Of course, Capone’s version of the proceedings differed, retaining the sanitized slant of him going innocently to his friend’s “place” for a holiday beer.
“And we were no sooner in there,” Capone said, “than the door opens and six fellows come in and start shooting. . . . In the excitement two of them were killed and one of my fellows was shot in the leg. And I spent the Christmas holidays in jail and the next week after that, too, and my poor wife had to carry the weight of the two of us.”
Local cops took Capone and six others into custody. Wiped-clean weapons, dead Irish gangsters, and a gunfight in the dark added up to self-defense. Charges were dropped.
Waxing sentimental about his family to the press—even in the aftermath of a massacre—was partly publicity. Nonetheless, Al was the kind of man who called home every day, wherever he was, to speak to his sister, mother, and wife, when he woke up at noon or at dinnertime.
Mafalda would snatch up the receiver and immediately hand it off to Theresa, irritating Mae, sometimes to the point where—when she finally got her turn—her husband had to kid her back into a better humor.
Sonny’s condition improved following his operation, even as the boy’s mother began suffering symptoms of an advanced case of syphilis. At her physician’s urging, she sought treatment at the Mayo Clinic, despite fears that the newspapers might get wind. In pre-penicillin days, little could be done; the disease would flare up again.
Although Mae’s husband knew of the diagnosis, he seems to have taken little notice for his own well-being. He apparently did not seek treatment, having displayed no outward symptoms for many years. Anyway, enemy bullets posed a much more pressing threat.
But the disease would work on Capone in dangerously subtle ways. Once syphilis enters the brain, it begins to affect its victim’s personality. The sufferer’s mood can swing rapidly from gregariousness to open hostility; he may develop an explosive temper and an obsession with sex, while behaving in ways that seem both curiously distracted and melodramatic—heightening tendencies Capone already possessed.
Back in the city, a special Santa’s bag of Christmas gifts had arrived—the Capone gang’s very own supply of Bergmann submachine guns. The weapons, German surplus from the Great War, were delivered to the Cicero PD for Outfit soldiers to pick up.
A gangland arms race had begun the previous fall, when Capone’s competitors adopted a new tool: the Thompson submachine gun. Newer and lighter than the Bergmanns, the tommy gun took some getting used to. When its fully automatic chatter first echoed in Chicago, the gunman missed his target and left police puzzling over how one weapon could leave so many bullet holes.
“That’s the gun!” Capone said. “It’s got it over a sawed-off shotgun like the shotgun has it over an automatic.” His men, unwilling to lag behind their rivals, ordered three Thompsons in February.
The tommy gun was streamlined, compact, and devilishly easy to use. Light enough to carry yet heavy enough to absorb its own recoil, the Thompson was surprisingly gentle on its user, hardly kicking when fired—“the deadliest weapon, pound for pound,” Time magazine declared, “ever devised by man.”
Born of the Great War, this “trench broom” meant to help American doughboys sweep their way across Europe. But the conflict ended too soon for the Thompson to take part, and many of the fifteen thousand guns in circulation by 1929 ended up in private hands. Because the weapon was so new, few laws governed its sale. Legally purchasing a tommy gun in Chicago, in those days, was easier than acquiring a handgun.
The new year found recent recruit Jack McGurn—who would earn the nickname “Machine Gun” for his prowess with a Thompson—gladly knocking off former Genna gunmen. Over two weeks, McGurn dispatched three ex-Genna hoods in a succession of well-executed executions, narrowly escaping death himself on March 29 while fleeing four gunmen down an alley, his hat the only casualty.
When the West Side mob of William “Klondike” O’Donnell (no relation to South Side bootlegger Spike) tried to horn in on Cicero, Capone unleashed McGurn, who struck at a top O’Donnell gunman picking up his girl at her beauty shop. McGurn nosed a Thompson out a car window and unloaded a one-hundred-round drum, destroying everything in the shop except its human inhabitants, who ducked below the “Chicago lightning.”
A few nights later, an informant pointed Capone to the Pony Inn, a speakeasy on Roosevelt Road where O’Donnell and his boys were imbibing. As the happy group stumbled out with plans for barhopping, five sedans thundered up. This time the Thompsons didn’t miss: three of the O’Donnell party were hit, two dying at once, another staggering to a tree where he expired. The other three—O’Donnell himself included—somehow avoided injury.
The carnage would have serious ramifications. One of two bullet-ridden bodies proved to be William H. McSwiggin, bespectacled twenty-seven-year-old star prosecutor.
Dubbed “Little Mac” and “the Hanging Prosecutor,” McSwiggin had scored seven convictions over the past ten months. A Chicago policeman’s son and a favorite of the press, McSwiggin’s successes helped reelect his boss, State’s Attorney Robert Crowe.
“We are going to get at the bottom of this,” Crowe said, offering a hefty reward. “I am going to root out the booze and gang killings . . . if we have to use all the peace officers in Cook County on the one task.”
Mayor Dever’s police chief promised to put every available man on the case, and issued a warrant for Capone’s arrest. Meanwhile, the papers hammered at two questions: “Who killed McSwiggin?” and “Why?”
Task forces, courtesy of the state’s attorney and the Chicago PD, shuttered every speak and vice operation in and out of sight, bleeding the Outfit of as much as a million dollars.
In Forest View, the once-quiet suburb now called Caponeville, vigilantes targeted the massive Outfit brothel known variously as the Maple Inn and the Stockade. They descended on the morning of May 30, overpowering a watchman before setting fires throughout the building. Firefighters arrived from Berwyn but did nothing more than stand back and watch the conflagration.
According to the Tribune, Capt. John Stege, considered by many a rare honest Chicago cop of the era, “said no attempts would be made to find the vigilantes.” He hoped they would burn down a lot more joints as tough as the Stockade—it was easier than trying to obtain injunctions.
Capone, who had never intended to kill McSwiggin, could only stand back like the Forest View firefighters and watch his empire burn.
McSwiggin was at a speakeasy for investigative purposes, some said. That claim fell apart when the bar’s owner identified McSwiggin as a regular who’d known the O’Donnell mob members since childhood. Their respectable friend partying with gangsters conveyed a nod-and-a-wink assurance that the prosecutor and his pals would not likely raid the speaks they themselves frequented.
Also, the press finally noticed, the colorful murderers McSwiggin had put away were not mobsters, while shortly before his death he unsuccessfully prosecuted the Murder Twins, Anselmi and Scalise. Added to that, one companion slain at the Pony Inn had been a defendant in a murder case Little Mac had lost.
State’s Attorney Crowe was up against it—his election had been aided by the bootlegging gangs agreeing to cut back on violence until Crowe was voted in. Now, with his star prosecutor tainted, Crowe looked bought and paid for.
The time had come to go after Capone, the likely culprit, who had not only organized the attack but apparently manned one of the Thompsons himself.
“Scarface Al Brown, whose real name is Caponi [sic],” the Chicago Tribune reported, “was the machine gunner who shot and killed William H. McSwiggin . . . according to the best information elicited by State’s Attorney Crowe . . . and Deputy Chief Stege of the detective bureau last night.”
The Tribune found a witness who “was in a restaurant in Cicero on last Tuesday evening at 7 o’clock and saw Al Brown, his brother, and two or three other men in hasty and agitated conversation,” which was followed by Capone going to
a panel in the wall and taking out a machine gun. The thugs with Capone took pistols from the compartment and the group rushed out, shortly before the McSwiggin killing.
The state’s attorney’s office and the Detective Bureau believed “Capone in person led the slayers of McSwiggin. It has become known that five automobiles carrying nearly thirty gangsters, all armed with weapons ranging from pistols to machine guns, were used in the triple killing.”
Whether he’d led the attack or not, Capone took to heart a lesson: the brazen McSwiggin killing had riled the citizenry. In particular, cops, angered by one of their own dying, were as dangerous as any mobsters—look what had happened to Al’s brother Frank, who had suffered virtual police assassination. To succeed in his chosen field, Capone needed the public on his side—but such wanton violence would inevitably turn them against him.
Capone sought shelter in the southern suburb of Chicago Heights, at the home of bootlegger Dominic Roberto. Some years before, Roberto’s wife—a nightclub singer who performed as Rio Burke—had encountered a drunk, obnoxious Capone at a picnic.
Now Rio could only marvel at the change she saw in Capone. Hiding out in her home, he dressed in silk suits and took great care with his appearance. If anything, he seemed subdued, rarely laughing or smiling, “all business.”
Perhaps the McSwiggin mess had chastened him.
After eight days with Roberto and Rio, Capone switched hideouts, fleeing at night to the suburb of Freeport, where another family of Capones—no relation—had previously sheltered him. Raphael, the patriarch, had shadowy Outfit ties; the gang hid a set of ledgers in his home, and Al would frequently come by to go over them.
Raphael always made a point of criticizing Al’s drinking, womanizing, and brutish behavior. So far, Al had brushed his criticism aside, but Raphael could no longer contain himself. When Al entered his Freeport home after the McSwiggin murder, Raphael greeted him silently, beating him with a cane.
Al’s bodyguards made a move to stop the attack, but Capone held up a hand.
Next Capone traveled two hundred miles to a place where he could truly feel safe: Lansing, Michigan. Once again, he hid out among a family of Italian-Americans whose patriarch had once worked for the Outfit.
Thanks to an arrangement with local police, Capone could walk freely around the city, soon becoming known in the Italian-American enclave. Al bought presents and ice cream for kids, financed at least one wedding, and lavished huge tips on a teenage errand boy. And, like Rio Burke, locals marveled at his quiet, gentlemanly manner.
“Capone was not loud, flashy, and coarse,” recalled the daughter of the family who’d taken him in. “Capone had class. More than that, he had grace.”
But a cloud of violence and fear surrounded him still, as did the armed bodyguards who followed him everywhere.
Capone spent much of the summer in a cabin on Round Lake, just outside town. He would read, hole up with his latest mistress, and indulge his love of swimming. On the Fourth of July, he paid for a huge fireworks show and performed as its master of ceremonies.
“He’d be out on the end of the dock, acting just like a little kid,” recalled the man who, as a teenager, had served as Capone’s gofer.
He would also remember Capone’s sadness one evening as they walked home from a movie theater and passed a house where a family was sitting down to dinner. Capone wished he could do the same—enjoy a quiet meal with his wife and son in front of an open window with no thought of gunfire.
He warned his young companion not to get involved in the criminal life.
“If you do,” Al said, “and I’m alive, I’ll personally kill you.”
The more time he spent in Lansing, the more Capone spoke of retiring from crime, of staying in Michigan or fleeing to Canada.
But he must have known he could never leave that life, not completely. He would turn himself in for McSwiggin’s murder, figuring he had little chance of being convicted. He would show Chicago he had nothing to hide—that his racket was no worse than anybody else’s.
He would offer himself up as a public figure, legitimizing his business by force of personality, if not by law. And he would work to make peace, resorting to war only if necessary, so he and his family could escape the threat of death.
Ness (second from right) poses with liquor seized from Pullman porters, alongside E. C. Yellowley, Frank White, and Alexander Jamie (left to right), August 1927.
(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives)
Six
1926–1927
Sgt. Anthony McSwiggin, the dead prosecutor’s father, was determined to see his son’s killer brought to justice. Talk of McSwiggin’s brothers in blue being trigger-happy was in the air.
To avoid the Chicago police, who might hold him for their own brand of questioning, Capone made an arrangement with State’s Attorney Crowe to meet federal agents at the Illinois-Indiana border on July 28, 1926.
“I think the time is ripe for me to prove my innocence of the charges that have been made against me,” he told reporters, insisting he had nothing to do with killing “my friend McSwiggin.”
Capone handled the press with ease, seeming anything but the ogre he’d been made out to be. Of course Al hadn’t killed McSwiggin.
“I liked the kid,” he said, then added an offhand bombshell: “I paid him plenty and I got what I was paying for.”
Police confirmed Al could not have snatched a machine gun from a hidden compartment at the Hawthorne Hotel, because they’d searched the place and found no secret cabinets behind trick panels.
But Sergeant McSwiggin remained fixed upon avenging his murdered son. Some said the detective worked out a deal with friends on the force, who brought Capone to a room where McSwiggin could shoot him in private, without fear of prosecution. Others claimed the elder McSwiggin confronted Capone at the Hawthorne Hotel. When McSwiggin accused him of murder, Capone handed him his own pistol.
“If you think I did it,” Capone said, “shoot me.”
Whoever told the tale, the payoff was always the same. As one gangster put it, Sergeant McSwiggin “was just too decent a guy to shoot a man, even Capone, in cold blood.”
Information about prosecutor McSwiggin’s double life spilled out of the grand juries and other sources, revealing no martyr, rather the accomplice of his crooked drinking pals.
After a night in stir, Capone was back reestablishing his realm. The task at hand was handling the North Siders, now led by the unstable Hymie Weiss, released from prison. “Weiss, the Pole, was the antithesis of Capone, the Neapolitan,” Fred Pasley wrote, “unemotional, of a cold ferocity that made him a dread figure to both friend and foe. He was a combination of brain and brute and said to be the only man Capone ever really feared.”
In July, one of Capone’s chauffeurs was kidnapped, tortured, and killed, then left to rot in a southwest suburban cistern. Whether for vengeance or self-protection, Capone knew Weiss and his key minions had to go.
The following week, Hymie Weiss and second-in-command Vincent Drucci exited the Congress Hotel and sauntered south on Michigan Avenue to make a cash payoff to a ward boss. The major business district at the south end of Chicago’s Loop surely seemed safe for a morning walk . . . before the skidding of tires and report of a gun. Weiss hugged the pavement, pedestrians scattering, as two gunmen scrambled from a car. Drucci took cover behind a mailbox and blasted back. A police car squealed up and the getaway car tore off, stranding the two gunmen. The fevered Drucci jumped onto a running board to commandeer a car and give chase, but was mobbed by cops.
One captured shooter proved to be a Capone enforcer who Drucci refused to ID. Five days later, again on Michigan Avenue, Weiss and Drucci would survive a similar attack.
Gang violence in the bustling Loop business district was previously unheard of. Such dirty business was reserved for in and around speaks and gambling dens, not where tourists and businessmen got in the line of fire. And as the bullets kept flying where they s
houldn’t have flown, those businessmen would soon demand protection—for themselves, and for their city’s bottom line.
On the afternoon of September 20, 1926, Al Capone was enjoying coffee with his bodyguard, Frankie Rio, in the restaurant on the ground floor of the Hawthorne Hotel, his Cicero headquarters. The restaurant was especially busy, thanks to that day’s horse races, with parked cars lining the street outside.
The hustle and bustle was blotted out as a sedan sped by, a Thompson firing wildly out of the back. Capone and Rio ducked, along with everyone else, and somehow nobody was hurt. Rio assessed the scene—confirming the bullets had done no damage. Had the gun been aiming away from the building?
“It’s a stall, boss, to get you out,” Rio said. “The real stuff hasn’t started.”
Meanwhile, Outfit member Paul Ricca, about to enter the restaurant, spotted a second suspicious vehicle approaching, and caught a slug in the arm as he called out the alarm.
Another sedan was rolling past now, a tommy gun blazing from its back window, this time taking aim at the restaurant—bullets ripping through parked cars, shattering windows, tearing apart wood-paneled walls, and turning ceramic plates and mugs into powder.
More sedans followed, over half a dozen, each with a tommy gun pouring lead into the wrecked restaurant. Then a car stopped and a man in brown overalls got out, clutching a Thompson with a hundred-round drum, which he emptied with the precision of a master craftsman, raking the weapon back and forth. The men in the car behind him kept lookout, shotguns ready at the hint of movement.
The final gunner got back in the car, which joined the caravan heading in the general direction of Chicago.
The North Side gangsters had fired an estimated thousand bullets into the Hawthorne Hotel and thirty-five cars parked out front. Weiss, Drucci, and Moran had left nothing to chance, yet still they had failed.
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 10