Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  • • •

  The wonder-working bribe had been arranged by Capone’s new associate and fast friend, Jack Guzik, a scion of Chicago’s first family of vice. Throughout his life, Guzik maintained he was not really a gangster, for he never carried a gun, never resorted to violence, and cringed at the sight of blood. Nor, at first glance, did Guzik’s background seem to fit the gangster mold. He belonged to a large Orthodox Jewish family, one of eleven siblings, some of them talented, others street-smart, and all of them loyal to one another. The Guziks were, in fact, the kind of immigrants who could have succeeded in any one of numerous legitimate occupations, but who happened to earn their living through prostitution and saw nothing wrong with it.

  The parents, Max and Mamie, emigrated to the United States from Russia in 1892, along with their children: Harry, Morris, Joe, Fannie, Benjamin, Jack, Rebecca, and Charles. In the New World, Max, the head of the family, followed a traditional Jewish immigrant occupation: he became a cigar maker. Once in Chicago, the Guzik family swelled to include three more children, Mollie, Katie, and Sam. Twenty-three years separated Harry, the eldest sibling, from Sam, the youngest. A cigar maker’s wages could not feed the entire family, and Max developed a lucrative sideline as a precinct captain for those politician-pimps, “Hinky-Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse” Coughlin. In this role Max delivered votes to the machine and collected payoffs in the process; he also made numerous contacts in the vice trade that he was able to pass along to his children. Two of Max’s sons, Harry and Jack, eventually joined forces to become, in the words of the law, pimps and panderers. And they became quite successful at it, too. Despite his youth, Jack (born on March 20, 1886) took the lead, running his string of no-frills brothels. As Al Capone discovered, Jack Guzik was nothing like the flamboyant Jim Colosimo; he was devoted to his wife, Rose Lipschutz, whom he married when she was sixteen, and to his children: Charles, Jeannette, and Frank. (Charles became the third generation of Guziks to work in the vice trade. In 1956 he was sentenced to a term of sixty to 100 years for sex offenses involving teenagers.)

  Meanwhile, Harry, the eldest sibling, and his wife, Alma, managed a popular brothel at 119th and Paulina Street; it was known as “The Blue Goose.” In 1907 they were convicted for white slavery, in the process achieving national notoriety. Indeed, the term white slavery first came into widespread use in connection with one of Harry’s own whores. Her name was Mona Marshall, and while she was confined to her brothel one night, she wrote the statement, “I am a white slave,” attached the note to a key, and threw it down to the street, where a milkman found it and turned it over to the police. Although Mona was not a captive in the conventional sense, since she spent at least as much time outside the brothel as she did within, and although she subsequently denied writing the note, the concept of a white slave inflamed the righteous indignation of a young assistant state’s attorney named Clifford Roe, whose oratory roused the entire city to one of its occasional fits of revulsion against the vice trade, and the noise was heard as far as Washington, D.C. In 1910, Congress passed the Mann Act (usually referred to as the White Slave Act), which made it a federal offense to transport a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.” As written, the law had limited usefulness, and within Chicago, little changed. Mona Marshall, the original white slave, returned to prostitution, and Harry Guzik, though sentenced to the Illinois State Penitentiary, received a pardon from the governor, Len Small, who was, incidentally, a protégé of Chicago’s mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson. Later, it emerged that Guzik had bribed the governor to obtain his freedom. The pimp knew every man had his vice, and every politician his price.

  Although he had been working in the vice trade for years, Jack Guzik managed to avoid legal trouble until December 3, 1917, when he was arrested for disorderly conduct—a charge covering a multitude of sins—and sentenced to eight months in the county jail. After that, his distinctive visage became familiar to police and, later, to the press: a short man, pudgy and pale, hopelessly flabby, with a large neck and jowls that seemed to double the size of his face. Actually, they were more than jowls, they were wattles, and they spilled over his collar, obscuring the knot of his tie, and whenever he spoke, they quivered. Jack favored round tortoiseshell glasses, heavily tinted; he always wore a hat, and the combination of his pear-shaped physique, glasses, and broad-brimmed hat made him look like a big shot with sinister connections.

  Although best known as a pimp, he did have aspirations beyond the brothel. He made himself so useful to Torrio that he was rewarded with an interest in the organization’s gambling joints. And in 1919, just before Prohibition took effect, Torrio further rewarded him with the ownership of a brewery whose profits were certain to skyrocket once beer was outlawed. Yet Jack Guzik was never really a gambler or bootlegger, except by default; he remained a pimp, the calling to which he had been born. As his reputation grew, he acquired a vivid, mysterious nickname: “Greasy Thumb.” No one could say exactly how he came by it; one story had it that as a waiter in a kosher restaurant he had often been careless in carrying plates to the tables and dipped his thumb in the soup. Another insisted that the name referred to his greasing the palms of police and politicians with money. In either case, the nickname conveyed the seamy aura surrounding Jack “Greasy Thumb” Guzik.

  Working for Jack, and then with Jack, Al became extremely fond of the man, who was like an older brother to him. Jack made him feel at home in Chicago. As their friendship deepened, Capone picked up a smattering of Yiddish from Jack, as well as fondness for Jewish delicacies such as jellied calves’ feet, and, in return, he was glad to demonstrate his cooking skills for the Guziks, donning an apron to prepare spaghetti with the Capone family’s special red sauce, extra spicy, the way he had learned from his mother. Jack, in turn, valued Al’s bookkeeping skills, and even more than that, his sense of family loyalty and his warmth. Finally, Capone’s physical strength and his willingness to use it endeared him to Jack, who was missing a kidney and suffered from chronic bronchial ailments. He seemed to be a perpetual convalescent, and he was an unrepentant coward in all physical activities.

  It was Torrio who had brought Capone to Chicago, but it was Jack Guzik who kept him there. Al’s primary allegiance in the organization switched from Torrio to Guzik, and the relationship marked an important step for Al, who until this time had worked exclusively for Italians in Brooklyn (Torrio, Yale), Baltimore (Aiello), and Chicago (Torrio again). He was now reaching beyond the Italian milieu with its inward-looking campanilismo to the city’s—and the rackets’—other important immigrant group, the Jews. There were nearly 300,000 Jews in Chicago in the early 1920s, and they were entering the mainstream of civic life as rapidly as the Irish had a generation earlier, their influence on the city’s political and business life growing with every passing year. The attraction the Guziks held for Capone is apparent; although they belonged to a different tribe, they were in many ways a reflection of the Capones—another large, closely knit, immigrant family who dealt in crime but who in their private lives maintained a solid, bourgeois, upwardly mobile façade. Jack Guzik and his family lived in one of the city’s better suburbs, in a house which, with its nine rooms and servant, could have belonged to any prosperous businessman of the day. A glance at the externals of the Guziks’ lives offered little clues as to the nature of the family business. Children played in the front yard, a dog romped through the bushes, and the future U.S. attorney for Chicago, George E. Q. Johnson, the man who would lead the crusade to put Al Capone and Jack Guzik in jail, lived just down the street. What better proof that the neighborhood was respectable and safe.

  • • •

  Although he was by now a member in good standing with the Torrio organization, the young Al Capone, without the steadying presence of his wife and child, is remembered mostly for his coarse, immature behavior, and his continual drinking. In August 1922, while drunk and at the wheel of one of Torrio’s deluxe sedans, he collided with a parked taxi. The young Capone
in a besotted rage staggered from his car and pulled a gun on the cabbie, whom he may have suspected of being a rival racketeer attempting to kill him. The incident appeared in one of the Chicago papers, who introduced its readers to a young man named “Alfred Caponi” residing “at the notorious Four Deuces, a disorderly house at 2222 South Wabash avenue.”

  Early this morning [the account continued] his automobile crashed into a Town taxicab, driven by Fred Krause, 741 Drake avenue, at North Wabash avenue and East Randolph street, injuring the driver. Three men and a woman, who were with Caponi, fled before the arrival of the police.

  Caponi is said to have been driving east in Randolph street at a high rate of speed. The taxicab was parked at the curb.

  Following the accident, Caponi alighted and flourishing a revolver, displayed a special deputy sheriff’s badge and threatened to shoot Krause.

  Patrick Bargall, 6510 South Claremont avenue, motorman of a southbound street car, stopped his car and advised Caponi to put the weapon in his pocket, and the latter then threatened him, according to witnesses.

  In the meantime, the Central police had been notified and they hurried to the scene, arresting Caponi. Krause was given first aid treatment by an ambulance physician.

  It was Capone’s first arrest in Chicago, the first time the police became aware of a young man about whom they would be hearing a good deal in the years to come.

  The article failed to mention that “Alfred Caponi” was, at the time, drunk, for he was charged with driving while intoxicated, carrying a concealed weapon, and assault with an automobile—all serious violations that might, if proven in a court of law, send him to jail for months or even years, his “deputy sheriff’s badge,” with which Torrio had provided him, notwithstanding. However, Torrio’s well-paid and well-placed connections saw to it that the matter was dropped, and Capone was never indicted.

  Capone’s drunken behavior figured again later that summer when he encountered a young singer from Kentucky by the name of Rio Burke, who was struggling to establish herself in Chicago. One day, after entertaining an audience of hod carriers, she attended their picnic in a city park. “To this picnic came two brothers,” she remembers. “One was rather good looking except for a deep and prominent scar that ran all the way down his left cheek. He had recently come out of New York and everyone seemed to know him and paid him great homage. I was later to learn he was Al Capone, which meant nothing at the time. As the afternoon wore on, Al became very, very drunk and started throwing money around like confetti. Everybody was getting ten- and twenty-dollar bills, and the entertainers went home rich. But he became so drunk and belligerent that his brother Ralph had to persuade him to say good-bye and go home, to everyone’s great relief.” That was not the last occasion Rio Burke would see Al Capone: “Never could I have dreamed that one day this drunken hulk would be sitting at my dining-room table, dressed to the nines in a silk suit, with princely behavior, or that he would hide out in my home for eight days after a spectacular Chicago murder.”

  The end of Capone’s drunken behavior coincided with the arrival of his family from Brooklyn—not just Mae and Sonny, but his widowed mother, younger brothers, and baby sister. Al was now making enough money from Torrio’s organization to be able to buy, in his own name, a home for them all at 7244 South Prairie Avenue. This was an address on a tranquil, middleclass South Side suburban street far from the turmoil of the Loop and the corruption of Johnny Torrio’s vice, booze, and gambling empire. Prairie Avenue went on for miles; no less than fifty long blocks separated the house from the Loop. The cushion of distance appealed to Capone’s need for safety, but he took further precautions to customize the house, installing iron bars in the basement windows and a large brick garage around the back to house his cars, which were always at the ready should he need to make a hasty departure. Despite these unusual features, the appearance of the house was conventional enough. Built of red brick, two stories tall, it towered over its small lot. Nine stone steps led from the street to the front door, and on the second story, a portal opened onto a small terrace overlooking the street. The front yard contained a single tree, and a vine crawled up one side of the house.

  Compared to the life Capone had known on Garfield Place in Brooklyn, the Prairie Avenue residence was a glorious improvement, a sign of having arrived in America, but by Chicago standards it was an ordinary dwelling such as any moderately successful businessman or career civil servant might own. It was one of thirty-four houses on its long block, several of which belonged, interestingly enough, to policemen and their families. In another sharp break with the past, the Capones were the only Italians in the neighborhood, which consisted of a mixture of Scotch, Irish, and German descendants. In fact, just two doors south of the Capones’ new home lived a retired Presbyterian clergyman. For a racketeer who sought to present a façade of respectability and legitimacy to the world, and who wanted to keep his family far from the field of battle, 7244 Prairie Avenue was ideal. The unpretentious house would serve as Al Capone’s residence of record for as long as he lived in Chicago. Although Capone was often absent for long periods of time—weeks, sometimes months on end—he always returned here, to breathe the unpolluted air, to feel normal again, a man with a wife and a child, even though with the passing of time that normality became an unreachable ideal.

  Although the Capones had apparently burst the bounds of campanilismo, they lived as they had back in Brooklyn, and as their ancestors had before them in Naples, that is to say, on top of one another, in the same house. No matter how far they had come economically and geographically, they still clung together. Now in her midfifties, Teresa, the honored dowager of the clan, lived on the top floor of the house. On the first floor, in a suite of rooms at the back, lived Al, his wife, Mae, and their boy, Sonny, now in his fifth year of life. Other brothers came and went, using rooms in the house as they needed. They included Frank, now twenty-seven, Mimi, twenty, Albert, sixteen, and Mattie, who was fourteen at the time the family moved to Chicago. Only Ralph, who was approaching thirty, lived outside the home, in the apartment at Farwell and Sheridan he had once shared with Al, but he, too, could often be found on Prairie Avenue. In sum, it was a crowded, noisy, lively household.

  The Capones soon became known to the neighborhood. Mae or Teresa often knocked on neighbors’ doors to borrow a cup of sugar or flour, and they made a point to return more than they borrowed. Mafalda rode her bicycle in the neighborhood. Later, when she became older, she attended the Richards School, a private institution. Her older brother Al was celebrated at the school for his habit of appearing at Christmas in a large sedan, filled with gifts. Playing the role of the grand seigneur to the point of parody, he would step out of the car and supervise the distribution of baskets of candy, turkeys, and presents for every student and teacher at his little sister’s school. Beyond that extravagance, the neighbors had little sense, initially, that Mafalda’s big brother, the one with the scars on his cheek, was a racketeer, bootlegger, and pimp. The Al Capone they knew (or thought they knew) said he was a dealer in used furniture, but he didn’t seem to hold a steady job. He spent many days lounging around the house, wearing a bathrobe and slippers. He occasionally played with his son in the backyard, gently tossing a ball in the boy’s direction. He would cook for anyone in the neighborhood who was willing to come inside and eat with him. Al’s spaghetti was known throughout the neighborhood, and as he stood before the kitchen’s huge stove, wearing an apron, stirring the sauce, he urged his guests to wash it down with as much Chianti as they could manage.

  The house, Mae, and, most of all, Sonny represented Capone’s strivings toward redemption. Although he preyed on other people’s weaknesses for a living, his reputation and standing in the community mattered deeply to him. The deeper he went into racketeering and all its associated sins, the more he idealized his family, as if they, in their innocence, were living proof that he was not the monster that the newspapers later insisted he was.

  • •
•

  During the Capones’ first few years in Chicago, the city still enjoyed a relatively peaceful environment. Under the influence of Johnny Torrio, local racketeers had neatly carved up the city, and each respected the other’s territory, settling matters among themselves without firing shots or leaving corpses for the police to find and the newspapers to photograph. Even the pressures of Prohibition did little to disturb the rackets’ smooth operation. However, the low body count told only part of the story, because the city’s neighborhoods were rocked by countless gunfights and explosions caused by homemade bombs, generally known as pineapples. You didn’t have to be a racketeer to be drawn into the escalating brutality; merchants (often from immigrant backgrounds) increasingly resorted to violence to protect their stores, fruit stands, or warehouses from small-time hoodlums hurling pineapples in the middle of the night from a passing car; the police, ever more deeply involved with racketeers and bootleggers, proved embarrassingly inept at coping with the situation and restoring law and order.

  News of the violence, carried to every home through Chicago’s six daily newspapers, eventually led to political repercussions. After eight years in City Hall, “Big Bill” Thompson became the scapegoat for the lawlessness (which he had at the very least abetted), and as scandal engulfed his administration, he withdrew from the 1923 election in the certain knowledge that he would lose. He was succeeded by the well-meaning, earnest, and slightly dull William E. Dever, who intended to enforce Prohibition as it had never been enforced in Chicago. “This guerrilla war between hijackers, rum runners and illicit beer peddlers will be crushed,” he declared. “I am just as sure that this miserable traffic with its toll of human life and morals can be stamped out as I am mayor that I am not going to flinch for a minute.” With such statements, Dever sowed a whirlwind of violence. The irony of the situation was obvious; under the two corrupt Thompson administrations, the racketeers quietly went about their business. Now, in the reign of the upright Dever, violence broke out across the city, and it came from all directions. Gangsters started feuding with other gangsters, policemen began killing gangsters, and innocent bystanders got caught in the crossfire. Not even Johnny Torrio, who abhorred violence, could find a safe haven.