Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  Phil D'Andrea, who became Capone's favorite bodyguard, was a rifleman who could split a quarter in midair. William "Three-Fingered" Jack White was an equally good shot with his left hand, his right having been smashed in boyhood by a brick falling from a building under construction. As sensitive about the loss as Capone was about his facial scars, White always wore gloves in public, the empty fingers stuffed with cotton. Another expert torpedo, Samuel McPherson "Golf Bag" Hunt, tracked his prey with a shotgun concealed in a golf bag. To a detective who once opened the bag, Hunt explained: "I'm going to shoot some pheasants." The first man he ever shotgunned failed to die and was known in gangland thereafter as "Hunt's hole in one."

  Antonino Leonardo Accardo, alias Joe Batters, a Sicilian shoemaker's son, committed his maiden offense, a traffic violation, at age fifteen. He was arrested twenty-seven times thereafter on charges that included extortion, kidnapping and murder, none resulting in any penalty more serious than a small fine. Felice De Lucia, alias Paul "the Waiter" Ricca, killed two men in his native Naples before his twenty-second year when he immigrated with false identification papers to Chicago. Both Accardo and Ricca joined the Torrio-Capone gang in its formative stage. So did Sam "Mooney" Giancana, who was rejected for military service as a psychopath. Murray Llewellyn "the Camel" Humphreys, who sported a camel's hair overcoat, also made an underworld name for himself early in life by bringing off a long series of robberies for which he never served a day in jail.

  Capone valued none of his young recruits more highly than Jack McGurn-"Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, as he was called after the tommy gun became his preferred weapon. He was born Vincenzo De Mora in Little Italy to one of the Gennas' alky cookers, who died full of buckshot following his sale of some alcohol to the competition. The son, according to legend, determined to avenge the murder, began practicing marksmanship by shooting the sparrows off telephone wires with a Daisy repeating rifle. A promising amateur welterweight prizefighter, he received his alias, McGurn, from Emil Thiery, a well-known trainer who agreed to take him on. The relationship was short-lived. Under pressure in the ring McGurn tended to wilt, and Thiery dropped him.

  McGurn was the complete jazz age sheik, a ukulele strummer, cabaret habitue and snaky dancer. An insatiable collector of women, preferably blondes, he parted his curly black hair in the middle and slicked it down with pomade until it lay as flat and sleek as Rudolph Valentino's. He wore wide-checked suits heavily padded in the shoulders, flower-figured neckties and pointed patent-leather shoes. The police ascribed twenty-two murders to McGurn, five of them supposedly committed in reprisal for his father's death. As a gesture of contempt after mowing down a victim, he would sometimes press a nickel into his hand.

  In the fall of 1927 Danny Cohen, the owner of a thriving North Side cabaret, the Green Mill, offered McGurn a 25 percent interest. All he had to do was persuade the star attraction, a young comic named Joe E. Lewis, to renew his contract. For a solid year Lewis had been packing the place nightly, and Cohen had raised his pay to $650 a week. But a rival establishment, the New Rendezvous Cafe, promised Lewis $1,000, plus a percentage of the cover charge, and he notified Cohen that he would accept.

  The next morning McGurn was waiting for Lewis outside his hotel, the Commonwealth. Lewis repeated his decision. He was opening at the Rendezvous on November 2. "You'll never live to open," said McGurn. Years later Capone, a Lewis devotee from the start, asked him, "Why the hell didn't you come to me when you had your trouble? I'd have straightened things out." Lewis often asked himself the same question.

  No harm befell him opening night, but the morning of November 10, a week later, there was a knock at his bedroom door. He let in three men. Two of them carried pistols, and they fractured his skull with the butts. The third had a knife. He drove it into Lewis' jaw, drew it up the left of his face to his ear. Twelve times he struck, gashing his throat and tongue.

  Incredibly, Lewis lived. But for months he could barely articulate, and the damage to his brain by the pistol butts left him unable to recognize words. He had to learn again to talk, read and write. He was performing within a year, but a decade passed before he recovered his early success. During his darkest days Capone gave him $ 10,000.

  While retaining their identity, several of the smaller gangs became virtual subsidiaries of the Capone syndicate. The most important were the Guilfoyle gang and the Circus gang. Martin Guilfoyle, whose disciples included Matt Kolb, a Republican politician, and Al Winge, an ex-police lieutenant, controlled the liquor and gambling concessions along West North Avenue. The Circus gang, composed chiefly of gunmen and labor racketeers, took its name from its meeting place, the Circus Cafe, at 1857 West North Avenue. The founder was John Edward "Screwy" Moore, better known as Claude Maddox, a Missourian with a criminal record dating from his seventeenth year. These two Northwest Side gangs together served as a counterforce to the North Side Weiss gang.

  In addition, the organization had occasional recourse to various independent technicians and specialists-"boxmen" (safe blowers) , cracksmen like Red Rudensky for breaking into government bonded liquor warehouses, arms merchants. Among the last was Peter von Frantzius, an alumnus of Northwestern University Law School, a member of the National Rifle Association and the owner of a sporting goods store, Sports, Inc., at 608 Diversey Parkway. Capone had been following with passionate interest the reports of Frank McErlane's tommy gun exploits. After his initial failure to remove Spike O'Donnell, McErlane had turned his tommy gun upon other foes with more impressive results. Firing a burst from his car as it sped past the Ragen Athletic Club, Ralph Sheldon's hangout, he had demolished Charles Kelly, who chanced to be standing in front of the building, and maimed a Sheldonite inside. In an attempt to eradicate two beer runners for a rival gang he had sprayed a South Side saloon with about fifty missiles, wounding, though not killing his quarry. Amazed by McErlane's new weaponry, if not his aim, Capone hastened to equip his own arsenal with tommy guns. His brother John and Charlie Fischetti bought the first three for him from a dealer named Alex Korocek. It was Von Frantzius, however, a timid, myopic man with a pencil-line mustache, who became his regular armorer. Sports, Inc., furnished machine guns and other firearms that would figure in some of the most spectacular gang killings of the decade. *

  The organization's greatest power derived from those close associates who held political office like Johnny Patton, the mayor of Burnham. Patton was so close an associate as to be a virtual member of the gang. He continued to keep Burnham safe for vice. His chief of police tended bar at the Arrowhead Inn, in which Capone had a controlling interest, and several town officials worked there as waiters. During periods when Prohibition agents maintained too tight a surveillance on the organization's Chicago breweries for them to produce anything except near beer the Arrowhead Inn became an important source of needle beer. Capone's trucks would haul barrels of the legal beverage from the Chicago plants to the roadhouse, with his eighteen-year-old brother Mimi bringing up the rear in a Ford coupe, accompanied by a triggerman, tommy gun at the ready, eyes peeled for hijackers. On their arrival all hands would pitch in. Mezz Mezzrow, who led the Arrowhead jazz band, described the process in his autobiography:

  One day along about noon Frank Hitchcock [a part owner] yanked us all out of our pads and took us downstairs. . . . We were called out to the backyard, where we saw some men putting up a large circus tent. . . . When we went inside the tent we saw barrels of beer being lined up in long rows and a large icebox being built off to one side . . . a man named Jack, one of Capone's lieutenants, came along. He gave us a brace and bit, a box of sticks like the butcher uses to peg meat with, and some galvanized pails. Then he yelled, "One of you guys drill holes in these barrel plugs and let three-quarters of a pail run out of each barrel. Then another guy plugs up each hole with these here wooden sticks, to stop the beer from running out." .. .

  After we let out the right amount from a barrel, another guy came along with a large pail that had a pump and gauge attached to it
. In this pail was a concoction of ginger ale and alcohol, just enough to equal the amount of beer that was drawn off. This mixture was pumped into each barrel, plus thirty pounds of air, and you had a barrel of real suds. I think they got as high as seventyfive bucks for this spiked stuff.

  Jack showed up for the next maneuver. That cat was stronger than Samson after a raw steak dinner. He would roll a barrel over so the plug was facing up, then break off the meat stick and place a new plug over the old one. With one mighty swing of a big wooden sledgehammer he would drive the new plug all the way in, forcing the old one clean into the barrel. In all the time I understudied at this spiking routine, I never saw Jack take a second swing at a plug.

  Capone, who had assumed the role of father to his younger brothers and sisters, was disturbed when Mimi became attached to a singer in the band. "Get her out of here," he ordered Mezzrow. "If I hear of any more stuff about her and Mimi, you're booked to go too."

  "I won't fire her," said Mezzrow, frightened by his own temerity. "She's one of the best entertainers we got around here. Why don't you keep Mimi out of here, if that's the way you feel about it?"

  "She can't sing anyway."

  "Can't sing. Why, you couldn't even tell good whiskey if you smelled it and that's your racket, so how do you figure to tell me about music?"

  Capone turned, laughing, to a group of his henchmen. "Listen to the Pro-fes-sor! The kid's got plenty of guts." He turned back to Mezzrow, the laughter fading. "But if I ever catch Mimi fooling around here it won't be good for the both of you."

  Under the presidency of Joseph Klenha Cicero's round-the-clock illicit resorts grew to number more than 100 gambling dens, many hundreds of beer flats, saloons and speakeasies and brothels by the score. Here Capone was the law. The real seat of municipal administration was the Hawthorne Inn. The gang sometimes stored its liquor in the basement of the Town Hall. Once when Klenha neglected to carry out an order, Capone knocked him down the Town Hall steps and kicked him as he struggled to rise. A policeman patrolling the block calmly watched, shrugged, and moved on. Another time, as the town council was about to ratify an ordinance displeasing to Capone, a squad of his toughs marched into the council chamber, dragged the chairman outside, and blackjacked him. The objectionable ordinance was rescinded.

  Yet there remained a thorn in Capone's side. This was a young newspaper editor, the youngest, in fact, in the country. Robert St. John was barely twenty-one when an older friend, an advertising man, Jack Carmichael, proposed that they start a weekly newspaper in Cicero. The town already had one paper, the Cicero Life, but St. John agreed with Carmichael that it was growing fast enough to support two. They formed a publishing corporation. Under Illinois law every corporation required at least three directors and so they took in a friend of St. John's, Tom Foss.* St. John and Carmichael each held 49 percent of the stock, Foss 2 percent. The Cicero Life confined itself to reporting social trivia, but from its first issue in 1922, the Tribune devoted its front page to the activities of the Capone organization and the editorial page to attacking the alliance between the gangsters and the local politicians. At about the same time, in the adjoining town of Berwyn, St. John's brother Archer founded the Berwyn Beacon with a policy identical to the Tribune's.

  Capone first tried to starve out the crusaders. Emissaries from both the Hawthorne Inn and the Town Hall roamed Cicero, warning its merchants against advertising in the Tribune. The defiant were subjected to official harassment. The tax assessor would increase the valuation of their property. NO PARKING signs would suddenly appear at the curb in front of their door. Fire and health inspectors would find them guilty of various violations. In exceptionally stubborn cases Capone's strong arm men might intervene with a slugging or bombing. The Tribune managed nevertheless to sell enough space to survive.

  Capone tried a new tack. At his instructions Louis Cowan, whose newsstand the Tribune overlooked, felt out St. John about the possibility of selling the paper. He failed to arouse a flicker of interest.

  In 1925 the Capone syndicate opened a new brothel on the southern boundary of Cicero, near the Hawthorne Race Track. St. John assigned a reporter to investigate it. Two weeks later the reporter resigned by registered letter. He never revisited the Tribune office, not even to collect the salary due him. St. John took over the investigation himself. The brothel, he discovered, also contained a death chamber. Recalling his experience years later, he wrote:

  One night I put on shabby clothes, emptied my pockets of all identification and set out.

  The place was a square, unpainted frame building two stories high and the size of a small armory. . . . It was entered through a room large enough for one table and a miniature bar. .. . This was not a drinking establishment. What was served at the bar was near beer, obviously designed to discourage any interest in lingering longer than necessary in this antechamber.. . .

  To pass from the bar into the main building, it was necessary to go through a series of three doors only a foot or two apart. The first and third were hinged on the right; the middle one on the left. The bartender was the establishment's "spotter." He controlled all three doors with electric buttons. It was possible for him to allow a client to get through the first door and then lock all three electrically, thus imprisoning the visitor. The establishment's "bouncer" sat at a small table just inside the main building. The barman could communicate with him by house telephone. If a man marked for extermination were to be locked in the, small corridor with the three doors, it was simple for the bouncer to fire a few bullets through the door on his side. Although the place had been open for business only about two weeks, the doors already looked like pieces of Swiss cheese and there were black stains on the floor and walls of the corridor.

  The ground floor of the main building was a single large room, its four walls lined with wooden benches. A client coming from the bar took a seat on a bench just to the left or right of the bar door.

  The procedure from then on was obvious at a glance. A girl wearing only the two most essential feminine garments would come down from upstairs, enter the large waiting room through a door in the far wall, make a slow circuit of the room, greeting anyone she already knew, and then would go back upstairs, accompanied by the man who occupied the spot on the bench just to the left or right of the far door. The man next to the place now vacated would move into it. This was a signal for all the other bench warmers to move a foot or two closer, ultimately leaving a vacancy by the bar door. The bouncer would then communicate by phone with the barman, who would press his electric buttons and allow another client to enter.

  Little conversation was taking place. Traffic moved rapidly. It took about half an hour to get from entrance to exit. In that time nearly one hundred different girls would each have made two appearances. When a man had worked his way to a place by the exit door, he had the privilege of leaving with the next girl going upstairs or, if he had taken a fancy to some particular female employee during the half hour, he could wait for her... .

  The closer I got to the exit door, the more frightened I became. I was still not yet a man, although I shaved regularly. . . . I had undertaken to try, almost singlehanded, to crush or at least to drive out of town one of the most powerful underworld organizations America had ever known, but that night I was afraid for many reasons.

  During the half hour of waiting I studied the faces of hundreds of girls. I finally found one whom I thought perhaps I could trust. She was older than the others and looked intelligent. I waited for her.

  One paid the five-dollar fee just before going upstairs, where there were at least one hundred small rooms.

  The girl's name was Helen. I had brought ten ten-dollar bills with me, and handed her one as soon as she had locked the door. Stumblingly I explained that I was a "writer." I had come here only to get "material." Would she be willing just to talk to me for the next fifteen minutes?

  I was lucky in the choice I made. . . . She answered every question I asked with what seemed like ho
nesty. .. .

  As the night advanced, Helen passed him along to other talkative girls until he had amassed "enough material for a modern Moll Flanders." At about 4 A.M. word reached the upper regions of the bordello that Ralph Capone had arrived to check the night's receipts. St. John left by a fire escape.

  The story that filled the entire next issue of the Tribune, one of the longest, most detailed exposes of a whorehouse ever published by a newspaper, sold thousands of extra copies, scandalized respectable Ciceronians and infuriated Capone. A result particularly gratifying to the author was a meeting of clergymen from Cicero and the surrounding Capone-infested communities. It was organized by the Reverend Henry C. Hoover of Berwyn, a tall, bony young man not much older than St. John, whose studious expression was enhanced by a pince-nez. Out of that meeting grew the West Suburban Citizens' Association dedicated to combating gangsterism. As an initial step, a delegation called on local officials like President Klenha and Cicero's chief of police, Theodore Svoboda, on County Sheriff Hoffman and State's Attorney Crowe. Everywhere they were courteously received and promised swift action. No action followed. So the Citizens' Association took the law into its own hands. It appointed an action committee budgeted at $1,000, with no questions asked and no explanations wanted. The committee handed over the money to a member of the Weiss gang. Early one morning, after the last customer had left, the new whorehouse burned to the ground.

  The day after the fire Cowan called on St. John. "Capone's sore," he said. "Tell him I'm sore, too," the editor replied. He was sore, he added recklessly, because the gang wouldn't clear out and leave the town alone.