Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (15 page)

"Jim wasn't a bad fellow, John," the Dink pleaded. "You know what he did. He fixed up an old farmhouse for broken-down prostitutes. They rested up and got back in shape and he never charged them a cent."

"Well," said Lyle, "now that he's dead, who's going to run this convalescent camp?"

"Oh, Jim sold it. Some of the girls ran away after they got back on their feet. Jim got sore, said they didn't have no gratitude."

The Chicago American reported:

"No matter what he may have been in the past, no matter what his faults, Jim was my friend and I am going to his funeral."

These and similar words were heard today from the lips of hundreds of Chicagoans. They were heard in the old Twenty-second Street levee district, over which Jim for so many years had held undisputed sway, they dropped from the mouths of gunmen and crooks, while many a tear ran down the painted cheeks of women of the underworld.

They were heard from many a seemingly staid businessman in loop skyscrapers and from men famous and near-famous in the world of arts and letters, who had all mingled more or less indiscriminately with the other world which walks forth at night.

Referring to gangster funerals in general, the perceptive Illinois Crime Survey illuminated the nature of the relationship between crime and politics:

Political power in a democracy rests upon friendship. A man is your friend, not merely because he is kind to you, but because you can depend on him, because you know that he will stick and that he will keep his word.

Politics in the river wards, and among common people elsewhere as well, is a feudal relationship. The feudal system was one that was based not on law but upon personal loyalties. Politics tends, therefore, to become a feudal system. Gangs, also, are organized on a feudal basis-that is, upon loyalties, upon friendships, and above all, upon dependability. That is one reason why politicians and criminal gangs understand one another so well and so frequently enter into alliances with each other against the more remote common good.

the rule which Colosimo established and maintained was a rule outside of and antagonistic to the formal and established order of society . .. for it is an undoubted fact that friendship . . . frequently does undermine the more formal social order. Idealists are notoriously not good friends. No man who is more interested in abstractions like justice, humanity and righteousness than he is in the more common immediate and personal relations of life, is likely to be a good mixer or a good politician... .

The city of Chicago, if we look at the map, is clearly divided into two regions, the east side and the west side-the lake front and the river wards. On the lake fronts are idealists and reformers, and in the river wards party politics based on friendly relations. This contrast between the two sides of the city, with their different social systems, is part of the problem of the interlocking relationships of crime and politics; and the repeated failures of the public in its attempts to break the alliance is an indication of the extent and persistence of these relations. In the practical work-a-day world in which Colosimo lived, the clear demarcation between right and wrong, as defined by law and public policy, did not exist.

Politics, particularly ward politics, is carried on in a smaller, more intimate world, than that which makes and defines the law. Government seeks to be equal, impartial, formal. Friendships run counter to the impartiality of formal government; and, vice versa, formal government cuts across the ties of friendship. Professional politicians have always recognized the importance, even when they were not moved by real sentiment, of participating with their friends and neighbors in the ceremonies marking the crises of lifechristenings, marriages, and deaths. In the great funerals, the presence of the political boss attests the sincerity and the personal character of the friendship for the deceased, and this marks him as an intimate in life and death.

Dale Colosimo lay grief-stricken for ten days. She learned that she had not been Big Jim's wife under Illinois law, which at that time required a year's interval between divorce and remarriage. She therefore had no claim to what remained of his estate. His family nevertheless granted her $6,000 in bonds and diamonds and to Victoria Moresco, $12,000. The rest went to Papa Luigi.

Dale tried briefly to manage Colosimo's Cafe until Mike the Greek Potzin took it over. She and her mother then returned to New York. Since November, 1919, the musical comedy Irene had been sending capacity audiences home from the Vanderbilt Theater humming and whistling "In My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown." Resuming her maiden name, Dale succeeded Edith Day in the title role and for several years sang it in New York and on the road. (Irene was the longest-running show in Broadway history up to that time.) In San Francisco, in 1924, she married an actor, Henry Duffy, and they played in stock together until the thirties, when Dale finally left the theater and disappeared from public view. Her story, meanwhile, had furnished Jack Lait and a collaborator, Jo Swerling, with the inspiration for a play entitled One of Us.

IMMEDIATELY after Colosimo's death Torrio, assisted by Capone, embarked upon his grand design for territorial expansion. In the initial phase he sought to win recognition as Big Jim's successor in the Levee. Aldermen Kenna and Coughlin bestowed their approval, and none of the other key Levee figures raised any serious objections. Next, having secured their home base, Torrio and Capone proceeded to expand their suburban gambling and whorehouse interests. Bribery was their principal tool. Town and village officials readily succumbed. Property owners near the site of a prospective dive might protest, but resistance usually melted when Torrio offered them money to pay off the mortgage, repair the roof, buy new furniture. . . . Within two years corruption transformed a long chain of once placid law-abiding communities, stretching from Chicago Heights, south of the city, to Cicero, west of it, into sinkholes of vice. In Chicago Heights Torrio opened the Moonlight Cafe. To his two thriving roadhouses in Burnham, the Burnham Inn and the Speedway, he added the Coney Island Cafe and the Barn. In Posen he established the Roamer Inn under the management of Harry Guzik, one of three Moscow-born brothers, and his wife, Alma. In Blue Island it was the Burr Oak Hotel (manager: Mike de Pike Heisler) ; in Stickney, the Shadow Inn; in Cicero, a string of cabarets and gambling houses.

The Roamer Inn was the prototypal suburban bagnio. The Chi cago-born jazz clarinetist, Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow, an habitue in his youth, described it in his autobiography, Really the Blues:

... There was a big front room with a long bar on one side and quarter slot machines lined up along the wall. In back there was a larger one, with benches running all around the walls but not tables. The girls sat there while the johns (customers) moped around giving them the once-over. Those girls were always competing with each other: one would come up to you, switching her hips like a young duck, and whisper in your ear, "Want to go to bed, dear, I'll show you a good time, honey, I'm French," and a minute later another one would ease along and say coyly, "Baby, don't you want a straight girl for a change?" .. .

The girls we knew were all on the dogwatch, from four to twelve in the morning. ... They paraded around in teddies or gingham baby rompers with big bows in the back, high-heeled shoes, pretty silk hair ribbons twice as big as their heads, and rouge an inch thick all over their kissers. When a john had eyeballed the parade and made his choice he would follow her upstairs, where the landlady sat at a: little desk in the hall. This landlady would hand out a metal check and a towel to the girl, while the customer forked over two bucks. Then the girl was assigned a room number. All night long you could hear the landlady calling out in a bored voice, like a combination of strawboss and timekeeper, "All right, Number Eight, all right, Number Ten-somebody's waiting, don't take all night." She ran that joint with a stopwatch.

The girls explained to me that they got eighty cents a trick, one payment for each metal check. . . . Twenty cents went for protection, and the other dollar belonged to the house. . . .

Those girls worked hard-some of them didn't even knock off for a single night, hiding their condition with tricks I won't go into now... .

It may have been at the Roamer Inn that Capone contracted gonorrhea in 1925.

The strength of Torrio's political connections underwent a stringent test in 1921, following an incident at the Roamer Inn. The Guziks advertised for a housemaid. When a pretty farm girl applied, they made her a prisoner, took away her clothes, and had her broken in as a prostitute. After five months of captivity she managed to get word to her family. By the time her brothers rescued her she was physically and mentally destroyed. In court her father told how the Guziks had tried to bribe him not to testify. They were convicted and sentenced to the penitentiary. While free under bail, pending an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court, they looked to Torrio for deliverance. He approached Walter Stevens, dean of Chicago's gunmen.

Stevens was fifty-four, an advanced age for one with his occupational hazards. As a lieutenant of Maurice "Mossy" Enright, a pioneer in labor union racketeering, he had slugged, bombed and slaughtered numerous victims during the industrial strife of the early 1900's. His price scale ran from $24 for laying open a skull to $50 for murder. He was the last survivor of the Enright gang, Mossy himself having been liquidated in 1920 by Sunny Jim Cosmano as a favor to a rival union racketeer, Big Tim Murphy. In certain respects Stevens resembled Torrio, that "best and dearest of husbands." He worshiped his wife, and when she became incurably ill, he nursed her for twenty years until the day she died. He adopted three children and sent them all to good schools. He himself was an educated man, a student of military history, who greatly admired Ulysses S. Grant and Bismarck, and a voracious reader, whose favorite authors included Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns and Jack London. Like Torrio, he had a puritanical streak. He never touched a drop of liquor and rarely smoked. He forbade his adopted daughters to wear short skirts or use cosmetics. Before permitting them to read the classics, he excised any passages he considered indecent. He constantly preached oldfashioned morality and idealism and denounced the "flaming youth" of the era typified by Clara Bow, Hollywood's "It" girl.

When Mossy Enright died in 1920, Stevens moved into the TorrioCapone camp. His greatest asset was the gratitude of Governor Len Small. A few months after Small, a farmer from Kankakee and a Thompson puppet, took office in 1921, a grand jury indicted him for embezzling $600,000 while state treasurer. Working behind the scenes for the defense were Stevens; "Jew Ben" Newmark, former chief investigator for the state's attorney, but more successful as a thief, counterfeiter and extortioner; and Michael J. "Umbrella Mike" Boyle, business agent for Electrical Workers' Union No. 134. Boyle's nickname derived from his practice of standing at a bar on certain days of the month with an unfurled umbrella into which contractors who wished to avoid labor trouble would drop their cash levy. As the governor's trial progressed, the trio undertook such delicate missions as bribing and intimidating jurors. Small was acquitted. He did not forget his deliverers. When they went to jail, Newmark and Boyle for jury tampering and Stevens for an old murder, he pardoned them. During his first three years in office he pardoned or paroled almost 1,000 felons. Stevens now drew his attention to the Guziks' plight, and before the State Supreme Court handed down its decision, the governor pardoned them. Within three months they were operating a new brothel, the Marshfield Inn, just beyond the city's southern limits.

In the third phase of their expansionist campaign, the bootlegging phase, Torrio and Capone faced a formidable array of gangs without whose concurrence they could not hope to succeed. On the Northeast Side, between the Chicago River and the lake, there was Dion O'Banion's gang. "Who'll carry the Forty-second and Forty-third wards?" Every Chicagoan knew the old quip. "O'Banion in his pistol pockets." "Deany's" suits did, as a matter of fact, conceal three extra pockets for firearms-one under the left armpit of the coat jacket, another on the outside left, and a third on the center front of the trousers like a codpiece. He could shoot accurately with either hand. A fellow Irishman named Gene Geary taught him how. O'Banion had a sweet, choir-trained voice, and when raised in "Mother Machree" or "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," it brought tears streaming down his mentor's cheeks. A criminal court later committed Geary to an insane asylum as a homicidal maniac. In the act of murder O'Banion's own blue eyes were usually smiling, his lips parted in a boyish grin, with what a psychiatrist once called his "sunny brutality."