A Criminal History of Mankind (87 page)

The greatest mistake of the Anti-Saloon League was in failing to work out how total prohibition could be enforced. ‘Near-beer’ - beer containing less than one half per cent alcohol - was still legal, so breweries were allowed to continue operating. But in order to manufacture near-beer, ordinary four per cent beer had to be brewed, then de-alcoholised. There was nothing to stop the brewers diverting kegs of real beer, or providing their customers with some pure alcohol - distilled from the beer - to add to their unpalatable near-beer. An alternative was to add industrial alcohol, which was still legal - American production of industrial alcohol shot up in the 1920s from 28 million gallons to 180 million. Drinkers who could afford it had no difficulty in buying real Scotch or brandy from smugglers who brought it in from Canada - which was soon providing the American market with more than five million gallons a year. Apart from these large-scale commercial concerns, thousands of ordinary citizens were willing to take the risk of distilling alcohol on cheap apparatus - ‘alky-cookers’ - and selling the results to criminal syndicates who paid up to $15 a day - a sum that would once have represented a week’s wages for many of them.

In Chicago, ‘Big Jim’ Colosimo - also known as Diamond Jim because of his habit of carrying pockets full of diamonds - already had the criminal organisation to launch into large-scale traffic in illicit alcohol. (It quickly became known as bootlegging, because a boot was a good place to conceal a bottle or a hip flask.) He already ran a chain of brothels, with the aid of his chief lieutenant, Johnny Torrio, who was an ex-member of the Five Points Gang. Torrio was small, well-dressed and quietly-spoken; he was also intelligent enough to know that violence usually rebounds against those who employ it. When it came to gangland disputes, he preferred diplomacy to assassination. At the beginning of Prohibition, he was in his mid-thirties; Colosimo was fifty - too old to take advantage of the magnificent opportunities that had been placed in his lap by the Anti-Saloon League. Torrio chafed impatiently; but on 11 May 1920, he suddenly inherited Colosimo’s empire when his employer was mysteriously shot through the head as he went to take delivery of a consignment of alcohol. Rumour had it that Torrio paid the assassin - a man named Frankie Yale - ten thousand dollars.

Colosimo’s funeral was magnificent, attended by five thousand mourners. And as soon as it was over, Torrio settled down to the business of organising Chicago’s crime. There were too many gangs engaged in bootlegging, and even at this early stage they were inclined to shoot at one another for violations of territory. Torrio called the gangs together, proposed a peace treaty - pointing out that there was more than enough for everybody - and suggesting that the gangs should reach strict agreements about territory. And when the various gang leaders - Dion O’Banion, the Gennas, the O’Donnells (two gangs of that name), ‘Terrible’ Touhy and Terry Druggan - had agreed to co-operate - or at least suspend hostilities - Torrio turned his attention to expanding the former Colosimo Empire, searching out locations for roadhouse-brothels in Cook County (which had been allotted to him) and bribing the local police and civic authorities. Torrio preferred to avoid threats and violence; instead he relied on persuasion and judicious gifts. Most of Chicago’s most influential businessmen and politicians were happy to co-operate. Torrio went into partnership with a wealthy brewer, and was soon making more money in a week than Colosimo had made in a year.

Minor criminals viewed his success with envy. A safe-blower named Joe Howard decided to join the bootleg business by holding up a truck loaded with alcohol and leaving the driver to walk home - a practice that became known as hijacking, presumably because the gunmen stopped the trucks with a shout of ‘Hi, Jack!’ When two of Torrio’s consignments vanished in this manner, Torrio decided to suspend his prejudice against violence. On 8 May 1924, Joe Howard was in Heinie Jacobs’ bistro on South Wabash Avenue, explaining to some acquaintances that all dagoes were cowards, when an overweight young Italian walked in through the door. ‘Hi, Al,’ said Howard, and was shot through the head six times. The next morning, Chicago newspapers carried photographs of Torrio’s chief lieutenant, Alphonse Capone, who was wanted for questioning by the police.

In 1924, Capone was twenty-five years old. He had known Torrio in New York, and had always regarded him with hero worship. When Capone was nineteen - in 1918 - Torrio had invited him to come to Chicago to work as a bouncer in the Colosimo Cafe on South Wabash; his wages were $75 dollars a week. It was widely believed in Chicago that Capone murdered Colosimo. What is certain is that by 1922 he was earning $2,000 a week by running the brothels. He also slept with the most attractive of the girls, and at some point acquired syphilis.

When the police were searching for Capone, he was nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, the witnesses to the Howard shooting all began to develop doubts about whether the killer
was
Capone. One of them simply vanished. A month later, Capone walked into a police station, saying he had heard a rumour that he was wanted for questioning. The police were forced to drop the case for lack of evidence.

By 1924, the Torrio-Capone gang was also at cross-purposes with Dion O’Banion, whose territory was the North Side. The Irishman had been a choir boy, and disapproved of brothels; he was also inclined to take every opportunity to grab more than his share. The last straw came when he sold Torrio one of his breweries for half a million dollars, then tipped off the police when Torrio went to view his acquisition; Torrio was arrested.

On 8 November 1924, three gangsters walked into O’Banion’s flower shop on North State Street. O’Banion felt no misgivings; a leading mafioso had died, and he was selling flowers to all the leading gangsters. He held out his hand to Frankie Yale, who had come from New York. Yale held on to it while the other two men emptied their guns into O’Banion. Again, the funeral was magnificent, with O’Banion in a solid silver coffin (costing $10,000), lined with white satin. Capone sent flowers.

O’Banion’s chief lieutenant, Hymie Weiss, swore vengeance. A few days later, Capone was sitting in a restaurant talking to its proprietor, Tony the Greek, who was a close friend; some customers came in and Tony went forward to greet them. He never came back; the next day his body was found encased in quicklime. Capone is said to have sobbed when he heard the news. In January, he missed death by seconds when he left his car to go into one of his speakeasies

so-called because customer’s were urged not to speak loud. Another car drove past slowly, and Capone’s car was riddled with machine-gun bullets. Twelve days later, Torrio narrowly escaped death as he and his wife were entering their apartment building; a sub-machine gun opened up, wounding Torrio’s chauffeur; Torrio dropped on all fours and ran towards the building. A bullet hit his left arm and spun him round; then a shotgun blast broke his jaw and punctured his lungs and abdomen. The gangster who stood over him - ‘Bugs’ Moran - to fire the final shot into his head discovered that his gun was empty; before he could reload, the driver of their getaway car hooted, and they ran off. Torrio decided it was time to resign his share of the business; he returned to Italy, a millionaire, leaving his ex-protégé in charge.

Capone became increasingly nervous as Weiss continued to shoot his friends and allies. Angelo Genna, a rival beer baron, was the next. Then, on 20 September 1926, an eleven-car cavalcade came into the heart of Capone territory, in Cicero, drove past the Hawthorne restaurant, where he was eating lunch, and riddled the place with machine-gun bullets. No one was hurt, but Capone was worried. He suggested a truce. Weiss agreed - on condition that Capone handed over the killers of O’Banion. Capone declined. He posted some of his men in a rented room opposite the flower shop (which continued to be Weiss’s headquarters). On 11 October 1926, three weeks after the Cicero incident, Weiss was entering the shop when machine-gun fire raked the street and he fell, riddled with bullets.

When O’Banion’s other aide, Vincent Drucci, was killed by a policeman, the only member of the gang who remained a threat to Capone was George Moran, known as ‘Bugs’ because when he lost his temper he seemed to go insane.

On 13 February 1929, a bootlegger told Moran he had a truckload of alcohol for sale; Moran told him to deliver it to a garage in North Clark Street. The next day - St Valentine’s Day - a car drew up in front of the garage just before 11 A.M., and five men got out, two in police uniforms. A few minutes later, they emerged from the garage, the policemen pointing guns at the other three; it seemed to be an arrest. Someone walked into the garage and found seven men lying on the floor near the wall. The ‘police’ had lined them up - they were mostly Moran gangsters - and then mowed them down with machine-gun fire. Then they were shot in the head with shotguns. One of the seven was a doctor who merely happened to be in the garage.

Moran escaped the massacre; he arrived while the shooting was going on and waited until the ‘police’ drove away. He told the real police: ‘The only man who kills like that is Al Capone.’ But Capone was sunbathing by his swimming pool in Palm Island, Florida, at the time of the massacre. Moran died in 1957 of lung cancer.

The St Valentine’s Day massacre caused a public outcry, and the authorities decided it was time to show that Capone was not above the law. A month after the massacre, on 16 March 1929, Capone and his bodyguard were leaving a cinema in Philadelphia when he was stopped by police and arrested on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon. He was quickly brought before a judge and sentenced to a year in prison. It was not an uncomfortable year - a man with fifty million dollars can usually buy small luxuries in jail. But when Capone came out, the twenties were over; the depression had set in. When the Inland Revenue Department had Capone arrested on a charge of failing to pay income tax, he tried to buy his way out of trouble with an offer of four million dollars. The tax authorities turned it down, and Capone was sentenced to eleven years in jail and costs of $80,000. He was paroled in 1939, and died in 1947 of paresis of the brain, due to the syphilis he had contracted years earlier. He was forty-eight at the time of his death.

Although Capone’s notoriety has led to an automatic association between Chicago and 1920s gangsterism, every major city in America had its bootleggers and gangsters - New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, Los Angeles - and in every one of them, the struggle for power between the gangs was as violent as in Chicago. In 1928, Torrio returned to America - driven out by Mussolini - and went back into the bootleg business in New York; together with Lucky Luciano, Longy Zwillman and Meyer Lansky, he quickly built up another booze empire. (He would also be jailed for income tax evasion in 1936.) Other leading bootleggers in New York were Dutch Schultz and the gambler Arnold Rothstein, who, as early as 1923, had also diversified into drugs. Rothstein was murdered in 1928 when he declined to pay a gambling debt of $320,000.

In October 1929, Lucky Luciano was himself ‘taken for a ride’ - probably by members of the gang of a rival bootlegger, Legs Diamond. They beat him unconscious and stabbed him repeatedly in the back with an ice pick, leaving him for dead. Rushed to hospital, ‘Lucky’ survived. Thereafter, members of Diamond’s gang began to disappear; Diamond himself was killed by persons unknown in December 1931.

By that time, it was clear to most people in America that Prohibition had been an appalling mistake, and that it had turned the country into a gangsters’ paradise. In 1932, the Democrats made repeal of Prohibition one of their major campaign promises; Roosevelt defeated Hoover by an immense majority, and in February 1933 Prohibition was repealed.

By that time, Luciano had established himself as New York’s leading mafioso, just as Gapone had been Chicago’s. Luciano’s boss had been an old-style gangster called Joe Masseria. In 1930, another gang boss named Salvatore Maranzano started a gang war against Masseria. As gunmen on either side were killed or ‘taken for rides’, Luciano decided that he might be in a better bargaining position without his boss. On 15 April 1931, Masseria and Luciano had just finished a game of cards in a restaurant when Luciano excused himself to go to the toilet; in his absence, four men shot Masseria to death. (All were famous gangsters: Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Joe Adonis and Bugsy Siegel.) Luciano quickly offered a truce to Maranzano on Maranzano’s own terms. But Maranzano had scarcely had time to accustom himself to his new role as the ‘godfather’ of New York when he was superseded. Five men walked into his office, flashing police identification badges; a dozen witnesses who happened to be present were made to line up with their faces to the wall. Then Maranzano was shot and stabbed to death. None of the killers belonged to the Mafia; their leader was Bo Weinberg, Dutch Schultz’s chief lieutenant. But it is impossible to doubt that this was a Mafia killing; for on the same day - 11 September 1931 - more than thirty old-style Mafia bosses - ‘moustache Petes’ as they were known disrespectfully to their juniors - also died in a nationwide purge. It was a remarkable feat of planning, and reveals how far Prohibition had turned the Mafia - now known as Unione Siciljano - into a giant corporation. And its president was now Lucky Luciano.

Prohibition had turned small-time mobsters into multi-millionaires, and so made them practically ineradicable. ‘Ever since the purge of ‘31, Unione has been no more Mafia than a processed shot of heroin is the original poppy.’ (Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten in
The Luciano Story, chapter
4.) With so much money, the Mafia could buy immunity and choose their own political appointees. After the Maranzano murder, the incumbent district leader (i.e. local councillor in Tammany Hall) was warned that, if he valued his life, he would resign. A Luciano candidate, Albert Marinelli, was elected. In July 1932, Marinelli was present at the Democratic Convention in Chicago for the presidential nomination; the leading Democratic candidate was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Also present were Lucky Luciano and his friend Frank Costello. Luciano kept well in the background - it would have benefited no one if some political commentator had wondered what leading gangsters were doing at a Democratic Convention - but the delegates were kept well supplied with good liquor. It made no difference that Marinelli was supporting one of Roosevelt’s rivals and that Roosevelt gained the nomination; Luciano had friends on both sides.