Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  For Chicago Thompson has meant filth, corruption, idiocy and bankruptcy. He has given our city an international reputation for moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft and a dejected citizenship. He has ruined the property and completely destroyed the pride of the city. He made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization.

  The jubilation inspired by Thompson’s defeat was tempered by the knowledge that his successor, Tony Cermak, was no reformer. Unlike Chicago’s last Democratic mayor, the honorable but ill-starred William E. Dever, Cermak was a traditional machine politician, a product of the Illinois Democratic organization. Coming up the hard way, he learned early in the game not to go around taking controversial stands, such as denouncing gangsters or supporting Prohibition; he knew the value of rewarding supporters with patronage; and as he had confided to Judge Lyle during the primary, he was perfectly willing to accommodate the Capone organization, if that was what it took to get elected. For all these reasons, a wave of reaction to the election condemned Tony Cermak in advance as a second-rate political hack and influence peddler. In an article headlined “Chicago Goes Tammany,” the Nation argued, “To the practical and unprejudiced observer it appears that Chicago has simply swapped one evil for another. Indeed, it is clear that the great crusade has had one net result: the people of Chicago, by electing Tony Cermak, have made him the most powerful political boss in the United States today. The power that lies in his hands is greater than that possessed by any other boss anywhere in the country; it may eventually prove greater than that of any other boss in American history, barring not even Tweed, Platt, Penrose, or Mark Hanna.” Fueling the fear surrounding Cermak’s elevation to the mayor’s office was a considerable amount of ethnic prejudice and ethnic envy, for the new mayor was cut from a different cloth than William Hale Thompson. For all his buffoonery, “Big Bill” came from an old, moneyed New England family, while Cermak had been born in Prague, the son of a miner, and had emigrated to the United States as a child. To his opponents, a foreigner had become the mayor of Chicago.

  Once Cermak took office, the crucial issue he faced, as the newspapers incessantly reminded him, was Chicago’s gangsters, specifically Al Capone. Most publications predicted failure. “He stands completely helpless before the gangsters and racketeers, and he will continue helpless, granting that he is sincere in saying that he is opposed to gangster rule, so long as the operation of the gangs and racketeers remains profitable to so many of the important people in the city,” said the Nation’s correspondent, who went on to warn, “I have heard in the last few days from the lips of more than one speakeasy proprietor and more than one Capone henchman that far from fearing anything in the way of a genuine Cermak offensive against the gangsters, these men actually supported Cermak on election day in the belief that he is helpless to move against them.”

  In reality, Cermak’s situation was not quite so dire. By now the federal government’s campaign to get Capone was so advanced that Cermak did not need to do much on his own; the momentum generated by Johnson, Wilson, and the other federal agents carried him along. Furthermore, Prohibition, it was now generally conceded, was on the way out, along with Herbert Hoover. Spared the thankless choice of defending or subverting the law, Cermak managed to avoid the one issue that could undo his administration. Which is not to say that the advocates of the Temperance movement had given up. The WCTU, the Anti-Saloon League, and all the other drys continued to proclaim Prohibition a great success and to argue that the only cure for violations of the law, which were universal, was stronger enforcement measures, yet the jails around the country were already swollen with the ranks of bootleggers; there was nowhere to put convicted offenders, whom judges were increasingly quick to let off with a warning and wink. It was 1931, and the drys were sounding not like voices from another decade but from another century, as indeed they were, and few politicians, Cermak included, troubled to listen to them anymore. Even President Hoover suspected the cause of Prohibition was futile, yet it was too late for him to adapt to new political and economic realities, for that would have meant abandoning his political base.

  • • •

  To hear Eliot Ness tell it, by the spring of 1931 he had succeeded in destroying Al Capone’s empire. As a result, “I was now receiving a great deal of newspaper publicity, and gradually becoming known as a ‘gangbuster.’ ” However, publicity, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. It was true that his name appeared from time to time in the Chicago newspapers, but only because George E. Q. Johnson made a point to tell reporters what a fine job young Eliot Ness was doing, going around in the dead of night raiding stills and generally distracting Al Capone while the federal government carried on the real business of assembling enough evidence to obtain indictments for income tax evasion. A typical account of his activities, appearing in the Chicago Tribune on April 11, 1931, read, “U.S. DRYS RAID BIG BREWERY OF CAPONE; NAB 5. Agents Batter Down Door with Truck; Seize $100,000 Equipment.” The name of Eliot Ness, misspelled, did not appear until the third paragraph. Even that much attention was too much, for Ness was supposed to maintain a low profile in the performance of his duties.

  Addicted to the limelight, Ness ignored the need for secrecy—and for safety. As Capone’s men became familiar with the identity of their principal antagonist, Ness became the subject of numerous threats. On one occasion, he noticed something amiss with the hood of his car as he happened to balance his briefcase on the fender. “Very cautiously I raised the hood,” he wrote. “Attached to the wiring system just under the thin panel separating the driver’s seat from the motor was a dynamite bomb. I carefully lowered the hood and called the police. ‘If you had touched that starter,’ said the Police Department explosives expert as he gingerly removed it [the bomb] from the car, ‘you’d have been blown to kingdom come.’ ”

  For once, even Ness was frightened, and he sat for a long time afterward in his car, trembling.

  • • •

  A month after taking office, Mayor Cermak confounded his critics by launching a major offensive against the Capone organization. The move was prompted by the discovery of the charred torso of Mike “de Pike” Heitler, a pimp who had, not long before his death, talked to the police about Al Capone. The state’s attorney brought in no less than nine Capone lieutenants for questioning, including Phil D’Andrea, Capone’s principal bodyguard, and Tony Accardo, now rising quickly through the ranks of the organization. Cermak himself declared that Al Capone was also wanted for questioning in the murder of Heitler. It was a bold move, perhaps a suicidal one, at least in Judge Lyle’s estimation, but with it Cermak demonstrated that he had established a new political order in Chicago.

  Capone was by now expert at distancing himself from gangland violence, and he knew the outcry over Heitler would soon fade—and so it did. Instead, he was preoccupied with strengthening his position on the national racketeering scene. His vehicle for doing so was the first major racketeering conference since the Atlantic City gathering two years earlier. Then, Capone had been in disgrace following the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and his jealous rivals, especially from New York, had conspired to transfer control of the Chicago organization from his trigger-happy hands to Johnny Torrio’s steadier grip. The plan had never been implemented, and Capone’s dominance of the nation’s rackets, especially bootlegging, had grown during that period to the point that he now played host for the new conference, which took place at the end of May.

  The conference had been called following a vicious gangland war in New York, a struggle with national reverberations. Known in gangster chronicles as the Castellammarese War after the Sicilian village where many of the participants had been born, the conflict erupted on April 15, when Giuseppe Masseria, the leading Mafia boss in New York, was assassinated in a Coney Island restaurant. His death upset an uneasy balance of power among the city’s rival Mafia clans. Capone’s boyhood acquaintance “Lucky” Luciano took on the role of “boss of b
osses” in New York, and he moved quickly to organize the clans into five Mafia “families” that survive to this day. Luciano himself took over the leadership of what later became known as the Genovese family, Joseph Profaci remained in charge of what is now known as the Colombo family, Philip Mangano became chief of the early Gambino family, Gaetano Gagliano assumed leadership of Lucchese family, and finally Joseph Bonanno gave his name to the former Maranzano family. At the beginning of the bloody conflict Capone had sent money to Masseria, but he wisely heeded a warning from Masseria’s enemies to avoid doing anything rash, such as sending gunmen. As a result, when the smoke cleared Capone was on good terms with the survivors; indeed, they now looked to him as an established boss to whom they could turn for advice and connections, even though he was an outsider, a Napolitano among Siciliani. Thanks to this gang war, Capone was poised to win the acceptance he had always been denied by the New York Mafia.

  Among the racketeers who converged on Chicago that May was the young Joseph Bonanno, in the company of Salvatore Maranzano, who had assumed his position on the death of Giuseppe Masseria. “Capone was an extravagant host,” Bonanno later recalled in his popular memoir, A Man of Honor. “He picked up the tab for everyone’s accommodations and provided the food, the drink and the women. He sent Maranzano a gold watch studded with diamonds. Capone also gave us his unimpeachable assurance that the police would not meddle in our business while we were at the hotel. . . . Despite his grisly reputation, now that I met him . . . I found him to be a rather jolly fellow, at least on this occasion.” As the conference got under way, Maranzano related the travails of the Castellammarese War and then introduced the new heads of the New York families. “Maranzano spoke glowingly about Capone,” Bonanno wrote. “Although Capone used to be of the Masseria faction, . . . he now wanted peace and the enjoyment of a society of friends. In so many words, therefore, Maranzano recognized Capone as the head of the Chicago Family. All clapped.” Capone in turn gave a speech in praise of Maranzano.

  Until this conference, Capone and the Mafia had often been mortal enemies. By the standards of the secretive Mafia, Capone’s organization was too public and included too many non-Italians. The differences had been insuperable until now, when Capone and the Mafia finally met as equals rather than rivals. To be accepted by the men of the Mafia, to be invited into their secret society, meant new opportunities for Capone to expand his racketeering network into the once hostile territory of New York, and, of even greater importance, it diminished the likelihood that Mafia gunmen would hunt him down. To be accepted by the Mafia now was a high honor indeed.

  Despite all the toasts, tributes, and outward signs of harmony, old rivalries and insecurities threatened to surface. At the final banquet, the heads of the various families offered a traditional tribute to Luciano in the form of cash-filled envelopes, but Luciano, concerned that his position made him vulnerable to assassination, wisely chose to refuse the gifts. “Why should you be payin’ anythin’ to me when we’re all equals?” he told the others.

  The exuberant Capone failed to grasp this Sicilian subtlety. “Maybe it’s all right to break down them old traditions,” he said to Luciano, “but why do you have to break that kind of tradition? . . . Why get rid of a good thing?”

  “It ain’t a good thing,” Luciano said. “It makes them feel like I’m the boss and I don’t want that. There ain’t gonna be no more gifts, no more envelopes, nothin’ like that.” In private, Luciano said, “I think I really made Capone sick. His face turned green.”

  Even as the other racketeers welcomed Capone into the fold, they were acutely aware that he would be indicted for income tax evasion at any moment, and, given the federal government’s perfect record of convictions for that offense, it was obvious to everyone—except, that is, to Capone himself—that the head of the Chicago “family” was bound for jail. The prospect of Capone’s departure from the racketeering scene raised the vexing question of succession. Capone favored his brother Ralph as his second-in-command, but “Bottles” lacked Al’s fighting spirit and leadership capabilities. Furthermore, he had been convicted of income tax evasion, and although he was free on appeal, he could be sent to jail at any time. Meanwhile, a group of younger members of the Capone organization vied for power; among the most prominent were Tony Accardo and Murray Llewellyn Humphreys—or, as he was known, “Murray the Hump,” and by extension, “Murray the Camel.” He was, incredibly, a Welshman, probably the only Welsh gangster to be found in America’s gangland. He was skinny and dapper and handsome in a sinister sort of way, a representative of the new breed of racketeer, part thug and part businessman. And he enjoyed Capone’s favor. “Anybody can use a gun,” Al said of his protégé. “The Hump uses his head. He can shoot if he has to, but he likes to negotiate with cash when he can. I like that in a man.”

  • • •

  As the nation’s most powerful racketeers hailed Al Capone, the federal government’s investigation of Public Enemy Number 1 nearly came undone. The first sign of a problem occurred when Frank Wilson received another unexpected phone call from Mike Malone, the IRS agent living undercover at the Lexington Hotel as De Angelo, the small time hood from Brooklyn. This time, Malone was calling to warn that Capone had brought in five gunmen to assassinate Wilson, Art Madden, Elmer Irey, and everyone else of consequence at the IRS. “I suppose Al figures it’ll scare the jury to death,” the undercover operative offered. Once again, Wilson and his wife moved, only to receive further word from Malone that Capone had changed his mind and dismissed the hired killers.

  Irey himself was the next target. When a Capone functionary visited the head of the IRS Intelligence Unit, hinting at the possibility of an enormous bribe, Irey, who had been waiting for this moment, sternly lectured his guest: “I don’t happen to share the fear that Al Capone throws into a great many people. There is no reason whatever why he should be treated differently than any other man who has criminally violated the statutes of the Unites States Government. I might add that so far as I am concerned Al Capone is just a big fat man in a mustard-colored suit. There is one thing I want to make clear to you, and I will appreciate it if you will make it clear to Capone. We know for a fact that Capone does not hesitate to order the murder of anyone who stands in his way. Now, if anything happens to any of our agents or witnesses at his trial I can guarantee you that the whole force of the United States Government will be brought to bear against those who are responsible.” The Capone delegate departed without a deal, and Irey returned to his business with renewed zest.

  Finally, George E. Q. Johnson also became a target of Capone’s manipulations, which nearly derailed the government’s painstakingly assembled case against him. Two months earlier, on March 13, a grand jury had actually taken the fateful step of returning an indictment of Al Capone for income tax evasion, but Johnson had decided to suppress it to avoid publicity and because Wilson, Irey, and the other agents had recently discovered new information on Capone’s income. In April, Johnson empaneled a new grand jury, which he expected to return a more thorough and damning indictment. By then Capone had learned of the suppressed indictment, and in May his lawyers, Thomas Nash and Michael Ahern, paid a call on Johnson, startling him with an alarmingly thorough account of the grand jury’s supposedly secret activities. They went on to claim that it would be impossible for Capone to receive a fair trial in Chicago, where he had received so much bad publicity over the years. Once they had concluded their legal posturing, they came to the point. Their client, Al Capone, was ready to make a deal with the U.S. attorney. In Johnson’s words, “If reasonable sentence were imposed he would be willing to enter a plea of guilty to the present indictment and to the indictments which he expected to be returned.” This simple offer, essentially a plea bargain, placed Johnson in a complex dilemma. If he refused the bargain and went to trial, he would inevitably face the possibility of jury tampering, especially in Chicago, where it was common. Whether or not members of the jury had been influenced through br
ibes or intimidation, there was a real chance that Capone would be acquitted, and for Johnson, that eventuality would be a disaster. On the other hand, if Capone actually went to jail on a plea bargain arrangement, there was a good chance he would be freed in time for the Chicago World’s Fair. That would be another disaster for the Feds, who worried that he would control unions and scare away tourists. For Johnson, the only acceptable course was a trial by a jury ready, willing, and able to convict Capone. Johnson had one powerful ally in this matter: Judge Wilkerson. From the way he had handled Capone in the contempt trial, it was obvious that the judge would, if given half a chance, prescribe the maximum sentence for Capone. Yet this course was risky indeed. If the jury acquitted Capone, there was little that Wilkerson, Johnson, Wilson, or any one of the dozens of other men who had dedicated themselves to bringing the racketeer to justice could do. Ultimately, Johnson was faced with a roll of the dice, and it seemed likely that Capone’s attorneys had loaded those dice.

  At that point, Johnson should have told Capone’s silver-tongued lawyers there would be no deal; instead, he hesitated and explained he would have to discuss the matter with the Department of Justice. He left immediately for Washington, where he conferred with the attorney general, who also equivocated and instructed Johnson to wait. On his return to Chicago, Johnson and Ahern met again, and this time Capone’s lawyer proposed a jail term of, say, eighteen months. Johnson refused; the sentence was too short.