Capone
Page 59
Although the raid was fraught with hazard, Ness, ever the jaunty college boy, planned it as a “football play,” with the emphasis on play. As the play unfolded, however, Ness confronted unanticipated obstacles and hazards, as he related in his memoir.
I had a truck with a huge steel bumper on the front of it. No prisoners had ever been taken during a Capone brewery raid; it was our plan not to give them a chance to escape, so it was decided that we would drive the truck through the doors of the brewery; five of us riding in the truck and 10 in two other cars. . . . We put the truck into low gear, up the street and—wham—through the doors. The doors fell with a great loud clap, and at that moment my heart sank. There was no brewery! What I was looking at was a wooden wall, painted black, about two truck lengths away from the front of the building, thus giving the illusion of a vacant garage. We soon found swinging doors in this wooden wall and were on the necks of five operators in less time than it took to tell it.
The raiders’ haul proved impressive: two trucks, including a glass-lined “tank truck,” and five men, most notably a brewmaster named Steve Svoboda who was, according to Ness, “Capone’s ace brewer, for each time [he was arrested] he would get out on bond and go back to brewing beer.” Once the men were arrested, Ness took in the surroundings. “This brewery was capable of turning out 100 barrels of brew daily. Seven 320 gallon vats were placed in a line in the room which was automatically cooled so that each morning 320 gallons of wort, unfermented beer, were brought in a tank truck. One hundred barrels would be filled with beer, the fermentation period being two weeks. In addition . . . the beer was spiked with carbonated gas.” To add to Ness’s sense of satisfaction, the raid received newspaper and newsreel coverage, and this publicity began to spread the story of the courageous young special agent and his incorruptible band of Untouchables. It was precisely the sort of publicity that Al Capone’s own brother, “Two-Gun” Hart, had received during the height of his Prohibition raids, tales of brave men risking their lives to capture stills. And, like Hart, Ness reveled in the attention. The sole disappointment of the raid was that his handsome young friend, Bill Gardner, quit the Untouchables immediately afterward. According to Ness, Gardner returned to his former boss, and said, “If the job is anything like THAT, I’m through!”
Undeterred, Ness devoted the next four months to a series of raids. In the account he wrote in his later years, he claimed to have raided no less than twenty-five Capone breweries and seized no less than forty-five delivery trucks. However, in a lengthy report to his boss, George E. Q. Johnson, dated March 26, 1932, much closer to the actual events, Ness offered a more realistic assessment of his accomplishments:
From the inception of the organization of the special group . . . six breweries with total equipment valued at $140,000 were seized. Observation of the workings of these breweries indicated that the total income based upon the wholesale [price] of beer manufactured would have totalled $9,154,200 annually. Five large beer distributing plants were seized in addition to the breweries. The total amount of beer seized in the breweries and plants was approximately 200,000 gallons having a wholesale value to the Capone organization of $343,750. Twenty-five trucks and two cars were seized, the value of which totalled approximately $30,950. Many of these trucks were large trucks exceeding ten tons and some of them were specially constructed. Four stills were seized with an approximate value of $12,000. 403,500 gallons of alcohol mash were seized in connection with these stills, value of said mash approximating $4,000.
Even without Ness’s subsequent inflation of these figures, it was apparent that the Untouchables had compiled an impressive record.
Ness was less satisfied, however, when he calculated the effect of his Untouchables on the Capone organization itself. In his 1932 report, he noted, “The attitude of the persons arrested has . . . changed from one of kind indulgence such as was shown in the beginning of 1931 to despair and violence . . . as these individuals realize that their backs are to the wall and that the United States Attorney plans to go through with the drastic seizures and arrests to its complete obliteration. It is interesting to note in this regard that it was apparent that the Capone organization felt the presence of this small United States Attorney’s group more acutely than any other organization.”
As he conducted the raids, Ness gained an appreciation for Capone’s methodical and professional approach to the business of bootlegging. “Each raid was made in exactly the same way,” he noted in his original memoir, “and each brewery was found to be erected on the scale of 100 barrels of beer a day. . . . Everything the Capone gang did was on a large scale and specialized basis. They had a sales office where the telephones rang without let-up with orders from speakeasies for beer and liquor. Another office was head of distribution—the dangerous business of getting the illicit product to the consumer. Another division was production; only the best brewing barons in the country could have so expertly designed and laid out various breweries . . . for 14 day fermentation.” Ness made the most of his findings by placing taps on the telephones of the Capone sales office, and when the sales office moved to a new location Ness followed, placing new taps within a matter of days. “In a short period of time,” he concluded, “it became almost impossible for them to deliver beer without a good risk of being knocked off by us.”
Eventually, the forty-five delivery trucks seized by the Untouchables during their raids would be sold at public auction, but before that occurred, Ness wanted to use them to taunt Capone. Thus, he boasted in The Untouchables, “I evolved a brilliant psychological counterstroke.” If not precisely “brilliant,” Ness’s plan was theatrical. He ordered the entire fleet of trucks to be cleaned until they gleamed. He then assembled them into a long convoy, really a parade, made longer still with the addition of several police cars to afford protection and to prevent hijackings. When all was ready, Ness arranged for the trucks to be driven along Michigan Avenue, past the Lexington Hotel. Just before the “parade” was to begin, so Ness relates in The Untouchables, he placed a call to the Lexington Hotel. “Put me through to Mr. Capone,” he told the switchboard operator, and when another voice growled, Ness said, “Let me talk to Snorky.”
“Who’s callin’?” the voice at the other end inquired.
“None of your God-damned business. But if you know what’s good for you, you’ll put him on here damned quick.” And when Capone himself did come on the line, Ness said, “Well, Snorky, I just wanted to tell you that if you look out your front windows down onto Michigan Avenue at exactly eleven o’clock you’ll see something that should interest you.” And with that, Ness hung up.
The drivers started their trucks, and one of the stranger parades ever seen in Chicago got under way. The trucks lumbered through the morning traffic, staying together with difficulty, as Ness, riding in the lead car and armed with a sawed-off shotgun, looked out for hijackers who might mistake the unusual convoy for easy prey. When the parade reached the Lexington Hotel, Ness was pleased to note “an even better ‘house’ than I had expected” as the captured trucks lumbered past the Capone stronghold. Brandishing his shotgun, Ness perused the sea of pearl-gray fedoras for the familiar scarred face and concluded that Capone was watching from his office window on a high floor. He looked up, noting the heads poking through the windows, but he saw no sign of Capone himself. Still, Ness was convinced that “Snorky” was up there somewhere, strangling on the humiliation the Untouchables had inflicted on him. Or so Ness imagined.
As the last of the trucks turned off Michigan Avenue, the parade gained speed and returned to a secure garage.
• • •
“In February 1931, I stood by the rail at Hialeah and looked into the boxes at the man I had been stalking for nearly three years,” recalled Frank Wilson. At the moment, the IRS investigator was not a well man. Deprived of sleep for months on end, smoking ever more heavily, he had begun to suffer from mysterious pains in his teeth and gums and other symptoms of nervous strain. His boss, Elm
er Irey, concluded that the best solution was to send Wilson to Florida, where he could recover his health and continue his research into the finances of Al Capone, who had recently returned to the warmth—and comparative safety—of his Palm Island villa. In Miami Beach, Capone again frequented the Hialeah racetrack, posing as another carefree high roller enjoying the warm weather and fast horses. The role made Wilson bridle. “Scarface Al Capone sat with a jeweled moll on either side of him,” the man from the IRS continued, “smoking a long cigar, occasionally raising his binoculars to his eyes, greeting a parade of fawning sycophants who came to shake his hand like a veritable Shah of Persia.” It was as if Wilson were gazing upon the devil himself: “I looked at his pudgy olive face, his thick pursed lips, the rolls of fat descending from his chin—and the scar, like a heavy pencil line across his cheek. When a country constable wants a man he just walks up and says, ‘You’re pinched.’ Here I am, with the whole U.S. government behind me, as powerless as a canary.”
In frustration Wilson did the next best thing to arresting Al Capone. Visiting a local dog track, he located an elusive bookkeeper for the Capone organization. This was Leslie Shumway, the man who had actually entered the figures into the registers Wilson had discovered that hot summer night in Chicago. Shumway was a major find; if he became a government witness, his testimony could conclusively tie Capone to the profits from the Cicero gambling clubs. The trick was to capture Shumway rather than frighten him into silence, and Wilson brought a certain amount of guile to the task. Within twenty-four hours Shumway was served with a subpoena to testify about a certain “White Steel Company.” Shumway protested that he had never heard of the company, and the agent who served the summons readily agreed that it was probably a mistake, but he encouraged Shumway to appear anyway, if only to clear up the confusion and to receive an apology. When Shumway did appear, the trap set by Wilson swiftly closed around the bookkeeper. The White Steel Company was fictitious, the subpoena a ruse. Instead of the expected apology, Shumway found himself face to face with Frank J. Wilson of the IRS, who produced the register of Al Capone’s gambling income, the register Shumway had compiled. (Actually, Shumway had employed two distinct types of handwriting to confuse investigators, but Wilson had caught on to the gimmick.)
Even when presented with this evidence, Shumway strenuously denied any knowledge of Capone. “Leslie,” Wilson said at last, “I know you’re in a helluva spot. You have only two choices: If you refuse to play ball with me, I will send a deputy marshal looking for you at the dog track. . . . You get the point, Leslie. As soon as the gang knows the government has located you . . . they will probably decide to bump you off.” Alternatively, Shumway could “come clean” by agreeing to explain the entries in the captured register. Wilson promised to protect Shumway, as Wilson had previously promised to protect Ries, or, as the IRS agent put it, “I’ll guarantee that Mrs. Shumway will not become a widow.” Faced with the inevitable, Shumway agreed to betray Capone to the federal government.
Before Wilson had a chance to enjoy his victory over the Capone organization, Elmer Irey received word from one of his undercover operatives that Al had kept watch over Shumway, had learned that the bookkeeper had talked to Wilson, and, exactly as Wilson predicted, planned to kill Shumway in retaliation. Irey’s first instinct was to pick up the phone and relay the warning to Wilson down in Miami, but the IRS operatives had also notified Irey that the phone in the rooming house where Wilson was staying had been tapped—not by the government, but by Capone’s men. Irey got around the problem by placing the call but first warning the operator not to say it was long distance, thereby alerting anyone listening in on the conversation that it was out of the ordinary. When Wilson got on the line, Irey recommended that Shumway leave Miami immediately, in the company of Wilson. Within thirty minutes, Wilson and Shumway were on their way to Peoria, Illinois, where they were met by Art Madden. Throughout the journey, Shumway supplied details of Capone’s gambling operation and explicated details of the register.
Leslie Shumway appeared before a federal grand jury in Chicago on March 13, only forty-eight hours before a statute of limitations would have ruled his testimony out of bounds. When he was finished, he took an enforced “vacation” paid for by the Secret Six. Accompanied by an IRS agent, the bookkeeper left for Oregon, one of the few states in the Union beyond the reach of Capone’s tentacles, and remained there until May. With the addition of Shumway’s testimony, the case against Public Enemy Number 1, after years of delay, was fast becoming overwhelming.
His nerves frayed to the breaking point by the stress of the investigation, Wilson had cut his investigation close, very close; had Capone’s lawyers realized the circumstances under which the IRS had obtained its evidence from Shumway, they would have howled, but secrecy worked in Wilson’s favor. In his willingness to bend the rules as far as he dared, he proved himself to be just the sort of zealot who was actually capable of damaging the Capone organization. Although he dealt only in financial matters, the trail of lucre led inevitably to vice, bootlegging, and gambling. Had Wilson investigated only bootlegging, or only murder, he would have had only a partial, distorted view of the Capone empire. By following the money he saw the big picture. The money was the most sensitive aspect of the Capone organization; Al knew how to deal with accusations of murder (he gave an interview proclaiming his love of family) and with accusations of bootlegging (he pointed out the hypocrisy of Prohibition), but he had no defense against the charge that he had failed to pay taxes on his immense income. As he knew, after the booze was served and the blood was shed, money was what it was all about; money was power—power to bribe, power to buy political influence, power to deny reality. Money—not bullets—proved to be Capone’s main tool of business. As he pieced together the details of Capone’s finances, Wilson was probing the essence of the Capone organization and the ultimate source of all his power. For that reason, he, more than any other man, more than J. Edgar Hoover, more than Eliot Ness, grasped the inner workings of the Capone organization; thus he, more than any other man, lived in constant peril.
Wilson was not the only representative of the federal government who traveled to Florida to conduct covert surveillance of Al Capone. George E. Q. Johnson, the U.S. attorney who was assembling the evidence collected by Wilson and the other agents into a case, also made the pilgrimage to Miami Beach, ostensibly to recover from a nasty bout of bronchitis brought on by the merciless Chicago winter. Even as Johnson kept watch on Capone, the racketeer’s hirelings kept tabs on the prosecutor and his son. “We picked up Secret Service agents in Miami,” recalls his son, George Jr., who accompanied his father, “and we arrived by train and went straight out to Palm Island to see the Capone mansion. It was a gorgeous place. I was a young man at the time, and I was impressed, because back in Chicago my life was restricted. Apparently word got around the gang that we were there, and there were cars and strange, tough-looking people hanging around our hotel. The hotel management was less than happy about our being there, not because we were disorderly but because of the activity our presence created around the hotel. The other guests were afraid they’d be caught in the crossfire of my father’s assassination.”
• • •
With both Frank Wilson and George E. Q. Johnson tracking his movements in Miami, Capone decided that he would be safer in Chicago, winter weather or not. Two urgent matters required his presence, the mayoral primary and a new summons for his arrest, and both were scheduled only days apart. First, the election. Of the utmost importance to Capone was the defeat of Judge Lyle, the dangerous, publicity hungry reformer who had staked his campaign on the effort to jail Capone for vagrancy. That left “Big Bill” Thompson, the Republican incumbent, who was entrenched, thoroughly discredited, but nonetheless willing to do Capone’s bidding. Lyle was determined to make Thompson’s ties to Public Enemy Number 1 the sole campaign issue. “If Mayor Thompson is renominated, the newspapers of the United States and Europe will herald the news with hea
dlines saying, ‘Capone Wins,’ ” he told a rally. “Four years ago it was not generally known that Capone was behind the Thompson scenes. Now his face can be seen plainly peering from the wings, looking over the crowd to see whether his star performer is getting away with it.” But Thompson wasn’t getting away with much in this campaign. Lyle and the Chicago Crime Commission both declared that they had proof that Capone had contributed to Thompson’s campaign; sums varying from $25,000 to $150,000 were mentioned.
On February 21, four days after Lyle leveled his charges and four days before the election, Capone, accompanied by his brother Ralph, took the Dixie Flyer from Miami to Danville, Illinois, and proceeded to Chicago, where the primary was entering its final frenzy. Thompson emerged from the seclusion that had marked most of his term as mayor to clobber his opponent with crudely entertaining rhetoric. In campaign speeches he called Lyle a “monkey,” a “chimpanzee,” and “the greatest liar.” In exasperation, he growled, “That lily-livered reformer has attacked my integrity. That’s too much. I’ll knock him down and jump on his face and kick hell out of him. You watch Big Bill Thompson.” Rising to this dubious challenge, Lyle replied, “People have grown tired of this blubbering jungle hippopotamus, defending his gangsters, his crooked contractors, and lazy blood-sucking jobbers by slobbering insults against the people of Chicago.” The voters loved the fray; this was politics, Chicago-style—part street brawl, part circus. It was generally assumed that Thompson would easily defeat Lyle and that Chicago was destined to succumb to four more years of “Bigbillism,” with all its attendant corruption and spectacle. The prospect suited Capone, who had long profited greatly from the status quo.