On days like this, Stege truly loved his life. He was a tubby little gray-haired man with round granny glasses and a double chin that swung like a hammock, but he carried himself with flair. He used to write a column for the Chicago Herald and Examiner headed by a photo of him holding a tommy gun. Somehow he pulled off the look. Now he told his men to wait on the front steps for a minute so he could enter the Chicago Heights police station alone. With daylight beginning to rub through the morning blackness, he turned and strut-waddled through the station’s front doors. He held his badge above his head so the gold would catch the overhead lights.
“Where are the keys to this joint?” he bellowed, unable to suppress a smile.
Within moments, as Stege’s men began to file through the door, he was unlocking the station’s jail cells. They were empty except for one containing three women. Stege shooed them out.
“We’ll need all the room we have in a few minutes,” he said.
The desk sergeant huffed at this. “Who are you and what do you think you’re doing?”
Stege’s answer: “We’re running the place for a while.”
The outsiders placed everyone in the station house under arrest, except for those actually facing charges—the three women. They sent the women, all freelance prostitutes, out into the streets. Stege happily let news photographers take pictures as he put the Chicago Heights policemen into their own cells. He smiled proudly as the flashbulbs popped. He had been forced to resign from the Chicago Police Department eighteen months before when a newspaper revealed he had been convicted of murder when he was fifteen. He was a good cop, though, a reformed man, and everyone who worked with him knew it. So when the scandal subsided, the city had quietly brought him back into the department. This was his chance to prove to the public that he deserved the second chance.
The feds were happy to give Stege his moment. He was a longtime critic of gangster chic, decrying how smirking, well-dressed hoods “flaunt their badness, boast of their bloody conquests, jeer at the widows of their victims, scoff at the suggestion of retributive justice.” He had shown contempt for the city’s mobsters years before it became socially acceptable to do so.
With the police station under federal control, the hundred or so officers and agents out in the Heights could take their quarry by surprise. The raiders pulled up in front of small clapboard houses, two-story brick apartment buildings, and a warehouse that served as the syndicate’s “distributing depot.” They broke into twenty private residences, pulling men out of their beds, their wives screaming, children crying. Some of the hoodlums managed to take flight, with agents running them down in the street. Agents and officers reported in at the police station with their knees scraped up and hands bruised, their prisoners missing teeth. One bootlegger sat in a cell and sobbed into his hands. As a general rule, dry agents described mobsters strictly as dead-eyed murderers, nothing more. Eliot would do the same in his public comments, but he didn’t actually have such a black-and-white view of them. He hated arresting men at their homes, in front of their wives and children. “It was astonishing what good family men some of them were,” he would tell his wife two decades later. He added: “There would be a lot of emotion at the separation of the women and children from their men. In fact one of the hoodlums took it so hard he was sick all the way to the police station.”
Agents brought twenty-five gangsters to the Chicago Heights police station that morning, along with dozens of guns and hundreds of boxes of ammunition. Over at the distribution depot on East Fourteenth Street, men with axes split open barrels and watched beer rush into the street. They also found four hundred slot machines, which they bashed up with ball-peen hammers. At his office in downtown Chicago, George E. Q. Johnson took responsibility for the town’s takedown, declaring that Chicago Heights “had fallen into the hands of a syndicate which made millions of dollars through its monopoly of slot machines and booze.” The Tribune triumphantly announced that “Chicago Heights, known as the most lawless town in Cook county, has been cleaned up.”
By midday, paddy wagons ferried prisoners into the Loop, delivering them to the detectives’ bureau for questioning. Later, the police brought Picchi into the county jail so all of the Heights goons could give the suspected assassin a good long look. No one admitted knowing him.
“None of the prisoners is talking,” Jamie told the press. “Their silence smacks of the Mafia.” He insisted they planned on charging Picchi with the murder of Joe Martino.
Standing around in the Prohibition Bureau office, Eliot watched Jamie grandstand for reporters. He watched agents laughing and roughhousing. He didn’t want to join the celebration. He felt carved out, like he’d been kicked in the stomach. The exhilaration of the chase hadn’t lasted long; now a black cloud was following along behind it. This was nothing new to Eliot. He had battled depression his whole life and never understood where it came from or what it meant. Deciding not to wait for his brother-in-law, he climbed into his car and drove home.
CHAPTER 5
The Capone Fans
The Chicago Heights operation was an unmistakable success. The newspaper headlines said so, as did the memos the local Prohibition office sent to headquarters in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, the one valuable conclusion the Chicago bureau office could draw from the demise of the Chicago Heights bootleg syndicate was that Joe Martino had been a small fish. He was mostly just a traffic cop directing booze between Chicago and the southern reaches of the state. Al Capone had owned him, just as Capone owned almost every bootlegger in northern Illinois.
This should not have been a surprise to the Prohibition Bureau. By now Alphonse Capone was the best-known man in Chicago. He had arrived in the city only nine years before, just as the Volstead Act was going into effect. At the time, he had been barely old enough to vote—not that he did—and as round and amiable as a vaudeville comic. Kids and mothers loved him. He set himself up as Al Brown, secondhand furniture dealer, with a storefront at 2220 South Wabash Avenue. His business card and dusty shop didn’t fool anyone. The distinctive scars along the left side of his face suggested that Capone wasn’t always as amiable as he appeared on first meeting. He glommed on to the notorious Johnny Torrio, becoming his right-hand man while running whores and providing muscle whenever and wherever needed. Capone had a soft spot for the prostitution game, but, no dummy, he quickly pivoted to where the real action was.
If Capone had simply wanted to make a nice, crooked living, he could have stuck with hookers, gambling, and shakedown rackets. These were tried-and-true businesses, mature businesses. But bootlegging, particularly in the big cities, was for men of ambition. Bootleggers wanted more than a big wad of cash at the end of each day. They wanted status, too. “We’re big business without high hats,” said Dean O’Banion, a flower-shop-owning gangster who controlled the Northside liquor trade—until he took a spray of bullets in 1924. Thugs finally could offer a service that respectable men wanted, and they were becoming wealthy beyond all conception by offering it. (Another local bootlegger, Terry Druggan, liked to show off his solid silver toilet seat.)
More than any of them, Capone became an object of fascination. The social worker Jane Addams despaired over how boys were “tremendously aroused” at the very sight of Capone and his cohorts. When his bulletproof black sedan rumbled through a neighborhood—any neighborhood—kids would crane their necks “as eagerly as for a circus parade,” wrote the journalist Fred Pasley. “There goes Al,” they’d say, and whistle in admiration. How could they react any other way? The man had style. The man had money and power. It wasn’t as if kids—or anyone else—could look to the city’s hard-hearted industrialists for inspiration. The economy was booming, but for average Chicagoans, the boom was the sound of an anvil coming down on their heads. “Morally,” the writer Nelson Algren said of bootleggers, “they are sounder than the ‘good’ people who run Chicago by complicity.” To young toughs around the city, the 1925 chan
ging of the guard at the city’s biggest gang—from the forty-three-year-old Torrio, heading off into semi-retirement, to the twenty-six-year-old Capone—represented something special, proof that merit could be rewarded, even in America. Twelve-year-old Louis Terkel, a student at John McLaren Elementary School on the West Side (he would later become known as “Studs”), listened raptly when two older classmates schemed for membership in the Forty-twos—“junior members of the Syndicate . . . What the Toldeo Mud Hens are to the New York Giants.”
They dream of the Forty Two’s as North Shore matrons dream of the Social Register. An older brother of one and a young uncle of the other, Forty Two alumni, are in the employ of Al Capone, one of our city’s most highly regarded citizens. The uncle, a few years later, was seen floating down the drainage canal. And no water wings. It was a strange place for him to have gone swimming. The waters were polluted even then.
Such swimming jaunts had become rather commonplace. Capone—the Big Fella or Number One to his men, Scarface Al to the press—sought to lock down his new standing and expand his domain the only way he knew how: through terror. In 1926, seventy-six hoodlums were killed in Chicago as rival gangs fought it out over turf and hurt feelings. The following year, fifty-four more mobsters fell. Many of these killings happened in public, in drive-by machine-gun attacks. That meant civilians were falling, too—including an assistant state’s attorney, William McSwiggin. Anyone walking in the Loop began to flinch, or outright panic, whenever they heard an automobile sliding around a corner at a decent clip. Many a man dived for cover only to have a taxicab scream past. The tension in the popular image of the bootlegger—glamorous modern-day prince, ugly cold-blooded killer—divided Chicagoans into two distinct classes: the romantic and the realistic, the stupid and the street-smart. One night at the Paramount Club downtown, the actress and vaudevillian Mildred Harris, Charlie Chaplin’s ex, introduced a handsome young patron to fellow performer Sally Rand. “I want you to meet a sweet and lovely man,” Harris purred. Rand, a dancer at the club, was impressed with the man’s duds and manners—and flattered when he began hitting on her. But later, in the dressing room, one of the other dancers said, “You’re certainly in high society tonight. Machine Gun Jack McGurn.” Rand began to shake uncontrollably. She sneaked out the back door, forgetting her coat, and ran to her hotel, where she locked herself in her room.
Capone took offense at the suggestion there might be something wrong with the way he conducted business, whatever the reputation of McGurn, his chief hit man. This was the twentieth century. Laws were passé; the country had evolved beyond them. He told the Chicago Tribune’s Genevieve Forbes Herrick: “They talk to me about not being on the legitimate. Why, lady, nobody’s on the legit. You know that and so do they.” Capone needn’t have worried so much about what delicate flowers like Sally Rand thought. Al couldn’t please everybody, but he could please enough of them. Unlike Torrio before him, the Big Fella loved to talk to the press. He loved to have his picture taken, as long as the camera got his good side. “‘Public service’ is my motto,” he declared, flashing a pleasant, boyish smile that had become a front-page staple. By 1926, he was as recognizable in Chicago as Cubs pitching ace Grover Alexander, a regular Capone customer. He had become an honest-to-goodness hero to thousands, and not just to the kids on the street corner. Industrialists and bankers admired a good bootlegger, too.
The novelist Mary Borden, a native Chicagoan and an expatriate visiting her hometown for the first time in twelve years, was shocked to find herself one evening listening to a socialite “who spoke to me with tears in her eyes of Capone. I was already getting rather sick of the Scarface, but this suddenly made me feel quite ill; this sentimentality frightened me. I had heard, of course, of the Capone fans—he had more adorers, so I’d been told, than any movie star—but I had not expected the friends of my childhood to be numbered among them.”
***
Even two years in, George E. Q. Johnson was still trying to figure out how to do his job.
The fifty-six-year-old Iowan’s reputation for unshakable honesty, along with a passing acquaintance with reformist U.S. senator Charles Deneen, had landed him the big office in Chicago’s U.S. district attorney’s office. His skills as a prosecutor, however, were suspect. During his thirty-year career in private practice, he had almost exclusively handled civil, not criminal, cases. For that entire time he remained little known outside his modest Swedish American community. But this inexperienced U.S. attorney did have the one characteristic that was absolutely essential for the job. When he came to Chicago from small-town Iowa as a young man, he began using the initial of his middle name so he would stand out from all the other George Johnsons in the big city. Not satisfied, he soon added a second, invented initial. You could say it was the E and the Q that would make him famous. Only a truly vain man would go after Al Capone.
Of course, even the vainest men in the city didn’t covet the task Johnson had given himself, especially now. One month after the dry bureau’s Chicago Heights raid, Chicago police sergeant Thomas Loftus answered a call reporting gunfire on the city’s North Side. He arrived at 2122 North Clark Street at eleven in the morning and stepped inside the dank, smoke-filled industrial building. He smelled burnt gunpowder and heard a wet scraping sound. Then he spotted a man on all fours crawling toward him. He recognized the man—Frank Gusenberg, a member of Bugs Moran’s crew, one of the few remaining gangs that didn’t answer to Capone. Gusenberg’s clothing was shredded, blood streaked behind him like an airplane contrail. Only then did the policeman notice the horrors beyond—the herd of men bloodily arrayed against a brick wall, steam from their gore rising softly into the cold February air. An eyeball oozed on the slick concrete floor like a poached egg.
The newspapers ran with the story for weeks, until the horror lodged deep in the city’s collective consciousness. “Can you imagine standing seven guys against the wall and running a machine gun and killing all of them?” said one Chicagoan, who, like millions of others, greedily read every word printed about the slayings. “You’d have to be crazy, right? Got to be doped up, no matter what kind of enemies they are.” The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as the killings came to be called, “was the worst thing that ever happened to Chicago as far as racketeering went.” After years of winks and chuckles about the gang wars, public opinion had finally turned. Wives worried endlessly about their husbands’ safety downtown during the day. Mothers kept their children from public playgrounds. Fear gripped every social stratum in the city. The violence, agreed the newspapers and politicians and everyone else, had to stop. Enough was enough. Even gangsters from other locales gaped at what was happening in the Second City. New York’s Lucky Luciano, after a visit, called Chicago “a real goddam crazy place. Nobody’s safe in the street.”
The public’s obsession with the Valentine’s Day murders, which everyone assumed Capone had ordered, meant life became harder for George Johnson. Johnson had been pursuing a tax-fraud case against Capone from almost the day he took the oath as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. Tax fraud wasn’t an exciting course of action, but it looked like a promising one—at least to Johnson. U.S. Attorney General William Mitchell wasn’t convinced. From Mitchell’s vantage point in Washington, Johnson had been futzing around with tax statements for a couple of years now and had nothing meaningful to show for it, while Capone was lining people up against walls and mowing them down. So he sent backup to Chicago in the form of U.S. Assistant Attorney General William Froelich. Johnson suddenly realized his job might be on the line. He wrote a long, defensive reply to Mitchell, insisting “that I am quite able to do this.” He knew income-tax charges worked against gangsters. He was convinced it was the best way to get Capone. After all, the tax laws had already been used to nail Al’s brother Ralph and Al’s bagman Jack “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, both convicted of tax evasion. But Johnson took Mitchell’s hint: a tax case, no matter how promising, was no longer goo
d enough. As the Internal Revenue agents working the case wrote: “Alphonse Capone is, without a doubt, the best advertised and most talked of gangster in the United States today. . . . [He] has been mentioned in connection with practically every major crime committed in Chicago within the last few years.” Capone, in short, had become a PR problem. President Hoover, and so Attorney General Mitchell, wouldn’t be satisfied with a mere conviction. They wanted to make an example of Capone.
CHAPTER 6
Good-Hearted Al
Johnson understood the challenge he faced.
Golding had been a disaster, but Johnson, like Willebrandt, wasn’t willing to walk away from the special agency squad. Willebrandt had once said she refused to believe that “out of our one hundred and twenty million population . . . it is impossible to find four thousand men in the United States who cannot be bought.” Johnson wasn’t sure about four thousand, but he knew there were indeed men out there who couldn’t be bought: he was one of them. He became determined to find some of the others.
Johnson had listened to Willebrandt’s discourses on Prohibition enforcement over the years. He had approved of many of her proposals, such as specialized training for dry agents and the transfer of the Prohibition Bureau from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department, both of which had eventually come to pass. By the fall of 1930, however, Willebrandt was gone. She had finally resigned in frustration and returned home to California to take up a private practice. But Johnson had not given up. With Mitchell providing pressure through Froelich, Johnson had pushed ahead in his fight against Capone, egged on by the gangster’s continued consolidation of power in the months after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The U.S. attorney now decided he would adapt Willebrandt’s dream of an incorruptible bureau—an impossibility—into an idea that was possible: a small, incorruptible team within Chicago’s special agency squad. And this time he would create it himself, rather than send away to Washington for it. The Justice Department had been encouraging Johnson for months to make a “greater effort . . . to reach the sources of the bootleggers’ supply and get at the revenue which finances the organized gangs.” He would make this objective a priority, and turn it to his own aims. His special squad within the special squad, acting entirely on its own, would be limited to one goal only: squeezing Al Capone’s income stream. Johnson figured there could be no better way to make the Big Fella buck and scream, to make him lose focus on what should matter most to him—being careful. You make a man angry, and he gets sloppy. The U.S. attorney’s tax case needed Capone to get a little sloppy.
Eliot Ness Page 6