Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Read online

  * Probably nobody ever walked up to Guzik and said, "Hi, Greasy Thumb." Nor did gangsters address each other as "Schemer," "Enforcer," "Potatoes," etc., except in movies and fiction. Such nomenclature was chiefly a game played by newspapermen. Legend ascribes many of the more picturesque sobriquets to James Doherty, a Chicago Tribune crime reporter, and Clem Lane, a Chicago Daily News rewrite man, who supposedly amused themselves on slow nights by coining them.

  0 To the author.

  • Sports, Inc. still exists in Chicago. Although the founder died in 1968, the company's letterhead continues to list "P. von Frantzius, Pres. & Gen. Mgr."

  * In deference to St. John's wishes I have disguised the names of his co-directors.

  • After editorial jobs on newspapers in Vermont, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, St. John joined the Associated Press in New York as city editor. During World War II he was its Balkan correspondent. Since then he has been a radio news commentator, lecturer and author of a dozen books.

  * Chicago taxi drivers still point out the cornerstone to strangers. The cathedral had largely been restored when I last visited the city, but a bullet scar was still visible.

  • The secret door was discovered by the present owner of the Lexington (renamed the New Michigan) . He spotted it from the street, a door to nowhere, after the office building had been torn down. An aged porter, who had worked at the Lexington ever since Capone's day, explained its use.

  • There are survivors of the era who agree, like the aged waitress in a South Side pizzeria who told me: "I think Al was a wonderful person. He took from the rich and gave to the poor, didn't he?" or the former Negro doorman, found by a local feature writer still living near the site of the Four Deuces, who remembered: "They was swell guys, all of them. These folks 'round here never knowed who paid the rent, but it was Al.... They was all fine boys and they was real good to me."

  * In 1945 a couple named Werner, who knew nothing about the building's lurid history, converted the front office into an antique shop. They were soon besieged by crime buffs. "They come here from all over the world-England, France, even New Zealand," Mrs. Werner complained. "If I had known, I never would have come here." The building was torn down in 1967. I know several Chicagoans who treasure a brick from it as a souvenir.

  * The St. Valentine's Day murder team, I was assured in 1969 by the Barker gangster Al Karpis, after he had served thirty-three years in federal penitentiaries, consisted of Burke, Maddox, George Ziegler, Gus Winkler and "Crane Neck" Nugent. These five, according to Karpis, who got his information from Nugent, constituted an execution squad regularly employed by the Capone syndicate and its affiliates. They were paid $2,000 a week plus an occasional bonus and travel expenses. Ziegler, said Karpis, actually planned the massacre, and a sixth hoodlum, not on the regular payroll, Byron Bolton, was one of the Clark Street lookouts.

  * By the underworld, by stool pigeons, by knowledgeable old cops like John Stege and by Chicago's top crime reporters like Ray Brennan and Clem Lane.

  • The others: (4) Frank Rio, alias Frank Kline, alias Frank Gline (5) Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn (6) James Belcastro (7) Rocco Fanelli (8) Lawrence "Dago Lawrence" Mangano (9) Jack Zuta (10) Jake Guzik (11) Frank Diamond (12) George "Bugs" Moran (13) Joe Aiello (14) Edward "Spike" O'Donnell (15) Joe "Polock Joe" Saltis (16) Frank McErlane (17) Vincent McErlane (18) William Niemoth (19) Danny Stanton (20) Myles O'Donnell (21) Frank Lake (22) Terry Druggan (23) William "Klondike" O'Donnell (24) George "Red" Barker (25) William "Three-Fingered Jack" White (26) Joseph "Peppy" Genero (27) Leo Mongoven (28) James "Fur" Sammons.

  * Later assigned to the Tribune's Washington bureau, Boettiger married President Roosevelt's daughter, Anna, quit the Tribune, and eventually became publisher of Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

  Table of Contents

  1. Snorky

  2. A Brooklyn Boyhood

  3. Big Jim

  4. ". . . . . the best and dearest of husbands" 52

  5. No Christian Burial

  6. From Death Corner to Dead Man's Tree

  7. "A. Capone, Antique Dealer"

  8. Cicero

  9. "Tell them Sicilians to go to hell"

  10. Garlic and Gangrene

  11. The Fall of the House of Genna

  12. "I paid him plenty and I got what I was paying for"

  13. War

  14. Big Bill Rides Again

  15. ". . . . . the sunny Italy of the new world" 213

  16. "I've got a heart in me"

  17. Against the Wall

  18. "Nobody's on the legit"

  19. Case Jacket SI-7085-F

  20. Mr. and Mrs. Alphonse Capone Request the Pleasure. .

  21. A Murder a Day

  22. ". . . regardez le gorille" 306

  23. Paper Chase

  24. Aggiornamento

  25. The Reckoning

  26. "Received . . . . . the body of the within named prisoner. named prisoner. ." 347

  27. Island of Pelicans

  28. Tertiary Stage

  APPENDIX: The Heritage

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  Illustrations follow pages 64, 256, 384.

  drift for a few years until some wise guy picks him up and steers him around and then he'll be heard

  gangster-including those who felled him-to honor him with an elaborate floral creation. To order fun

  late (1920) for its intended use in trench warfare ("a trench broom," Thompson called it), it was pl

  A week after the Hawthorne Smoke Shop opened its doors, Capone went underground, having committed mu

  "I would have killed for Al." It is Max Motel Friedman, alias Morris Rudensky, speaking *

  liquor warehouses, arms merchants. Among the last was Peter von Frantzius, an alumnus of Northwester

  Yet there remained a thorn in Capone's side. This was a young newspaper editor, the youngest, in fac

  faced friend have won. Say goodbye to him for me." He left Cicero that day, never to set foot in it

  EVERY KNEE SHOULD HEAVEN AND EARTH.*

  the second floor and slip into a maids' changing room. There a fulllength mirror, hinged at one side

  Capone once thought seriously of trying to retain Ivy Lee, the public relations genius who so succes

  He was mistaken. Frank Gusenberg still breathed. Though fourteen machine-gun bullets had hit him, so

  years and flushed a rich assortment of suspects.*

  The state was as yet no more prepared to try Scalise and Anselmi for the St. Valentine's Day massacr

  There were other tribulations. The Ness team, driving a 10-ton truck with a flat bed to support scal

  At the morgue to which the police carried Lingle's body his billfold was found to contain fourteen $