Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  Avis remained unmoved.

  “Climatic conditions on the Coast,” he wrote, “and other general conditions prevailing there are not conducive to inspiring a man who is not already so inclined to produce more work, or work longer hours.”

  He ordered Chapman back to Chicago. Meanwhile, Avis’s boss, the director of Prohibition, noted in Chapman’s file the agent’s attempt “to use political pressure” to get out of an important assignment. Ness would soon get his pencil detective back, but he couldn’t fix Chapman’s attitude so easily.

  To shore up the crumbling squad, Ness recruited agents from the Chicago office, starting with Bernard Vincent “Barney” Cloonan, thirty-four, a burly, blue-eyed, brown-haired Chicagoan with a no-nonsense demeanor. Only recently promoted to special agent, Cloonan had experience finding stills and breweries and following paper trails back to their owners, his work supplementing the sometimes-unreliable Chapman’s.

  More help came from Thomas J. Friel, a skinny special agent and former Pennsylvania state trooper. Friel, thirty-eight, unmarried, had the perfect background, taking law courses from the same correspondence school as Ness and working to build conspiracy cases under Alexander Jamie. He was also terribly shy around women, something Marty Lahart—who also joined the squad around this time—ribbed him about unmercifully.

  Even Bill Gardner returned. He had gone to San Diego with his wife and young daughter, seeking relief for his ailing lungs. When Gardner finally checked in with Ness and learned no one knew what had happened to him, he rushed back to Chicago and showed up, ready to carry on as if he’d never left.

  Ness told his wandering agent to call Washington; if it was all right with them, he could stay. Gardner then spoke to someone in the home office, who raised no objections, if Ness gave the okay. But rather than getting Ness’s approval, Gardner simply slipped into a bureaucratic dead zone, keeping his job because no one had fired him. He didn’t stay long—after spending three more weeks on the Capone case, Gardner resigned and returned to California.

  Gardner would eventually bounce back to the Bureau, though never again serve on Ness’s squad. When Prohibition began to wind down, Gardner’s mediocre record made him among the first agents dropped. He spiraled into alcoholism, living off various family members till he wore out his welcome and went back to the bottle. The marriage that kept upending his career eventually collapsed. He died in Arizona in June 1965, having lived long enough to see his brief, five-week stint on the Capone squad become the basis for a central character on the popular Untouchables TV series.

  Ness left little record of his struggle to hold his squad together. Though modest by nature, he tended to cover up his own embarrassments and never dwelled on his mistakes, at least not publicly. He would later paint the team as a well-oiled machine, harmonious from the start—not just comrades but friends, even brothers.

  More likely, they were simply men doing a job, one that didn’t seem all that remarkable at the time. But as he looked over the complex structure of the Outfit, and saw how the man at the top kept everything under control, Ness had to admit a certain admiration for his nemesis.

  “Capone was a natural,” Ness said. “He could organize and he had appeal; men fell in behind him.” Had Capone played it straight, Ness believed, the ganglord could have been a major figure in legitimate business.

  This perhaps gave Capone too much credit—Al had inherited Torrio’s Outfit almost fully formed, while Ness had to build his team from scratch. And yet, when it came to being a leader and convincing his men to fall in behind him, Ness still had much to learn.

  Elsewhere in Chicago, Frank Wilson kept searching for bookkeeper Leslie Shumway, the one man who could tie the Hawthorne Smoke Shop ledger to Capone. But Wilson was running out of time, if he wasn’t already too late.

  Federal courts had yet to decide whether income tax evasion fell under a six-year statute of limitations or one lasting only three years. A case working its way through the courts in Boston would soon settle the matter—if a judge ruled the shorter statute applied, the Hawthorne ledger would be inadmissible, covering as it did income from 1924 to 1926.

  Even if the longer rule won out, the ledger was perilously close to its expiration date. To charge Capone with tax evasion in 1924, federal officials had to win an indictment before March 15, 1931. And without Capone’s bookkeeper, they had nothing to present before a grand jury.

  About a month before deadline, Wilson got word through “underground channels”—probably Eddie O’Hare—Shumway could be found in Florida, Wilson’s favorite vacation spot. He went down to Miami with O’Hare’s reporter pal John Rogers, and squeezed in a day of fishing on the Gulf Stream before locating Shumway at his place of employment, a Capone-connected dog track. Figuring the man would flee if approached directly, Wilson had another agent serve him a subpoena from a fictitious business, the “White Steel Company.”

  When the bookkeeper said he’d never heard of the firm, the agent spoke casually of a probable mix-up, but advised he appear anyway and expect to be excused. Shumway took this advice, walking right into Wilson’s trap.

  “Once we had Shumway where we wanted him,” Wilson said, “we showed him the records.”

  Wilson leaned hard on the timid little bookkeeper, threatening to let the gang know the feds had located him. Surely, the agent said, the syndicate would not hesitate to silence a potential witness, and leave Shumway’s poor wife a widow.

  “It took some time,” Wilson recalled, “but we finally convinced Shumway that Capone’s day was done and that he had better come clean.”

  On February 18, Shumway signed a sworn statement identifying the ledger as the business record he’d kept at the Hawthorne Smoke Shop. Apart from the club’s managers, “the only other person whom I recognized as an owner of the business and from whom I took orders relating to the business was Mr. Alphonse Capone.”

  Now, Wilson had all he needed to secure an indictment. He secretly spirited Shumway to Chicago and brought him before the grand jury. On March 13, two days before deadline, the grand jury returned a secret indictment charging Capone with evading his income tax in 1924.

  But the case against the gangster remained incomplete. Federal officials won the indictment “not because there was enough evidence available,” Assistant Attorney General Youngquist wrote, “but because the statute of limitations was about to run for the year in question, 1924.”

  This gave the government a reprieve, but only a brief one. Sooner or later, Capone would learn of the indictment, and the feds would lose the element of surprise. If word of the charges got out, George Johnson knew potential witnesses would clam up, destroying any chance for a second indictment.

  So Wilson kept gathering testimony. Once he had enough, the investigation would go public.

  Having just managed to corral his own unit, Ness now found himself racing against the tax men to avoid losing his shot at Capone.

  Capone leaving court after his contempt-of-court trial, February 27, 1931.

  (Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection)

  Twenty-One

  December 1930–February 1931

  Al Capone’s imperious eighteen-year-old sister, Mafalda, had always been important to him. She loved him deeply, too, although she would sometimes chafe at the damage his notoriety did to her.

  “Who,” she often complained, “would dare to risk dating Al Capone’s little sister?”

  The answer could be found in her brother’s circle of business associates—John J. Maritote, brother of another “public enemy.” They’d been childhood sweethearts, Mafalda said, though Maritote—a twenty-three-year-old whose eyebrows overwhelmed his otherwise handsome face—currently had a different woman in his life. He took out his marriage certificate with transparent reluctance, remarking, “I’ve hardly seen the girl in a year.”

  Capone arranged the wedding to shore up his own power, gangland observers said, like the head of a royal family in the Middle Ages, barely con
sulting the couple. Still, Mafalda apparently welcomed this solution to her dating woes, and the groom’s qualms were eased by a $50,000 dowry and the gift of a home from the bride’s big brother.

  The wedding took place at St. Mary’s Church in Cicero on December 14 before a packed sanctuary of “the elect of the alky aristocracy,” as the Tribune put it. The only “untoward event” was the arrest of five armed bodyguards by uninvited party pooper Pat Roche. Despite a snowstorm, local rubberneckers swarmed the edges of the red carpet to the church doors while Cicero police dealt with heavy traffic; schoolchildren crawled under the ropes beneath the canopy, chased away by the police before trying again.

  From the silk top hat of Ralph Capone, who gave the bride away, to the soft white leather shoes of the little flower girl, the afternoon event was a perfect, perfectly normal North Shore wedding—ushers in tuxes, bridesmaids in pink taffeta, matrons of honor (Mae, and Ralph’s slim blonde wife) in silver-edged chiffon. In ivory satin, Mafalda, pretty and plump, beamed next to her uncomfortable soulmate. The reception would showcase a wedding cake that cost more than two thousand Depression dollars.

  Apart from actual romance, the wedding had everything, except the older brother who arranged it—Al Capone stayed behind at Palm Island. Though Cicero was outside Chicago police jurisdiction, Capone was still ducking Judge Lyle’s vagrancy warrant, and likely didn’t want to subject Mafalda and other relatives to increased press attention.

  Missing the event would be painful for a man so devoted to his family. Despite the comforts of Miami, Capone remained indignant about his expulsion from his adopted hometown, unloading his frustrations to sympathetic journalists a few days after Christmas.

  Washington Herald editor Eleanor Patterson—who stopped “on an impulse” at Capone’s home on Palm Island—was granted a surprisingly frank interview.

  Patterson found her famous host a “kindly, hospitable man, proud of his estate,” though she remarked his famous scar was “like the welt from the lash of a whip.”

  “Come in,” he told her, a bodyguard nearby. “Let me show you around.”

  The iron gates clanked behind her. Capone escorted her through his garden and back to the swimming pool and two-story bathhouse with its second-floor diving board extending over the pool. Smartly dressed young bodyguards lurked in the shadows. In the sunshine, she got her first real eyeful of her host.

  “He has the neck and shoulders of a wrestler,” she reported. “One of those prodigious Italians, thick-chested, close to six feet tall. The muscles of his arms stretched the sleeves of his light brown suit, so that it seemed to be cut too small for him.”

  But she couldn’t look him in his “ice-gray, ice-cold eyes,” any more than she could a tiger’s.

  As they strolled, Capone groused about not “getting a square deal” from society or law enforcement.

  “I don’t interfere with big business,” he said. “None of the big business guys can say I ever took a dollar from ’em. Why, I done a favor for one of the big newspapers in the country when they was up against it.”

  He was referring to strikebreaking activities he’d provided for the Tribune, owned by Patterson’s cousin, Robert McCormick.

  “And what do I get for doing ’em a favor?” he asked, adding, “I only want to do business, you understand, with my own class. Why can’t they let me alone? . . . I don’t interfere with their racket.”

  He said the government was framing him back home—both the tax charge and the vagrancy beef.

  Patterson asked why he wanted to return to Chicago, anyway. Had he considered living in Italy?

  “What should I live in Italy for?” Capone was no Italian; he’d been born in Brooklyn. “My family, my wife, my kid, my racket—they’re all in Chicago.”

  Not really—Mae and Sonny were Florida residents now.

  He walked the reporter to the sun porch, “furnished in excellent taste.” Open doors onto the living room revealed more loitering bodyguards, smoking, reading. In a nearby corner, cotton snow surrounded a brightly decorated Christmas tree under whose branches Sonny’s toys could be glimpsed, including child-sized golf clubs. Patterson and her host sat at a glass-topped table. Lemonade was served.

  That was when she noticed Capone’s half-clenched hands.

  “Enormous,” she wrote. “Powerful enough to tackle—well, most anything, although superficially soft from lack of exposure, and highly manicured.”

  Capone sat impassively, like an intense, if nervous Buddha. But when she suggested he’d gone into prison out of fear, he bristled.

  “Oh, you think I’m afraid? I’ll show you how afraid I was.”

  As he spoke of how hard he’d worked to get out of prison, he began to talk “very fast and for the first time with a tinge of foreign accent. You sensed again the terrific tension hidden behind the deliberate gestures and stolid face.”

  “And where did I go when I got out of jail?” Capone went on defensively. “Just to show you how much afraid I was. First thing I did, I went back to Chicago, didn’t I? And believe me, I’m going back there now!”

  From this “flash of real hate and rage,” Patterson knew she’d hit a nerve. “The one thing every gangster fears most is fear,” she wrote. “One sign of weakness, one second of faltering and his own wolf pack is upon him, tearing at his throat.”

  This show of temper indicated Capone—normally so cool with the press—was starting to have trouble controlling himself. Stress? Syphilis?

  Around this time, Capone played host to another famous journalist. Gossip columnist Walter Winchell was in Miami when a mutual friend asked if he would like to visit Palm Island. Winchell arrived to find Capone and “three huskies” playing cards. The boss sat facing the door, as he always did; when Winchell entered, the three men vanished at Capone’s unspoken command.

  Winchell was impressed with Capone’s size—not just his hands, but his whole form. He also took note of a large automatic pistol on the card table.

  “Here you are playing a game of cards with your friends,” Winchell said, “but you keep a gun handy.”

  “I have no friends,” Capone shot back.

  This from a man who’d conspicuously palled around with entertainers and politicians. But those relationships were based on Capone’s ability to supply money and booze. Like many a celebrity, Al found himself surrounded yet always alone.

  Capone spoke about his upcoming contempt-of-court trial, heaping scorn on his physician, Kenneth Phillips, though the doctor had stood by the affidavit claiming Capone was too ill to go to Chicago. Al insisted he’d been “so sick I fell down a whole flight of stairs!”

  But Phillips, he said, recanted after trying to chisel Capone with a huge bill, which his patient only partly paid.

  “So he told the Government that I was never sick,” the ganglord said—adding, with a heavy sigh, “Anybody I have wined and dined right in my own house crossed me.”

  The prospect of another jail term loomed large to Capone, yet Winchell could see that, in a way, the gangster was already imprisoned.

  Capone did what he could to help Big Bill Thompson beat back a primary challenge from John Lyle. The judge, claiming Capone contributed as much as $150,000 to Thompson’s campaign, asked voters what kind of influence that money bought. He even brandished a machine gun in one speech.

  “The real issue in this campaign,” Lyle said, “is not whether I shall be elected or whether Thompson shall be elected, but whether Al Capone is to be authorized to rule Chicago again through the medium of a dummy in the Mayor’s office.”

  On primary day, February 24, Lyle predicted he’d “take the city by a majority of 150,000 votes”—the same margin Thompson expected for himself. Both were overly optimistic, though in a crowded field, Thompson won by almost 68,000 votes, less than 47 percent of the total.

  “The majority of the Republican vote was against him,” said the Tribune, “but its distribution made it ineffective. Judge Lyle could have been nominat
ed if he had been given a clear field against the mayor, whose acts and character are condemned by the majority of voters in his own party.”

  Weakened but unbowed, Thompson would go on to face Democrat Anton J. Cermak in the general election.

  “The chance of escaping four more years of political depravity in the city hall,” wrote the Trib, “is contained in the Democratic ticket.”

  But Thompson’s opponent was no reformer—for years, Anton Cermak opposed Prohibition and pocketed graft as a state legislator, alderman, and Cook County Board president. Born in Bohemia, Tony grew up in Braidwood, Illinois, where he worked in a coal mine; in Chicago, he was a railroad brakeman and horse-drawn streetcar driver, then set up a hauling business before winning election as state representative in 1902.

  A hard worker and ready fighter for his constituents, Cermak maneuvered well in county government, moving up the Democratic ladder. The Bohemians were a comparatively small ethnic group; but Tony, working with other voting blocs, saw his influence grow—and his wealth, from graft and payoffs.

  Cermak, roughhewn but pragmatic, won with 58 percent, thanks in part to Lyle voters who liked the Bohemian’s tough anticrime talk. Finished in Chicago politics, Thompson slunk off to retirement and irrelevance. The Tribune bade him good riddance.

  “For Chicago,” they wrote, “Thompson has meant filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy and bankruptcy. He has given the city an international reputation for moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft, and a dejected citizenship. . . . He made Chicago a byword of the collapse of American civilization.”

  As his hold on city government slipped away, Capone focused on his upcoming contempt-of-court trial. Nearly two years had passed since the ganglord ducked a federal subpoena to testify about the massive Jamie-Ness raid on Chicago Heights, but George E. Q. Johnson had waited until other lines of attack against the gangster—the tax and Prohibition investigations—were well under way.