I think it is manifestly unfair and unreasonable for this Bureau to be expected to assign Agents to matters that do not come within this Bureau’s jurisdiction, particularly when the work of this Bureau is as congested as it is at the present time. We have primary jurisdiction in Bankruptcy, National Bank cases, White Slave violations, Antitrust violations, Motor Theft violations, and innumerable other major violations of the Criminal Code. . . . Our investigative force is totally inadequate for the performance of the Bureau’s regular duties, but it becomes an impossibility to properly function at all if we are going to be called upon to work on cases for which other Governmental investigative agencies have been created.
In other words, Hoover was saying, if Al Capone happens to steal a car, the FBI will look into it; otherwise please don’t even think of bothering us, we’re drowning in work as it is.
Over Hoover’s strenuous objections, the Department of Justice prevailed on the Chicago office of the FBI to arrest Frank Nitti, the “Enforcer,” who had been in hiding since he had been indicted for tax evasion in March 1930. One reason the FBI reluctantly came around was the discovery, in late September, of a list of thirty-one racketeers scheduled to be arrested by one federal agency or another. The list turned up when two IRS agents, Art Madden and Clarence Converse, staged a raid on the Carleon Hotel in Cicero, in reality a thirty-five crib brothel owned and operated by Dennis Cooney on behalf of Al Capone. In the previous weeks, Converse had taken to disguising himself as a gandy dancer, a track laborer, and asked around about Nitti, who he heard was staying at the Carleon. When they raided the hotel, the agents went from room to room, rousting the disgruntled women out of bed, but Nitti had fled. Instead, Madden confronted a Capone spear carrier named Tony Tagenti, who claimed to be down with the flu. Searching for a weapon, Converse overturned Tagenti’s pillow, revealing a list. As the agents began to read, Tagenti strenuously denied any knowledge of it; he had no idea whatsoever how it had come to be under his pillow. Tagenti was taken down to police headquarters to be fingerprinted, while agents placed copies of the list in the hands of the city’s newspapers, going over the heads of corrupt police who would surely have destroyed it, for this was a remarkable list, containing both the names of the racketeers to be arrested on vagrancy warrants as well the police officers assigned to each man. Although Madden had yet to find Nitti, the IRS agent had exposed yet another example of the close cooperation between the Capone organization and the police, cooperation that made the Feds’ task extremely difficult to accomplish.
Embarrassed into action by the latest scandal, a team of FBI agents located Nitti in a roadhouse called the Roamer Inn, outside Michigan City, Indiana, on October 11. When the agents, shorn of identification, entered the restaurant, they discovered a supply of bootleg booze and prostitutes eager for business. The Roamer Inn, it seemed, was a typical Capone brothel. Rather than arresting Nitti on the spot, the agents shadowed him until the end of the month. By that time, a detail consisting of two FBI agents and no less than fifteen Chicago policemen was following his movements in Berwyn, the town adjoining Cicero, where Nitti and his wife lived quietly under assumed names. The agents wanted to arrest Nitti at home, but they lacked his exact address.
Pat O’Rourke of the Treasury Department finally succeeded in tracing Nitti to his current address by following his wife home from the beauty parlor one afternoon. To determine the correct alias and apartment number, the Treasury agent resorted to a ruse. One night he pushed Nitti’s car in front of a fire hydrant and then set off a nearby alarm to summon the Fire Department. When the firemen found a car blocking the hydrant, they traced its owner, and in this way O’Rourke learned that Nitti lived in apartment 3D under the name Belmont. The agent staked out the apartment for two days, and when he was certain he had seen Nitti come home for dinner, he summoned police backup and pounded on Nitti’s front door. “There must be some mistake,” Nitti shouted. “My name’s Belmont. I’m the well-known Belmont,” adding, sotto voce, “you son of a bitch!” The police broke down the door and arrested the well-known Mr. Belmont-Nitti.
Now that they had Nitti in custody, the federal agents realized to their embarrassment they knew next to nothing about him or his actual connection to Capone. Unlike every other principal in the Capone organization, Nitti had no criminal record. That was all about to change; from now on Nitti would have a record, “if for no other reason than his association with the celebrated gangster [Al Capone],” in the words of an FBI memorandum. Under questioning, Nitti revealed he had been born in Angri, Italy, on January 27, 1888. He also supplied a wan little autobiographical sketch of a typical immigrant boyhood, omitting any reference to Capone or racketeering. In his version he was no enforcer, merely a humble barber who, he wrote, “worked at various jobs in Brooklyn, . . . giving my earnings to my mother to support the family.”
In the wake of the arrest, Nitti’s photograph appeared in all the Chicago papers, and the entire city became familiar with the dapper little man who sported a neatly trimmed mustache and whose brow seemed furrowed in perpetual worry. Despite Nitti’s lack of a criminal record, Ries’s testimony proved that Nitti had been making secret deposits for Al Capone at the Schiff Trust and Savings Bank, and on that basis the U.S. attorney pressed charges. Confronted with the evidence against him, Nitti lost his mettle; indeed, he seemed to have lost his will to live. Dispirited, he pleaded guilty, and in exchange for his cooperation was given a relatively light sentence of eighteen months in jail.
George E. Q. Johnson received still more good news days after Nitti’s arrest. On November 19, 1930, a federal jury, after hearing evidence for a week and deliberating for six and a half hours, returned a guilty verdict against Jack Guzik for failing to pay his income tax in 1927, 1928, and 1929. During the trial the government had contended that Guzik had earned about $1 million during those years but had paid only $60,240 in taxes out of the $250,000 he actually owed. Fred Ries, the Capone accountant, was the government’s star witness, and his testimony implicated not only Guzik but Capone, who had yet to be indicted. Ries told the court that Jack Guzik was his “immediate boss” and that he had others, namely, “Al Capone, Ralph Capone and Frank Nitti.” He explained that a typical Capone gambling operation netted about $25,000 a week, “when business was good,” that the house never lost money, and that he delivered the profits, in the form of cashier’s checks, to Guzik’s chauffeur.
Following his conviction, Guzik went through another round of appeals, all denied, and Judge Charles E. Woodward sentenced him to five years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary and ordered him to pay a fine of $17,500. Guzik staved off the inevitable with more appeals until, on April 8, 1932, the fat little pimp whom all Chicago had come to despise finally began to serve his jail sentence.
In his testimony implicating Guzik, Nitti, and Capone, Ries had performed splendidly for the government, but the Capone organization had posted a reward for information leading to the cashier’s whereabouts (or worse). Since it would be many months until Ries would be required to testify again, there was every reason to believe that he might not survive. Having personally apprehended Ries, then tormented him with confinement in a vermin-infested cell, and finally made him a prime target for Capone’s assassins, Frank Wilson came to feel a measure of responsibility toward Ries, whose life was now in constant peril. At the time there was no Witness Protection Program, no formal way at all to safeguard the government’s key witness, so Wilson improvised a solution of his own: “I packed my scowling little treasure off to South America with government agents to guard him until we needed him in court.” Wilson even persuaded the Secret Six, the group of wealthy financiers dedicated to cleaning up Chicago, to pick up the tab for Ries’s enforced vacation.
With Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, Jack “Greasy Thumb” Guzik and Ralph “Bottles” Capone all convicted, the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago could now count three large, if belated, victories against the Capone organization. So Johnson had reason to
take heart, for the case against Al Capone himself, Public Enemy Number 1, was becoming stronger with every passing month, and later, as events began to crowd one another, with every passing week.
• • •
The world of the rackets was changing quickly, and Capone was struggling to keep pace. Since the start of his outlaw career, he had survived because he recognized that the greatest threat he faced came not from the law but from other gangsters. Now he was slow to realize that the situation had changed. He was the “Big Fellow,” the dominant racketeer in Chicago, and he had little to fear from his former rivals—he had defeated them all. In their place he faced a newly invigorated law enforcement establishment. Even his time-tested weapon in dealing with lawmen—the bribe—did not work with the new breed of zealots. Meanwhile, as Ries testified and Frank Nitti pleaded guilty, Al Capone decided to try his case in the court of public opinion.
“120,000 MEALS ARE SERVED BY CAPONE FREE SOUP KITCHEN,” the Chicago Tribune headlined on December 5. “ ‘Vagrant without Support for Self or Family,’ ” as Judge Lyle’s warrant described Capone, “Spends $12,000.” During the last weeks of 1930, Al Capone’s soup kitchen became one of the strangest sights Chicagoans had ever seen. An army of ragged, starving men assembled three times a day beside a storefront at 935 South State Street, feasting on the largesse of Al Capone. Toasting his health. Telling the newspapers that Capone was doing more for the poor than the entire U.S. government. Why, he was even offering some of them jobs. Capone milked his good works for all the favorable publicity they were worth. He came down and walked among the men, the wretched of the earth, offering a handshake, a hearty smile, and words of encouragement from the great Al Capone. He wondered aloud why the government was wasting its time trying to prosecute a benefactor and employer like him when it had so many more pressing concerns, such as feeding the hungry.
During November and December, Al Capone’s soup kitchen kept regular hours, serving breakfast from 7:00 A.M. until 9:00 A.M., lunch from 11:30 until 2:00, and dinner from 4:30 until 6:30—early enough for his homeless patrons to find themselves a flophouse or a park bench for the night. Thanksgiving Day 1930 was a particular public relations triumph for Capone. On that day he could boast that he fed more than 5,000 hungry men, women, and children with a hearty beef stew. He made certain to publicize the fact that he had bought and paid for 1,250 pounds of beef. No politician running for office could have handled this particular social program more nimbly than Capone. The regular publicity given to the soup kitchen generated a torrent of favorable mail, much of it addressed simply to “Al Capone, Chicago, USA” or “Al Capone’s Soup Kitchen.” Many of the letters beseeched Al Capone, the vagrant and Public Enemy, to help them get back on their feet. Even more remarkably, Capone’s soup kitchen appealed to the rich and influential as well as the poor and disenfranchised. “I met a lovely member of Chicago’s four hundred who spoke to me with tears in her eyes of Capone,” wrote Mary Borden in Harper’s Monthly. “I was already getting rather sick of the Scarface, but this suddenly made me feel quite ill, this sentimentality frightened me. I had heard, of course, of the Capone fans—he had more adorers, so I’d been told, than any movie star—but I had not expected the friends of my childhood to be numbered among them. That the hungry and ragged army of unemployed waiting in the street to partake of his bounty should, with a catch of the throat, mumble the maudlin words, ‘Good-hearted Al’ seemed natural enough, but that the petted and pampered daughters of Chicago’s old families should be moved to tears by the spectacular display of the bootlegger’s big heart was startling. It seemed to indicate . . . the spread of some moral intoxication or fever.” Borden left Chicago deeply troubled by what she had seen and heard; she was convinced that Capone’s organization was, as everyone had described it to her, “a government within a government.”
To counteract the favorable publicity the soup kitchen generated for Capone (and to boost his candidacy for mayor), Judge Lyle participated in a raid on Capone’s hideaway on South Austin Boulevard in Cicero on November 30. The information as to Capone’s whereabouts was woefully out of date; he hadn’t used the place in several years, but his absence did not stop the federal agents from ogling the luxurious furnishings. As they searched the place, they came across a dozen pairs of silk pajamas monogrammed “A.C.,” but they came no closer to Capone that night. Even if they had found him lolling in his bed, the agents could have done little more than hold him briefly on Lyle’s vagrancy warrant, which was itself of doubtful legality. The raid proved an embarrassing anticlimax.
Meanwhile, the soup kitchen continued to serve thousands of meals a week, and Capone was still at large. Exasperated beyond reason, Lyle insisted that if Al Capone ever appeared before him in court he would send the racketeer straight to the electric chair. The occasion for this startling declaration was a banquet held by the Chicago Corset Manufacturers’ Association at the Hotel La Salle, with Judge Lyle as the guest of honor. The city’s assembled corset manufacturers listened respectfully as he was introduced as “Chicago’s most distinguished jurist,” and, more to the point, “Chicago’s next mayor.” At the podium, Lyle took the occasion to denounce Al Capone to the corset manufacturers. “Capone has become almost a mythical being in Chicago,” Lyle told them. “He is not a myth but a reptile. He is more than a concentrated crime wave. He is a real and powerful political force. He sent one of his men to the legislature at the last election when a Democrat was crowded from the field. He has one mouthpiece in Congress and another in the City Council. . . . He must go, both as a criminal force and a political force.” Lyle came to a rousing conclusion: “We will send him to the chair if it is possible to do so. He deserves to die; he has no right to live.” To bolster this conclusion, Lyle proceeded to blame the racketeer for the death of “Big Jim” Colosimo in 1920, well before Capone arrived in Chicago. The corset manufacturers applauded heartily, assured that Judge John H. Lyle would keep their industry safe from the depredations of racketeers. Of course, Lyle’s reckless disregard for due process and for the rights of the accused made him sound foolish, but people understood the motive behind his tirade. The man was running for mayor; he couldn’t help himself.
As Lyle’s hysterical remarks suggested, a climate of fear surrounded Capone wherever he went, even in the soup kitchen. The potential for violence was always present, as Mike Rotunno, a press photographer, discovered when he was sent down to the soup kitchen to get a picture of Capone distributing food to the poor. Rotunno knew Al from various Chicago courthouses, where he photographed the racketeer, and, during lulls, played cards with him, and in his experience Al was always a cooperative subject. Rotunno knew that if he photographed only the right side of Capone’s face, omitting the scars, he would receive a $50 “tip” for his trouble. On this day Rotunno went about his business, but as he snapped his picture, the flash powder exploded in a bright puff of smoke, and everyone ran for cover. Rotunno tried to explain that no gun had gone off, no assassins had tried to kill Capone, it was merely the photographic apparatus, but the fear was so great, he recalls, that “for a couple of minutes I thought there was going to be bloodshed.”
The tide of emotion obscured certain facts about the soup kitchen. Although Capone stated that the soup kitchen cost $10,000 a month to operate, he probably did not pay its costs himself; he “encouraged” local bakeries, meatpackers, and coffee roasters to donate to his cause, and what Al Capone told them to do, they did. More importantly, at the same time that he fed the poor, he raised the wholesale price of beer in Chicago. For as long as anyone could remember it had been $55 a barrel, but in the early weeks of December, when the soup kitchen was at its height, it went to $60 a barrel, with the increase being passed along to the customer. Meanwhile the cost of producing the suds remained constant, at about $4 a barrel. Even as Capone gave to the poor with one hand, he took with the other, yet because he had timed the maneuver to coincide with the soup kitchen, he managed to escape criticism.
Indeed, by the end of 1930, his popularity was as high as it had ever been. At the Medill School of Journalism in Chicago, a student poll of the ten most “outstanding personages in the world” generated the following list: Benito Mussolini, Charles Lindbergh, Admiral Richard Byrd, George Bernard Shaw, Bobby Jones, Herbert Hoover, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, and Alphonse Capone. As this register suggested, the 1920s had been a decade of heroes—athletes, scientists, explorers, industrialists—but the decade just beginning would have a different tone; the 1930s would be an era of tyrants and dictators and demagogues. Capone managed to straddle both extremes; he had the unique ability to play the villain and the hero simultaneously, the Robin Hood who was also Public Enemy Number 1, the “vagrant” who fed thousands of hungry, law-abiding citizens. Capone appealed to Americans because he combined several persistent popular mythologies. To some, he was an urban outlaw, Jesse James in Chicago’s canyons of steel and stone, a man asserting his identity in a world of ciphers. To others, he was a bandit with a social conscience, a romantic figure stealing from the wealthy to help the poor. Playing Robin Hood, he had the courage to confront America’s impersonal, rapacious corporate culture. All that was required to seal his reputation was his martyrdom.
Capone’s soup kitchen was distinct from his earlier generosity, which had always been private and capricious, although equally dedicated to his self-glorification. He had thrown money from a car, bestowed cash on widows at weddings, left extravagant tips, and in general enjoyed playing the “Big Fellow.” In this case, however, his soup kitchen was carefully calculated to rehabilitate his image and to ingratiate himself with the workingman, who, he realized, had come to regard him as another unimaginably wealthy and powerful tycoon. Although his maneuvers gave his reputation a temporary boost, he missed the opportunity to transcend himself by establishing other social services for the customers who frequented his soup kitchen or leaving the rackets as he had so often said he would. That promise, once sincere, if unrealistic, fell victim to his fear and his notoriety. As Public Enemy Number 1, he was no longer free to return to the legitimate world; about the best he could expect was to forestall the inevitable reckoning waiting for him at the end of la mala vita.
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