Then he disappears from sight until 1922 when a small bakery named “Sullivan’s Bakeshop” opened on Clark Street just north of Armitage. Within the year he had assembled a crowd of Irish toughs to help him run whiskey across the Canadian border. He also became a “silent partner” in several modest speakeasies. Where did he get the money? Perhaps he had saved a nest egg from his army pay during the war years.
Sweet Rolls was secretive about his past. He would summarize his youth concisely and always in the same words, “Sure, wasn’t I a poor kid from West Cork who learned how to be a baker and then joined the English army and came home after the war and got involved in a mild sort of way in the ‘troubles’ that were happening there.”
Legends about this “mild involvement” in the Irish War for Independence and the Irish Civil War which followed it spread through the Irish community in Chicago during his brief five years of glory before the end came in his new and enlarged bakery shop across from Holy Name Cathedral. At the height of his popularity, when it seemed that he might indeed be the one to block Capone, these legends seeped into the Chicago papers. One story has it that he was a member of Michael Collins’s “flying squad” which assassinated British intelligence agents. Another says he was involved in the murder of Sir Henry Maitland, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in a London park. He was supposed to have turned against Collins during the Civil War, joined the “Irregulars” in the war against the “Free Staters” and left, when the former won their inevitable victory, with a price on his head. Another story holds that he killed so many Irregulars to avenge Collins (who was a scant seven years older) that even the hard-liner Kevin O’Higgins, who became the backbone of the Free State after “The Big Fella’s” death, warned him to leave because it would be difficult to protect him.
Yet another story claims that he had served in the hated Black and Tans, the English auxiliary force which terrorized Ireland during the last days of its imperialist reign over the twenty-six counties which would emerge as a barely independent Ireland.
Sullivan must have heard all these stories. He may have told some of them himself. “There’s all kinds of good stories about me,” he is supposed to have said to the Chief of Detectives of the Chicago Police Department, who was his employee.
“Did you serve in the English Army during the Great War?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t have been the only Irishman that did so, would I now? And sure, it wasn’t the only army I served in, was it?”
Thus one pieces together a story: a child of an unwed mother comes to Cork City at the age of seven after the death of his mother. He becomes a virtual slave of his relatives who owned the bakery. He is, however, charming and hardworking, wins the admiration of the neighbors, and earns the reputation of being an excellent baker. He survives four years in the trenches—a rare feat indeed—and becomes a hero, perhaps because he no longer cared whether he lived or died.
Then, with the horror of the trenches forever locked in his head, he comes back to Ireland and, on one side or the other, engages in more killing. When the “troubles” end, he migrates to America, probably entering illegally across the Canadian border, settles in Chicago, opens a bakery, organizes his own gang, and enters the bootlegger business and the bootlegger wars. His reputation for ruthlessness is matched only by that of Scarface Al.
That is about as much detail as we will ever have about Sweet Rolls Sullivan. It seems likely, however, that he had done a lot of killing before he appeared in Chicago. If he was truly the Lt. James Sullivan who was wounded in Flanders, the killings in Chicago must have seemed penny ante.
When he married Marie Kavanagh, a year before his death, he was asked whether his parents would “come over” from Ireland. “Not very likely,” he said with a bitter laugh. Those who heard the response were surprised. “Red” usually gave no hint of bitterness.
But then he usually gave no hints at all.
A reporter for the Chicago Herald summed him up the week before his wedding: “James ‘Sweet Rolls’ Sullivan is a charming, witty, quick-talking Irishman. He could as well be a politician or a doctor or even a priest. Until you look at his pale blue eyes, which seem utterly unrelated to the joke he’s just told or the quick answer with which he has just fended off a reporter. They are cold, hard eyes, unblinking, unfeeling, without a trace of mercy or compassion. Young Marie Kavanagh should take a close look at those eyes before she marches down the aisle of Immaculate Conception Church to enter holy wedlock with this handsome, but deadly man.”
Without any realization, however, that Jimmy
Sullivan was approaching the denouement of his life, Marie did not look into his deadly eyes and see misery and suffering in her future.
“Your man loves his French words, doesn’t he?” Nuala pointed at the photocopy of his article.
“Doesn’t he now?”
“His eyes were not as pretty as yours, Dermot Michael, not at all, at all. No way.”
“You never saw his.”
“I don’t have to … Would he have been any better than Capone if he had won?”
“Probably not, Nuala Anne. Capone was fat and ugly and crude. Sullivan was slender and handsome and seemed civilized. Prohibition would have run its deadly course anyway.”
“Wouldn’t the right-thinking people of America have hated him just as much as they hated Capone?”
“The right-thinking people of America turned Capone into a folk hero. That’s what Prohibition did to us.”
“Is Sullivan a hero?”
“He was not a good guy, Nuala. The point in the article and in his life is that, as well as a gangster, he was a romantic and tragic figure, far more than Capone was.”
She nodded.
“Ireland has had more than its share of them kind … And, Dermot Michael, go easy on that Bailey’s. You’re not going to get another, and yourself driving home.”
“If I had a third, I might sleep at your house.”
“It’s not my house and much good you’d be to me with three of them things under your belt.”
I sighed.
“Tis true.”
“Sure, don’t I sound like an awful Irish matriarch now? You mustn’t let me be that way after we’re married, do you understand?”
“It won’t be easy.”
“It’s not SUPPOSED to be easy … But wasn’t this one a strange man altogether?”
“He was all of that, Nuala Anne. He must have loved danger. Couldn’t do without it.”
“Still you’d think that after all his experience of battle, he wouldn’t have been alone in his bakeshop in the middle of a gang war. Does your man ask that question?”
“Only indirectly. But read on.”
“Speaking of strange men, what do you hear about your old friend, Jared Kennedy?”
A question like that might simply have been a chance. But with Nuala I could never be sure whether she might not have a sense of the worries which Cindy had stirred up the day before.
“I hear on the street that he’s wearing a wire for the Bureau, uh, a tape recorder for the FBI.”
“What street?”
“LaSalle Street: that’s where you hear all the rumors.”
“I thought you didn’t go over there.”
“I don’t. Hearing it on the street is a kind of a figure of speech. I heard it from Cindy, who heard it somewhere.”
“So that’s what you were talking about Sunday, was it now?”
“It was.”
Never, never try to hide a worry from Nuala.
“If people on the street know that he’s wearing a wire, what good does it do to wear the wire?”
“To catch the people who never hear anything on the street, the little, not-very-bright people who have no business in the game anyway. The big guys know about a wire as soon as it goes on and avoid the guy that’s wearing it as if he’s got typhoid fever. They’d avoid Jarry even if he wasn’t wearing a wire. All the Bureau ever picks up in these much-pub
licized ‘stings’ is a few minor operators and a lot of publicity.”
“Are you sure you’re safe?”
“Sure I’m sure. I don’t work over there anymore. I never see Jarry, thank heaven. And I’ve never done anything wrong. I’m probably not smart enough to.”
“Uhm,” she said, and went back to her reading.
Yet I was scared. My troubles with the CFTC and IRS had made me feel guilty, though neither agency had found any wrongdoing. Suspicion had been enough to scare me.
Not a very good hardball player.
Marie Elizabeth Kavanagh was a flapper, a typical young woman of the twenties, one who thought she was a liberated spirit. She was a Catholic flapper, however, a product of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, so she was a conservative flapper, not that there were all that many Chicago flappers in those days who were all that radical. Her father, Henry Kavanagh, a chief auditor for the Pullman Company (ticket receipts) with an office on Michigan Avenue, was on the upper crust of the Irish middle class, sufficiently affluent that he could afford the tuition the Sacred Heart nuns charged and the costs of a coming-out party at the family home on Marine Drive. The Chicago papers delighted in calling her a debutante, as in the headline in the Hearst paper, “Gorgeous Debutante to Wed Hood!”
She was indeed gorgeous, to judge from the pictures of her at the time of her betrothal and marriage, a tall willowy red head with a lovely body and a bright smile. Apparently there was not much behind the smile. The papers deftly hinted that she was not very bright.
As one can imagine, Henry Kavanagh was less than enthused at the prospect of his eighteen-year-old daughter’s wedding to a criminal. Under pressure from his wife, who seems to have been as empty-headed as their daughter, he compromised. He granted his daughter permission to marry, authorized his wife to spend money on the wedding, and announced his intention not to attend the wedding. The Examiner’s gossip columnist reported breathlessly that he had asked Archbishop Mundelein to intervene to prevent the marriage.
“Deb’s Father Asks Church’s Help to Prevent Marriage,” the headline had said.
“Oh, Daddy will give in and be there. He’s really a cream puff,” Marie had said in response to the rumor.
Her prediction was accurate. Her father did indeed attend the wedding and, according to observers, looked decidedly uncomfortable in the presence of the lords of the demimonde. Naturally Scarface Al—Al Brown as he sometimes liked to call himself—was there in his finest and most expensive—and most vulgar—duds. Bugs Moran, head of a rival North Side gang was not invited; as Jimmy Sullivan was claiming possession of his bride in the Honeymoon Suite of the new Drake Hotel, three of Moran’s gang were gunned down in front of Moran’s speakeasy on Armitage.
Capone was blamed for the killings. He always pleaded innocent, a rare claim for Scarface. Later he hinted that maybe Sweet Rolls Sullivan was responsible for the assassination. Sweet Rolls was dead and couldn’t defend himself. A year and a half later, Capone finished off the Moran gang in the notorious St. Valentine’s Day massacre. If Sullivan was indeed to blame for having three men murdered on his wedding night, he was merely doing Capone a favor.
Ten months after the wedding, Marie Kavanagh Sullivan presented her husband with a baby girl who was baptized—in their little church on North Park—Margaret Ellen. Newspaper pictures showed Sweet Rolls beaming over his new daughter. Four months later he would be dead, though not before impregnating his wife for a second time. Marie and Margaret dropped completely from sight soon after the funeral. The present researcher could find no trace of them in the usual records. Relatives of the Kavanagh family refused to discuss them. Even contacts in organized crime shrugged. It was a long time ago, they would say. No one cares about them anymore. At this time Marie Sullivan, born in 1909, would be just over sixty years old. Her children would both be in their forties.
If any of them are still alive.
“Och,” Nuala announced to me, “she’d be in her middle eighties now and they’d be in their sixties.”
“Something like that.”
“Ah, she’d have stories to tell, wouldn’t she?”
“She would indeed … But your man was a dogged researcher. If he couldn’t find anything, there was probably nothing to find.”
“Unless someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
She picked up the article again and began to read it, her eyes narrowed in intense concentration.
“Such as?”
“Such as, if you want to keep living, you’ll forget about Marie and Peggy and young Jimmy.”
“Peggy, is it?”
“Of course it is, what else would it be?”
What else indeed?
Nuala was on the hunt. Quick, Dermot Michael, the game’s afoot and we haven’t a second to lose.
Right, Holmes.
James Sullivan, if that were truly his name, was a man with everything for which to live—money, power, a beautiful wife, a child of whom he was proud. Why did he not get out of the illegal trade in liquor and settle down to enjoy life? Perhaps open a chain of bakeshops, as he liked to call them?
There is no clear answer to that question. Perhaps he loved the danger and excitement. Perhaps he could not be happy unless there was violence in his life. Perhaps he wanted total power.
Then why not go after Capone, not just his gang, but Scarface himself? Why not finish off “Al Brown” and win the gratitude of all right-thinking people in America?
Of which there were very few when it came to Prohibition.
Everyone realized that there could be only one bootlegger in Chicago, either Sullivan or Capone—though poor Bugs Moran thought he was still in the game, as did the sinister Genna brothers. During the year after Sullivan’s marriage, the killings continued. So too did the pictures of Marie Sullivan in the society pages, engaged in all kinds of virtuous activity. There are many pictures also of her and her husband, expensively and tastefully, at Orchestra Hall and various Chicago theaters.
In the skirmishing that year, Capone seemed to be losing—along with the remnants of other gangs, small businessmen trying to fight the duopoly that was emerging.
Someone had to go. Either Capone or Sullivan. The question remains even today as to why Capone survived. Scarface Al was ruthless and cunning. But he was not as ruthless and not as shrewd as Sweet Rolls Jimmy.
The two sides engaged in chess moves. A Capone convoy of trucks was ambushed outside of International Falls, Minnesota, the booze smashed on the road, the trucks burned, the drivers and shotgun riders bound and left in the winter cold. A classy speak, in which Sweet Rolls was a silent partner, burned to the ground on a Saturday night. No one died in these ventures, but they well might have.
“Why don’t they go after each other?” they asked in Chicago. And sometimes, “Why doesn’t Sully kill that cheap Sicilian pimp?”
Then they began to go after one another’s soldiers. As in all wars, there was argument about who started it. A Sullivan man disappeared from the face of the earth. Rumor had it that he was dumped off of Navy Pier into an icy lake. Within a week two of Capone’s tommy gunners went up in flames when the touring car in which they were preparing for a raid blew up. The battle dragged on through the winter into spring and summer. Safe houses in the country belonging to both sides were torched. The windows of Sullivan’s bakeshop were smashed and a firebomb thrown inside. Fortunately it did not ignite. Then a car sideswiped Marie Sullivan’s car when she was eight and a half months pregnant. Fortunately she was not injured. Then there was the exchange of gunfire in front of the Lexington Hotel, after which Scarface complained that it could have been him.
In the meantime a citizens committee had been established to end the warfare between the “bootlegger titans.” Editorial writers denounced the “random and senseless violence” as editorial writers always do. Sweet Rolls smiled benignly and told reporters that apparently there were some “business differences” between a couple of criminal groups.
Scarface growled that nobody killed his people.
The obvious answer was that someone had.
Despite the publicity and the public outrage, anyone who knew anything about Chicago was aware that more hobo drunks died every winter night on West Madison Street in the winter than gunmen of the two gangs killed in the battles between Sullivan and Capone. They also knew that the police and the city officials could stop the war anytime they wanted to, which was anytime they were willing to give up the fat envelopes of greenbacks which mysteriously appeared on their desk every Tuesday afternoon, just before the end of the working day.
The most puzzling question, then and now, is why Sullivan, having failed to nail Capone after the shoot-out in front of the Lexington Hotel, did not strike again quickly before Capone got him. After his death, many wondered why he stood waiting, without a bodyguard, for the killers to come.
And come they did at 4:30 in the afternoon. Jimmy Sullivan was showing two of his women employees the sumptuous cake he had just fashioned for his wife’s twentieth birthday—chocolate cake with vanilla frosting and silver decorations including a giant Roman “XX.” A black Packard pulled up in front of the bakery and three men emerged. It was a lovely autumn day and across the street from the bakeshop the sun glowed on the white bricks of Holy Name Cathedral set against the clear blue sky. Men and women entered and left the church for their “visit to the Blessed Sacrament” on the way home from work.
Irish Whiskey Page 8