Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  On Easter Sunday, two days before the primary, the clergy of Chicago-Catholic, Protestant and Jewish-spoke out as one voice against the Small-Thompson machine: "We have a governor who ought to be in the penitentiary. . . . Ours is a government of bombs and bums. . . . 0 Lord! May there be an awakening of public spirit and consciousness. Grant that we may be awakened to a sense of public shame. . . ."

  April 10, the primary. The party hacks on both sides, with the entrenched Thompson forces in the vast majority, now employed the stratagems that had been perfected through generations of Cook County electoral chicanery. Those who had managed to get themselves appointed election officials padded the registration lists with fictitious names under which fraudulent voters could vote. They inserted the names of unregistered voters friendly to their slate, submitted by the ward bosses, who had verified them from preelection pledge cards. They registered vagrants whose votes the bosses had bought for a few dollars, assigning them false names and addresses. Before the polling booths opened, they stuffed the ballot boxes with bundles of ballots premarked in favor of their faction. They let the bosses' hirelings remove additional bundles for marking and mixing with the legitimate ballots during the final tally. They diverted ballots intended for bedridden voters into other hands.

  As the voting got under way, Capone's henchmen, packing bombs and guns and far outnumbering the thugs enlisted under the Deneen banner, cruised the polling areas in cars bearing America First stickers. Capone himself directed his battle troops. With threats of mayhem they drove off voters thought favorable to the opposition. Now and then they ran into a contingent of pro-Deneen hoodlums and a skirmish ensued. But the Capone camp had the numerical supremacy, and it remained in control of the field. The Caponeites terrorized scrupulous election officials into keeping away from their posts. If intimidation failed, they dragged them away and held them captive until the polls closed. This obliged the polling judges to appoint a substitute at the last minute, and the gangsters saw to it that the only choices at hand were all Thompsonites.

  The paid fraudulent voters ran to five main types. There was the stringer, who voted according to a relay system. The first man in a string entered the polling booth with two ballots, the usual blank one furnished by the clerk and a premarked ballot. After dropping the latter into the ballot box, he slipped the blank to the next man in the string who repeated the process and so on to the end of the string. The floater, recruited from among the city's transient tramps, voted frequently during the day, as gangsters whisked him by car from precinct to precinct. The stinger was an armed floater prepared to shoot any poll watcher who might try to expose him. The ward bosses had gone so far as to house some vagrants in their ward during the thirtyday preprimary period required by the residency law. They were called mattress voters. The repeater voted as many as a hundred times in the same precinct, but under different aliases and addresses. One repeater gave the same address sixteen times. In a postprimary grand jury investigation this turned out to be a riding stable, which prompted the gibe, "Every horse voted."

  With the counting of the ballots, a miscellany of other dodges came into play. Corrupt officials disqualified hostile ballots by surreptitiously double marking them-that is, inserting an X in the boxes left empty opposite the adversaries' names. They transferred the totals on the tally sheets to the credit of their candidates, substituted bogus tally sheets, fabricated totals. Thousands of anti-Crowe votes were destroyed altogether. To discourage protests from honest officials, gangsters menacingly paced the rooms where the counting took place.

  None of these ploys could have succeeded without the connivance of the police. They helped by their absence. The precinct captains, obeying orders from the ward boss, and in many cases directly from Capone, under pain of demotion or promise of reward, assigned their subordinates to duties remote from the polls. Morris Eller, who was Thompson's choice for Republican committeeman of the Twentieth Ward, put it tersely: "The police are with us."

  Murder capped the Pineapple Primary. A Negro attorney, Octavius Granady, had dared challenge Boss Eller's candidacy. Never before had a Negro demanded political equality in the Twentieth Ward. But how many votes he may have won became academic. Shortly after the polls closed, Granady was standing outside, chatting with friends, when a shot from a passing car barely missed him. He jumped into his car and fled. The assassin's car turned and followed, shotguns blazing away. Granady's car crashed into a tree. An easy target in the headlights of his pursuers, he was torn apart by a dozen slugs. Eventually, four policemen and three gangsters, including James Belcastro, stood trial for the murder. All were acquitted.

  The political seers had been forecasting a victory for the SmallThompson-Crowe axis. The best organized, most powerful party machine in Chicago's history, it had never lost a primary. Through patronage it controlled practically every state, county and city office. In addition to its militant gangster arm, it could muster 100,000 campaign workers. The prophets predicted a primary turnout of about 430,000, with the great majority voting for the incumbent faction.

  What they failed to foresee was the boomerang effect of violence. Chicagoans who had seldom bestirred themselves for a primary before were jolted out of their lethargy by the bombs, the gunplay and Thompson's cynicism. "Sure, we have crime here," the mayor had nonchalantly conceded after the bombings of the Deneen and Swanson homes. "We always will have crime. Chicago is just like any other big city. You can get a man's arm broken for so much, a leg for so much, or beaten up for so much. Just like New York, excepting we print our crime and they don't. . . . There'll always be bombings just-as long as there is prohibition." The paramount electoral issue, transcending all others-America Firstism, the United States and the League of Nations, the Draft-Coolidge-for-President movement-became Al Capone. Was the gangster overlord to go on unchallenged as the dominant influence behind the government of Chicago?

  The answer was a resounding no. The turnout on April 10 exceeded by nearly 100 percent the most optimistic estimates. Close to 800,000 voted, and not all the fraud and terrorism could save a single Thompson candidate. Governor Small and State's Attorney Crowe sank under a tidal wave of revulsion. Although Thompson himself had three more years to serve as mayor, his political career had been shattered beyond repair. The rebuff, together with a judicial inquiry into his conduct and the whiplashes of a hostile press, left him with little zest for further combat as his party prepared to confront the Democrats in the fall elections. Physically and mentally deteriorated, drinking heavily, he retreated for the summer to a country hideaway, abandoning City Hall to Acting Mayor Samuel Ettelson. The Chicago Tribune jubilantly attributed his defeat to "the work of an outraged citizenship resolved to end corruption, the machine gunning, the pineappling, and the plundering which have made the state and the city a reproach throughout the civilized world."

  The election over, Capone hurried back to Miami to fortify and embellish his newly acquired Elysium. Dade County's best architects, landscape artists, masons and carpenters, recommended to Capone by Parker Henderson, were kept busy for months. A wall of concrete blocks went up all around the estate. Heavy oaken portals were hung behind the already-existing spiked iron entrance gate, completely shutting off the view of the interior. A house phone by the gate enabled callers to announce themselves. None was admitted until an armed bodyguard, stationed behind the portals, had inspected them through a Judas hole. Between the house and the bay was installed the biggest swimming pool in the area, 60 by 40 feet, with one of the first filter systems adaptable to both fresh and salt water, and on the bay side, a two-story bathhouse in the style of a Venetian loggia. A rock pool, its borders lushly planted, contained rare tropical fish to which Capone and his son would toss bread crumbs. For fishing and cruising Capone maintained a variety of craft, among them a Baby Gar speedboat, which he named the Sonny and Ralphie, and a 32foot cabin cruiser, the Arrow. When his cronies visited him, he liked to pack a picnic of salami sandwiches and beer and charter a seapla
ne (at $60 an hour plus $100 an hour for the pilot) to fly them to Bimini.

  In the living room, stuffed with massive, overupholstered furniture, the central adornment was a life-size oil painting of the Capones, father and son.

  The master bedroom at the rear of the main house afforded a sweeping view of pool, loggia and bay. Capone slept in an immense four-poster, at the foot of which stood a wooden chest full of cash. ("Don't keep your money in a bank," he would say. "Keep it like I do.") When showering, Capone liked the feel of hard needle spray everywhere on his body, and he had a stall shower built with seven extra shower heads jutting from the sides. The cost of all these improvements came close to $100,000.

  Regretfully, Capone reached the decision that his old friend and early patron, the Brooklynite who had once employed him as a barroom bouncer, Frank Yale, must be exterminated. The reasons were twofold. The first bore upon the Unione Siciliane, or the Italo-American National Union, as it was now called. When the killing of Angelo Genna vacated the presidency of the Chicago chapter, Yale, as national president, had temporized. Wanting to retain the goodwill of both Capone and the North Siders, he had refrained from coming out flatly in favor of either contender for the successionCapone's Tony Lombardo or the North Siders' Joe Aiello. Upon Capone's insistence he did not oppose Lombardo, but at the same time he quietly encouraged Aiello in his hopes of later capturing the presidency. Actually, it mattered little to Yale who ran the Chicago chapter as long as he continued to receive a substantial share of its profits from alky cooking and various rackets. Under Lombardo's rule that share dwindled to mere token payments. Lombardo, in effect, revolted against the national leadership. And now, according to Capone's sources of intelligence, Aiello was in New York, aided and comforted by Yale, having sworn to restore the customary tribute if Yale would help him overthrow Lombardo.

  The Brooklyn boss' second grave offense involved liquor. Since 1926 Capone had been expanding his bootleg operations on a national scale. Through a network of interstate alliances-among others, Abe Bernstein's all-Jewish Purple Gang in Detroit, Egan's Rats in St. Louis, Max "Boo Boo" Hoff in Philadelphia-Capone was obtaining liquor of the highest quality, landed at lake and coastal points by rum-runners from Canada, Cuba and the Bahamas, and marketing it all over the Midwest. Yale, who supervised landings on Long Island, had undertaken to ship regular consignments to Chicago by truck. Beginning in the spring of 1927, a good many of the trucks were hijacked before they ever left Brooklyn. To sell liquor, then hijack it was a common enough form of double cross, and Capone wondered whether Yale might not be practicing it. He sent a henchman named James Finesy de Amato to Brooklyn as a spy. Evidently De Amato gave himself away because within a month he was shot down in the street-not, however, before he had transmitted enough information to confirm Capone's suspicion. Yale received an anonymous warning: "Someday you'll get an answer to De Amato."

  During the last week in June Capone conferred at the Ponce de Leon with several associates from Chicago, among them Charlie Fischetti, Jake Guzik and Dan Serritella. A few days earlier he had asked the ever-obliging Henderson to procure some firearms for him, and Henderson had bought a dozen assorted pieces from a Miami pawnshop. They included two .45-caliber revolvers. On June 28 six of the visiting Caponeites boarded the Southland Express for Chicago. At Knoxville, Tennessee, four of them got off the train, bought from the local Nash agency a used black sedan fot $1,050, and proceeded in it to New York. There they were met by an affiliate of the Capone gang.

  Toward midafternoon on July 1, a Sunday, Frank Yale, his jetblack hair and dark skin set off by a Panama hat and light-gray summer suit, was drinking in a Borough Park speakeasy when the bartender called him to the phone. What he heard sent him hurrying out to his car parked nearby. A few minutes later on Forty-fourth Street a black sedan crowded him to the curb; bullets from a variety of weapons-revolvers, sawed-off shotguns, a tommy gun-nailed him to the seat. The tommy gun was the first ever used to kill a New York gangster.

  The killers abandoned the Nash along with their weapons on Thirty-sixth Street between Second and Third avenues. The serial numbers on two .45-caliber revolvers led detectives to Parker Henderson, who was then brought to New York. He had, he admitted before a grand jury, bought the revolvers for Capone, but he insisted that, after he delivered them, .he never saw them again. The tommy gun, meanwhile, was traced to Peter von Frantzius' Chicago sporting goods store. "In my opinion," said New York's Police Commissioner Grover Whalen when the grand jury had disbanded without indicting anybody, "there was enough evidence not only to get an indictment but a conviction as well."

  A white ribbon fluttering from a wreath of roses and orchids at the Yale funeral, the most spectacular New York had ever witnessed, bore an ominous promise spelled out in gold letters-WE'LL SEE THEM, KID.

  The Yale murder reopened the War of the Sicilian Succession. Two months later the Aiello forces, restored to full strength in their Little Sicily bastion, staged yet another of those daylight street shootings for which the city had become world-famed. The Chicago address of the Italo-American National Union was 8 South Dearborn Street, the Hartford Building. There, in an eleventh-floor office, Tony Lombardo normally spent the afternoon attending to his presidential duties. On the afternoon of September 7, just as he finished work, a phone call came from Peter Rizzito, a North Side merchant, and it kept him at his desk for almost fifteen minutes. According to the rumors that circulated later, Rizzito was a false friend and secret Aiello ally, whose real purpose had been to detain Lombardo while the enemy gang set a trap in the street below. Lombardo left the office at about four thirty with two bodyguards, Joseph Ferraro and Joseph Lolordo, whose older brother, Pasquale, was a Unione politician. They turned into Madison Street, moving with effort through the dense crowd of shoppers and office workers. As they passed a restaurant midway down the block, Lolordo heard a man's voice behind him saying, "Here he is," then four shots. Lombardo pitched forward, half his head torn away by dumdum bullets. Ferraro fell beside him, two bullets in his back. Lolordo saw two men running in opposite directions, one wearing a dark suit, the other dressed in gray. Drawing his revolver, he started after the man in gray. A patrolman stopped him and wrested the revolver from him. The killers escaped.

  At Ferraro's hospital bedside Assistant State's Attorney Samuel Hoffman asked him to name his murderers. Ferraro gave no answer. "You're going to die," Hoffman told him. Ferraro remained silent to the end, which came two days later. Though Lolordo had seen both killers clearly, had begged the patrolman who disarmed him to let him pursue them, he insisted at the coroner's inquest that he could remember nothing.

  Lombardo was the fourth Unione president to die by an assassin's hand since political terrorists shot Anthony D'Andrea in 1921. He was not the last. During the next three years the presidency proved lethal to every incumbent, as well as to several candidates. But the emoluments, if one lived long enough to enjoy them, were too tempt ing to resist. Under Unione control the alky-cooking cottage industry had grown to embrace the majority of Chicago's immigrant Italian households. There were about 2,500 home stills constantly bubbling away, producing the raw material for a multimillion-dollar bootleg market.

  In the race to succeed Lombardo as Unione president Pasquale Lolordo outstripped Peter Rizzito and took office on September 14. Rizzito died soon after, shot down in front of his Milton Street store near Death Corner, whether by order of Capone or of Joe Aiello was never disclosed. The same week the Caponeites launched a machinegun attack against Aiello headquarters, wounding Tony Aiello and an aide. In various subsequent skirmishes they killed four Aiello gunmen and lost two of their own.

  Lolordo lasted less than five months. Under the delusion that the Aiellos were friends he invited three of them to his North Avenue apartment for a drink. They shot him as he was proposing a toast. His wife, Aleina, hearing the gunfire from the next room, rushed in to see them finish him off with a second volley. In her grief she identified Joe Aiello as one
of the killers from a photograph the police showed her, but once mistress of herself again, she fell silent like a good Sicilian widow.

  Thus, Joe Aiello finally won the presidency of the Unione Siciliane. He held it almost a year. Then, on the evening of October 23, 1930, as he left a friend's house at 15 North Kolmar Avenue, he was caught in a crossfire from two machine-gun nests that had been set up in nearby flats rented ten days earlier, a well-tested Capone tactic. The hour of Joe Aiello's death was commemorated by the floral piece de resistance at his funeral-a clock face made of roses with the hands pointing to eight thirty.

  Aiello's Capone-supported successor, a macaroni manufacturer named Agostino Loverdo, also reigned for a year before he was killed in a Cicero dive.

  One of the rare few Unione presidents to survive his tenure was the Capone bodyguard Phil D'Andrea.

  DURING the summer of 1928 Capone shifted his Chicago headquarters from the Metropole to the Lexington, diagonally across the street. The Lexington had formerly ranked among the city's most select and imposing hotels. President Cleveland once addressed Chicagoans from the balcony opening off its colonnaded grand ballroom. If no longer select, it was still imposing with its bay windows and turreted corners, the sweep of its lofty public rooms from the main entrance on South Michigan Avenue through to Wabash, its lobby rising a full story to a circumambient shopping gallery.