Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  Gus liked that Capone was a guy who kept his nose clean. Maybe he could do the same. After all, among the gamblers and bookies, Al was known as “a square shooter,” a man who always paid his debts, however exorbitant.

  “If he gives you his word,” the racetrack crowd said of Capone, “you can believe him.”

  And if you did right by Al, it was understood, he would go to the wall for you; but if you crossed him, well, that’s why he needed men like Gus Winkeler on call.

  In late May 1927, Antonio Torchio came by train from New York City to Chicago, drawn to town for a try at the Aiello gang’s open contract on Al Capone. Heading on foot from Union Station to Little Italy, taking in these impressive new surroundings, the Sicilian heard a click behind him followed by thunder as Capone enforcer Jack McGurn’s bullet traveled through his brain. Four more followed, but Antonio heard and felt nothing.

  A few days later, a big black sedan pulled up in front of 473 West Division—the Aiello family bakery. Working inside that evening were Joe Aiello’s brothers Dominick and Tony and three employees. When a tommy gun noisily chewed at the building, two drums’ worth of bullets flying, everybody hit the deck. Cakes were decorated with bullets, furniture went to pieces, and a player piano gave out not music but the crunch of splintering wood.

  Tony and a baker suffered serious wounds, surviving what was apparently intended as a warning. But Joe Aiello only stepped up his drive to kill Capone, this time enlisting a crony, Lawrence LaPresta, who on the first of June took two sawed-off shotgun barrels in the back courtesy of McGurn. Had Capone dispatched McGurn to preemptively take out any Aiello gunmen, or had the torpedo taken it upon himself to make a brutal point? Either way, in a month and a half, McGurn gunned down another seven. Brought in on one murder, McGurn walked away—insufficient evidence.

  With the press making noise about a new mob war, Capone gave McGurn a rest and brought his bought-and-paid-for cops in off the bench. A raid on the Rex Hotel on North Ashland nabbed five gunmen with rifles and ammunition who, after backroom interrogation, gave up their boss. Joe Aiello was arrested, but he remained unworried—his contacts would bail him out.

  With Aiello snug in his cell, several taxis rolled up outside the Detective Bureau. A dozen husky Capone gunmen piled out like combat soldiers from military vehicles. Nine armed thugs circled the block while Louis Campagna and two others stood out front, one hood transferring an automatic pistol from a shoulder holster to his side overcoat pocket. This caught police attention, and before any siege could be laid on by the gangsters, Campagna and the two hoods were rounded up, the rest scurrying off into the night.

  Short, heavyset, oval faced, with thinning hair and thick dark eyebrows, Campagna was another ex-Brooklynite who might have known Al in early young-gang years. “Little New York,” as Louis was known, was an ex–bank robber, ex-con, and successful Outfit enforcer, much valued by Capone.

  The trio of hoods was taken to the cellblock where Aiello watched in horror. Campagna whispered to Joe in Sicilian (a language distinct from Italian), “You’re dead, friend, you’re dead. You won’t get up to the end of the street still walking.”

  Aiello whimpered, “Give me fourteen days and I’ll sell my stores, house, and everything and quit Chicago for good. Can’t we settle this? Think of my wife and my baby.”

  “You started this,” Campagna snarled back. “We’ll end it. You’re as good as dead.”

  Aiello pleaded for police protection, but on release got escorted only as far as a cab. Within hours he had gathered his family and taken the train to New Jersey.

  Capone claimed he was happy to let Aiello settle his affairs and go, always glad to avoid bloodshed.

  “But I’m going to protect myself,” he said. “When someone strikes at me, I will strike back.”

  After ducking assassination attempts for six months, Al Capone was now viewed as a liability by Big Bill Thompson, of all people. The most corrupt mayor in Chicago’s history—an astonishing accomplishment in itself—was running for president.

  And even a buffoon like Thompson knew Capone, the top criminal in a city now world famous for crime, was attracting the wrong kind of national attention. The Aiello clashes only ramped that up. Now anybody affiliated with the Outfit faced police harassment and arrest, with Al himself constantly tailed by the law.

  Capone’s growing notoriety weighed heavily on his wife and son.

  “Can’t something be done to protect this innocent and inoffensive child?” Mae pleaded to the Herald and Examiner in mid-December. “Every day [Sonny] comes home crying. His schoolmates tease him and abuse him, all because of what has been said and printed about his father.”

  Soon Al was holding court from his bulletproofed desk chair, needing a shave but decked out in hunting togs—as worn by wealthy types who shopped at Marshall Field’s, not the average hunter in Wisconsin’s north woods.

  “I’m leaving for St. Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow,” he told reporters. “Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I’m sick of the job—it’s a thankless one and full of grief. I don’t know when I’ll get back, if ever. But it won’t be until after the holidays, anyway.”

  He’d given the best years of his life to the public, providing pleasures and showing them a good time.

  “And all I get is abuse,” he said, “the existence of a hunted man. I’m called a killer.”

  Then his tone grew sarcastic. “Well, tell the folks I’m going away now. I guess murder will stop. There won’t be any more booze. You won’t be able to find a crap game, even, let alone a roulette wheel or a faro game.”

  He claimed that 99 percent of Chicago’s adults drank and gambled. “I’ve tried to serve them decent liquor and square games. But I’m not appreciated.”

  Then he brightened. “Say, the coppers won’t have to lay all the gang murders on me now. Maybe they’ll find a new hero for the headlines. It would be a shame, wouldn’t it, if while I was away they would forget about me and find a new gangland chief?”

  While Capone’s complaints were as sincere as they were hypocritical, he was also doing Mayor Thompson a favor and the police, too, who could brag about driving Capone out of Chicago. Of course, with Frank Nitto running things, bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution would experience no shortage of customers.

  The trip to St. Petersburg—where Johnny Torrio had a place—never happened. Instead, Al, his family, and two bodyguards journeyed to Los Angeles. On their two-day stay, the Capones never left the Biltmore Hotel grounds, before getting cast out by the L.A. police and put on the train back to Chicago. Los Angeles was mounting its own tough-on-crime campaign.

  Capone whined to the Los Angeles Times, “Why should everybody in this town pick on me? I wasn’t going to do anything here. . . . We are tourists and I thought that you folks liked tourists.”

  Back in Chicago, the police were talking tough again.

  “Despite the cold wave,” the chief told the Herald and Examiner, “my men are prepared to make Chicago too hot for Capone.”

  Even the Metropole, Capone’s headquarters, claimed his rooms had all been rented out.

  “It’s pretty tough,” Al told a reporter, “when a citizen with an unblemished record must be hounded from his home by the very policemen whose salaries are paid, at least in part, from the victim’s pocket. You might say that every policeman in Chicago gets some of his bread and butter from the taxes I pay. And yet they want to throw me in jail—for nothing.”

  This had to sting Capone, with so many police on his payroll, although with the Thompson crowd unfriendly now, Outfit graft was said to be down. Why pay to be harassed?

  Then Capone announced: “I’m going back to Chicago. Nobody can stop me. I have a right to be there. I have property there. I have a family there. They can’t keep me out of Chicago unless they shoot me through the head.”

  His mood turned combative. “I’ve never done anything wrong,” he said. “Nobody can prove that
I ever did anything wrong. They arrest me, they search me, they lock me up, they charge me with all the crimes there are, and when they get me into court I find that the only charge they dare to book against me is disorderly conduct.”

  Nonetheless, Capone had arranged for his brother Ralph to collect him in Joliet to bypass any problems at the Chicago station.

  But when Ralph arrived an hour early, with four men carrying pistols and shotguns, police placed all five under arrest; and their presence immediately told local authorities Ralph’s brother would soon arrive.

  When Al got off the train in Joliet, he walked right “into the arms of the entire police force of that city,” the Herald and Examiner reported. The local police chief and a captain stood waiting to greet him.

  “You’re Al Capone,” the captain said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Capone replied.

  The chief personally frisked Capone, finding nearly $3,000 in cash on his person as well as two guns.

  “You may want some ammunition, too,” Capone said, as he handed over a few excess magazines.

  Police confiscated seven other guns and more hefty bankrolls from Capone’s bodyguards, then locked the gangsters up at the local jail. Capone took offense at having to share his cell with two strangers. According to the Tribune, they “made too much noise and were too long unshaven to suit the fastidious taste of Capone.”

  Al paid both of his cellmates’ fines—for a grand total of $23—so he could enjoy some privacy.

  While he waited for his lawyers to post bail, Capone remained magnanimous.

  “When I come back for my trial,” he told the Tribune, “I am going to make a good big donation to the worthy charities of Joliet. I’m not mad at anybody.”

  But his resolve remained firm. As he prepared to leave Joliet, a reporter asked him for a forwarding address.

  “I am going to my home in Chicago,” Capone declared.

  When he finally arrived at South Prairie Avenue, after a celebratory stopover in Chicago Heights, harassment at the hands of police continued. The police chief stationed twelve detectives around the house, with orders to nab Capone if he walked out, or any other gangsters should they walk in.

  “I wouldn’t invade his mother’s home to arrest him,” said the chief of detectives. “Anyway, we haven’t any specific charge against him. But—if he is seen on the street, my men have instructions to pick him up and take him to jail.”

  And so Al Capone hunkered down to spend Christmas on Prairie Avenue, surrounded by police. Business interests, he told the press, would keep him in the city for the foreseeable future.

  “Besides,” he added, “I like Chicago. It’s my home and I pay taxes here. I’m not a gangster, I’m a real estate broker.”

  Meanwhile, Big Bill Thompson’s cross-country travels had gone almost as poorly as Capone’s. As with Al, Big Bill found few outside his city to be on his side, his “America First” message bombing as badly as his birdcage humor. He slunk back to Chicago, his presidential candidacy a bust.

  On December 22, 1927, Capone went back to Joliet and pleaded guilty for carrying a concealed weapon. He paid in cash the fines and court costs for himself and his men, casually peeling a thousand-dollar bill and six hundreds off his ever-present roll. The clerk offered him $10.20 in change, but Capone refused it.

  “Please take that down to the Salvation Army Santa Claus on the corner,” he said. “Tell him it’s a Christmas present from Al Capone.”

  Ness (behind wheel) with unidentified agents, late 1920s.

  (Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection)

  Eight

  Spring–Summer 1928

  On March 29, 1928, twelve men invaded a speakeasy on South State Street, carrying “shotguns, pistols, rifles, sledge hammers and at least one machine gun,” according to the Tribune, bursting in through three separate entrances, demanding patrons “stick ’em up!”

  The apparent robbery sent thirty-five-year-old customer William Beatty fleeing with his wife, but before the couple could make it to the street, one invader opened fire. The bullet caught Beatty in the back, cutting through his chest and shattering his pocket watch. Other raiders dragged the wounded man inside, forcing him to stand with his arms up, a shotgun buried in his stomach, while they proceeded to harass his wife.

  These men were not gangsters but a special squad of Prohibition agents sent from Washington at Chicago prosecutor George E. Q. Johnson’s request. Johnson had gone to D.C. the previous fall to ask for fresh investigators—outsiders, men untouched by mob influence, who could expose the corrupt ties between bootleggers and Prohibition agents.

  The Bureau had sent him chubby-faced George Elias Golding, thirty-eight, who despite his owlish eyeglasses, considered himself a “hardboiled” New York copper. After Beatty’s shooting, the press took to wryly nicknaming the federal man just that: “Hardboiled” Golding.

  Golding’s men were special agents, a new group independent of the regular Prohibition force. Rather than going after small, local bootleggers, they tackled conspiracy cases against large-scale violators, specifically gangsters like Capone.

  Ideally, these were investigators suited to building cases carefully and quietly over many months, able to weave fine strands of evidence into a tapestry that wouldn’t tear in court. Unfortunately for Johnson and the city of Chicago, Hardboiled Golding was no such investigator.

  Formerly of Elmer Irey’s Intelligence Unit, Golding—who considered himself “a fighter”—loved to throw his weight around. But he also took offense easily and refused any duty that affronted his sense of virility. In Cleveland, he once arrested a police officer who stopped him for jaywalking.

  Golding pleaded guilty to his reputation as impulsive when requesting a Prohibition Bureau job, but insisted, “The fact cannot be denied that I obtained results.”

  Results, yes—convictions, no. His habit of failing to show up in court when his cases went to trial guaranteed they would fall apart and exasperate his colleagues.

  “His raids are spectacular and his prosecutions fall into a vacuum,” wrote a Rhode Island newspaper after Hardboiled blew into town, labeling his record “a striking illustration of prohibition as a farce.”

  Hardboiled arrived in Chicago in January 1928 and managed to keep himself and his men undercover for over two months. The squad also did its best to keep a lid on the Beatty shooting, placing a guard on their victim’s hospital room and barring any press or police. But Beatty turned out to be a municipal court bailiff, and the state charged his shooter with assault to commit murder. The agent holed up in the Federal Building for days, like a gangster gone to ground.

  Golding refused to cooperate with police, claiming Beatty had fired first, and that his men “had to shoot back in self-defense.” The special agents conveniently found a revolver across the street, which they declared belonged to the bailiff, a gun that had not been fired recently.

  The matter would be settled in-house, Golding insisted, saying, “I don’t care what the police want to know.”

  “If there is any law in the United States, these quick-trigger men from Washington don’t represent it,” the police commissioner told the press. “They may be able to get away with their shootings in other cities and tell the police to go to hell, but they’re in Chicago now.”

  Of course, plenty of gangsters had gotten away with worse in Chicago, but the city held Prohibition agents to a much higher standard.

  Golding remained on the attack. Now that his men were in the open, they descended on Chicago, smashing up speakeasies and stills, brandishing pistols and shotguns, and vaulting over furniture like they were bank robbers. Such legal niceties as obtaining search warrants were of little interest, their cases in court invariably proving flimsy. But convictions seemed beside the point—this was harassment.

  In their drive to dry up the city, Golding and his men took on the thuggish tactics of the gangsters they sought to destroy. Chicago had flaunted federal law for too long
, and these special agents intended to beat it into submission.

  As an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Prohibition agent, Eliot Ness remained on the sidelines as Golding tormented the city. But as tensions grew between local officials and the federal government, Ness suddenly found himself drafted onto the controversial squad.

  Once again, he had Alexander Jamie to thank for his promotion. When the Civil Service Commission deemed Jamie too inexperienced to keep his post as assistant Prohibition administrator, Eliot’s brother-in-law typically turned to his network of contacts to lobby for an exemption. His most important ally was George Johnson, who saw Jamie as a key asset in the effort to clean up Chicago.

  “I have been very much impressed by [Jamie’s] character and integrity in my official dealings with him,” Prosecutor Johnson wrote Prohibition Commissioner James Doran that March.

  To accommodate Johnson, Doran transferred Jamie to the special agent squad, which kept him on the force in a position of influence while eliminating any civil service issues. Visiting Chicago that spring, Doran asked Golding to bring Jamie onboard, which meant also taking on Ness.

  Golding was glad for the additional manpower—the Chicago Division could use more special agents. Jamie joined the unit in May 1928, Eliot following in June.

  That same month, twenty-one-year-old Edna Stahle reported for duty as Golding’s new stenographer. A petite brunette with deep blue eyes and a teardrop face, Edna had worked for the Prohibition Bureau since 1925, mostly in its Legal Division. Somewhere along the way, she crossed paths with Ness, likely recognizing him from her old neighborhood, where they’d gone to the same elementary school.

  Both were serious, self-conscious, and somewhat withdrawn. Even more than the solitary Ness, Edna liked to wall herself off from the outside world. She would shut her eyes as she rode around on an old bicycle, enjoying the wind whipping through her hair.

  She felt drawn to the dashing young agent, so courageous and effortlessly charming. And about the time Ness joined Golding’s unit, she requested her own transfer there. Perhaps she wanted to be closer to him.