Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  Requests for passes to see Capone flooded into the U.S. marshal’s office, many from “petty politicians” probably gathering passes for Outfit members. Another report claimed Torrio had brought a pair of rival New York mobsters, Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, to see Capone. The foursome met in the room housing Cook County’s electric chair, and Capone amused himself by sitting in the hot seat as he tried to broker a peace. But the rapacious Schultz refused to accept Capone’s ruling, and the meeting ended badly.

  “If I’d had him outside,” Capone said, “I’d have shoved a gun against his guts.”

  But Torrio felt differently, and he went on to build a partnership with Schultz ending with the latter’s murder, allegedly on Luciano’s orders, in 1935.

  As late as January 18, 1932, George Johnson told the Bureau he still opposed any further probe into Capone’s jailhouse activities. But a week later, a Johnson assistant gave Special Agent McSwain “information to the effect that Capone had been allowed to have visitors other than those who possessed proper passes for such visits.”

  The warden, citing overcrowding, had placed other inmates in the convalescent ward, and those prisoners had reportedly been receiving Capone’s visitors as their own, under such names as “Mr. Smith” and “Mr. Jones.”

  “I’ll put a stop to that if I have to move him,” the U.S. marshal told the Tribune. “I can understand now why we haven’t had a lot of gangster-looking fellows coming to my office for passes.”

  Melvin Purvis, the new special agent in charge of the Chicago office, met with Moneypenny on January 26, finding him surprised by reports of Capone’s conduct in prison.

  “Mr. Moneypenny takes every opportunity,” Purvis wrote, “to inform me of his sincere efforts to circumvent any action by which Al Capone might continue the supervision of his so-called business interests in Chicago.”

  Purvis also said Moneypenny had suggested to Johnson that Capone be moved to a military installation “and placed in the brig there, but that this suggestion had probably not met with a favorable reception.”

  In mid-February, federal officials placed a guard of U.S. marshals on Capone around the clock. Johnson lent his support, writing the attorney general on February 20 that confidential nongovernment sources had told him Capone was “in fact directing his illicit enterprises from the County Jail” with no record “of visitors or persons with whom he communicates.”

  One source said the defendant, if the judgment went against him, might seek to escape.

  “With the influence this defendant seems to be able to exert,” Johnson added, “such a thing is not impossible.”

  Two days before Christmas, Eliot Ness’s father died at a hospital in Roseland, a few months shy of his eighty-second birthday.

  Age had forced Peter Ness to retire from the bakery some years prior, a stroke leaving him partially paralyzed for his last few months. But the man who once urged his youngest son to continue his education had lived to see that advice bear fruit, as Eliot won a college degree and fame as a federal agent. After a lifetime spent carving out his family’s place in America, Peter could take pride in that.

  The elder Ness’s unrelenting drive lived on in Eliot, who wasted little time in getting back to work. For weeks, the Untouchables had closed in on a trio of big breweries connected with the Capone syndicate. They hit the first, in a garage at 2271 South Lumber Street, on January 8. After crashing through several sets of heavy steel doors, Ness and his men found no one inside, but confiscated 140 barrels of beer and destroyed $75,000 worth of equipment.

  The squad found more success a few days later, at a garage at 1712 North Kilbourn Avenue. To make sure this raid took prisoners, they waited until a truck drove inside before swooping in, arresting four bootleggers right away and two more who wandered in soon after.

  The garage proved to be among the biggest breweries on Chicago’s North Side, holding $250,000 worth of beer and eight large vats valued at $125,000. Ness told reporters its owner was George “Red” Barker, a rebellious West Side hood once allied with Capone, now vying to replace him. The raid inflamed an already tense situation; federal officials told the Herald and Examiner “rival gangs were oiling their guns for war of vengeance, blaming each other for ‘tip-offs.’ ”

  Barker died just over six months later, courtesy of machine-gun bullets and, one police official said, “too much ambition.”

  Ness’s latest raid campaign climaxed on January 21, when the Untouchables captured a brewery hidden in a two-story brick structure at 2024 South State Street. They again smashed through the front door in their battering-ram truck—Ness’s “customary calling card,” said the Chicago Daily News—before arresting five men, seizing $75,000 worth of equipment, and destroying sixty-seven barrels of beer.

  They also confiscated a familiar vehicle: the same truck that, months earlier, Bert Delaney used trying to recover Capone’s property from the brewery at 3136 South Wabash, before the Untouchables sprang their trap and arrested him. The gang had bought the truck back at government auction, only to lose it once more to the feds.

  The first two raids earned little coverage in the press, but this time Ness took pains to make headlines. He called up several papers, letting them know when and where the bust would take place. Reporters and photographers showed up on cue, along with a newsreel crew from Universal Studios. Flashbulbs popped and celluloid whirred as the federal men took axes to the barrels, dumped buckets of beer, and opened spigots on giant vats, flooding the place with froth.

  Ness stayed in back of the cameras. Courting the press was part of his job—George Johnson and William Froelich urged him to pursue cases that would make good headlines—but he never seemed quite comfortable with the limelight. Unlike his brother-in-law, who often posed for pictures after raids, Ness avoided photo ops and showed no interest in cashing in on his newfound fame.

  Shortly after Capone’s indictments, Ness received a letter from an old classmate at the University of Chicago, now a public relations man, offering him the chance to write a few “short but very brisk articles” on the case.

  “The proceeds should run well into the thousands,” this PR man wrote, “and your end would be remitted by check to yourself or any fund you might care to designate.” Ness passed up the offer, content with his $3,800 a year.

  The more Ness’s work made the papers, however, the more his colleagues resented it. Decades later, Untouchable Barney Cloonan would inaccurately depict Ness as “a publicity hound of the worst type,” who never made a bust without reporters present. Prohibition agent William Connors recalled a nasty spirit of competition arising between the regular dry force and Ness’s elite special agents. Both groups kept trying to outdo each other.

  “At times,” Connors said, “the situation wasn’t too healthy.”

  And this attitude went some distance up the chain of command. W. E. Bennett, Chicago’s special agent in charge, would complain of Ness’s “egotism and publicity-seeking activities” in a Bureau of Investigation interview, claiming Ness’s fame spread “dissension” throughout the office.

  But Bennett had his own reasons to feel aggrieved. The Prohibition Bureau had chosen him over Ness as Alexander Jamie’s replacement back in 1930, and since then the young Untouchable had constantly upstaged him. Although reporters usually referred to Ness as Bennett’s “assistant” or “aide,” anyone could see Eliot got far more ink than his supposed boss.

  William Froelich later insisted any criticism of Ness as a press hound most likely stemmed from jealousy. The lead Untouchable did publicize his activities, Froelich said, but never without first getting Johnson’s approval.

  Johnson had, after all, constantly courted the media throughout the Capone investigation and, far more than Ness himself, created the legend of the Untouchables.

  Nor was Ness the only Untouchable who faced pressure to grab headlines. Around this time, Maurice Seager got into an argument with Johnson and Froelich over whether or not to press bribery
charges against a particular bootlegger. Seager saw the case as a waste of time, believing no Chicago jury would ever convict.

  But Johnson and Froelich insisted on an indictment, simply for the sake of good press. Disgusted by this naked grab for “headline publicity,” Seager left the squad and refused to do any more work on the Capone case.

  Unlike Seager, Ness never objected to the public relations aspects of his work—from his mentor, August Vollmer, he’d learned law enforcement could and should use the press to reach out to the general public.

  As police chief in Berkeley, Vollmer worked tirelessly to promote his own reforms, ingratiating himself with reporters and providing access to departmental files in exchange for favorable coverage.

  Ness tried to follow Vollmer’s example but struggled to connect with Chicago’s hardboiled newsmen. They dismissed him as “not quite a phony but strictly small time,” according to Tony Berardi, a photographer with the Evening American. In his fumbling attempts to win them over, Ness fell back on a time-honored Prohibition agent tactic—letting the press sample the evidence.

  Berardi recalled Ness calling photographers to a government warehouse where they could fill their camera cases with seized liquor. They gladly took the booze, but didn’t let it change their minds—everything about this fed, especially his quirky sense of humor and fancy college degree, rubbed them the wrong way.

  Capone had come up through the school of hard knocks, like many a Chicago newsman. He spoke their language. Berardi told of Capone approaching him at a racetrack, offering a tip on a horse that couldn’t lose. The cameraman didn’t bite, but Capone had a winning ticket slipped into Berardi’s pocket anyway.

  Asked years later whose company he preferred—Ness’s or Capone’s—Berardi, after a half second’s hesitation, chose Capone.

  “Because I knew what Al Capone was,” he said. Ness was just a publicity hound, “a messenger boy.”

  But as a proud Italian-American, Berardi was quick to say of the gangster, however newsworthy, “Personally, I hated his guts.”

  The Universal Newsreel featuring Ness’s raid on South State Street debuted four days after the bust, jaunty music accompanying footage of agents demolishing the brewery as the quavering voice of a narrator bewailed the loss of so much beer. The whole piece had an air of comedy, as if the raid had been carried out purely for the cameras.

  By early 1932, the Beer Wars had largely migrated from America’s streets into the cool comfort of its movie theaters. The first great gangster film had appeared the year before: Warner Bros.’ Little Caesar, based on W. R. Burnett’s novel. The Ohio-born writer moved to Chicago in 1928, and soon after befriended a North Side hood who taught him the ins and outs of gangster psychology.

  “I had the old-fashioned Ohio ideas about right and wrong,” Burnett recalled, “remorse and all that stuff, which to him was utter nonsense. I’d ask him, after he’d kill guys, leave ’em on the street, how did he feel? And he said, ‘How do soldiers feel?’ To him it was a war.”

  On February 14, 1929, Burnett got to view casualties firsthand. A Tribune reporter took him to the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre while bodies still littered the floor and blood still spattered the walls. Burnett left sickened but inspired.

  Published in June 1929, Little Caesar captured the public’s imagination by presenting life from a gangster’s point of view. In director Mervyn LeRoy’s film version, Edward G. Robinson played Rico “Little Caesar” Bandello, an ambitious small-time thug who rises up from the gutter only to return there in the final reel.

  Though the film’s “Big Boy” is more directly patterned on Capone, Rico dresses with gaudy ostentation and happily poses for photographs, delighted at seeing his picture in the newspapers. Robinson’s fast-talking, sneering style defined the public’s perception of a gangster, and they couldn’t get enough. When Little Caesar premiered in New York, three thousand people fought their way in, smashing windows and overwhelming the box office.

  Later that year, Warner’s followed with director William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy, with James Cagney starring as Tom Powers, an amalgam of Dean O’Banion, Terry Druggan, Frankie Lake, and other Chicago hoods. Just as nasty as Rico Bandello, Powers kills a cop, roughs up a bartender who doesn’t buy his beer, and famously smashes a grapefruit into his girlfriend’s face.

  But Cagney’s all-American charm proved irresistible, disturbing moralists who saw in him a glorification of gangsters, despite Tom Powers winding up wrapped like a mummy and dropped off to his loving mother.

  Violent and uncompromising, The Public Enemy styled itself as a study of slum life, offering a grimmer view of gangsters than Little Caesar. Yet its startling brutality paled in comparison to the bloodiest of the early gang films, the one most clearly patterned on Capone—1932’s Scarface.

  Millionaire Howard Hughes had bought the rights to the 1930 Armitage Trail novel and hired director Howard Hawks to make it into a film. W. R. Burnett wrote the first draft, but to polish it up Hawks hired Ben Hecht, former Chicago newspaperman whose script for Underworld won the first Academy Award for screenwriting in 1929. Hecht penned his draft of Scarface in eleven days, drawing less from the novel and more from actual history.

  The murders of Big Jim Colosimo and Dean O’Banion, the tommy gun fusillade at the Hawthorne Hotel, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—all of it and more appeared, in one form or another, in Scarface. Capone was now Tony Camonte, Johnny Torrio had become Johnny Lovo, and various North Side leaders were combined into Gaffney, played by a pre-Frankenstein monster, Boris Karloff.

  This fast-and-loose fidelity to the facts brought the film the wrong kind of attention. Before its release, two Capone men showed up at Hecht’s hotel room late one night and demanded an explanation.

  “They had a copy of my Scarface script in their hands,” Hecht wrote. “Their dialogue belonged in it.”

  One gangster asked, “Is this stuff about Al Capone?”

  “God, no,” Hecht replied. He said he’d been acquainted with the late Colosimo and O’Banion, but left town before getting to know Capone.

  “If this stuff ain’t about Al Capone,” one said, “why are you callin’ it Scarface? Everybody’ll think it’s him.”

  “That’s the reason,” Hecht replied. “Al is one of the most famous and fascinating men of our time. If we call the movie Scarface, everybody will want to see it, figuring it’s about Al. That’s part of the racket we call showmanship.”

  Now he was speaking their language. The gangsters departed, convinced Hollywood meant their boss no harm. The censors would not be so easily won over.

  “Under no circumstances is this film to be made,” came word to Hughes from the industry censorship board. “If you should be foolhardy enough to make Scarface, this office will make certain it is never released.”

  Hughes made the movie anyway, but included a few cosmetic changes to appease the censors—for example, Camonte’s mother, who loved her son unconditionally in Hecht’s first draft, now rejected his evil deeds.

  Paul Muni’s Capone was a wild-eyed maniac, lacking the gangster’s charm and sometime warmth. When Camonte first gets his hands on a tommy gun, it’s love at first sight.

  “Some little typewriter, eh?” Camonte asks his mentor. “I’m gonna write my name all over this town with it in big letters!”

  Then he shoves the Torrio character aside and opens fire at the camera, giddy as a kid on Christmas morning. Hawks’s film shared Camonte’s evident delight in dealing out death, which left some viewers feeling sick.

  “It should never have been made,” wrote the trade publication Film Daily, fretting how it might damage the whole industry. But audiences didn’t seem to mind; Scarface broke advance-booking records even before its release, and took in a whopping $90,000 in just two weeks at New York’s Rialto Theatre alone, going on to outearn each film that house had shown in the past sixteen years.

  As a contemporary observer noted, gangsters reflect
“the here and now, with the vital reality of something that might be happening at the present moment in the next street. No wonder the pictures about them fascinate us, sometimes to the verge of terror and anger.”

  Burnett called his Little Caesar “a gutter Macbeth”; the New York Times saw Rico as “a figure out of Greek epic tragedy” transported to the modern era. The violent, degrading deaths of Rico Bandello, Tom Powers, and Tony Camonte gave viewers a much-needed catharsis. To many Americans, Capone’s conviction was an empty victory, no matter how much the government tried to dress it up.

  “The public wanted justice,” wrote historian Richard Gid Powers, “not technical and legalistic justice, but a poetic justice that took into account moral, and not merely legal, guilt.”

  The movies gave them what real life could not. Censors imposed on Scarface a new ending replacing Camonte’s bullet-ridden death with a sequence showing him tried, convicted, and hanged for murder. This made the film a triumph for the justice system, but its audience had grown tired of the legal niceties.

  Soon Hughes restored the original ending—Camonte dying in the street, begging for his life under a lighted sign that mockingly declares: THE WORLD IS YOURS. Tony gets it from the barrel of a gun—the way audiences wanted, and so many gangsters did.

  No movie captured this thirst for vengeance better than director Gregory La Cava’s Gabriel over the White House, produced by press baron William Randolph Hearst in 1933. The film tells of a corrupt, incompetent president who suffers a head injury, transforms into a benevolent dictator, and takes on Nick Diamond, a racketeer closely patterned on Capone. Diamond thinks he’s untouchable—“I’ve paid my income tax,” he sneeringly tells the president—and demonstrates his power with a drive-by shooting at the White House. The president responds by establishing a “Federal Police to Eliminate Gangsters”—heavily armed and wearing fascist-style uniforms, riding out in armored cars to subdue Diamond and his men.