Despite Ralph’s obvious lies and evasions, the government prosecutors pressed their case. In the courtroom, the technical, nonviolent, noninflammatory nature of the charges proved an asset. The prosecution did not accuse him of being a gangster, a bootlegger, a gambler, or even a pimp; instead, the government focused narrowly on the nonpayment of federal income tax. There were no shades of gray in this area; either he had paid or he had not—and evidence of the latter was overwhelming. The government was betting that tax evasion would prove to be a convictable offense in Chicago, unlike murder or Prohibition violations. Experience had shown that jurors involved in a murder trial feared revenge, often with good reason. Nor was violating the Prohibition laws a convictable charge, for jurors tended to sneer at Prohibition. It was a smart, if unspectacular strategy to stick with the noncontroversial tax evasion charge. The case was sent to the jury on April 26, and after two and a half hours of deliberation and six ballots, they returned a guilty verdict on all counts. Ralph now faced a total of twenty-two years in prison and a fine of up to $40,000. “I don’t understand this at all,” he grumbled, and that may have been the one truthful remark he made during the entire proceeding.
Although convicted, Ralph was not led from the bar in manacles to begin serving time—at least not yet. His lawyers initiated a series of time-consuming appeals, and until they were resolved, he retained his freedom. He was forced to endure one more public humiliation, however. At the conclusion of the trial, Al threw a small, subdued party for Ralph, taking the occasion to deliver a stinging rebuke to his older brother. “You got caught because you weren’t smart,” Al said. “You talked too much and you put too many things in writing. You gotta be smart, Ralph, and I hope you will be when you get out.” Al had good reason to be concerned, for he was acutely aware that Ralph’s trial was merely a rehearsal for his own, and if the government could produce a four-foot-high pile of evidence against Ralph, how much more would they be able amass against the “Big Fellow” himself?
Despite its enormous implications for Al Capone and all other racketeers, the outcome of Ralph’s trial rated only cursory mention in newspapers outside Chicago, and public reaction to the verdict was muted. However, the conviction did send shock waves through Chicago’s racketeering fraternity. Bootleggers, extortionists, and gamblers of every description hastened to the Federal Building, where they waited in line to pay whatever back taxes the IRS said they owed. By May, George E. Q. Johnson reported that the government had received more than a million dollars from the delinquent hoodlums of Chicago, but that amount was only a fraction of what they actually owed.
One other party taking a keen interest in the outcome of Ralph’s tax evasion case was President Hoover, who continued to oversee the effort to put not just Ralph but Al Capone behind bars. The guilty verdict prompted Elmer Irey’s IRS Intelligence Unit to redouble its efforts to obtain evidence against the “Big Fellow,” evidence that proved maddeningly elusive. Two days after the end of the trial, Arthur Madden, the Intelligence Unit’s Chicago field man, was forced to concede to his boss, “There is nothing of much interest in connection with Al Capone.” But he did report a few leads, whose significance was not yet apparent. “I have no doubt that Al Capone and his associates received substantial income from the dog race track operated near Cicero,” Madden noted. “As a matter of fact, there is fairly convincing proof that substantial sums were paid to Frank Nitto,” that is, Nitti, now under indictment, “who is one of the principals in the Capone organization. One of the banks involved in these transactions has apparently been very obstinate or fearful, or both. I think that some of the bank’s officers and employees will have to be thoroughly examined by the Grand Jury before the facts can be brought out.” The most telling section of Madden’s report concerned an effort by a lawyer Capone had just hired, Lawrence Mattingly, to settle Al’s tax obligations. “Mr. Mattingly has called at the office of the Internal Revenue Agent in Charge on several occasions. He has another appointment this afternoon. Evidently he wants to reach a settlement, but the indications are that he desires to accomplish it in a way that would prevent the prosecution of his client.” In other words, unlike the treatment accorded every other racketeer at the time, Johnson refused Al Capone’s offer to pay up; indeed, the government would later portray Mattingly’s efforts on behalf of his client as evidence of Capone’s guilt. There was only one reason that Johnson singled out Capone for this treatment: the government, and that meant everyone from the president down, was determined to convict Al Capone—if only they could find the evidence.
• • •
Reeling from Ralph’s conviction for income tax evasion, Al Capone was dealt a fresh blow from an unlikely opponent: Frank J. Loesch, the seventy-eight-year-old head of the Chicago Crime Commission. From Capone’s perspective, Loesch was a toothless dragon backed by a bunch of rich gin-swilling hypocrites whose campaign against racketeers carried distinct overtones of racial and ethnic prejudice. “The American people are not a lawless people,” Loesch had recently stated in an address at Princeton University on March 22, 1930. “It’s the foreigners and the first generation of Americans who are loaded on us.” His audience knew exactly whom he meant—those Italians, Jews, Poles, and Irish—and Loesch took some heat for his remarks, but he refused to back down. Pressed for an explanation, he insisted, “The real Americans are not gangsters. Recent immigrants and the first generation of Jews and Italians are the chief offenders, with the Jews furnishing the brains and the Italians the brawn.” (It is worth noting that Loesch himself was a first generation American, the son of German immigrants.)
On his return to Chicago, Loesch decided to take matters into his own hands, not by resorting to violence or instituting legal action against Capone but by launching a program to stigmatize Capone and others. His idea was a simple one, but it worked better than Loesch could have imagined, so well, in fact, that it continues to this day. “I had the operating director [of the Chicago Crime Commission] bring before me a list of the outstanding hoodlums, known murderers, murderers which you and I know but can’t prove, and there were about one hundred of them, and out of that list I selected twenty-eight men,” said Loesch. “I put Al Capone at the head and his brother [Ralph] next, and I ran down the twenty-eight, every man being really an outlaw. I called them Public Enemies, and so designated them in my letter, sent to the Chief of Police, the Sheriff, every law enforcing officer.” The primary object of Loesch’s ire was of course Al Capone—“not that I hold Capone responsible for all the crime in Chicago, by no means, but he is head and shoulders in the matter.”
Ranking the Public Enemies in declining order of significance, Loesch’s list had its share of lacunae and distortions. For instance, he neglected to include the boys from Chicago Heights, and to ignore Chicago Heights was to ignore the innermost circle of racketeering in Chicago and throughout the Midwest. At the same time, he attributed undue significance to comparatively minor figures. Despite these flaws, the list did present a fairly comprehensive Who’s Who of the underworld. Among the public enemies, in the order Loesch ranked them, were:
Alphonse Capone
Ralph Capone
Frank Rio
Jack McGurn
Jack Guzick
George “Bugs” Moran
Joe Aiello
Edward “Spike” O’Donnell
Joe “Polack Joe” Saltis
Myles O’Donnell
Frankie Lake
Terry Druggan
William “Klondike” O’Donnell
James “Fur” Sammons
“The purpose,” Loesch said in a letter explaining his list, “is to keep the light of publicity shining on Chicago’s most prominent, well-known, and notorious gangsters to the end that they may be under constant observation by the law enforcing authorities and law-abiding citizens.” Even as he stigmatized the gangsters, Loesch challenged the police and everyone else concerned to discharge what he insisted was their civic duty. Had Loesch been e
ven more forthright, he would have placed Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson at or near the top of the list; had he possessed a larger historical vision, he would have cited Prohibition, on which all the Public Enemies thrived.
Although Loesch’s Public Enemies List covered only Chicago and ignored racketeers of equal or possibly even greater menace in cities such as New York and Kansas City, its significance extended far beyond the borders of Cook County. On April 24, the Chicago Tribune announced the list in an eight-column front-page headline, and it was reproduced in newspapers across the country. Suddenly Chicago’s racketeering elite found itself exposed to unprecedented scrutiny—none more than Al Capone. At a stroke, Loesch had defined Capone in the boldest possible outlines. Until this time, the public’s impression of Capone was fuzzy, constantly shifting. He was known as the man who might have engineered the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, but then again, he might not have been involved. He was held responsible for the murder of William McSwiggin, a corrupt young prosecutor, but no one could say for certain what his role in McSwiggin’s death had been. Although everyone knew Al Capone the bootlegger, few realized he was also a pimp. Now, courtesy of Frank J. Loesch, everyone knew exactly who Capone was: Public Enemy Number 1.
The label struck a chord in a nation racked by the Depression, and Capone now became the scapegoat for all sorts of social ills. No longer was he indulged as a symptom of these ills; he was now perceived as the cause. Thanks to Loesch’s publicity stunt, Al Capone became the first great American criminal of the twentieth century, and as befits a modern criminal, he was an organization man, not a highway robber or lone killer, but a racketeer, the leader of an illegal fraternity. Conventional wisdom decreed that he and his organization had corrupted society as a whole, and the corruption was spreading fast. As Public Enemy Number 1, Capone redefined the concept of the criminal and by extension crime in the popular mind. Before Capone and the Prohibition era, the public and law enforcement agents clung to notions of criminals—their motives, their personalities—dating back to the previous century. Criminals, it was believed, chose to be evil; indeed, they relished their wickedness, their depravity, and cruelty. And they were loners, outcasts. In the 1920s, however, criminals such as Capone entered the mainstream of society, acquiring vast economic power. They espoused bourgeois values, built homes, took care of their families, tried to teach their children the difference between right and wrong. Some, like Capone, hoped to rise above their line of work. They were not necessarily evil, wicked, or depraved (though some were); they became Public Enemies because they were in an illegal line of work. Their organizations mimicked the customs and structure of conventional businesses. They practiced a rudimentary form of charity. They could deliver social services to people with no access to the legitimate political system. Their very success in business and with their constituents made them menaces, Public Enemies.
Other law enforcement luminaries were quick to echo Loesch’s brilliant public relations ploy. In Chicago, Robert Isham Randolph, “The Colonel,” as he insisted on being called, wrote a sizzling condemnation of Capone for Collier’s magazine. At the time Randolph was the head of the Secret Six, a group of some of the richest men in Chicago, including Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Samuel Insull, soon to be revealed as a racketeer in his own sphere, public utility companies. Their idea was to purge Chicago of its gangsters and thereby improve business conditions, especially for themselves. To this end they gave several hundred thousand dollars to the Chicago Crime Commission, and they even donated $75,000 to Elmer Irey to assist the work of the Intelligence Unit of the IRS.
In his article, Randolph warned of the danger of Al Capone’s becoming a model for the nation’s underprivileged—that is, immigrant—youth. “To an energetic youngster, born into a civilization that provides him with insufficient playgrounds, gangster life has a natural if disastrous lure. He cannot be relied upon to see through the pretense of Al Capone, master of brothels, posing as a hero. He may only feel the infantile thrill of carrying a gun—playing cowboy—and so blunder into a gang and take up its tragic career as his own. Such a boy meets the poor, weak-brained harlots who serve the gangs and who heap admiration upon youths who wear pistols.” Isham’s warning ended on an especially contemporary note. “He learns to use drugs to bolster up his courage for assassination assignments and, as like as not, winds up, face down, on some lonely suburban road, ‘taken for a ride.’ ”
Another member of the Chicago Crime Commission, Henry Barrett Chamberlin, used the radio to spread his anti-Capone propaganda. In a broadcast devoted to the subject of organized crime, he tried to whip up public frenzy against the great menace they faced. “Capone is the most dangerous, the most resourceful, the most cruel, the most menacing, the most conscienceless of any criminal of modern times. He has contributed more to besmirch the fair name of Chicago than any man living or dead,” he declared. “Beginning as a little ruffian in Brooklyn, by stages, through pandering, traffic in women, and murder, he has reached a place never before occupied by any kind in this country.” Even as he portrayed Capone as an omnipotent monster, Barrett tried to assure his listeners that law enforcement authorities were equal to the task of bringing Public Enemy Number 1 to justice. “This lone gorilla of gangland is being cornered. . . . The end is certain; his notoriety, for a time the secret of his strength, promises to be the instrument of his undoing.”
Adding his voice to the chorus of condemnation, Billy Sunday, the Evangelist advocate of Prohibition, rented a theater in the Loop where he preached against Al Capone every day for a week. “I’m going to Chicago to do my level best to give Al Capone and his gang of cutthroats the hot end of the poker,” he said. “The agencies for good that are at work in Chicago aren’t going to be the goat much longer, and if I can be of any help in their battle against Old Man Devil and his crowd I’ll stand up and preach him out of Chicago or drop in my tracks in the effort.”
In Washington, D.C., President Hoover lent the prestige of his office to this new campaign against Capone by inviting reporters to attend an off-the-record conversation in which he explained that the federal government had already gotten Ralph Capone, and it was only a matter of time until they were able to “reach” his younger brother Alphonse. At the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover also took note of the Public Enemies List. Always jealous of publicity, he adapted Loesch’s list into an FBI register of the nation’s “Most Wanted” criminals, to be updated as circumstances dictated. In time, the concept of a Public Enemies List became so closely identified with the FBI and Hoover that Loesch’s role as the originator of the concept was all but forgotten.
• • •
On April 20, three days before the Public Enemies List appeared, Al Capone took a train from Chicago to Miami, where he once again tried to disappear into the quiet routine of domestic life at his Palm Island villa. He had been out of prison for over a month by this time; always fearful that other gangsters were planning to assassinate him, Capone wanted to disappear behind the walls of his retreat even sooner, but several weeks earlier the governor of Florida had announced that Capone would be expelled if he set foot in the state. Capone responded to the challenge by hiring two of Miami’s leading attorneys, J. F. Gordon and Vincent C. Giblin, who maintained that their client was entitled to enter Florida because he owned a home there. As soon as Capone’s lawyers persuaded a federal judge to grant an injunction preventing the sheriffs from “seizing, arresting, kidnapping and abusing” their client, the racketeer boarded a train for Miami Beach. On arrival he held yet another press conference in which he emphasized his intention of living peacefully. “I am here for a rest which I think I deserve,” he said in language obviously chosen for him by his lawyers. “All I wish is to be left alone and enjoy the home which I have purchased here.” He even claimed to have worked out his income tax problems with the federal government, but he was deceiving himself on that issue. In Chicago, Johnson’s office pursued the matter with increasing vigor while
avoiding all publicity.
Reunited with his family at last, Capone amused himself by taking his son on boat rides across Biscayne Bay, beholding azure vistas denied him during the long months in jail. But the holiday was cut short once the list of Chicago’s Public Enemies hit the newspapers. He quickly discovered that going through life as Public Enemy Number 1 was going to be difficult and humiliating—exactly as Loesch and the Chicago Crime Commission had intended. Other than the Philadelphia escapade, the racketeer had yet to be convicted of anything—had yet, in fact, to be indicted—but wherever he went he was treated as if he had already been pronounced guilty of heinous crimes and had no business going forth in society. Bowing to public pressure, the city of Miami announced that Public Enemy Number 1 would be subject to arrest on charges of vagrancy whenever he set foot outside the door of his home. And the city managers kept their promise. Police followed Public Enemy Number 1 wherever he went, and they arrested him whenever they could. He was locked up not once but twice in the same week. On both occasions he was freed on a writ of habeas corpus after spending the night in jail.
Capone Page 52