"No, ma'am."
"Well, ask me again when she knows."
I didn't take no for an answer. I worked her for six weeks, sent candy, flowers, a mug with a gold bracelet, which she sent back by way of that same mug. I ask her again I don't know how many times. "Ask me when she knows." Did I say she was a tough nut? Ball bearing's more like it. But I wore her down in the end. I could charm the panties off a lamb chop when I set my mind to it. She agreed to go to dinner. We ate. We talked about our families—well, about mine; her parents were dead and she didn't have any brothers or sisters, so she wanted to know all about the Capones from Brooklyn. She knows I'm in the liquor trade, of course, but that was like being a salesman; if we lived in Hollywood and I said I was in pictures, she'd say, "What else?" It's all the same. She wouldn't let me take her home afterwards. I put her in a cab.
Two nights later we went to a movie. Later that week the Four Deuces, only not for dancing because she don't. I took her to more movies. She liked the Gish sisters. I bet we saw everything they were in that year. We went to restaurants, ritzy joints where the waiter clears the crumbs off the tablecloth with a little tin sweeper and they bring you a little bowl of water to dabble your fingers in between courses. We were careful about Mae; I took Maggie to Outfit places and neighborhood theaters clear across town, and there weren't any nosy reporters and photographers hanging around then; I'm Alfred Caponi, remember, just another palooka at harvest time.
I never did see where she lived. When we were alone it was in my hotel suite, and when we said good-bye it was always at a cab stand. I get the idea she's married, but I stop short of having her tailed to find out for sure. What business is it of mine? "Ask me again when she knows." Hell, I think, maybe he knows. Things've loosened up since the Kaiser took it on the ankles. Skirts are short, music's loud, the president's got a chippie right there in the White House. (I got this from Johnny, who got it from Frankie Yale, who had a nodding acquaintance with the commander-in-chief's personal bootlegger.) You can buy a deck of playing cards in the Loop with a different set of titties on every card, right there among the penny whistles and MoonPies. If she can handle it so can I.
But she don't handle my behaving like a mug and getting my name in the papers doing it, even if it is only on page three and it isn't even my name. I made the mistake of telling her about it, laughing, like it's a good joke on me. She didn't join in. We were in bed at the time. She gets right out and starts dressing, saying there's a difference between breaking a numbskull law like Prohibition and threatening to kill a poor hack over a dented fender, and a fender I dented to boot. She left, slamming the door, and the next day there's a different girl behind the cigar counter, milk-faced thing with braces on her teeth. Maggie quit.
Two years later I'm still thinking about her. I'm in a better position to dig up information—the cops are more expensive now, but they're higher up on the ladder—and I find out she's married, though I don't ask how long because it's still none of my business, living in the suburbs, got a kid. She's sickly and the husband's not raking in millions. I start throwing little jobs his way, just to help out; I ain't Santa Claus and a man's got his pride. That's the story on Maggie, the only woman I ever loved outside of Mary Coughlin Capone.
In April 1923, the Outfit went on the ropes when Big Bill lost out for reelection to William Dever, a circuit court judge they said was straight as a horse's dick. It was our own fault for not doing enough to get out the vote, trucking in tramps we paid by the bottle and posting plug-uglies at the polls to send a message to the dopes waiting to cast their ballots—you know, observing the conventions. Well, we didn't, and Dever raided the Four Deuces before his name was even dry on the office door. So we went to Cicero. What the war books call a strategic withdrawal.
Johnny was proud of how he done it. He had a right to be, because we got in our foothold without spilling a drop of blood. The news hawks said I tossed Joe Klenha, the president of the village board, down the city hall steps, but I never laid a hand on him. We were having a difference of political opinions and he slipped, though I will say he was more inclined to see things from the other fellow's point of view on the way back up than he had been going down. That's what a fire or a bad fall will do to a person.
The only gambling sanctioned in town was the slots, so Johnny, not wanting to offend the local franchise, brought in a string of girls. Cicero cops raided the house and locked them up, so he opened another place, but they shut that down too. Then he rang up friends in Cook County and the sheriff came in and busted up all the slots. After that, Johnny came to terms with the locals: they got to keep their one-armed bandits, and Johnny kept his whores, and as a bonus got the exclusive right to sell beer in Cicero. That was his percentage for all the trouble and aggravation. Then he took a holiday.
He earned it. He'd been working nonstop since he left Brooklyn, but till I came along didn't have anybody he could trust to run things in his absence. That was some compliment to a kid who five years ago made his dough roping johns into the Harvard Inn. Johnny drew out a million in cash and securities and letters of credit and booked two first-class cabins for Europe with his wife and mother. I moved my carved elephants into the Hawthorne Hotel on Twenty-Second, took over the top floor, put up steel shutters on the windows. People coming to see me had to walk past guards in the hallway and stand for a frisk if their faces weren't familiar, and in some cases when they were.
But it wasn't all sunshine and two-bit cigars with my feet up on the desk. The O'Donnell business was still going on, and I had to lease some extra muscle from O'Banion, and that cat's smile of his didn't put me any too much at rest about the Irish throwing in with Italians against other Irish. When the other shoe dropped I intended to be ready for it. Also I was in mourning for my brother Frank.
When the fall elections came up in Cicero, we weren't about to repeat earlier mistakes. We set up our candidates with plenty of the folding for megaphones and votes, put the snatch on opposition volunteers and gave them hospitality until after the polls closed, premarked ballots at all the precincts and dropped them in the box so the citizens weren't late reporting back to work. I sent a dozen seven-passenger touring cars to get the boys around. A county judge got wind of all the activity and anted up an army of Chicago police to assist the locals. That was against the state charter, but I never said we had the corner on breaking the law. Nobody's legit, I always say.
Jimmy says Frank was the best of us. I'm inclined to agree, even though he was still in knickerbockers when Jimmy lit out for the territories, so how would he know? Frank was the older brother closest to me in age, and he was always there to pry me out of a jam I got myself into with my hot head, like fights with guys twice my size before I had my growth. He had movie-star good looks, built like a college tackle, never lacked for a dame on New Year's Eve or any other night, and his line of gab—well, he could've been anything he wanted, but he chose to follow me to Chicago and see I didn't fall into a hole he couldn't pull me out of. To that purpose he took command of one of those big touring cars election night.
A squad of plainclothes dicks from Chicago out cruising spotted him with a couple of other guys on the corner of Cicero and Twenty-Second, in front of the precinct building, and pulled over to get out, they said at the inquest, for a look-see. They said Frank started the shooting, and they brought out a pistol they swore was Frank's, with three rounds fired. But my cousin Charley Fischetti was with Frank on that corner, and he said the cops shot first. What are you going to do? You can't even the score with them the way you would a mug. So I swallowed that sour pill. I'm over it now, but they didn't have to pose for pictures holding up Frank like a mackerel they landed. A sergeant named McGlynn drilled him through the heart.
So I laid off the razor again and buried my brother Frank. O'Banion handled twenty grand worth of floral displays, which spilled out of the house on South Prairie onto the porch and even the front yard. I bawled like a baby, and then I did something nobody in th
e business ever did, before or since: I closed down every saloon in Cicero for two hours until after the funeral. That's something even Eliot Ness couldn't do, for all his press conferences and headlines. The ham.
Mae cried, too. She liked Frank. She said, "Snorky, it isn't your fault." But it was. I thought I was safe in my little sandlot, counted on the gents who made the laws and put teeth in them to obey them. What you have to do, you have to own the gents. Charley Luciano used to say, "If you can't buy 'em, kill 'em. If you can't kill 'em, promote 'em"; which is to say, throw the bastards out of your ballpark. I took it to heart soon as I had the juice. There's a boy in FDR's Brain Trust has me to thank for taking him out of stickball and putting him in tennis shorts. No, no names. Confession only goes so far.
But life goes on, death too. Our slate was in and we were opening joints in Cicero fast as defense plants, which is a good way to put it since we were at war. We were still mopping up O'Donnells and putting out fires, one of which I admit I started myself when Joe Howard, the papers called him Ragtime on account of he could hijack a truckload of Old Log Cabin in the time it took a shine piano player to polish off eight bars, slapped around my pal Jake Guzik just because he could and I braced him at Heinie Jacob's tavern on South Wabash. He called me a pimp.
The cops said I emptied a .38 into his face, but they couldn't find anyone else to say it so they sprung me. I wasn't even heeled when they picked me up. Johnny was back by then, filled with European culture, but he had trouble of his own and didn't chew me out this time.
Mayor Devers' police chief sent a squad to arrest him at the Sieben Brewery on the North Side. Two of his own cops were standing sentry, and they wound up in the wagon with the rest.
Then damn if the chief didn't hand the load over to the feds for violation of the Volstead Act. It was a setup, and it came straight from our pal Deanie O'Banion.
That Mick was slick as an eel. The Gennas wanted him on ice for hijacking a shipment of that government alcohol they'd fixed up a license to distribute, but Johnny counseled peace, which put their backs up against him and also O'Banion's, because he knew Johnny would expect a favor in return, and the Irish hasn't been born who likes owing anybody, especially a wop. But you wouldn't guess it to hear him talk. He offered Johnny a bargain price on the Sieben Brewery. He said he'd made his pile and was ready to pull out for Colorado and raise horses. He set up an inspection tour and was even there to greet Johnny personal. He figured his being on hand to stand the pinch would take the heat off him, and he took the ride to headquarters, cussing out the cops and the reformers along with everyone else, but he overplayed his hand, because when Johnny made bail for himself and his boys he didn't include Deanie. Hymie Weiss was left to cool his heels, too; we knew we'd have him to deal with in time.
"Deanie has to go," I told Johnny. We were alone in the Hawthorne, and he took the drink I offered him, which shows you his state of mind, a teetotaler like him. He was under federal indictment, and you can't fix those birds, not unless you can promise them U.S. Attorney General. (No true bill for Deanie, though; that was his cut for delivering Johnny.) The liquor don't lift his mood. He looked like the widower at a wake.
"It wasn't supposed to be like this," he kept saying. "There was plenty to go around, enough for everybody."
"There's never enough when your name has an O in front of it," I say. "I'll take care of it."
He smiles, but there isn't any gas behind it. I see the spider tracks at the corners of his eyes, gray specks in his chin stubble. He's just forty. "Al, what would I do without you?"
"Snare some other monkey from the Brooklyn Zoo and put him in a boiled shirt." Joshing, you know. Cheer him up.
"He couldn't replace you. A monkey's got only four fists to fight with."
That's not everybody's opinion, despite recent events; it wasn't O'Banion's. I give him rope, send word I'm willing to sit down and work out our differences. I use Frank McErlane, one of his own countrymen. The answer was short and not sweet; "Tell them Sicilians to go to hell." It should be on his headstone.
On November 8, 1924, Mike Merlo, president of the Unione Siciliana, a man of great respect, died of cancer, the first of us to go in bed and the last for a long time. O'Banion sold a hundred grand in flowers for the sendoff. What with the turnover among us, I bet Deanie cleared almost as much out in the open as from the rackets. Compared to him I was selling pencils out of a cup in my little antique store. For this occasion, he built a twelve-foot replica of Mike made entirely out of roses and carnations, a masterpiece, and I was tickled to see it. A really first-class chiseler ought to retire at the top of his form. For myself, I do him the honor of bringing in Frankie Yale to show him the door.
Frankie, you remember, is the man who punched Diamond Jim's ticket, and he did it solo, but Deanie wasn't slow and ignorant like Jim, so for backup I borrowed Scalise and Anselmi from the Gennas. You never spoke of one without the other, like Fields and Weber or Leopold and Loeb. They came as a package, the kind Bomber Belcastro sent to certain parties by special messenger, and they never missed. I was so happy with the way things worked out I never got around to returning them to the Gennas, which led to more bad blood, but that situation wasn't likely to improve anyway and I'd rather have that pair on my side than theirs.
Mike was going under on the eleventh, so Deanie was in his shop early on the tenth, rearranging his staff's bouquets and snipping little green sprouts off Mike's statue of posies in the cooler. When the bell tinkles above the front door and his clerk tells him who's calling, he don't leave it to the help. Scalise and Anselmi are two of them Sicilians he told to go to hell, but Frankie Yale, whose great northeastern pipeline keeps the liquor flowing like water, and who's killed more men than Sergeant York, is a man to deal with face-to-face. Out Deanie comes from behind the counter to offer Frankie the rare O'Banion handshake. It's only natural that a muckety from Brooklyn would come to pay his respects to the boss of the Midwestern Mafia.
Frankie's done his homework, about who gets Deanie's hand and who just a nod with his mitts in his pockets, and especially about them pockets; even when he's in his shirtsleeves and a rubber apron, like now, you got to figure him for two rods minimum. So Frankie takes the glad hand and hangs onto it like it's a rescue rope and he's going down for the third time, while Scalise and Anselmi plug away, bammity-bam, so close to him his clothes catch fire, and when Deanie slips his grip and topples, Frankie leans over and gives him one in the brain for the payoff, what we called the coup de grace, French, yet; Johnny's Grand Tour is already having its influence on our education. Charles Dion O'Banion cashed in his chips at the ripe old age of thirty-two.
Cardinal Mundelein put the kibosh on a funeral Mass at Holy Name, directly across the street from the flower shop, but what the Church wouldn't do, the boys made up for in spades. It ain't every day a genuine mob celebrity goes to his rest before his time: once every couple of months is occasion enough to pull out all the stops. His casket alone, silver and bronze, ran ten grand, with gold candlesticks all around: it looked like an ocean liner going up Michigan Avenue. Of course, all the flowers came from his own shop. It took two dozen cars just to deliver them to Sbarbaro's Funeral Home, including a big basket I popped for. They said ten thousand people followed the hearse to Mount Carmel Cemetery, tromping all over graves and knocking down headstones just to make sure Deanie didn't pop out of the ground, laying about with a pistol blazing in each hand, the way they said he did back before he could afford mugs to do his furniture moving. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played "Danny Boy" as he was being lowered into the hole. You had to be made of stone not to cry a little at least.
The North Side belonged to Hymie Weiss now, and he hit back like the Po-lack welterweight he was. Johnny went away on another vacation, which was becoming his answer to everything, and Weiss's gun punks made themselves conspicuous sweating bullets in their winter hats and overcoats following him through train stations in Hot Springs, New Orleans, Florida, Cuba, and t
he Bahamas, always a day late and a dollar short; but that was just a feint.
On January 12, 1925, a car carrying Weiss, Schemer Drucci, and Bugs Moran, Hymie's right bower, drove up alongside my car at State and Fifty-Fifth and raked it from end to end with one of General Thompson's trench brooms. I was inside a restaurant at the time, but my driver caught a slug in the back that he was still carrying around last I heard.
First thing I did, I got on the horn to Detroit and promised the head engineer a fat bonus to deliver my bulletproof Cadillac in two weeks. While I was waiting I lined up a two-car escort everywhere I went, one in front and one behind, with plenty of artillery aboard, and set up a perimeter around the Metropole with boys on foot to discourage strangers from parking within four square blocks, which they did by stepping off the curb and sitting on their fenders until the joker behind the wheel got the hint and drove off. I stopped going to restaurants for a while, because I didn't eat in greasy spoons and it meant reserving half a dozen tables for the crew twenty-four hours ahead. Nightclubs, same thing. I was a prisoner in my own town.
But that trick on the corner, that was another feint. Johnny was the one Weiss wanted. The papers were calling him the head of what they tagged "organized crime" in the area, and I was just the hired help. I didn't exactly engage a press agent to claim O'Banion. Johnny suspected what was happening when he read about the attack in the out-of-town papers, and when he came back after a couple of weeks he went before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to the charge of breaking Prohibition. Why waste money on bodyguards when Washington provides them for free, along with three hots and a cot?
The judge gave him five days to settle his affairs before he went away to Waukegan. Johnny and Ann, his wife, spent the next day shopping on Michigan Avenue, which was the thing they liked to do best as a couple and wouldn't be doing for nine months. When they got back to their apartment house on Clyde, Johnny's driver climbed out to help with the packages. Johnny followed, carrying a stack of hatboxes. Weiss and Moran piled out of a Cadillac parked on the corner and opened up with a pistol and shotgun. A slug went right through Johnny and cracked the engine block of his Locomobile. A stray hit his driver, and the glass door of the apartment house fell apart when another went past Ann's head as she was pushing through it with her back because her arms were full of parcels.
The Confessions of Al Capone Page 36