by Deirdre Bair
He told the Outfit’s boss repeatedly that if he ever needed a favor, he had only to ask, and when Capone did, it must have seemed that no one could provide a more secure and anonymous hideout than this honest man and his family. How strange, then, that Al Capone, the man whom Chicago authorities were actively seeking and whose face was in every newspaper in the country—never mind the rest of the world—could have stayed in one place for several months without anyone turning him in. And yet he did, hiding in plain sight, in the capital of the state of Michigan. Or so it seemed.
One of the first things he did was put out feelers to an officer in the Lansing Police Department, John O’Brien, who was rumored to be open to being put on the Outfit’s payroll in exchange for his silence. O’Brien has been credited for keeping the lid on Capone’s whereabouts, which is credit he does not deserve, because he was not highly enough placed in the department to have wielded the kind of clout many Lansing residents claimed for him in later years. O’Brien alone could not have guaranteed that Capone’s hideout was never leaked to the Chicago authorities. Another spurious contention comes from today’s residents of Lansing, many of them the patriarch’s descendants, who claim that O’Brien’s graft was uncovered as early as 1930 and that he ended his life in disgrace. In the official history of the Lansing Police Department, the record shows that O’Brien began his career as a lowly patrolman in 1917 and throughout the 1920s, especially during Capone’s time in Lansing, was a low-level officer in the detective bureau; in 1937, when Capone was long gone from Lansing, he became the city’s chief of police and, by all existing accounts, a popular and respected one who retired to a quiet life with a good pension.
And yet there was Al Capone, seeming fearlessly unconcerned about his privacy and safety as he walked freely up and down the streets of Lansing, where he was easily recognized. He enjoyed waving and chatting with people who shouted, “How ya doin’, Al?” No one snubbed him or scurried off in fear when his big car drove by, and no one teased him by making what had become the familiar gesture of shaping their arms to hold a tommy gun, pointing their fingers, and grunting an “ack-ack” in greeting. People seemed unconcerned that he was Al Capone, the reputed murdering mobster; they liked him because he was generous with money, so the story goes, dropping a fiver on a child and telling him to buy ice cream for his friends, paying a poor widow’s food or coal bill, or offering to buy a new car for the family that sheltered him (the patriarch declined this offer). Stories abound of how he guaranteed to pay for college educations and expensive medical treatments. Some of them may be true, but because very few people in those ethnic and social classes kept records or documents, and because Capone always paid in cash, none of this extraordinary generosity can be proven. There is no question, however, that he liked to play Lord Bountiful because he enjoyed the adulation it brought, so if stories proliferated and if they were all positive, so much the better. Indeed, on the Fourth of July, he was a highly visible participant in the annual fireworks display and was written up in the local papers. No one tried to stop the stories from being printed because Al Capone did not mind the publicity at all.
Capone needed more room than his patron’s house provided, so he often convened his men for meetings at one of Lansing’s most visible and popular hotels, the same one where members of the state legislature often gathered. His men drove up from Chicago in their usual long black sedans, and their dress and deportment ensured that anyone who saw them would know what line of business they were in. Local newspaper reporters hung out in the general area around the hotel, usually on the hunt for a political story but always on the lookout for anything interesting, especially a big scoop they could put on the wire services.
Surprisingly, little of Al Capone’s professional activity found its way into the local press, most likely because money was flashing everywhere when he and his men were out and about in Lansing; perhaps some of it was flashy enough to blind the members of the fourth estate. Curious, too, is the fact that Chicago police, who tailed gang members as a routine matter, never seemed to follow any of Capone’s men as they left for Lansing and never asked any of their stoolie sources where they had been after the men returned. Comparatively speaking, things were quiet in Chicago now that Al Capone was gone, and the authorities liked it that way.
And then he moved on, this time to a resort area a slight distance from Lansing known as Round Lake, where other Chicago mobsters, among them Frank Nitti, had bought land and property both for summer homes and for hideouts. Capone brought in his bodyguard Frankie Rio and his chief terminator, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, and set them up in beach cottages surrounding the one he took for himself. It was a quiet area on a little lake, where he indulged in two of his favorite pastimes, swimming and fishing. When he tired of the bucolic life, there was a speakeasy roadhouse just down the road, and there he found the female companionship he had been without since he left Chicago.
Like all his other mistresses, this one was young and blond, and as pretty as his wife, who remained quietly at home in Chicago. Rio Burke was right: the mistresses were on the spot and therefore knew everything that was happening; the wives—Mae among them—stayed at home and, whether or not they knew anything, kept their mouths shut.
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By mid-July, Capone had had enough of loafing, glad-handing, and adulation and was itching to get back into the swing of things. He was constantly alert to what was going on in Chicago, thanks to the men who made the trek back and forth from the city. He knew that the police were frustrated in their attempts to pin McSwiggin’s murder on anyone, let alone him, and he knew that other gangs were in disarray now that so many of their leaders were dead and gone. His own Outfit was running smoothly, and his place at the head of it was secure, and so it was time to return and claim the spoils of victory.
At the end of July, Al Capone let it be known that he was planning to turn himself in and that on the morning of July 28, 1926, the police could find him standing on 106th Street, the Indiana-Illinois border, where they were welcome to meet and escort him into the city. He is alleged to have feigned innocence as he said something like “I understand you boys are looking for me,” a remark the press had great fun inserting into stories of his surrender.
Federal agents took him directly to the Chicago Criminal Courts Building, where he staunchly denied having had anything to do with the O’Donnell killings and particularly that of McSwiggin, whom he claimed as a friend and whose reputation he clouded forever with a single remark: “I paid McSwiggin…plenty and I got what I was paying for.” Capone expected that because no charges could be filed against him, he would be released. But the judge had other ideas and sentenced him to spend the night in an ordinary jail cell. At the next day’s hearing, the prosecutors sheepishly admitted they had no evidence to tie him to the killings, and the judge had no recourse but to dismiss all charges. Capone was a free man and could go anywhere in Chicago he chose.
Instead of going home to Prairie Avenue and the wife and child he had not seen for several months, he chose to go directly to Cicero and the Hawthorne Hotel. The first order of business for the undisputed victor was to receive the homage that would solidify his rightful place as the supreme head of Chicago’s underworld.
Fred Pasley exaggerated when he wrote what is generally considered the first biography, describing Al’s domain as “supreme on the west, from the Loop to Cicero, and on the south from the world’s busiest corner to the Indiana boundary line at the lake and 106th Street, and on down to Chicago Heights.” However, it was not an exaggeration when he described Al Capone as “the John D. Rockefeller of some 20,000 anti-Volstead filling stations. He was sitting on top of the bootleg world.” He was indeed, and it was time to let the rest of the world know it.
Chapter 9
THE GLORY YEARS
All over Chicago, gang murders proliferated as one bunch killed off its foes and the others retaliated to avenge them; there was so much vicious creativity in how they carrie
d out the violence and gore that a jaded public greeted the front-page stories of the daily papers with a yawn, a ho hum, and a cursory glance at the headlines before dismissing one more story that was more of the same. John Stege, the chief of detectives in the Chicago Police Department, was so distressed by public complacency that in January 1927 he wrote a series of articles for the Chicago Herald and Examiner entreating readers not to take the attitude that the murders didn’t matter because it was only one gangster killing another. Stege raged against the “czar-like power” wielded by gang leaders and begged the public to shed its indifference and rise up in protest. He ranted and raved, but no one seemed to listen, especially not Al Capone.
On the few occasions when he managed to go home to Prairie Avenue, Teresa alternately cried, cooked, and berated him (but gently) for the worry and heartache he caused her. Mae neither cried nor cooked, but she did make her usual plea for him to retire, citing the strain it put on her and the increasingly bewildered Sonny, who heard enough household chatter to ask for explanations about the nasty things newspapers and radio were saying about his father. Al let Sonny know how much he loved him and reassured the women of his invincibility, but he also told them firmly that retirement was impossible.
“I’m the boss [and] I’m going to continue to run things,” he told a reporter as he described how many times other crooks had tried to “put the roscoe” on him. “Don’t let anybody kid you into thinking I can be run out of town. I haven’t run yet and I’m not going to.”
All the while, Capone was positioning the Outfit to take the lead in what William J. Helmer, one of the most consistent observers of the Chicago crime scene, called his “own form of venture capitalism.” Georgette Winkeler, a smart and savvy woman whose husband, Gus, was one of Capone’s most trusted gunmen, had ample opportunity to analyze how he operated. She thought it unfair to call him a gangster when in reality he was only “a racketeer,” which she considered a cut above the usual thug: “This definition may seem like splitting hairs, but as a matter of fact, the entire Capone enterprise was based on illegitimate business, and not the cruder forms of crime.” Capone was turning the Outfit into such a smoothly running criminal organization that the Harvard Business School case study explicitly examined its structure with an organizational chart.
The name “Alphonse Capone (alias Al Brown)” was all alone in a box at the top of the chart with the title “President of the Syndicate.” Slightly below Capone’s box and linked to it on the left was another box, with a partial listing of the many “personal attendants” a man in his position required, among them valets, chefs, chauffeurs, trainers, waiters, barbers, secretaries, doctors, and an unspecified “etc.” To the right was another link to a separate box for his “personal bodyguards,” who numbered “several dozen men, but they all [also] had important other duties,” here again left unspecified. “His body guards were legion,” according to one of the many histories of Prohibition. Some of the most colorful were Phil D’Andrea, who could slice a quarter in midair with a single rifle shot; Antonio Leonardo Accardo (alias Joe Batters); “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn; and “the most loyal of all,” Frankie Rio.
The box for the twelve “Board of Directors” was just below these three and included Ralph, the only brother who held such a position and whose job title was “general assistant in the liquor, vice, and gambling rackets”; Frank Nitti, the “enforcer” who provided Capone’s link with the Unione Siciliana and later took over the entire operation, was then only “chairman of the board and vice president of the Syndicate.” Jake (sometimes “Jack,” sometimes “Greasy Thumb” but never to his face) Guzik was “business manager and chief statistician,” leaving out his assignments in money laundering, bribery, extortion, and other rackets. Edward J. O’Hare (misspelled on the chart as O’Hara) was another director, but his task was “big dog track and race track manager, etc.,” with no reference to his legal duties as the Outfit’s lawyer. In two equal-sized boxes just below the board of directors were the departments of “Income” and “Protection,” and below them, stretching across the bottom of the chart, was a box describing “mostly gunmen but many were in the bootleg liquor business, vice, gambling, and labor rackets and other undertakings with Al Capone.”
All told, there were several hundred names on the Harvard Business School chart. Some of the most notorious were Charlie Fischetti and Lawrence “Dago” Mangano, who distributed liquor; Frank Pope and Peter Penovich [Jr.], who controlled gambling houses and who were later called by the prosecution to give testimony against Capone; and Mike “de Pike” Heitler and Harry Guzik, who controlled the brothels. Hymie “Loud Mouth” Levine was the Outfit’s “chief collector,” and Louis Cowen, a newsagent, posted bail for anyone arrested, having been given control by Al Capone of various real estate parcels to post as security (he, too, would be named during Capone’s trial). And because someone had to be put in charge of bombings, the former Black Hand extortionist James Belcastro held that position.
These several hundred workers toiled in the office of the phony “Dr. Brown” several blocks from the Metropole Hotel. Fred Pasley described it as “a supertrust operating with the efficiency of a great corporation.” Jake Guzik was the “brains” of the corporation, and under his direction between twenty and thirty people made up the clerical staff that kept records of everything from the names of police officers and Prohibition agents on the payroll to ledgers detailing the cost system used in the brothels. There was also a special ledger for the names of well-known Chicagoans who patronized the Outfit’s various holdings, from the speakeasies to the gambling dens and brothels. Special records were kept for the various channels through which liquor was brought into the country via cities that included New York, Miami, New Orleans, and Detroit. The Outfit controlled four large breweries in Chicago that produced beer, and they, too, needed separate bookkeeping records. At its most robust, the Outfit had at least five hundred “gorillas” on the payroll, all of whom made sure the beer was delivered where intended.
Jake Guzik knew to the penny what the Outfit brought in annually, because it was all in his books. However, he was neither “inconvenienced [nor] dismayed” when the records were seized by police on the mayor’s orders to clean up the city. The policeman in charge ostentatiously refused a bribe of $5,000 to “forget” he found them, which did not matter at all, because the municipal judge in charge of the hearing that followed the raid simply returned them to the Outfit, and everyone it employed went quietly back to work.
By the end of 1928, the Outfit controlled a large percentage of the rackets in Chicago, but depending on the source, estimates can range from a high of 70 percent to a low of something around 30–40 percent. The estimates vary, but the usually accepted number of annual gross profits is $105 million (almost $1.5 billion in 2015), and all of it in cash. When Al moved the headquarters from the Metropole Hotel to the Lexington, the cash was stored in padlocked canvas bags until it could be deposited in many different bank accounts under a variety of fictitious names. To guard the loot, it is estimated that he employed “between seven hundred and a thousand men, machine gunners or sluggers, or bombers.”
“You know what will happen if you put me out of business?” Capone asked a reporter who questioned his enterprises. “I have 185 men on my personal payroll and I pay them [each] from $300 to $400 a week. They’re all ex-convicts and gunmen, but they are respectable businessmen now, just as respectable as the people who buy my stuff and gamble in my places…If you put me out of business, I’ll turn every one of those 185 respectable old convicts loose on Chicago.” The boast was so dangerous to public safety that no one dared put him in a position to fulfill it.
He could make such threats now because no one seemed able to stop him from doing whatever he wanted. A. P. “Art” Madden, the IRS agent who had been sent to meet Capone when he returned from Lansing and who would play a significant role several years later in his downfall, wrote a report for the agency that was scathing in
its appraisal of his character. With a nod to Capone’s intelligence and business acumen, Madden wrote, “He’s the boss, make no mistake about that, but he listens to advice, particularly from lawyers.” Madden also noted cryptically and without further comment that Al Capone had “many friends in the police force.”
As for the man personally, Madden had far less respect: “He is one mobster who doesn’t care about money. He wants to be the Big Guy, and if he can take the bows he doesn’t care much who gets the cash; just so long as he can bet on horses, buy the horrible junk he calls clothes, and collect jewelry. He likes women, but…he is sensitive about that source of income.” Madden was not the first observer to note how prickly Capone became whenever the subject of brothels and prostitutes was raised. It was wise to be cautious, for he had beaten lesser men to a pulp for even the most casual remarks that might have only hinted about him as pimp and procurer.
Al Capone did indeed want to be the “Big Guy,” and until the end of the decade he was, as the most colorful stories about him proliferated. He was allegedly spotted riding merrily through the streets of the city tossing silver dollars out of his car windows to pedestrians and passersby. If true, he must have kept a stash of the heavy coins in the car for just such encounters, because no one ever wrote of his pockets jingling with change. Other stories have him tossing $1,000 bills when he was enjoying the role of padrone at Italian weddings, baptisms, and other celebrations. No doubt he was generous with money, but more likely he peeled it off the roll of $100 bills he carried routinely. Tales of his extravagant gambling, of how he could drop $100,000 on a single throw of the dice, were common gossip and probably contained a modicum of truth. Money was no object when it came to betting, especially on the horses, but even if the games or races were fixed, he still found ways to lose.