The outcome of surrender was impossible to predict. Within him stirred the potential for redemption as well as the lust for fast money, deceit, and murder. Yet to be known as the former manager of the notorious Four Deuces, to be called “Scarface” for the rest of his life, was intolerable. The opinion of other people always mattered deeply to him; he craved their good opinion, in fact. He had his whole life before him; he was only twentyseven—old for gangsters, who tended to die at about that age—but he was young according to the standards of the legitimate world. So, after much anguished indecison, Capone chose to return to Chicago to seek exoneration and ultimately, to abandon the rackets in which he had made his name and his fortune in favor of a legitimate career. To choose legitimacy, then, was to choose life. He would leave the rackets forever.
• • •
After four months of rest and reflection, Al Capone called the Chicago authorities to tell them he was returning to Illinois at last. According to the agreement he worked out with State’s Attorney Crowe, Capone planned to deliver himself into the custody of federal officers led by Pat Roche, the chief investigator, at the Illinois-Indiana state line.
On July 28, 1926, in sweltering midday heat, a car slowly approached the state line and deposited a bulky, well-dressed figure, instantly recognizable as Alphonse Capone. A contingent of reporters on hand to cover the proceedings approached and listened intently as Capone explained the arrangements. “I will go with Mr. Roche to the Federal Building [in Chicago],” he said in a matter-of-fact tone indicating his careful preparations for this moment. “We have been talking by long-distance phone, and I think the time is ripe for me to prove my innocence of the charges that have been made against me. I’ve been convicted without a hearing of all the crimes on the calendar. But I’m innocent, and it won’t take long to prove it.” A reporter asked why Capone had gone into hiding if he truly believed himself innocent, and the elusive racketeer responded, “The police have told me a lot of stories. They shoved a lot of murders over on me. They did it because they couldn’t find the men who did the jobs, and I looked like an easy goat.”
With these words Al Capone launched the campaign to clear his name.
* * *
1. A pseudonym.
2. A pseudonym.
CHAPTER 5
The Return of Al Capone
HIS CHRYSALIS OF PRIVACY TORN ASUNDER, Al Capone reentered Chicago to face accusations of murder. The unhurried pace of his summer sojourn in Lansing gave way to a series of bureaucratic shocks to his system; he was suddenly public property, deprived of his freedom, in police custody. Only now did the abhorrent implications of his situation become real. The police had gunned down his brother Frank with impunity, and they would seize any pretext to do the same to him. But Capone fought back the rage and fear the police inspired and put on an amiable façade, as if he were completely unconcerned about being surrounded by coppers who held him responsible for McSwiggin’s death. There would be no charming these coppers, no bribing them; his only course was to submit. The hour of judgment was at hand, and Capone, his immaculate fedora in place, his tie knotted precisely, readied himself to meet it.
On July 29, 1926, the morning after his surrender on the Illinois-Indiana state line, Capone was scheduled to appear before Judge Thomas Lynch, the chief justice of the Criminal Court of Chicago. The outcome would reveal whether Capone’s decision to emerge from hiding and confront the accusations concerning his involvement in the death of McSwiggin was the shrewdest or the most foolhardy of his career; it was certainly the riskiest. If he handled the situation well and kept his wits about him, he might succeed in avoiding the snares of the law, but if he lost his temper, he could lose his life in the process. Reporters awaited him on the courthouse steps, where he paused to try his case in the press by making a statement that qualified as a minor masterpiece of innuendo. “Of course I didn’t kill him,” Capone said of McSwiggin, as the journalists frantically scribbled in their notepads, trying to keep pace with the words uttered by the man who had mysteriously vanished for three months and had just as mysteriously returned to their midst. “Why should I? I liked the kid. Just ten days before he was killed I talked with McSwiggin. There were friends of mine with me. If we had wanted to kill him, we could have done it then and nobody would have known. But we didn’t want to; we never wanted to. Doherty and Duffy were my friends, too. I wasn’t out to get them. Why, I used to lend Doherty money. I wasn’t in the beer ‘racket’ and didn’t care where they sold. Just a few days before that shooting, my brother Ralph and Doherty and the O’Donnells were at a party together.”
To another reporter, Capone offered his most precious revelation: “I paid McSwiggin. I paid him plenty, and I got what I was paying for.” Thus Capone made several points: the first was that he knew and liked McSwiggin, the second was that McSwiggin frequented Capone-controlled speakeasies in violation of Prohibition, the third was that the deceased’s father was a drinking pal of Al’s, and finally, and most tellingly, he routinely bribed McSwiggin.
Having delivered his artful self-defense, Capone entered the courtroom to face the moment of truth, the charge of murder. He was accompanied by his lawyer, Thomas Nash, who had built a thriving practice on guiding racketeers such as Al Capone through the maze of the Chicago court system. It was whispered in the halls of the Federal Building that Nash managed to get his clients off with such frequency because he knew whom to bribe, and, when it came to jurors, whom to threaten. On this instance his preparations paid off, for no sooner did an assistant state’s attorney named George Gorman announce the warrant for murder than the judge dismissed the case, explaining, “This complaint was made by Chief of Detectives Schoemaker on cursory information and belief. Subsequent investigation could not legally substantiate the information.” After months of controversy, civic uproar, and the newspapers’ determination to call him to account, Capone was a free man.
The swift decision vindicated Capone’s delayed return to face questions and accusations concerning the murder of William McSwiggin; in fact, it proved to be a masterstroke, for the elusive racketeer had contrived to purchase the most precious commodity of all: time. In his absence tempers had cooled, and the continuing investigation into McSwiggin’s career had turned up a great deal of suspicious behavior. So open were McSwiggin’s alliances with various Irish bootleggers and men who could reasonably be called “gangsters”—alliances rooted in the neighborhood, going all the way back to their childhoods—that he was posthumously revealed to be a thoroughly sullied and compromised public servant who had at the very least placed himself repeatedly in harm’s way. He was, in short, an accident waiting to happen. Only a remarkably foolish and reckless prosecutor would routinely gamble and carouse with bootleggers, as McSwiggin had. And if McSwiggin was flouting Prohibition, the law he had sworn to uphold, and not merely taking a nip in the privacy of his home but racing from one bar to the next all across Cicero and doing so in the company of some of the city’s biggest bootleggers, and not merely drinking with them but accepting rides in their car and gambling with them, and telling his father about it, who, although a police sergeant, seemed to think nothing of such behavior—if McSwiggin was capable of such behavior, then what kind of prosecutor was he? More than that, what kind of example was he? As the public mulled over his behavior, it became apparent that Capone and McSwiggin were not on opposite sides of the law; they were, in fact, locked in an alliance—perhaps conspiracy is a more accurate description—against the law of the land. They were not at opposite ends of the moral scale; they were separated by only a few indistinct shades of gray. Each was using the other, and the public be damned. Ultimately, McSwiggin was using the law against itself. In light of these revelations, which had appeared throughout the summer of 1926, he was no longer the martyred public servant he had seemed that night in May when machine-gun bullets cut him down.
As Capone and his counsel left the courtroom, they passed Sergeant Anthony McSwiggin, a gaunt, tragic f
igure, there to bear witness for his slain son. After the man he believed to be his son’s killer left, McSwiggin said bitterly, “They pinned a medal on him and turned him loose,” and he went on to mutter, “They killed me, too, when they killed my boy.”
The enmity between Capone and Anthony McSwiggin did not die in court that day. In a lonely, quixotic quest, the old policeman wandered the jails of Chicago, seeking to interview prisoners who might supply clues as to the identity of his son’s murderer. Although none gave Capone’s name, the elder McSwiggin went to the papers and claimed he now knew who had killed his boy, but he could not reveal the murderers’ identity because the information was too dangerous for public consumption. Soon he reversed himself and said he could, after all, name the men who had killed William McSwiggin. The killers were Al Capone; two of his lieutenants, Frankie Rio and Frank Diamond; and a bootlegger by the name of Bob McCollough. Few heeded the words of a profoundly troubled old man, and Anthony McSwiggin’s attempt to reopen the case came to nothing.
Not long afterward, the story of a new confrontation circulated through the newsrooms and speakeasies of Chicago; it told how the veteran police officer, incensed and obsessed, tracked down Capone in the lobby of the Hawthorne Hotel and shouted “Murderer!” to his face, at which point Capone produced a revolver and handed it to his dumbfounded accuser with these instructions: “If you think I did it, shoot me.” But Anthony McSwiggin could not bring himself to pull the trigger at the crucial moment; he fled the lobby, and Al Capone returned to a high-stakes poker game in progress in one of the rooms upstairs.
In the end, Capone was never fully exonerated in the death of McSwiggin, but the finger-pointing and the blame-shifting moved past him, to new targets, including the office of the prosecutor himself, Robert Crowe, who appeared too comfortable with racketeers to prosecute them. Crowe, after all, was McSwiggin’s boss and had profited from the same unwholesome alliances in which McSwiggin had been entangled. The more prosecutors investigated the McSwiggin killing, the closer they came to indicting themselves. As the investigations droned on, all pretense of secrecy, of “closeddoor” hearings evaporated, and the findings suggested the real culprits were not the racketeers but the entire city government of Chicago, now revealed as an entrenched bureaucracy far more interested in protecting itself and preserving its hard-won perquisites than in responding to public issues, needs, and concerns.
Ultimately, the real victim of the McSwiggin shooting was Chicago’s established political order. William Dever, “Decent Dever,” the reformist mayor, stood on the sidelines, wringing his hands, a picture of impotent indignation and self-righteousness. All his antigangster, Prohibition rhetoric remained just that. It was apparent that no city, county, or state agency was capable of launching an impartial investigation into McSwiggin’s death or any other serious matter involving racketeers and bootleggers; the final recourse, a federal inquiry, did not as yet exist. From now on the situation would either get a lot worse or a lot better. Corruption would either become so far-reaching and so accepted, and men like Capone so powerful, that no one would waste the breath to challenge them, or the federal government would be compelled to step in, if only to preserve its own credibility in the face of the threat posed by gangsters run rampant. The question remained, however: of all the laws that Capone and other racketeers broke as they went about their business, what crime would finally lure the Feds into the fray?
• • •
All Chicago was aware of Capone’s highly public campaign for vindication in the McSwiggin shooting. Meanwhile, he waged a secret war—a conflict as intense as any beer war battle in the streets of Chicago—in the outlying city of Chicago Heights. At the time, the town was a century old; originally known as Thorn Grove, and later Bloom, it finally became incorporated in 1892 as Chicago Heights. Italians began moving to the Heights in large numbers soon after, and by 1920 the city’s population had risen to 20,000 and would double within a decade. They settled in a town of broad, straight streets lined with modest, single-story homes and two-story shops. The railroad cut a swath through the center of town, beneath an immense western sky. Although Italians found employment in the factories and onion fields of Chicago Heights, many never found a reliable path to self-advancement. A typical Chicago Heights factory, ran one account of the time, “was a place of heat, grime, dirt, dust, stench, harsh glares, overtime, piece work, pollution, no safety gadgets, sweat, etc. The workers were, as the Italians called them, ‘Bestie da soma,’ beasts of burden.” Even their neighborhood was known as “Hungry Hill,” a cruelly appropriate name.
The Battle of Chicago Heights seemed an extension of the brutality of life there; at the time it occurred few understood the reasons behind the bloodshed; indeed, it has never been fully understood until now. This was a fight for control of Chicago Heights, an area of ever increasing importance in the Capone organization. It was here, in this community where alcohol was brewed in so many Italian homes, that Capone faced opposition not from the usual enemies, the police and the Drucci-Moran-Weiss gang, but from other Italians. And it was here, in Chicago Heights, that Capone’s associates implacably subdued the opposition of their countrymen. Three ambitious members of the Capone organization were chiefly responsible for the campaign. They were Dominic Roberto, who had sheltered Capone shortly before he fled to Michigan; Jimmy Emery; and Frankie La Porte.
The oldest of this ruthless trio was Jimmy Emery, who had been born Vincenzo Ammarati in Cosenza, Italy, on November 2, 1892. He did not reach the United States until he was twenty. Shortly after, he settled in Chicago Heights with his wife, Josie, with whom he had five children—four sons and a daughter—within a span of eight years. The Emerys lived at 2606 Chicago Road, and when he applied for naturalization in March 1922, Jimmy listed his occupation as “grocer.” Even by this early date, perhaps before he had even heard of Al Capone, Jimmy Emery knew Frankie La Porte, who witnessed the petition for naturalization. On his petition, dating from May 1926, La Porte also declared he was a grocer and stated that he had been born in Sambiase, Italy, on October 7, 1901, arriving in the United States in 1913. His address in Chicago Heights during this period was 212 East 22nd Street, and he was not yet married, which was unusual for a man of his age. La Porte also witnessed Dominic Roberto’s petition for naturalization, which was filed on January 1, 1921, and was eventually dismissed on account of the petitioner’s “bad character.” Thus La Porte and Roberto were acquaintances of long standing. Roberto had been born, like La Porte, in Sambiase, Italy, on January 15, 1896; he had arrived in Canada in 1913 and immediately entered the United States. He lived at 2415 Chicago Road in Chicago Heights, close to Jimmy Emery’s home, and like his two colleagues listed his occupation as “grocer.”
Roberto claimed he was single when he applied to become an American citizen, but there was a good deal of wishful thinking in that statement. Before he arrived in the United States he had indeed married, and his wife still resided in his hometown of Sambiase. When he emigrated to the United States, she became a “grass widow,” the name given to the wives who were left behind when their husbands emigrated to America. Like many of these wandering husbands, Roberto later took another wife in the New World, the singer Rio Burke. They met in Chicago Heights, where she was performing. Fleeing his advances, she returned home to Kentucky, but he chased her all the way there, enlisted the support of her family, and in the end his suit was successful. They were married on April 14, 1924, in the home of a Methodist minister in Jeffersonville, Indiana, a small town on the Ohio River, not far from Louisville, Kentucky. Because of the improvised nature of the marriage and the absence of a priest, Dominic Roberto regarded his union to Rio as something less than binding. Jaunty, well dressed, charming, and generous, “Dom” continued to maintain his Italian wife throughout his marriage to Rio. Even as he lavished presents, including a grand piano, on Rio, he funneled money to his Italian wife in Sambiase, keeping both women happy. “Dominic made a good husband,” Rio says. “
He had a soft heart.” Roberto’s double life was an open secret among Italians in Chicago Heights, though Rio, who was not Italian and therefore an outsider, did not learn of it until years later.
During her years as Roberto’s American wife, Rio became accustomed to having Capone as a frequent guest in their house. She remembers his constant concern over Sonny’s health, which remained precarious, although by “health” Capone probably meant personal safety. “Of course Al bought him every toy under the shining sun,” Rio says. “He didn’t have one bicycle, he had four or five. He didn’t have one train, he had four or five. He would play with them awhile and then tire of them. Then Al would get a pickup truck and bring all the stuff out to Jimmy Emery’s house.” Observing Capone’s lieutenants at close quarters, she became aware that Jimmy Emery was not the smiling paterfamilias he appeared to be. If Dominic had a soft heart, “Jimmy had one like stone. He had a mean streak, a real mean streak. He would call Josephine, his wife, in the middle of the night, one or two o’clock in the morning, and say, ‘Get up, Josie, and cook for six, cook for eight.’ And she had to get up and cook a big meal. Of course, Al Capone would often be among them. One night Jimmy caught her putting butter in something, and he didn’t like butter. I saw him pick up one of these great big glass cigarette holders and throw it at her; it cut her mouth open. She was in bed a couple of weeks. And I’ve seen him bat her around. He had an ungodly temper.”
Although Rio appeared to be a compliant racketeer’s wife, she nearly became the undoing of the men who ruled Chicago Heights. “While we lived in Chicago Heights,” she recalls, “Jimmy was grooming Frankie La Porte to take his place in the organization. And Frankie was somewhere near my age—very young and very handsome. We practically took La Porte into the family; he was there most of the time. Now, after I married Dominic, I could never go anywhere alone. Italian men are very possessive and watchful of what the wife does, you know, and of course I was considered a very beautiful girl, I had opportunities, so I wasn’t ever allowed out by myself. Frankie had to take me. Every time I went to the doctor to take care of a little lung trouble, Frankie took me. Every time I went shopping downtown, Frankie took me. We were thrown together almost daily, and after a while, it got a little sticky. But we were both smart enough to know the consequences if we were to let it go on, so we cooled it. I didn’t want to get stabbed in the back when I was making love.” So far as Rio could tell, neither Dominic nor Jimmy Emery was ever aware of the romance taking root in their midst.
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