The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  I kept my mouth shut. Pressing Johnny was like blowing your horn at a train crossing. The caboose goes by when it's ready. He lined up the shot glasses the other players had left on the table. He picked up the bottle of Scotch I'd been pouring from, John Haig it was called, a very good mellow whisky, it had a fancy shield on the label. "This is prewar," he said. "Jim's been charging two dollars a bottle. This morning in Baltimore it was going for four. I guess someone missed the fire sale yesterday. Six months from now, once everyone's drunk up what they laid in, it'll be twenty-five, if you can get it." He pulled the cork and filled one of the pony glasses. "Yesterday, at the bar, that was ten cents."

  I nodded. Everybody knows you charge more by the ounce.

  He filled the next glass halfway. "Ten cents today."

  Next glass. He just wet the bottom. "Six months from now."

  I saw where he was headed, and it threw me for a loop. I'd never paid more than six-bits for a quart in my life. At this rate I wouldn't be able to wet my whistle for less than a buck.

  "Jesus, Johnny."

  "Let me finish." Now he hauls over the old-fashioned glass I'd been drinking from, fills it to the top. The bottle gurgles four times. When the glass is brimming he sets down the bottle.

  "Six months from now. Fifty bucks." He rams in the cork.

  "Nobody could afford that."

  "John D. Rockefeller maybe, but he can't drink it on account of that guinea pig's stomach they gave him to replace the one he wore full of holes smashing competitors. What we do, we cut it with water, step on it with fusel oil and mineral spirits, brown sugar so it don't taste like we stirred it up in a pisspot. Understand, we don't start with liquor near as good as this. Nobody'd appreciate it. Come July, Americans will be paying John Haig prices for Old Underdrawers, and glad to get it." He sat back, smiling that old-maid smile. "It's called the law of supply and demand. I read it in a book."

  "That's why you brought me here, to sell booze?" My heart was in my socks. I'd thought he wanted a personal bodyguard, or a bouncer in some ritzy joint that made the Harvard Inn look like Joe's Drink and Spew. A crummy salesman?

  "Nothing like that. I've got that all lined out with the Genna brothers, who never take no for an answer. I want you to be my partner."

  "Partner in what?" I still wasn't getting it. Johnny worked for Colosimo.

  He swept his hand around in a circle, taking in all the gaming tables, the blackboard, the waiters trotting in and out carrying glasses and bottles on trays, towels folded over their arms like at Delmonico's in Manhattan. It sure was a class dive. The bar downstairs was solid mahogany carved all over with flying lions and mermaids, hop-dream stuff.

  "The cafe?"

  "No, not the cafe." He was losing patience with me.

  "Chicago, Al. Chicago. The pearl of the Midwest, and half of it's yours."

  THERE WASN'T A THING WRONG WITH JIM COLOSIMO THAT BEING LESS successful wouldn't cure.

  A man's pushing fifty, he looks at how far he's come and how far he's got to go, and if he isn't where he hoped to be back when he was twenty he steps on the gas, and if he's farther than he expected, he shifts into neutral and coasts home. Well, Diamond Jim had come as far as an ignorant dago street sweep could expect to come in this land of opportunity and then some.

  At ten he shined shoes and picked pockets. At eighteen he had his own stable of girls, but then he went to jail and when he got out he shoveled horseshit for the sanitation department. Now at forty-nine he owned the gaudiest place in town and collected union dues from every whorehouse in Cook County and even elected himself a mayor. He had a library full of books he never read, a hundred kinds of imported cheese in his basement. Caruso came to see him when he was on tour. Two months after I made Jim's acquaintance, he threw over his wife of twenty years and married a chippie. Money, power, respect, flashy wife, he had it all.

  Trouble was that's all he wanted. When Prohibition came, Johnny told him he had to get in on it. Jim had a fantastic inventory already, acres of booze, a wine cellar that went on and on like the catacombs in Rome. But he waved it off. "Johnny, why you wear me out? Things are good. New venture, you never know what's-a gonna happen. This thing, it won't last: six months, a year, drinking's legal again, all you got to show for it's a buncha trucks an' a lot of overhead. Let the punks go broke. I'm-a surprise you come to me with this crazy kid stuff." That was how Johnny put it, that night in the cafe. "I said he wouldn't have to lift a finger, I'd make the arrangements. He said it was beneath my dignity as his consiglieri. I collect from the bagmen, who collect from his whores, liquor's beneath my dignity. I pushed. He forbid me. Forbid me." He shook his head. "Jim's my cousin, he's like my uncle. My father; my old man died in Naples when I was two. Jim's got to go."

  We're drinking Diamond Jim's liquor, enjoying his hospitality in his own place, Johnny says he's got to go. That's the way of things: The old bull slows down, it's the young bulls' turn, for the good of the herd. But I can see it's tearing Johnny up inside. He was a sensitive man. I reach under the table and squeeze his knee. "Johnny, mi padrino, you don't have to do a thing. I'll take care of everything."

  His smile is sad, I know what he's thinking: twenty-one-year-old kid, what's he know about setting guys up for a fall? But he don't say that. What he says, "Okay, Al. So long as it isn't beneath your dignity."

  I didn't move right away. Things worked slower then in what I like to call peacetime. Diamond Jim has all the connections; we take him out too soon, we lose them. Johnny's just thirty-eight, for all his talk of being an old man, O'Banion's ten years younger—hell, we was all wet behind the ears, it was a young man's racket—and big political wheels like Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John and even that lunkbrain Big Bill Thompson in the mayor's office won't deal with a bunch of hotheaded squirts liable to put everybody's neck in the noose. They have to be nurtured along first, which is Johnny's department. Meanwhile there's meetings to arrange, logistics to work out, like how you going to get the liquor from where it's at, which is Canada and Mexico, to where it's going? That's my part. Johnny was impressed by the way I listened to reason over the Galluccio affair, when my scars were still raw, and my idea of setting up fronts to simmer down the reform crowd. I'm a visionary.

  First thing, I stocked an empty storefront on the ground floor of the Four Deuces Club, a Colosimo crib down the street from the cafe, with used furniture I bought for a song, and had cards printed up saying, A. BROWN, ANTIQUE DEALER. That way none of the neighbors asked questions when we started carrying barrels and crates in through the alley door and stored them in back. I had the same thing painted on the cabs of a couple of army surplus trucks, and now we had us a fleet. Then I made a quick trip back to Brooklyn and struck a deal with Frankie Yale to truck in alky from Canada by way of Buffalo. He's already got the New York market nailed down from his office in the Harvard Inn and looking to expand. While I'm there I discuss with him the Diamond Jim situation. Frankie, he liked to keep his hand in; that was his fatal flaw, he wouldn't delegate the gun stuff, and later when his face was too well-known from his picture on all those boxes of cheap cigars he turned to screwing over his partners just for the boot it gave him. But all that's in the future. He's so grateful to Johnny and me for cutting him in on Chicago he volunteers to do the job himself. That's hunky-dory with me; given the time for planning I always preferred to import talent from out of town, because by the time the bodies cool down to room temperature and the cops start nosing around, the heavy lifters are halfway home aboard the train.

  "Just say when, Al," he says in that mushmouth voice I have to lean in close to make out the words. "I'm free all next week."

  "Too soon, Frankie. I got a million things to set up, and Johnny's still pouring oil on City Hall. I'll ring you up in a couple of months, invite you to Chicago for a visit. How's that?"

  "Smooth, Al. I always said you was too smart to spend the rest of your life roping johns into the inn."

  I didn't much care for that, his bring
ing up my days as a pimp. That was Frankie's way of saying he knew me when and don't get too big for your britches. But I let it slide. I had bigger fish to fry.

  While I'm busy playing Henry Ford, reinventing the assembly line for the thirsty customer, Johnny's stroking city hall with gifts and hospitality and sitting down with all the other gang leaders over a big map of Chicago and the suburbs. It was in the back room of the Roamer Inn, a crib in which he owned a part interest, and which was run by Harry Guzik, who introduced me to his brother Jake. Jake balanced the accounts and kept the figures in his head, where no hotshot state's attorney could subpoena them. There was O'Banion, them bat-shit Genna brothers, Terry Druggan and Frank Lake, who ran the Valley Gang, the oldest around, and Joe Saltis and Frankie McErlane, who imported the first tommy gun to Chicago a few years later. All ambitious boys, tough as underboiled spaghetti. The plan was to carve up the territory so nobody had any beef that would lead to a bloodbath and cut into profits. I sat in on a couple of sessions. With a big black pencil and a lot of palaver, Johnny drew lines between the North and South Sides and along Lake Shore Drive and around the stockyards and wrote a gang leader's name on each section. I shut my yap and paid close attention. It was like watching the U.S. and France and England slicing up Europe after the Kaiser took a powder. The only thing missing was the souvenir fountain pens them high-hats handed out after the signing.

  Instead, drinks and cigars and handshakes all around, and a free turn upstairs with one of the girls for those who were so inclined, which I bet is what also happened at Versailles, not that you read of it; it was France, after all. Johnny was a genius. Who else could've gotten Micks to sit down with wops and Polacks and iron out a deal that made everybody happy? I did a lot of reading in stir, about how Attila united all the barbarian tribes that had been putting each other on the spot since Judas was a Cub Scout and shook down the Roman Empire for tribute. That Hun had nothing on Gentleman Johnny Torrio, and Johnny dressed better.

  A beautiful thing, that peace treaty. It should be under glass like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I almost cry when I think about it.

  It had one tiny crack, which broke it apart in the end. Things would've went different if only somebody had thought to invite the O'Donnells to the table.

  I thought if trouble started it would be the Gennas behind it. The Terrible Gennas, they were called, and it wasn't an exaggeration. There were six of them, real Stone Age types, ugly as a dog's ass except for Tony, who I think now must've been adopted. Tony, who was the oldest, wore nice suits and manicured his nails, but the others dressed like circus tents in candy-striped shirts and ties with naked girls painted on them, their mama still cut their hair, slap a bowl on their heads and lop off whatever stuck out. I think they bathed every Easter.

  They specialized in blowtorches and fingernail extractions, also the double-cross. If the other party didn't wind up with the shitty end of the stick, they figured they'd been cheated. I begged Johnny to cut them out, but he said we needed them because somehow they'd wangled a government license to distribute industrial alcohol, which they used to make needle beer in their warehouse on West Taylor Street and put into circulation in speakeasies where the clientele didn't much care what they was drinking so long as it wasn't that 3.2 piss was still legal. I didn't argue. I was still at the listening stage, learning as I went like everybody else. But I always thought the Gennas was a disaster waiting to happen, and I've never been wrong about predicting something bad. If I could make a buck betting against bad horses, I'd've had enough to buy off Washington back in '31.

  There were only four O'Donnells compared to six Gennas, but to look at their record you'd have sworn there were forty. They stuck up banks, broke strikes, cracked safes, and just for fun lobbed pineapples into polling places on election day; I doubt they cared who won, and I'm damn sure none of them ever stood in line to cast a ballot. Whatever side bid highest for their services, that was the side they threw in with. So they were a force to reckon with, but because Spike, the oldest, was in Joliet for walking out of the Stockyards Savings & Trust with twelve thousand in cash and securities, Johnny figured they were without a leader and that any alliance he made with them was shaky. Meanwhile his brothers were running errands to make ends meet and waiting on a pardon for Spike that nobody thought had a snowball's chance in hell.

  But for the moment all the included parties were pleased as pigs in shit. The wonder of it all was that all this was going on right under Diamond Jim's nose and against his express orders, but he was too busy porking his child bride and fingering his diamonds like they was his testicles to notice; which pretty much sums up the general lack of attention to his best interests that had signed his death warrant. The politicians were turning our way, but Johnny was too savvy to jump the gun, as it were, so he let Colosimo simmer in his own fat while he tended to the finer details.

  One of which was my dress and deportment.

  We was sitting in the cafe, digesting a heap of clams that would go straight to my belly and right on through Johnny, me drinking Chianti, him ginger ale. I'd just handed him a list of the neighborhood speaks that were in line for our first shipment from New York, which had put that prim little smile on his face that if he was Diamond Jim would be a big old smothery bear hug and a cigar big around as your wrist. Suddenly he scoops a roll of C-notes out of his pocket and plunks it down on the table with a splat like old cabbage. "Al, I want you to go to the men's department at Marshall Field's and ask for Sam Levy. Tell him Johnny Torrio sent you and wants him to dress you skin out. On second thought, I'll go with you. People know you're working with me, so it's a personal embarrassment to have you walking around looking like you do."

  So I get done over. Levy's a dried-up little Jew with a potbelly, born with his vest unbuttoned and a tape measure dangling around his neck, and by the time he's through with me he knows more about me than my doctor. Johnny's there telling him what's needed special, like a double-stitched pocket for my rod since it's obvious I'm not going to trust it to a flunky like he said I should, and extra room there so it don't stick out like a goiter. Then Levy asks me a question I don't understand. "Dress right or left?" Which is when I found out that the side your cock hangs down on is very important to tailors. I turned red when it's explained.

  "Pick one," Johnny tells him. "He'll make the adjustment."

  I start off with four suits, two for winter, two for summer, one of each in black for funerals—I got a lot of mileage out of those in just my first five years—a snappy yellow gabardine for ball games and the track and a charcoal with a gay purple pinstripe for business meetings. I threw away my old brown hat and picked out a Panama and a straw boater for after Memorial Day and a pearl-gray borsalino for after Labor Day, and some swell shoes, wingtips and spectators in Italian glove leather. A dozen silk shirts in all colors and a different necktie for each. I came out of the final fitting farting through silk drawers, a new man. To this day I'm down in the dumps, I call up Jack Sewell there on East Flagler and order a new suit for every season.

  According to Johnny I am now okay on the outside, but it takes more than a few bolts of cloth to turn a boy from Navy Street into Boul' Mich' material. He loaded me up on library books by Emily Post and whatnot, drilled me on which fork to use with each course, how to introduce people to each other, to ask pardon when I burped, and not to burp. He hired an elocutionist from the University of Chicago to hold a lighted match up to my lips when I said "teapot" and "pretty birdie" until I could do it without blowing out the flame. This same elocutionist, who wears white gloves and travels with throat spray, teaches me also when to say "don't" and "doesn't" and not to drop my g's and to eschew all slang. That's what he said, "eschew." I want to say gesundheit but I know it won't go over so I don't. Most of this took, though when I get tired or careless I forget and take grammar for a one-way ride, and of course you can't do business with mugs like Schemer Drucci and Nails Morton without using the lingo of the trade. Bu
t I can talk with reporters and judges and bishops without humiliating myself, and I've got Johnny to thank for that.

  Now we've got all the routes set up, the gangs on board, Scarface Al Brown shining like a nugget in a goat's ass, and the politicians so eager for all that graft I'm half-surprised they don't gun Diamond Jim themselves, Johnny says make the call. It's May, Jim's had two months of wedded bliss with his showgirl. He's back a week now from his honeymoon in French Lick, Indiana, where there's a spa, all the swells go there, soak out all the poisons. Get 'em when they're happy, I say. State of grace.

  Frankie answers on the first ring, like he's been waiting by the phone since February. "How's chances you passing through my neck of the woods anytime soon?" I say.

  "Sure thing, Al. Tomorrow?"

  I check the page-a-day calendar on Johnny's desk. May 10, 1920. "Four o'clock."

  Johnny watches me hang up. "That's it?"

  "That's it."

  "All those elocution lessons, fourteen words." He shakes his head. "I knew I made the right decision when I sent you those train tickets."

  Which for me is like getting a medal from the pope. The next day Frankie calls the Roamer Inn from Union Station. He knows the time and place, he didn't miss the train. I work the hook and start to dial Diamond Jim at home. Johnny reaches over and breaks the connection. "This is one call I should make."

  I push the phone his way, no argument. He wasn't one to stick his head in the sand; he might not push the trigger, but he always gave the go-ahead. Jim's expecting a delivery at the cafe, two truckloads of whiskey for special customers. He never let anyone else officiate in that situation. He prided himself on personal service.

  "Four o'clock, Jim. Think you can shake yourself loose from the little woman?"

  The Italian hasn't been born that can back off from a challenge like that. The big man's on his way.