Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Once St. John departed, Cicero belonged to Al Capone—not every building, of course—nevertheless, it belonged to him in spirit. It had taken two years of struggle, but he had attained dominion over the city. Now that he controlled the city without fear of inquiry from prying journalists, his organization stored its liquor in the safest of all locations: the basement of the Town Hall. Al gave a very public demonstration of his power over the local government when, one day, he got into an argument with Joseph Klenha, his handpicked mayor, and wound up throwing Hizzoner down the steps of the Town Hall and, as the mayor attempted to get to his feet, kicked him aside; all the while a policeman walking his beat observed without interfering.

  Under the Capone regime Louis Cowen continued to prosper—for a time. He managed the Cicero Tribune; Albert Capone, the second-youngest of all the brothers, served an apprenticeship in its circulation department. Thus the newspaper that had made its reputation attacking the Capones now became the Capones’ house organ. Cowen later entered a new racket: slot machines. In time, the former news dealer earned the title “King of the Slot Machines,” yet no matter how inflated his reputation became, he remained Al’s faithful errand boy. He continued to relish the perquisites of his position until one day in 1932. As he was delivering the proceeds of the day’s betting at the Hawthorne Race Track, some $6,000 in cash, a fusillade of bullets blasted him into eternity. The police inquiry into the murder of Louis Cowen led nowhere, nor was the money he carried at the time of his death ever recovered. The investigating detective, it is said, made off with the loot.

  • • •

  The Capone family lost a son in 1924, but before the year was out they gained one, as well.

  After the Capone brothers became the subject of lurid headlines—first Frank’s death at the hands of the police, and later Al’s murder of Joe Howard—reporters at Chicago’s daily papers became aware of yet another Capone brother. This one did not live in Chicago, as the rest of his family did, nor was he a racketeer. He was, the newsmen were astonished and amused to note, a Nebraska Prohibition agent who had taken the name of Richard Hart—“Two-Gun” Hart, as he was called back home. Even though he was on the opposite side of the law from the rest of his siblings, his burning dark eyes, olive complexion, and determined manner all created an unmistakable family resemblance.

  He was now drawn to Chicago by the headlines his brothers had generated, to see what had become of the kin he had abandoned. The Capones in 1924 were a much different family than the one he had left in 1912. So much had happened; his father had died four years earlier, and the entire clan had moved to Chicago, where Hart found them living in the solid, conventional house on South Prairie Avenue. In a sense, everyone was the same, all of them living on top of one another, Teresa still cooking, but everyone was different, too. This was not Brooklyn, and the Capones were no longer just another family of recently arrived Italian immigrants struggling for a foothold on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. They had, for better or worse, made a name for themselves in Chicago. In the Loop, in Cicero, and out on the distant reaches of South Prairie Avenue the Capones were somebody, as they had never been back in Brooklyn, or, for that matter, in Naples. As Hart discovered, they were full-fledged racketeers now, in league with Johnny Torrio. They were not members of the Mafia, which even here, in America, remained a stronghold of Sicilians, or the Neapolitan Camorra, which was strictly Old World, but of their new American counterpart, the rackets, the “syndicate,” the “organization.” No matter what name it was given, it took an up-to-date, businesslike approach to the same old disreputable trades, while benefiting greatly from a new line, bootlegging, thanks to the hypocrisies of Prohibition.

  One of the most startling aspects of his brothers’ life in Chicago was how freely they went about the city, despite their notoriety. The journalists, many of whom used the Capones’ drinking and gambling facilities, treated them as friends, almost as celebrities. So when their brother came a-calling from Nebraska, the Capones were happy to show off the family’s black sheep in the white hat. The reporters, in turn, asked Hart the inevitable question: did he, as a Prohibition agent, sworn to uphold the law, plan to arrest his brothers for bootlegging? Hart told the newsmen he certainly would, if any of his brothers ever happened to set foot in Nebraska. As long as they stayed in Chicago, they were safe.

  Hart also knew his family was still in mourning. The recent death of Frank had done nothing to deter the surviving brothers from entering ever more deeply into a life of crime; if anything, the tragedy increased their determination to pursue la mala vita in Chicago, wherever it might lead. His senseless death demonstrated anew what they had always known to be true: that there was no justice for Italians in America, except for the justice they enforced by their own hand. The police, politicians, the mayor, even the governor of Illinois could all be bought with the proceeds of prostitution, bootlegging, and gambling. In this wilderness of corruption, only the gun spoke with absolute authority, as Hart knew better than any of his siblings. He was aware of their criminal activities, and he knew that his younger brother Al had recently taken a man’s life, but they were still family.

  Despite the obvious differences in the paths they had chosen, what mattered in the end were the blood ties, the unstated sympathies, especially between Hart and his brother Al. Like Al, Hart had been involved in the death of a man just a few months before the Joe Howard murder. He had nearly lost his job and his life because of it. Both men possessed a strong will to power, and both were drawn to the gun and gunplay. The two brothers had a fierce desire to impose their will, and they had both become notorious in the process, as the nicknames they both had earned—“Two-Gun” and “Scarface”—indicated. Each brother personified one aspect of a duality deep in the Capone family’s collective psyche, one choosing to become an outlaw, the other a lawman, each a mirror image of the other. It was as if one brother represented a hidden aspect of another, Hart displaying Al’s frustrated striving toward respectability, and Al acting out Hart’s barely restrained attraction to violence and anarchy. Good and evil inseparably linked by a fraternal tie.

  Although he reestablished ties to his family, Hart did not resign his commission as a Prohibition agent; he was not tempted to exchange the marshal’s Stetson for the gangster’s fedora. He had his own life to lead in Nebraska, his own wife and children, who knew him only as Richard Hart, the lawman, and he had his own reputation to maintain. So after his visit to Chicago, he returned to the wrinkle in the prairie known as Homer, Nebraska, the open spaces, and the Indian reservations, where he felt most at home. It was as though he were leaving the twentieth century, where his brothers dwelled and became wealthy from their collective endeavors, for the nineteenth, where a man lived and died by his own devices and controlled his own destiny. This man who appeared so violently determined to assert himself was actually adrift on the tides of time, a hitchhiker through history.

  • • •

  Thereafter, Hart returned to Chicago at least once a year, generally during holidays. He never told his wife, Kathleen, where he was going, or why; nor did he tell his children about their notorious uncles in Chicago. Still, rumors trailed him back to Homer, and as his children grew older, they overheard their friends whispering that their father, “Two-Gun” Hart, was related to the famous Al “Scarface” Capone. And when Hart’s children weren’t listening, their friends called them “Capone.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Memento Mori

  PIMP, BOOKKEEPER, PROTÉGÉ, political boss, gambler, bootlegger, “used-furniture dealer,” mourner, murderer, addict—Capone had played all these roles during his first four years in Chicago: a high-velocity voyage into notoriety. With the help of his brothers and the patronage of Johnny Torrio he had become master of a fair-sized industrial town by the fall of 1924. He was wealthy, he was powerful, he was feared, he was well dressed. He had established his wife, child, and mother in a comfortable home, and he observed the proprieties of home life ev
en as he sought the favors of prostitutes and supported himself with the poisoned fruit of their trade. All this, and he was only twenty-five years old: a legend-in-the-making, another Chicago success story. The racketeer as tycoon. Yet as Capone knew so well, a single well-aimed bullet could take it all from him in an instant, and other racketeers would rush to divide the spoils. After an opulent gangster funeral—the wreaths, the endless cortege, the sobbing at the grave—he would become just another victim of the city’s gangster wars, remembered only by his family. Indeed, it was highly likely that he would meet his end in precisely this way, as racketeers in Chicago were doing with increasing frequency all around him.

  On Chicago’s South Side, the truce Johnny Torrio had carefully put in place with the advent of Prohibition was quickly disintegrating, with lethal results. With some accuracy, the press labeled the struggle a “beer war,” although much more than beer and other types of alcohol were at stake; it was actually a vicious battle for political control of Chicago. In just one month, September 1923, the beer war claimed four victims, all members of gangs that had violated Torrio’s truce and invaded one another’s territories. In December, five more murders occurred in the bootlegging trade, each one dutifully, even lovingly, recorded by the press. Now the smell of gunfire hung over all of Chicago, not just Cicero.

  The Chicago Crime Commission, the most reliable source of information concerning the early growth of organized crime in Chicago, compiled a body count of the beer war comprising both the well-publicized, pivotal assassinations, when real power changed hands, and the day-in, day-out deaths of foot soldiers. In 1920, for example, the survey recorded twenty-three “gangland-style” slayings in Chicago; most remained unsolved. The following year, the number of deaths reached twenty-nine, and in 1922 the rolls increased to thirty-six victims. Then, in 1923, as Prohibition took hold and the stakes grew, there were fifty-two casualties, an average of one a week, according to the Commission’s survey, and in 1924, the number crept up to fifty-four, with no end in sight.

  Although bootlegging-related deaths accounted for only a fraction of Chicago’s overall murder rate, they received the majority of the headlines, and the disproportionate attention accorded them prompted one journalist of the period to state, “Two-thirds of the deaths in Chicago are due to the beer running trade.” Statistics failed to support his claim, but the impression gained general acceptance, especially outside the city limits. In Washington, D.C., the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the leadership of its youthful director, J. Edgar Hoover, refused to interfere in Chicago or anywhere else, preferring to leave the messy business of enforcing Prohibition laws to the beleaguered and often corrupt agents of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol Violations. So the violence in Chicago—all of it widely reported, discussed, and condemned—grew unchecked, tolerated as the inevitable stepchild of Prohibition. “You can hardly be surprised at the boys killing each other,” said Clarence Darrow, the eminent trial lawyer, who lived in Chicago. “The business pays very well, but it is outside the law and they can’t go to court, like shoe dealers or real-estate men or grocers when they think an injustice has been done them, or unfair competition has arisen in their territory. So they naturally shoot.”

  By the time gangland violence in Chicago attracted national attention, the figure most often associated with it was Al Capone, whose name was dragged into nearly every major slaying, though never with conclusive evidence. It was true that the bloodshed of the early and mid-1920s worked uncannily to his advantage, eliminating his rivals, superiors, and enemies, and making it possible for him to rise to the topmost echelon of the rackets, but he consolidated his power not by plotting murders but by running an organization, taking care to stay well behind the front lines, and benefiting from the mayhem taking place all around him. Nowhere was this better illustrated than by the death of the man who handled the floral arrangements for Frank’s funeral: Dion O’Banion.

  • • •

  The angel-faced chief of Chicago’s North Side bootlegging had prospered ever since that gray, solemn day in May 1924 when Frank Capone was laid to rest. His business was flourishing, not just flowers, but bootlegging, which netted him nearly $1 million annually, and he supplemented this amount with a series of daredevil hijackings of other bootleggers’ finest stock, bonded whiskey being a particular favorite of his. Only recently he had raided a warehouse containing nearly 2,000 barrels of whiskey, which he replaced with water as a jest. Officially, he was allied with the Torrio-Capone organization, which offered him an umbrella of protection from rival bootleggers and numerous freelancers, but even though he had contributed men and firepower to the April I election in Cicero that brought Capone to power, he felt slighted, used, misunderstood. Think of the gorgeous flowers he had supplied for Frank’s funeral!

  Torrio threw O’Banion a bone in the form of a tightly circumscribed piece of territory in Cicero; the grant wasn’t worth much, maybe twenty grand a month, walking-around money by the standards of the Torrio syndicate, but it was a presence. O’Banion owed his fortune to being a little crazy and to his talent for business, as he proved anew by increasing the take of this concession fivefold, in part by encouraging speakeasies to move to Cicero. Torrio and Capone were impressed, envious, resentful. “Dion was all right and he was getting along . . . better than he had any right to expect,” Al explained later, adding a memorable turn of phrase. “But, like everyone else, his head got away from his hat.” Ever the strategist, the peacemaker, and the visionary racketeer, Torrio proposed to give O’Banion a percentage of the organization’s income from prostitution in return for a percentage of O’Banion’s Cicero operation. The deal was a typical Torrio proposition, linking potential adversaries in a common enterprise. But Torrio made one miscalculation. O’Banion, like many Irish racketeers, was appalled by prostitution; it was a filthy business, and he preferred to leave it to the Italians and the Jews. Let them burn in hell for all eternity. Deal refused.

  O’Banion’s resentment of the Torrio-Capone syndicate’s preeminence extended to their allies, especially the six Genna brothers. The “Terrible Gennas,” they were called—Angelo, Sam, Pete, Tony, Mike, and Jim—all of them Sicilian bootleggers. They were reputed to be a tough crew, prepared to resort to violence at the slightest provocation, yet the Gennas were also imbued with a certain Old World, fin-de-siècle elegance and ennui, as if they had been exiled from their proper realm and were fated to pass the rest of their days engaged in a futile search for their lost grandeur. They were a tightly knit family, these Gennas, and one of their number, Tony, resembled a poet more than he did a gangster. He did whatever he could to distance himself from his disreputable family, living in the Congress Hotel with his companion, Gladys Bagwell, a minister’s daughter who played piano in speakeasies. He aspired to a career as an architect and was fiercely proud of the apartment buildings he had designed to supply decent housing for his impoverished countrymen. No matter how far afield he ranged, however, the family business came first, even for Tony.

  The Gennas easily overcame the restrictions of Prohibition by acquiring government authorization to produce “industrial alcohol.” Permission in hand, the Gennas became “alky-cookers,” that is, they paid impoverished Sicilian families in Chicago’s Little Italy to brew whiskey at home in small copper stills, easily moved to avoid detection. The Sicilian families had been accustomed to brewing at home in Italy, and it was natural for them to continue to do so in the United States. The Gennas paid their Sicilian home brewers the astonishing amount of $15 a day, and all they had to do in return was to mind the still and siphon off the residue. Meanwhile, the Gennas’ fee for the homemade whiskey quickly became a necessary supplement to each household’s meager income. Every week the Gennas gathered the results of the week’s alky-cooking, which they stored in a giant warehouse located at 1022 Taylor Street, only four blocks from the Maxwell Street police station. This proved to be a convenient arrangement for the police and the Gennas alike, and the sight of cop
s entering and exiting the warehouse as they collected their bribes became so common that people in the neighborhood referred to the warehouse as “the police station.” The arrangement was so profitable that policemen from distant districts came by to collect bribes—until the Maxwell Street police gave the Gennas a list of their men, the only cops to pay off.

  It was dreadful stuff, the Gennas’ homemade brew. It stank, it was raw, and it was dangerous. Brewed quickly, on the cheap, the Gennas’ whiskey teemed with toxins. Real whiskey acquires its distinctive golden hue from the wooden casks in which it is slowly and patiently aged. But the Gennas had no time for the careful distillation of whiskey; instead, they colored it with caramel, or coal tar, and flavored it with fusel oil, a noxious by-product of fermentation normally removed from whiskey lest it cause severe mental disturbance or even insanity. These chemicals were not the only hazards to the health of the consumer. Confiscating a hundred casks of the home brew, the police discovered dead rats in the whole lot.

  Nor were the Gennas the only ones selling home brew. Alky-cooking was ubiquitous in Prohibition-era Chicago; the streets of Little Italy reeked with the sickeningly sweet vapors of homemade booze. The phenomenon was repeated all over Chicago, all over the country, in fact. It was one of the saddest aspects of the failure of Prohibition. Good liquor, manufactured by traditional distilleries, was scarce and extremely expensive; in its place cheaply made substitutes flooded speakeasies, poisoning drinkers. As Prohibition wore on, Americans forgot what real liquor was like, how it tasted, the subtle ways it affected the mind and body. Instead, they became familiar with the far more potent effects of bootleg booze. If any type of alcohol deserved to be prohibited, it was this poisoned fruit of Prohibition. The Gennas put their homemade poison in a bottle labeled brandy or whiskey or bourbon, and thus disguised it was extremely profitable. Three dollars a barrel: half the price of O’Banion’s high-class whiskey. Each still produced as much as 350 gallons of high-proof poison a week with ingredients costing less than a dollar a gallon. The Gennas grossed over $300,000 a month, of which $7,000 went toward payoffs to the police, who also had the opportunity to purchase the alcohol, wholesale, if they wished. When the Gennas began selling this wretched alcohol in O’Banion’s prime territory on the North Side, the florist implored Torrio to send the six Sicilians back where they belonged, on the West Side. Torrio demurred; he knew how dangerous the Gennas were, heavily armed, steeped in Sicilian blood oaths, and well connected to the police. In defiance, O’Banion dared to do what no other bootlegger would: he hijacked a truck bearing $30,000 of the Gennas’ rotgut. The Gennas rattled their sabers, but with Torrio acting as go-between, advocating restraint, the animosity between the Irishman and the Sicilians stopped short of outright war.