Jack McGurn’s last years illustrated what happened to gangsters who outlived their time. After Al went to jail, life was not the same for McGurn. Although he had orchestrated the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, arguably the crime of the century, he no longer enjoyed the patronage of the Capone organization. He fell on hard times, and Louise Rolfe, the “Blonde Alibi” whom he had married to escape prosecution for his role in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, abandoned him. The day before Valentine’s Day, 1936, found him at a bowling alley at 805 Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. Two gunmen burst in and shot him to death in front of twenty witnesses. The timing of the event strongly suggested that the assassination was “Bugs” Moran’s revenge for the Massacre, but the killers were never caught, although they left a calling card in the form of a crude poem placed in McGurn’s lifeless left hand.
You’ve lost your job
You’ve lost your dough
Your jewels and handsome houses.
But things could be worse, you know.
You haven’t lost your trousers.
Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti also fell on hard times. While Capone was in jail, he had been shot and nearly killed during a quarrel with two policemen. Once he recovered, he ran afoul of the Feds, who reindicted him for tax evasion, along with the surviving members of the Capone organization, all of whom were prepared to offer him up to the government as a sacrificial lamb. Isolated from friend and foe alike, Nitti cheated them all by shooting himself to death on March 19, 1943, the only Capone racketeer of any consequence to commit suicide.
Exactly one year later, “Big Bill” Thompson, the most colorful and corrupt mayor Chicago had ever seen, died of pneumonia shortly after waging an unsuccessful campaign for governor of Illinois. At the time of his death, it was revealed that this dedicated public servant, who had never earned more than $22,500 a year as the mayor of Chicago, left an estate worth nearly $2 million, most of it in banknotes and gold certificates crammed into strongboxes.
“Bugs” Moran, who had escaped his appointment with death at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, lived on and on, although his career was much diminished. He reverted to the petty burglaries of his youth, and in 1956 the FBI finally caught up with him and arrested him for a bank robbery he had committed years before. Moran died in Leavenworth Penitentiary in February 1957 of lung cancer and was buried in the prison’s cemetery.
Many other racketeers managed to dodge the law as nimbly as they ever had. Under the leadership of younger Capone lieutenants such as Murray “The Camel” Humphreys, who succeeded Al as Public Enemy Number 1, the rackets continued to thrive in Chicago. Of course the nature of the game had changed, along with the rest of American society; bootlegging no longer figured in the racketeering equation, but many former bootleggers had become semirespectable liquor distributors and saloon owners. Gambling and prostitution still flourished under the management of the rackets, and political payoffs, while more discreet, remained a fact of public life in Chicago. The racketeers had become more sophisticated in their business dealings with the passage of time; they now sought to control unions and financial institutions, and many of them—or their sons—passed into the legitimate sphere altogether, bidding farewell to the old ways, even the old neighborhoods, and, no doubt, the old thrills.
The complicated network of overlapping rackets formerly known as the Torrio organization, later as the Capone organization or the syndicate, was now called the Outfit, the name by which the Chicago rackets are known today. In many ways, the Outfit resembled its predecessors. For one thing, it was based in Chicago Heights, Al Capone’s old refuge, and the ultimate boss was still Frankie La Porte. Now that Al had lost his mind, La Porte wanted all the Capones to remain quiet and out of sight. That was the way La Porte preferred to do business; he had learned the lesson Johnny Torrio had known by heart, that in the rackets publicity led to disaster. It proved to be a successful strategy, for only those in the rackets guessed at his importance. As for the inhabitants of Chicago Heights, Frankie La Porte intimidated them all into silence. They were afraid to speak his name, let alone reveal his identity to the police. Under his leadership, the Outfit reverted to the traditional racketeering style. Once again it became secretive and clannish, with little of the flamboyance that had marked Capone’s reign. No one would ever make a movie about Frankie La Porte, for he avoided publicity with the zeal that Al Capone had once displayed in seeking it, but he remained the most powerful and capable racketeer of them all, the true heir of Johnny Torrio’s embattled empire.
• • •
In Homer, Nebraska, things had gone from bad to worse for Richard “Two-Gun” Hart. By 1940 he was so broke that he could not afford to pay the light bill, and the power company was threatening to shut off the electricity. Once again he had to swallow his pride and appeal to his brother Ralph Capone for financial assistance. Instead of money, he received an invitation to visit Ralph at his summer retreat in Mercer, Wisconsin. It was a long drive, but Hart had no choice.
When he arrived in Mercer, Hart was welcomed by Ralph, a few of the boys from the old days in Chicago, and, unexpectedly, his mother. It was quite a homecoming, and, to judge from the new clothes he bought for himself, quite profitable, too. When Hart returned to Homer he wore a spanking new Panama suit, and his pockets were stuffed with $100 bills. His transformation astonished his sons. They had never seen a $100 bill before, and now their father had an entire roll of them. When they asked where he had come by all this money, he suddenly grew stern and secretive, telling them he had taken a job with the government, but he could not reveal what it was, since the nature of his work was a military secret.
In the months to come, Ralph continued to forward money to the lost Capone brother, and when Hart ventured north to Wisconsin the following summer he was in for a shock, for there was Al himself, tan and robust. The brothers had not seen one another since well before Al went to jail, and Hart noted that his younger brother did not seem to be all that sick and weak from “paresis.” In fact, he looked healthy and happy; he just didn’t have much of a memory. But, the Capones rationalized, who would after spending all those years in Alcatraz? No doubt the guards had beaten him silly while he was there, and that was the real reason why he was a little funny in the head.
Later, Hart brought three of his boys, Bill, Sherman, and Harry, who were teenagers now, to visit the Capone family in Wisconsin, and the family spent the whole summer together. When Hart and his children reached Mercer, they were met by their Uncle Ralph, who had a surprise in store for them. “We drove down a highway quite a bit,” Harry recalls, “way back into the timber, and then we came to a gate, and I started to get out an open it, but Ralph said, ‘Wait a minute.’ Pretty soon a guy comes walking out, and he opens the gate. We close it and go on in. It’s like a resort town in there, a beautiful place, all cabins, and it’s nice and everything, and then I was sitting at a table between Uncle Ralph and Uncle Al”—Al Capone, the uncle he had never met but knew only through rumor and legend and who, the boy began to realize, was the ultimate source of his father’s mysterious, newfound riches. “We were in a great big room,” Harry continues, “and there were about twenty people or so sitting around the table and in the middle there was a lazy Susan turning with all the food on it, and if you wanted anything you just turned to it. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was sitting with all the bigwigs from Chicago that night. They were having a big meeting.”
As the Hart boys came to know their Uncle Al, they discovered that he was nothing like the Al Capone in the movies and newspapers. He was no gangster, he was a stocky, gentle man who wore khaki pants and a work shirt and had always had a kind word. Just a great big gentle lovable bear of a man. (Several years later a reporter asked Harry if he was afraid of the notorious Al Capone. “Why should I be?” Harry replied. “I had no reason to be scared of him. He was my uncle.”) The boys used to wrestle with Al in the lodge, all the kids piling on top of Uncle Al, one after the other,
trying to hold him down. He didn’t realize his own strength. And then when they were still gasping for air he would give the boys a $100 bill, tell them to go and buy him some cigars, and keep the change. They couldn’t help but like him. Nor were they aware that he was a sick man; to the young Harry, he looked “the picture of health.” And a friend whom Harry took along on the trip to Mercer came away with this impression of Al: “He was a big man, very friendly and outgoing. He was in a fine mood, very happy. He did not appear to be in poor health; he looked just fine.” Despite these impressions, Al’s health was more precarious than it appeared; he was incapable of tending to himself and still lived in a perpetual daze.
After the weeks in Mercer, Harry traveled to Chicago to become acquainted with another part of his lost family, his grandmother Teresa, who still lived in the house on Prairie Avenue, where he spent three of the strangest, most fascinating weeks of his life. The name of the street was about the only thing that reminded Harry of home, however, for, as he quickly realized, he was among virtual foreigners. His grandmother Teresa knew a few words of English, but she mainly spoke Italian, which he couldn’t understand, since he had not realized until recently that his father came from Italy. Occasionally Richard would say, “Now mother, talk English so we understand you.”
So the Capone family survived, and, for Teresa, surely, the best part was having all her children together again, not just Ralph, Matt, Mimi, Mafalda, and Albert, but also Al, who slipped into Chicago now and then to visit her, and Richard, who with every passing year was becoming less of a “Two-Gun” Hart and more of a Vincenzo Capone. Of course, in a family gathering of this size, there were bound to be strains. Mafalda, for instance, made no secret of her dislike of Vincenzo, that traitor and deserter, posing as a marshal and a Prohibition agent, of all things, when the real family interests lay on the other side of the law, and she also resented Ralph’s generosity. The way she looked at things, the more money Ralph gave Vincenzo, the less would be left over for her.
There was also a “little tension,” as Harry recalled, between Al and his lost brother, but how could there not be, when the two of them had spent their lives on opposite sides of the law? Vincenzo expressed no remorse for having abandoned the family as a teenager, nor would he admit that he had lived a lie since then. And when Ralph pointed out some of the good things racketeers did, how they fed hungry Italians (including Vincenzo) during the Depression and supported churches and other charities, all from the proceeds of a little harmless gambling and other vices in which people would engage regardless, Vincenzo refused to go along with this line of reasoning. For him, the law was the law, and he liked enforcing it. When his brothers pointed out that it was the law, the Chicago police, to be exact, who had killed Frank Capone as he walked down a street in Cicero in broad daylight, Vincenzo had nothing to say. Prohibition was over, so what difference did it make? Nothing would bring back Frank. The other Capones hoped Vincenzo’s sons wouldn’t turn around and become cops. No, their father assured his brothers, the boys had their own ideas. Now that they were all reunited, the Capone family would try to stay that way, because that was how they started out, and, in the end, all they had was each other.
• • •
Ever since that day in 1932 when he had seen Al Capone off to the Atlanta Penitentiary, it had been Eliot Ness’s fondest wish to become an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And why not? What better candidate than Ness, with his degree from the University of Chicago and his experience as a Treasury agent in Chicago during the last years of Prohibition, collecting evidence of Capone’s bootlegging activities? He was truly a scholarpoliceman.
Only one man blocked the fulfillment of that dream. He was J. Edgar Hoover, the director himself. Awaiting his appointment to the FBI, Ness drifted from one law enforcement position to the next. 1933 found him in Cincinnati, Ohio, working in the local Prohibition agency, but with repeal now a reality, the job was a dead end. He was thirty, the Depression had eliminated jobs in the private sector, and he was growing desperate. At this point he contacted his former boss, George E. Q. Johnson, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, to write a letter of recommendation to J. Edgar Hoover. Unfortunately, Ness had no way of knowing that Hoover still harbored a dislike of Johnson, based on the irrational belief that the prosecutor had stolen the FBI’s thunder during the effort to put Al Capone in jail. In any event, the U.S. attorney wrote to Hoover. “During the Government’s investigation of the Capone case,” Johnson said of Ness’s work with the Untouchables, “he had a special division working which reported to the United States Attorney; under his direction these men did a splendid piece of work. His integrity was never questioned and I recommend him to you without reservations.” Few things could do more damage to Ness’s prospects at the FBI than a letter from Johnson, and inevitably Ness’s application was not approved. But that was not the end of his involvement with the Bureau. Now that Hoover associated him with Johnson, the FBI regarded Ness as a troublemaker and began to maintain a confidential file on his activities, as it would with any other individual suspected of breaking federal laws. As the years went by, the file expanded to include Hoover’s numerous handwritten comments, mostly warning his men to have nothing whatsoever to do with Ness. “Beware of Ness,” he advised. It was Hoover’s eternal frustration that Ness was widely assumed to have spent at least part of his career as an FBI agent, and Hoover went out of his way to assure everyone that Ness never worked for the Bureau. But Hoover’s interests went beyond setting the record straight. The critical tone of his comments about Ness and the FBI reports on his activities make it clear that Hoover regarded Ness not as a lawman but as a dangerous and reckless vigilante, and for the rest of his life the director waged a propaganda war against Ness and his reputation as a gangbuster.
Having put his dream of working for the FBI aside, Ness accepted a position as director of public safety in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 12, 1935. Just weeks before, a reform mayor, Harold Hitz Burton, had taken office, and he quickly made his most important appointment, that of Eliot Ness. The choice proved an immediate success, for the corruption-weary city was delighted to have the young, handsome former Treasury agent who billed himself as the nemesis of Al Capone. “CLEVELAND: MEET THE MAN WHO BROKE CAPONE,” declared a newspaper headline. Taking office on a wave of reform, Ness was charged with the task of driving the rackets out of town and reviving its tired police department. He now had responsibility for the safety of the nation’s seventh-largest city, with a population of just under a million. At the time, Cleveland was known as a haven for racketeers, most of whom had used the profits of bootlegging and gambling during Prohibition to purchase political power. Although Cleveland had no one to equal Al Capone, the city was honeycombed with brothels and gambling dens, and its police department was widely acknowledged to be corrupt and ineffectual, its equipment obsolete. For all these reasons Ness faced daunting challenges on taking office, but he delighted Clevelanders with the bold measures he took during his first months on the job. He transferred half the sergeants on the force and more than a third of the patrolmen. He fired officers for drunkenness and ordered weapons to be brought up to date. He staged raids—highly publicized in the papers, of course—on local roadhouses and gambling dens. Because he was young, handsome, and married (to Edna Staley), Ness became known as a man on the go in Cleveland, achieving the celebrity that had eluded him in Chicago. He cultivated close relationships with reporters, especially Ralph Kelly of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Clayton Fritchey of the Cleveland Press. In fact, he became so close to Fritchey that the editor of the Press, Louis B. Seltzer, allowed the reporter to work with Ness on a full-time basis as an investigator. In return, the newspaper received a never-ending series of exclusives. The unorthodox arrangement allowed Ness to reach Clevelanders without submitting to the scrutiny of an independent journalist. It meant that every article concerning his activities amounted to a press release. And it meant that no one challenged Ness. In a city ba
ttered by the Depression, Eliot Ness’s latest exploits against local racketeers always made for colorful, upbeat reading, and the newspapers all spelled his name correctly now. After only six months, the Cleveland News, reviewing Ness’s report to the mayor, editorialized, “There is one interesting—very interesting—paragraph in the report of Cleveland’s safety director. We quote a simple sentence: ‘Cases of vandalism totaled 89 this year as against 300 for the same period last year.’ For that single sentence, Mr. Ness, you are entitled to take a bow.”
Ness’s youth and good looks helped his popular appeal. Still slender, his hair full, and his eyes glimmering, he looked like a hero as he gave his interviews and feigned modesty. Even as he went about the serious business of flushing out Cleveland’s gamblers, prostitutes, and crooked policemen, Ness cultivated his image as a gangbuster by addressing impressionable audiences, for whom he inflated his deeds in Chicago to heroic proportions. “Thousand Young Dick Tracys Thrill and Cheer As Ness Tells How G-Men Got Capone Gang,” ran a representative headline in the Cleveland News. The audience consisted of children, who, before receiving their Dick Tracy badges, had to submit to a lecture by Ness about his exploits on the trail of Al Capone. When Ness finished, and they received their souvenirs at last, Ness told the cheering throng, “You have a badge just like mine, only maybe yours is a little smaller. When you grow up to be a man with long pants perhaps your badge will grow up with you, and when that time comes I’d like to have you all working for me as real detectives.” Thus Ness indoctrinated a new generation. According to a reporter who was present, “The enthusiasm was uncontrollable.”
Capone Page 85