It was understood, too, that the Unit’s halfhearted raids did nothing to stop the flood of poisoned liquor leaving drinkers blind, palsied, and lying dead in the streets. The gangsters, it was said, only shot each other; but trigger-happy Prohibition agents opened fire at the slightest provocation.
By Prohibition’s end, according to one writer, dry agents had killed at least “twenty-three innocent, definitely non-gangster citizens” in Chicago alone, with not one such death resulting in a murder conviction. Facetious motorists took to driving around with a rear window sticker: DON’T SHOOT—I AM NOT A BOOTLEGGER.
That Ness would even consider joining such a disreputable outfit speaks volumes about the bond he’d formed with his brother-in-law. But like Jamie, Ness had ambition, and law enforcement offered him a path.
“I looked around me after a little while,” Ness said, “and decided there really wouldn’t be much competition in that field.”
As an honest, well-educated professional, he would stand tall among the blundering grafters filling the Prohibition Unit. If he did good work, stayed true to his principles, and kept close to Jamie, he could count on quick advancement. Plus, the job offered something of the excitement he’d always craved.
Ness left the Retail Credit Company in August 1926 and took his oath of office as a Prohibition agent that same month, at a starting salary of $2,500 a year.
When Ness broke the news to his parents, Peter and Emma couldn’t fathom why their son, with his brains and work ethic, would devote himself to a dirty profession like law enforcement.
Ness merely replied, “Someone has to do it.”
But, Emma said, “So many of them are dishonest men.”
“Not me,” Eliot said. “If there’s anything you’ve taught me, Mother, it’s to be honest.”
But Ness should have listened to her. His first week on the force, he told his more experienced partner, Ted Kuhn, about an illicit distillery.
“He couldn’t wait to make an arrest,” Kuhn recalled. “He thought it would have some kind of domino effect and scare away all the other moonshiners.”
In his excitement, Ness had blabbed his discovery to other, less trustworthy agents. When Kuhn found that out, he knew right away the bust would never happen.
But he encouraged Ness to get a warrant anyway, because the kid had a lot to learn about how things worked in Chicago. And when the pair showed up to raid the place, the still had, unsurprisingly, disappeared.
The incident taught Ness a valuable lesson. His nearest enemies weren’t the bootleggers, but the corrupt cops and feds who took their money. If he wanted to succeed, he’d have to keep his mouth shut. He would play his cards close to the vest from now on.
“I’ll say this for him,” Kuhn remarked of Ness, “he was a fast learner.”
Capone hiding his scars from the press, mid-1920s.
(Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection)
Five
1925–1926
As a young hoodlum, Capone treated reporters with open hostility, and when confronted by a camera, he’d either hide his face or attack the photographer. Then an editor at the Chicago Evening American advised him to stop behaving like a common thug.
“You’re a public figure,” the newspaperman said, “and you ought to act like it.”
Soon, Capone became the most accessible of gangsters, making public appearances, giving lengthy interviews, and—provided the cameras couldn’t capture his scars—allowing himself to be photographed. He had an intuitive understanding of how the press could help him, not just by advertising his businesses but also by shaping how the public saw him.
He worked to project in the press the image of a businessman doing what anyone else would do in his place. Caught by the Herald and Examiner in his Prairie Avenue home, wearing a “gaudy pink apron” and holding “a pan of spaghetti,” he seemed human—never mind he never actually cooked.
“I violate the Prohibition law, sure,” Capone said. “Who doesn’t? The only difference is I take more chances than the man who drinks a cocktail before dinner and a flock of highballs after it.”
Not really—the Eighteenth Amendment had not outlawed drinking or buying alcohol, just its manufacture and sale. Still, Al’s seeming honesty about his activities came off disarmingly, particularly in a two-faced town like Chicago.
“There’s one thing worse than a crook, I think, and that is a crooked man in a big political job,” Capone said. “A man who pretends he’s enforcing the law and is really making dough out of somebody breaking it.”
From implied bribery, Capone moved on to homicide. “What does a man think about when he’s killing another man in a gang war?” he asked. “Maybe it means killing a man who’d kill you if he saw you first. Maybe, it means killing a man in defense of your business—the way you make the money to take care of your wife and child.”
But Capone wasn’t always so polished or articulate. Backed in a corner, he could prove chillingly nasty.
On May 16, 1925, a young reverend from Berwyn named Henry C. Hoover arranged to have deputy sheriffs raid Capone’s big Cicero casino, the Hawthorne Smoke Shop. Shortly after raiders burst in, Capone arrived wearing pajamas and an overcoat, unshaven and surly. Rarely rising before noon, he’d been summoned from bed at the hotel next door. When he tried to force his way inside, a real estate broker turned deputy blocked his way.
“What do you think this is,” the broker asked, “a party?”
“It ought to be my party,” Capone snarled. “I own the place.”
The broker took a harder look at Capone, saw the long scar, and bid him, “Come on in.”
Another raider brought Capone upstairs, where the men were dismantling and carting off gaming equipment. Capone claimed he was being picked on, then said ominously, “This is the last raid you will ever make.”
Reverend Hoover watched the man in pajamas clean out the cash register and asked him who he was.
“Al Brown,” Capone shot back, invoking his preferred alias, “if that is good enough for you.”
“Muttering and grumbling, Capone went out,” the reverend recalled, “and disappeared down the stairs. Some time later . . . he re-appeared, neatly dressed and shaven and clothed in an entirely different spirit.”
“Reverend,” he asked, “can’t we get together?”
“What do you mean, Mr. Capone?”
“I give to churches,” Capone said, “and I give to charity . . . if you will let up on me in Cicero, I will withdraw from Stickney.”
The reverend was unmoved. “The only understanding, Mr. Capone, that you and I can ever have is that you must obey the law or get out of the western suburbs.”
But Capone’s earlier threat had been a promise: as they left the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, the raiders were attacked and beaten. The broker who’d let Capone inside suffered a broken nose. A few days later, another raider was shot when four thugs surprised him at home. He survived, but took no further interest in Al Capone’s affairs.
Reverend Hoover and his men had gone on their last Capone raid.
That same spring, Al Capone, now the head of a multi-million-dollar criminal empire, found himself in the midst of a multifaction gang war. O’Banion’s unpredictable partner Hymie Weiss was tied up in a bootlegging case that would send him temporarily to jail. Spike O’Donnell was still acting up on the South Side, and the Gennas on the West Side remained a real problem.
In 1925, “the Terrible Gennas” were, in the words of contemporary writer Edward Dean Sullivan, “overdressed, boastful, reeking with money and strutting for their countrymen.” Capone had done business with them—“though they were about as serviceable as a litter of wildcats”—because they controlled a most profitable and powerful bootleg operation, worth some $5 million.
Thousands of Genna stills were tucked away among the tenements of Little Italy, tended by residents who received a princely $15 a day for their trouble. The generous wages built in these poor immigrants a str
ong allegiance to those who paid them well and bailed them out of trouble.
The Gennas could easily afford the expense, because their toxic liquor—which reportedly could cause blindness, insanity, and death—raked in $350,000 in gross sales every month. Their product’s nasty bite matched the character of the Gennas themselves, whose religious devotion never seemed to stay their hands from killing.
“Bloody” Angelo, the brother handling enforcement, earned a fearsome reputation among West Side Italians. To maintain their hold on power, the Gennas paid police off handsomely, and employed the most coldly efficient killers in the city. Clannish and territorial, they were the antithesis of Capone’s open and inclusive Outfit.
When volatile Angelo Genna took over the politically powerful Unione Siciliana, the non-Sicilian Capone had his influence over the Near West Side greatly reduced. The fraternal organization—with some forty thousand members in Chicago alone—was key to Capone’s ability to both sway honest Sicilian-Americans and control the area’s illicit, profitable activities, namely bootlegging. Wresting control of the Unione Siciliana from the Gennas would buy for Capone the loyalty of a community.
And Capone held two advantages over the Gennas. First, the brothers had many enemies, with Hymie Weiss blaming them for complicity in O’Banion’s death. And Weiss was, in author Sullivan’s words, “the most energetic dynamo of revenge Chicago gangland ever knew,” fearless in part because he’d been diagnosed with cancer in 1924.
Second, Capone had added a new enforcer-bodyguard, Vicenzo Gibaldi, a Sicilian with the unlikely alias Jack McGurn, who bore a vengeance-fueled hatred against the Gennas for killing his stepfather over a bootlegging beef while Jack was still a teen. Still, McGurn’s training as a boxer and pro-level golfer gave him a focus and discipline not found in many street punks.
The newly wed Angelo Genna and his bride were living outside Little Italy in a hotel on O’Banion turf. Angelo’s post-wedding hope was to buy a place in fashionable Oak Park, among the many strikingly modern homes built by Frank Lloyd Wright and away from the brutal inner city.
On May 26, 1925, flush with cash to purchase property, Angelo tooled his flashy roadster along Ogden Avenue toward the West Side. An engine roared as a sedan caught up alongside and a shotgun started blasting. Genna pulled a revolver and emptied it at his attackers, then swerved into a lamppost. The sedan drew up and perforated “Bloody” Angelo further, splintering his spine. At the hospital, he bid his bride good-bye before making a final getaway.
The Gennas and the cops agreed the North Side mob, now run by wildman Hymie Weiss, was responsible. Others theorized Capone had launched the attack, knowing the blame for a shooting in O’Banion territory would be misdirected. Typically, no one was charged.
Angelo Genna’s funeral was the usual gangster spectacle—high-priced coffin, endless flowers, burial in Mount Carmel Cemetery—with the added touch that the wreckage of Angelo’s bullet-punctured roadster got towed in the procession. Angelo was buried not far from O’Banion, as were so many of the gangster enemies who wound up in the same cemetery’s unconsecrated ghetto.
The Gennas sought immediate revenge, Mike Genna enlisting his favorite torpedoes, the inseparable Albert Anselmi and John Scalise. Dubbed the “Murder Twins,” Scalise was tall and slim while Anselmi was short and stocky. Born in Sicily, the ruthless pair had become Mafia assassins in the old country until murder raps sent them scurrying to America.
“They were abnormal and unaccountable men without nerves, emotion, or heart,” wrote one gangland observer. “They looked upon murder as routine day labor.”
Reportedly, Scalise and Anselmi imported the Sicilian practice of rubbing garlic on their bullets to create gangrenous wounds. It didn’t really work, but it soon became a habit among Chicago killers.
Early on June 13, Mike and his Murder Twins, trolling the Near South Side for O’Banion gangsters, were seen heading south on Western Avenue by police in an unmarked car, which took chase. The Genna crew raced down Western, only spurring the cops on. Braking suddenly when a truck started across the next intersection, the car spun, winding up with its tail jumping the curb, right fender crunched against a lamppost in a terrible echo of Angelo’s demise.
The Genna driver bolted, but the Twins and Genna himself got behind the wrecked car, the police skidding to a stop and piling out to be greeted by gunfire. The police driver and another officer went down dead while the other two officers shot back, one taking a shotgun blast to the chest that, incredibly, didn’t kill him. Seventy bullets peppered the police car; one punctured Genna’s ride.
The Twins and Mike fled but were pursued, the latter turning to fire a now-empty shotgun and getting a bullet in the leg for his trouble. Genna hobbled bloodily away, firing a handgun as he went, then scrambled into a basement to hide. Two more cops joined the pursuing officer, following a trail of blood to Genna in his hideaway, where life was oozing out of him, an artery severed.
Anselmi and Scalise were grabbed as they fled on a streetcar. At their booking for murder, they were dragged in badly battered (having “resisted arrest”), lucky to be breathing at all after a cop-killing bust.
On July 8, Anthony Genna went for a morning walk and was shot five times in the back. On his deathbed, he fingered an ex-Genna henchman now working for the Capone-affiliated Chicago Heights gang.
That was enough to encourage brothers Sam, Jim, and Pete Genna to leave town. This would seem to open the door for a Capone stooge to head the Unione Siciliana, but instead a Genna enforcer pronounced himself new president. His term was short, however, ending in a hail of gunfire delivered by Jack McGurn and another hood at a barbershop on Roosevelt Road.
McGurn had taken his vengeance on the Gennas, and Capone could now install his own man as head of the Unione Siciliana.
After almost two years, three trials, and thousands in defense money, Anselmi and Scalise would be acquitted for killing the two policemen, earning a big celebratory shindig from Al Capone.
Why Capone was so devoted to the pair remains a mystery. Perhaps they had supplied him with inside dope while working for the Gennas. And of course he knew how useful they could be—hitmen didn’t come more ruthless.
A triumphant Al decided to spend Christmas 1925 with his family in Brooklyn.
He said, “I guess [Mae] didn’t know what she was letting herself in for when she married me. I was just a nice little boy that grew up with her in Brooklyn, and she was a sweet little Irish kid who took me for better or for worse.”
Asked what he wanted his son to grow up to be, Al said, “A brave man who can look anyone in the eye and stand his ground no matter what comes. I like a man with nerve—even if he’s on the other end of a gun fight.” Changing course, Capone said, “I don’t want him to be a bootlegger or a reformer, either. I’d rather like him to be a professional man, a doctor, lawyer, or a business man.”
What did Capone want his son to think of his papa? “I want him to know that I loved him enough to risk my life to work for him. . . . I expect him to repay me by playing the game straight.”
Christmas wasn’t the only reason for the family trip—Capone had two other agendas, starting with getting his son to New York for surgery for a mastoid infection imperiling the child’s hearing.
“I had three doctors there,” Capone said, “and they told me that operations of that kind were about a fifty-fifty chance.” His offer of $100,000, which he bragged about to the press, was declined in favor of the standard $1,000 fee. The operation saved Sonny’s life but took a toll on his hearing.
“It was Christmas Eve when my wife and I were sent home to get some sleep,” Capone said. “We found her folks trimming the Christmas tree for her little nieces and nephews and it broke us all up.”
This Norman Rockwell scene was interrupted the evening of Christmas Day by a friend of Capone’s dropping by to ask him “to go around the corner to his place to have a glass of beer.” Al added, “My wife told me to go; it’d do me goo
d.”
Capone’s friend’s “place” was the notorious Adonis Social Club, a seedy speakeasy with a cigarette girl and a ragtime piano player with a songbird on the side, enlisted for the occasion of Frankie Yale’s holiday party. Orange bunting draped the club, shaky lettering wishing A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR.
Capone with two bodyguards—including Frank Galluccio, provider of Al’s famous scars—ambled in to pay Yale their respects. Center floor, in a chandelier’s muted glow, was a table Capone and his men strolled past without occupying. Al and his boys took seats here and there in the shadows.
The party showed no sign of losing steam by a little before 2:00 A.M., when six men drifted in—White Hand members, the Irish answer to the Italian Black Hand—with whom Yale had long been at odds. Their leader, Richard “Peg Leg” Lonergan, brazenly, if stiffly, traversed the dance floor.
Already well lubricated, Lonergan and his men strolled over to the only open table, the one under the chandelier. Once the unwanted guests had settled themselves, somebody hit the lights, with only the overhead fixture still going to highlight the White Hander table. Shots came from everywhere, tables overturning, silverware clattering, glasses and dishes shattering.
The White Hand leader, a toothpick still clenched in his teeth, wobbled on his wooden leg, then hit the floor a corpse; another Irish guest dropped, dead before he landed. Two more scattered for the door, then two wounded confederates, the last out leaving a scarlet trail to the gutter.
Yale had been warned Lonergan intended to show up for the annual get-together and then attack. Some nonlocal faces would be needed to help turn the Irish ambush into an Italian one. Capone, with a trip already planned to do his fatherly duty, had agreed to participate, pleased to pay Frankie Yale back for various homicidal favors.
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 9