Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  • • •

  For all its pomp and circumstance, the funeral of Dion O’Banion became Johnny Torrio’s last hurrah. His vision of peaceful, profitable bootlegging (with a little gambling and prostitution on the side) ended as bootleggers and racketeers became ever more disorganized and combative, shifting alliances week by week. Torrio and Capone, who thought that they would enjoy greater security than they had ever known, became marked men the instant O’Banion went to his grave. Even at O’Banion’s funeral each man feared for his life as rumors circulated that gunmen were looking for them, that they were, in Chicago parlance, “on the spot.” Their newest enemy was “Hymie” Weiss, the bootlegger who had failed to persuade O’Banion to apologize to the Gennas. Weiss now set his sights on O’Banion’s prime North Side territory, and he was determined to take it from the Torrio-Capone organization by force.

  In the face of this threat, Torrio concluded it would be wise to absent himself from Chicago and his new enemies. Immediately following the funeral he once again entrusted the organization to Capone, whose main task at this point was simply to stay alive. Death was everywhere, and Capone became obsessed with security. Over the next eighteen months, the gangster associates of Dion O’Banion, including Moran, Drucci, and Weiss, would make a dozen recorded attempts on the life of Al Capone, each one a reminder both of the absolute necessity of security precautions as well as the incompetence of his adversaries. (If ever there was a gang that couldn’t shoot straight, it was Moran and company.)

  The threat of assassination had a profound effect on the way Al conducted himself and his business. Although he himself was unarmed as a mark of his status, he never went anywhere without at least two bodyguards, one on either side. With the exception of his home on South Prairie Avenue, he was never alone during this period. He traveled only by car, sandwiched between bodyguards, with a trusted, armed chauffeur named Sylvester Barton at the wheel. Even with all this protection, he preferred to travel under cover of night, risking travel by day only when absolutely necessary. Such were the rules of the deadly game to which he was irrevocably committed. The death of Frank—result of a split-second decision—had taught him fear, and fear became his constant companion, caution his watchword, as he shuttled from his lair at the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero to the fortress on Austin Avenue and his home on the South Side. Even indoors he took security precautions. In a restaurant he sat at the back, facing the door, near a window, in case he needed to effect a quick escape. In his home he never stood in front of an open window; the curtains were always drawn to prevent a sniper from drawing a bead on him. No other racketeer, not even Johnny Torrio, took the same precautions as Capone. Most of them, entranced with their own power and swagger and the fear they could strike into “civilians,” went about the city casually, carelessly, assuming the weapon bulging in a shoulder holster offered them all the protection they required. Not Capone. For him security, constant vigilance, and bodyguards were neither an encumbrance nor an admission of cowardice, they were a way of life. Rather than crippling him, this fatalism paradoxically liberated him; if he was going to die young, he might as well enjoy the illicit pleasures available to him while he could. His cocaine addiction made the thought of imminent death easier to accept; under the influence of the drug it seemed as if la mala vita amounted to a glorious suicide mission.

  As Capone sequestered himself in Chicago, Johnny Torrio traveled south to Hot Springs, Arkansas, which was fast becoming a refuge for racketeers on the lam, but the fear that gunmen loyal to the late O’Banion were trailing him prompted the aging racketeer to move on to New Orleans, Cuba, the Bahamas, and Florida. At each stop he transacted some quick bootlegging business before he fled.

  While Torrio contrived to stay a jump or two ahead of the gunmen, Weiss decided to strike at his chief deputy, Al Capone, who had remained in Chicago as the winter settled in and icy winds swept off Lake Michigan across the city’s towering, indifferent skyscrapers. On the assumption that the enemy of his enemy was a friend, Weiss formed a loose alliance with two other rivals of the Torrio-Capone organization, “Schemer” Drucci and “Bugs” Moran, both of whom had served as pallbearers for Dion O’Banion. They were long on idiosyncrasy and bravado, this trio, but short on skill and cunning. Their nominal leader, “Hymie” Weiss, was actually named Earl Wajciechowski, but when he shortened his last name, it was generally assumed he was a Jew, and he acquired the nickname “Hymie.” In reality, however, he was Catholic. Unlike many racketeers, who let their wives pray for their sins, Weiss was devout and carried rosaries wherever he went, frequently attended Mass, and had no difficulty reconciling his spiritual inclinations with his temporal activities, which now included his determination to assassinate Torrio and Capone. Weiss relished the perquisites of the racketeer’s life, especially the sumptuous chorus girl with whom he lived, Josephine Libby. “You’d expect a rich bootlegger to be a man-about-town, always going to nightclubs and having his home full of rowdy friends,” she said of their life together, “but Earl liked to be alone with me, . . . listening to the radio or reading . . . histories and law books. He was crazy about children.” But their home life was perhaps not quite so wholesome as she maintained. When federal marshals arrested him for violating the Mann Act (prostitution, in other words), they discovered an array of gangster paraphernalia in his apartment: shotguns, revolvers, knockout drops, handcuffs, and enough whiskey to stock a speakeasy. At twenty-six, he was the youngest member of the group, though he was already a veteran of the Chicago rackets, an example of the youngsters coming up fast in a boom economy supercharged by Prohibition.

  “Schemer” Drucci, the least-known, least-influential associate, derived his nickname from his propensity for concocting all manner of far-fetched hits, heists, and kidnappings. In reality Drucci was more the dreamer than the schemer, his criminal behavior confined to such prosaic activities as robbing public telephones of their coins. Still, he had a streak of recklessness and daring, and he looked the part of a gangster—tough, dark, and menacing, his expression frozen in a tragic mask topped by wild, unkempt hair: a face to haunt the dreams of his enemies.

  Of them all, George “Bugs” Moran was the most violent and unstable. (Since there is no justice when it comes to gangsters he would also be among the most long-lived.) They called him “Bugs,” even to his dimpled, handsome, smooth-shaven face, because his temper was so horrible people assumed he was “buggy” or crazy. Moran was of Polish and Irish descent, born in Minnesota in 1893, married to a woman claiming to be a Sioux Indian: an all-American combination. He took to a life of crime in his youth on Chicago’s North Side, and by the time he was twenty-one he had participated in twenty-six known robberies and had served several jail sentences. As a result, an aura of the repeat offender and the jailbird hung over him. Whenever there was a beer war slaying, the police routinely hauled “Bugs” in for questioning, only to release him hours later. He knew all the judges in Chicago and liked to tweak them. “That’s a beautiful diamond ring you’re wearing,” he once told Judge John Lyle, the self-appointed scourge of gangsters. “If it’s snatched some night, promise me you won’t go hunting me. I’m telling you now I’m innocent.”

  The Moran-Drucci-Weiss gang immediately set out to eliminate the man they considered primarily responsible for killing O’Banion: Al Capone. It was a task that would preoccupy them for the next five years, culminating in the most celebrated gangland slaying of all, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and even that bloodbath failed to resolve the conflict. Capone proved too careful, too lucky, to succumb to his implacable, incompetent opponents, but even if they had succeeded in killing him, it would have done little to alter the makeup of the Chicago rackets, for Capone was an organization man. Had Al fallen in the line of duty, Ralph was prepared to fill the leadership vacuum, just as Al had taken over when Frank died, and if Ralph was assassinated, there were all the younger Capones waiting in the wings. In addition, the family enjoyed the backing of Jack Guzik and his exten
sive network of political alliances. There really was little the Moran faction could do to topple the Torrio and Capone organization, though they certainly did not stop trying.

  On the afternoon of January 12, 1925, while Torrio was still down south, Moran, Drucci, and Weiss made their initial attempt on the life of Al Capone. They found him—or at least his chauffeured car—parked outside a restaurant at State and 55th Streets. The means they chose to execute the hit were precedent-setting. Until 1925, racketeers and their gunmen had traditionally relied on pistols, shotguns, and homemade bombs to settle their disputes. Now Capone’s would-be assassins employed a new, highly deadly weapon known as the Thompson submachine gun.

  It was not a new weapon, merely a forgotten one, surplus from the Great War, a “broom for sweeping trenches,” as it was called, designed to kill as many men as efficiently as current technology permitted. At the time, no one imagined it would fall into the hands of civilians, much less outlaws. The weapon was intended strictly for war, but war was precisely what the gangs in Chicago had declared on one another—and on the police, should they be tempted to interfere. They used them at first in practice, on dummies or other targets, in basements, but it was only a matter of time until some ferocious assassin decided to see what the tommy gun could do to his enemies. The inventor of this modern, scientific dispenser of death was a retired Army ordnance officer, Brigadier General John Taliaferro Thompson, who in 1916 devised what he called a “submachine gun.” It was smaller than its successor, but astonishingly potent, capable of firing 800 rounds per minute. The bullets were stored either in a magazine or a round drum, which gave the weapon its distinctive look. Although it was as large as a shotgun, and the drum made concealment difficult, it was still relatively light, less than ten pounds, yet its .45-caliber bullets could pierce armor plate at a distance of 500 yards. Accuracy was impossible; just holding onto the gun was all that most men could manage. Because the tommy gun recoiled at the rate it spat bullets, it often gave its handler deep bruises.

  After the war, the Auto-Ordnance Corporation, based in New York, tried to sell the weapon commercially, and since it manufactured 15,000 of them, it tried hard. Their plan was to equip every major police department in the country, as well as reputable private security forces, with the tommy gun. The New York Herald of January 31, 1922, carried an advertisement for the gun, declaring it a “Sure Defense Against Organized Bandits and Criminals” and proceeded to explain how changing times demanded no less: “The old time safeguards are inadequate to foil the carefully planned raids of heavily armed bandits, whose ‘getaway’ is assured by high powered automobiles.” The gun sold for a modest $175, the drum magazine cost an additional $50. Since there were no laws to prohibit or to limit the sale of the submachine gun, the Auto-Ordnance company enjoyed a wide-open market. Yet they found few customers, and most of the guns were stockpiled until unscrupulous dealers delivered them into the hands of the very outlaws they were intended to be used against. By then some regulations—too little and too late—had been instituted, and the black market price for a nice submachine gun with the serial number filed off or obscured by a row of little Xs had soared to $2,000. Only gangsters could afford those prices. At first, the Chicago police were at a loss to explain the damage caused by the earliest machine gun attacks. Old-fashioned shots fired one at a time chipped away at masonry here and there; now, hundreds of .45-caliber bullets shattered windows and left distinctive jagged patterns of bullet holes. When the police finally identified the cause of the damage, they, too, equipped themselves with tommy guns, and thus, in the space of a year or two, pursuing a career as a bootlegger became several times more deadly than it had ever been. The machine gun changed the rules of gangster war. No longer was a marksman’s skill required; now only brute force was needed to wield the weapon with deadly results.

  Armed with their submachine guns, the would-be assassins drove slowly past Capone’s car and fired at it. It was a fine show, destined to be repeated often in Chicago over the next six years, but in this case it was a failure. At the time the submachine guns opened fire, there were three men in Capone’s car: the chauffeur, Sylvester Barton, who was wounded, and two bodyguards, both of whom eluded the lethal spray of .45-caliber bullets by falling to the floor. As for Al himself, he had left the car only minutes before to enter the restaurant. He returned to find that the tommy guns had stippled his car with bullets, tearing a gash in the hood and ruining the motor.

  The new weapon made a mighty impression on its intended victim, as well. “That’s the gun!” Capone later told a journalist. “It’s got it over a sawed-off shotgun like the shotgun has it over an automatic. It shoots four hundred and fifty shots a minute. Put on a bigger drum and it will shoot well over a thousand. The trouble is they are hard to get. A cop don’t want to get hold of one because his shield number gets mixed up in the record of sale. Bank guards ought to be a good spot to get them from.”

  • • •

  As Capone’s driver, Sylvester Barton, recuperated from the injuries he had received in the attempt on the life of his boss, a young man named Tommy Cuiringione took over the job. Within days henchmen working for the Moran-Drucci-Weiss forces kidnapped the new man. The weeks passed, and nothing was heard from the missing driver.

  A month after his disappearance, a couple of boys walking a horse through the woods south of Chicago paused at a cistern for the horse to drink. The horse refused, backing away from the cistern as if it contained something vile. Perhaps the boys looked in the cistern and saw what the horse had sensed; perhaps they did not bother to investigate. But later that day they brought a policeman to the suspect cistern. The policeman smelled the water, fouled by the stench of decaying flesh. With the help of the boys, he removed a body—pale, bloated, and disfigured—from the drinking hole. Whoever it was, it was obvious he had died horribly, for the skin was disfigured in numerous places with cigarette burns. His wrists and ankles were bound with wire, and at the back of his head there were five bullet holes. It was a death of surpassing brutality, even for brutal Chicago.

  The body, when it was identified, turned out to be that of Capone’s loyal driver, Tommy Cuiringione.

  For the boys who had found the corpse, it was their first encounter with death. For the policeman who had pulled it from the cistern, it was a sickening reminder of the level of violence in his city. And for Capone, who had employed the victim, it was evidence that the assassination of Dion O’Banion had been a mistake of major proportions. But O’Banion had been so sly and infuriating in the way he had double-crossed him that both Capone and Torrio had allowed themselves to be drawn into a contest which, once begun, could lead to the deaths of all the participants.

  • • •

  Despite the ever present danger, Torrio quietly returned to Chicago after his anxious journey through the South, tanned if not rested. He was still under indictment for the Sieben Brewery raid and would soon be standing trial along with eleven other men, and he had at least as much to fear from the police and federal law enforcement authorities as he did from rival gangsters. Fixed in his ways, he returned to his apartment and his wife. Assuming he was safe because he had turned over the reins of his organization to Capone, he went about the city unarmed, without even a bodyguard.

  On January 24, twelve days after the attempt on the life of Capone, Torrio judged the weather mild enough for shopping in the Loop with his wife. When darkness fell they headed home, arriving at their apartment building on Clyde Avenue a few minutes after four. As his wife, Ann, walked from the car to the door, Torrio followed a few steps behind her, carrying packages, heedless of the blue Cadillac rounding the corner and pulling up in front of the building. Two men—“Hymie” Weiss and “Bugs” Moran—jumped out of the car. Weiss held a sawed-off shotgun, Moran a pistol, and they took aim at Torrio’s automobile, apparently under the impression that their target was still in it. They fired, wounding the driver, Robert Barton (the brother of Al Capone’s chauffeur, who had be
en similarly afflicted), and then caught sight of Torrio. They fired wildly, in the general direction of Torrio, who was hit twice, in the chest and in the neck. The criminal mastermind, mentor of Al Capone and advocate of nonviolence, fell to the street, helpless, in agony, as his assassins approached. Weiss and Moran stood over him and deliberately fired into his right arm, and then, to destroy him as a man, into his groin. Throughout the ordeal, Torrio remained conscious. The gunmen were following the pattern of O’Banion’s killing: a series of bullets to the body, then the coup de grâce administered to the head. O’Banion’s avengers wanted Torrio to die the same way. Moran held a pistol inches from the victim’s head and prepared to fire, but before he squeezed off the fatal bullet he was distracted by a passing laundry truck. When he did fire, there was silence, a faint click; the firing chamber was empty: a typical Moran miscalculation. The would-be assassins fled, leaving Torrio barely alive on the icy asphalt.