Four bystanders were injured in the tommy gun fusillade, including a mother and her son visiting from Louisiana; Capone and Rio escaped unscathed. Ricca, the only Outfit soldier wounded, won the Big Fellow’s gratitude and a promotion to the front office.
“A machine gun was used to shoot up the Hawthorne Hotel a few days ago, and they can’t blame that on me,” Capone told the press. “Why, I’m still paying owners of automobiles parked in front for the damage done to their cars in that raid, and I am trying to save the eye of the poor innocent woman they wounded sitting in a car in front.”
Capone paid for the damage done to the café, too.
Once again, the ganglord used the press to his advantage. If he could position himself as better than the other guys—or, in the case of McSwiggin, reduce them to his level—he could retain some measure of public sympathy.
In private, he planned retaliation. Unlike Weiss’s attack on the Hawthorne, a surgical strike was called for. Al would remember McSwiggin’s death and the dangers of collateral damage.
“The Big Fellow,” an Outfit soldier explained, “never wants any innocent bystanders hurt.”
In early October, Capone assembled a peace conference at the Hotel Sherman, sending Tony Lombardo of the Unione Siciliana as his representative. Weiss had a demand: the two men who’d attacked him on Michigan Avenue must be turned over.
“I wouldn’t do that to a yellow dog,” Capone told Lombardo.
Giving up a pair of expendable types might seem a fair trade for a bootlegging alliance, but who of Capone’s men would put their lives on the line for him after he turned over two of his own for execution?
So the war would go on. Weiss was the one man whose death would slow or stop the conflict. But the last thing PR-savvy Capone wanted was more bullet storms on city streets. The hit had to be well-planned and sudden.
He handed the task to Frank Nitto.
Weiss still maintained O’Banion’s old office above the State Street flower shop. Holy Name Cathedral, the mammoth limestone seat of Chicago’s archdiocese, consumed the opposite block. But in a rooming house at 740 North State, to the north, a second-floor apartment had a view on the street.
On October 11, around 4:00 P.M., Weiss, his lawyer, driver, bodyguard, and a politico pulled into a parking lot catercorner from the flower shop, just south of Holy Name Cathedral. Weiss and his business associates were lost in conversation; the others may have slowly scanned the street, alleys, and doorways, including the church, before starting across. No one looked to the heavens, however, from which rained down machine-gun rounds and shotgun bursts. Weiss’s bodyguard collected seven slugs while Weiss took ten, lurching to the sidewalk and falling, never regaining consciousness.
The machine-gun nest hustled the rest of the Weiss party along, wounding them all, bullets careening off the cathedral’s cornerstone, obliterating letters from its inscription.
The police rushed the room at 740 North State and found three shotgun shells, thirty-five machine-gun shells, and plenty of cigarette butts near two window chairs. The gunmen had taken care to zero in on their targets and keep pedestrians out of the line of fire. Nitto had planned the job well.
Virtually every cop in Chicago believed Capone had ordered the hit. In response, Capone did something unusual for a gangster but typical of “other notables of the news,” as the Tribune put it—he called a press conference.
To receive reporters, Capone used a drably furnished Hawthorne Hotel room to downplay his financial status. In slippers but no jacket, trademark cigar in his teeth, Capone appeared relaxed, despite—or perhaps because of—the fifteen bodyguards standing by.
“I’m sorry Weiss was killed,” Capone said, after handing out cigars and drinks. “But I didn’t have anything to do with it. I telephoned the Detective Bureau I’d come in if they wanted me and they told me they didn’t want me. I knew I’d be blamed for it, but why should I kill Weiss?”
“He was supposed to be your rival,” one reporter pointed out, “for control of all the gangs of Cook County.”
Capone ignored the question, instead launching into a whitewashed version of his life, with no reference to his ventures in vice and gambling, though frankly admitting his involvement in the “beer racket.” He went back to his boyhood in Brooklyn, insisting both he and his parents were American born.
“I have to laugh at the way those hoodlums squawk that I’m a foreigner. . . . You can count on the fingers of one hand the foreigners I’ve got with me here,” Capone said.
He gave his version of the Beer Wars, in which he and Torrio were earnest peacekeepers while the North Siders were incorrigible troublemakers.
“I’ll tell them why I want peace,” Capone said, “because I don’t want to break the hearts of the people that love me. . . . Especially I don’t want to die in the street, punctured with machine-gun fire.”
Capone blamed his adversaries for all the bloodshed. He had “tried since the first pistol was drawn in this fight to show them that there’s enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street.”
He even spared a thought for Weiss’s grieving mother. “I know that sweet old lady. . . . When Hymie was in business with us, many’s the night I slept in his house and ate at his table. Why didn’t he use some sense and keep out of this shooting stuff?”
The Weiss funeral, with its few hundred attendees, was small by gangster norms. Weiss—never without his rosary—was, like O’Banion, refused Catholic rites and interred in unsanctified ground without a final Mass.
Finally, well into October, a major peace conference took place, most likely at the Hotel Sherman across from City Hall and a major haunt of fixers, politicos, and lobbyists. Bugs Moran was against North Siders attending, but Drucci forced the issue and both appeared.
Past clashes were to be forgotten, future differences resolved nonviolently, the old Torrio borders restored. To Capone’s benefit, the original pact hadn’t included his Cicero holdings, his interests already furthered by the removal of the Gennas.
“Here they sat,” Fred Pasley wrote, “partitioning Chicago and Cook County into trade areas, covenanting against society and the law, and going about it with the assurance of a group of directors of United States Steel or Standard Oil transacting routine matters.”
The gang leaders, who a short time before had been trying to kill each other, retired to a bacchanal of drinking and laughter, dubbed the “feast of ghouls” by the press. According to Pasley, Capone was now “the John D. Rockefeller of some 20,000 anti-Volstead filling-stations. He was sitting on top of the bootleg world” from the Loop to Cicero, and east to Indiana.
Flush with victory, Capone gushed to a Herald and Examiner reporter, “I believe it’s peace to stay. . . . I know I won’t break it and I don’t think they will. I feel like a kid I’m so happy. When the meeting was over I called up my wife and told her. She cried so she couldn’t talk to me.”
Capone added, with a straight face, “I’m going home to sleep now after I have a couple of beers. That’s my celebration. I don’t drink as a rule, but the lid’s off tonight.”
* * *
The man who lent his name to the dry law was, like its most famous enforcer, the son of two Norwegian immigrants. Congressman Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota was not a die-hard dry but firmly believed laws held the power to regulate morality. He put his faith to the test with a bill designed to give teeth to the Eighteenth Amendment—the National Prohibition Act. Passed over a presidential veto in 1919, it would forever be known by the name of its sponsor: the Volstead Act.
Most Prohibitionists gave little thought to actually enforcing the dry law. Getting it into the Constitution was all that mattered; certainly good, ordinary Americans would never willingly violate their nation’s sacred charter.
But Volstead knew his namesake would be dead on arrival without strong, effective enforcement. To that end, his Act set up the Prohibition Unit, empowering it to go after bootlegge
rs. Prohibition agents were exempted from civil service requirements, making them essentially political appointees. By giving themselves the power to handpick these agents, the drys hoped to make sure only true believers fought the war on liquor.
Politicians flooded the Unit with their faithful supporters, a crew of hacks, sycophants, and outright criminals who bore little love for the law they would supposedly enforce.
Soon after taking office, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the assistant attorney general in charge of Prohibition cases, discovered “that hundreds of prohibition agents had been appointed through political pull and were as devoid of honesty and integrity as the bootlegging fraternity.”
Those agents not actively colluding with gangsters were often hopelessly inept, unqualified to carry a badge, much less a gun. A more perfect engine of corruption than the Prohibition Unit could scarcely have been designed. Rather than protecting the Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act had virtually doomed it to failure.
Congress compounded the problem by drastically underfunding the Unit. Prohibition agents made less than garbage collectors, earning what amounted to a starvation wage in bigger cities like New York and Chicago.
And, as the late, selectively lamented Dean O’Banion once observed, “Gold badges look swell, but you can’t eat ’em.”
Yet agents making roughly $2,500 a year were seen wearing diamond rings and riding around in chauffeured cars. These upholders of law and order rarely raided a Chicago speakeasy without warning the owner.
“When the cops and the Prohibition agents come here after hours all the time to get drunk,” remarked one saloon keeper, “why, of course, they go along with us.”
Something akin to the later Internal Affairs Divisions of modern law enforcement agencies seemed called for. The task of policing these couple of thousand Prohibition agents fell to the Treasury Department’s Intelligence Unit, a team of thirty-nine men under the command of Elmer Lincoln Irey.
A soft-spoken man who began his career as a post office stenographer, Irey had taken the job thinking he would spend his time going after tax evaders. Instead, the Prohibition Unit all but drowned him in an endless tide of corruption and criminality. From January 1920 until February 1926, more than 750 Prohibition agents resigned under charges of extortion, insubordination, theft, and worse—a rate of more than two a week. Many more never got caught.
“As I think back upon Prohibition enforcement,” Irey wrote, “I am astonished that so many agents did remain honest. Certainly they, and the law they were enforcing, were held in high contempt across the land.”
One such honest agent—stationed in Chicago, of all places—was E. C. Yellowley, the Prohibition administrator for Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Yellowley had turned down an assignment in balmy California and requested a transfer to Chicago, just in time for winter, because he wanted to take the fight to the bootleggers. And he was absolutely incorruptible, having once refused a $250,000 bribe to protect an illicit still. With Eliot Ness’s brother-in-law Alexander Jamie as his second-in-command, Yellowley made a valiant effort to combat Chicago’s drinking problem.
But this “rip snortin’ enforcer” (as the Tribune dubbed him) proved no match for a city with thousands of speakeasies, a place where cops regularly hired themselves out to guard liquor shipments and bars operated in the county building and the Board of Education. This was Chicago, where the police chief offered booze to journalists, and a politician could declare, “I drink as much and as often as I can, in order to lessen the supply!” The Loop was littered with more gin joints than Yellowley had Prohibition agents in his entire district.
In the late spring of 1927, Special Agent Pat Roche of Elmer Irey’s Intelligence Unit tipped Jamie off to a huge South Side brewery at 70 East Thirty-First Street. Roche received the intelligence from a mechanic who worked nearby, but when Jamie sent agents to interview the witness, the men reported they didn’t buy his story. The next morning, the mechanic saw a huge beer truck rumble into the suspected brewery and called Jamie’s office to report it. Unknown to the informant, Jamie wasn’t in that day.
Within half an hour, two Prohibition agents arrived, questioned the mechanic, and tailed the beer truck when it drove off. Then a third man, also claiming to be a Prohibition agent, showed up to talk to the informant.
“You appear to be a pretty decent fellow,” the alleged agent said. “There are some big people connected with the operations carried on in that building, and there are a number of officials in the Prohibition office on the payroll . . . I will put you on for $75 a week, and all you will have to do will be to keep your mouth shut.”
The mechanic accepted a $20 down payment and reported the bribe to Roche, who immediately telephoned Yellowley and Jamie; they had never received the informant’s call. Yellowley asked the Intelligence Unit to carry on the investigation—his men weren’t up to the job.
Roche and another special agent, Clarence Converse, staked out the brewery and kept track of everyone who came and went. They also discovered that the Prohibition agents the mechanic had seen were really members of what the feds were still calling “the ‘Al Caponi’ alias ‘Al Brown’ gang.” The license plate numbers of cars parked outside confirmed a Capone operation.
Early on the morning of June 8, 1927, Roche and Converse led several Prohibition agents—among them Eliot Ness’s partner, Ted Kuhn—in a raid on the brewery. The place was empty; someone had tipped off the workers. But the agents did seize the brewing equipment.
Hoping to track down the phony Prohibition agents, the real ones continued to investigate and soon found an even larger brewery nearby, at 217 East Thirtieth Street. The agents knew the place would be alerted if they told the Prohibition office of their discovery. Instead, they would lie in wait.
After several weeks of surveillance, on August 5, the special agents noticed Capone cars prowling the neighborhood. A motorcycle cop and squad of police cars also swept the area, apparently making sure the coast was clear.
Then a ten-ton truck laden with beer barrels backed out of the brewery. Posing as corrupt Prohibition agents, Roche and Converse seized the truck. One bootlegger told them “the brewery was owned by Al Brown, that he was a good fellow, and that he would go and see a man right away who would fix everything with us.”
The special agents let him go, but when he hadn’t returned after forty-five minutes, they arrested the other three. Only then did they call the Prohibition office.
The impressive raid, the district’s largest in years, resulted in the seizure of a massive brewery capable, the feds reported, “of putting out at least 200 barrels of beer a day,” costing Capone a minimum of $100,000.
But Yellowley, in no uncertain terms, told the special agents he didn’t want the Intelligence Unit making Prohibition raids, as having the tax investigators do his job for him reflected badly on his office. Roche and Converse explained the bootleggers obviously had a connection in Yellowley’s office sharing any contemplated raids.
Yellowley wasn’t having any. The official who turned down fabulous gangster bribes was susceptible to pride, refusing to let the Intelligence Unit pursue the case. Roche and Converse reluctantly gave up their hunt for Capone’s mole in the Prohibition office.
By now, the drys had to admit the only way to fix the Prohibition Unit was to scrap the whole venal, blood-soaked mess and try again.
Congress had tried and failed to pass a bill replacing the Unit with a new Bureau of Prohibition. When that bill finally became law in March 1927, every Prohibition agent had to take a civil service test. Current agents, and anyone seeking to join their ranks, now faced stricter qualifications. The tests did weed out some of the worst offenders, while others managed to hang on through political influence. And the stringent new standards wound up disqualifying many competent agents.
Eliot Ness was among those nearly thrown out. To become or remain a Prohibition agent, applicants now had to be at least twenty-five years old. But when the new rules went
into effect that April, Ness was just turning twenty-four.
This man so noted in history for his honesty appears to have added a year to his age—claiming to be born in 1902, not 1903, in order to make the cut. This was easy enough to do; he had been born at home, leaving no official record of his birth. If Eliot Ness’s true age had been discovered, he’d have been barred from government service and possibly prosecuted. Of course, in the miasma of misconduct pervading the Prohibition Bureau, the infraction may have seemed relatively minor to Ness.
Almost certainly, Eliot’s brother-in-law encouraged him to lie about his age, and—as the second-highest ranking man in the office—could ensure he wouldn’t be caught.
Ness would have to keep up the fiction for the remainder of his federal service—the stakes growing higher as his career advanced. For the moment, though, the job remained a game Ness played gladly. More than anything, he loved going on raids. He savored the rush of kicking down a door and throwing himself over the threshold, never knowing what was on the other side. A desk job couldn’t compete, he said, because “there certainly is a thrill in pitting your wits against others’.”
This thrill-seeking, game-playing attitude helped give Eliot’s early raids the flavor of schoolboy pranks, or an elaborate round of cops and robbers, where one couldn’t always tell which was which.
In the fall of 1926, Ness broke up a bootleg ring supplying students of the University of Illinois. To obtain the necessary evidence, he went undercover, enrolling as a graduate student.
The following April, Ness and another agent, Frank L. White, staked out a roadhouse in Lyons, just west of Capone’s stronghold in Cicero. They saw a truck drive up to deliver two barrels of beer and quickly got on either side of the man behind the wheel.
“You can’t arrest me,” the driver declared. “I’m the chief of police.”
He was telling the truth. The agents apprehended him anyway.
The very next week, Ness and White made headlines yet again for a daring bit of undercover work. Disguised as “Kentucky colonels who owned racing stables,” they visited four gin joints in Aurora on race day, gathering evidence so Jamie could raid each place.
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 11