Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  Capone returned to a busy household. A big party was in preparation. With the Miami winter season at its peak and boxing enthusi asts already converging on the resort for the approaching world championship fight between Jack Sharkey and "Young" Stribling, Capone had invited more than 100 guests to Palm Island-sportswriters, gamblers, show folk, racketeers, politicians. A boxing enthusiast himself, who favored Sharkey to win the title, he frequently visited his training camp and was photographed by news cameramen standing between Sharkey and Bill Cunningham, sportscaster and former All-American center.

  As Detective Sweeney bent over the still-breathing gangster, he recognized a boyhood companion. Clarence Sweeney and Frank Gusenberg had gone to the same public school not six blocks from the warehouse. "Frank," said the detective, "in God's name what happened? Who shot you?"

  But Gusenberg was unconscious. He revived a little in the Alexian Brothers Hospital, and Sweeney, at his bedside, repeated the question.

  "Nobody shot me," said Gusenberg.

  He did not have long to live, the detective told him. His brother Pete was dead. Let him speak. The law would avenge them.

  "I ain't no copper." They were his last words.

  When Bugs Moran learned of the massacre that he had escaped by only minutes, he said: "Only Capone kills like that."

  The guests feasted on an elaborate buffet and drank champagne served by half a dozen of Capone's bodyguards. The night was hot, and the bodyguards had been allowed to remove their jackets and pistol holsters. They were otherwise impeccably attired, young, most of them, and muscular. ("Capone hires nothing but gentlemen," attested a thug named Harry Dore, who once worked for him, bursting with professional pride in the association. "They must be welldressed at all times; they must have cultured accents; must always say, 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir' when he addresses them. He hires men with great care and takes pains that they are his own type in dress and conduct.")

  Mae Capone hovered quietly in the background, seeing to everybody's wants. At Sonny's bedtime his father took him by the hand and led him from group to group to say good-night. The small boy with the hearing aid, a shy, withdrawn little figure, his big eyes opened wide in bewilderment, made a pathetic contrast in that strident gathering.

  Jack Kofoed, the New York Post's sports editor, brought his wife, Marie. As the steamy night wore on, she decided to cool off in the swimming pool. Retiring to the Venetian loggia with her swimsuit, she saw, in a corner of the ladies' dressing room, what appeared to be a chest covered by a tarpaulin. She sat on it to remove her shoes and quickly got up again with a cry of pain. Lifting the tarpaulin, she uncovered a tangle of machine guns, shotguns and revolvers.

  Tact restrained the guests from discussing too loudly the Chicago massacre that was reported in the evening papers and radio broadcasts. The next morning, when additional details had been published, among them Moran's comment, Jack Kofoed called again on his host. "Al, I feel silly asking you this," he said, "but my boss wants me to. Al, did you have anything to do with it?"

  "Jack," Capone replied, "the only man who kills like that is Bugs Moran."

  Mortified by this latest gory blot on the city's reputation, the Chicago Association of Commerce posted a reward of $50,000 for the arrest and conviction of the killers. An aroused public subscribed $10,000 more. The City Council and the state's attorney's office each added $20,000, bringing the total to $100,000, the biggest price ever put on the heads of gangsters.

  No agency wanted a swift solution more eagerly than the police, for some people believed what the killers meant them to believe: that policemen had done the deed. Such was the disrepute into which the Chicago Police Department had fallen. The newspapers quoted the local Prohibition administrator, Frederick D. Silloway, as saying: "The murderers were not gangsters. They were Chicago policemen. I believe the killing was the aftermath to the hijacking of 500 cases of whiskey belonging to the Moran gang by five policemen six weeks ago on Indianapolis Boulevard. I expect to have the names of these five policemen in a short time. It is my theory that in trying to recover the liquor the Moran gang threatened to expose the policemen and the massacre was to prevent the exposure."

  To which Chief of Police Russell rejoined: "If it is true that coppers did this, I'd just as soon convict coppers as anybody else," and Chief of Detectives John Egan added: "I'll arrest them myself, toss them by the throat into a cell and do my best to send them to the gallows."

  The next day Silloway retracted his accusation, claiming he had been misquoted. To mollify the Police Department, his superiors in Washington transferred him to another district. But the damage was done. The suspicion lingered.

  The investigation proceeded with Chief Egan, the state's attorney's staff and the Cook County coroner, Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, each grappling with different aspects of the case. Scouring the warehouse, Egan and his men recovered seventy empty .45-caliber machine-gun cartridges and fourteen spent bullets of the same caliber. Across the street, at Nos. 2119 and 2125, were rooming houses run, respectively, by Mrs. Michael Doody and Mrs. Frank Orvidson. As Assistant State's Attorney Walker Butler was canvassing the neighborhood for information, they came forward with corroborating stories. Ten days before the massacre three young men appeared, looking for rooms to rent. Mrs. Doody was able to accommodate two of them, and Mrs. Orvidson took in a third. They said they were cabdrivers, working a night shift, and they insisted on front rooms overlooking Clark Street. None of them hardly ever left his room. When either landlady went in to clean, she usually found him sitting by the window, watching. The three men vanished on the morning of the massacre. Having suspected from the start that the Purple Gang was involved, Butler showed the landladies photographs of sixteen members. They identified three of them as the mysterious lodgers. But when questioned, at Butler's request, by the Detroit police, all three produced unshakable proof that they had been nowhere near Chicago.

  On February 22 chance aided the investigators. A fire broke out in the garage behind the house at 1723 North Wood Street, about three miles west of the warehouse. The firemen who extinguished it found a black Cadillac touring car which had been partly demolished by an acetylene torch, axes and hacksaws. The torch, they surmised, had accidentally started the blaze, putting the wreckers to flight. In a corner lay a Luger pistol and the charred wooden handles of two other small arms. Notified by the Fire Department, Egan examined the remains of the Cadillac. The still decipherable engine number enabled him to trace the car to a Michigan Avenue dealer, who said he had sold it in December to a man identifying himself as "James Morton of Los Angeles." From the owner of the Wood Street property, a neighborhood grocer, Egan learned that a "Frank Rogers" rented the garage on February 7. He gave 1859 West North Avenue, around the corner, as his address. That house was now deserted, but, significantly, it adjoined the Circus Cafe, headquarters of Claude Maddox, whose ties to Capone, the Purple Gang and Egan's Rats were well-known. Tony Accardo was then a member of the Circus gang and, according to a police theory developed later, helped plan the massacre. Soon after, he became a Capone bodyguard and was sometimes seen in the lobby of the Hotel Lexington with a tommy gun across his knees.

  The police could uncover no trace of either "James Morton" or "Frank Rogers," and they had no legal grounds on which to detain Maddox. As for Bugs Moran, he refused to disclose anything about the hijacker who had phoned him on the eve of the massacre except that he had long known and trusted him. ("Moran raves when he talks about him," one detective reported. "He threatens all the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition.") But on the basis of the clues gathered thus far, combined with their knowledge of intergang relationships, the investigators reconstructed the events of February 14 as follows:

  The plot that Capone conceived to exterminate the North Siders called for two men who could persuade the victims to surrender their arms without a fight. Hence, the police disguise. The masqueraders, of course, had to be total strangers to the victim. Probably, Maddox imported them for Capone fro
m either Detroit or his native St. Louis, kept them under cover until needed, and provided them with the spurious police car.

  The function of the three Clark Street lodgers was to watch for Moran-echoes of past Caponian ambushes!-informing the killers by phone the moment he entered the warehouse. What saved Moran's life was his resemblance to Weinshank. The business racketeer chanced to arrive first, and the watchers phoned too soon.

  The collision on Clark Street suggested the route the killers took -north along Wood Street for a mile to Webster Avenue, then east for two miles on Webster to Clark, a fifteen-minute drive at most. The three men wearing civilian clothes probably waited in the warehouse office while their uniformed accomplices relieved each victim of his weapons. They then emerged with their tommy guns adjusted to rapid fire and ordered the seven North Siders to face the wall. Though the killers must have realized by then that Moran was not present, they dared not let the others live. It was to confuse any witnesses to their getaway that they staged the final scene, reappearing on the street posing as policemen after a raid with their prisoners.

  On February 27 the police obtained a warrant for the arrest of Jack McGurn. It was based on the testimony of a youth named George Brichet. He was passing the warehouse on the morning of the fourteenth, he said, when five men entered it. He heard one of them say, "Come on, Mac," and he identified McGurn from a rogues' gallery photograph as the man so addressed.

  The arresting officer found McGurn living at the Hotel Stevens with a young blonde named Louise Rolfe. Following his indictment for seven murders, bail was set at $50,000. He raised the amount by putting up as surety a hotel he owned valued at more than $1,000,000.

  Coroner Bundesen, meanwhile, had summoned before his blueribbon jury every gun dealer in the county. Among them was Peter von Frantzius, the reputed armorer of gangland. Could he tell the jury anything about recent sales of tommy guns? Yes, Von Frantzius admitted, he had sold six to a Frank H. Thompson. He understood that the buyer was acting for the Mexican consul general., whose government wanted them to put down revolutionaries. The police knew Thompson as an ex-convict, safecracker, hijacker, rum-runner and, lately, middleman in arms deals. He was then wanted for attempting to machine-gun his wife and her lover in his hometown of Kirkland, Illinois.

  Thompson surrendered to Bundesen. He confirmed his purchase of the tommy guns but mentioned a different consignee-James "Bozo" Shupe, subsequently killed. Shupe, the police knew, was a close associate of Scalise, Anselmi and Joseph Giunta, the current, Capone-backed president of the Unione Siciliane. On these thin grounds they arrested the three Sicilians. Giunta they were obliged to release almost immediately for lack of evidence, but new witnesses placed Scalise and Anselmi in the fake police car. They, too, were indicted and freed on bail of $50,000 each.

  Two days later Assistant State's Attorney Stansbury added three more names to the list of alleged assassins, making the total six instead of five. The first was Joseph Lolordo, a natural suspect, being the brother of the Unione Siciliane president whose murder Moran possibly engineered. During the World War Lolordo served with a detachment of machine gunners, and Stansbury ascribed most of the St. Valentine's Day gunnery to him. He had since disappeared.

  The disclosure of the second and third names followed a piece of information furnished by a prominent Chicagoan. The collision on Clark Street had also been witnessed by H. Wallace Caldwell, president of the Board of Education. Passing close to the Cadillac, he had noticed that the driver in police uniform lacked an upper front tooth. That distinguishing mark fitted one of Egan's Rats, Fred "Killer" Burke. At the time of the massacre he was a fugitive under indictment in Ohio for bank robbery and murder. So was his constant companion, James Ray. Their modus operandi, when robbing banks, was to wear police uniforms.

  McGurn's alibi before the grand jury-his "Blonde Alibi," as the press called her-was Louise Rolfe. He never left her side at the Hotel Stevens, he swore, from 9 P.M. of February 13 to 3 P.M. of February 14. The state's attorney thereupon had him indicted for perjury, but before McGurn could be tried on that charge, he married Louise. A wife cannot be obliged to testify against her husband.

  As for the murder charge, under an Illinois statute if the accused demanded trial at four separate terms of court and the state was not prepared to prosecute him, then the state must discontinue the case. Between the spring and winter of 1929 McGurn made four demands for trial. None was met, and on December 2 he walked out of the courtroom a free man. By then the authorities had revised their version of his role in the St. Valentine's Day massacre. They concluded that though McGurn may not have accompanied the firing squad, he served as its logistician. To prove this, however, they had still less evidence.

  During the early stages of Coroner Bundesen's inquest a detective giving testimony referred to the cartridges and shells collected from the Clark Street warehouse. Asked by the foreman of the blue-ribbon jury, Burt A. Massee, what purpose was served by preserving them, he explained the principles underlying the relatively new science of forensic ballistics. Every firearm, he said, leaves its own characteristic marks on the bullets passing through it. The bore of a rifle, for example, imprints distinctive ridges on the sides of the bullet. The firing pin makes an indentation on the primer; the tooling of the breech imparts concentric circles to the base of the shell when the shell recoils against it. Each part of the mechanism coming into contact with shell or bullet writes its signature, and like fingerprints, no two markings are identical. Thus, with a microscope and various measuring instruments, the expert could match a bullet with the weapon that fired it.

  Unfortunately, the detective added, the Chicago Police Department lacked the equipment for such analyses. This struck foreman Massee and a juror named Walter E. Olson, both prosperous and civic-spirited businessmen, as an inexcusable deficiency. With a group of other wealthy Chicagoans, whose interest they enlisted, they put up the money for a scientific crime detection laboratory to be installed at Northwestern University. Completed by 1930, it was the first of its kind, the model for many others, including the FBI Laboratory. To direct it, Major Calvin H. Goddard, the country's foremost authority on forensic ballistics, was brought from New York. The first case to absorb his attention was the St. Valentine's Day massacre and his findings dispelled once for all the still-lurking suspicion that real policemen took part in it.

  Complying with the request of the coroner [Goddard reported], I have tested out various Thompson machine guns in the hands of the police of the City of Chicago. I examined altogether some eight Thompson machine guns, five in the hands of the Chicago police, one at Melrose Park Police Headquarters and two in the possession of the Cook County Highway police. I fired a number of rounds of ammunition of the same caliber, type, make, and vintage as used in the murder, through each of these. The bullets were recovered undeformed from a receptacle of cotton waste into which they were fired and each bullet and empty shell was numbered with the number of the gun from which it had issued. The bullets and shells so recovered were carefully compared with specimens of the fatal bullets and shells. In no instance did I find a duplication of markings to indicate that any of the police weapons had been employed in the killings.

  Without the weapons, Goddard could reach no positive conclusions. Almost a year elapsed. Then, on the evening of December 14, 1929, in St. Joseph, Michigan, Patrolman Charles Skelly overtook a hit-and-run driver, forcing him to the curb. As he jumped onto his running board, the driver shot him three times and continued his flight. Skelly died in the hospital. The fugitive's car was found on U.S. Highway 12, near St. Joseph, cracked up against a telephone pole. The registration papers in the glove compartment bore the name Fred Dane and an address on the city outskirts. There, in addition to a Mrs. Fred Dane, who professed to know nothing of either her husband's business affairs or his whereabouts, the police found $319,850 in stolen negotiable bonds and an arsenal that included two tommy guns and men's shirts with the laundry marking FRB. One of the policemen g
uessed the initials stood for "Fred R. Burke," the long-sought man with the missing front tooth. The St. Joseph authorities immediately notified Chicago, and at the urgent request of Coroner Bundesen the district attorney personally delivered the tommy guns to the Northwestern Crime Laboratory. The drums contained bullets of various makes. Many were of the same make as those gathered in the Clark Street warehouse. Selecting thirty-five of these, Goddard fired twenty through one of the tommy guns into a container of cotton waste and fifteen through the other.

  The result of these studies was to demonstrate conclusively that the two guns found in the Burke home were those that had been used in the St. Valentine's Day massacre. . . . I did not devote unnecessary time to pinning various of the fatal bullets to one particular gun but satisfied myself by determining that the single bullet from the body of Reinhardt Schwimmer had been fired by one of the two guns and that one of the bullets from the body of James Clark had issued from the other.

  That was not all. The New York police submitted to Goddard the bullets that had been taken from Frankie Yale's body a year and a half earlier. They, too, proved to have been fired by one of Burke's tommy guns.