Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Page 35

  So they decided to kill him. Jack Zuta, the whoremonger, who had become Moran's business manager, supposedly supervised the details, paying the labor racketeer Simon Gorman $20,000 to recruit a killer from among his cohorts. The choice, according to Roche's source, fell on one James "Red" Forsythe, who vanished immediately after the murder.

  Zuta was a familiar figure around the detective bureau. He had been brought there frequently. Whining and servile, he was thought capable, if sufficiently frightened, of sacrificing his own mother. Captain Stege once reduced him to quaking terror by saying: "You're doomed. I've told that to 14 other hoodlums who have sat on that same chair you're sitting on and all of them are dead."

  The North Siders despised Zuta for his cowardice, yet tolerated him because, next to Jake Guzik, he probably had the best business brains in the underworld. When, on June 30, the police arrested him along with a woman companion, Leona Bernstein, and two men, Solly Vision and Albert Bratz, and took them to Roche, a tremor of apprehension ran through the gang. Though Zuta did not, in fact, incriminate anybody during the twenty-four hours he was detained, reports to the contrary leaked out of the bureau. He sensed as much, for when freed at 10:30 P.M. on a writ of habeas corpus, he implored a detective, Lieutenant George Barker, to escort him and his companions to safety. Because one was a woman, Barker agreed to drive them in his Pontiac through the Loop to the El station on Lake Street, thirteen blocks north. Bratz and Leona Bernstein sat in the front seat. Solly Vision sat behind with Zuta.

  They were edging slowly into the Loop, by night as bright as high noon with its million dollars' worth of newly installed candlepower, when Zuta's fear took shape. Peering out the rear window, he saw a blue sedan bearing down on them. On the running board stood a man wearing a tan suit, a boutonniere and a Panama hat. "They're after us!" Zuta screamed, flinging himself to the floor. Bratz vaulted the front seat and crouched next to him. As the sedan drew alongside, the man on the running board took a .45-caliber automatic from a shoulder holster and emptied it into the tonneau of the Pontiac, while the driver and another gunman in the rear seat fired revolvers at the windows. Jamming on his brakes, Barker leaped to the street, gun in hand. The sedan halted, too, and as the summer nighttime strollers scattered in panic, gangsters and detective traded shots. Stray bullets hit a bank guard and a motorman, whose streetcar had been blocked by the besieged Pontiac. The motorman died in the hospital. (G. K. Chesterton was less than accurate when, six months later, following a visit to Chicago, he glibly wrote in the New York Times Magazine: "Chicago has many beauties, including the fastidiousness and good taste to assassinate nobody except assassins.")

  Ammunition exhausted, the driver of the sedan shifted into first and started north up State Street. Barker stepped back into his car. His three passengers had vanished. He sped after the gunmen, but with a trick new to gang combat, they escaped him. Through a specially installed injection pump they forced massive quantities of oil into the intake manifold, thus laying down from the exhaust a dense, black smoke screen that covered the street from sidewalk to sidewalk. By the time Barker had crawled through it they were gone.

  In the middle of State Street he spotted a revolver that one of the killers had thrown from the sedan. Delivered to the Goddard labora tory, it told an interesting story. A month earlier Sam "Golf Bag" Hunt had been arrested for trying to shoot Leo Mongoven, Public Enemy No. 27 and a Moran bodyguard. Searching the receptacle that gave Hunt his sobriquet, they confiscated a shotgun, a .38-caliber revolver mounted on a .45-caliber frame and shells for both weapons. To obliterate the serial numbers, the symbol # had been stamped over them, a Caponian technique. The revolver discarded on State Street bore the same symbol.

  Zuta stayed out of sight for a month. He finally surfaced under the alias J. H. Goodman at the Lake View Hotel, a roadhouse by the shore of Upper Nemahbin Lake, in Wisconsin, 25 miles west of Milwaukee. The barroom had a coin-operated player piano, and on the evening of August 1 Zuta was idly feeding it nickels while half a dozen couples lindy hopped around the dance floor. Five men came in, Indian file, the first holding a tommy gun, the others sawed-off shotguns and revolvers. Zuta had just popped another nickel into the slot, causing the piano to thump out a hit of the hour-"Good for You, Bad for Me." The fusillade slammed him against the keys.

  Sixteen bullets were extracted from Zuta's body. Several proved to be of a type used almost exclusively in the model of the revolver removed from Sam Hunt's golf bag. Applying his etching process to the Hunt weapon, Goddard discovered the number, communicated it to the manufacturer, and shortly established, as the ultimate consignee, the Capone organization. At the same time a frequenter of the Lake View Hotel identified Ted Newberry from photographs as one of Zuta's assassins. Though neither piece of evidence proved sufficient to bring the turncoat gangster to trial, both added weight to the theory that Capone had ordered the killing. (On the fatal evening Capone presided at a banquet in Cicero's Western Hotel for a hundred of his loyalists.) But the motive-whether to avenge Lingle or to prevent Zuta from telling what he knew about the assassination-remained forever obscure.

  Zuta, a methodical man, had kept records of his business transactions under aliases in safe-deposit boxes at different banks. Roche's inquiries led him to two of them, and he obtained warrants to open them. Chicagoans had long been inured to revelations of politicocriminal chicanery, but what Zuta's caches disgorged dumbfounded the most blase. They included canceled checks, ranging in amounts from $50 to $5,500-a total of $8,950-payable to two judges and Judge Harry Fisher's brother, Louis, the dog track lawyer; two state senators; two police officers; a chief deputy coroner; an assistant business manager of the Board of Education; a city editor; and the William Hale Thompson Republican Club. There was a letter from Evanston's Chief of Police William 0. Freeman.

  DEAR JACK:

  I am temporarily in need of four "C's" for a couple of months. Can you let me have it? The bearer does not know what it is, so put it in an envelope and seal it and address it to me.

  Your old pal, BILL FREEMAN

  P.S. Will let you know the night of the party, so be sure and come.

  A card signed by Charles E. Graydon, sheriff of Cook County, notified whomever it might concern that "The bearer, J. Zuta, is extended the courtesies of all departments." Letters dated June, 1927, from an ex-Caponeite, Louis La Cava, who had been banished when he attempted to appropriate Cicero territory, suggested another reason why Capone might have wished to eliminate Zuta.

  I'd help you organize a strong business organization capable of coping with theirs in Cicero. You know you have lots of virgin territory on the north side limits border line and they are going to try and prevent me from lining up with you and thereby starving me out, until I go back to them, begging for mercy. . . . I have heard the Big Boy is stopping my brothers from making a living... .

  A balance sheet showed the North Siders' gross revenue from gambling at their apogee, before the St. Valentine's Day massacre. In a single week (November 6-12, 1927) it totaled $429,146. Roughly a fourth of that went for police protection.

  During the four months since Lingle's death the police, casting a dragnet over the Chicago underworld, had hauled in and questioned about 700 criminals of record. Rathbun and Roche followed dozens of trails to their dead ends. Again and again the compass needle of suspicion had swung back to Capone. Lingle took $50,000 from him (so it was whispered along the grapevine) as the price of official sanction for a new dog track on the West Side but never delivered, a capi tal offense in Capone's domain. The reporter's considerable knowledge of Capone's financial transactions-if, as Frank Wilson had thought possible, he could have been persuaded to share it with the government-would have constituted another reason for killing him. But no evidence supported any of these hypotheses.

  Rathbun and Roche decided upon a campaign of relentless, daily harassment of gangland, hoping that somebody somewhere would eventually crack under the pressure and furnish a lead. Accordingly, the
detectives assigned to them by the state's attorney, armed with axes, sledgehammers and crowbars, proceeded to raid and wreck every brothel, gambling dive and speakeasy they could find in Chicago and its suburbs and to arrest everybody on the premises. At the same time Rathbun and Roche strove to have old forgotten charges against the Public Enemies revived, parole violators reimprisoned, and pending cases hastened to trial. Judge Lyle did his bit by setting bail so high, whenever gangsters were brought into his Felony Court, that they preferred to await the outcome in jail. Thus, many important members of the Capone organization and its subsidiaries were immobilized, among them George "Red" Barker, boss of the Chicago Teamsters' Union, who was returned to jail to complete a sentence for robbery; his fellow labor racketeers James "Fur" Sammons, jailed again as a parole violator with an unexpired sentence for murder, and Danny Stanton, extradited to Wisconsin under a murder indictment; Three-Fingered Jack White, tried for killing a policeman in 1924, convicted, freed on appeal, and now resentenced; Claude Maddox, booked for vagrancy. . . .

  Judge Lyle had also invoked a long-disused vagrancy law that defined as a vagrant one without visible means of support, regularly pursuing illicit enterprises, and provided penalties of up to six months' imprisonment or a fine of up to $200 or both. "I had within me a warm, tingling feeling," the judge recalled later, "as I reviewed the possibilities in the law in the case of, let us say, Al Capone. If Capone, arrested on a vagrancy warrant, declined to answer questions, he would automatically fail to disprove the allegations. I could find him guilty of vagrancy and fine him $200. If he tried to pay the fine he would have to explain where the money had come from. He could be sentenced to the House of Corrections to work out the fine. Were he to recite the sources of his income he would be opening the door to criminal charges. And any claim to legitimate employment would launch an investigation that could conceivably result in perjury charges."

  The first warrant he issued named Capone, who appeared in Felony Court on September 16, 1930, with Nash's svelte law partner, Michael Ahern. "The People of the State of Illinois against Alphonse Capone alias Scarface Al Brown," the clerk of the court intoned. With fame and fortune the gang leader had grown increasingly sensitive about his scars and was planning to undergo plastic surgery. "Your Honor," said Ahern, "I ask that the epithet be stricken from the record."

  Capone did not take lightly the disturbance to his organization. In hopes of ending it he requested, through a go-between, a confidential talk with Rathbun and Roche. They refused to meet with him themselves, but sent an emissary, identified in the records only as "Operative No. 1," to hear what he had to say.

  At the morgue to which the police carried Lingle's body his billfold was found to contain fourteen $100 notes. The Tribune's John Boettiger-the first reporter on the scene of the murder-fearing that so much cash might give rise to nasty gossip, somehow persuaded the police to let him take charge of it. He turned it over to his city editor. Such discretion commended itself to McCormick, and he chose Boettiger to work with the investigative committee. From this vantage point the reporter gathered material for a book published a year later, Jake Lingle or Chicago on the Spot, which put McCormick and the Tribune in the best possible light.* One chapter reproduced the exchange between Capone and Operative Number 1.

  "Here's what I want to tell you, and I won't be long about it," said Capone. "I can't stand the gaff of these raids and pinches. If it's going to keep up, I'll have to pack up and get out of Chicago."

  Operative Number I replied:

  "So far as I can tell, the gaff is on for keeps. This town has been burning up since Jake Lingle was murdered."

  "Well, I didn't kill Jake Lingle, did I?"

  "We don't know who killed him."

  "Why didn't you ask me? Maybe I can find out for you."

  "I have heard that Lingle was involved in the attempts of the North Side gangsters to open a dog track in the Stadium. . . . I have been told that Lingle was asked by the Zuta crowd to see to it that the police and the state's attorney would not bother them, and that Lingle was paid $30,000. . . .

  When the gang saw that they could not go they blamed Jake Lingle, and I think that's why he was pushed." [A story Rathbun and Roche had heard before, but with the difference that Capone was the supposed dupe.]

  "But I don't know who they used to do the job; it must have been some fellow from out of town. I'll try to find out."

  "You can do this if you want to, Capone," said Operative Number 1, "but I don't think it'll help you with Pat Roche."

  If Capone himself did not order Lingle's murder, he very likely knew who fired the fatal shot. He told Jake Guzik as much during a talk at the Lexington Hotel, which the great masquerader, Special Agent Mike Malone, overheard. Malone also heard Capone tell Guzik that he had no intention of delivering the real murderer. A few days later he asked Operative No. 1 whether Rathbun and Roche would take the killer dead. Had they risen to the bait, had they called off their incessant raids and arrests, Capone might conceivably have fabricated evidence against some triggerman, had him slain, and the body left for the police to find. The response to his question was flat. "You can tell Capone," Roche instructed Operative No. 1, "that we know he has been bluffing and that he can go to hell."

  The official solution, when Rathbun and Roche finally announced it in December, 1930, left a good many people unconvinced. In October, having exhausted every other means, the investigators hired a purportedly reformed bank robber, beer runner and former associate of the Gennas named John Hagan to reenter gangland as their undercover operator. Hagan shortly ingratiated himself with a garrulous old hoodlum, Pat Hogan, whom underworld gossip vaguely connected with the Lingle murder. Taken to cabarets by Hagan night after night, plied with food and drink, Hogan finally let fall a nickname-Buster. This Buster, a friend and partner in crime, he drunkenly disclosed a few nights later, was Lingle's actual slayer. Hiding out broke in Chicago, he needed to bring off a robbery or two. Would Hagan care to team up with him? Hagan agreed, and Hogan promised to arrange a meeting.

  Weeks passed while Rathbun and Roche waited for Buster to show his hand. Eventually, they learned through Hogan's confidences to their prize stool pigeon that Buster was living under the alias Leo Bader, at the Lake Crest Drive Apartments. There, on December 21, Roche, Rathbun, four detectives and John Boettiger captured a tall blond man.

  His real name was Leo Vincent Brothers. A labor-union terrorist, thirty-one years old, he came from St. Louis, where he was wanted for robbery, arson, bombing and murder. Of the fourteen witnesses to the flight of Lingle's murderer, seven now testified that they recognized Brothers and seven that they didn't. Arraigned before Chief Justice John P. McGoorty and asked how he pleaded, Brothers replied: "On the advice of my attorneys I stand mute."

  The Tribune congratulated Rathbun, Roche and itself and later paid John Hagan the $25,000 reward. But the majority of the Chicago newspapers doubted Brothers' guilt, an attitude that Boettiger ascribed to professional jealousy. "[They] sought to obstruct the prosecution of a murderer who had been trailed and caught by an agency set up and supported by the Tribune." Some members of the opposition press insinuated that Brothers was the victim of a frameup, either an innocent victim or one who allowed himself to be framed for money.

  His trial, which lasted from March 16 to April 2, 1931, almost ended in a hung jury, so evenly balanced was the evidence presented for and against him. Though seven prosecution witnesses identified him as the man they saw fleeing from the Michigan Avenue tunnel, not one testified that he saw Brothers shoot Lingle. After deliberating for twenty-seven hours, the jury delivered a compromise verdict. They found Brothers guilty, but instead of the death penalty, as first-degree homicide normally called for, they imposed the minimum sentence of fourteen years' imprisonment, commutable for good behavior in eight. "I can do that standing on my head," was Brothers' comment.

  In its issue of April 11 Editor and Publisher ran a dispatch from its Chicago correspondent, Edw
in Johnson, who was also a staff member of the Chicago Daily News.

  The verdict . . . brought a torrent of denunciation upon Chicago courts in newspaper comments from other cities.

  The very fact that Brothers received the minimum sentence has given critics a basis for charges which have persisted since the announcement of the arrest. The utter certainty of officials that Brothers was the man who killed Lingle and the fact that not one witness testified he saw Lingle slain, presents at least a groundwork for the ugly rumors that have been circulated.

  ... it is held unreasonable that a jury, finding a man guilty of the cold-blooded murder of Lingle, could impose the minimum sentence on the evidence presented.

  It is a question in the mind of the police at large as to the guilt of Brothers.

  The Tribune has, from the first, maintained that Brothers is the man. This persistence, in the face of an unwillingness on the part of either the newspaper or officials to strip the case bare, show a motive, reveal gang connections, and thus prove to the world that Brothers had a reason for killing Lingle and did so, has engendered a belief among newspapermen that Brothers is the man who killed Lingle, but it cannot be legitimately proved without entailing a scandal which would prove so devastating as to render the game not worth the candle.

  . .. Those dissatisfied with the verdict are of the opinion that from a point of general good, Brothers belongs in jail but they hold that there is still the question left unanswered, "who killed 'Jake' Lingle, and why?"