The Capone forces retaliated by bombing the home of Judge John A. Swanson—the Deneen-backed rival to State’s Attorney Robert Crowe—and Deneen’s home itself. These bombings followed the funeral of Esposito, who—after ignoring Capone’s death threats—got himself peppered with bullets and buckshot. The Chicago police stayed mostly on the sidelines, though clergymen across the city spent the weekend before the election urging their congregations to vote for reform.
“Ours is a government of bombs and bums, of grafters and corrupt politicians,” declared one rabbi. A United States senator from Nebraska publicly suggested deploying the Marines in Chicago “to protect American property.”
The violence reached its peak on Election Day, with the murder of one reform candidate—an African-American attorney who had served his country in the Great War, shotgunned at least a dozen times. But the voters, twice the anticipated turnout, sided with Deneen’s slate, all three of his candidates winning. And the terrible publicity generated by the Pineapple Primary effectively crippled the Thompson machine, leaving Big Bill an emotional wreck.
“He drank constantly,” reported his biographers, “gabbled hysterically and spoke irrationally, stared through rheumy eyes at men he had known for years and called them by wrong names, raged against enemies who had long ago faded out of politics.” Nevertheless, Thompson refused to resign—as he’d threatened to do if his allies lost—and settled in for his remaining three years in office.
The election of reformer Swanson as state’s attorney over Crowe indicated an unexpected—even miraculous—shift in public opinion against crime and corruption.
“The political revolution in Chicago came as a surprise to most political observers,” wrote the New York Times. “They had thought the city was disgraced, but not ashamed.”
Yet even this upset victory could do little to rehabilitate Chicago’s image. Newspapers carried the results as far away as Paris, where Le Journal remarked that “the good city of Chicago, which . . . enjoys a world-wide reputation as the great center of the meat industry, has developed a new form of slaughter, heretofore limited to the stockyards. It is human lives in which the world’s sausage metropolis is now specializing.”
That slaughter would only grow more savage, more coldly efficient, thanks to someone Capone added to his staff around this time: Fred Burke, a strong, tall, former farm boy from Kansas. Born Thomas Camp, Burke raised hell with the likes of fellow Egan’s Rat Gus Winkeler, joining him in the snatch racket as well as pulling robberies and killing on contract. After a bloody run-in with the Purple Gang in Detroit, Burke at Winkeler’s suggestion signed on with Capone.
Burke joined the assassination squad Capone dubbed his “American Boys”—Italians tended to refer to anyone not from the Old Country as “Americans”—who as non-Chicagoans were unknown to Al’s enemies. The squad also included ex-Rats Bob Carey and Ray Nugent, Winkeler’s former partners in the snatch racket, and Fred Goetz, a college-educated, good-looking lunatic who was not the pride of his respectable family.
This group came together at a convenient time, as Capone faced a tough, even heartbreaking situation. For roughly a year, shipments from his boyhood mentor Frankie Yale had been hijacked left and right. While Canadian smuggling was an Outfit mainstay, the East Coast was the gateway to high-quality overseas liquor. But a Brooklyn friend of Capone’s warned him Yale was stealing his own booze en route to Chicago. Soon after, that friend fell victim to a drive-by shooting.
This obvious treachery enraged Capone, his fury overwhelming whatever regard he had left for Yale. And the Brooklyn mobster’s list of sins didn’t end there. As head of the national Unione Siciliana, Yale proved suspiciously uncooperative in helping Capone gain control—even backing Al’s mortal enemy, Joe Aiello. A Sicilian torpedo from Yale’s New York had been an early entry in the Aiello sweepstakes to kill Capone. And what about the fleeing Aiellos settling in nearby New Jersey? Rumor had it Yale welcomed Joe to New York, where he could plot his takeover of the Chicago Unione.
Capone’s American Boys were as unknown in New York as in Chicago, making them the perfect weapon. Winkeler, Goetz, and Burke were dispatched with the regrettable task of killing Al’s first real boss, his onetime role model, Frankie Yale.
Louis “Little New York” Campagna escorted them around Brooklyn’s Italian area. The boys had bought a car in Tennessee, while Capone pal Parker Henderson purchased several handguns and stowed them in a Ponce de Leon hotel room for pick-up.
On July 1, Yale received a phone call at his Brooklyn speakeasy, the Sunrise Café—his wife was sick and needed him at home. He headed there in his Capone-style bulletproofed Lincoln, soon realizing he was being followed. He made no effort to evade the tail until he made a sharp turn onto residential Forty-Fourth, where his pursuers let loose their firepower in what was now a high-speed chase.
The Lincoln’s windows were rolled down, so the bulletproofed vehicle was scant help for Yale. He swerved onto the sidewalk, kids and moms fleeing before the Lincoln crashed against the front steps of a home. The pursuing car pulled up and Burke piled out. Capone’s dead mentor, trapped behind the wheel, was beyond objecting as the .45 drilled bullets into him.
Everything about the killing seemed to signal Chicago. Police discovered the hitmen’s car a few blocks away and found it laden with firepower—a shotgun, two pistols, and a tommy gun. This made Yale the Thompson’s first New York casualty, and those weapons weren’t called “Chicago typewriters” for nothing. If that weren’t enough, the anonymous murderers had unintentionally further signed their work by making several long-distance calls home to their women. Capone, incensed by this lapse in judgment, kept Burke, Goetz, and Winkeler on call nevertheless.
A month or so after suffering the loss of his mentor, Capone received a visit from a prominent community leader, attorney Frank Loesch. Balding, beetle browed, with an overripe banana of a nose, the seventy-seven-year-old Loesch had seen Chicago at its best and its worst. He’d been in love with the city since 1871 when he saw it consumed by fire. Ever since, he’d made himself Chicago’s protector, a Christian warrior fighting the forces of evil; he admired the way Mussolini had chased the Mafia out of Italy, desperately wanting something similar for Chicago.
Loesch had been a member of the Board of Education, vice president of the Historical Society, and president of the prestigious Union League Club. He was also president of the Chicago Crime Commission, formed in 1919 by the Chamber of Commerce to decrease crime, advance policing, and inform the citizenry.
The business community was hoping to mount a world’s fair, its success dependent upon attracting a million visitors to Chicago. But international headlines were depicting Chicago as the crime capital of the world, and the Pineapple Primary with its murder and bombings had added a new dimension to Chicago’s image of anarchy. Instead of a magnet for commerce and tourism, Chicago had become, in the words of one Arkansas newspaper, “America’s worst advertisement.”
Too often people were frankly afraid to visit the now infamous city—and those who did often came to see Al Capone. At hotels from Boston to Richmond and everywhere in between, the clerks all greeted one Chicago journalist with some variation of the same phrase: “Well, I see you got out alive!”
Even across the Atlantic, people knew to steer clear. One young businessman traveling through Italy and France that spring “heard evil remarks about Chicago” wherever he went.
“Judging from the reports in the papers,” he told the Tribune, “a European who had never visited our city would think every Chicagoan took his life in his hands when he stepped out of doors.”
Repairing such a vile reputation would not be easy, but Loesch took it upon himself to do the impossible—even if it meant seeking help from the man most responsible for tarnishing the city’s image.
Capone had recently shifted from the Hotel Metropole to more expansive offices at the nearby Lexington Hotel. The gray-haired, distinguished Loesch strode chin up through
the lobby, past huddling hoods, hard young men with hard old eyes, watching, watching. More hoodlums were waiting on the fourth floor as he made his way to suite 430, crossed the parquet floor with its inlaid “A.C.,” and entered the executive office where he would ask a favor of the man he wanted so badly to depose.
Half a dozen more guards were positioned around the room. Loesch noted three oil portraits on the side wall over a fireplace—Washington, Thompson, Lincoln—then sat at the massive mahogany desk across from the equally massive Capone. The gangster’s powerful body had a swollen look, no doubt the effect of rich meals and late-night partygoing.
Gracious, hospitable, Capone asked his guest if he’d like a drink, which was declined. Loesch quickly got down to business, expressing his concern about the upcoming election for state’s attorney and various important city and county offices. He asked Capone how long he expected to beat the law and the gun. Capone replied that while he would always beat the law, he expected his demise some day at the business end of a shotgun.
“But they’ll only get me when I’m not looking,” he added.
“I am here to ask you to help in one thing,” Loesch said. “I want you to keep your damned Italian hoodlums out of the election this coming fall.”
Capone didn’t reply at first, then said, “I’ll help.”
The gangster went on: “I’ll have the cops send over the squad cars the night before election and jug all the hoodlums and keep ’em in the cooler until the polls close.”
“I can tell you it was a grateful handshake that I gave Mr. Capone at this proposition,” Loesch said, adding, “It turned out to be the squarest and most successful Election Day that Chicago ever had in forty years. There was not one complaint, not one election fraud, not one threat of trouble all day.”
But granting the Crime Commission this wish cost Capone nothing. His slate of candidates had all lost in the primary. He might not even have intended to try to influence the election with so little at stake.
Chicago’s most respected attorney marched out past well-tailored hoodlums whose shoulder-holstered weapons barely bulged. Such young men might have been soldiers in the legion of the unemployed, or in that army of menials manning mops or hauling crates. The general they served had brought them up from the bottom, even if they were nowhere near the top. The twenty-nine-year-old captain of industry on the fourth floor ran the city, not gray-haired old men like Loesch.
Amid all the plotting and attempts on his life, Al Capone sought safety and relaxation on the fairway. Since the mid-1920s, he’d made regular visits to a golf course in Burnham, a southern suburb on the Indiana border. There he would play a few holes with the likes of Jack Guzik, Jack McGurn, and Johnny Patton, Burnham’s “boy mayor,” a longtime Outfit stooge.
Capone loved the game, and stunk at it.
“He could drive the ball half a mile,” recalled his caddy, “but he always hooked it, and he couldn’t putt for beans.”
The gangsters gambled on every green, black holes consuming more squandered money.
Capone grew to like his caddy, a young boy from Burnham who endeared himself to the ganglord by cheating for him without being asked. Whenever Capone lost his ball, as he did frequently, the caddy would produce another and drop it on the ground without being seen.
“Nobody had ever treated me or my family with such kindness,” the caddy recalled. Only later did he learn Capone was romancing his teenaged sister, even expressing a dubious willingness to leave Mae for her.
Still, the caddy’s admiration for Capone remained strong. Once he asked to join the Outfit “and carry a gun like the other guys,” but Capone told him to forget it.
“You might get hurt,” he said. “Most guys in my line of business do. So stay just like you are, OK?”
Capone proved himself right one Saturday morning in September 1928, after playing a round of golf with Mayor Patton. Though Capone didn’t always carry a gun, he had one on him now: a .45-caliber pistol tucked in his pants pocket. As he and Patton got into a car, the gun went off into Capone’s groin.
“The bullet plowed down through the fleshy part of his right leg,” wrote the Tribune, “narrowly missed the abdomen and then imbedded [sic] itself in his left leg.” Somewhere along the way, it tore a hole in Capone’s scrotum.
Patton rushed the wounded gangster to a nearby hospital, where Capone checked in under an assumed name. His bodyguards, Louis Campagna among them, soon filled four rooms around Capone’s while their boss underwent treatment.
The Trib put the story on the front page, though the exact nature of Capone’s injury remained hush-hush. Despite the location of the wound and the large caliber of the weapon, Capone apparently managed to avoid any long-term damage, back on his feet within a week, dancing for a reporter just to prove he was all right.
Perhaps even more humiliating than the public embarrassment had been Mae’s visits to his hospital room, when she’d berated him for his carelessness—and, perhaps, for the teenage mistress she knew he’d taken up with in Burnham.
Plenty of gangsters had tried and failed to shoot Capone, only to have the gangster do it himself, in the most undignified way possible. Yet Capone’s ability to brush off such an intimate injury only added to the aura of invincibility surrounding him in the late 1920s.
This would be the only time that a bullet ever pierced his skin—proof, if any were needed, of who his worst enemy really was.
Prohibition Bureau raid on Chicago Heights, January 6, 1929.
(Authors’ Collection)
Lorenzo Juliano’s body as it was found on June 20, 1930.
(Authors’ Collection)
Ten
August 1928–January 1929
“Hardboiled” George Golding, special agent in charge, continued to wield his men like Cossacks. When Golding wanted a car, he simply confiscated one, which he outfitted with an ear-splitting siren to speed around the Loop, daring the cops to try to stop him.
Alexander Jamie watched Golding’s antics with growing concern. Jamie had gone from a leader in Chicago’s Prohibition office to a lackey in Golding’s “reign of terror,” as the press called it. If that weren’t enough, he’d taken a significant pay cut. Jamie considered himself an administrator, not a field agent, his raiding days supposedly behind him. Surely, he thought, he could do a better job than the cowboy in charge.
The assistant commissioner of Prohibition, Alf Oftedal, sympathized with Jamie’s frustrations and urged Golding to treat this experienced investigating officer with respect.
“If you deal with him tactfully,” Oftedal wrote to Golding, “I believe he will come to realize . . . that [he] is not in fact demoted, but is now in a position to conduct investigational work that is really worthwhile.”
But Golding wanted men ready to wield axes, not push paper. To him, Jamie was “lazy” and a “sort of Bolsheviki,” more interested in politics than his job.
As a feud brewed between the two men, Jamie’s grumbling grew louder. Golding’s tactics were ineffective, he said—harassing petty offenders, not major bootleggers. Jamie contemplated pulling strings to get Golding’s job, and when Hardboiled found out, he banished Jamie to St. Paul.
But Jamie kept angling for leadership back in Chicago. And if he couldn’t unseat Golding, maybe he could topple his old boss, Prohibition Administrator E. C. Yellowley.
Yellowley had been one of Jamie’s staunchest backers, choosing him for the post of assistant administrator back in 1926, describing him as “a very fine fellow . . . absolutely loyal.”
But shortly after joining the special agent squad, Jamie had closed a case involving an industrial alcohol plant that diverted its product into bootlegging. Its owner kept a “little black book” of everyone he bribed, including thirty Prohibition agents. The entire business seemed to depend on systemic corruption within Yellowley’s office.
When that information made the papers, Yellowley accused Jamie of leaking it. Jamie vigorously denied doing any such
thing, and his superiors in Washington took him at his word. Although Yellowley managed to hold on to his job, he never forgave Jamie.
On August 21, Golding’s men burst into an office in the City Hall Square Building, in the heart of the Loop. They were looking for the distribution center of a liquor smuggling ring, but hadn’t bothered getting a warrant. A visitor to the office, Merle Adams, thirty-six, punched the nearest fed and dashed out, making a break for the stairway.
He didn’t get far. Arthur Franklin, twenty-six, on the job for about three months, ran after Adams, gun in hand. Witnesses said the agent appeared “in a frenzy.” He opened fire just as Adams reached the top of the stairs. Adams crumpled and tumbled down with a bullet hole through his torso “the size of a dime” on entry and an exit wound “the size of a lemon.” Adams survived only because the slug had glanced off a rib, missing major organs.
Office workers dove for cover and clambered under their desks. Franklin ran back into the office, screaming, “I got him! I got him!” Another agent went to check, found the wounded man still moving, blackjacked him a few times, then dragged him back into the office. When police showed up, the special agents told them to stay away. They were even rougher with the press.
“Get out,” they ordered, threatening to smash cameras and faces alike. Federal officials claimed the shooting was justified—Adams had resisted arrest, assaulted an officer, and given authorities a false name. The Tribune identified him as “a grape juice salesman”—code for bootlegger.
But when police examined Adams’s wounds, they found he’d been shot with a so-called dumdum—a lethal round with a crease carved in its nose, to ensure the bullet would expand and break apart inside the body.
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 16