by Deirdre Bair
The agents started with the ledger entries, where they found three different and distinct handwritings. They needed to find these unnamed and unidentified writers and make them testify before the grand jury that what they wrote was true. Wilson claimed with bravado that he and the other agents found the writers in a remarkably short time, saying they were ferreted out by comparing handwriting samples in the ledgers with those collected from every possible agency, from bail bondsmen and criminal court forms, to signatures on driver’s licenses in the Department of Motor Vehicles. No doubt they did do all this, but still, having seized records from the Ship, they had to have known the names of the employees who were arrested during the raid, so the hunt for the culprits was probably easier and far more direct than the version Wilson gave.
Curiosity also rises about how the federal agents were able to gain such easy access to the private banking records of Leslie “Lou” Shumway, one of the ledger keepers, for to this day there is no documentation pertaining to a subpoena or search warrant, which was the law at that time. They never explained (nor were they ever asked in court or on the record) how they were able to see canceled checks that allowed them to compare signatures without first obtaining legal authorization. The supposition is that the checks were traced back to a 1928 incident wherein one Miami bank reportedly asked another to cash a $1,500 check in large bills that had been endorsed by Capone and a fictional J. C. Dunbar (actually Fred Ries), whose name appeared with slight changes in several other instances. The second bank told the first to “wash their own dirty linen” and reported it to the local IRS office. Although the memo to Irey was forwarded to Chicago and other offices, and although it became connected to other witnesses who helped Capone launder money, there was nothing to tie it to Shumway. It was not until they gained access to his bank records that they got lucky.
Besides Ries, there were several occasional small notations in the ledgers that were eventually traced to Peter Penovich Jr. (who had a small share in the profits) and Ben Pope (who worked at the Ship briefly), but the first real break came when a bank deposit slip Shumway submitted matched the signature on a canceled check. Because the agents could not have asked for the records of every depositor in every bank in Chicago, they must have learned (or else already knew) that Shumway had been the Ship’s cashier and that he had been succeeded in the job by Fred Ries. The natural surmise was that one of the handwritings was Shumway’s and the other was Ries’s, and two out of three was a good start toward making the ledgers stand up before a grand jury. Even though both men were well-known to everyone involved in the case, the task became how to find them, for neither was in Chicago. They found Ries fairly quickly in St. Louis, but it took them four months to locate Shumway in Miami.
Ries had testified before, when he gave important testimony against Guzik in his 1930 tax evasion trial. He admitted that he had worked since 1927 as a cashier-bookkeeper in four different gambling houses, including the Ship, and that among the owners were Ralph and Al “Brown,” the alias the Capone brothers used. Ries provided comic relief when he also told how Guzik “took him to task because the gambling places were not making money.”
Capone had his grapevine into the legal system, but Wilson also had one for the Outfit, thanks to the snitches who infiltrated it. While the Guzik trial was under way, they told Wilson two helpful facts about Ries: that on Guzik’s orders he had fled to St. Louis, where he was being paid to hide out until he could make his way to Mexico, and that he was phobic about insects, especially cockroaches and bedbugs. Wilson sent men to arrest Ries but told them not to take him to a Chicago jail; instead, he told them to put him in a vermin-infested cell in the small town of Danville. Wilson wrote gleefully of how the “cocky, beady eyed, cop-hating” Ries held out for four days until he could no longer stand living in a cell where “cockroaches and other wild life were virtually holding a convention.” He became one of the most important and convincing witnesses in both Guzik’s and Nitti’s trials, where he named them, Al, and Ralph as the owners of various illegal businesses and recipients of their profits. That was in 1930, and the problem in 1931 was how to keep Ries alive to testify against Al Capone when (no longer “if”) his trial began. At this point, the Secret Six took over, raising enough money for Ries to be taken to an unnamed destination in South America, where he remained under guard until the trial began.
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They found Leslie Shumway, the exact opposite of Ries and “a perfect little gentleman,” in Miami, thanks to information provided by Edward J. O’Hare, an informant who was directly connected to Capone through a partnership in the Hawthorne Kennel Club. Dubbed Artful, Fast, or Easy Eddie, O’Hare has gone down in history as the turncoat who informed on Al Capone for a high and noble cause, the love of a father for his son. He is supposed to have volunteered to snitch because his beloved son, called Butch and also named Edward, wanted to go to the U.S. Naval Academy and, despite the danger of mob retaliation, Easy Eddie willingly traded information in the hope that Wilson would use his influence to help his son. It is a tender story and probably does have a grain of truth in it, but it was far from the only reason O’Hare turned on his partner in the lucrative business of dog racing.
Edward “Butch” O’Hare did go to Annapolis and became an aviator-hero who lost his life when his plane was shot down during a World War II raid on Japanese ships. Today, Butch’s name is kept alive and honored through Chicago’s chief airport, O’Hare Field. Easy Eddie, however, is known not so much for being his father as for the dishonorable way he died. The Outfit bided its time until November 1939, when O’Hare was murdered by shotgun fire while driving his car, with his own gun in full view beside him on the passenger seat. Whether his death was directly connected in any way to Al Capone has never been proven, for by 1939 he was totally removed from authority within the Outfit. What is known is that Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti, was married one month later to the woman who had been O’Hare’s mistress for the better part of a decade.
Easy Eddie’s career had been a shady one that began in St. Louis, where he had been the lawyer who represented Owen P. Smith, the man who was the real inventor of the mechanical rabbit that greyhounds chase around a track. O’Hare was not averse to letting people believe it was he whose invention revolutionized dog racing, but he only gained control of it when Smith died and he allegedly “bought” the patent from Smith’s widow. The sale has always been clouded by the rumor that she was a reluctant seller whom O’Hare paid a mere pittance, while he used it as the basis for making a fortune. O’Hare was nobody’s fool, and when local gang pressure became too uncomfortable in St. Louis, he moved his dog track operations to Cicero. Rather than trying to best Al Capone, he was smart enough to ask for a partnership instead. He was the front man, while Capone stayed behind the scenes, collecting hefty profits that O’Hare helped him move from place to place through third parties.
Wilson always praised O’Hare as being “inside the gang…one of the best undercover men I have ever known,” yet the story of who contacted whom first is much like that of the proverbial chicken and egg. Wilson takes the credit for decoding the ledgers, while O’Hare claims it was he who did so; Wilson claims his agents found Shumway, while O’Hare claims he told Wilson where to find him; Wilson does not name the source(s) who told him Capone allegedly placed a hit on him and the three other agents, while O’Hare claims it was he who gave the warning. It is probably best to say that all these things did indeed occur without choosing one man over the other as the one who made them possible.
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Whoever tracked down Lou Shumway, it was Wilson who went to Miami in February 1931 and found him working behind one of the betting windows at a dog track. Wilson had begun his search the night before at Hialeah, but the only person of interest he saw there was Capone. His shrill distaste was still palpable several decades later when he described how he saw “Scarface Al, [sitting] with a jeweled moll on either side of him, smoking a long cigar…greeting a pa
rade of fawning sycophants who came to shake his hand.” Al took care never to dishonor Mae while he was out and about and especially where he could be photographed, so the “molls” were most likely there with other men whom Wilson conveniently forgot to include. He could not resist overindulging in the hyperbole that Al Capone inspired: “I looked upon his pudgy face, his thick pursed lips, the rolls of fat descending from his chin—and the scar, like a heavy pencil line across his cheek.” Because no other descriptions of Capone at this time matched Wilson’s portrayal, clearly he was a man obsessed with his job.
He was skilled enough to know not to accost Shumway in public, where any of the Outfit’s men might see them talking. Wilson “tailed him home” and waited until early the next morning to ring the bell. He does not describe their conversation but jumps to what happened next, when they were in his car on their way to the federal building; he has Shumway “turning a real green,” even though he had not been told “what the case was about.” It seems strange that a man who had been around the rackets for as long as Shumway had, and who was well aware of all the tricks gangsters and their lawyers used, would have gotten into a car so easily without first asking Wilson why he was wanted or whether there was a warrant for his arrest. But if Wilson’s account is correct, Shumway went willingly and without protest. With glee he could not restrain, Wilson wrote that when he told Shumway he was investigating Al Capone, the poor man did not “merely shake…He rattled.”
Wilson told him he had two choices: either agree to testify in private or else face being arrested at his job, where all Capone’s men could see him, which would surely guarantee that he would be disposed of before he could ever squeal in court. Shumway chose the former, and once again the Secret Six were enlisted to help. They paid for him to tell his wife he had to make an emergency visit to a sick relative in Oklahoma, while they actually hid him in California.
Wilson tracked down one other witness whose hostility was assured and whose testimony was bound to be suspect. Louis LaCava, a gambler and low-level Outfit worker, had been banished from Chicago by Capone in 1927 because he was a loose cannon, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Wilson’s agents found LaCava in Pittsburgh and brought him to Chicago, where, as expected, his hatred of Capone was so obvious that his testimony carried far less weight than that of Shumway or Ries.
While Wilson was busily pursuing possible witnesses against Capone, Special Agent James N. Sullivan was cultivating another source who has all but disappeared from the story. Brought from New York to assist Wilson, Sullivan was assigned to find connections between the Outfit and income from its brothels. He spent his Saturday nights hanging around the courtrooms in the federal courthouse where prostitutes were arraigned, and when he spied a pathetic-looking “bedraggled veteran in her fifties, at the end of her professional career,” he signed her up as an informant. She called herself Reigh Count, after the horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1928, and for $50 a week, far more than she ever earned through her usual employment, she went to work for him. There is no record that she ever contributed any information of any importance to them, but the federal government (and/or the Secret Six) contributed nicely to her retirement account.
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Gradually but steadily, as the case against Capone was building, those pursuing him thought it important to have someone inside the Outfit who could watch him on a daily basis and report his every deed. After the Secret Six told Elmer Irey they would meet all the expenses for the undercover operation, he agreed to transfer the special agent Michael F. Malone to Wilson’s team. Malone was to leave his posting in Washington and arrive undercover in Chicago as a small-time drifter and grifter on the lam. He was to take his time to build this image by stopping first in Philadelphia and then in Brooklyn, where he was to hang about on the fringes of local gangs. When he arrived in Chicago, he was to position himself in the lobby of the Lexington and wait to be noticed. When Al’s foot soldiers engaged him in conversation, he was to hint that he had done something irregular and had to hide out in a place where another gang was unlikely to start trouble on a rival’s turf.
He went by the name of Michael Lepito, an Italian-American on the run. It helped that he was a swarthy and stocky Irishman originally from Jersey City who had the accent and could talk the talk he picked up on the city’s roughest streets. He knew how mobsters dressed, so one of his first stops was the famed John Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, where he bought the appropriate clothing and sent the bill to the bureau’s Chicago office, where it was in turn sent to the Secret Six, who paid it without question.
Malone’s role as Lepito in helping to bring down Al Capone was painted in dramatic, self-aggrandizing strokes when Wilson and his boss, Elmer Irey, penned their separate memoirs. Both vied to present themselves, along with Malone, as fearless and brave in the face of constant danger. They describe Malone’s undercover career as one perilous adventure after another that kept them fraught with tension and in constant fear that they would be responsible for his death if the deception were unmasked. Wilson called Malone “the greatest undercover agent in the history of law enforcement,” a statement echoed many years later by another IRS agent who called it “the riskiest assignment you could ever think of. People were dying left and right, witnesses were dying left and right. Nobody wanted to be with these guys.” Well, perhaps. The biographer Robert J. Schoenberg, who accepts the view that neither Wilson nor Irey actually lied about Malone’s undercover activity, thinks they “merely exaggerated the danger beyond recognition.” One could say the same for the agent quoted above.
Schoenberg tells a different and far more realistic story about what would have happened to Malone if he had been outed as a federal agent. Murdering him was highly unlikely, for no gang would risk bringing such attention and wrath upon themselves, and “besides,” Schoenberg writes, “why kill him? He sat at no inner councils, could have seen and heard nothing Capone didn’t want him to learn.” Schoenberg posits that Al’s top counselors were well aware of Malone’s duplicity, so they fed him whatever information they wanted him to know. As the top secret “Operative Number One” in the bureau’s parlance, he told whatever he found out to O’Hare, who in turn sent it on to Wilson. High-level gamesmanship existed on both sides, but the real evidence against Al Capone was amassed as Wilson and his agents continued with the “very painstaking, and very boring, checkup on all the recorded money transactions.” Cloak-and-dagger stories make for exciting reading, but as with so much else surrounding the eventual trial, they have to be put into proper perspective.
Chapter 19
“WHO WOULDN’T BE WORRIED?”
While all Wilson’s machinations were going on and Capone’s lawyers were busily trying to make deals on his behalf, he himself stayed uncharacteristically subdued and out of the public eye. For the first half of 1931, he was mostly at his headquarters in the Lexington, only leaving there long enough to go to his mother’s for as many meals as he could manage. Mae was in Miami because Sonny was still in school there, and he stayed in touch with her through daily phone conversations. Despite being surrounded by his men, and with a floor full of kept women should he have wanted them, he was relatively lonely without the companionship offered by Ralph, Nitti, and the Guzik brothers, all of whom were serving their prison terms in Leavenworth.
It is difficult to assess Al Capone’s behavior during the six months when so much concrete legal evidence was building the case against him. His passivity continued, and he seemed indifferent each time a new brick was laid. He had given Mattingly his power of attorney and knew that the lawyer was using it as he made overtures to both Wilson and Johnson after he had submitted the letter listing Capone’s purported income. He had already used the letter as the basis of several conferences with Wilson and Agent W. C. Hodgins, in which he tried to persuade the government to settle the case. Each time, they warned Mattingly that the letter would not be granted any degree of immunity, either full, qualified, or transactio
nal, and that they would use it to fortify their case.
Wilson and Hodgins knew what ammunition they had with the letter, “an admission of large taxable income for the four years 1925 to 1928,” and they were determined to introduce it at trial. Mattingly was equally determined that it should not be entered into evidence, but by that time he had removed himself as counsel with the declaration that he was a tax and not a trial lawyer and therefore of no further use to his client. Even Al Capone had to admit Mattingly’s incompetence when the first indictment against him was issued. He dismissed Mattingly and turned again to the two lawyers who had represented him in earlier encounters with the law, Thomas Nash and Michael Ahern. They worked as a team, both highly skilled in the ins and outs of Chicago politics and known for their ability to make favorable deals for often-unsavory clients as well as actual gang members. Ahern was “the backroom brief writing partner,” and Nash “the courtroom wizard half.” They were later joined by the “recruit” lawyer Albert Fink, who ended up playing a major role in Capone’s defense. Capone probably settled so cavalierly on them because they had represented the Outfit, usually with favorable outcomes, on other matters.
Capone gave the impression that he was unconcerned about the matter of counsel, and several reasons have been suggested for his apparent acceptance of their methods. Some of his descendants wonder if his brain damage from the syphilis that eventually killed him might have already begun. He still preened and postured in public, wearing his colorful clothing and trading quips with onlookers and reporters, but not nearly as much as he had done in the past. For the flamboyant fellow the public was used to seeing, he was noticeably subdued. His behavior led other observers to believe he was unconcerned about his legal team because he thought there was nothing to worry about: if the case was not dismissed for lack of evidence and went to trial, he thought he could always bribe the jury and anyone else who might be needed to “fix things.” If worse came to worst and a trial began, he planned to plead guilty to nonpayment of taxes and accept the minimum jail term. At the same time, there were those who could not understand how he could continue to believe himself invincible after he had been marginalized at the 1929 gangland meetings in Atlantic City; they thought he should have been aware of how the protective gangland wall around him was crumbling. Nevertheless, even though his behavior was uncharacteristically muted and the ripostes and repartees with reporters and interviewers did not have the wit and bite he usually exhibited, he kept up the appearance that there was no need for him to be concerned.