Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  Businessmen like Kroc and Hefner were the true heirs of Al Capone—identifying the basest of human needs, from food to sex, and catering to them cleanly, efficiently, with self-interest as naked as Playboy’s centerfolds. They helped create America’s new consumer culture, while the city blossomed around them—growing up from the days of speakeasies and stockyards into Mies’s starkly modern steel and glass structures.

  In 1955, with the election of Mayor Richard J. Daley, Chicago had a new boss, at least vaguely in the Capone mode. A Democrat out of Anton Cermak’s political machine, Daley ran his city like a monarchy, with power far outdistancing Scarface’s. Critics and supporters alike saw him as a throwback to the city’s corrupt past. On the night of Daley’s election, a gleeful alderman cried out, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform!”

  Despite Daley’s innate pragmatism—a willingness to work with anybody, no matter how crooked—the new mayor was not just another grafter. One historian called him “Chicago personified,” somehow managing to embody both the ruthlessness of Al Capone and the public-spiritedness of Eliot Ness.

  “The old bosses were not interested in what was good for the public welfare,” Daley said. “They were interested only in what was good for themselves.”

  Daley appropriated Big Bill Thompson’s favored nickname—“the Builder”—repaving downtown streets, encircling the city with highways, and littering the landscape with huge office buildings and housing projects. Chicago saw the rise of its newest and most iconic skyscrapers, the John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower—the latter reigning as the world’s tallest building for more than twenty years.

  The new metropolis Daley built along the lakefront looked resolutely forward instead of backward. Just as Chicago had rebuilt itself after the fire, so this new city had to destroy its former self to exist.

  To that end, Daley’s administration oversaw the demolition of many brick-and-mortar reminders of the Prohibition era. Colosimo’s Restaurant was among the first to go, replaced by a parking lot in 1958. Two years later, Holy Name Cathedral leveled the entire block that included O’Banion’s flower shop, making space for parking and a playground. The church covered the bullet damage to its cornerstone, but tourists still looked for the pockmarks. The Four Deuces came down around 1964, leaving a garbage-strewn lot in its place.

  That same year saw the construction of a new Federal Building, a thirty-story modernist monolith. Designed by Mies, the black skyscraper rose directly in front of the original gray granite courthouse, dwarfing its squat, compact dome.

  The cold inhumanity of Mies’s new structure was no accident, according to Judge James Wilkerson’s replacement on the federal bench. He derided the old building’s “cracker box surroundings,” insisting that “pure justice” was insufficiently impressive to the public. Like a certain tax evasion conviction, the new building went beyond “pure justice” to create the appearance of justice, the better to demonstrate the government’s power.

  Despite some calls to save the old Federal Building, the aging structure couldn’t escape Daley’s march toward progress. In 1965, the courtroom where Al Capone and Samuel Insull had stood trial fell to the wrecking ball, making way for a post office, where wanted posters would go on traditional display.

  Like the elite men behind the Secret Six, Daley sought to make Chicago appear safe, approachable, and business friendly by scrubbing any memory of gangsterism from its streets. The city made this explicit when it destroyed perhaps the most notorious remnant of Capone’s Chicago.

  For years, the owner of the garage at 2122 North Clark Street endured tourists looking through her windows, trying to talk their way inside, or even forcing themselves in, to see the wall where seven North Siders were tommy-gunned.

  By 1967—the same year Roger Corman re-created The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre on film—she finally had enough, selling the building to the city for demolition.

  “Generally we try to preserve buildings which are of historical significance to the city,” one official told the Tribune. “But this is something we’d rather not remember.”

  Mayor Daley’s office did allow a Canadian businessman to preserve the building’s most important feature—its southern wall. The wrecking crew numbered the bricks, then shipped them to Vancouver, where the wall was rebuilt in a Roaring Twenties–themed nightclub. Covered by glass, the murder wall stood in the men’s room, where customers could line up like Bugs Moran’s boys and relieve themselves.

  But it wasn’t enough to keep the nightclub in business. Eventually, the wall made its way west, where it stands today, still behind glass, but sans urinals—in Las Vegas’s Mob Museum.

  Not all residents of Daley’s “city that works” enjoyed its benefits.

  Chicago’s African-American population increased by the hundreds of thousands in the years after World War II, while a rigid system of de facto segregation squeezed blacks into vast swaths of slums and housing projects. The South Side—home of Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and Richard Daley—became the “Black Belt,” given over by its city to poverty and neglect.

  “On Lake Shore Drive, life in Chicago is lovely—for the few,” said the Saturday Evening Post in 1960. “For the millions, life in Chicago is toil and ugliness . . . squalor and privation.”

  Capone’s South Michigan Avenue headquarters, the Metropole Hotel, sat trapped within this “Second Ghetto.” In January 1975, a Tribune reporter found the halls once patrolled by pearl-hatted gangsters gloomy and still—heat, water, and electricity all shut off—as the few remaining residents stood guard against vandals. Only a dozen renters still called the Metropole home—some too old and infirm to move, others too stubborn to go anywhere else.

  Conversing by candlelight in the dining room, near the gas ovens cranked up against Chicago’s typically brutal winter, one resident told the Tribune he’d grown “attached to the building,” calling it “a good old lady.”

  When the city tore the Metropole down later that year, the media paid no heed. One concerned citizen wrote the Tribune months later, lamenting the loss of another landmark.

  “How long will we let this wanton destruction of our heritage continue?” he asked.

  Thirteen years later, Tim Samuelson of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks sought to preserve the Capone family home at 7244 South Prairie Avenue, asking the state to designate the building an official landmark—not to honor Capone, but to recognize his undeniable importance as “Chicago’s most famous citizen.”

  “Chicago has vainly tried to close its eyes and run away from Capone’s ghost,” Samuelson said, “but he has remained in close pursuit, breathing down the city’s neck and tugging at its coattails.”

  The proposal drew immediate protest. Other homeowners on South Prairie, already enduring regular visits from gangster-seekers, feared an even greater tourist invasion. And a local Italian-American group resented “this attempt to resurrect the fading memory of Al Capone,” which would “stereotype all Italians.” Why not honor, say, Enrico Fermi? Even if “the father of the atomic bomb” had far more blood on his hands than Capone.

  “No doubt, Chicago is better known around the world for Al Capone than for its great and many humanitarians, artists, authors and scientists,” admitted the Chicago Sun-Times. “And, if the city is pleased with this image, then we suppose Capone’s South Side home ought to be declared a landmark.”

  Local officials leaned toward recognizing the home, but following the bitter outcry rejected Samuelson’s proposal twice. One local amateur historian appealed to the Department of the Interior to place Capone’s home on the National Register of Historic Places. But when residents and local Italian-American groups again objected, the man behind the appeal quickly withdrew his proposal.

  Despite never receiving landmark designation, Capone’s home has so far avoided the fate of many gangster landmarks. Put up for sale in 2014, its asking price dropped precipitously—from $300,000 to $179,000. The listing became an excuse for the curious to get
inside and see where Capone slept. A headline in the Tribune wondered whether the building was “Untouchable.”

  Almost four years later, the Capone home remains unsold.

  While Chicagoans battled over the future of the South Prairie house, the Lexington Hotel deteriorated along with its neighborhood—from hotel to brothel to flophouse. By the time a court order closed its doors in 1980, the once-grand structure had become a hazard.

  “It’s a monstrosity,” the local alderman told the Sun-Times. “The bricks are falling off, and the roof is falling in.”

  A nonprofit foundation bought the shuttered Lexington, seeking to rehabilitate it. After workers came upon a walled-off space in the basement, television personality Geraldo Rivera agreed to host a two-hour live broadcast from the Lexington on April 21, 1986, for the opening of Al Capone’s vaults.

  “I was pretty sure we would find either guns or money or dead bodies,” Rivera recalled.

  The heavily promoted program confirmed Capone’s lasting hold on the American imagination. During the broadcast, a “Capone safe-cracking party” filled the nearby Hyatt Regency with guests decked out Roaring Twenties style, while the IRS—still intent on collecting Capone’s tax debt—waited to seize whatever money might be found. A crowd gathered outside the decaying hotel, harsh spotlights revealing its every crack and fissure.

  “With no panes in the windows and with a huge hole in the sidewalk out front,” reported the Sun-Times, “the Lexington looked like a battle casualty.”

  After exploring Capone’s old office and test-firing a tommy gun, Geraldo dynamited the supposed vault, exposing nothing but dirt and discarded bottles. He wandered off-screen singing about “that toddling town,” fully expecting he’d blown his career right along with the vault.

  But some 30 million households tuned in, breaking records for a syndicated program. Rivera had not only turned his career around, he’d created a new genre: reality television.

  The Lexington would never enjoy such redemption; various plans to restore and reopen it all failed. Within a decade, the building became “a stinking corpse,” according to the Sun-Times, “fouling a Near South Side community that is struggling for life.”

  By then, the ownership of the Lexington had fallen into dispute. In November 1995, as both claimants battled in court, the city lost its patience and ordered the structure razed. As the Lexington fell to rubble, a local architect working for the city hoped to save Capone’s bathroom tiles.

  In 1960, after eight Chicago cops were revealed to be part-time burglars, Mayor Daley fired the police chief and replaced him with a disciple of August Vollmer. The new chief instituted a series of reforms that would have made his (and Eliot Ness’s) mentor proud, cutting crime in Chicago by 15 percent.

  Once again, however, these reforms were mostly for show. Daley knew wide-open police graft would delegitimize his whole administration, even as other forms of corruption persisted elsewhere. He “amputated an appendage to keep the body alive,” as one historian put it.

  As for the Outfit, Daley—ever the pragmatist—chose to let the rackets operate under the radar, rather than drive them out.

  “Well, it’s there,” Daley said of the mob, “and you know you can’t get rid of it, so you have to live with it.”

  Organized crime helped Daley get elected, and he wasted no time in repaying the favor. He hired Outfit comrades to official posts, giving criminals “another chance.” In 1956, he closed down an elite task force gathering intelligence on Chicago gangsters.

  “The police department,” declared the Chicago Crime Commission, “is back where it was ten years ago as far as hoodlums are concerned.”

  Under Daley’s benign neglect, the Outfit grew to new levels of power and influence. As late as 1968, Chicago’s gangsters still obeyed the territorial divisions laid out in Capone’s day. Their organization increasingly behaved like a major corporation, extending its reach into new markets and territories—from Florida to Hollywood and especially Las Vegas, with its legal gambling.

  “There’s money pouring in like there’s no tomorrow,” gangster Johnny Rosselli said in 1960.

  The Outfit reached its peak in the 1960s, when the Central Intelligence Agency, through Rosselli, sought their help in its failed attempts to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

  Yet even as one arm of the federal government briefly became the Outfit’s allies, others worked with increasing determination toward their destruction. In 1957, after state and local police in Apalachin, New York, raided a nationwide Mafia summit, J. Edgar Hoover could no longer deny the reality of nationally organized crime, and the FBI finally went into action on that front. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy and an Untouchables-like team battled corruption in the mobbed-up Teamsters Union.

  But the feds still faced the same problem Eliot Ness and his Untouchables had dealt with in 1931. Federal law remained largely concerned with criminals as individuals, giving prosecutors few tools to go after crime syndicates as organizations. Thirteen years after the Apalachin conference, that changed with the passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of 1970.

  The law’s author, G. Robert Blakey, designed it to essentially outlaw membership in any criminal group, with much harsher punishments than old conspiracy statutes—no longer two years, but up to two decades in prison.

  “You’ve got to go after the organization,” Blakey said. “Individuals commit organized crime, but organizations make the organized crime possible. You’re in it to destroy a family.”

  RICO codified the root-and-branch approach Ness and his Untouchables had pursued against the Outfit, echoing their strategy of proving Capone’s role in the booze business by linking him to other members of the gang. Crime bosses could no longer hide behind underlings. Now every member of a criminal syndicate could be found equally guilty of any crime committed by that organization.

  Blakey spent a decade urging law enforcement to adopt this new weapon, often by showing the Capone-inspired film Little Caesar to groups of FBI agents. Although he always refused to say whether the film’s protagonist—Rico Bandello—inspired the name of his law, Blakey used the movie to demonstrate the foolishness of trying to fight organized crime by targeting marquee mobsters. While the film’s flashiest, most press-hungry gangster dies in the end, his boss—the shadowy “Big Boy”—lives on after “The End.”

  “What about Big Boy?” Blakey would ask. “They forgot about Big Boy . . . nothing ever happens to him. He’s still in charge. Oh sure, they got Rico. What’s the use of that?”

  Beginning in the 1980s, federal prosecutors started using RICO to break up criminal syndicates. The endgame for the Outfit came in 2007, when federal prosecutors in Chicago—led by Patrick Fitzgerald, known as “Eliot Ness with a Harvard degree”—won the convictions of four gang leaders and their coconspirator, a corrupt cop.

  The case, Operation Family Secrets, had been in the works for almost ten years, after an imprisoned Outfit enforcer agreed to inform on his associates. His testimony and that of dozens of other witnesses linked the Outfit to eighteen murders and decades of racketeering. By sending the four bosses to prison for life, federal officials finally completed the work begun by Ness’s Untouchables seventy-six years earlier.

  Even before Family Secrets, the gang had become a shadow of its former self. Years of federal investigations and deaths of key leaders—whether by natural or highly unnatural causes—had whittled the ranks. Those who remained—“Mob Lite,” one magazine called them—retreated to Cook County, ceding the rackets in other states to local criminals.

  “The Outfit is a business,” one criminal justice professor observed, “and they’ve learned that having a smaller core is good business.”

  Unlike their fictional counterparts in the Godfather films, the literal descendants of Capone, Nitto, and their associates had little trouble escaping the family business if they were so inclined. By the new millennium, the children of the Outfit had enter
ed business after business along Michigan Avenue—and not by muscling in, but by making their way honestly.

  Asked at the dawn of the 2000s what had happened to the Outfit, the current head of the Chicago Crime Commission laughed and said, “They’re everywhere. They’ve become involved in every possible Chicago business.”

  Descendants of Italian and Jewish immigrants no longer found their paths to prosperity blocked by prejudice. The crime and violence some of their ancestors had used to steal a slice of the American Dream had migrated south, into the region once known as Chicago’s Black Belt. Decades of predatory mortgage lending and deindustrialization have turned Eliot Ness’s old South Side neighborhood into a war zone, where street gangs battle over personal slights while innocents get caught in the crossfire.

  As Ness well understood, stopping such killing requires repairing the surrounding environment, fixing the social and systemic problems that lead people into lives of crime. Local leaders have pursued that goal for years—the Ness family’s final home in Roseland stands within sight of the church where a young Barack Obama began his career as a community organizer.

  In 2015, the governor of Illinois froze all funding to Operation CeaseFire, a crime prevention program designed to treat violence like a sickness, sending former gang members like antibodies into dangerous neighborhoods. Once funding stopped, Chicago saw a roughly 60 percent jump in homicides, with 762 murders in 2016—more than the 729 gang killings Cook County endured throughout Prohibition. The city’s renewed murderous reputation prompted a presidential promise to “send in the Feds.”

  Yet that same year, Chicago broke its own tourism record with 54 million visitors, an increase of 15 million in six years. Most violence stayed concentrated in Roseland, Englewood, and other outlying neighborhoods, while the Loop remained what Robert Isham Randolph and the city fathers of his generation envisioned—a place where businessmen and tourists could walk without fear of catching a bullet.