Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  The patrons began to stir, though no one ventured to stand, except for Capone, who realized that his attackers, whoever they were, had fired blanks. Of course. No one, not even a gangster, would fire into a crowd of innocent bystanders with a machine gun. Determined to show that he had not been intimidated, Capone got to his feet and began marching toward the doors, but his progress was halted by a human form flying through the air at him and wrestling him to the ground. Before he had time to react, Capone was pinned to the ground; his assailant was Frankie Rio, who was only doing his job. “It’s a stall, boss,” Rio said, gulping for air. “The real stuff hasn’t started. You stay down.” Capone looked at him, blinked, and relented. Down he stayed, waiting for the next development.

  Half a minute later, a convoy of seven closely spaced cars rolled past the U-shaped façade of the Hawthorne Inn. As they drew even with the hotel, machine guns concealed within the cars began to fire on the restaurant containing Capone, his lips pressed to the floor. This time they were firing real bullets, which drilled a deadly design into the hotel’s façade. The lead car came to a halt at the far end of the Hawthorne, and five more behind it appeared to park in front of the hotel, one after the other, without a gap, and from every car came a stream of machine fire aimed at the Hawthorne and its neighbor, the Anton Hotel. Then two more cars pulled up, and during a brief lull in the firing, a man whom witnesses later described as wearing brown overalls and a khaki shirt emerged from the second-to-last car and walked to the main doorway of the Hawthorne, carrying a machine gun in his right hand. He knelt and started firing continuously, reloading when necessary, raking the exterior and interior with hundreds of .45-caliber bullets in orderly rows about the height of a man’s heart. When he was finished, he stood and walked back to the car. The car blew its horn three times, and the convoy rolled down the street and out of view.

  The marauders had fired more than a thousand shots at the two Capone-controlled hotels, destroying every single pane of glass, reducing doors and other wooden fittings to splinters, chiseling grotesque shapes into bricks and mortar. Despite the ferocity of the attack, not one person had been killed, including the intended victim: Al Capone. There were several injuries, however. Clyde Freeman, his wife, and their five-year-old son, Clyde Jr., all of whom had come from Louisiana to see the races, were trapped in their car parked near the Hawthorne when the attack began. When the smoke cleared, Mr. Freeman discovered a bullet hole in his hat and another in his son’s coat. More seriously, one bullet had grazed his son’s knee, another had entered his wife’s arm, and a shard of glass from the shattered windshield had landed in her right eye. Capone rushed to the Freemans’ car, which was pockmarked with bullets from one end to the other, and when he discovered what had happened, he offered—no, insisted—that he pay all their expenses. He did, and they eventually came to $10,000.

  The other victim was none other than Louis Barko, the Capone gunman who had opened fire on Drucci and Weiss the month before. He took a bullet in the shoulder, a wound that brought him to the attention of the chief of detectives, William Schoemaker, who once again uttered oaths and subjected Barko to a prolonged grilling, along with Weiss, Drucci, and “Bugs” Moran. Once again, all that Barko would say was, “Never saw them before.” The police dropped their investigation of the incident, even though a thousand bullets had been fired in Cicero in the middle of the day. Had “Shoes” and his embattled and corrupt police department bothered to jail any of these men, the next bloody episode in the history of Chicago’s gang war would never have occurred. In the absence of such measures, Capone demonstrated once again his flair in settling scores with his enemies, especially the man who had dared to humiliate him as “Hymie” Weiss had that brilliant fall afternoon in Cicero.

  Before Capone struck, he decided to give Weiss one last chance to live. In the spirit of his resolve to quit the rackets, he invited Weiss to a meeting at the Morrison Hotel on Monday, October 4. Capone hoped to lure Weiss into a business alliance, thereby ending their lethal rivalry. Determining that his own presence was too inflammatory, Capone selected Tony Lombardo, the current boss of Chicago’s Unione Sicilione, to negotiate on his behalf. “Capone is very anxious for peace,” Lombardo was reported to have said at the meeting. “Few men will be left alive on either side if this fighting keeps up. Both you and Capone are under thirty. There is no reason why either of you should die. All this killing is insane. There’s plenty of business for both.” Lombardo then presented Capone’s deal: in exchange for peace Weiss would manage all the beer concessions in Chicago north of Madison Street. This was an extravagant offer, for Madison cut through the heart of the Loop, and the territory comprised thousands of speakeasies. It was the equivalent of handing Weiss, murdering son of a bitch though he was, an exceedingly lucrative distributorship. Such was the price Capone was willing to pay for peace—and his life.

  Weiss angrily refused the offer. “He’s a snake,” he said of Capone. “His favorite stunt is to smile in your face and kill you. There’s more in this thing than business. Capone hasn’t paid yet for O’Banion’s murder.”

  “That was two years ago,” Lombardo replied. “You fellows have done your share of killing.”

  “Capone will have to prove to me he means peace,” said Weiss.

  “He’ll give you any proof in his power.”

  “Scalise and Anselmi killed O’Banion,” Weiss noted. “Tell Capone to put Scalise and Anselmi on the spot. That’s the price of peace.”

  Lombardo excused himself from the meeting and called Al to tell him of the condition. How should he reply to Weiss?

  “I wouldn’t do that to a yellow dog!” Capone shouted.

  Lombardo relayed that message to Weiss, who stormed out of the meeting, and the effort to arrange peace between the warring factions fell into disarray. With the failure of these negotiations, it was only a matter of time until Capone reacted to the humiliation Weiss had inflicted on him. Either he would have to kill Weiss, or Weiss would surely kill him. So the nightmare of blood and terror returned, raising the possibility once more that he would soon be laid to rest beside his brother Frank in the Capone family plot in Mt. Carmel Cemetery.

  • • •

  The following day, October 5, a man calling himself Oscar Lundin rented a second-story room at 740 North Street for $8 a week. The location happened to be across the street from Schofield’s flower shop—the same shop in which Dion O’Banion had been assassinated two years earlier, and which continued to serve as the headquarters for his successors, “Schemer” Drucci, “Bugs” Moran, and “Hymie” Weiss. The room Lundin rented afforded an unobstructed view of this shop; in fact, it made for an ideal machine-gun nest, and throughout the following week its constantly changing occupants staked out the site. Finally, on the afternoon of Monday, October 11, a Cadillac bearing Weiss himself came into view, gliding to a stop across the street from Schofield’s flower store.

  Two men observed Weiss from their vantage point in the second-story apartment at 740 North State Street. The floor was littered with their cigarette butts, but when they saw his car pull up, they put down their cigarettes and picked up their tommy guns. They watched carefully, for, if they were lucky, they would be able to pick off not only Weiss but also his four companions: W. W. O’Brien, a criminal lawyer; Benjamin Jacobs, a corrupt politician; Patrick Murray, a bootlegger; and Sam Peller, their chauffeur.

  Weiss waited until a Buick arrived; he then left his Cadillac and began to cross the street, apparently in a state of excitement. He was in the midst of a complicated transaction, having just left the Criminal Courts Building, where he had just obtained a list of the jurors selected for the trial of “Polack Joe” Saltis, a South Side racketeer charged with murder; Weiss intended to bribe or threaten the jurors. Meanwhile, the assassins hidden in the second-story apartment lifted their machine guns to the window, and as Weiss jumped across the trolley tracks in the middle of the street, they opened fire. Within seconds the gunmen killed Murra
y and wounded Jacobs, O’Brien, and Peller. As for Weiss himself, he fell dead on the sidewalk with ten bullets in his body. He was twenty-eight years old, middle age for a racketeer.

  Holy Name Cathedral stood as a silent witness to the shootout, and it bore the scars. Before the bullets flew, the cornerstone was inscribed with a quotation from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians:

  At The Name Of Jesus Every Knee Should Bow

  In Heaven And On

  Earth.

  Afterward, the inscription read:

  Every Knee Should

  In Heaven And On

  Earth.

  For years the cathedral did not repair the damage, preferring to leave it as a monument to Chicago’s violence, of the day when, in the words of the Tribune, “Gangdom literally shot piety to pieces.”

  Weiss received a predictably lavish gangster funeral. The undertaker who organized his last rites was John Sbarbaro, who had so ably touched up the bullet-ridden corpses of other gangsters. The casket was bronze with silver fittings, and the body was laid to rest at Mt. Carmel Cemetery, final resting place of both gangsters and their victims. Capone was not brazen enough to attend the funeral, but Moran and Drucci were there to mourn their slain comrade in arms, wondering whose funeral they would attend next: Capone’s, each other’s, or their own. Since it was late October and election day was fast approaching, a number of the politicians who turned out to pay their respects to the city’s second-biggest bootlegger rode in cars festooned with garish campaign posters, transforming the funeral into a campaign rally. Speeding toward the cemetery, automobiles in the cortege proclaimed their urgent messages:

  KING-ELLER-GRAYDON FOR SANITARY DISTRICT TRUSTEES

  JOE SAVAGE FOR COUNTY JUDGE

  JOHN SBARBARO FOR MUNICIPAL JUDGE

  In the Chicago of the late 1920s, politics and funerals, especially gangster funerals, increasingly had a way of overlapping, the distinction between them growing ever more faint with every new murder.

  Although every indication pointed to Capone as the man who had planned Weiss’s death, the killers were never found, their identities never discovered, despite an intriguing array of evidence they left behind. Detectives investigating the murder found one of the tommy guns used in the shootout only a block from the scene of the crime. In the second-story room rented by “Oscar Lundin” they discovered depleted shotgun shells strewn across the floor. There was even a gray fedora on the bed; within, the label was that of a Cicero merchant whose store was located close to the Hawthorne Inn. Despite these and other clues, as well as dozens of potential eyewitnesses to the shooting, the police failed to arrest or charge anyone with the murder. Instead, the chief of police, Morgan Collins, substituted rhetoric for action, announcing that he held Capone personally responsible for the latest slaughter in the streets of the city. “Capone played safety first by importing the killers, expert machine gunners, and then hurrying them out of town,” Collins explained. Furthermore, Collins admitted, “Capone has an alibi. He was in Cicero when the shooting occurred. If we bring him in it will be because we have the goods on him cold, but there is no use putting him on the grill until we do.” A reporter commented, “The Chicago Police Department surrendered to Capone—unconditionally.”

  This time Capone had no need to flee. Instead, he held a press conference. “I’m sorry Weiss was killed,” he declared, concealing his glee, “but I didn’t have anything to do with it. I telephoned the detective bureau I would come in if they wanted me to, but they told me they didn’t want me. I knew I would be blamed for it, but why should I kill Weiss?” Unlike the McSwiggin killing, the police and prosecutor’s office did not even attempt to question Capone about the assassination of Weiss, let alone try him for it, although they suspected he had engineered it. But then, McSwiggin had been one of their own, and Weiss was but another hoodlum. In a sense, Capone had done the police a favor by eliminating him.

  Capone’s confident handling of the situation reflected his increasing sophistication in fending off murder inquiries. Walter Trohan, a reporter covering the police beat for the City News Bureau, a press pool that served as a training ground for many of Chicago’s best-known journalists of the era, recalls Capone’s techniques for dealing with Chicago’s law enforcement agencies, techniques more reminiscent of a powerful politician than a gangster: “If there was a gang killing, the police used to bring in Capone just for questioning and to look him over. . . . At the time the court was located above the South State Street police station. One morning, as I went up these wide steps leading into the court, where Capone was, two fellows frisked me. I became highly indignant. I went downstairs to complain to the captain of the police station. They were largely Irish in that police station, and since I was a Notre Damer I was a hero there, and all the people were generally very kind to me. The captain looked at me and said, Those aren’t my men, those are Capone’s.’ ”

  • • •

  Meanwhile, the murder of “Hymie” Weiss occasioned the city’s worst crisis of conscience since McSwiggin’s death six months earlier, and it revived talk everywhere of Chicago as the nation’s murder capital, a city ruled by machine-gun-wielding gangsters whom the police were powerless to control. According to one account, during the previous four years 215 gangsters had killed one another, and the police had taken the lives of an additional 160 booze-runners and racketeers. Throughout the city, cries of revulsion at all the killing went up. Chicago, declared the Literary Digest, “is sick today with poison, . . . at least from the political and governmental point of view, as any drunkard poisoned in the liver, kidneys and heart by alcohol itself,” and the publication summed up the situation in Chicago as “murder galore and crime unpunished.” This was a sentiment widely shared across the nation, and the coverage was even more shrill than it had been in the past, if that were possible, the tone more frantic, more desperate, as the papers realized that Chicago’s law enforcement agencies really were powerless to intervene in the gang wars; no amount of prodding in the press or bloodshed on the streets could inspire the police or even the state attorney general’s office to take action. There was a great deal of talk about what the killings would do to Chicago’s “image,” a word used even then, and that concern became the dominant theme of public discourse—not safety, not corruption—no, the issue of the day ran along the lines of, “Good heavens, what must other people think of us, carrying on as we do with machine guns and such? People must be made to realize that Chicago is filled as it has always been with decent, God-fearing citizens, and these hoodlums are only a tiny minority, an aberration.”

  Amid the clamor few thought to examine the underlying cause of the violence and corruption: Prohibition. The corruption and hypocrisies created by the unenforceable law had become an integral part of the city’s economic and political life. The police enriched themselves from the graft, and even the newspapers, so quick to vilify gangsters, were often in secret sympathy with them, as this reminiscence by a crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune, James Doherty, reveals: “The Trib was a wet paper and its staff were wet too—we were a hard-drinking, hard-working bunch, and we were against Prohibition because of the methods of enforcement.” Competition among Chicago dailies was intense, and as a result, Doherty noted, “Crime was important news then and we used to give it full coverage. . . . I spent a lot of time with the mob and saw Capone often. I can’t say I especially liked the guy, but he was always nice enough to me. I wrote hundreds of stories about him. I’d accuse him of murder today and meet him tomorrow, and neither of us would mention the subject. I’d see him at a funeral, or in a speakeasy, or down at the DA’s office, and he’d always give me some quotes. He wasn’t very good company, not a very articulate guy. He’d exchange commonplaces but he didn’t volunteer information. Still, the more I wrote about him, the more he liked it. He loved the limelight and was always willing to yak a little with reporters. He liked the advertising. It made better business for him. It made it easier to intimidate the
customers. We built him up as the big shot in the gang world. They were all racketeers and they liked to be known as good ones—like the politicians used to say: ‘Just spell my name right and say what you like.’ I can’t feel he was all evil, like he’s been painted since then. Sure, he was a cold-blooded killer, but he had his good side. I see him as a victim of his time and circumstances. Capone was tolerated by the public because—let’s face it—he was giving them a service they wanted. No one minded about them trading booze; it was all the killing that brought about their undoing.” So the reporters wrote their stories condemning violence, then went to their speakeasies to drink their bootleg booze to forget about it, while their bosses, the newspaper owners, went home at night and uncorked choice vintages from their wine cellars, and they, too, forgot all about it—until the morning brought news of fresh carnage during another night ruled by the unenforceable law.

  The frantic tone of the newspaper coverage of the killings and violence obscured many of the reasons behind it. Strangely, no one had as yet paused to analyze the overall structure of Chicago’s gangs and their battles with each other, but if they had, they would have discovered that the assassination attempts were not as random or arbitrary as they seemed; they in fact were highly predictable. They were often preceded by threats and warnings (if anyone had cared to pay attention), and they were all accomplished for specific reasons—usually revenge. The skein always went back to the killing of Dion O’Banion, and the subsequent competition between his successors, the Moran gang and the Capone organization. Nearly every major shootout contributed to the vendetta between these two groups. These were hardly the only gangs in Chicago, but they were so large and influential and had formed so many alliances with smaller gangs and bootleggers that the Capone-Moran rivalry defined the racketeering environment in Chicago and throughout much of the country. With every murder this pattern became clearer, and it was obvious to everyone that the killing would beget more killing. The pattern told a tale of greed and revenge; it was only a matter of time until the vendetta led to a massacre.