cent to Eisen for the commission." Another courageous victim, Mrs. Mamie Oberlander, a fifty-two-year-old widow with five children, complained to the Chicago Crime Commission: "I went to Eisen and pleaded with him to let me open a fish store and he agreed on condition that I gave him $300. I have no money as I am a poor woman. I threatened to tell my trouble to some public officials, but this brought a hearty laugh from Eisen. He said he is the boss and is not afraid of any official or anybody in the city or county, that nobody can make him do what he doesn't want to do."

  So prevalent did the rackets become that a special Rackets Court was established with jurisdiction over the following frequently committed offenses: destruction of property and injury of persons by explosives (in 1928 racketeering hoodlums exploded approximately fifty bombs) ; making or selling explosives, throwing stench bombs, malicious mischief to houses, collecting penalty payments; entering premises to intimidate, kidnapping for ransom, mayhem, intimidation of workmen.

  During the twenties more than 200 different rackets flourished in Chicago under such brimming titles as the Concrete Road, Concrete Block, Sewer and Water Pipe Makers' and Layers' Union, Local No. 381; the Soda Dispensers and Table Girl Brotherhood; the Bread, Cracker, Yeast and Pie Wagon Drivers' Union. The 10,000 members of the Midwest Garage Owners' Association each paid its organizer, David Albin, alias Cockeye Mulligan, $1 a month for every car handled. In one month Albin's bully boys slashed 50,000 tires on cars belonging to the customers of nonassociation garages.

  Simon J. Gorman, a veteran of Ragen's Colts, who started his racketeering career as business agent of the Cook County Horseshoers' Union, became the czar of Chicago's laundry rackets. With his partner, Johnnie Hand, he organized the Chicago Wet and Dry Laundry Owners' Association, which netted them $1,000 a week. Gorman had powerful City Hall connections, and he used them to discipline holdouts. At his behest a safety inspector would visit the recalcitrant laundryman and condemn his boilers. Hand ended full of machinegun bullets in a lot behind the Hawthorne Inn, but Gorman went on to dominate the Laundry Owners, Linen Supply, Hand Laundry and Laundry Service associations, imposing levies as high as 10 percent of the gross business.

  Poison was the persuader adopted by the Kosher Meat Peddlers' Association. They hurled bottles of it into delicatessens that bought their sausages from unaffiliated wholesalers. The Beauty Parlors' Protective Association approached unwilling prospects in two stagesfirst, a little black powder ignited on the ledge of a rear window; then, if that failed to break down resistance, a stick of dynamite tossed into the middle of the shop. For a time few sporting events could be held in Chicago without casualties unless the promoters hired their help from the Theater Ticket Takers' and Ushers' Union at $5 a head. Since the union's labor pool consisted largely of small boys happy to take tickets or usher for nothing if they could watch the game, its margin of profit was exceptionally big.

  The Electric Sign Club found it relatively easy to extort protection payments of $1,500 to $2,000 from theater owners after its thugs flooded one theater with gasoline and set it afire. The Janitors' Union operated in tandem with the Milk Drivers' Union to victimize apartment-building owners. The milk drivers would deliver no milk to apartments that did not employ extra janitors, while the janitors would not stay on the job unless the tenants bought their dairy products from designated suppliers. The Elevator Operators obtained an assessment of $1,000 from each of twenty-five Loop skyscrapers on pain of suspending service without warning, leaving hundreds of people stranded on the top stories. Not even the lowly bootblacks escaped exploitative unionization. They had to pay an initiation fee of $15 plus monthly dues of $2.

  Toward the end of 1928 the state's attorney's office compiled a list of ninety-one Chicago unions and associations that had fallen under racketeer rule. Affecting nearly every small business and a good many big ones, they included the Retail Food and Fruit Dealers (initiation fee: $25; monthly dues: $5), the Master Photo Finishers, the Junk Dealers and Peddlers, the Candy jobbers (still another Gorman enterprise, it was said to gross $7,000,000 a year), the Commission Wagon Owners, the Newspaper Wagon Drivers and Chauffeurs, the Building Trade Council, the City Hall Clerks, the Steamfitters and Plumbers, the Marble Setters, the Theater Treasurers and Box Office Men, the Glaziers, the Bakers, the Excavating Contractors, the Window Shade Manufacturers, the Barbers, the Soda Pop Peddlers, the Ice Cream Dealers, the Garbage Haulers, the Window Cleaners, the Street Sweepers, the Banquet Organizers, the Golf Club Organizers, the Automobile Mechanics, the Distilled Water Dealers, the Electrical Workers, the Clothing Workers, the Musicians, the Dentists' Technicians, the Safe Movers, the Florists, the Structural Iron Workers, the Motion Picture Operators, the Painters and Decorators, the Vulcanizers, the Carpet Layers, the Undertakers, the Coal Teamsters, the Jewish Chicken Killers, the Poultry Dealers, the Master Bakers of the Northwest Side, the Wholesale and Retail Fish Dealers -the last four associations organized by the sharklike Maxie Eisen.

  Gradually, Capone or one of his affiliates came to control the majority of the Chicago rackets. Some investigators put it as high as 70 percent. Of the estimated $105,000,000 the Capone syndicate grossed in 1928, about $10,000,000 flowed from the rackets. That year, as a result of his dominant position among the racketeers, Ca pone found himself a partner in a legitimate business. How this came to pass demonstrated more forcibly than any event in his career the scope of his power and the impotence of the police.

  The most omnivorous Chicago racket was the Master Cleaners' and Dyers' Association. It not only skimmed 2 percent from the gross annual earnings of every member wholesale plant, but exacted dues and fees totaling $220 a year from every retail shop that collected clothing for the plants and every trucker that delivered it to them. A favorite device of its terrorists for forcing independents into the fold was the exploding suit. Into the seams of a suit they would sow inflammable chemicals, then send it for cleaning to the defiant plant. When detectives from the state's attorney's office asked the association's business agent, Sam Rubin, who had never worked as a cleaner or dyer, how he qualified for his position, he replied: "I'm a good convincer."

  In the spring of 1928 the association decreed a citywide increase in the price of pressing from $1 to $1.75 for men's suits and from $2 to $2.75 for women's dresses. Morris Becker, an independent who operated a chain of retail stores as well as a wholesale plant, defied the order. Shortly, his foreman introduced him to Rubin. "Oh, you are the Mr. Rubin I hear so much about," said Becker (as he had the pluck to testify later before a grand jury) .

  "Yes," said Rubin, "and you will hear a great deal more. I want to tell you something-you are going to raise prices."

  "The Constitution guarantees me the right to life, liberty and full pursuit of happiness," said Becker.

  "To hell with the Constitution. I am a damned sight bigger than the Constitution."

  Three days later a blast of dynamite partly wrecked Becker's main plant. This was followed by a visit from another association officer named Abrams. "I want you to know," Becker told him, "that these are our prices and we will stick by them."

  "If you do, Becker, you're going to be bumped off," said Abrams.

  Becker filed a complaint with the state's attorney's office. Fifteen officers, among them Sam Rubin, were indicted. Clarence Darrow defended them. The only prosecution witnesses to show up for the trial were Becker and his son, Theodore
. When they asked the assistant state's attorney trying the case what had become of the others, he replied: "Go out and get your own witnesses. I'm a prosecutor, not a process server." The racketeers were acquitted.

  Since the law could not protect him, Becker turned to Capone. The result was a newly incorporated chain, the Sanitary Cleaning Shops, with Capone, Jake Guzik and Louis Cowan sharing a $25,000 equity. The first Sanitary Cleaning Shop opened near Capone's Prairie Avenue home. "I have no need of the police or the Employers' Association now," said Becker in a public statement infuriating to both. "I now have the best protection in the world."

  CAPONE WARS ON RACKETEERS was the headline over a Chicago Daily Journal story that poured scorn on the authorities; INDEPENDENT CLEANERS BOAST GANGSTERS WILL PROTECT WHERE POLICE FAILED.

  The temporary beneficiary was the consumer. The Sanitary Cleaning Shops maintained the old price scale, and the association had no choice but to do the same. When Capone was asked thereafter to give his occupation, he liked to say, "I'm in the cleaning business."

  If Dan Serritella's word can be credited, at about the time Capone succored Morris Becker he performed an equally valuable service for the autocratic publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Colonel Robert R. McCormick. As Serritella recounted the story two years later in a letter to Mayor Thompson:

  ... Max Annenberg, director of circulation, told me the Trib- bune was having some trouble with their chauffeurs and drivers ... they were going to call a strike for the following Saturday, and he wanted me to get someone to talk to the executive committee. . . . He said that Dullo, business agent of the union . . . demanded $25,000 to straighten out the strike. Annenberg said he wanted to treat the boys right and that he wanted to reach someone who could get the executive committee to fix the strike up.