Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (14 page)

THE National Prohibition Act, popularly known as the Volstead Act, after the tobacco-chewing Republican Representative from Minnesota who introduced it into the House, went into effect at 12:01 A.M. on January 17, 1920. Volstead was serene in his conviction that "law does regulate morality, has regulated morality since the Ten Commandments." The first recorded violation occurred at fifty-nine minutes past midnight in Chicago. A truck rolled into a railroad switching yard. Out leaped six masked men, brandishing revolvers. They bound and gagged a watchman, locked six engineers in a shed, and, breaking into two freight cars, removed $100,000 worth of whiskey stamped FOR MEDICINAL USE. At approximately the same hour another Chicago gang stole four barrels of alcohol from a warehouse, while a third gang hijacked a truck loaded with whiskey-the first known instance of what would become common gangster practice. Nobody was ever arrested for any of these forays.

Torrio surveyed the scene with impatience. No fairer prospect of profits had ever beckoned to him, yet he could not rouse Colosimo from his amorous torpor. Most of the saloons and roadhouses had stayed open in expectations of obtaining liquor somehow, and the risk of supplying it seemed trifling compared to the rewards. To cover the entire state, as well as Iowa and part of Wisconsin, the Prohibition Unit had assigned a measly force of 134 agents. As for the Chicago po lice, Torrio anticipated no more difficulty securing their protection for bootlegging than he had for whoremongering or gambling. (He was right. Charles C. Fitzmorris, Chicago's chief of police during the early Prohibition years, publicly admitted: "Sixty percent of my police are in the bootleg business.") Best of all, there was Big Bill Thompson, paladin of the wide-open policy. When he began his term, the city treasury had a $3,000,000 surplus. Four years later it had a deficit of $4,500,000. The crudity of Thompson's speech and behavior, his xenophobia and know-nothing. isolationism, which he trumpeted throughout World War I, made him an international laughingstock. When Marshal Joffre, the hero of the Marne, and Rene Viviani, the French minister of justice, undertook a goodwill tour of America after it had entered the war, Mayor Thompson refused to invite them to Chicago. "Are these distinguished visitors coming here to encourage the doing of things to make our people suffer or have they some other purpose?" he asked. The shamefaced City Council issued its own invitation. But despite his gaucheries and misrule Big Bill retained the support of the most powerful political machine in Chicago's history and with it a fat campaign chest to which his thousands of civil service appointees were compelled to contribute. By a slim margin he managed to win a second term.

Altogether a situation fraught with promise, and Torrio was not the only one to appreciate it. Most gang leaders were going into bootlegging. Some had laid away stocks months before the Volstead Act became law. (The Dink and the Bath accumulated a million dollars' worth of bourbon and were offering it for sale at twice the original price.) Others had arranged for deliveries from moonshiners and smugglers. Torrio planned, characteristically, to obviate wasteful hostilities by working out among the gang chieftains a series of multilateral trade agreements guaranteeing to each unchallenged sovereignty in his own territory. Colosimo neither opposed nor actively supported the proposal. Content as long as he received his share of earnings from the enterprises Torrio was directing in his name, he left him free to act as he thought best. But what was needed to bring everybody into line was a reassertion of Big Jim's old forceful leadership, a recovery of his prestige. Passive acquiescence was dangerous. It could only encourage the jackals to turn on the lion and divide up his kingdom. But the lion would not stir. Plainly, the time had come for Torrio to assume authority in name, as well as in fact.

Big Jim, who had been living apart from Victoria Moresco for three years, offered her a settlement of $50,000 not to contest a divorce action. "I raised one husband for another woman," the fat and aging procuress said later, "and there's nothing to it." The decree became final on March 20, 1920. The grounds: desertion. Within three weeks Victoria had married a Sicilian hoodlum twenty years her junior named Antonio Villani, and Big Jim had married Dale. After a honeymoon in the fashionable Indiana spa of French Lick, Big Jim brought his bride back to his ornate mansion at 3156 Vernon Avenue and invited her mother to live there, too.

A week later, on Tuesday, May 11, Torrio telephoned to announce the delivery at the cafe of two truckloads of whiskey. He was very precise about the time-4 P.M. Big Jim left the house a few minutes before the hour, ablaze with diamonds, a red rose in his buttonhole, a homburg perched jauntily on his large head. In his right hip pocket he carried a .28-caliber pearl-handled revolver. His car, driven by a chauffeur named Woolfson, was standing at the curb. Dale asked him to send the car back so that she and her mother could go shopping. He promised to do so, kissed her good-bye, and climbed into the back seat. Woolfson recalled later that Big Jim kept muttering to himself in Italian all the way to the cafe.

There were two entrances on South Wabash Avenue about 50 feet apart. Woolfson deposited Big Jim at the arched north entrance and drove back to Vernon Avenue. Big Jim pushed open a glass-paneled door and crossed a small porcelain-tiled vestibule, passing a cloakroom, a phone booth and a cashier's cage, walked the length of the main dining room, went through an archway into a second dining room used for overflow crowds, and entered his office at the rear. Presently, a porter, coming up from the basement, noticed a stranger going into the vestibule. The porter returned to his duties below, where four other employees were working.

In the office, standing beneath the Colosimo family sword, Big Jim's secretary, Frank Camilla, and Chef Caesarino were discussing the day's menu. Big Jim asked them if anybody had called. Nobody had. This appeared to trouble him. He tried unsuccessfully to reach his lawyer, Rocco De Stefano, on the phone. After chatting a while with Camilla and Caesarino, he walked back toward the vestibule through the auxiliary dining room. They had the impression that he intended to wait for his caller there or on the sidewalk. They glanced at a wall clock-it showed 4:25-and resumed their discussion of the menu. A moment later they heard two sharp reports. Caesarino dismissed them as backfire, but Camilla decided to investigate. He found Big Jim lying facedown on the porcelain tiles of the vestibule, blood streaming from a bullet hole behind his right ear. A second bullet had cracked the cashier's window and buried itself in the plaster wall opposite. Big Jim was dead.

In response to Camilla's call, Chief of Police John J. Garrity arrived from headquarters with Chief of Detectives Mooney. The state's attorney sent several of the detectives attached to his office. When Camilla called Dale Colosimo, she fainted.

From the angle of fire the police deduced that the killer had waited for his victim in the cloakroom. On the phone booth shelf they found a note in Big Jim's handwriting.

Swan [it said] I made out the statement. You fill in the rest as you see fit. Tell the man to look out after the drugstore and see that he finds out where to find the stuff for me. Don't keep over thirteen men. If you've got more, ask someone to lay off. Bank. P.S. Anything you make over $50 belongs to me.

When Big Jim wrote the note, how it came to be left in the phone booth, what it meant, who Swan was-the police never discovered.

They questioned more than thirty suspects, including Torrio and Capone, both of whom could prove that they were occupied elsewhere at the time of the shooting. Torrio's eyes filled with tears, an unheardof display of emotion. "Big Jim and me were like brothers," he said. Had Joe Moresco pulled the trigger to avenge his scorned sister? He, too, furnished an unbreakable alibi. Victoria herself and her Sicilian husband were in Los Angeles when Big Jim died.

The state of the dead man's finances deepened the mystery. Rocco De Stefano had expected to find at least $500,000 in cash and diamonds. An exhaustive search turned up $67,500 in cash and bonds, $8,894 worthy of jewelry and 15 barrels of whiskey. According to a rumor nobody could confirm, Colosimo left his home on May 11 with $150,000 cash in his pockets, but they contained no such sum when the police reached the scene of his death. De Stefano ascribed the dwindling of his client's fortune to the tribute paid to extortionists. Several Black Handers fell under suspicion, particularly Sunny Jim Cosmano, but Sunny Jim happened to have spent May 11 in jail.

Yet there were developments that suggested the solution. Chance, underworld rumor and the testimony of the cafe porter produced them. Into a police dragnet the day of the murder blundered the veteran Five Pointer and executioner Frankie Yale. He had been in town a week and was about to board an eastbound train when the police stopped him. They could not connect him with the murder at that time, however, and they let him go on to New York. Then the porter came forward with a description of the stranger he saw entering the cafe on Colosimo's heels. It fitted Yale. Finally, a stool pigeon passed along the underworld rumor that Torrio had paid Yale $10,000 to rid him of Colosimo. At the request of the Chicago authorities the New York police picked up Yale, and the porter was brought to New York. Face-to-face with the killer, the witness froze. He swore he could not identify him. The investigation foundered there, but the police of both cities doubted neither Yale's guilt nor Torrio's.

Big Jim, first of Chicago's great gangster overlords to be slain, was buried on May 14. The lavishness of the floral tributes (with wreaths "from Johnny" and "from Al" among the showiest), the costly bronze casket, the size and the composition of the cortege set the style for gangster funerals. No rites were performed in a Catholic church or a Catholic cemetery, because Archbishop George Mundelein forbade them.

His Eminence makes it plain to his pastors [so a diocesan spokesman later interpreted injunctions of this kind] that any gangster who, because of his conduct, is looked upon as a "public" sinner or who by his refusal to comply with the laws of his church regarding attendance at church services and Easter duty . . . such a man is to be refused Christian burial.

Therefore, it cannot be assumed that the fact of one's being a gangster or bootlegger is alone the cause of his being refused Christian burial, for each individual case must be considered. . . .

The only offense specified in Big Jim's case was neither whoremongering nor murder, but divorcing his wife to marry Dale Winter.

In the end a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Pasquale De Carol, was found to perform the funeral rites in the Vernon Avenue mansion. The Apollo Quartet sang the hymns. As they began "Nearer My God to Thee," Dale Winter Colosimo appeared, barely able to stand, supported by De Stefano and the Dink. Before the casket was closed, the Bath knelt beside it, recited Hail Marys and the Catholic prayer for the dead. Ike Bloom, who managed one of the Levee's most disreputable dance halls, delivered a eulogy. "There wasn't a piker's hair in Big Jim's head," he said, uttering the underworld's ultimate accolade. "Whatever game he played, he shot straight. He wasn't greedy. There could be dozens of others getting theirs. The more the merrier as far as he was concerned. He had what a lot of us haven't got-class. He brought the society swells and the millionaires into the red-light district. It helped everybody, and a lot of places kept alive on Colosimo's overflow. Big Jim never bilked a pal or turned down a good guy and he always kept his mouth shut."

Capone observed an ancient Italian mourning custom: During the three days between Big Jim's death and his burial he didn't shave.

A thousand First Ward Democrats preceded the cortege as it wound through the Levee on its way to the nonsectarian Oakwood Cemetery. They paused before the crepe-draped portals of Colosimo's Cafe while two brass bands played a dirge. Dale Colosimo and De Stefano rode behind the hearse in a car with drawn curtains. Five thousand mourners followed. The fifty-three pallbearers and honorary pallbearers included, in addition to criminals of every stripe, nine aldermen, three judges, two Congressmen, a state senator, an assistant state's attorney and the state Republican leader. The Bath had tried to persuade judge Lyle, then a Republican alderman, to join the pallbearers, but he declined.