Even Capone could not resist adding his voice to the debate over Chicago’s gangster problem. He seized on the mounting public hysteria to portray himself as the city’s savior rather than its scourge. For the first time he was attempting to carry out at least some of the decisions he had reached over the summer in Lansing; perhaps he even thought he could be hailed as the savior of Chicago, as certain citizens in Lansing were prone to think of him. Although he was unwilling to give up his massive, lucrative bootlegging empire, he delivered a grandiloquent, emotional plea to other bootleggers to give up their violent ways (and incidentally to let him run the industry untroubled by competition). With the skill of a politician carefully gauging the symbolic value of his surroundings, Capone chose to hold his press conference not in his lavish suite at the Metropole, where his words would seem self-serving and hypocritical. Instead, he returned to a far less opulent setting, his former base in Cicero’s Hawthorne Hotel, where he would seem more the victim than the perpetrator, for only weeks earlier he had been the intended victim of the spectacular drive-by shooting, from which hundreds of holes drilled by machine-gun bullets were still plainly visible. Even there he took care to meet the gentlemen of the press in a small, shabby room furnished with only a bed, a dresser, and several chairs, “the one object indicative of the man who is reported to have made more than two million dollars in the booze game,” a reporter noted, “being a magnificent diamond brooch tie-pin with a four-carat amethyst in its center.”
“There is enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the streets,” he said. “I don’t want to die in the street punctured by machine-gun fire.” As he spoke, Capone clutched a photograph of his son, now seven years old, and insisted that he wanted only to make the city a safe and decent place for the child whom he loved beyond all else. “They all got families, too,” he said of his rivals. “What makes them so crazy to end up on a slab in a morgue with their mothers’ hearts broken over the way they died? If anyone will get those fellows together—what’s left of the North Side gang—and anyone else that thinks they’re bucking me in business will take their guns away and sit them down to listen to me I’ll make peace with all of them. I’ll tell them why I want peace—because I don’t want to break the hearts of people that love me—and maybe I can make them think of their mothers and sisters, and if they think of them they’ll put up their guns and treat their business like any man treats his—as something to work at and forget when he goes home at night. . . . I talked to ‘Hymie’ Weiss and the others, saying, ‘What do you want to do, die before you’re thirty? I don’t.’ We started over. We kept our bargain, but they broke theirs. I sent word to those fellows to stop while some of us were left alive. They wouldn’t listen. A couple of weeks after that eleven cars drove past this hotel at noon and gave us a machine-gun fire that made this street look like a battlefield.” The oratory revealed Capone’s growing confidence that he could, after all, control the entire city and turn it into a bootlegger’s paradise.
On October 20, nine days after Weiss’s death, he arranged an extraordinary “peace conference” between the two opposing factions. This was no secret underworld convocation held in a smoke-filled basement; it was, rather, a well-publicized meeting scheduled to take place at the Hotel Sherman, located but a stone’s throw from City Hall and across the street from the office of Morgan Collins, the chief of police. Above all Capone wanted to give the conference a sense of legitimacy. To this end he dispatched an emissary to Judge John Lyle, of all people, who now found himself the target of Capone’s latest attempt at gangland diplomacy. The Capone emissary explained his proposition: since Chicago’s rival syndicates were constantly warring with each other, Al wanted to hold a meeting to divide Chicago among them and thus bring peace to the city, and he wanted Lyle, who had declared himself the implacable enemy of the city’s racketeers, to act as the arbiter.
Astounded by the audacity of the idea of asking a judge to preside at a meeting of racketeers trying to settle their turf disputes—all of which concerned illegal activities—Lyle was moved to ask himself, Is there anything in the world as weird as the gangster mind?
“What’s my cut?” he inquired, kidding the emissary, who was at a loss for a reply.
“The boys didn’t think you’d take their money.”
“Here’s a message to take back to the boys,” Lyle said, turning serious. “We’re not going to give them the town. We’re going to take the town away from them.”
To which Capone’s emissary replied, “You mean you won’t do it? Think of the prestige! Judge, this could make you a big man. You could run for mayor!”
Lyle habitually portrayed himself as the hero in his encounters with racketeers, and the record does show that he resisted the temptation to become a “big man” in this fashion. Spurned by the judge, the Capone organization promptly offered its backing to their second choice, the blustering former mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson. Ever since William Dever had defeated him, “Big Bill” had been spoiling for a comeback, and now that his rival’s anti-racketeer policy had proved a dismal failure, Thompson was more than willing to cooperate with Capone in order to win the election, which would be held the following year.
In the meantime, Al Capone’s vaunted peace conference took place as scheduled in the Hotel Sherman—the Sherman House, as Chicagoans called it. On Capone’s side of the table, the roster included Harry Guzik, Jack’s brother; Maxie Eisen, a racketeer loosely affiliated with the Guziks; Tony Lombardo of the Unione Sicilione; and Ralph Sheldon, a bootlegger. Across from the Capone group sat the distinguished representatives of the Moran-Drucci gang: “Bugs” Moran; “Schemer” Drucci; William Skidmore, a saloon keeper turned political fixer; and Jack Zuta, who served as their equivalent of Jack Guzik. Those were the living. Given the circumstances that had led up to this meeting, the dead figured even more prominently; the shades of “Hymie” Weiss, Dion O’Banion, and Frank Capone hovered over the conference, as did the ghosts of dozens of other, lesser-known racketeers and hundreds of their departed henchmen. “Here they sat,” wrote an indignant journalist of the gathering, “thieves, highwayman, panders, murderers, ex-convicts, thugs, and hoodlums—human beasts of prey, once skulking in holes as dark as the sewers of Paris, now come out in the open, thrust up by Volstead and corrupt prominence to the eminence of big business men. Here they sat, partitioning Chicago and Cook County into trade areas, covenanting against society and the law, and going about it with the assurance of a group of directors of United States Steel.”
For those in attendance, more than business was at stake; they were negotiating survival itself. Capone attempted to dominate the meeting through sheer force of personality. Afterward, he described the arguments he had employed to persuade his rivals of the importance of peace: “I told them we’re making a shooting gallery out of a great business, and nobody’s profiting by it. It’s hard and dangerous work and when a fellow works hard at any line of business, he wants to go home and forget it. He doesn’t want to be afraid to sit near a window or open a door. Why not put up our guns and treat our business like any other man treats his, as something to work at in the daytime and forget when he goes home at night. There’s plenty of beer business for everybody. Why kill each other over it?” He then switched to his more personal concerns for wanting peace. He recalled that he told the racketeers how he wanted to stop the killing “because I couldn’t stand hearing my little kid ask why I didn’t stay home. I had been living in the Hawthorne Inn for fourteen months. He’s been sick for three years . . ., and I’ve got to take care of him and his mother. If it wasn’t for him I’d have said, ‘To hell with you fellows! We’ll shoot it out.’ But I couldn’t say that, knowing it might mean they’d bring me home some night punctured with machine gun fire.”
Capone’s harping on his concern for his only child swayed the other racketeers, and once Al fell silent, business was transacted swiftly. The results of the extraordinary meeting were immediate
ly announced to the reporters waiting just beyond the closed doors. Of greatest importance, there would be a “general amnesty” among the gangs, which vowed to refrain from beatings or murders. As a corollary, all past murders were to be considered closed cases, as if they were so many debts to be wiped off the books. In addition, the gangs would refrain from feeding malicious tidbits of information concerning rivals to the press. Anyone who was caught violating these standards would be reported immediately and “disciplined” accordingly. The gangs’ fierce territorial disputes were resolved, at least on paper. Moran and Drucci retained their strongholds, the Forty-second and Forty-third Wards, while Capone formally acquired control of all territory south of the Madison Street boundary, as well as the territory to the west and south down to Chicago Heights.
Once the meeting broke up, the participants filed out of the Sherman House and reconvened in the Bella Napoli Café to toast the new era in Chicago’s rackets. A reporter whom Capone had invited to the feast witnessed once-mortal enemies taunting each other as if they were children running loose on a playground. “Remember that night when your car was chased by two of ours?” asked one.
“I sure do!” said another.
“Well,” said the first hoodlum with a laugh, “we were going to kill you, but you had a woman with you.” And with that lighthearted jest all the men collapsed with laughter.
As the booze took hold, the men grew sentimental, lachrymose, and united against their common enemy—not the police, not the DA’s office, but the press. “I’d never have had my boys shoot any of yours if it hadn’t been for the newspapers,” said one, who spoke for the others. “Every time there’d be a little shooting affair the papers would print the names of the gang who did it. Well, when any of my boys were shot up and the papers came out with the right hunch as to who did it, I just naturally decided that I’d have to have a few guys bumped myself.” After a night of drinking the men straggled home and awoke to greet the new day in Chicago.
The conference proved to be a success. “Just like the old days,” Capone said. “They stay on the North Side and I stay in Cicero and if we meet on the street, we say ‘hello’ and shake hands. Better, ain’t it?” Before the treaty, the beer war had claimed a dozen lives each month. For seventy days following the conference, not a single man was murdered in connection with the bootleg trade: the longest stretch of peace Chicago had known since the advent of Prohibition nearly seven years before.
• • •
Capone had managed to survive another year of attempts on his life. Against all odds, he had brought about a cessation of the beer war, though no one could say how long the fragile treaty among the racketeers would last. As New Year’s revelers hailed 1927 by uncorking bottles of bootleg champagne, Capone began to talk publicly about his plan to retire from the rackets, in fulfillment of the promise he had made to himself in Lansing. The first short winter days of January found him not at the Metropole Hotel or the Hawthorne Inn, but at the little house on Prairie Avenue, busying himself with family pursuits and greeting the New Year with resolutions to mend his ways and live up to the noble promises he had made to himself and Angelo Mastropietro during the summer. As he looked forward to 1927, Capone had reason to hope that the truce in Chicago would endure.
Despite his newfound conversion to the cause of nonviolence, rumblings of gangster warfare resumed, some of them unnervingly close at hand. The bitter cold night of January 6, 1927, found Al in the restaurant of the Hawthorne Inn, which was deserted with the exception of his friend Tony Anton, the owner. A bell rang, signifying the arrival of patrons downstairs. “Customers coming up. I’ll get their order and be back in a second,” said “Tony the Greek.” Al waited, but Tony did not return. Nor did he hear any sound of patrons from the doorway. Al eventually went downstairs himself to look around, but Tony had disappeared.
The following night, Al returned to the restaurant in search of his friend, only to learn that Theodore Anton, a.k.a. “Tony the Greek,” had been taken for a ride. His body, frozen solid, had been found in a ditch, partly covered with several inches of ice that had to be chipped away to free the corpse. On hearing the news, Al broke down and cried, inconsolable at the death of his friend. The murder remained a mystery, never avenged. Had “Tony the Greek” been murdered at any other time, the event would have led to a new cycle of gangland violence, but with Capone subscribing to the Sherman House peace conference and resolved to end the killing, he did no more than shed tears for his loyal friend. After all, he had retired from the rackets, hadn’t he?
And yet, Capone being Capone, he could not resist leaving the field of battle without managing to generate a little publicity for himself. So it was that he invited reporters to visit chez Capone on January 23, 1927, when he planned to make an announcement of interest. The Al Capone who greeted the distinguished members of the press that day appeared the picture of domesticity and contentment as he padded about the house in ornamented bedroom slippers. A bright pink apron completed the disarming picture of the racketeer in repose. There were no guns, no bodyguards in evidence. He had celebrated his birthday twelve days earlier, but he looked at least a decade older than his twenty-seven years. His mature appearance came partly from his thinning hair and partly from his bulk, carrying as he did over 215 pounds on his five-foot-seven frame, but there was more than that. The five violent years he had spent in Chicago had marked him deeply; he had lived harder and faster than most men, and he was already embarked on a premature middle age.
In between greeting his guests he busied himself preparing a large quantity of spaghetti, glancing occasionally at a huge pot in which several gallons of water boiled furiously. “I am out of the booze racket,” he told the journalists as he emptied the scalding water in which he had boiled the spaghetti, and then he invited them all to join him for a good, old-fashioned Italian meal, complemented by a fine bootleg wine. “I positively have retired,” he reiterated as the reporters toasted his health and began to twirl their forks around the steaming coils of spaghetti heaped on their plates. At that moment Al probably believed what he was saying. It did seem like the right thing to do, to quit the rackets as if he were a champion prizefighter retiring from the ring before he was humiliated by a knockout blow. So he indulged his penchant for playacting, carrying out one last grandiose gesture. But when the afterglow faded he became bored within the confines of his house. No amount of cocaine or bootleg booze could slake his thirst for power and attention. And there was still so much money to be made in the rackets. What had begun in Lansing as a solemn promise to his honorable friend, Angelo Mastropietro, devolved into a ruse designed to protect his position.
Once the effects of Capone’s wine wore off, the reporters became more than a little skeptical of his declaration. They knew him as a feared killer, the head of an immensely lucrative racketeering organization, and one of the nation’s biggest bootleggers, if not the biggest. What, exactly, had he retired from? Who would succeed him as head of the organization? And what would he do next? As subsequent events demonstrated, Al Capone had no more retired from the rackets than his enemy “Bugs” Moran had. But Al, who knew the uses of publicity, wanted to give the appearance that he had retired; he hoped thereby to deflect police scrutiny and, even more importantly, to make his enemies, the ones like Moran who still wanted him dead, believe that he was no longer worth killing. As Capone and his audience knew, no one left the rackets voluntarily, especially not the leaders. So the reporters weren’t fooled, and they resumed their campaign (which happened to sell thousands of newspapers) to convict him of some final disgrace from which he would never be absolved. “Capone lives on in luxury,” wrote a Tribune reporter in a swoon of despair. “He lives on because—surrounded by Italian gunmen who are little known, since they are kept out of the limelight—he is scrupulously guarded and because his killers have exterminated most of his rivals. Meanwhile Chicago stands bedraggled and mocked at before the world. As Daniel Defoe wrote long ago:
&nbs
p; We have been Europe’s sink, the jakes where she
Voids all her offal outcast progeny.”
Such was the contempt that Al inspired, even in “retirement,” as the Pax Capone descended on Chicago.
• • •
Tell ’em, cowboys, tell ‘em! I told you I’d ride ‘em high and wide!
—“Big Bill” Thompson, April 5, 1927.
Capone may have mended his ways for the present, but Chicago’s political life continued to follow its old crooked path. Although the beer war had abated, folly continued to rule public life. Corruption remained the order of the day, with or without Capone’s money, influence, and firepower behind it. Mayor Dever’s political fortunes had continued their decline, and his campaign to enforce Prohibition had lost its credibility. His lot could be compared to that of a hapless substitute teacher assigned to a particularly unruly classroom on which he vainly tried to impose order by shaking his fist, but his behavior only served to aggravate the anarchic situation, and he was on the verge of being laughed out of his classroom by the troublemakers he had vowed to subdue.
“Big Bill” Thompson, awaiting a comeback since he had dropped out of the race four years earlier, found this volatile political climate ideal, and he exploited it with showmanship reminiscent of P. T. Barnum. Better than any other figure on Chicago’s political scene—with the possible exception of that quasi politician, Al Capone—Thompson knew the uses of publicity. He never missed an opportunity to grab a headline, to remind voters that they need only turn to him to restore the city to its former luster.
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