Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  The judge was thrilled with his own cleverness. “I held within me a warm, tingling sense of satisfaction as I reviewed the possibilities in the law in the case of, let us say, Al Capone,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Dry and Lawless Years. Those possibilities were enough to make Lyle cackle with judicial glee:

  If Capone, arrested on a vagrancy warrant, declined to answer questions he would automatically fail to disprove the allegations. I could find him guilty of vagrancy and fine him $2000. If he tried to pay the fine he would have to explain where the money had come from. He could be sentenced to the House of Correction to work out the fine.

  Were he to recite the sources of his income he would be opening the door to criminal charges. And any claim to legitimate employment would launch an investigation that would conceivably result in perjury charges.

  There was also the possibility that a vagrancy hearing would assist the treasury agents in their efforts to develop an income tax case against Capone. . . . Under cross-examination in my court the mobster might make admissions at variance with the statement he had given the government.

  Lyle immediately met with his old friend Henry Barrett Chamberlin of the Chicago Crime Commission, whose “keen eyes sparkled as I outlined the vagrancy attack.” Barrett took the plan to Frank Loesch, who gave his approval.

  The judge issued warrants for the arrest of Al Capone and the rest of Chicago’s Public Enemies on vagrancy charges. The Tribune gave the campaign ample publicity, and Lyle suddenly found himself center stage in the city’s crime drama. He made a point to carry a gun with him now at all times; yes, he assured reporters, it was a necessary precaution, he had been receiving threats, his life was in danger. This was rough justice, but with the public’s fear of gangsters running higher than ever, Lyle was able to get away with his posturing and his legal maneuvering. Ultimately, all the “vagrants,” including Al Capone, were tried and convicted, with the exception of “Spike” O’Donnell, who received some helpful legal advice from Trohan “for the sake of a good color story.” (Even Trohan was learning how things were done in Chicago.)

  The legal victory proved illusory. In the end, the state Supreme Court overruled the convictions, and the vagrancy campaign fizzled out. All along, it had been nothing more than an attention-getting device for Lyle and the newspapers, especially the Tribune, a way of assuring the public that they were doing something big and bold about the gangsters. In fact, they had accomplished nothing. In the end, only Judge Lyle benefited from the crusade. Exploiting the favorable press he had received, he did run for mayor, opposing “Big Bill” Thompson himself in the primary.

  Meanwhile, the search for Lingle’s killer continued to preoccupy Chicago. Theories abounded as to who had killed the journalist and why. Newspapers speculated that Lingle had double-crossed Capone, who then ordered his death, but no proof was forthcoming. Colonel Calvin Goddard, the ballistics expert, examined the bullets and weapons supposedly used in the murder, but even he was stumped. At the Tribune Walter Trohan had been working constantly on the Lingle case, and as he immersed himself in the details of the slain reporter’s career, Trohan became convinced he knew who was responsible. The culprit was not Al Capone, as so many people assumed, but Capone’s longstanding rival, “Bugs” Moran, who was highly displeased with Lingle’s selection of Bill Russell as the chief of police. As Trohan and others had begun to realize, Lingle cooperated with both Capone and Moran—a dangerous practice. In all likelihood, Moran, believing that Lingle had betrayed him both to Capone and to the police, ordered Lingle’s death. From Moran’s point of view, the murder of Jake Lingle was the perfect crime, for Moran knew that the blame would fall on Capone, as did the blame for McSwiggin and, of course, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  Although Trohan came closer than anyone else to the truth by implicating Moran in the death of Jake Lingle, Moran himself did not pull the trigger. To find out who did, the Tribune formed and funded a committee to investigate the matter; the most prominent members were Charles F. Rathbun, a lawyer who worked for the newspaper; Patrick T. Roche, an investigator for the state attorney; and John Boettiger, a Tribune reporter. As might be suspected, the committee became more interested in covering up the Tribune’s involvement with Lingle than in uncovering the truth. After more than a year of delays, the committee named an unlikely suspect, Leo Vincent Brothers, a thirty-one-year-old gunman out of St. Louis, where he ran with the Egan’s Rats gang. When Brothers was brought to trial, the evidence against him proved to be less than compelling. For instance, fourteen witnesses testified that they had seen Lingle’s murderer fleeing the scene of the crime, but only half of them named Brothers as the assassin. Brothers himself refused to comment on the killing or to reveal who, if anyone, had hired him to kill Jake Lingle. Still, he looked the part of a killer, surly and snarling, and in the Tribune’s version, he was the man who had killed Lingle. In the end, a jury found him guilty, but given the inconclusive nature of the evidence against him, he received the minimum sentence, fourteen years, with time off for good behavior. Defiant to the end, Brothers jeered, “I can do that standing on my head.” His conviction satisfied no one but McCormick and the Tribune’s editorial writers, who loudly proclaimed that justice had been done, the newspaper’s honor avenged. But many in Chicago, including the impartial Chicago Crime Commission, remained convinced that Brothers had been framed and that Lingle’s killer was still at large.

  • • •

  Al Capone watched the Lingle drama unfold from the relative safety of his Miami Beach retreat. He finally broke his silence on July 18, when he invited Harry Brundidge of the St. Louis Star to Palm Island and spoke with the reporter about Lingle for three hours as, Brundidge wrote, “the beams of a tropical moon danced on the waters of Biscayne Bay.”

  Brundidge found Capone in good spirits, brimming with “typical Latin effusiveness,” which meant that Capone placed his hand on the reporter’s shoulder to emphasize a point. Despite the revulsion he felt, Brundidge could not bring himself to dislike the affable racketeer. “He has a dark, kindly face, big sparkling eyes, and dark curly hair that is thinning from the brows,” Brundidge observed. “His whole demeanor is that of an overgrown boy. The long scar on his left cheek adds to his appearance; his personality is exceptionally pleasing, and it requires no vivid imagination to understand the reasons for his huge success in his chosen field. A stranger, knowing nothing of his past, might characterize him as ‘a playful, lovable chap, as harmless as a St. Bernard dog.’ ”

  Capone turned somber when Brundidge brought up the murder that had shaken Chicago. “Was Jake your friend?”

  “Yes,” Capone replied, “up to the very day he died.”

  “Did you have a row with him?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “It is said you fell out with him because he failed to split profits from handbooks.”

  “Bunk. The handbook racket hasn’t really been organized in Chicago for more than two years and any one who says it is doesn’t know Chicago.”

  Brundidge brought up another subject of intense public interest: “What about Jake’s diamond belt buckle?”

  “I gave it to him,” Capone said.

  “Do you mind stating what it cost?”

  “Two hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “Why did you give it to him?”

  “He was my friend.”

  Brundidge fed Capone another soft question. “What do you think of newspaper men who turn their profession into a racket?”

  “Newspapers and newspapermen should be busy suppressing rackets and not supporting them. It does not become me of all persons to say that, but I believe it.”

  “How many newspaper men have you had on your pay roll?”

  Capone’s reponse was calculated to cause consternation in Chicago newsrooms: “Plenty.”

  The two men had been speaking on the porch. Capone now treated Brundidge to a tour of the house, and as they went from room to room, the racketeer tried
to make light of his recent legal difficulties in Miami. “A little clique . . . has tried to run me out of town, but I refused to be chased. They have arrested me repeatedly, tried me unsuccessfully on a perjury charge which was trumped up and tried to padlock my home because I kept a drink here for myself, as who in Miami doesn’t?” he explained. “I am out of all rackets. I will make Miami my home and will go to Chicago only occasionally. I had my success, saved my money and now I’m through with the rackets.”

  Capone had said this before, and he would say it again, but no matter how persuasive his tone, he was not through with the rackets, nor were the rackets through with him. Capone knew better than any one else how difficult it was to abandon la mala vita, and when a man was as notorious as he, it was virtually impossible. Even if he made his peace with his colleagues, the federal government would never leave him alone. The guns, the fear, the stigma—the whole seductive, glamorous, hellish business of the gangster life—would hound him to the grave.

  CHAPTER 9

  Secret Agents

  THE SUMMER OF 1930 HAD BEEN LONG, hot, and frustrating for Frank J. Wilson, who led the IRS investigation of Al Capone. Wilson had watched the murder of Jake Lingle induce paroxysms of dread in Chicago, and he was crestfallen when the ensuing scandal failed to smoke out Capone. Rather, it made everyone realize that Capone’s tentacles reached everywhere, not only into the city’s gambling dens, brothels, nightclubs, and saloons, not only into City Hall and the Police Department and the town of Cicero, but into the city’s newsrooms. Isolated by the fear that corruption would taint his office as well, Wilson had spent the last two years studying countless ledgers and bank statements, but he had failed to uncover any concrete evidence of Capone’s income. “He had bought himself a Florida Palace on Palm Island, imported a chef from Chicago and was spending $1,000 a week on banquets. He tore around in sixteen-cylinder limousines, slept in $50 French pajamas, and ordered fifteen suits a time at $135 each,” Wilson reminded himself, “and I couldn’t show that this satrap of Chicago earned more than $5,000 a year!”

  Wilson received countless leads developed from newspaper stories and informers, but in every case he came up empty-handed. “Everyone was hostile,” he found. “They were a hundred times more afraid of being killed by Capone guns than they were of having to serve a prison term for perjury.” Although Wilson’s snooping placed him squarely in harm’s way, his anonymous, peripatetic existence protected him better than conventional security. Lurking in the shadows of Capone’s empire, he looked like Everyman—gangly, balding, bespectacled, attired in a wrinkled white shirt and tie—and he lived a makeshift life of last-minute train rides, short stays in rundown rooming houses, smoking an endless stream of cigarettes as he placed calls from public phones. He was willing to track down any lead, no matter how inconsequential. At one point he was reduced to exploring a rumor that Capone controlled the miniature-golf racket, such as it was, in Chicago. “Investigation of this merely improved my putting,” he tersely noted of the result. It defied reason that one of the most powerful men in Chicago, perhaps the most powerful, left no fiscal fingerprints, yet there it was: Public Enemy Number 1 was financially invisible.

  Desperate for a productive lead, Wilson turned to outside sources. He traveled to St. Louis, where he saw John T. Rogers, the reporter whom he had assisted with the exposé of Jake Lingle in the Post-Dispatch. Now Wilson wanted a favor in return. Rogers invited Wilson to lunch at the Missouri Athletic Club, where they were joined by a third man, who claimed he was in position to know something about the Capone organization’s gambling income. His name was Edward O’Hare. As a young man he had gone into business with the inventor of a patented mechanical rabbit used to start dog races. Track owners paid a small percentage of their take for the right to use the device, and over the years O’Hare, by controlling these rights, made a considerable amount of money. That was not his only source of income; in 1923 he was convicted of a bootlegging-related offense. The conviction was overturned on appeal, and O’Hare’s ability to negotiate around the law earned him the sobriquet “Artful Eddie.” He subsequently began operating dog tracks across Illinois, soon attracting the interest of Al Capone, who wanted a piece of this particularly lucrative business. (Dog racing was a racketeer’s dream because it was easy to fix; all you had to do was feed the dogs you wanted to lose a large meal shortly before the start of the race.)

  Initially, O’Hare resisted Capone’s overtures and operated the Lawndale Kennel Club in competition with Capone’s Hawthorne Kennel Club. A supremely self-confident man, O’Hare warned that he would refuse to allow the mechanical rabbit to be used on any tracks if Capone tried to hurt him or his business. In response, Capone proposed a meeting, and the two men, though rivals, took a liking to one another. In the end, Capone suggested that O’Hare could make more money than he thought possible if their dog tracks merged. At the moment, dog racing was all the rage, and the tracks were said to net $50,000 during a good week. O’Hare was under no illusions about Capone, but “Artful Eddie” persuaded himself he could handle the perils involved. “You can make money through business associations with gangsters, and you will run no risk if you don’t associate personally with them,” he explained. “Keep it on a business basis and there’s nothing to fear.”

  O’Hare kept his distance from the Capone organization; he was never seen in Capone’s company or at a Capone-controlled gambling den, but there was no way out of the arrangement, and by the time he met Frank Wilson, O’Hare had come to realize he had made a pact with the Devil. “Eddie realized too late that Capone was so powerful . . . he couldn’t operate the dog track without accepting this new silent partner,” Wilson noted. “I sympathized with O’Hare as I realized the serious predicament into which he had unconsciously been thrown.” As the lunch proceeded, it became apparent that the light of Eddie O’Hare’s life was his son, twelve-year-old Butch. Father and son shared a dream that one day little Butch O’Hare would attend the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. Wilson liked the genial O’Hare, but he could not imagine why O’Hare would jeopardize his life, as well as his son’s, by testifying against Capone. However, only days after he returned to Chicago, Wilson received a phone call from his friend Rogers, who announced that O’Hare was prepared to tell what he knew. Wilson remained skeptical: “I hope he doesn’t have too much blood on his hands and that we can depend on him.”

  “I’ve known him twenty years,” Rogers assured Wilson. “He never got drawn directly into any of the gang wars. He limits his activity to legitimate dog tracks and has no connection with the Capone booze and vice rackets. He has wanted for a long time to get away from Capone, but once the organization sucks in a businessman they just don’t let him retire.” But why, Wilson asked, was O’Hare willing to talk? “He’s nuts about that boy Butch,” Rogers explained. “He’s dead set on getting him into Annapolis and he figures he must break away. But he can’t do it while Capone is on the throne. I told him you were making headway and that if he helped, the big shot might be on his way to the penitentiary a little quicker.”

  “Does he realize that in helping me put Scarface on the spot he is taking his life in his hands?”

  “Hell, Frank, if Eddie had ten lives to live he’d jeopardize every one of them for that boy Butch.”

  From that time forward, Rogers served as an intermediary, passing information from the compromised businessman seeking redemption to the IRS investigator intent on obtaining Al Capone’s conviction.

  • • •

  Confident that Judge John Lyle’s outstanding warrant for his arrest on vagrancy charges was meaningless, Al Capone celebrated his return to Chicago with a banquet at the Western Hotel. Days before, on July 29, the assassination of Jack Zuta, a pimp and accountant for the old Moran gang, briefly raised the hopes of law enforcement authorities who thought they might be able to prove that Capone was somehow involved. Because the police had questioned Zuta a month before his killing, the newspapers speculated that he h
ad implicated Capone in any number of crimes (“The vice monger was a softie,” explained the Chicago Tribune’s Fred Pasley. “Gangland had him pegged as yellow and a squawker.”) and that Capone had killed him in retribution. However, this theory, like so many others concerning the inner workings of Chicago’s rackets, sounded dramatic but lacked a basis in fact. Of greater interest were the financial records found among Zuta’s effects; these showed that the Moran gang, for which he worked, practiced precisely the same type of bribery of elected officials as the Capone organization. The documents suggested that Zuta had tried to cultivate the late, unlamented Frankie Yale and lesser known Capone allies. In a letter dated June 1927, Louis La Cava, who worked for Capone before fleeing to New York, wrote to Zuta about trying to defeat the Capone organization: “I’d help you organize a strong business organization capable of coping with theirs in Cicero. You know you have lots of virgin territory on the north side limits border line, and they are going to try and prevent me from lining up with you and keep starving me out until I go back to them, begging for mercy.” Although Zuta’s records contained many such fascinating tidbits, they did not, by themselves, present a comprehensive picture of either the Moran gang or Al Capone’s criminal behavior.

  Throughout the uproar over Zuta’s death, Capone gave the appearance of luxuriating in peaceful retirement. He devoted most of August to the pursuit of a lower handicap at the Burnham Wood golf course, where, between churning up divots, he casually transacted business with “Greasy Thumb” Guzik and “Machine Gun” McGurn. It was just like old times, the betting, the cheating, the rude camaraderie of the boys as they whiled away the late-summer afternoons playing gangster golf. “He’s all right, if you ask me,” a waitress said of Capone, “and he and the boys always play a full eighteen holes, too.”