Rogues’ Gallery
Capone Family
Alphonse “Scarface Al” Capone
Mary Josephine “Mae” Capone
Ralph “Bottles” Capone
Frank Capone
Charles Fischetti
Chicago Outfit and Allies
John Torrio
James “Diamond Jim” Colosimo
Frankie Yale
Frank “The Enforcer” Nitto
Jack “Greasy Thumb” Guzik
“Machine Gun” Jack McGurn
Frankie Rio
Albert Anselmi
John Scalise
Tony Lombardo
Mike “de Pike” Heitler
Dr. Kenneth Phillips
E. J. “Artful Eddie” O’Hare
The American Boys
Gus Winkeler
Fred “Killer” Burke
Fred Goetz
Chicago Heights Mob
Lorenzo Juliano
Joe Martino
North Side Gang
Dean O’Banion
Hymie Weiss
Vincent “Schemer” Drucci
George “Bugs” Moran
Joe Aiello
Jack Zuta
The Terrible Gennas
“Bloody” Angelo Genna
Mike Genna
Anthony Genna
Pete Genna
Politicians and Press
Mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson
Mayor Anton J. Cermak
William McSwiggin
Robert E. Crowe
Jake Lingle
Bureau of Prohibition
Eliot Ness
Alexander G. Jamie
Albert M. Nabers
Edna Stahle Ness
E. C. Yellowley
George E. Golding
The Untouchables
Lyle B. Chapman
Bernard V. “Barney” Cloonan
William J. Gardner
Martin J. Lahart
Joseph D. Leeson
Paul W. Robsky
S. Maurice Seager
Robert D. Sterling
Warren E. Stutzman
Secret Six
Robert Isham Randolph
Samuel Insull
Julius Rosenwald
Shirley Kub
Department of Justice
George E. Q. Johnson
Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt
Assistant Attorney General G. A. Youngquist
Judge James H. Wilkerson
William J. Froelich
Dwight H. Green
Jacob Grossman
Samuel Clawson
Attorney General William D. Mitchell
J. Edgar Hoover
Melvin Purvis
Intelligence Unit
Elmer Irey
Frank Wilson
Arthur P. Madden
Lawmen and Allies
President Herbert Hoover
Pat Roche
LeRoy Gilbert
August Vollmer
2122 North Clark Street—February 14, 1929.
(Authors’ Collection)
Prologue:
St. Valentine’s Day
On a frigid February morning in 1929, gangsters gathered in a garage on Chicago’s North Side, waiting for their boss.
Outside, a bitter wind pelted pedestrians with a faint dusting of snow. The garage—a narrow, one-story structure squeezed between two buildings on North Clark Street—offered shelter but no furnace. Most of the men kept their heavy overcoats on, or huddled around a pot of brewing coffee. A single dangling bulb gave off just enough light to cast a stark glow over a few trucks and cars, each registered to a fictitious address.
Nine years had passed since the start of national Prohibition, the benefits of which the men in this garage had reaped. They wore tailored overcoats over custom-made suits, jeweled stickpins on brightly colored neckties, silk shirts, and diamond rings. Most had fat wads of cash in their pockets and pistols under their arms.
Three were hardened gunmen, enforcers for the North Side mob controlling this part of Chicago. Two handled business tasks—one a financial wizard and the gang’s reputed “brains,” the other a speakeasy owner and labor racketeer. A sixth, a former safecracker, was employed by the gang as a $50-a-week mechanic—he wore only coveralls, and probably worked under one of the vehicles as the rest assembled. The seventh wore a carnation in his button hole—a thrill-seeking optician with no known criminal record who hung out with gangsters and bragged he could have anybody he didn’t like killed.
Just past 10:30, two armed raiders burst in through the back door. The gangsters might have felt a momentary surge of adrenaline—after years of open warfare on Chicago’s streets, they had every reason to expect retaliation from South Side rivals. But a glance at the invaders quelled their fear.
The blue-uniformed pair announced themselves as cops. The North Side gang had things well worked out with ranking members of the Chicago police. A raid like this was just a nuisance, a sham conducted by a department of unparalleled corruption. It wasn’t like any of them would ever serve time for violating the most unpopular law in the history of the United States.
The bluecoats brandished a shotgun and lined men up facing the wall. The gangsters, and the optician and coverall-clad mechanic, raised their hands and offered no resistance as one officer patted them down and took their weapons. A snub-nosed .38 clattered to the floor, nobody bothering to pick it up.
Then the uniformed pair ushered in two men in long, heavy overcoats, from under which they produced two Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the weapons were handed off to the uniformed “officers”; but more likely the new arrivals held on to the guns themselves. Either way, the tommy guns were raised and leveled at the backs of the seven men leaned against a cold brick wall.
One weapon was equipped with a twenty-round stick magazine, the other a fifty-round drum that wound up like a watch. Each contained .45-caliber pistol bullets, weighty rounds with a relatively slow muzzle velocity, losing much of their power flying through the air. Being shot by a .45, even multiple times, did not necessarily mean instant death.
But the Thompson could fire six hundred rounds every minute, and when the first tommy gun opened fire, all fifty of its rounds were spent within five seconds.
The harsh chatter of machine-gun fire filled the tight space as the gunman raked his Thompson back and forth, huge jets of flame leaping from the muzzle, strobing the garage as a hail of .45s caught the gangsters first in the heads, then across their backs. The shooter had to fight to keep control of the weapon, pulling down on its front grip as the movement of its heavy bolt—snapping back and forth ten times a second—pushed the barrel up toward the ceiling.
At such close range, the bullets shredded flesh, snapped bone, mutilated viscera, and spurted hot blood onto the cold concrete floor. Some slugs passed through their targets and pounded into the brick wall, shattering into fragments and ricocheting back into the dying men. The victims spun violently and fell—on their backs, on their faces, one slumping over a chair. A shotgun barked, and a burst of buckshot caught the optician in the back as he dropped.
When the tommy gun’s last spent shells rattled to the floor, the air was dense with smoke and a mist of blood and brain matter.
Some, perhaps most, victims were taking their time dying, writhing and moaning as their lifeblood seeped out. But their killers were in a hurry. They had held the second Thompson in reserve, should the often-unreliable drum mag of the first fail to fire properly. Once that drum had been emptied, the man holding the backup tommy stepped forward and fired into the men on the floor. The mechanic caught a bullet in the head, but must have still been moving, because whoever held the shotgun finished him, firing directly into his face. The charge obliterated the left side of his forehead, spilling his brains onto the cement, what remained of his eye sinking back into its shattered socket.
The gunfire attracte
d only scant attention outside the garage. A witness later testified he mistook the chatter for a car backfiring. But men in heavy overcoats exiting with their hands up, held at gunpoint by two apparent uniformed cops, indicated a routine bootlegging arrest—business as usual in Prohibition-era Chicago. The quartet piled into a big black Cadillac and sped off into the snowy city.
The entire operation had taken no more than five minutes.
Prompted by a suspicious housewife, a neighbor forced his way into the garage and walked into a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. Gun smoke still hung thick and heavy, but not concealing the seven bodies sprawled against the back wall, blood coursing down a central drain. Nearby, a survivor howled—a big German shepherd straining at a rope tied to a truck. Highball, the dead mechanic’s dog, appeared to be the only living thing in the room.
But one man was moving, crawling through puddles of scarlet in a hopeless bid for the door. Frank Gusenberg, younger brother of the dead man bent over a chair in the corner, had been shot fourteen times. Police arrived and took him to a nearby hospital, where Gusenberg refused to identify his killers, saying only that the raiders were dressed like cops. He died around 1:30 P.M., after defiantly telling police, “Nobody shot me.”
The garage on North Clark Street soon filled with police, reporters, and photographers. Many had seen their fair share of violence, but never such sickening carnage.
The Chicago Daily News described “the circle of yellow lamplight, where six things that were men are sprawled.” A Chicago Evening American reporter, after walking around the room, remarked, “I’ve got more brains on my feet than I have in my head.”
What the newsmen couldn’t describe, the cameramen captured, their gruesome photographs pushing the limits of what the newspapers dared print. The next day’s Chicago Tribune tried to shelter its readers from the horrific slaughter by covering the corpses with cartoonish images. The Chicago Herald and Examiner, however, forced its readers to view the carnage, a huge photo of the only slightly touched-up bodies next to a story beginning: “Chicago gangsters graduated yesterday from murder to massacre.”
On February 14, 1929, gangland sent Chicago a very bloody valentine. Like the unlucky, bullet-and-buckshot-riddled optician, many Chicagoans took a perverse pride in their city’s reputation for gangsterism and corruption. They enjoyed the bootleg liquor organized crime was happy to supply, and to the citizenry—the police included—an occasional murdered gangster or two seemed a fair trade.
But the calculated brutality of the massacre shocked the nation, and far exceeded what even the most jaded Chicagoans might shrug off. Bootleggers seemed suddenly less like daring outlaws breaking a stupidly unfair law, and more like bloodthirsty killers. Many gangsters fled the city, temporarily at least, for fear of a police crackdown.
The most notorious of gangland leaders, a celebrity criminal like none the world had seen before, was not even in Chicago that icy February morning. But he would return from a sunny vacation to a city turned cold and far less hospitable.
No one was ever charged, much less convicted, for committing the so-called St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. But almost immediately everyone in Chicago seemed to know who had given the order. Police fingers pointed at the South Side gangsters who had been at war with the North Siders since the early 1920s.
Prominent among the accusers was George “Bugs” Moran, the North Side mob leader whose tardiness spared him the grisly fate of his cronies. Over the preceding few years, several Moran allies had been wiped out with the same careful planning and brutal efficiency that characterized the massacre.
Now the word got around that Moran blamed his South Side rivals for these killings as well. As he was said to have put it, “Only one gang kills like that—the Capone gang.”
At the very hour of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Alphonse Gabriel Capone was in Miami, Florida, answering questions in the Dade County Courthouse about his financial transactions and alleged underworld connections.
As a stenographer established a beyond-any-doubt alibi for his whereabouts, Capone flatly denied ever being a bootlegger. What was he, then? A onetime antiques dealer turned professional gambler, whose losses at the racetrack far outstripped his meager winnings. How he managed to pay those debts—or to afford a $40,000 house on Miami’s Palm Island, a custom-built armored limousine, and $7,000 in tailored suits, pajamas, and silk underwear—remained between him and his wallet.
Though originally from Brooklyn, Capone embodied the ethos of his adopted hometown. As one observer said in 1931, “No one is ashamed of anything in Chicago,” which was “too big, too busy, too powerful. . . . [It] is gorgeous and it is awful.”
Al Capone fit right in. Hefty and powerful, an inch or two under six feet, he threw around more than two hundred pounds of fat and muscle. Every feature of his broad, expressive face seemed too large—big eyes under thick eyebrows, wide nose over fat lips, thick cheeks and bulbous chin, a visage encouraging caricature.
He wore his wealth literally on his sleeve by way of brightly colored, custom-tailored suits in every shade from sober blue to bright yellow. His trademark pearl-gray fedoras and fat, expensive cigars would soon be copied in films and comic strips, and by lesser gangsters. Where most criminals lurked in the shadows, Capone embraced the spotlight, becoming (as Harper’s put it in 1931) “one of the central figures of our time.”
This was a man whose hunger for more of everything—power, pleasure, publicity—drove him from the slums of his boyhood to the pinnacle of luxury. A conservative estimate placed Capone’s net worth in 1929 at $20 million, or more than $280 million by early twenty-first-century standards. But he cared little for dollars and cents.
Georgette Winkeler, wife of one presumed St. Valentine’s assassin, wrote Capone “had no regard for money except as a business necessity and a personal convenience.” He spent freely, tipped extravagantly, and gave generously, handing out $100 bills to kids to “go buy some ice cream.”
Like many a mobster, Capone maintained his power through fear. In 1926, famed Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow said the illicit nature of bootlegging made violence and intimidation inevitable.
“The business pays very well,” Darrow said, “but it is outside the law and they can’t go to court . . . so they naturally shoot.”
And Capone would not hesitate to pull the trigger. Stories of his capacity for violence—firing into a man’s face four times in a bar full of witnesses, or bludgeoning three men to the edge of death with a baseball bat—served the same purpose, partly fabricated or not. That fearsome reputation was essential to cement his place in Chicago’s gangland.
Yet some part of Al Capone desperately wanted to be liked, even admired, and he took pains to put up a respectable front. As an up-and-coming hood, he saw how his mentor, Johnny Torrio, lived the life of an honest businessman, even a gentleman, while thriving off vice and crime.
“Everybody calls me a racketeer,” Capone supposedly said. “I call myself a business man. When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on the Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality.”
Capone was a man perfectly fitted to his times. He rose to prominence when Americans were idolizing the great captains of industry—the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Fords—and for a while Capone assumed an unlikely place in that pantheon. The public knew Capone had killed, by proxy if not always in person, yet that seemed only to add to his roguish appeal.
As W. R. Burnett, author of the seminal gangster novel Little Caesar, observed in 1930, “Capone is no monster. Far from it. He is merely a thoroughly ruthless individual, who had acumen enough to take advantage of a very unusual situation.”
Capone’s ability to murder at a distance made him easier to accept. He offered himself up as a flamboyant character, known affectionately as “the Big Fellow,” while staying aloof from the evil done in his name. The public could look at him the way they might a lion in a zoo—a colorful killer, safely domestica
ted, if not yet behind bars.
His true self seemed always to hover just out of view. He tried to have press photographers take his picture from the right side, so the camera wouldn’t capture the thin white lines across his left cheek that had earned him his hated nickname: “Scarface.”
Those scars, a memento of his rough-and-tumble bouncer days in New York, Capone did his best to minimize—shaving three times a day, using talcum powder, turning down hat brims on the left side to keep his torn cheek in shadow. He would claim a bayonet had sliced his face during battle in the Great War, though he never actually served. But like the violence defining his career, the scars remained a part of him, famous and impossible to conceal.
On that Valentine’s Day in 1929, Capone seemed at the height of his power. He effectively controlled Chicago’s city government and had his chief gangland rivals beaten back. Whether by accident or design, the Clark Street massacre wiped out Capone’s last major opponent by shattering what remained of the North Side mob. Many observers considered Capone the undisputed king of Chicago, and he had only just turned thirty years old.
But he remained a victim of his own success. His meteoric rise to power and fame had trapped him in a kind of purgatory—“the most-shot-at man in America,” according to his first biographer. Surrounded by bodyguards, slipping from hideout to safe house, he seemed always on the lookout for another assassination attempt. After years of fighting to stay on top—to say nothing of fighting to stay alive—he’d grown tired and weary. He frequently announced a desire to retire, and probably spoke the truth—not that he ever could achieve that goal.
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 2