“The Beast uses his muscle men to peddle rotgut alcohol and green beer,” Moran said. “I’m a legitimate salesman of good beer and pure whiskey. He trusts nobody and suspects everybody. He always has guards. I travel around with a couple of pals. The Behemoth can’t sleep nights. If you ask me, he’s on the dope. Me, I don’t even need an aspirin.”
Capone never took kindly to criticism, though Moran’s jibes bothered him less than the North Sider’s constant efforts to undermine him. Moran had recently offered aid and comfort to Capone’s chief rival, Joe Aiello.
“Any enemy of the Beast,” Bugs would say, “is my pal.”
As long as Moran drew breath, Capone had reason to fear, his goal of consolidating Chicago’s underworld remaining just out of reach.
In the fall of 1928, Al gathered his closest associates at a lodge in northern Wisconsin, not far from the lakeside Capone compound near Couderay. They spent a couple of weeks enjoying a nice vacation and debating how to kill Bugs Moran. Attending were Gus Winkeler, Fred Goetz, Louis Campagna, and Fred Burke, several of whom numbered among their host’s American Boys, the hit squad used sparingly on key projects like the murder of Frankie Yale. Their relative anonymity was critical as the North Siders knew many of Capone’s inner circle—Moran’s man Pete Gusenberg, for example, had made several attempts on Jack McGurn.
They decided upon a carefully staged assassination, to be carried out by Burke, Winkeler, Goetz, Bob Carey, and Ray Nugent. As with the Hymie Weiss murder, they planned to employ lookouts to keep watch on Moran’s frequent meeting place, the S-M-C Cartage Company at 2122 North Clark Street, to chart his daily routine; but unlike the hit on Weiss, the lookouts would not do the shooting. The assassins would be “police”—Fred Burke had used a fake cop routine before in other crimes. Moran, and anybody unlucky enough to be with him, would be taken out not on the street but inside the garage, as Capone never wanted innocent bystanders hurt.
Back in Chicago, Capone assigned the job to Frank Nitto, who had Frankie Rio acquire the cars, weapons, and police uniforms. Nitto’s careful staging of the Hymie Weiss hit, which one observer termed “gangland’s most perfect execution,” helped secure him a trusted place in the organization, though his rise rubbed some gang members the wrong way.
One Capone associate felt Nitto “always acted kind of snotty, like he was in charge.” Another complained, “What had [Nitto] ever done, except push a few punks around and shoot some guys in the back?” Yet Nitto’s talent for taking care of dirty work while keeping his own hands spotlessly clean would soon earn him the status of the Outfit’s second in command, as well as an imposing and durable nickname: “the Enforcer.”
Gus Winkeler’s wife, Georgette, described the effect of seeing the police uniforms before she knew how they’d be used.
“Goetz enjoyed his costume,” she recalled, “and strutted about the house imitating a policeman making a raid. He lowered his voice, talked out of one corner of his mouth, and impersonated several officers he knew, much to Gus’s amusement.”
Later, when Georgette learned just how Gus and his associates had employed those uniforms, she threw a newspaper in her husband’s face and ran to her bedroom, “too sick with horror to shed tears.”
Legend has it that Capone’s men laid a trap for Moran by offering him the chance to buy a hijacked shipment of whiskey. But the men in the garage that morning included top Moran associates, not hired hands there to unload a liquor truck, hardly dressed for manual labor.
Moran’s son, seven years old at the time, said his father received a phone call from an informant shortly before the massacre. Perhaps the Outfit passed along a tip about a traitor in the North Side gang or some other threat to the organization, alarming Moran enough to call a meeting of his “board of directors” for Thursday, February 14, 1929.
Moran showed up late, delayed by a haircut that took longer than expected. The six men he was planning to meet—along with their optician pal—arrived well ahead. And unfortunately for Capone, one bore a striking resemblance to Moran himself. The lookouts, believing they’d seen their target enter the garage, gave the signal. When Moran approached, he saw what he thought were policemen exiting the garage, their guns trained on two guys whose faces he did not know. Moran hadn’t heard the gunfire, but he had sense enough to slip into a nearby building.
The assassins’ careful planning had worked too well—the ruse they’d devised to trick Moran actually wound up saving his life.
On the typically sunshiny Miami morning of February 14, 1929, Al Capone arrived at the Dade County Courthouse, fresh from a brief Bahamian vacation and far from the blustery thirteen-degree Chicago weather. Outfit matters were in the good hands of Frank Nitto, Jack Guzik, brother Ralph, and various handpicked others. Al and Mae were looking forward to celebrating Valentine’s Day in their newly redecorated home.
That would come after Al dealt with the latest harassment by Florida authorities, calling on Dade County Solicitor Robert Taylor; also on hand was New York Assistant D.A. Louis Goldstein, looking into the death of Frankie Yale. The latter investigation went nowhere, since Capone hadn’t even been in New York at the time.
More evidence had come to light linking Chicago and/or Miami to the Yale murder. The discarded tommy gun had come from a Chicago gun dealer, with the handguns tracked to Capone’s young Miami friend, Parker Henderson; neither professed to know how the weapons got into the hands of killers in New York. Henderson had just stored the guns in a hotel room, but they had vanished when he came back for them.
Anyway, Frankie Yale was one of Al’s oldest friends—Capone wanting anything but the best for him was nonsense.
Asked about his business, Capone said, “I am a gambler. I play the racehorses.”
“Besides gambling, you’re a bootlegger, aren’t you?”
“No, I never was a bootlegger.”
He denied using the name Al Brown, as well as A. Costa, whose money orders Parker Henderson had gathered.
“You didn’t receive any money by Western Union from Chicago?”
Capone couldn’t recall, but as for funds he’d received while in Florida, “all of it comes from Chicago.” Gambling income.
After the meeting, a Miami Herald reporter asked when Capone planned to return to Chicago.
“I am not going back,” Al said, “as I am having a pretty good time in Miami.”
Capone may not have known the Valentine’s Day hit had already gone down, or that Moran had skipped the party. No calls from Chicago had gone out or come in during recent days, to avoid any phone traces. Rumor had it one of the participants, Ray “Crane Neck” Nugent, went to Palm Island to personally deliver the bad news.
“Capone,” reported one federal agent, “was very much incensed . . . presumably because [Nugent’s] going there might tend to connect Capone with the killing.”
Nugent would eventually be arrested in Florida for a crime committed up north. After Capone paid his $10,000 bond, Crane Neck disappeared. According to federal sources, the Outfit left his body in the Everglades—perhaps for supplying his saloon with beer from their competitors. Certainly Nugent’s conduct after the massacre proved this American Boy couldn’t be trusted to follow orders.
Finding out his men had missed their target seems not to have soured Capone’s mood, at least publicly. On Saturday evening, two days after the killings, he threw another lavish party at his Palm Island estate. Playing host to roughly eighty people, mostly strangers, “Capone entertained with the prodigality of a Medici and the wistful pride of a small boy,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Yet behind the gangster’s frequent smiles, the reporter noticed “something harried about him.” Capone seemed skittish as a deer, rarely sitting, and “anxious only to please those who accepted his hospitality.” As always, he betrayed a need to surround himself with people.
“ ‘Scarface’ led the way around his place with pride,” wrote the Times. “His guests agreed that he had done th
ings in a big way.”
For Bugs Moran, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre brought back a very familiar kind of pain. He’d been with Hymie Weiss when they learned of Dean O’Banion’s death; Weiss had keeled over at the news, so shocked he could barely speak, mumbling only, “Everything I have is gone.” Now Weiss was dead, and Schemer Drucci, too, with seven bloody corpses stretched out on the floor of 2122 North Clark Street.
When Moran learned just how close he’d come to ending up alongside his slaughtered men, his grief got the better of him. He escaped to the suburbs and checked into a hospital, where he hid out for days, laid up with shock. Once he felt well enough to leave, he fled the country—first to Canada, then France.
The same day Moran left the hospital, Capone gave a jovial interview to the United Press, joking about the fearsome reputation that sent Moran scurrying to safety.
“If I were as bad as I’m reported to be,” Capone said, “I’d be afraid of myself.”
The gangster chuckled at that, but then grew serious, his resentment bleeding through.
“I think it is absolutely unfair to tie me up with every gun explosion in Chicago,” he said.
Moran had done just that; newspapers were already pinning the massacre on the “Capone mob.” Speaking to the Herald and Examiner by long-distance telephone, Capone denied the charge without losing his sense of humor.
“That fellow Moran isn’t called Bugs for nothing,” Capone said. “He’s crazy if he thinks I had anything to do with that killing. I don’t know anything about that shooting, and I don’t care.”
But he certainly reaped the benefits. Beyond causing the deaths of a garage mechanic and an optician, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre had sapped the strength of the North Side gang—eliminating three deadly gunmen, a key union racketeer, and a dog-track rival of Capone’s. Moran’s mob would never be the same, and more reasonable North Side gangsters soon would help Capone increase his scope of operations.
Yet even though the massacre had succeeded despite its own failures, Capone remained in a precarious position. By knocking Bugs Moran out of the arena, Capone became the city’s reigning gangster—and also its greatest shame. Chicago’s editorial pages, always offended by the local lawlessness, went into hysterics, crying out for a civic savior.
“The mass murder on the North Side has sounded an alarm like a call to arms,” wrote the Herald and Examiner. “Every true Chicagoan should rise to the defense of this city against disloyal traitors in the public service who have betrayed it.”
The Tribune reflected on the absurdity of the city’s inability to solve even a single gang murder. The motive for each crime seemed obvious, yet the proof remained elusive—at least to the police.
“The Moriarties of detective fiction are plenty and realistic,” observed the Tribune. “Sherlock Holmes remains imbedded in legend.”
With city government paralyzed by corruption and apathy, the Tribune wanted to know if anyone would—or even could—stand up to the gangsters who seemed so untouchable.
“The butchering of seven men by open daylight attack,” they wrote, “raises the test question for Chicago: Is it helpless?”
When the massacre first hit the papers, Capone was not yet a focus of inquiry. Some thought real police had done the murders. Other possibilities were a hijacking gone awry or vengeance for the murders of various Unione Siciliana presidents.
With neighborhood help, the police quickly found the lookout posts. A hunt was launched for Jack McGurn, who was holed up in a downtown hotel room not far from a suite rented by the task force investigating the slaughter.
McGurn was in the midst of a protracted Valentine’s Day frolic with his latest sweetie, Louise Rolfe. He might have been a Hollywood actor with his slicked-down hair and slim build; his blonde lover had already hit Hollywood and missed, before turning showgirl to provide for her daughter. The press called her McGurn’s “Blonde Alibi”—a genuine alibi at that, since Jack was for once innocent of a crime.
On February 22, a garage in back of 1723 Wood Street erupted in flames, while an Italian-looking man, his face badly scorched, fled the scene. After the fire department put out the blaze, police found a partially disassembled black Cadillac tallying with the one used in the massacre. Evidently, the burned man had been chopping it up with an acetylene torch—“a little bit each day . . . so it would never appear as a mute witness,” said the Tribune—until he unwittingly hit the fuel pump, full of gasoline. In one corner of the garage, police discovered a discarded siren.
The ranking officer on the scene alerted headquarters: “The murder car has been found.”
The singed fugitive was identified as a gangster who ran a café with another mobster—an Outfit-affiliated former Egan’s Rat, like Fred Burke and Gus Winkeler. Moving from one mob connection to another eventually drew attention to Capone. Another of the fake cop cars—a Peerless touring job—blew up five days later, this time on purpose. McGurn was captured on the same day and charged with the murders, as were several other Capone gunmen, including Anselmi and Scalise. They all walked.
To date no one had bothered to talk to Capone.
“We may find reason to change our minds on the matter,” Deputy Police Commissioner Stege told the Tribune, “but as things now stand, we don’t want to talk to Capone at all. He was in Florida at the time of the Clark Street murders.”
That same month, U.S. Attorney George E. Q. Johnson subpoenaed Capone about bootlegging in Chicago Heights—a direct result of the raid Ness and other federal agents had pulled off in January.
A deputy federal marshal and an Intelligence Unit special agent went to Capone’s Palm Island home to deliver the subpoena, only to be told no one there knew “anybody by that name.” The special agent threatened to find some way of serving the subpoena in public, rather than affording Capone the courtesy of receiving it privately. From inside the house, someone called, “Here I am, boys, come in.”
Capone received them on the porch, wearing “a brown camel hair coat typical of Florida” over silk shirt and tie, his light-toned pants a match for his shoes. As the marshal read the subpoena, Capone listened politely, then asked what was required of him. The marshal told him he would have to testify in Chicago.
“He was pleasant and affable to us,” the special agent recalled, “and treated us, I thought, very gentlemanly.”
Capone seemed the very picture of health. But earlier in the year he had suffered a serious bout with influenza; Sonny had picked it up at school and passed it on to his parents. On January 13, not long after the feds raided the Heights, Al was fighting a 104.5-degree fever.
This prompted a call to a local doctor, Kenneth Phillips, who visited Palm Island and found Capone’s bedroom packed with people “sitting with their hands posed—I presume praying—when I came in.” The doctor diagnosed Capone with bronchial pneumonia, wiring the family physician in Chicago that the condition was “not serious,” despite a persistent cough.
By early February, Capone was well enough to make regular visits to the Hialeah Race Track, take a daylong plane trip to the Bahamas, and board a ship for a few days in Nassau.
The day he received his subpoena, Capone attended a prizefight in Miami Beach, sitting beside Jack Dempsey to watch Jack Sharkey and William Stribling battle it out. Mae, in a purple dress and a fur, made a rare public appearance with her husband at the fight.
Within a few days Al’s mood darkened, thanks to the summons.
“I am sick of being accused of everything that happens,” he said. “I am out of the racket and I am entitled to a chance to stay away and live my own life.”
Dr. Phillips lived in fear of the Capone brothers—Ralph, in particular—and didn’t need much convincing to declare his patient too sick to travel. On March 5, Phillips swore out an affidavit—Capone had been bedridden with pneumonia for six weeks since January 13, with no mention of Bahamian trips and other activities. Capone “has not fully recovered,” Phillips swore, and the c
hange of temperature in Chicago might very well kill him.
Capone’s lawyers brought the affidavit before Judge James H. Wilkerson and asked for a forty-day delay. Reluctantly, the judge gave them eight, postponing the hearing until March 20.
Prosecutor Johnson saw through the claims in Phillips’s affidavit, recognizing an opportunity to lock Capone up on a federal contempt-of-court charge. He asked the Chicago office of the Intelligence Unit to look into proving the affidavit false, but they concluded they lacked the authority to make an investigation.
So Johnson reached out to Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt, asking the Justice Department to step in.
Willebrandt forwarded Johnson’s request to J. Edgar Hoover. “As a personal matter of very great importance to me,” she wrote, “I wish you would look into this Al Capone affidavit . . . so that we can punish Capone and the Doctor for contempt. May I rely upon you to do so secretly and soon?”
Hoover wasted no time putting agents on the case. Although he would later display a curious reluctance to battle organized crime, Hoover recognized a potential coup for his young Bureau of Investigation. Disproving the affidavit would take little effort—newspapers had printed photos of the supposedly sick Capone at the Sharkey-Stribling fight—while allowing J. Edgar to take credit as the lawman who’d finally gotten the goods on America’s most notorious gangster.
But even an investigation this simple would take time. Capone’s grand jury appearance would be the perfect opportunity to arrest him on contempt charges; after that, he might disappear again. Even before Hoover’s Bureau could begin its work, the gangster had already made the trip up north for his court date.
On the evening of March 19, scheduled to testify the next day, Capone holed up in an Indiana suburb, informing the press he would appear at the Federal Building as scheduled. The gangster knew he was sought in connection with “the four or five hundred murders I’m supposed to have had a hand in and didn’t.” George Johnson’s office responded by promising to treat Capone “like the hoodlum that he is.”
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 19