by Deirdre Bair
That being the case, hiding in plain sight, whether in downtown Chicago or in fortress Cicero, was becoming too dangerous. It was time to leave town and not tell anyone where he was going.
Chapter 8
IN HIDING
As early as 1926, it was apparent to Al that he would need to secure a place where no one could find him. Ralph had bought property in northern Wisconsin’s Hayward area that he named after himself by abbreviating his two names: RaCap. Al followed Ralph’s example when he heard about a property twenty-three miles down the road in the hamlet of Couderay: four hundred acres in a pine and hardwood forest with numerous existing buildings on top of a hill that had commanding views down to the private Cranberry Lake. Although Ralph was the official owner (and not Al, as legend often had it), he did not buy the property in his name but put the deed of sale in the name of the mob’s lawyer, Edward J. “Artful Eddie” O’Hare.
The Capone brothers were initially drawn to the area because Joe Saltis, with whom the Outfit was then on cautious (and temporary) good terms, had bought property in the area to use as a way station for contraband booze trundled in from Canada. The possibility of doing the same was always uppermost in Al Capone’s mind, but there were other things about the property that made it so attractive to a man in an always-threatened position. It was well-nigh impossible for a rival gang to stage a surprise attack, because the only way to the house was down a gated and heavily guarded dirt road; situated high atop a hill, it had a clear view across the lake, so no boat could arrive undetected.
It was O’Hare who arranged for the original house to be enlarged and fortified and for the other buildings to be constructed according to the needs of a mobster primarily looking for a hideout and a quick getaway. All this cost upwards of $250,000 (in 2015, more than $3.25 million). The main house was old and small until he turned it into a ten-room, six-bedroom lodge with eighteen-inch-thick stone walls. Windows were small and sparse in the main room, whose most dramatic features were a native-stone fireplace that rose to the vaulted ceiling and a huge custom-made mahogany spiral staircase that led to the second-floor bedrooms.
Around two hundred local men were hired to upgrade the property, many of them skilled stonecutters who worked on the main house and the numerous outbuildings where the men from the Outfit were lodged. Because the property was far from the nearest towns, the workers bunked there during the week, and to the present day their descendants can describe in detail the gargantuan meals Capone’s cooks fed them. The locals always had company, for anyone in the Outfit who needed a break from the Chicago gang wars could find one in Couderay; all they had to do was board the train on the Chicago and North Western Railroad, where a local resident (not in the Outfit’s pay) was the conductor and would let them ride for free.
Residents of the little town knew something unusual was happening when furniture vans with Chicago addresses printed on their sides roared down the little main street. Sixty years later in the 1980s, when the property had been turned into a hotel and resort called the Hideout, visitors could still sit on some of the original sofas and chairs, walk on the expensive Oriental rugs, and look at the stuffed owls and zebra skins that Al Capone had transported from the city.
Capone had the land’s natural defenses supplemented during construction, and by the time the work was done, there were eight other buildings surrounding the main house. Everything was easily kept under surveillance from a gun tower adjacent to the main lodge, where armed guards were always on duty and spotlights shone across the lake at night. He loved to swim and enjoyed fishing and boating, so there was also a boathouse with several kinds of boats and places within and around the structure where guards could be securely stationed. There was a bunkhouse where the rotating shifts of guards slept, ate, and amused themselves in their off-hours and an eight-car garage in which the big black limousines were carefully stashed, always facing outward and ready for quick getaways. It, too, had thick stone walls into which little portholes had been carved so that machine guns could be fitted and fired with ease. There was even a jail cell just in case someone was foolish enough to try to invade the premises, but no one ever did, and eventually it was used for storage.
From the beginning of the Capone tenancy, rumors flew. As late as the 1980s, the most persistent one was of underground tunnels that connected all the buildings, none of which were ever found. There were also tales of seaplanes taking off and landing in the depths of night to unload contraband booze and weapons. These stories were connected more to Saltis than to Capone, although unmarked trucks did make frequent stops at the property. Another legend had Al worrying that the kerosene lanterns used to light the property did not offer enough protection, and because electric utilities had not yet come to that part of Wisconsin, he had his own power station built. That was not true either, and if he or Ralph did have some form of primitive generator installed, traces of it have not survived.
The stories that are true show Ralph as a shadowy, background figure whom most local people tried to avoid. Although he lived in that general area of the state from middle age until he died, elderly townspeople are reluctant to tell stories about him, even as they tell many about his famous brother. Many men and boys who live around Hayward, Wisconsin, helped to build Al Capone’s hideaway, and the various stories they tell flourish to this day. The travel editor of the local paper, writing tongue in cheek in the 1980s, said, “Al must have never gotten anywhere because [his car] was always in a ditch or getting a flat tire fixed, according to the tales of those who ‘helped’ Scarface Al in the old days.”
Many old-timers tell how, when they were children, their parents gave them strict instructions about what to do if they ever saw the fleet of big black sedans driving through the streets of town: they were to run into the nearest store and duck down behind the counters and away from the windows. A vivid memory for two of those children, now elderly, is of running into the penny candy store after they saw a big black sedan stop outside. They were hiding behind the counter with some of their friends when a big man came in and asked the clerk to fill the biggest bags available, all of which he paid for and then gave to each of the children. They said their parents never got over the danger they had been in as they told and retold the tale of their children’s encounter with Al Capone. Actually, it was probably Ralph, who was fond of making such gestures all his life.
The daughter of the town barber remembered how she went into her father’s shop one day to ask him for a nickel when the big man in the chair facing the door yelled at the barber to get his daughter out of there because it was too dangerous. She remembered that in both the front and the back of the shop there were “big black cars, with the motors running.” She, too, insists it was Al, but more likely it was Ralph.
It is not clear if Al was in residence when the incident for which he is most fondly remembered happened. There was a Catholic mission to the Native American Chippewa tribe located about six miles from his property on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation. Everything on the reservation was in serious disrepair, and there was no actual church building. The priest, Father Ignatius Kinney, was a mild-mannered man whose pleas for aid to the local bishop went unanswered. As his relatives tell the tale, one night the bright lights across the lake that he saw when the Outfit was in residence looked brighter than usual, as if they were calling to him. Here the tale takes on the qualities of a miracle: Father Kinney knew he was taking his life in his hands to go out on the lake, but something made him get into a boat, row across it, and not only walk up to the house but walk straight into “a room where the gang lords were playing poker.” No guards stopped him, and no cardplayers seemed surprised when Father Kinney spoke eloquently about the mission’s many needs; all they wanted was to get rid of him so they could get on with the game. They scooped up all the money on the table, about $700 (almost $10,000 in 2015), and told him to “get out of there.” Father Kinney used the money to build a church, which was named St. Ignatius Loyola with a
nod to the saint but with grateful thanks to Al Capone.
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The Hideout, as it came to be called, was the perfect retreat in every sense of what Al needed and wanted in 1926, but in its way it was as visible as the house on Prairie Avenue or his hotel headquarters. It was a long drive from Chicago, and there were many places along the road that made him a target for anyone looking to bump him off. “He is the most-shot-at man in America,” wrote Fred Pasley in 1930. “There have been more attempts upon his life than upon that of any other gangster.” There had been at least a dozen attempts to kill him after the drive-by shooting in 1925 when he was in a restaurant; by conservative estimates, thirty-five cars and numerous buildings were riddled with more than a thousand bullets and slugs from machine guns, automatic pistols, and shotguns—incredibly, all of them missing Capone. In other attempts more reminiscent of the medieval Borgias than modern America, a restaurant cook was offered a bribe to poison his food (which he declined), and a $50,000 reward was offered to anyone who could deliver his dead body. The accidental assassination of the up-and-coming assistant district attorney William H. McSwiggin in April 1926 proved the crucial turning point when Northern Wisconsin no longer served as sufficient sanctuary. Al needed another place to hide, one where none of his enemies could get to him.
“Of all Chicago’s gangland killings, the death of Billy McSwiggin remains one of its most complex and intriguing mysteries,” wrote one of Capone’s many biographers. McSwiggin was a young prosecutor who boasted that he was going to get Capone for the earlier murder of the small-time gangster Joe Howard, but he liked to consort with gangsters and was sometimes seen in Al Capone’s company, drinking, joking, and laughing. Capone was heard to boast publicly that McSwiggin was on his payroll. However, if it was a true boast, McSwiggin was paid in cash and off the books, for none of the many investigations of how the Outfit operated have turned up information to verify this claim.
Interestingly, although they were approximately the same age, McSwiggin was always described as a mere boy, whereas Al was always portrayed as older, slower, and darkly brooding. In all the media coverage, McSwiggin was the blond ingénu defending the law, and Capone was the heavy, swarthy villain who always broke it.
McSwiggin had the misfortune to go carousing on a drunken spree through Capone-controlled Cicero in a big black limousine that was easily identified as belonging to the rival O’Donnell gang. That they would venture into territory he controlled was a slight Al Capone could not ignore; he and his men formed a five-car cavalcade that eventually caught up with the O’Donnells’ car and poured bullets into it and its passengers, wounding several but killing McSwiggin. One of the most important of the still-unanswered questions is what McSwiggin was doing in the company of known gangsters, the O’Donnells. Nevertheless, his death was a major event sure to attract unwanted attention. The heat was on, and Al the Big Guy was sweating.
Herbert Asbury, who was among the earliest (and most florid) writers to chronicle crime in Chicago, flat out blamed Capone for firing the actual shots that killed McSwiggin. The even more florid Fred Pasley went further, quoting newspaper accounts saying Capone handled the machine gun himself “in order to set an example of fearlessness to his less eager companions.” Pasley did add, however, that in Chicago “murder cases are tried in the newspapers long before they reach the courtroom.” But here again, the truth is elusive: How was anyone to tell where the hundreds of rounds that had been fired came from? Unquestionably, Al Capone had a weapon, and if he was there, he was probably responsible for wounding or killing some of the car’s passengers; however, to assign blame specifically to him, one person out of the thirty or so occupants of the five-car cavalcade, would be difficult if not impossible.
He was used to being the primary suspect in every murder investigation. “It’s a waste of time to arrest him,” said one of the Chicago police chiefs who spoke for them all during the investigation into the murder of Hymie Weiss. Still, the authorities spent the next four months trying and failing to indict him for McSwiggin’s murder, with a large part of the failure stemming from the fact that they could not find him long enough to question or charge him.
First they raided Ralph’s apartment, where they found a cache of weapons they could not connect to McSwiggin’s murder and no Al; then they raided the Prairie Avenue house, finding nothing but a hysterical Teresa, a grim and silent Mae, and a belligerent John (Mimi), whom they arrested and released shortly after. The authorities looked everywhere, but from May to October Al Capone was not to be found. Or so it seemed.
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Meanwhile, the gang turf wars raged that, as Asbury put it, “spread Chicago’s evil renown to the far corners of the earth.” He wrote of how “territorial claims were ignored, trucks were hi-jacked, breweries and distilleries robbed, and Chicago’s streets echoed to the roar of shotguns, the crack of automatic pistols, and the rattle of machine-guns.” Al left Ralph to deal with most of the carnage and went into hiding at the Chicago Heights home of Dominic Roberto, a lieutenant in the Outfit. Al trusted him enough to give him one of the diamond-studded belt buckles similar to the one he now sported and that he had begun to give to anyone who did him a favor or merely caught his fancy. In this case, it was for Roberto’s hospitality and in exchange for the earlier gift of the bulletproof chair. Capone had retreated there before, but this time he “holed up” for eight days and never once went outside to walk the spacious grounds.
Roberto was compulsive about everything connected to his property and did not allow his wife to have any choice about the furnishings or the hired help. She was his ornament, and he even vetted her maid. Al was very fond of Roberto’s wife, a Kentucky girl born Ray Rucker, who started out in Chicago singing in Big Jim Colosimo’s nightclub and eventually became the chanteuse and elderly character-around-town known as Rio Burke. Many years later in one of the more than a hundred interviews she gave about Al Capone, she said he liked her mostly because she knew her place: “Gangsters don’t tell their wives anything. Nothing! The wife is for the nursery, the kitchen and the bed. The mistresses, they knew what was going on.” In Al’s case, she was only partly correct, for even though he told Mae as little as possible because he did not want to upset her, she always knew exactly what he was doing. Rio knew her place and “stayed in the background,” for her only job was to “look pretty” and leave the conversation to the men. She was allowed to speak to Capone long enough to ask if he wanted something to eat or drink, but that was all. As for him, “he was a perfect gentleman at all times.”
Being in Roberto’s highly controlled environment made him restless, and so after eight days when no one seemed to be looking for him, he left in the dark of night for Freeport and Raphael Capone’s house and the occasion when he allowed himself to be beaten with the cane. He stayed only long enough for some of his men to go over the ledgers because this house did not offer the privacy of the Roberto house, so here again he was always inside, cooped up. He twitched with restlessness, but having no alternative to release pent-up frustrations, he bided his time.
Freeport was a good place to lie low, mainly because so few people in Chicago knew of this particular Capone family’s existence, but even though it was a big house, it was crowded with the large family, and there was scant room for Al Capone and the contingent of men he needed to protect him. He had to go somewhere else. One possibility was to a house along the Indiana dunes on the shore of Lake Michigan, but that idea was quickly discarded. Even though the setting was isolated, there were enough year-round residents who might decide to court danger by telling authorities about the big black cars and ferocious-looking strangers in their midst.
He decided to go to Lansing, Michigan, where he mostly stayed from late May until the end of July. Occasionally, he made forays to Benton Harbor, where his friend and right-hand man, Tony Lombardo, had a large house on spacious grounds. The difference in lifestyle in each place was pronounced: in Benton Harbor, the Lombardo house and groun
ds were patrolled by bodyguards day and night, whereas in Lansing Al Capone moved about the town like an ordinary citizen.
Lombardo held a high-level position in the mob, while the patriarch of the Lansing family had been one of the lowly workers who had been in the Outfit but who knew so little about its activities that he was allowed to leave it and “go straight.” In later years, when Capone had been long gone from Lansing, his descendants honored his directive never to talk about Al Capone. Unlike so many others who encountered him at various times in their lives, this family, whose surname remains deeply private, is now in its third and fourth generations and has been careful about what stories they chose to tell. Lombardo’s descendants are also in their third and fourth generations, but they never hesitate to tell stories about their patriarch’s exploits, real or alleged.
When the Lansing patriarch worked for the Outfit, he was a lowly “soldier,” a laborer who sometimes loaded and unloaded cases of contraband booze and was sometimes promoted to drive a truck; fortunately for him, he only made short-distance deliveries and was seldom in real danger. His job meant that he knew little or nothing about how the Outfit operated, so no other gang was going to torture him for information because everyone knew he had none. When he asked to leave Chicago, he went with Al Capone’s approval, and after he settled in Lansing, he started a business that was so small and insignificant that with the exception of one or two “small jobs” he was never asked to handle money, numbers, or any other vice.