After the Fact

by Owen J. Hurd

  Success four flights thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas. Orevelle Wright

  Orville’s name was misspelled, and two seconds were inadvertently shaved from the length of the longest of their four flights, but everything else was correct. And, by the way, they did make it home for Christmas. Good thing, as Wilbur was in charge of stuffing the turkey.

  On that fateful day on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, younger brother Orville made the first-ever human flight unaided by wind. It lasted all of twelve seconds. Wilbur took the controls for the minute-long flight, which covered 852 feet. The Wright Brothers had discovered the secret to human flight. For the next two years, they were the only human beings capable of what had been until then an unimaginable feat in the minds of most people. During these halcyon days the Wrights were relatively unencumbered by external expectations, complicated business relationships, administrative red tape, and patent challenges. Sure, they were lampooned by those who doubted their claims, but the Wright brothers possessed a serene confidence, as well as a prescient knowledge of the eventual importance of their discoveries—a self-assuredness that would carry them through the adversities they would soon experience.

  Forsaking their bicycle shop, Orville and Wilbur Wright immediately began tinkering with their design, building a new more powerful, sturdier, and more easily maneuvered airplane. Advancing ever beyond gliding technology, in favor of powered flight, they no longer relied on the gusts provided by the Atlantic’s coastal winds. The following season’s test flights were conducted in an open field near their Dayton home. With each flight, they set a new record, traveling farther, flying higher and longer. Orville flew 1,760 feet on November 16, 1904. Later that day, Wilbur piloted the plane on a two-mile flight. A year later, they were flying twelve miles in twenty minutes, then twenty-four miles in forty minutes.

  The world was waking up to the practical applications such a flying machine might have, but slowly. Wilbur and Orville were confident that the government would want to commission the building of planes for military and governmental uses, but they got a chilly reception. Instead of relying on reports of successes, the government demanded proof, in the form of a demonstration, as well as detailed drawings of the aircraft and a firsthand inspection. The only problem was that the Wrights were still concerned about their hold on the intellectual property. The Wright brothers’ patent, applied for in 1903, still had not been granted. They were concerned that others would copy their designs and beat them to market, so all demonstration flights were grounded for two years, and the brothers refused to disclose proprietary information, even to the U.S. government. Without a contract in hand, they were content to sit on their invention.

  Finally, in 1906, the U.S. Patent Office granted patent protection for the brothers’ “alleged new and useful improvement in Flying-Machines.” Stung by the U.S. government’s previous lack of faith, the Wrights decided to demonstrate the value of their airplanes to several governments simultaneously, including France, Great Britain, and Germany. Orville headed to Fort Myer, Virginia, to show the U.S. Army Signal Corps what their airplane could do, while Wilbur took to the skies in Pau, France. Each captivated his audience with flights that far exceeded any of the other rivals then competing for aeronautical superiority.

  Even though there had been several mishaps and minor crashes, the Wright brothers had to this point escaped any significant injuries, but their luck would soon run out. In 1908, the government sent a number of representatives to Fort Myer to monitor Orville’s flights, inspect the machines, and report on their potential utility. One of these men, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, boarded the Wright Flyer II for a test flight with Orville. After a smooth takeoff, the plane had barely reached its cruising altitude when a loud popping noise signaled a major problem. The plane nose-dived into the ground. Orville sustained a head wound as well as a broken leg and broken ribs. Selfridge was dead, the first person ever to die in a powered plane crash. Pinpointing and fixing the mechanical failure, the Wrights still earned the government contract of $30,000, a small fortune at the time.

  The next few years saw their share of frustrations and outrages. The Wrights were repeatedly forced to defend their patent rights in court, as other companies began to manufacture their own planes using technology developed by the Wrights. It wasn’t that the Wrights were insisting on a monopoly on airplane technology. They just believed that as inventors who invested so much time and money and who assumed so many risks to life and limb that they were entitled to a share of the profits. Ideally, they hoped to earn enough through royalty and licensing arrangements so that they could focus on what they truly loved to do: researching new technologies. They sought injunctions on companies selling competing airplanes and conducting paid exhibitions until they came to terms.

  At the same time the Wrights were obliged to defend their reputations from attacks by aviation rivals who questioned the brothers’ claims of being “first in flight.” A cabal of scientists and inventors associated with the Smithsonian Institution closed ranks in an effort to diminish the discoveries made by the bicycle repairmen turned aviation pioneers. Octave Chanute and Alexander Graham Bell—friends of the late Samuel Langley, aerodynamics pioneer and onetime head of the Smithsonian—each added to the myth that the Wrights were acolytes of Langley and Chanute. They made it seem like the Wrights merely put into practice theories developed by their alleged predecessors. Subsequent studies have proven, however, that not only were the Wright brothers’ innovations original to them but also that Langley’s theories on aerodynamics were largely flawed.

  Commercial and legal disputes drained Wilbur’s energies. A notoriously taciturn and often morose man, naturally wary and reluctant to trust, Wilbur spent much of his time steadfastly protecting the Wrights’ intellectual property rights around the world.

  “Orville and I have been wasting our time in business affairs and have had practically no time for experimental work or original investigations,” Wilbur complained. These were dark and vexing days for a man who would rather be confronting the challenges of aerodynamics in a workshop than haggling with lawyers in a boardroom. But what choice did he have? After all, “the world does not pay a cent for…inventions unless a man works himself to death in a business way also.” And that’s just what he ultimately did. Wilbur died May 29, 1912, at the age of forty-five, of typhoid fever, his last days spent in febrile disorientation. Two years later, the Wright Company won a civil lawsuit that officially legitimized their patents.

  Orville, even less inclined toward business affairs, sold the Wright Company shortly after his older brother’s death. He maintained a role as a research consultant but never made any other truly groundbreaking inventions for the rest of his life. Like Wilbur, Orville never married. For much of his life, his closest female companion was his sister Katharine, who lived with him and his father for most of their lives. Their father died in 1917, and in 1926 Orville’s then-fifty-one-year-old sister married a widower she had previously dated in her college years. Orville was distraught and furious, refusing to attend the wedding ceremony or to even speak with his sister, despite numerous attempts at reconciliation. It took a grave illness before Orville would relent. He visited Katharine on her deathbed just before she died of pneumonia in 1929.

  Orville lived long enough to see his invention used for great accomplishments, such as Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing in 1927, and the Lockheed Constellation’s record-time-setting cross-country flight in 1944. He also saw his invention used to horrifying effect, first in World War I, then in World War II, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and then the atom bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan. He died of a heart attack on January 30, 1948.

  LOOSE ENDS

  After its historic first flight, the original Kitty Hawk Flyer was never flown again. Damaged by winds, it was placed into
storage where it remained for years. The Smithsonian Institution would have seemed the proper place to display this important relic, but Orville could not bring himself to add his invention to an exhibit that he believed misrepresented the history of human flight. Designed by employees loyal to former Smithsonian secretary Samuel Langley, the exhibit gave precedence to Langley’s rival flying machine, the Aerodrome, even though it never achieved manned flight. Instead, Orville sent the Kitty Hawk Flyer to the London Science Museum in England in 1928. The dispute with the Smithsonian outlived Orville, but the museum eventually agreed to terms with the Wright estate to display the Kitty Hawk Flyer in an exhibit that accurately represented the Wrights’ primary role in the pursuit of human flight. Today, the flyer can be viewed in its rightful place beside Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

  The Wright brothers were famously shy and reserved. As one contemporary said, “You have never heard true silence until you have talked to Wilbur Wright.” On one occasion, when the Wrights were the guests of honor at an awards ceremony, they were asked to share some insights about their aeronautical feats. Wilbur reluctantly approached the bank of microphones. “Thank you, gentlemen,” was all he said before returning to his seat. The even less gregarious Orville was content to let his big brother do all the talking, so to speak. He routinely shunned reporters and public speaking opportunities.

  CHAPTER TEN

  GANGSTERS AND G-MEN

  WHAT did Al Capone, Eliot Ness, John Dillinger, and Melvin Purvis all have in common? Regardless of what side of the law they were on, they all relished the attention they got for their exploits. They were media savvy at a time when newspapers, radio, and newsreels were broadcasting their derring-do to an international audience. The intense publicity contributed to the downfall of Capone, Dillinger, and Purvis and did little to assuage the professional and personal failings of Ness—at least during his lifetime.

  After the Valentine’s Day Massacre

  On February 15, 1929, George “Bugs” Moran could consider himself a lucky man. After all, he was still alive. The same could not be said for the seven men who the day before, lay sprawled in puddles of their own blood, having just been sprayed by a barrage of machine gun bullets and shotgun pellets. Moran would have been lying right next to them if he hadn’t been late for the morning meeting with his associates. As his car approached the nondescript garage on Chicago’s north side, he saw several men dressed in police uniforms enter the building. Moran retreated to a nearby coffee shop, at a safe distance as the most famous massacre in gangland history took place.

  Most assumed the massacre was the handiwork of Moran’s bootlegging rival Alphonse Capone. The two had squabbled over turf for most of the Prohibition era, attempting to control the liquor markets, gambling, and other illegal rackets. Some speculated the massacre was retribution for the recent murder of two Capone associates, most likely ordered by Moran. But definitive proof never materialized. Capone was in Florida when the shooting erupted in the north-side garage, and his go-to hit man “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn also had a plausible alibi. Even though no one was ever found guilty of the gruesome crime, the event marked a turning point in Chicago’s gang warfare; the fortunes of all those involved—or suspected—would suffer greatly from this point forward.

  No matter who was to blame, the Chicago Crime Commission and the FBI were alarmed by the intensity and boldness of violence in organized crime, and they decided to do something about it. While Eliot Ness was staging raids of Capone’s breweries, the authorities began to look for other ways to bring down the underworld kingpin. The U.S. attorney in Chicago, George E. Q. Johnson, summoned Capone to Chicago for questioning in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. When Capone ignored the summons, Johnson charged him with contempt of court. Meanwhile IRS agent Frank Wilson was working up a tax evasion case on Capone, and the Chicago Crime Commission invented the Public Enemy list, naming Capone their number one target.

  Collaborating on the tax evasion angle, Johnson and Wilson eventually got their man. Although they had no proof of income, they built a largely circumstantial case based on the testimony of those who witnessed Capone’s lavish spending. A man who spends $30,000 on a bulletproof limo and $50,000 on a diamond-encrusted ring must have gotten the dough from somewhere. Legal or not, income was income, and Capone had not paid taxes on it. The jury found Capone guilty on five counts of tax evasion, and the judge imposed a harsh sentence of eleven years in prison and $50,000 in fines. A mere three years after the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, Al Capone’s criminal reign had come to an end.

  Capone began his sentence at a federal prison in Atlanta, where he suffered indignities like group showers and menial jobs. It went from bad to worse when he was transferred to the new maximum-security prison called Alcatraz, on a foreboding island off the coast of San Francisco. The man who once sat atop a criminal kingdom was now reduced to pushing a mop around the prison floor. They used to call him Scarface, now they called him the “wop with a mop.” A fellow inmate stabbed Capone in the back with a pair of scissors. Capone also started to lose his marbles. Largely due to the effects of an untreated case of syphilis, Capone could often be found shuffling around the cell block muttering nonsensically.

  Capone had lost his freedom, his health, and finally his wits. His shockingly precipitous fall was consummated one day when an argument between Capone and an inmate in an adjacent cell degenerated into a feces-throwing fight. Shortly after that episode, Capone was transferred to a federal prison on Terminal Island and finally released from prison on November 16, 1939. A shell of his former self, Capone no longer presented a threat to society. He lived out the rest of his years in his Florida home, subsisting on criminal revenues squirreled away before his prison sentence, supplemented by his brother Ralph’s management of gambling and prostitution rackets. Capone’s favorite pastime was fishing, but as his mental capacity deteriorated, even this pleasure was robbed of all significance, as he usually just sat by the waterside idiotically dipping a bare hook in the water.

  Capone died of a heart attack on January 25, 1947, at the age of forty-eight. His wife, Mae, outlived him by almost forty years, dying in 1986 at the age of eighty-nine.

  Things also went south for Bugs Moran after the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. He went underground for a time. By the time he came back up for air, Prohibition was repealed, robbing him of the conditions that made bootlegging so profitable. Moran returned to his old ways, pulling small-scale heists and garden-variety burglaries. His lack of criminal versatility rendered him a small-time player for the rest of his career, which pretty much ended when he began serving the first of two prison sentences in 1946. While doing a stretch in federal prison, Bugs Moran succumbed to lung cancer in 1957. Any secrets he may have had about who perpetrated the St. Valentine’s Day massacre and why died with him.

  Though Capone hit man “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn was long a suspect in the mass murder, he never faced charges, mostly thanks to testimony provided by Louise Rolfe, the sultry girlfriend dubbed the “blonde alibi” by local reporters. But as with Capone, the authorities were hell-bent on getting the violent thug McGurn off the streets. When McGurn retreated to Florida with Rolfe, the authorities picked him up on a trumped-up charge of violating the Mann Act. Also known as the white slavery act, the law made it a federal crime to transport unwilling females across state lines to force them into prostitution. Not only did Rolfe travel willingly with McGurn, by this time she was actually his wife. Unbelievably, the jury still returned a guilty verdict. In a strange application of justice, they also convicted Rolfe, presumably for being complicit in her own abduction. The defendants challenged the rulings in the Supreme Court, which threw out the convictions.

  McGurn continued to live in the Chicago area, but with Capone in jail he no longer had an employer who appreciated his skill set. He even attempted—unsuccessfully—a career in professional golfing. An expendable hit man is a dang
erous thing to be. On the seven-year anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, McGurn was bowling with friends at a north-side alley. Shortly after midnight, gunmen shot him down, leaving behind a greeting card that read:

  “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.” The murder was never solved.

  The police in Chicago, meanwhile, were having no luck solving the mystery of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. A major break in the case seemed to come in December 1929 on the other side of Lake Michigan. What started as a routine fender bender in St. Joseph, Michigan, turned into a high-speed chase and a shoot-out. St. Joseph police officer Charles Skelly was shot and killed. The gunman turned out to be Fred “Killer” Burke, a Capone henchman. Authorities searching his home found contraband and a huge arsenal of weapons, including two machine guns. Ballistics tests indicated that these were the guns used in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Maybe Capone had hired the hit after all.

  But it wasn’t that simple. Several witnesses placed Burke in Calumet City on the morning of the massacre. And no one could say for certain how many times this pair of weapons changed hands on the black market since the killings. Burke was never charged with the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, but he did spend the rest of his life behind bars for Officer Skelly’s murder.

  It turns out that the most plausible explanation for the massacre was in the hands of the FBI for almost eighty years. But the information didn’t come to light until 2010. While doing research for his new book, Get Capone, reporter and author Jonathan Eig discovered what he deems “the most logical and satisfying solution to the crime.” It was a letter dated January 28, 1935, written by a man named Frank T. Farrell addressed to J. Edgar Hoover. The letter details a series of plausible events leading up to the slaying. One night in 1928, a few of the Moran gang’s boys were whooping it up in a north-side tavern when one of them got into an altercation with William Davern Jr. Davern was shot in the stomach. He died six weeks later, but not before he told his cousin William White who the shooters were.