His partner in this enterprise was an established bootlegger who went by the name of ‘Dutch’ Schultz but who was born Arthur Fliegenheimer in New York in 1902 and had followed a similar criminal career to Diamond. Indeed, ‘Legs’ and ‘Dutch’ were so similar in character that they spent most of their partnership trying to cheat one another.
One night, Diamond killed a drunk in his club and had to flee town. Schultz took over his business, so Diamond retaliated by hijacking Schultz’s liquor trucks. Diamond felt safe from further retaliation having teamed up with another gangland figure, New York gaming club and brothel owner Arnold Rothstein. But just as he had lost a friend in the assassinated Orgen, so he did again in 1928 when Rothstein was murdered in a poker club after welching on a $320,000 debt.
Now it was Schultz’s turn to get his own back on his ex-partner. He dispatched a hit squad to kill Diamond, whom they found in bed with his mistress. They sprayed the room with gunfire but, although five bullets entered his body, Diamond survived. Two further attempts on his life failed. Finally, in December 1931, unknown hitmen, possibly Schultz’s goons, finally got their man. They followed Diamond home from a girlfriend’s apartment, waited until he had retired to bed, then smashed the front door off its hinges and shot him dead.
Schultz now believed he had a free reign to openly run his liquor, gambling and protection rackets, which together brought in an estimated $20 million a year. But his gun-slinging style of business was inimical to the new, rising breed of Mafia leaders, like Myer Lansky, who were trying to inhibit the excesses of the old-style New York gunslingers.
There was further embarrassment when Schultz went on a bender to celebrate the result of a sensational tax evasion case, in which he was acquitted after succeeding in having the trial moved to a small upstate courthouse. During a drinking binge, he accused one of his gang, Jules Martin, of ‘skimming’ money collected from his New York restaurant protection rackets. A witness to their dispute later related what happened next:
‘Dutch Schultz was ugly; he had been drinking and suddenly he had his gun out. Schultz wore his pistol under his vest, tucked inside his pants, right against his belly. One jerk at his vest and he had it in his hand. All in the same quick motion he swung it up, stuck it in Jules Martin’s mouth and pulled the trigger. It was as simple and undramatic as that, just one quick motion of the hand. Dutch Schultz did that murder just as casually as if he were picking his teeth.’
Prohibition had ended and the rip-roaring days of casual public shootings, such as those regularly orchestrated by Schultz, were embarrassing to the new Mafia leaders. On 23 October 1935, ‘Dutch’ Schultz was dining with three friends at a Newark, New Jersey, restaurant when two men with machine-guns entered and shot them all. The last of New York’s old-style gun-slinging gangsters was out of action for good.
It took just as many years to rid Chicago of the scourge of its street-war gang leaders, epitomised by Al Capone, who was responsible for the most brutish villainy of the age. Head of some of the cruellest cutthroats in American history, he inspired gang wars in which more than 300 men died by the knife, the shotgun, the tommy gun and the pineapple, the gangster adaptation of the World War One hand grenade.
Alphonse Capone was born in Naples on 17 January 1899, the son of an impoverished barber who emigrated, with his wife and other eight children, to New York and settled in Brooklyn. A street-fighting thug who gained his nickname ‘Scarface’ while working as a bouncer for a Brooklyn brothel, he looked up to an established Brooklyn hoodlum named Johnny Torrio, who was 17 years his senior. When Prohibition was imposed in 1919, making all manufacture, purchase, or sale of alcoholic beverages illegal, Torrio moved to Chicago to go into the bootlegging business and, short of tough minders, sent for the ‘Fat Boy from Brooklyn’.
As it happened, Capone urgently needed to get out of New York, where he was wanted for questioning over the death of a policeman. He arrived in Chicago to find that Torrio was not his own boss but under the thumb of an old-time Mafioso, ‘Big Jim’ Colosimo, who ran labour and extortion rackets as well as about 100 brothels in the city. The one business he did not seem to be involved in was bootlegging.
At this time, Torrio fell out with Colosimo, not only over his lack of interest in the illicit booze trade but because he divorced his first wife, who happened to be Torrio’s aunt, and married a singer, Dale Winter. Colosimo and his new wife held court nightly at his restaurant on South Wabash Avenue, surrounded by minders as well as politicians and entertainers. On 11 May 1920, Torrio arranged to meet his boss there to sign for a delivery of whiskey. As Colosimo waited in the empty restaurant, Al Capone stepped out of a phone booth and, acting on Torrio’s orders, shot Colosimo dead, then took his wallet to make the killing look like a robbery. Both Capone and Torrio mourned at Colosimo’s funeral – then took over his crime empire, added bootleg liquor to the criminal portfolio and set about amassing a fortune.
The bloodshed had only just begun, however. And Capone’s creed – he once said: ‘You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun’ – meant it would continue for another decade.
In the early Twenties, Chicago’s underworld was shared between the Mafia gang run by Torrio and Capone and the mainly Irish gang of Charles Dion ‘Deanie’ O’Bannion. A baby-faced ex-choirboy once destined for the priesthood, O’Bannion’s childhood friends included future gangsters Hymie Weiss and George ‘Bugs’ Moran, all members of a strong-arm crew called the Market Street Gang. They started in a small way during what became known as the ‘Chicago Newspaper Wars’, in which the city’s competing newspapers hired thugs to beat up paperboys who sold the competition’s journal.
O’Bannion next tried his hand at robbery but after being arrested for a safecracking job he went to work in the more convivial environment of the city’s dive bars, where his speciality was drugging patrons’ drinks and then robbing them when they passed out. As part of this scam, joke-cracking O’Bannion also did stints as a singing waiter in a nightclub that was frequented by criminals. They found the entertainer so engaging that they helped him set up in big-time business for himself. He ran his operation from a flower shop, the grandest in Chicago, catering for the city’s high society weddings and funerals. But his core moneymaking trade was in illicit brewing and distilling.
O’Bannion had style and principles. Unlike his Italian rivals in neighbouring parts of Chicago, the Irishman would not allow brothels in his area and refused to sell any but the best-quality booze. He sneered at the crudity of the Mafia gangsters but in 1924 he cracked his most costly joke at their expense. He sold Johnny Torrio a half-share in a brewery for half a million dollars – without revealing to Torrio he’d been tipped off that it was about to be raided. O’Bannion ensured he had an alibi when the police swooped but Torrio, who had been careful to avoid any police record, was booked. Revenge was swift and bloody.
Three hoodlums working for Torrio and Capone dropped into O’Bannion’s shop to buy a wreath. The ‘joke’ being played on the Irishman was that the wreath was for himself. One of the thugs held the Irishman down while the others shot him dead. O’Bannion’s funeral was attended by Chicago’s richest and most influential citizens, as well as murderers, thieves and bootleggers. No one stinted on the wreaths, said to have cost over $50,000.
O’Bannion’s gang, including the notorious George ‘Bugs’ Moran and Hymie Weiss, now went on the attack, ambushing Torrio as he returned home from a shopping trip. The hitmen gunned him down, shooting him in the jaw, lungs, groin, legs, and abdomen. Moran tried to deliver the coup de grâce into Torrio’s skull but ran out of ammunition and he miraculously survived. After recovering in hospital, Torrio was picked up by the police and jailed for nine months over the illicit brewery. On his release, he fled Chicago in 1925 with a reputed $50 million and with Moran and Weiss still on his trail, and settled in his family’s hometown, Naples. He returned to New York in 1928 and worked an enforcer for Mob mastermind Meyer La
nsky (of whom much more in the next chapter) until being jailed again for tax evasion. He died of a heart attack in 1967.
Capone was now master of the richest territory in the underworld, running a thriving empire in prostitution, bootlegging, gambling and extortion, but he had started a gangland war that he could not finish. Before the Twenties were out, more than 1,000 bodies were to end up on the streets of Chicago in a string of bloody reprisal raids. And one of the earliest was against ‘Scarface’ himself.
Capone’s headquarters was the Hawthorn Hotel in the wholly corrupt Chicago suburb of Cicero. From there he ran his $5 million-a-year business in the most flamboyant manner, playing host to the city’s louche glitterati, from politicians to showgirls. In September 1926 ‘Bugs’ Moran and Hymie Weiss, having failed to settle their score with Johnny Torrio, led a motorcade past the Hawthorn Hotel and sprayed it with hundreds of submachine-gun bullets. Capone was unhurt but his pride was ruffled and he had Weiss gunned down in the street shortly afterwards.
Moran proved more elusive so, while maintaining a price on his head, Capone turned to other business matters that needed settling. The Genna family, a gang of six Sicilian brothers, led by ‘Bloody’ Angelo, were established suppliers of ‘medical quality’ alcohol. Both Capone and Moran wanted to muscle in on their business and one by one their gang members were gunned down until the remaining brothers fled the city.
Capone then turned on one of his own men, Francesco ‘Frankie’ Yale, one of the hitmen hired to assassinate ‘Deanie’ O’Bannion. Suspecting Yale had short-changed him on a liquor deal, he was lured to a fake appointment in New York in 1928 and machine-gunned to death from a passing car. Back in Chicago that same year, an attack by unknown assailants also gunned down ‘Diamond’ Joe Esposito, another hoodlum who had become a bent politician controlling police, politicians and union leaders.
The next obstacle to Capone’s monopoly of power in the West Side of Chicago was another bootleg liquor supplier, Roger Touhy. As a means of driving him out of business, Capone in 1931 kidnapped his partner, Matt Kolb, and when Touhy paid the $50,000 ransom demanded for his release, shot him anyway. When Touhy still held out against Capone, the gangster got corrupt police to frame him for a separate kidnapping and he was jailed on perjured evidence. Days after his release, he was shot dead in a Chicago street.
But to Al ‘Scarface’ Capone, the sweetest act of revenge was always going to be the elimination of his most hated opponent, George Clarence ‘Bugs’ Moran, the O’Bannion aide who had tried to kill Capone’s old partner Johnny Torrio in 1924. For the task, Capone employed his deadliest hitmen to enact what would become the most infamous gang shoot-out of all time – the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929.
On a snow-covered Chicago morning, men in police uniforms burst into a garage used by Moran’s North Side Gang. Seven of his men, who had gathered to await a liquor delivery, were lined up against a wall. The fake cops then motioned to the Mafia executioners just outside. Machine guns spat death.
Neither Capone, who was vacationing in Miami at the time, nor Moran, were in the garage that morning, the latter only narrowly missing his assassination. But six Mob associates and a car mechanic were killed. It was a massacre at the height of the Chicago Mob wars that shocked a nation already accustomed to headlines announcing random street killings. It also shook Moran himself, who fled town, leaving the ‘Windy City’ to Capone.
The actual hit is thought to have been organised, and possibly carried out, by one of his most trusted lieutenants, Vincenzo DeMora, who liked to be known as ‘Machine Gun’ Jack McGurn and sidekick Anthony ‘Joe Batters’ Accardo. McGurn, who had joined Capone as a hired gunman after his father was killed by the Genna family, had a fearsome reputation. By 1929 at least 25 bodies had been found with his ‘calling card’, a nickel coin pressed into the palm of the victim’s hand. His fees for contract killings allowed him to buy shares in a number of Chicago clubs. In 1927 when a comedian, Joe E. Lewis, refused to work at one of them, he was beaten up by McGurn and had his vocal cords cut. McGurn himself was machine-gunned to death by three masked executioners in a bowling alley in 1936, seven years and a day after the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.
McGurn’s sidekick, Anthony ‘Joe Batters’ Accardo, went on to succeed Capone as head of the Chicago Mafia. In old age, he gave way to Sam Giancana (of whom, much more in a further chapter).
McGurn’s killers were never traced but the prime suspect was ‘Bugs’ Moran. He largely disappeared from public view after his men were massacred and it was not until 1946 that he resurfaced in Ohio, where he was jailed for bank robbery. Shortly after his release in 1956, he was again caught after robbing a bank. He died in Leavenworth prison in 1957.
After forcing Moran to flee for his life following the 1929 massacre, Capone had taken over control of the entire criminal network of the city of Chicago. But his empire would soon crumble. In 1931 what the police failed to achieve in a decade the taxman managed in a few weeks. On 4 October after a speedy trial, Al Capone was found guilty of tax evasion. He was fined $50,000 and ordered to pay $30,000 costs – chickenfeed to him. But he was also sentenced to a jail term of 11 years. It broke him.
When he was released in 1939, Capone was already sliding into insanity from syphilis. He hid himself away on his Florida estate, shunned by neighbours and even his fellow Mafia veterans until his death, alone and deranged, in 1947. The new breed of Mob leaders wanted nothing to do with the loud-mouthed, brutish scar-faced relic of a blood-spattered era.
CHAPTER 2
MONSTERS WHO BECAME MOGULS OF THE MOB
A young Polish immigrant was walking through the streets of New York when he saw a girl being assaulted by two men. The 16-year-old rushed to her rescue, fists flying. In the ensuing fight, police were called and all three men were arrested and kept in prison for 48 days. Their brief incarceration changed their lives. The girl’s two attackers were young thugs ‘Lucky’ Luciano and ‘Bugsy’ Siegel. The plucky teenager was Meyer Lansky. Despite his attack on them, the thugs took Lansky under their wing … and all three went on to become Mob magnates.
Well, it’s a nice story. (And even as an author of crime books, I also once believed it.) But like so many myths about the Mafia, it paints a glamorised picture of what is, in stark truth, a grimy, grubby, barbaric criminal subculture. There are no ‘Robin Hoods’ in the ongoing history of the Mafia, only hoodlums and their manipulative masters, the Mob bosses.
Take ‘Lucky’ Luciano, who liked to think of himself as a heroic wartime agent for the US government. In fact, his real name was Salvatore Lucania, Sicilian-born pimp and drug pusher who was a bully and cheat almost from birth. ‘Bugsy’ Siegel – so nicknamed because he was ‘as crazy as a bedbug’ – presented himself as a handsome playboy, who mixed with Hollywood’s rich and famous. But Benjamin Siegel was really a nasty thug and cheap chiseller who, when entrusted with millions of dollars to run his own business, stole from his friends. Seemingly self-effacing Meyer Lansky was, to all appearances, a polite, mild-mannered businessman. But the bent accountant, born Maier Suchowjansky, was as guilty as any of the murderous mobsters who worked for him – a cynical mover of money earned from the vilest criminal undertakings that cost untold lives.
The story is true, however, that Luciano and Lansky met early in life. Born in Sicily in 1897, Luciano arrived in the United States in 1906 and got into trouble within hours of disembarking from his migrant ship – for stealing fruit from a handcart. The following year the ten-year-old was charged with his first crime, shoplifting. He also launched his first racket, charging Jewish kids a penny or two for his ‘protection’ to and from school. If they refused to pay, he would beat them up. In 1915 his life of petty crime led him to a custodial sentence for the first time for drug peddling but his year in reform school left him a hardened criminal. Luciano became a leader of Manhattan’s Five Points Gang and police named him as a suspect in several local murders although he was never indicted. Fellow
members of the gang at various times were Johnny Torrio and Al Capone.
Meyer Lansky, born in 1902 to a Russian family, arrived in the US in 1911 and was one of the Jewish kids that Luciano targeted, offering him protection at a price. Lansky refused to pay, and after Luciano failed to beat him up they became friends. Like his Italian pal, Lansky formed his own small gang while still in his teens, mainly involved in gambling and car theft. Luciano was at first Lansky’s mentor and later his associate. They controlled a number of New York gangs, mainly Italian and Irish, involved in robbing homes, shops and warehouses. But there was an area of crime in which Luciano specialised and which Lansky abhorred: prostitution. The Jew would have no part in the vice trade because, while a teenager, he had fallen desperately in love with a young prostitute, then found her one night in an alley with her throat cut, probably by her pimp.
Between 1918 and 1932, Lansky was arrested seven times on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to murder but he had to be released on each one because of lack of witnesses. Luciano was more successful in keeping out of police custody. He and Lansky had both become affiliated to the gang of Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen, who made a fortune from union and organised labour rackets. On Orgen’s behalf, Luciano became New York’s most feared hitman, whose favoured weapon was an ice pick. His reward was a string of Manhattan brothels that, by the Twenties, were estimated to be earning him more than $1 million a year.
While Luciano was the epitome of a brutal gangster, Lansky took the softly-softly approach. Seeing how fellow Jews were intimidated by their Irish and Italian neighbours, he began offering their businesses ‘protection’ – at a price. But he needed ‘muscle’ to make his racket work, and the first person Meyer recruited was fellow Brooklyn boy Benjamin Siegel, also of Russian Jewish descent, though born in New York in 1906. Siegel had already devised his own protection racket, forcing Manhattan pushcart merchants to pay him a dollar or he would incinerate their merchandise. From his teenage years, the tough thug was building a criminal record that included armed robbery, rape and murder.
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 2