Facing the prospect of at least four years of Dever’s rhetoric and tiresome reform politics, the Torrio-Capone organization decided to move the base of their fast-growing operation to the western suburban town of Cicero. It seemed like the ideal solution, for Cicero was small enough for the organization to control. They could own the city government, from the mayor to the dog catcher. Their gambling dens and brothels could function without interference. And Cicero was in Cook County, as was Chicago; indeed, the big city merged almost imperceptibly into its smaller neighbor. Although Cicero was a suburb, it was largely industrial. There were no architectural flights of fancy here, only endless rows of brick buildings squatting beside the town’s broad avenues, below the immense, smoke-filled sky. It was an ugly place; you’d have to go all the way to Gary, Indiana, and its hulking gray furnaces to find more depressing surroundings. Until the arrival of Al Capone, Cicero was best known as the site of an enormous Western Electric plant, which employed over 20 percent of the town’s wage earners; they assembled, so the company claimed, most of the world’s telephones. They were paid handsome wages, these dutiful, hardworking citizens of Cicero, to work for Western Electric, which anchored the town’s economy.
Like every other part of Cook County, Cicero had its distinctive ethnic cast. There were few Irish, Italians, or Jews in Cicero, and virtually no blacks; 80 percent of its 40,000 inhabitants came from Bohemia in Central Europe, or their parents had. Cicero’s Bohemians were known as quiet, even submissive folk, rather rigid, clinging stubbornly to the ways of the Old World, who wanted one thing that only the bootleggers could give them: their daily beer. No ordinary saloon suds, theirs was a robust, heavy brew, so filling that the men often drank it instead of eating a conventional lunch. It was made by local breweries according to Old World formulas, and it occupied a central role in their lives. It was the workingman’s due, and more, a symbol of their culture and way of life. To Cicero’s citizens, Prohibition was an inexplicable aberration in an otherwise benign country, and they deeply resented it as an intrusion on their peaceful, productive way of life. For all these reasons, the organization’s move to Cicero should have been a happy solution, but it was not to be. From the moment the Capone boys came to town, gunfire echoed in the once-quiet streets, and violence subverted time-honored custom.
The racketeers’ conquest of Cicero began in October 1923, when Johnny Torrio opened a brothel on Roosevelt Road, staffed with twenty prostitutes. Police arrested the entire consignment of girls, as well as a second batch Torrio sent to another location in Cicero, but the real opposition to the introduction of prostitution came from rival racketeers afraid to be outdone. Always the peacemaker, Torrio sat down with them and painstakingly worked out agreements concerning which gang would handle what vice in Cicero. Once the deal was set, Torrio decided the time had come to move his aging mother back to Italy. The two of them traveled to Italy, where he squirreled away the millions he had made in the Chicago rackets and set her up in a large estate staffed by thirty servants. In his absence, he left the management of the Cicero rackets to Al Capone, who proceeded to demonstrate a style completely different from that of his master.
Although he had been in Chicago for more than three years, Al Capone remained an unknown, with the exception of the brief notoriety he had gained in his 1922 car accident. He had managed a few brothels, demonstrated a talent for ingratiating himself with Torrio and Guzik, and had moved the rest of his family to their comfortable, bourgeois home out on South Prairie Avenue, but beyond that he had little to show for himself. He was still a small-time hoodlum masquerading under various aliases, most frequently “Al Brown.” But all that changed when he assumed the management of Torrio’s Cicero operation. Torrio had been content to build an empire piece by carefully assembled piece while remaining hidden in the background; Capone insisted on nothing less than complete control of Cicero, thrusting himself into the foreground at every opportunity. For the first time, the extravagant outlines of the Capone persona became visible to all Chicago.
As soon as Torrio sailed for Italy, Capone installed himself in a somber, redbrick building known as Anton’s Hotel, owned by a restaurateur known as Tony “the Greek” Anton, who had joined his retinue. He was soon joined by his older brother Ralph, who opened or assumed control of speakeasies and nightclubs. The best known was the Cotton Club of Cicero, located at 5342 West Twenty-second Street. The files of the Chicago Crime Commission, which continued to track the spread of the rackets, characterized it as a “ ‘whoopee’ spot where liquor flowed freely and it served as a rendezvous for those interested in night life.”
The most visible Capone in Cicero at this time was not Ralph or Al but Frank, who, at twenty-nine, was two years younger than Ralph and four years older than Al. Of all the brothers, Frank seemed by far the most promising. He was certainly the best looking—tall and lean, with thick, wavy hair. His quiet manner and neat business suits gave him the air of an intent young banker. Trading on his respectable appearance, Frank fronted for the organization in its dealings with the Cicero town government. In exchange for Capone’s support, they pledged to let the organization’s gambling and prostitution rackets function without interference. They were to see to it that no one, not one solitary police officer, stood in the way of Capone’s clubs, gambling dens, and brothels. To ensure these worthy men held office, Frank Capone went far beyond the usual Chicago-style politics of importing people from other towns to vote again and again. In his first Cicero election, he organized a show of Capone force, placing a fleet of sedans on the street. He stationed men at the polling places to ask voters their preference; anyone planning to vote for a candidate not controlled by the Capone organization was advised to leave. At day’s end, Capone henchmen seized ballot boxes in the precincts considered favorable to the opposition, emptied them, and filled them with new ballots favoring Capone candidates. The inevitable result of Frank’s election strategy was that every Capone-backed candidate was elected by an overwhelming margin.
While Frank reorganized Cicero’s political scene, Ralph supervised the opening of the organization’s new brothel, the Stockade. It was a gruesome choice of a name, conjuring as it did the bygone stockades of the Levee’s white slave trade, in which young girls were “broken in” to their new calling. As for location, Ralph chose to place the brothel not within Cicero proper but in neighboring Forest View, a newly incorporated village whose lack of a local government meant that Ralph need not trouble himself with the niceties of rigged elections. Instead, he went directly to the head of the police, Joseph W. Nosek, and announced his intention to build a “hotel” in Forest View. Recalled Nosek, “I saw no harm because I just didn’t know who the Capones were.” He found out once he saw Ralph’s entourage of smalltime racketeers. Nosek ordered them out of town. That night two men rousted him out of bed and hustled him to the town hall, where others awaited him. “They told me they were going to kill me,” Nosek said later. “They beat me over the head with the butts of their guns and though I was streaming with blood and dazed from pain they kicked me over the floor.”
In the end, Nosek was spared his life, and Ralph erected his brothel. It sheltered about sixty girls who worked out of a large old building made of stone and wood. The Stockade was more than a whorehouse; it also served as a gambling den, a munitions dump for the Capone organization, and a hideout for racketeers on the run from the law. A first-class, full-service establishment, the Stockade catered not to Cicero’s working-class population but to pleasure seekers who came by car from Chicago. The Capone-controlled Stockade prospered and became by far the best-known attraction in Forest View, which acquired a new nickname, “Caponeville.”
As the Torrio organization strengthened its hold on Cicero, Al developed a special interest in the operation of a new, state-of-the-art gambling establishment known as the Ship. After his apprenticeship in Torrio’s brothels, gambling was actually a step toward respectability for Al, but managing a gambling den was a complicate
d business. To function properly, it required more than an assortment of roulette wheels and blackjack tables; it also required a staff of specialists. There were the ropers, who stood outside the door, trying to lure customers within; the friskers, who were prepared to relieve patrons of their weapons; the stickman, who controls the dice; the bankers, who control the payment of money; and, most importantly, the shills, who were employees of the house posing as patrons. Taking care to look as legitimate as they could, the shills were responsible for creating the excitement designed to keep a patron in a game, and who made it unlikely that the patron would ever win.
In addition to the Ship, the Torrio-Capone organization also came into control of Cicero’s Hawthorne Race Track, which presented fixed races. Despite Al’s increasing involvement with all these varied aspects of gambling, he himself was an astonishingly reckless bettor, who invariably lost far more than he gained. Of course, when Al gambled at the Ship, he was the house, so losing was to his advantage, and at the track, he always knew in advance which horse would win, so he had little incentive to master the fine points of handicapping. At the same time, his making a point of dropping large sums of money—at first hundreds and later thousands of dollars on a roll of the dice—gave the impression that Cicero’s gambling establishments were indeed legitimate.
• • •
Although his power was increasing month by month, Al Capone remained remarkably unchanged. When not aroused to fury, he could be as charming, gregarious, relaxed as he had been back in the Brooklyn dance halls he frequented during his adolescent years. He spent much of his time with his landlord and friend, “Tony the Greek,” lounging in Tony’s restaurant by the hour, and consuming vast quantities of Tony’s food. Tony, for his part, saw only Capone’s generous and warmhearted side, and he was quick to leap to his friend’s defense. He would tell of Al’s countless acts of generosity, the lavish tips he dispensed on newsboys and errand-runners.
News of his progress in Chicago traveled all the way back to Brooklyn, inspiring other young Italian immigrants to try their chances in the wide open western city on the lake. Inevitably, they gravitated to Al Capone, expecting he would give them a job that would make them rich overnight. Although he did not make them rich, Capone did find them jobs, usually back in Brooklyn, where he still had influence. His old neighbors on Navy Street, the Pitaros, with whom he had formed a short-lived gang, were typical beneficiaries of Al Capone’s informal employment agency. “ ‘I’m going to Chicago, I’m going to speak to Al Capone,’ ” Angela Pitaro recalled her oldest brother, Joseph, declaring one day. “He wanted to get in the gang, my brother.”
When he reached Chicago, Joseph Pitaro was warmly received by Al, who took him on a tour of Chicago Heights—Capone territory. “Joseph,” he said, “this is my building, this my laundry, and these are my whorehouses.” He then took his visitor to the Capone headquarters; there were guns everywhere. “Joseph,” Capone suddenly warned him, “you go home. Go back to Brooklyn. You got a job there, and don’t you ever get mixed up in this.” Then Capone gave Joseph a small but significant lead. “When you go back to Brooklyn,” the racketeer advised, “you go to Myrtle Avenue, to the movie house, and see Mr. Haskel.”
Haskel, it turned out, was a Jew, a novelty for people like the Pitaros, and he gave Joseph a test. “I’ll show you something,” he said. They entered the movie theater, where a gang of rowdy youths were disturbing the other patrons. “You see that? That’s got to stop. If you’re man enough to stop these boys, you’ve got a job.” Joseph took his coat off, smoothed his hair, and walked through aisles until he came to the troublemakers. He grabbed one by the neck. “Come here,” he said to the boy, “I want to talk to you. Are you gonna stop this? Are you gonna behave? If you ain’t gonna behave, you’re getting out of here, and you’re not comin’ here no more to this show.” Joseph managed to quiet the boys, and the job, thanks to Al Capone, was his.
As the Capone aura grew, people gravitated to him not just for what he could do for them, but because they wanted to associate with him, and, even more tellingly, to be like him.
Among the would-be Capones was a young boxer, a club fighter named Mickey Cohen (you didn’t have to be Italian to follow Capone’s example), who ingratiated himself with Al’s brothers Ralph and Matthew. Soon the brothers invited him to dinner at the Capone home on South Prairie Avenue, where, over Teresa’s pasta, Mickey fell under Al’s spell. From the start, Cohen maintained “a great respect for Mr. Capone, because the guy was such a man and carried himself so nicely.” He was also charmed by Al’s solicitous manner. “After I got to know him, he always patted me down to see if I had money in my kick—my pocket. I think the least he ever put in my kick was a couple of hundred-dollar bills. I respected his ways, like a kid has an admiration for a great boxer or some idol that you want to kind of follow in his footsteps, or mold your life in his footsteps. . . . Admiring the guy as much as I did, I may have tried to copy his ways. Like somebody may talk in a way that you like, so you try to copy his way of expressing himself.”
As Cohen intuitively sensed, Capone’s smoothness and his air of civility made the rackets seem as legitimate as any other business, an avenue to self-respect. For an outsider like Cohen, the legitimate world was a country club to which admittance was forbidden and prejudice a white picket fence separating him from privilege and entitlement. But Capone’s example made those cruel boundaries seem irrelevant. “See, I was really nothing—a young kid really—when I came to Al Capone, and the guy treated me like I was Frank Costello from New York,” Cohen later wrote with something approaching wonder. “He never talked down to me or anything. And he was worried about how I was getting along all right, my comfort. And he even said to me, ‘What do you want to box for? It’s a tough racket, why don’t you get out of it?’ . . . He intimated to me . . . if I found something to get into, he would back me up.” With Al’s blessing, Cohen began running a small crap game in cahoots with Matthew Capone—Mattie, as everyone called him. Cohen financed the crap game in a novel fashion; each night he borrowed several hundred dollars from the cash register of a barbershop in the Loop, and each morning he returned the amount, plus a small additional sum. But money was not Cohen’s problem; people were. Mattie and Al were often not on the best of terms, for the younger Capone fiercely resented Al’s prominence, and the sibling rivalry eventually brought Cohen into conflict with Jack Guzik. “Greasy Thumb” summoned Cohen to a meeting and delivered a harangue in which he tried to lay down the law, at least as it was understood by racketeers: “Are you crazy? We gave you an OK for poker. We don’t have any craps in the Loop, and you come around and you open a fucking crap game. Are you out of your mind?”
“I couldn’t make no money with poker,” Cohen tried to explain.
Guzik ordered Cohen to shut down his crap game and report to work at a Capone gambling joint going by the name of Chew Tobacco Ryan’s. “I’m putting you on the payroll for twenty-five dollars a day,” Guzik said, but Cohen insisted this was not enough for him and his assistants. “That’s what I was told,” Guzik replied. The scales fell from Cohen’s eyes. Al was the salesman, the glad-hander and backslapper, who picked pockets in reverse, depositing money rather than stealing it, but once you were on the inside, Cohen discovered, you didn’t deal with Al, you dealt with Ralph or Guzik, which wasn’t nearly so much fun. They didn’t waste time holding hands and making you feel good the way Al did, they didn’t cater to your hopes and fears; they told you exactly what they wanted you to do. It was a classic Mr. Inside/Mr. Outside operation, with Al presenting a smiling face to the outside world and Guzik maintaining internal discipline. He was a son of a bitch, accustomed to dealing with other men who fit that description; they were all sons of bitches together. Shouting and posturing, Cohen and Guzik failed to come to an agreement, and Cohen stormed out of the meeting, vowing to reopen his crap game that night, and “Greasy Thumb” Guzik be damned.
Five nights later, Cohen happened to be st
anding out in front of his joint, where a game was in progress, looking out for meddlesome cops. (“You know, a ten-dollar or twenty-dollar bill would carry the coppers.”) The snow was knee-deep, the street quiet, and then, all at once, “I’m a son of a bitch if a black car don’t come by with this machine gun and baroom!” Thus spake “Greasy Thumb.”
Cohen refused to seek safety by falling to the street, for he did not want to sully the flashy camel hair coat he had just purchased from Hill Brothers. Still standing, he watched the black car circle and return; the gunmen fired again, not directly at Cohen, who assumed “they were just trying to scare me.” Later, Cohen fancied himself the hero of this encounter: “They were all talking about that crazy little Jew bastard that wouldn’t even fall.” In fact, the chastened gambler shut down his rogue crap game and began to look for a new racket.
Although Capone could be secretive and brutal, he was also capable of whimsical, self-aggrandizing gestures when the mood came over him. Learning that Peter Aiello was coming to Chicago to attend an engineers convention, Al remembered the Baltimore contractor who had given him his first legitimate job and subsequently loaned him $500 to move to Chicago. Determined to repay the debt many times over, and, not so incidentally, to demonstrate his newfound status in Chicago, Capone decided not to throw a mere banquet for Aiello. No, his heart was so full of gratitude he decided to organize an entire parade.
Since Al Capone wanted a parade in Cicero, a parade there was. On the appointed day, the guest of honor beheld hundreds of well-wishers, all of them assembled at the behest of Al Capone and the organization, marching through the streets of Cicero, waving flags and throwing confetti, all in celebration of Peter Aiello, the man who had sent Capone west.
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