by Deirdre Bair
Her source for most of the complaints against Capone was the U.S. attorney in Chicago, George Emerson Q. Johnson, who like Willebrandt was an incorruptible public servant. Together the two of them set Capone’s eventual downfall in motion. Johnson sent Willebrandt a copy of the affidavit Dr. Phillips swore, saying he had “the honor” of sending it on after A. P. “Art” Madden of the Chicago Intelligence Unit declined to investigate because it was “not within his authority to do so.” In Chicago, there was the usual speculation about why Madden would not go after Capone, but that did not stop Mabel Willebrandt. She was famous for hinting obliquely about the agents in her own department by saying that within the entire population of the United States, “it is impossible to find four thousand men…who cannot be bought.”
Willebrandt was a housewife who had abandoned an unhappy marriage and taught in public schools to put herself through USC Law School at night. She made her early reputation as a public defender representing battered women and prostitutes in the Los Angeles courts, and because she saw so much misery in her position, it was another reason she reviled Al Capone. As an assistant attorney general in President Harding’s administration, she was put in charge of enforcing Prohibition, a job she probably got because she was a woman so recently graduated from law school that no one expected her to succeed where so many self-important men before her had not. Daniel Okrent, in his history of Prohibition, Last Call, described what happened after she was appointed as “something devotees of dime novels, fairy tales, or other ritualized clichés could have predicted: she became a terror.”
To dismantle the illegal sale of liquor, Willebrandt looked beyond the destruction caused by its production and distribution to focus on what is today a simple and effective idea: Why was it that criminals involved in Prohibition flaunted such great wealth even as they never paid taxes? Now such prosecutions are a commonplace of law enforcement, but at the time it was an idea no one had thought of, one that was “brilliantly original…completely, stunningly out of left field,” but that most judicial authorities thought was “completely insane.” Johnson was one of the few who took her idea seriously.
Both were rarities in law enforcement, as was the cooperation they gave each other. Willebrandt was a dowdy middle-aged woman who dressed in business suits without style or grace and whose usual facial expression was so serious that it sometimes inspired fear as well as respect. It was exactly how the few women in professional life at that time were expected to look, dress, and act, and George E. Q. Johnson could be described as her male counterpart. Newspapers of his day described him as “mild, middle-aged…and of ministerial mien.” Reports by United Press called him “the most dangerous foe Chicago gangsters ever encountered.”
After Willebrandt heard what newspapers were writing about Johnson, she wrote an impassioned memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover, telling him it was “a personal matter of great importance” to her that he punish both Dr. Phillips and Capone, “secretly and soon.” At almost the same time, President Herbert Hoover was receiving Colonel Robert McCormick, the influential owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and one of the six (or more) civic leaders who had united to crack down on crime. President Hoover’s way of dealing with problematic situations was not by drafting legislation to solve them; instead, he liked to set up commissions or hold conferences, and one of his favorite ways to try to effect social change was to create fact-finding groups of prominent people who would fund them through their personal fortunes and private philanthropy, especially when Congress was unlikely to authorize legal government participation.
Like J. Edgar Hoover, President Herbert Hoover was reluctant to enforce Prohibition because he acknowledged that hard liquor was “a vehicle of joy [that] could not be generally suppressed by Federal law.” The president had been aware of the out-of-control situation in Chicago since 1926, when his predecessor Calvin Coolidge’s vice president, the Chicago banker Charles G. Dawes, described the city’s “reign of lawlessness and terror” to the U.S. Senate. Coolidge did nothing to stem it, and neither did Hoover until March 1929, shortly after McCormick’s initial visit, when he and another contingent of prominent Chicago citizens went to the White House to implore him to do something. Among them was Judge Frank Loesch, the president of the Chicago Crime Commission, who was still smarting from having had to ask Capone to help control the violence in the 1928 Pineapple Primary.
As President Hoover later wrote in his memoirs, Loesch told him that the city was “in the hands of gangsters, that the police and magistrates were completely under their control, that the governor of the state was futile, that the Federal government was the only force by which the city’s ability to govern itself could be restored.” The suggestion was made that troops be recalled from Nicaragua and sent to Chicago to restore order. When the president heard how bad things had become, he directed all federal agencies to “concentrate upon Mr. Capone and his allies.” He agreed with Willebrandt and Johnson that the federal government’s authority would not extend to cover the Outfit’s criminal activity, so he asked them to concentrate on Capone’s nonpayment of federal taxes and bootlegging. To be in charge of the entire investigation, Hoover appointed his good friend the Prohibition-flouting secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, who never hesitated to take a drink. Hoover’s daily question later became his catchphrase: Did Mellon “get Capone” yet? The president thought it ironic “that a man guilty of inciting hundreds of murders, in some of which he took a personal hand, had to be punished merely for failure to pay taxes on the money he had made by murder.”
When President Hoover wrote his memoirs some years after he left office, he described how it took two years to assemble the evidence against Al Capone and conduct the trials that sent him to prison but how it was worth it in the end because “we restored the freedom of Chicago.” From the day he sent Capone to jail, in light of the city’s subsequent history, his statement has been eminently debatable.
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As required by the subpoena, Capone returned to Chicago on March 20, 1929, to face Johnson’s questioning. The media were on high alert, covering the railroads and highways leading into the city from every direction and even staking out the Prairie Avenue house. But there was no sign of Capone, causing Johnson, who never showed emotion in public, to lose control and shriek at reporters that when he showed himself, he would be treated “like the hoodlum he is.” The hoodlum evaded the media until he arrived at Johnson’s office, exactly on time and prepared to face the grand jury and Judge James H. Wilkerson, who presided that day and would later become the canny adversary who eventually presided over Capone’s trial and conviction.
Law enforcement officials wanted important answers, but all the press wanted was a good story, and Al Capone gave them one. He did his usual posturing and performing, even inviting the reporters to follow him into Johnson’s office for interviews, at which point Johnson lost control again and shouted at them to leave. The main questions for which reporters wanted answers were, where had Al Capone been, and how had he sneaked into Chicago without anyone noticing? It was simple, he told them: he drove from Florida, in a car with his brother Ralph. All the reporters accepted this story, and none asked follow-up questions about the route he took or where he stayed along the way, and neither Al nor Ralph bothered to enlighten them. All the Chicago stories that were printed gave incorrect information, saying that he had arrived, as he had done earlier, via the Indiana border. Only two suburban newspapers filed correct versions, the Belvidere Daily Republican and the Rockford Daily Republic. They knew that he came to Chicago via Rockford and that he had been there for the better part of a week, but even knowing he was in their midst, no reporter had seen him, and none knew where he had stayed.
Actually, he was with the other Capones, Raphael and Clotilde and their now-grown children. No one knew of his relationship with this family, and the seclusion of their home offered a way to hide in plain sight, to regroup and plot strategy. It was probably the last time
he was ever there, and the last time he saw Raphael Capone alive, just weeks before he was gunned down on his way to do Outfit business.
Rockford was an especially good setting for the partial anonymity and seclusion it afforded, for he had kept his closeness to this couple so deeply private that the only people who knew about it were the bookkeepers who went there regularly to work on the duplicate books or deliver everything from cash to food baskets for the family. Even though Capone made daily use of the house’s telephone to keep in touch with his wife and mother, none of his brothers ever went to the home of the Rockford Capones. And when he sneaked in and eluded all but the local press as he had done this time, he could summon the men from the Outfit he wanted to see, and they could come undetected to bring him up to date on everything from finances to gang-world happenings. The latter was one of the primary reasons Capone wanted to hide out in Rockford before appearing publicly in Chicago, for threats against his life were coming at him from all the gangs engaged in the ongoing turf wars who had been emboldened by his absence.
He was a very busy man in March 1929 as all the government agencies were uniting to begin the case against him. He had to work on damage control via the press, fend off assassination attempts from rival gangs, and work on plans to dispatch members of the Outfit he believed had betrayed him. There was much to do, and most of it had to do with cleaning up various gangland messes that arose while he was in Florida, when he was concentrating more on enjoying himself than taking care of Outfit business. He plotted strategy and then went into battle.
Chapter 12
ATLANTIC CITY AND AFTER
The photographer Tony Berardi followed Al Capone closely and had seen many atrocities committed in his name, but when he saw the bodies at the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, he said it was “a crime so hideous that even gangsters turned against him.” Most English-language newspapers said the same, while the Italian-language newspapers considered the massacre such an embarrassing black mark on the nationality that Al Capone’s very name was anathema: they refused to print it or even mention that the massacre happened because of Chicago’s increasingly violent beer wars.
The federal government was not the only entity out to “get Capone”; his fellow mobsters were intent to do the same. Capone needed to make a dramatic move to let his enemies know he was still in charge and capable of serious retaliatory damage, but that would take time, and he had other things to take care of first. Before he left Rockford, he summoned some of his accountants to explain the Outfit’s financial situation through the extra set of record books he kept there. After Raphael was murdered while making his weekly pickup for the Outfit’s burgeoning slot machine business, he gave instructions from Chicago about the stipend he would pay to Clotilde and her children for their upkeep.
Al had invested heavily in slot machines several years previously, buying a number of factories where they were manufactured throughout other midwestern states. The machines had to be transported to the greater Chicago area and hidden in secure locations before they were delivered to their final destinations in venues the Outfit controlled. Once they were installed, only trusted workers could empty each machine of its money and then take it to a central location where it could be sorted, counted, and sent on its shady way to the Outfit’s coffers, and Raphael was one of the men who made what his now-elderly grandchildren still remember as a “weekly pickup.” They were not told how or why he was murdered, but the assumption was that another gang was involved. Because his bullet-ridden body was released quickly and quietly for burial, his family was certain that whoever prepared the official death certificate was in the Outfit’s employ and no one connected with it wanted any publicity.
From then until Al Capone relinquished control of the Outfit’s money to others, he made sure the widow and her children were provided with what they needed. Capone was good to this family who bore the same surname; throughout the 1930s while the country staggered under poverty and unemployment, they were comfortable. Raphael’s grandchildren remember hearing their fathers express their gratitude for Al Capone’s generosity; the five grown men in that house could not find a good day’s work, but there was always enough money, and food was always on the table. They acknowledge that their family owed its security during tough times to Al Capone.
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Frankie Rio, Capone’s personal bodyguard and most faithful retainer, was far less sanguine than his boss about the return to Chicago in March 1929. He recognized how dangerous it could be once the government began to ask questions about undeclared income and unpaid taxes, and he urged Capone to treat it seriously. Rio’s impassioned warnings tended to anger Capone, so he took to couching them as jokes. Rio told his boss that every time he ordered a new suit, he should make sure it was one with stripes because that was what he would be wearing in jail if he didn’t pay attention to the charges and do something to get the government off his back. Capone ignored him: there was another, far more pressing matter, and he couldn’t concentrate on anything else until he took care of it. Rio was the only person he trusted to help him resolve it.
“Slippery Frank,” as Rio was called, was a ruthless killer and a reckless robber who once got away with $500,000 in bonds heisted in broad daylight from Chicago’s Union Station. Whenever it seemed there was enough evidence against him that he would have to stand trial, he terrified potential witnesses into refusing to testify, and when he needed a little extra insurance to make sure he would walk away a free man, he simply bribed the judges. His fearlessness and street smarts made him one of Al’s favorites, and his loyalty earned him the prize job of chief confidant. It also earned him a permanent guest room in the Miami house, which Mae didn’t like but knew better than to complain about. When she hinted to Al that perhaps Frankie could stay in the gatehouse with the other men, he told her not to be “jealous” of “Faithful Frankie’s” constantly hovering presence because he was “trusted like a brother.” And that was why Frankie Rio became the only person Al Capone chose to help him dispatch John Scalise, Albert Anselmi, and Joseph “Hop Toad” Giunta. It took careful playacting and planning to bring off their brutal murders.
Of the many threats against Capone’s life, the most serious came from his old adversaries in the Unione Siciliana, one of the few remaining gangland entities with enough nerve and clout to take him on. Hop Toad Giunta was the newly elected president, and he had thrown his allegiance to Joe Aiello, Capone’s loudmouthed and long-standing rival who had previously boasted of assassination threats against him that Capone had not dared to carry out. This time Aiello was serious, letting it be known that he had $50,000 for the man who would kill Al Capone. Capone learned of the bounty on his life through Rio, who heard the stunning news on the gangland grapevine that Scalise and Anselmi, the prime assassins on the Outfit’s payroll, had accepted Aiello’s offer. The rumor shocked even other jaded gangsters, for Scalise and Anselmi made a very good living as Al Capone’s most trusted killers. The two men had no grudge against him; they simply took the offer because they were greedy for money and always ready to kill for the highest bidder. This time it just happened to be Aiello. Capone knew he had to get them before they got him and that it would take (as one wag put it) a combination of “political showmanship, Sicilian hospitality, Renaissance statesmanship, and medieval torture.” He was ready for the challenge.
Their elimination was supposed to be carried out like any other gangland murders, a straightforward rubout in response to a rival faction’s threat, designed to let all the other gangs know they had better not get ideas because Al Capone was still the untouchable kingpin of crime. And of course the traitors had to be dealt with in a way that would keep him clean and clear of involvement. Instead, the turncoats were beaten and battered beyond recognition before they were riddled with bullets, “taken for a ride” (as the expression came to be coined), and left in their own burned-out car on a street in Hammond, Indiana. That much of the incident has been verified and is truthful
, but over the years the details of what happened have accreted so many additional layers that nothing else is certain, starting with who actually committed the murders and where they were carried out.
The original account begins in late March or early April 1929, just after Capone left Rockford and returned to Chicago, when he and Rio began their counterattack by staging a mock disagreement in a restaurant where Scalise and Anselmi were also eating. They pretended to argue loudly until Rio ended it by slapping Capone’s face and rushing out of the restaurant. Scalise and Anselmi were impressed enough by Rio’s fearlessness to invite him to join them in the assassination plot and to share the loot in a three-way split. Rio was the key to their getting close to Capone, so they allowed him to lay out a plan in which he would offer a pretend apology to get back into his boss’s good graces. He did and told them afterward that Capone wanted to hold a reconciliation dinner to show there were no hard feelings. Rio told them that because they were witnesses to the altercation, he would see that they were invited to the reconciliation. It is here that the story diverges.
Some accounts say it was a banquet dinner in the Hawthorne Hotel; others say it was held at a restaurant (or roadhouse, or speakeasy) just over the Indiana line in Hammond. While other biographers and historians provide vague descriptions of the diners invited to a private room in various unnamed places, John Kobler is the only one who named the sources for what he called “the account generally accepted,” all of whom told him that the Hawthorne Hotel was the venue. Among his sources, Kobler listed everyone from “the [general] underworld” to “[unidentified] stool pigeons” to “knowledgeable old cops like John Stege and…Chicago’s top crime reporters like Ray Brennan and Clem Lane.” Interestingly, his description does not provide the gory details that almost every other chronicler of the incident gives; Kobler is content to say merely that the three Sicilians were murdered in an “execution following a banquet at the Hawthorne Inn on May 7,” after which “their bodies were loaded into the back of their own car, which the driver abandoned near Hammond, Indiana.” Kobler concludes his restrained account by saying the coroner who examined the bodies “found hardly a bone unbroken, hardly an area of flesh without bruises.”