Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Although dozens of passers-by witnessed the murder of Lombardo, and many offered detailed descriptions of the assassins to the police, no arrests were made. Old “Shoes,” the chief of detectives, claimed to know who had killed Lombardo and how Capone was involved. “Lombardo paid the penalty for having instigated, with Alphonse Capone, the murder of Frank Uale, alias Yale, in Brooklyn on July 1,” said Schoemaker, as if to explain why the police need do nothing. Like so many gangsters before him, Lombardo was laid to rest in Mt. Carmel Cemetery. Despite the impotence of Chicago’s law enforcement officials, it was generally assumed Lombardo’s death was revenge for Yale’s killing, and no event could be more calculated to upset the fragile equilibrium among Chicago’s gangs than the assassination of the head of the Unione Sicilione.

  The new outbreak of violence in the streets attracted the attention of the Chicago Crime Commission. Under the direction of its seventy-six-year-old leader, Frank J. Loesch, the CCC was attempting to move beyond mere fact-gathering to a more muscular campaign against crime in general and Al Capone in particular. Loesch had practiced criminal law years before in Chicago and later became a prosecutor investigating corruption and election fraud in Chicago when Al Capone was still a child in Brooklyn. In 1928, Loesch sought and received a commission as a special state’s attorney to investigate that year’s primary in all its manifold corruption. Initially his mission appeared doomed, for the County Board, protecting itself, refused to appropriate money for his investigation, but civic outrage proved so fierce that a popular subscription raised money to run his office, and Loesch accumulated a $150,000 war chest. Eventually the County Board was embarrassed into providing additional funds. The investigation gained momentum, and within months sixty-three men were under indictment. Nearly all the culprits were convicted and fined, but their transgressions only served to whet Loesch’s appetite for battle. Antonio Lombardo was hardly cold in his grave, his memory still crowned with a martyr’s halo, when Loesch denounced him as the head of the Chicago “Mafia”: “All the kidnappings, blackmail, terrorism, murders and countless other crimes committed in the name of the dread Mafia sprang from the minds of Lombardo and the men who are now fighting to take the place vacated by his death. . . . Capone, partner of Lombardo, ruled in other ways. Through him the family tree spreads to take in the names of Jack Guzik and Ralph Guzik. Guzik runs the brothels and the beer and booze syndicates [while] Ralph takes to moonshining.” Although the Unione Sicilione drew his ire, Loesch was absolutely obsessed with Al Capone, whom he designated “the head center of the devilment” afflicting Chicago.

  Loesch was determined to meet the man who appeared to control the city—all of Cook County, in fact—while holding no official capacity himself. Al at first resisted the idea, but once he received assurances that Loesch came not to prosecute but to negotiate—“I told him I was not there to investigate his criminal record, because I had no power to do that, that I did not care to investigate his Prohibition violations, because that was not my business”—he eventually agreed to a meeting at the Lexington Hotel. With his air of respectability combined with a certain macabre sense of menace, Capone was like no one Loesch had ever met in his long experience as a criminal lawyer. “I found him in an officelike room with half a dozen of his non-English speaking guards standing with their hands on their guns. Over Capone’s desk hung three oil portraits. They represented George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and ‘Big Bill’ Thompson,” Loesch recalled. “That alone was enough to flabbergast me.”

  “Mr. Capone, gunmen will get you or me whenever they want to,” Loesch began. “The gunmen or the law will get you at one time or another.”

  “He replied,” said Loesch, “that he would always best the law, but that he expected his demise some day at the business end of a shotgun.”

  Given the recent spate of gangland deaths in Chicago, not to mention his own brother’s fate, this was a reasonable assumption on Capone’s part. “But they’ll only get me when I’m not looking,” he added.

  Then Loesch got down to business. “I am here to ask you to help in one thing,” he said. “I want you to keep your damned Italian hoodlums out of the election this coming fall.” Loesch was referring to the November 1928 election, which involved more than local politics; with Coolidge out of the race, the country was going to elect a new president.

  Capone listened in silence to this request and the slur on his Italian heritage. He thought for a while, then rose to his feet and offered Loesch a drink. The inquisitor declined, and Capone said, “Sure, I’ll give them the works, because they are all dagoes up there, but what about the Saltis gang of micks over on the West Side? They’ll have to be handled different. Do you want me to give them the works, too?”

  Loesch later recalled his reaction to Capone’s reply: “I was overpleased with Mr. Capone’s apparent willingness to help on the west side and I expressed myself as being grateful.”

  “All right,” said Al, laying out the terms of the deal and flexing a certain amount of racketeering muscle for Loesch’s benefit, “I’ll have the cops send over the squad cars the night before the election and jug all the hoodlums and keep ’em in the cooler until the polls close.”

  Recalled Loesch: “It was a grateful handshake that I gave Mr. Capone at this proposition.”

  Capone proved as good as his word. “On the specified day,” Loesch said as he lapsed in Al’s gangster lingo, “seventy police cars were used to jug the hoodlums. It turned out to be the most successful election day that Chicago had in forty years. There was not one complaint, not one election fraud, not one threat of trouble all day. What is the answer to that?” For Loesch, the answer was Capone, the most powerful man in Chicago. For this reason the august Chicago Crime Commission came crawling to him for help. “Crime is highly organized,” Loesch explained. “Capone’s men work with the same precision as does a captain of industry, except in Capone’s organization the penalty for failure is a charge of shotgun slugs.” In his position, Capone paradoxically became a force for stability, doing more to deter street crime than the entire police force managed to do. For instance, he liked to portray himself as the scourge of pickpockets: “A pickpocket once crowded next to my mother on the State Street car and took the wallet out of her purse. I’ve got no use for a dip. They prey on working people, the scrubladies coming from Loop office buildings in the morning and the tired clerks at night.” He preferred the working people of Chicago to spend their wages on his bootleg booze, or in one of his gambling joints or brothels.

  Loesch recognized he had crossed an invisible line in going to Capone to beg for peace on election day, and he kept the meeting a secret for nearly two years, until he finally revealed the details in a speech to the Southern California Academy of Criminology and again before a Senate subcommittee. Eager for autumnal glory, Loesch thought of himself as the savior of Chicago’s civic virtue, but the revelation of the deal he had struck with Capone caused a shudder of revulsion, for the spectacle of the grand old man of the Chicago Crime Commission going to the Lexington Hotel on bended knee to negotiate a cease-fire from a gangster offered further proof, as if it were needed, of Capone’s control over Chicago. The result was that Loesch’s reputation was tarnished and Capone’s enhanced. The older man’s willingness to go public also meant the end of their working relationship. It was only a matter of time until Frank Loesch, like so many others with whom Capone had arrangements, turned on him.

  • • •

  The chain of killings set in motion by the assassination of Frankie Yale ended with the murder of Pasqualino Lolordo, who had succeeded Antonio Lombardo as the head of the Capone-controlled Unione Sicilione, on January 8, 1929. Lolordo’s three assassins were sufficiently familiar for his wife to admit them to her home and to serve them food and liquor. As they drank to his health they pulled out their revolvers and fired. Mrs. Lolordo claimed she saw nothing, and they, like so many other Chicago assassins, were never apprehended.

  By this time, C
apone had returned to his family in Miami Beach, where he planned to spend the winter in gangster heaven, fishing from his boat and furnishing his home. He believed he had earned a brief respite from the terrors of gangland, for the last half of 1928 had been especially violent. Capone had plotted the death of Frankie Yale, and he had suffered the loss of his Sicilian allies Antonio Lombardo and Pasqualino Lolordo. On balance, however, his assassination of Yale had accomplished its aims, and Capone believed his selective use of violence had been justified, his judgment vindicated. But the calm was deceptive. Shortly after the New Year, he planned an even more ambitious offense, one that promised to eliminate all his enemies in Chicago and end gang warfare in that beleaguered city forever.

  Part Two

  DESCENT

  CHAPTER 7

  Slaughter and Sanctuary

  IF THERE WAS ONE MOMENT in Al Capone’s racketeering career when he appeared absolutely invulnerable, it was now, as he approached his thirtieth birthday on January 17, 1929. The racketeering coalition he had built reached across ethnic boundaries to include Jews, Italians, Poles, blacks, and any other bloc of significance. He was not the only bootlegger in Chicago, but he dominated the business; there was Al Capone, and there was everyone else. The same held true for the vice trade and for gambling. He maintained bases at the Lexington Hotel on the South Side of Chicago; at several locations in Cicero and Chicago Heights; as well as a winter retreat in Miami Beach, Florida, and a summer hideout in Lansing, Michigan. He oversaw an organization of skilled racketeers and gunmen, but the terms gangster, racketeer, or hoodlum were no longer adequate to describe or contain him. “Bugs” Moran was a common hoodlum, “Greasy Thumb” Guzik a racketeer, but Capone had evolved beyond them into a feared political boss—the de facto mayor of Chicago. His economic influence extended far beyond the city limits. The Capone bootlegging network reached from New York’s Long Island to Lake Michigan, and he controlled the flow of alcohol from Europe, Canada, and the Caribbean. Newspapers estimated his income exceeded $100 million a year, but that was the gross amount; as Capone said repeatedly, he had tremendous overhead. No one, not even Capone, could say how much he pocketed, for he avoided banks and saved nothing beyond the stash of cash at the foot of his bed at the Palm Island villa. He was, rather, a pipeline through which huge quantities of money passed; when he needed funds, he dipped into the stream and helped himself. Political circumstances continued to favor him: the mayor was afraid of him, he had bribed the Chicago Police Department into a state of compliance, and Prohibition, the chief cause of his good fortune, was entering its tenth year, turning millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into lawbreakers.

  Many drinkers had come of age during Prohibition and could not remember a time when it had not existed. Thanks to Prohibition, a casual disregard of the law became part of the American way of life. Many Americans realized, perhaps for the first time, that the law of the land could be misguided, or even downright wrong, and therefore should be ignored. In 1929, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who had served as assistant attorney general, wrote in despair: “No one who is intellectually honest will deny that there has not yet been effective, nation-wide enforcement. Nor will it be denied that prohibition enforcement remains the chief and in fact the only real political issue of the whole nation. No political, economic, or moral issue has so engrossed and divided the people of America as the prohibition problem, except the issue of slavery.” Capone had made the most of the situation, riding to fame and fortune on its ironies and hypocrisies. When people referred to him, it was usually in conjunction with the word big. Refer to “Big Boy” or the “Big Fellow” and everyone knew whom you meant; there were many gangsters in Chicago, but only one “Big Fellow.” Some feared him, others loved him, and given the hypocrisy born of Prohibition, many despised him and rooted for him at the same time. Chicago’s power structure drank his booze even as they condemned him as a dago thug, and his ability to circumvent a ridiculous law earned him the sneaking admiration of countless citizens. The career of Al Capone showed it was still possible for a man to come to Chicago with little or no resources and strike it rich in this most commercial of American cities. And Capone had managed to rise to his position of eminence within a span of only seven years, before he turned thirty. Morality aside, his was the grandest success story Chicago had seen in a generation.

  It was at the apogee of his power and influence that the government forces that were to bring him down began to gather momentum. Compared to the clout Capone wielded, the Feds were an insignificant presence in Chicago. To Capone and his allies, they seemed harmless, nothing more than a small group of nearsighted clerks poring over ledgers and sorting through yellowing newspaper clippings in cramped, dusty offices borrowed from the postal service. Yet Capone’s failure to take them into account proved to be a distinct advantage, for they were free to pursue their goal without interference.

  Driven by his sense of moral outrage, George E. Q. Johnson, the newly appointed U.S. attorney, was the first to comprehend the role Chicago Heights played in the Capone bootlegging empire as a refuge, staging area, and arms depot. The Heights had drawn his attention shortly after its police chief, Leroy Gilbert, made a routine arrest of two men ferrying bootleg booze through the town. Chief Gilbert was scheduled to testify against the boot leggers before a grand jury. Then, on the evening of December 6, 1928, as Gilbert sat in the parlor of his home, reading a newspaper, his head was blown off. The police determined that two unknown men with shotguns were responsible, but they were never apprehended.

  In retaliation for the outrage, Johnson’s office, in cooperation with the Chicago Police Department, raised a posse numbering 100 men, mostly police officers, and deputized them all. This was the first time that a significant number of federal, county, and city law enforcement authorities had put aside their turf squabbles and combined forces against racketeering in Chicago. The results were to prove more dramatic than even they hoped.

  Exactly one month after the murder of Police Chief Gilbert, the posse staged the largest raid Chicago Heights had ever seen. In the early hours of January 6, 1929, the streets of Chicago Heights were deserted, the saloons filled. On Hungry Hill, the Italians dutifully tended their stills and tried as best they could to protect themselves from the stinging, piercing cold. The police cars arrived under cover of darkness; in itself, this was not an unusual or threatening sight in Chicago Heights, where the Capone organization controlled the local Police Department, but these police cars had come all the way from Chicago, and eventually there were twenty of them on the streets of the Heights, their motors idling, their headlights dark. Their first destination was not, as might be expected, a still or saloon or gambling joint populated with hoodlums and flappers and a jazz band; no, the cars headed toward the Chicago Heights jail, which the raiders regarded as an enemy outpost to be invaded and captured. And that was precisely what they proceeded to do. First, they surrounded the building. Next, a delegation of raiders marched in the front door, telling the startled sergeant dozing at his desk that he was being relieved of duty; they were now in charge here. Surprised and overwhelmed by the invaders, the docile Chicago Heights police yielded. Thus the “good cops” temporarily seized control of the building from the “bad cops.”

  With the police station secured, the posse executed the next directive. The raiders fanned out across the Heights, breaking into breweries, smashing stills, and seizing huge quantities of alcohol. This was to be expected. However, when the deputies descended on the estate of Oliver J. Ellis, who they believed managed the Subway, one of Capone’s lucrative Cicero gambling dens, they finally struck pay dirt. In a building behind the main house the raiders discovered over 400 slot machines; Chicago Heights, they suddenly realized, was the center of the organization’s slot machine racket. As day broke, the townspeople came out of their homes to watch the raid on the Ellis estate. As the deputies took sledge hammers to the slot machines, small children chased after the nickels and dimes that scatter
ed across the floor. At the conclusion of the raid, the posse took more than twenty men suspected of complicity in the murder of Chief Gilbert to the Chicago Heights’ jail and locked them up, along with the sergeant on duty.

  In the span of a few hours, the raid had permanently altered the face of the conflict between the racketeers and law enforcement agencies. The battle lines had suddenly been redrawn, or, considering the history of police corruption, drawn for the first time. Each side had massive resources at its disposal. The Capone organization, for its part, relied on the tremendous revenue generated by bootlegging, and it used the money to buy political power and loyalty throughout Chicago and the state of Illinois. The money also bought the racketeers weapons, headquarters throughout the city, a ready supply of young men willing to risk their lives in return for high wages, and the silence of grand juries. As long as Prohibition continued, this revenue and all it purchased was secure. In addition, the organization had the benefit of the leadership of Al Capone and the allegiance of a broad spectrum of immigrant groups.