Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  The Roamer Inn was the prototypal suburban bagnio. The Chi cago-born jazz clarinetist, Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow, an habitue in his youth, described it in his autobiography, Really the Blues:

  ... There was a big front room with a long bar on one side and quarter slot machines lined up along the wall. In back there was a larger one, with benches running all around the walls but not tables. The girls sat there while the johns (customers) moped around giving them the once-over. Those girls were always competing with each other: one would come up to you, switching her hips like a young duck, and whisper in your ear, "Want to go to bed, dear, I'll show you a good time, honey, I'm French," and a minute later another one would ease along and say coyly, "Baby, don't you want a straight girl for a change?" .. .

  The girls we knew were all on the dogwatch, from four to twelve in the morning. ... They paraded around in teddies or gingham baby rompers with big bows in the back, high-heeled shoes, pretty silk hair ribbons twice as big as their heads, and rouge an inch thick all over their kissers. When a john had eyeballed the parade and made his choice he would follow her upstairs, where the landlady sat at a: little desk in the hall. This landlady would hand out a metal check and a towel to the girl, while the customer forked over two bucks. Then the girl was assigned a room number. All night long you could hear the landlady calling out in a bored voice, like a combination of strawboss and timekeeper, "All right, Number Eight, all right, Number Ten-somebody's waiting, don't take all night." She ran that joint with a stopwatch.

  The girls explained to me that they got eighty cents a trick, one payment for each metal check. . . . Twenty cents went for protection, and the other dollar belonged to the house. . . .

  Those girls worked hard-some of them didn't even knock off for a single night, hiding their condition with tricks I won't go into now... .

  It may have been at the Roamer Inn that Capone contracted gonorrhea in 1925.

  The strength of Torrio's political connections underwent a stringent test in 1921, following an incident at the Roamer Inn. The Guziks advertised for a housemaid. When a pretty farm girl applied, they made her a prisoner, took away her clothes, and had her broken in as a prostitute. After five months of captivity she managed to get word to her family. By the time her brothers rescued her she was physically and mentally destroyed. In court her father told how the Guziks had tried to bribe him not to testify. They were convicted and sentenced to the penitentiary. While free under bail, pending an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court, they looked to Torrio for deliverance. He approached Walter Stevens, dean of Chicago's gunmen.

  Stevens was fifty-four, an advanced age for one with his occupational hazards. As a lieutenant of Maurice "Mossy" Enright, a pioneer in labor union racketeering, he had slugged, bombed and slaughtered numerous victims during the industrial strife of the early 1900's. His price scale ran from $24 for laying open a skull to $50 for murder. He was the last survivor of the Enright gang, Mossy himself having been liquidated in 1920 by Sunny Jim Cosmano as a favor to a rival union racketeer, Big Tim Murphy. In certain respects Stevens resembled Torrio, that "best and dearest of husbands." He worshiped his wife, and when she became incurably ill, he nursed her for twenty years until the day she died. He adopted three children and sent them all to good schools. He himself was an educated man, a student of military history, who greatly admired Ulysses S. Grant and Bismarck, and a voracious reader, whose favorite authors included Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns and Jack London. Like Torrio, he had a puritanical streak. He never touched a drop of liquor and rarely smoked. He forbade his adopted daughters to wear short skirts or use cosmetics. Before permitting them to read the classics, he excised any passages he considered indecent. He constantly preached oldfashioned morality and idealism and denounced the "flaming youth" of the era typified by Clara Bow, Hollywood's "It" girl.

  When Mossy Enright died in 1920, Stevens moved into the TorrioCapone camp. His greatest asset was the gratitude of Governor Len Small. A few months after Small, a farmer from Kankakee and a Thompson puppet, took office in 1921, a grand jury indicted him for embezzling $600,000 while state treasurer. Working behind the scenes for the defense were Stevens; "Jew Ben" Newmark, former chief investigator for the state's attorney, but more successful as a thief, counterfeiter and extortioner; and Michael J. "Umbrella Mike" Boyle, business agent for Electrical Workers' Union No. 134. Boyle's nickname derived from his practice of standing at a bar on certain days of the month with an unfurled umbrella into which contractors who wished to avoid labor trouble would drop their cash levy. As the governor's trial progressed, the trio undertook such delicate missions as bribing and intimidating jurors. Small was acquitted. He did not forget his deliverers. When they went to jail, Newmark and Boyle for jury tampering and Stevens for an old murder, he pardoned them. During his first three years in office he pardoned or paroled almost 1,000 felons. Stevens now drew his attention to the Guziks' plight, and before the State Supreme Court handed down its decision, the governor pardoned them. Within three months they were operating a new brothel, the Marshfield Inn, just beyond the city's southern limits.

  In the third phase of their expansionist campaign, the bootlegging phase, Torrio and Capone faced a formidable array of gangs without whose concurrence they could not hope to succeed. On the Northeast Side, between the Chicago River and the lake, there was Dion O'Banion's gang. "Who'll carry the Forty-second and Forty-third wards?" Every Chicagoan knew the old quip. "O'Banion in his pistol pockets." "Deany's" suits did, as a matter of fact, conceal three extra pockets for firearms-one under the left armpit of the coat jacket, another on the outside left, and a third on the center front of the trousers like a codpiece. He could shoot accurately with either hand. A fellow Irishman named Gene Geary taught him how. O'Banion had a sweet, choir-trained voice, and when raised in "Mother Machree" or "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," it brought tears streaming down his mentor's cheeks. A criminal court later committed Geary to an insane asylum as a homicidal maniac. In the act of murder O'Banion's own blue eyes were usually smiling, his lips parted in a boyish grin, with what a psychiatrist once called his "sunny brutality."

  He never shook hands with strangers. If anybody he didn't know approached him, he would face him, feet firmly planted apart, hands on hips, poised to draw a gun at the faintest hostile move. He had good reasons for caution. "Chicago's arch criminal," Chief of Police Morgan Collins said of him, "who has killed or seen to the killing of at least twenty-five men." He would fire on slight provocation, sometimes out of sheer nervousness. He once asked Edward Dean Sullivan, a Herald-Examiner reporter, to recommend a good cigar for a convalescing hospital patient. "Who's sick?" Sullivan asked. O'Banion showed him a clipping from the afternoon edition. A laborer, Arthur Vadis, had been shot in the leg by an unknown assailant. "This morning," O'Banion recounted, "I'm going across the Madison Avenue Bridge and I got plenty on my mind. Somebody's been trailing me lately. An automobile crossed the bridge and backfired. I didn't know what it was. I took a pop at the only guy I saw. I got to send some smokes over to him."

  A fancied slight prompted O'Banion to attempt a murder in the lobby of the La Salle Theater. Exactly what Davy "Yiddles" Miller, a prizefight referee, had said or done to offend him was never clear, but having spotted him in the audience, O'Banion waited for him outside after the performance and before hundreds of witnesses put a bullet through his stomach. A younger brother, Max Miller, leaped to the fallen Davy's rescue, whereupon O'Banion fired at him. The bullet glanced off Max's belt buckle. Smiling, the marksman swaggered out into the night. The police arrested him, but neither Davy, who recovered, nor Max cared to prosecute. "I'm sorry it happened," said O'Banion. "It was just a piece of hotheaded foolishness."

  He never spent a day in jail for shooting anybody. His political usefulness was too great. just as Big Jim Colosimo had controlled the Italian vote in his part of town, so Deany O'Banion controlled the Irish vote in his. Cajolery and bounty normally sufficed to swing it any way O'Banion c
hose, but if they failed, he and his cohorts never hesitated to slug, shoot or kidnap. "I always deliver my borough as per requirements," he declared and he always did. So highly did the Democratic bosses of the Forty-second and Forty-third prize O'Banion's vote-getting ability that when they heard he might shift to the Republicans, they gave him a testimonial dinner at the Webster Hotel, climaxing it with the gift of a gem-encrusted platinum watch. Among those present were Colonel Albert A. Sprague, Cook County commissioner of public works and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate; Robert M. Sweitzer, then Cook County clerk; and Chief of Police Michael Hughes. The guest of honor went Republican anyway.

  O'Banion loved flowers, and he loved the church, and he was overjoyed to acquire a half interest in William Schofield's flower shop at 738 North State Street, directly opposite Holy Name Cathedral, where he once served as an acolyte and choirboy. Most days, between 9 A.M. and 6 P.M., he could be found in the shop, a sprig of lily of the valley or a white carnation in his buttonhole, happily breathing in the perfumed air as he bustled about, potting a plant here, nipping an excess bud there, arranging a wedding bouquet or a funeral wreath. He became gangdom's favorite florist, a lucrative situation, because underworld etiquette required the foes, as well as the friends, of a fallen gangster-including those who felled him-to honor him with an elaborate floral creation. To order funerary flowers from any florist but O'Banion would have been as egregious a faux pas for a gangster as it would for a Gold Coast matron to have invitations to her daughter's debut engraved by other than a Cartier or a Tiffany. O'Banion never needed to wait until the mourners actually placed their orders. The moment word of a gangster's demise reached him he knew how many flowers to buy from the wholesalers. It depended on the dead man's rank in the underworld hierarchy. Even before the calls started coming in and while the embalmer was still plugging up the bullet holes in the corpse, O'Banion and his staff would be at work composing floral wreaths, blankets and horseshoes and choosing suitable sentiments to be sewn in gilt letters to the ribbons-"Sympathy from the boys-We'll miss you, dear old pal. . . . Gone but not forgotten." All the caller had to do was identify himself and name the amount he wanted to spend-"This is Charlie. Five grand."

  By night O'Banion and his crew devoted themselves to other employment, consisting variously of banditry, burglary, safecracking, hijacking and, after 1920, bootlegging. O'Banion's adoring wife, Viola, maintained, with the willed blindness necessary to most gangsters' wives: "Dean loved his home and spent most of his evening in it. He loved to sit in his slippers, fooling with the radio, singing a song, listening to the player-piano. He never drank. He was not a man to run around nights with women. I was his only sweetheart. We went out often to dinner or the theater, usually with friends. He never left home without telling me where he was going and kissing me goodbye."

  A childless couple, they occupied a twelve-room apartment on North Pine Grove Avenue, a short spin from the flower shop in O'Banion's late-model Locomobile. His proudest home possessions were the player-piano, for which he had paid $15,000, and a Victrola, and he was constantly setting them both to playing the same tune and trying to synchronize them.

  "We're big business without high hats," O'Banion once remarked to his second-in-command, Earl "Little Hymie" Weiss, after they had hijacked a liquor truck. He nevertheless aped the dress and manners of the Gold Coast high-hatters, wearing a tuxedo when he attended a dinner or theater and minding his grammar and etiquette, and he insisted that his cohorts restrain their natural impulses. O'Banion popularized formal attire among gangsters, and owing partly to his example, their general social behavior distinctly improved.

  He limped, his left leg being shorter than his right, the aftermath of a boyhood fall from a streetcar. He was otherwise a prime physical specimen, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped. He had slender hands, with long, tapering fingers, which he submitted regularly to a manicurist's care. He parted his brown, silken, wavy hair low on the left side. His face was round, his chin cleft, and his normal expression one of geniality and goodwill toward men.

  He was born Charles Dion O'Banion twenty-eight years before Prohibition to an immigrant Irish plasterer and house painter in Aurora, Illinois. His mother died when he was five, but he retained a glowing memory of her, speaking of her frequently as the maternal ideal. One Memorial Day, as his customers were ordering flowers to decorate the graves of their loved ones, he was moved to such transports of filial piety that he jumped into his Locomobile and drove 150 miles to his mother's grave in the tiny village of Maroa, Illinois. Finding her tombstone with difficulty because of the weeds overgrowing it, he had it replaced by a huge monument visible at a distance. When his father grew too told to work, O'Banion settled a sum on him large enough to take care of him for the rest of his life. There was also a married sister in Coldwater, Kansas, to whom he regularly sent money.

  "Deany was a fighter as a boy but a good worker," said his father. In his infancy the family left Aurora for Chicago and a tenement flat on the edge of the North Side's Little Sicily, a maze of narrow, garbage-strewn streets, overrun by dogs and rats, the air hazy and reeking with the smoke of surrounding factories. The flames from a gasworks chimney that reddened the sky at night gave the area its nickname-Little Hell. It was formerly an Irish shantytown called Kil- gubbin, and about 1,000 Irish remained, but the "dark people"-the Sicilians-had been coming since 1900, and now they were in the majority. Though barely half a mile square, Little Hell surpassed even the Levee in the incidence and diversity of its vice and crime. Every year for twenty years between twelve and twenty violent deaths occurred in Little Hell. One spot, the intersection of Oak and Milton streets, became known as Death Corner after thirty-eight people had been gunned down there in little more than a year. Thirteen of those murders were attributed to a single Black Hander, identity never discovered, whom the press dubbed the Shotgun Man.

  For the boy O'Banion this baneful environment was partly offset by the influence of Father O'Brien at Holy Name Cathedral. During four years as a chorister and altar boy Deany developed such religious zeal, his conduct was in all ways so estimable, that the pastor hoped he might someday qualify as a novitiate. But before his voice changed, the choirboy was attracted to a gang of juvenile Little Hellions, the Market Streeters, and though he continued to observe religious ritual, Father O'Brien's moral precepts soon went by the board. At ten he was peddling newspapers and thieving. At sixteen he was a singing waiter in McGovern's Saloon, one of the lowest North Side dives, reducing the drunks to maudlin tears and picking their pockets or, if they became altogether helpless, a condition he frequently hastened by slipping them Mickey Finns, jackrolling them. By his seventeenth year he had enlisted as a slugger in the newspaper circulation wars on the side of the Herald-Examiner, overturning the competition's delivery trucks, burning newspapers, and beating up dealers who sold them. As leader of his own gang, he turned to burglary, safecracking and highway robbery. In 1909 he served three months in the House of Correction and two years later, another six months for blackjacking his prey. Those six months constituted his total prison record. Having demonstrated his efficiency as a ward heeler, he could rely on political patrons to keep him out of prison.

  Had he been a subtler safecracker his name might never have appeared on a police blotter at all, but his guilt was usually glaring. In attempting to open a safe with a charge of dynamite, he once blew out the entire side of an office building, but hardly scratched the safe. In 1921 a Detective Sergeant John J. Ryan caught O'Banion, Hymie Weiss and two lesser satellites in flagrante as they started to blast open a Postal Telegraph safe. With his sweetest smile, O'Banion explained that Ryan had misinterpreted their presence; they were there simply to apply for jobs as apprentice telegraph operators. An alderman furnished the $10,000 bail bond for O'Banion, and it cost $30,000 in bribes to have the case nolle prossed. Not long after, the police raised the fingerprints of O'Banion, Weiss and Vincent "Schemer" Drucci on the dial of a safe they had emptied in the P
arkway Tea Room. The jury acquitted them. "It was an oversight," O'Banion remarked to a reporter as he strutted out of the courtroom. "Hymie was supposed to wipe off the prints, but he forgot."

  Every good ward heeler knew when and where to scatter bounty, and O'Banion was no exception; but as his fortunes soared, his charity went beyond self-interest. He genuinely pitied the outsider, the derelict, the disenfranchised such as he and his parents had been. O'Banion often visited the slums, his car laden with food and clothing. He gave money to the aged poor and to the orphaned young, paid their rent and their medical bills. He once sent a crippled boy to the Mayo Clinic and, when told that neither surgery nor medication could cure him, undertook to support him as long as they both should live. "No high-salaried organization to distribute my doles," he said. "My money goes straight to those who need it."

  O'Banion's general staff consisted of criminals no less individualistic. Hymie Weiss, born Wajiechowski of Polish parentage, invented one of gangland's favorite murder methods and coined the phrase for it-"taking him for a ride." The victim was lured into the front seat of a car, the back of his head exposed to the gunman behind him. Gangsters considered the cerebellum an ideal target because the bullet was unlikely to "take a course"-that is, to be deflected from a vital area. The killers would fire when the car reached a desolate spot, fling open the door, and eject the corpse. The first one-way ride victim, executed by Weiss himself in July, 1921, was another Pole, Steve Wisniewski, who had hijacked a beer truck belonging to O'Banion.