Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Read online

  I told him that as president of the newsboys' union there was nothing I could do. Then Max Annenberg said he would call up Capone and see if he could do anything in the matter, which he did and made an appointment with Capone to meet him in the Tribune's office. I attended this meeting, at which Capone agreed to use his influence to stop the strike, which prevented same. Max Annenberg then ... introduced McCormick to Capone. McCormick thanked Capone for calling off the strike and said, "You know, you are famous, like Babe Ruth. We can't help printing things about you, but I will see that the Tribune gives you a square deal."

  The letter, published by Thompson in a campaign booklet entitled The Tribune Shadow-Chicago's Greatest Curse, drew a different version from McCormick: "I arrived late at a publishers' meeting. Capone walked in with some of his hoodlums. I threw him out and after that I traveled around in an armored car with one or two bodyguards. Capone didn't settle anything. And he didn't take over the newspapers as he wanted to do."

  Yet a news delivery strike had been threatened and averted. Forever after, when Capone, in self-appraisal, would enumerate what he considered to have been his major public benefactions, the abortive strike figured high on the list. "People don't understand that I settled it," he would say in an aggrieved tone. "McCormick wanted to pay me afterward, but I told him to give the money to a hospital."

  The inventor of the mechanical rabbit for dog racing was a St. Louis promoter and greyhound fancier named Oliver P. Smith. He first tested the device in 1909 and spent the next decade developing it. After filing patent application papers, he formed a partnership with a sharp-witted young St. Louis lawyer, Edward J. O'Hare. For the right to install a mechanical rabbit dog track owners paid them a percentage of the gate. Smith died in 1927, considerably enriched by a sport that had caught on in both America and Europe, and under an arrangement with his widow O'Hare obtained control of the patent rights.

  Dog racing was then illegal throughout the country (Florida became the first state, in 1931, to legalize it), and the track owners to whom O'Hare leased the rabbit ran mainly to mobsters. Capone's initial venture into the field, undertaken jointly with Johnny Patton, was the Hawthorne Kennel Club on the outskirts of Cicero. Unlike the later closely supervised legal sport, the dog racing of the twenties was fraught with traps for the innocent bettor. Nothing was easier than to rig a pari-mutuel race. Given eight entrants, for example, overfeeding seven of them by a couple of pounds of meat or running them a mile before the race would guarantee victory to the eighth dog. O'Hare despised the men he had to deal with as much as he enjoyed the riches they showered on him. "You can make money through business associations with gangsters," he once said, "and you will run no risk if you don't associate personally with them. Keep it on a business basis and there's nothing to fear."

  O'Hare's own record was not without blemish. At the outset of Prohibition the enforcement authorities permitted a liquor wholesaler, George Remus, to store about $200,000 worth of whiskey in the same building where O'Hare had his law office, after Remus had put up a $100,000 bond as surety that he would not remove a single bottle without government sanction. Nevertheless, by 1923 all of it had found its way into the bootleg markets of Chicago, New York and other cities, not a drop of it to Remus' profit. In his fury he brought charges that caused the indictment for theft of twentytwo men, among them O'Hare. The lawyer was sentenced to a year in jail and fined $500 but won a reversal on appeal when Remus withdrew his original testimony. O'Hare, it developed years later, had secretly agreed to indemnify Remus.

  "Artful Eddie," as some of his colleagues referred to him after that, was a well-mannered, cultivated, attractive man. A crack athlete, he rode, boxed, swam and played golf, preserving a youthful body into middle age. He never smoked and drank no hard liquor. Married young, he fathered two girls and a boy. The boy, Edward H. O'Hare, nicknamed Butch, who was twelve at the time his father first met Capone, he idolized. "My son, Butch" were words frequently on his tongue, and more than anything he wanted for himself he wanted a distinguished career for his son.

  A dog track produced profits so much greater than the mere leasing of Oliver Smith's brainchild that O'Hare decided to operate a track of his own. In Madison, Illinois, across the river from St. Louis, he started the Madison Kennel Club. The money poured in until a series of police raids forced him to shut down. A Cook County judge, Harry Fisher, meanwhile, had come to the aid of the Capone outfit by declaring dog racing tracks legal and enjoining the police from raiding them. The judge's brother, Louis Fisher, a lawyer, represented the dog track owners. The Illinois Supreme Court eventually overruled him, but for a time the Hawthorne Kennel Club prospered. O'Hare leased land nearby and opened the Lawndale Kennel Club. This was a bold intrusion, but he felt safe enough. He let it be known that should anybody attempt to harm him or to put him out of business, he would withhold the rights to the mechanical rabbit in Cook County. If he couldn't operate there, nobody could. Capone proposed they merge their tracks, and O'Hare agreed.

  The public had gone mad about dog racing. The syndicate could not build grandstands and parimutuel booths fast enough to keep up with the increasing crowds. The weekly net ran as high as $50,000. O'Hare acted as counsel and manager, a double function he executed with such skill that the syndicate later entrusted him with other dog tracks in Florida and Massachusetts. O'Hare might continue to hold himself socially aloof from the Caponeites, but he became inextricably entangled in their affairs.

  As Capone expanded into ever more diversified fields, he repeatedly found the same challengers blocking his advance. The North Siders under Bugs Moran were foes as relentless as ever they had been under O'Banion, Weiss or Drucci. On the Detroit-Chicago highway they hijacked truck after truck of liquor consigned to Capone by the Purple Gang, and from a Canadian ship moored off the lakeshore they once lifted an entire cargo of whiskey meant for Capone. They bombed six saloons that were buying his beer. They abetted the Aiellos in their struggle to recapture the alky-cooking monopoly. There were growing indications that Bugs Moran had helped plan, if he did not take a direct hand in, the murder of Pasquale Lolordo. His North Siders twice attempted to kill Jack McGurn. The second time the Gusenberg brothers caught him in a telephone booth at the Hotel McCormick and fired a tommy-gun burst through the glass. Major surgery and a long hospital confinement saved his life. The rivalry spread to dog racing. Moran started a track in southern Illinois, while his business manager, Adam Heyer, alias John Snyder, opened the Fairview Kennel Club in Cicero itself. North Side guerrillas went so far as to set fire to the Hawthorne Kennel Club track. Moran's latest incursion took him into the cleaning and dyeing business. Seizing control of an independent plant, the Central Cleaning Company, he installed two of his followers, Willie Marks and Alfred Weinshank, as vice-presidents.

  He missed no chance to taunt Capone, calling him the Beast and the Behemoth. "The Beast uses his muscle men to peddle rot-gut alcohol and green beer," he said in an interview with the Reverend Elmer Williams, a Methodist minister who published a monthly magazine, Lightnin', devoted to exposes of gangsterism and crooked politicians. "I'm a legitimate salesman of good beer and pure whiskey. He trusts nobody and suspects everybody. He always has guards. I travel around with a couple of pals. The Behemoth can't sleep nights. If you ask me, he's on the dope. Me, I don't even need an aspirin."

  Capone left again for Miami in late December. McGurn visited him there in early February. From 93 Palm Island (as telephone company records would show) Capone talked at length every day with Jake Guzik, living in Chicago's Congress Hotel. The calls stopped on February 11. Three days later was St. Valentine's Day.

  CAPONE rose earlier than usual, having been summoned to the office of Dade County solicitor Robert Taylor. He took a dip in his swimming pool, a black one-piece bathing suit stretched tight over his barrel of a torso. After a copious breakfast he dressed carefully in gray flannel slacks, white shoes and a camel's hair sports jacket. His chauffeur, driving a Packard with a t
hree-tone electric horn, then took him across the causeway into downtown Miami. It was shortly after nine when he walked into the county solicitor's office, unruffled and cheerful.

  A light snow was powdering North Clark Street when the big black Cadillac touring car edged toward it from Webster Avenue. There was a police gong on the running board and, fastened to the back of the driver's seat, a gun rack such as police squad cars carried. The driver, who had on horn-rimmed glasses, wore a policeman's uniform, complete to blue cap and brass star. So did the man beside him. The three men in the rear seat wore civilian clothes.

  County Solicitor Taylor's questions reflected the curiosity of two other agencies besides his own. His concern was confined mainly to Capone's local activities, current and prospective, but he had undertaken a further inquiry in behalf of both the New York City police, who were trying to solve the Yale murder, and the Bureau of Internal Revenue's Intelligence Unit, which had begun to look into Capone's income. A stenographer, Ruth Gaskin, recorded the dialogue.

  "Do you remember when you first met Parker Henderson?" Taylor asked.

  "About two years ago," Capone replied.

  "That was when he was running the Ponce de Leon Hotel?"

  "Yes."

  "Can you remember who was staying there with you that winter?"

  "I don't like to disclose their names unless you tell me what this is all about."

  Taylor persisted.

  "I don't remember," Capone said finally.

  "Under what name did you register?"

  "My own name."

  "You didn't register under the name of A. Costa?"

  "No."

  The night before, the hijacker had telephoned Bugs Moran to offer him a truckload of whiskey from Detroit at the bargain price of $57 a case. Moran had told him to deliver it around ten thirty in the morning to his warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, where his men would help unload it. Seven North Siders were waiting there now, but Moran had started late. With Ted Newberry, a gambling concessionaire, he left his Parkway Hotel apartment, close by the warehouse, a little after ten thirty. The temperature had dropped to fifteen degrees below freezing, and a bone-chilling wind was blowing from the west. Pulling up their coat collars, Moran and Newberry took a shortcut though an alley toward the rear of the warehouse. Willie Marks, one of the gang's specialists in business racketeering, was also tardy. He arrived from the Clark Street side by trolley car at almost the same instant.

  "You left money with Henderson, $1,000 to $5,000 at a time, didn't you?"

  "I don't remember."

  "You didn't receive any money by Western Union from Chicago?"

  "I don't remember. I'll try to find out."

  "Then you keep a record of your money transactions?"

  "Absolutely."

  As the Cadillac turned the corner of North Clark Street, twenty blocks west of its starting point, a truck sideswiped it, forcing it to a stop. The truckman, Elmer Lewis, horrified at having hit what he took to be a police car, scrambled down from his seat and, full of remorse, hurried toward the Cadillac. The blue-uniformed figure behind the wheel smiled and waved him back reassuringly as if nothing had happened. Baffled but relieved, Lewis watched the car go on for half a block, then stop again in front of No. 2122. . . .

  "How long has Dan Serritella been living with you?"

  "He's not living with me. He's just a friend of mine."

  "How much did you give Parker Henderson to buy your home?"

  "$50,000."

  "Was that in cash?"

  "Yes."

  The warehouse was a one-story red-brick building, 60 feet wide and 120 feet long, dwarfed by the four-story buildings on either side. Both the plate-glass front window and the glass-paneled door to the right of it had been painted black. A white placard with black lettering filled the lower half of the window:

  Behind the sign, running the width of the building, was a narrow office separated from the warehouse proper by a wooden partition. Formerly a garage, the warehouse had concrete flooring and brick walls, the original whitewash a grimy yellow with age. Tall, wide doors at the rear opened on the loading area in the alley.

  On the morning of February 14 three empty trucks stood against the side walls. A fourth had been jacked up in the center of the floor, and lying on his back under it, wearing oil-smeared overalls, Johnny May was repairing a wheel. A forty-year-old ex-safecracker, whom Moran had hired as an auto mechanic at $50 a week, May shared a nearby slum flat with a wife, six children and a German shepherd named Highball. The dog was tied by his leash to the axle of the truck. May had brought some scraps of meat for him in a paper bag. A coffeepot percolated on an electric plate, and the six other men sat around it with their hats and overcoats on, for the warehouse was unheated. A naked 200-watt bulb overhead shed a fierce white light on them. There were the Gusenberg brothers, Frank and Pete; James Clark, alias Kashellek, Moran's brother-in-law; Adam Heyer; Al Weinshank; and Reinhardt H. Schwimmer. The Gusenbergs had a long day ahead of them. As soon as the hijacked liquor had been delivered, they were to drive two of the empty trucks to Detroit to pick up some smuggled Canadian whiskey. Heyer, a business college graduate and expert accountant before he went to prison for embezzlement, handled all of the gang's financial transactions, as well as the management of the Fairview Kennel Club. Weinshank, the newest gang member, had helped Moran muscle into the cleaning and dyeing business. Heavyset and round-faced, he looked a little like Moran from a distance. The resemblance was enhanced on this particular morning by the similarity of their dress: Both happened to wear tan fedoras and gray overcoats. All six were heavily armed, and to pay for the expected delivery, they carried cash in their pockets, totaling almost $5,000. Schwimmer was an anomaly. In the gang but not of it, enjoying the company of criminals but not himself inclined to criminality, he had met Moran at the Parkway Hotel, where he, too, resided, and become his beglamored friend. He was an optometrist by profession, aged thirty. Like Parker Henderson, he derived an excitement, a vicarious feeling of power from intimacy with gangsters. He had dropped into the warehouse, as he frequently did on his way to work, to see what the North Siders were up to, and he had stayed to chat.

  "Besides gambling you're a bootlegger, aren't you?"

  "No, I never was a bootlegger."

  "Do you know Jake Guzik?"

  "Yes."

  "What does he do?"

  (Jokingly) : "He fights."

  Elmer Lewis was not the only person to see the Cadillac stop at the warehouse and four of the men go inside, those in uniform leading the way. On the second floor of her rooming house next door, as she was ironing a shirt, the noise of the truck scraping the Cadillac drew Mrs. Max Landesman to the window. Surprised that no altercation took place, she watched until the quartet had entered the warehouse.

  When Moran and Newberry saw the car, they assumed a police raid or a shakedown was taking place, and they swiftly retraced their steps back to the Parkway. A third Gusenberg brother, Henry, who also lived there, had been about to join them at the warehouse, but they warned him not to go near it. Willie Marks, approaching from south of the warehouse, reached the same conclusion. Shrinking into a doorway, he jotted down the car's license number.

  "And you don't know anybody who sent you money under the name of A. Costa?"

  "No."

  "But you did receive it from Chicago?"

  "That is correct. All of it comes from Chicago, from my gambling business."

  "Are you going to buy Cat Cay?"

  "I don't know. I don't think I will get it."

  "How much do they want for it?"

  "Half a million."

  "Who is Mitchell of Oak Park, Illinois? He called your home three times on January 20th?"

  "He commissions money on racetracks for me."

  "Did you get any money from Charlie Fischetti while you were staying at the Ponce de Leon? Henderson said you received various sums from $1,000 to $5,000."

  "What has money got to do wi
th it?"

  With that indignant question left unanswered the interview ended. For Capone it had been a welcome confrontation in at least one respect: Miss Gaskin's stenographic transcript would establish beyond the slightest doubt where he had spent the morning of February 14, 1929.

  It sounded like the chatter of a pneumatic drill. Or drumbeats, furiously fast. It started a few moments after the five men entered the warehouse and lasted a minute or two. Then, two single blasts like a car backfiring. A dog began to howl. Vaguely disturbed, Mrs. Landesman moved back to the window and glanced down at the snowy, windy street. Her friend across the way, Mrs. Alphonse Morin, looked out of her third-floor window at the same time, and they both saw the men reappear. The first two came out with their hands raised. The two men behind them, wearing the uniforms, held pistols to their backs and prodded them toward the car. A police raid and an arrest, the women concluded; the fifth man must have been a plainclothes detective. The car continued south on Clark Street to Ogden Avenue and there turned right. .. .

  As the dog kept up its howling, Mrs. Landesman's uneasiness grew. Finally, she asked one of her lodgers, a man named McAllister, to see what ailed the animal. He went into the warehouse. He did not stay long. He came running out, pale and sick. "They're all dead," he said.

  He was mistaken. Frank Gusenberg still breathed. Though fourteen machine-gun bullets had hit him, some passing through his body, he had managed to crawl about twenty feet away from the rear wall. The others lay dead where they had fallen at the foot of the wall, Kashellek on his face, Weinshank, Heyer, May and Schwimmer on their backs. Pete Gusenberg had died kneeling, his upper body slumped against a chair. The hapless optometrist, Schwimmer, still wore his hat, and Weinshank's tan fedora rested on his chest. Where the seven had stood before the bullets flew, blood slopped down the yellowish bricks, and blood from the bodies snaked across the oily stone floor. Highball, howling and snapping, tore at his leash. The executioners had been systematic, swinging their machine guns back and forth three times, first at the level of the victims' heads, then chests, then stomachs. Some of the corpses were held together in one piece only by shreds of flesh and bone. Yet evidently life had still flickered in Kashellek and May after the machine-gun volleys, for they had also been blasted with shotguns at such close range as to all but obliterate their faces.*