Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  While Sylvester Barton was recovering from his wound in the hospital, Capone replaced him with one Tommy Cuiringione, alias Rossi. He proved to be a chauffeur-bodyguard of exceptional loyalty. Not long after he assumed his new duties, the O'Banionites kidnapped him, hoping to force him to tell where and when they might ambush Capone. One morning a month later, two boys leading a horse through a wood in southwest Chicago stopped at a cistern to water him. The horse backed away, refusing to drink. That afternoon the boys mentioned this odd behavior to a patrolman they knew. He accompanied them to the cistern, leaned over, sniffed. With the boys' help he hauled up what remained of Tommy Cuiringione. The body was mottled with cigarette burns. He had been bent forward across a slab of concrete and his wrists and ankles pulled together with wire that cut deep into his flesh. His torturer had finally put five bullets into his head.

  The Torrios returned to Chicago in mid-January. After seven months at liberty on bail, Torrio and eleven co-defendants were to stand trial in the Sieben Brewery case. With Weiss' executioners still in pursuit, shaken by their attempt to kill Capone, he cast about for some sort of sanctuary. The approaching trial suggested- one. When, on January 23, Torrio came before Federal Judge Adam Cliffe, he pleaded guilty, confident that no avenging hand could reach him in prison and that by the time he got out Capone would have dealt with Hymie Weiss.

  Before passing sentence judge Cliffe granted Torrio five days in which to settle his affairs. With his wife he spent the afternoon of the twenty-fourth shopping on Michigan Avenue. Their car was laid up for repairs, and they had borrowed Jake Guzik's Lincoln sedan, as well as his chauffeur, Robert Barton, Sylvester's brother. It was almost dusk when the sedan, laden with parcels, swung into Clyde Avenue and stopped at No. 7011, where the Torrios occupied a thirdfloor apartment. Neither Barton nor his passengers noticed the Cadillac limousine parked at the corner of Clyde and Seventieth Street. It bore no license plates, and the window curtains were drawn.

  Barton opened the rear door of the sedan and helped husband and wife gather up their parcels. Ann Torrio went ahead along the short cement walk to the entrance of the apartment house. The Cadillac began to move. As she pushed against the glass door with her back, her hands being full of parcels, the Cadillac stopped across the street, parallel with the sedan. She now saw dimly through its curtained windows the outlines of four men, each holding an automatic, a sawed-off shotgun or both. Torrio had just stepped to the sidewalk. Petrified, she watched helplessly as two men leaped from the car with automatics and charged him. The first man fired two shots, tumbling him to the ground, his jaws broken, a bullet in his chest. As he lay squirming on the sidewalk, the second man shot him in the right arm and the groin. At the same time the two men who had stayed in the Cadillac started blasting away, peppering the sedan with buckshot and bullets. A bullet hit Barton in the right leg below the knee. The first killer bent over Torrio and held the automatic against his temple for the coup de grdce, but the chambers were empty. Before he could reload, the driver sounded a warning blast of his horn. The two men ran back to the Cadillac, and it whisked them away.

  Still conscious, Torrio crawled a few feet toward his wife, who managed to drag him inside the building. The gunfire had brought the neighbors to their windows, and a Mrs. James Putnam, who had witnessed the onslaught from the beginning, called the nearby Woodlawn police station. An ambulance was summoned. As it sped Torrio to the Jackson Park Hospital, the thought of garlic and gangrene flashed through his mind and he cried out: "Cauterize it! Cauterize it!"

  Barton, ignoring his leg wound, had hobbled back into the sedan and gone tearing off toward 71st Street. He passed a car driven by a retired detective sergeant, Thomas Conley, who, spotting the bullet holes in the sedan, his man-hunting instincts aroused, gave chase. He confronted the fugitive in a drugstore as he was emerging from a telephone booth, limping and bleeding. Barton refused to satisfy the old sleuth's curiosity. He broke away from him and drove off again. After a flight across half the city, he was finally forced to the curb by a police patrol car, taken to a station house and thence to a hospital. The person Barton had telephoned, the police concluded, was Capone.

  At the Jackson Park Hospital, speaking with difficulty because of his damaged jaw, Torrio muttered in answer to a reporter's question: "Sure, I know all four men, but I'll never tell their names." He never did.

  Among the neighborhood witnesses was the seventeen-year-old son of an apartment building janitor, Peter Veesaert. He had been standing in the doorway of the building at the time of the attack. Shown a photograph of O'Banion's pallbearers, he pointed to Bugs Moran as the first man who shot Torrio. He persisted in his identification when the police brought him face to face with Moran, saying: "You're the man." The police wanted to hold Moran until they could establish some evidence in support of the boy's testimony, but Judge William Lindsay released him under $5,000 bail. He was never indicted.

  Capone reached the Jackson Park Hospital soon after the ambu lance to learn that Torrio's condition was critical. In tears, he refused to leave his bedside. As a security measure, he insisted upon Torrio's removal to an inner room on the top floor, and though two policemen stood guard before the door, he posted four of his own bodyguards in the corridor. These precautions were not idle. During the night the superintendent noticed three carloads of armed men circling the building. She called the police, and at their approach the motorcade dispersed.

  Torrio made a swift recovery. In less than three weeks he left the hospital via a fire escape, surrounded by bodyguards. The same day, February 9, with his jaw still bandaged, he appeared again before Judge Cliffe. He was content to pay a $5,000 fine, and without a murmur of protest he accepted a sentence of nine months in Lake County Jail at Waukegan.

  The warden fitted the windows of Torrio's cell with bulletproof steel-mesh blinds, assigned two deputy wardens to patrol the corridor outside, and added such touches of comfort and luxury as throw rugs, easy chairs, pictures and a downy mattress.

  This was not unheard-of treatment for rich and politically wellconnected convicts. In June, 1924, U.S. District Court Judge James Wilkerson issued a permanent injunction against the Standard Beverage Corporation, a property belonging to Terry Druggan and Frankie Lake. They defied it, and on July I1 the judge sentenced them to a year's imprisonment for contempt of court. The day they entered Cook County Jail, Morris Eller, boss of the Twentieth Ward, told Sheriff Peter Hoffman, "Treat the boys right." The boys themselves paid Warden Wesley Westbrook, a former police captain, and other officials bribes totaling $20,000.

  One day a reporter from the American called to interview Druggan. "Mr. Druggan isn't in today," the jailer told him. The reporter said he would interview Lake instead. "Mr. Lake also had an appointment downtown," the jailer explained. "They'll be back after dinner."

  When the stunned reporter repeated this dialogue to his city desk, the editor assigned him to a full-scale investigation. From disgruntled jail personnel, who were not sharing in the Druggan-Lake bounty, the reporter learned that the gangsters came and went as they pleased. Conveyed to and from jail in his chauffeur-driven limousine, Druggan spent most of his evenings with his wife in their $12,000-a-year duplex apartment on the Gold Coast, whose distinctive appurte nances included a solid silver toilet seat engraved with his name, while Lake enjoyed the company of his mistress in her North State Parkway bower. At other times the partners visited their doctor or dentist, shopped, dined in the best Loop restaurants, played golf, attended theaters and cabarets.

  As a result of the American expose, Sheriff Hoffman was fined $2,500 and sentenced to thirty days in jail and Warden Westbrook to four months, neither term to be served in their own cozy lockup.

  The warden of Lake County jail allowed Torrio to hold business conferences on the premises. In March, a month after his incarceration, Torrio, Capone and their lawyers held a momentous one. The intergang treaties that Torrio had forged and struggled so hard to implement were now wrecked beyond r
ecovery, all hope of underworld peace gone. Inevitably, Torrio foresaw, the gangs would revert to warfare, and for this he lacked the gumption. Never a physically brave man, he had been cowed by the feel of lead in his body.

  Torrio was a criminal far ahead of his time. He anticipated by at least two decades the organization gangster who would forgo personal vendettas, stooping to murder only as a practical necessity and then leaving the execution to remote sublieutenants with whom nobody could associate him, who, guided by corporation counsel, would funnel unlawful profits into lawful channels until, a multimillionaire, his financial stance was indistinguishable from those of reputable businessmen.

  To Capone and his lawyers, Torrio announced his retirement from the Chicago scene. He proposed to divest himself of all his interests there. Demanding no payment and stipulating no conditions, he formally transferred everything to Capone-the breweries, brothels, speakeasies and gambling houses which together were producing an annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. But with the Torrio coalition disintegrating, it had become a slippery possession. To secure it again, Capone knew he must win back, subjugate or destroy every major gang in the city. He was equipped for the challenge with qualities which made him, by the special standards of the underworld, a paragon, a leader of leaders.

  "I would have killed for Al." It is Max Motel Friedman, alias Morris Rudensky, speaking * at a remove of half a century. Red Rudensky, or Rusty, as Capone called him, was twenty when he came to Chicago, a wiry, flame-haired Jew of German-Polish parentage, born on New York's Lower East Side, already noted in the underworld for his talent as a lock picker, safecracker and escape artist. A former locksmith's apprentice, he claimed he could make a master key to any hotel in the country in ten minutes. From a friendly chemist he had learned enough about explosives to blow a safe neatly with nitroglycerine. He was a fugitive from a New York reformatory, an Illinois state prison and a federal penitentiary. He belonged to no gang but operated on the fringes of gangdom as a free-lance "mechanic." He grew adept at cracking open government warehouses full of bonded liquor. Though he never worked directly for Capone, they occasionally ran into each other at the Four Deuces. The youth's gall and swagger tickled Capone, who treated him as a kind of mascot, and Rudensky hero-worshiped the gang boss. "He was big-hearted, loyal, dynamic. . . ."

  Rudensky was not alone in his admiration. To Francis Albin Kar- paviecz, the youngest member of Ma Barker's Ozark gang of bank robbers, kidnappers and killers, who Americanized his Lithuanian name to Al Karpis, Capone was "a wonderful person . . . a real man." Karpis formed this judgment years before he met Capone, when he was seeking a refuge between holdups in Cicero. The presence of a fugitive bank robber could cause the local gangsters acute embarrassment by stirring up police activity, and to relieve the stress, some of them had been known to betray such fugitives. "That just wasn't in Al's nature," Karpis recalled.* "He always knew when we hit town and where we stayed, but he never tipped off the cops."

  Toward the members of his gang, their family and friends, Capone was paternalistic, protective, a lavish giver in the tradition of the Mafia dons, though he never belonged to the Mafia. On occasion his sense of loyalty transcended his self-interest. An opportunity arose in 1926 to end the enervating feud with Hymie Weiss. The implacable Pole offered to make peace if Capone would betray Scalise and Anselmi into his hands. "I wouldn't do that to a yellow dog," said Capone.

  He demanded prime physical fitness in his henchmen and urged them to follow a regular athletic training program. In 1925, when it had become apparent that the well-meaning Mayor Dever was helpless against Chicago's politico-criminal cabal, Capone reestablished 0 In an interview with the author.

  city headquarters in the seven-story Hotel Metropole at 2300 South Michigan Avenue, around the corner from the Four Deuces. He took a fourth-floor corner suite of eight rooms for himself and half a dozen rooms on the two top floors for his entourage. Two of the seventhfloor rooms he converted into a gymnasium with punching bags, rowing machines, horizontal bars, a trapeze and other body-building equipment. Jack McGurn, the sometime prizefighter, kept in shape by skipping rope.

  It was Capone's notion that, in his own words, "When a guy don't fall for a broad, he's through," and from time to time he would test his bodyguards by exposing them to eager, voluptuous women. If they failed to respond enthusiastically enough, he would assign them to a less exacting post or dismiss them altogether.

  The Caponeites had a discipline and cohesiveness, a team spirit, equaled only by the O'Banion gang under Dion O'Banion, and like the O'Banionites' esprit de corps, it stemmed from the personal power their chieftain had built up through the subversion of public officials. No documentation exists to support two of the most widely circulated anecdotes concerning Capone's power, but his men firmly believed and gloried in them. According to the first, a hoodlum escaped from the Criminal Courts Building. In the search for him a squad of police rookies, acting on an informer's tip, raided the hangout of a South Side gang affiliated with Capone. They failed to find the fugitive; but the gangsters present were heavily armed, and the zealous rookies confiscated several automatics and shotguns. When they delivered the weapons to their commanding officer and told him where they came from, he was consternated. "Who gave you such orders?" he demanded. "Take the stuff back." The raided gangsters, meanwhile, had complained to Capone, who in turn reproved the commanding officer. The latter thereupon advised the rookies to placate the gang leader lest they be banished to some remote beat. They called on Capone at his Hotel Metropole headquarters. "I understand your captain wasn't to blame," he said affably, "that you boys just made a mistake. All right, I'm going to give you a break. But don't pull another boner."

  According to the second apocryphal story, a Capone lieutenant was arrested and held without bail. Capone telephoned the judge. "I thought I told you to discharge him," he said. The judge explained that he was not on the bench the day the police brought in the prisoner, but he had given his bailiff a memo for the alternative judge. The bailiff forgot to deliver it. "Forgot!" Capone roared. "Don't let him forget again."

  The attempted murder of Torrio marked the beginning of the longest hottest gang war ever fought in Chicago. The casus belli went beyond Weiss' lust for vengeance. At stake was nothing less than the control of commercialized crime and vice throughout the area.

  The gangs realigned themselves mainly, though not entirely, according to ethnic ties. The Irish, Polish and Jewish gangsters tended to rally behind O'Banion's successor. The West Side O'Donnells, for example, and later the Saltis-McErlane gangs, once allies of Torrio, went over to Weiss. The Sicilians, notably the Gennas, and most of the Italians stuck to Capone. So did Druggan and Lake. Some of the lesser gangs like Ralph Sheldon's and a few independent hoodlums shifted back and forth with the changing fortunes of war.

  Applying the lessons Torrio taught him, Capone forged a large, heterogeneous, yet disciplined criminal organization. On the top echelon, at his right hand, stood Jake Guzik, business manager; Frank Nitti, risen from triggerman to treasurer, Capone's chief link with the Unione Siciliane and later with the Mafia; and brother Ralph Capone, director of liquor sales. Ralph acquired the nickname Bottles because of his persuasiveness with saloonkeepers who were reluctant to stock Capone merchandise. Though all the brothers except the college-educated Matt and the vanished James worked for the organization at one time or other, only Ralph achieved a position of major responsibility.

  On the managerial level, supervising the distribution of liquor, there were Charlie Fischetti and Lawrence "Dago" Mangano. Frank Pope, who managed the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, paid particular attention to the off-track horse race betting and retained 18 percent of the net from all the gambling games, while Peter Penovich, in charge of roulette, craps, blackjack, etc., got 5 percent. From the gambling houses that Capone did not own outright he exacted a share of the profits as payment for political and physical protection. His chief collector was Hymie "Loud Mouth" Levin
e. Mike de Pike Heisler and Harry Guzik oversaw the whorehouses. For advice on every phase of his operations Capone often turned to Tony Lombardo, an urbane, cool-headed Sicilian seven years his senior, who had prospered as a wholesale grocer in Little Italy.

  Next came the specialists and technicians. Every member of the organization carried a card with a name and phone number to call in case of arrest. The number was that of a pay booth in a Cicero drugstore at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifty-second Avenue; the name, Louis Cowan. When anyone phoned for Cowan, the druggist would go to the door and beckon to a small, frail man sitting inside a newsstand. A green limousine was parked at the curb nearby. The newsdealer, who stood barely 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds, would dash to the phone, listen intently, dash out again and, after finding somebody to mind his kiosk, hop into the limousine and drive hell for leather to whatever police station his caller had indicated. Cowan was the organization's chief bondsman, a status sufficiently rewarding to have obviated a pursuit as humble as selling papers; but having sold them on the same corner since boyhood, he chose sentimentally to keep the newsstand, and it now doubled as his office. Capone trusted Cowan to such a degree that he placed in his name several apartment buildings he owned worth about half a million dollars. Whenever Cowan went to the aid of an arrested Caponeite, he would take with him documentary proof of these real estate holdings, which he then put up as security for bail.

  On the lower echelons there was a choice assortment of bodyguards, sharpshooters and all-purpose muscle men. James Belcastro, a veteran Black Hander, directed a bombing squad. If competitors attempted to open a still or a brewery in territory the organization considered its own, Belcastro would issue a warning. If the interlopers ignored it, his men would obliterate the property. Speakeasy operators who refused to buy the liquor the organization offered them likewise risked a bombing.