Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (19 page)

Through a combination of Celtic charm and ruthlessness, Ragen rose high in the Democratic Party and was elected city commissioner, one of Cook County's principal governing officers. The club, which he molded into a powerful party arm, grew to such proportions that it adopted the motto "Hit Me and You Hit 2,000." In addition to notable ballplayers, it turned out aldermen, county treasurers, police captains, sheriffs and sundry officeholders. It also turned out a gallery of criminals. They included Harry Madigan, owner of the Pony Inn, a Cicero saloon, who accumulated eight charges of kidnapping and assault to kill during elections, none of them ever prosecuted, thanks to the club's protection; Joseph "Dynamite" Brooks, another saloonkeeper, a barrel-bellied clodhopper, usually drunk and often homicidal; William "Gunner" McPadden, wanted for numerous murders; Danny McFall, appointed deputy sheriff despite his murder of two business competitors; Yiddles Miller, the prizefight referee, a white supremacist as brutish as any Southern red-neck; Hugh "Stubby" McGovern, gambler, larcenist and triggerman, with a record of seven arrests and only two penalties-both trifling fines for petty larceny and carrying concealed weapons; Ralph Sheldon, who organized his own splinter gang.

At every stage of Ragen's rise the Colts backed him with muscle and firepower. Nor did they confine their operations to a single precinct or candidate. Many politicians all over Chicago, candidates for every office from City Council to the state legislature, owed their victory or defeat to the rampaging Colts. "When we dropped into a polling place," one of them bragged, "everybody else dropped out."

Racists and 110 percent Americans, the Colts further served as protector of Chicago's white population against the encroachments of Negroes. On a blistering July afternoon in 1919 a Negro boy, swimming off a South Side beach, crossed into segregated waters. From the lakeshore a crowd of white bathers began hurling rocks at him. The boy scrambled aboard a float. A rock knocked him back into the lake, and he drowned. That night the long-smoldering racial tensions of the South Side erupted. Shortly before the first blow was struck, a swaggering youth from Halsted Street warned a group of Negroes (according to their subsequent testimony before a coroner's jury) : "Remember it's the Ragen Colts you're dealing with. We have two thousand members between Halsted and Cottage Grove and Fortythird and Sixty-sixth streets. We intend to run this district. Look out." In the ensuing riot the Colts tore through the Black Belt with guns, bombs and torches, shot Negroes on sight, dynamited and set fire to their homes, looted their shops. The Negroes, many of them war veterans armed with their old service revolvers, returned the attack, toppled over automobiles and streetcars carrying whites, wrecked white property. Before the fury burned itself out four days later, 14 Negroes and 20 whites had been killed and on both sides more than 500 injured.

With Prohibition the Ralph Sheldon wing of Ragen's Colts added bootlegging to their exploits.

On the far South Side, the O'Donnell brothers (no relation to the West Side O'Donnells) -Ed "Spike," Steve, Walter and Tommy. Versatile outlaws since boyhood, they were proficient as pickpockets, second-story men, muggers, labor sluggers, bank robbers, political terrorists. Spike, the eldest and the head of the gang, was a raffish, whimsical joker, given to polka-dot bow ties, who had been twice tried for homicide and was suspected of half a dozen other killings. "When arguments fail," he would exhort his troops, "use a blackjack." St. Peter's Catholic Church had no communicant more devout.

The O'Donnells were a force Torrio should have reckoned with in his blueprint for citywide, intergang organization, but he left them out of his calculations, a rare strategic error that would prove costly. He ignored them because they were leaderless and drifting, Spike O'Donnell, without whom they never ventured a coup, having been confined to Joliet Penitentiary for complicity in the $12,000 daylight robbery of the Stockyards Savings and Trust Bank. Spike, however, had no intention of serving his full five-year sentence. He was too well connected politically for that. On Governor Small's desk there already lay letters urging his pardon from six state senators, five state representatives and a criminal court judge. To support themselves while awaiting Spike's release, his brothers hung around the Four Deuces, performing odd jobs for Torrio and Capone and secretly building up resentment against them.

Such were the main Chicago gangs at the outset of Prohibition, and it was a measure of Torrio's statesmanship that despite all their old ethnic, political and commercial rivalries-now intensified by the prospect of fantastic riches-he managed to keep them not only at peace for almost three years but, with few exceptions, cooperative in his own ascendancy.

SO the listing read in the Chicago telephone directory. He had some business cards printed, describing himself less pretentiously as "Alphonse Capone, second hand furniture dealer, 2220 South Wabash Avenue," and he stocked a storefront adjoining the Four Deuces with junk. He never tried to sell any of it. Prospective collectors who made inquiries by phone were told, if anybody answered at all, "We ain't open today." Capone maintained the shop as a cover for illicit dealings. These he handled so expeditiously, he proved so reliable an aide, that Torrio rewarded him with the management of the Four Deuces and a 25 percent share of the profits from all his brothels. In 1920 this came to $25,000. Torrio further promised Capone 50 percent of the bootleg business as soon as it started to produce revenue. They had liked and trusted each other since the early days in New York. They complemented each other, the slight older man, cool, taciturn, reserved, condoning violence only when guile failed; the beefy younger one, gregarious, pleasureloving, physically fearless, hot-tempered. By the second year they no longer stood in the relationship of boss and hireling; they were partners.

In November, 1920, Capone got bad news from home. For some time his father had been suffering from heart disease, an affliction not improved by the day labor to which he had been reduced after giving up his barbershop. On the evening of the fourteenth he dropped around to the poolroom in Garfield Place, a step from his front door, where Al had once racked up so many victories. While watching a game he collapsed and, carried back to No. 38, died before the doctor came. He was fifty-two. The doctor named as the cause of death myocarditis-inflammation of the cardiac muscle.

"Al's a good boy," Teresa Capone would always insist. When she became a widow, he opened his arms to her and to his brothers and sisters, bringing them one after the other to Chicago as fast as his means allowed-all except Jim, whose fate was still a mystery. He housed them and fed them, found work for the older boys, and generally, in the Italian family tradition, saw to their welfare. He later had his father's remains exhumed, shipped to Chicago and, having bought Plot 48 in Mount Olivet Cemetery, reburied there under a shaft of black marble with a portrait fastened to the base.

The first brother to follow Al to Chicago was Ralph, the second oldest after Jim, who also adopted the nom de crime "Brown." At twenty-eight he did not entirely lack underworld experience. He had tended bar in a Brooklyn speakeasy during the first year of Prohibition. He was twice arrested and fined. On the other hand, he had held down more lawful jobs for longer periods than any of his brothers: Western Union messenger at eleven, the year he quit public school; a paper and cloth cutter in the same bindery as Al; streetcar conductor; salesman; longshoreman. When America declared war against Germany, Ralph joined the Marines but got no farther than boot camp on Parris Island, where he was discharged because of flat feet. In Chicago he reverted to bartending in one of the TorrioCapone resorts. He then replaced Al as manager of the Four Deuces. For a time he shared an apartment on South Wabash Avenue with Al and his wife. Charlie and Rocco Fischetti, first cousins of the Capone boys, who had also come to Chicago at Al's urging, lived in the same building. Like Ralph, they rose to the command level of the Torrio-Capone forces.

In anticipation of his mother's coming to Chicago Al chose a quiet, tree-shaded section of South Prairie Avenue, near St. Colum- banas Church, and there built a two-story, fifteen-room red-brick house. The upstairs parlor of No. 7244 had floor-to-ceiling mirrors and gilded cornices. The bathroom accouterments were imported from Germany and included a seven-foot bathtub. A steel gate led from an alley at the rear into the basement. Here the walls were im pervious to bullets, having been constructed of reinforced concrete a foot thick, and the windows had steel bars set too close together to admit a bomb.

Al moved into the seven ground-floor rooms with his mother, two sisters, wife and son, while Ralph, who married a girl named Velma Pheasant and had a son and daughter, occupied the eight rooms above. Al enrolled Mafalda in a private girls' school near home, the Richards School, to which he played Santa Claus every Christmas thereafter, driving a Cadillac to the entrance heaped with boxes of candy, baskets of fruit, turkeys and a gift for every student and teacher. The two youngest brothers, John "Mimi" and Matt, also made their home for some years at 7244 South Prairie. Mitzi, a bibulous, girl-chasing youth of eighteen, had barely reached Chicago in 1922 when he was arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $5. Matt, four years younger, had an exemplary record as an adolescent. Al sent him to the Marmion Military School in Aurora, Illinois, then to Pennsylvania's Villanova University. Twenty-seven-year-old Frank Capone completed the family circle. The brothers resembled each other. All had thick, heavy bodies and blunt features, and when assembled in family council, they suggested a small herd of ruminating bison.

Though by 1922 Capone was known to both the underworld and the police of Chicago, he meant so little to newspaper reporters that the first time they had occasion to mention him they got his Christian name wrong and inadvertently gave the original version of the family name, calling him "Alfred Caponi." One of his own best customers, Al drank, gambled and whored. Early one August morning, after a night of carousal, he was racing his car along North Wabash Avenue with a girl beside him and three men in the rear seat. Rounding the corner of East Randolph Street, he crashed into a parked taxi, injuring the driver, one Fred Krause. Jumping to the sidewalk in a drunken rage, Capone flashed a deputy sheriff's badge (evidence of the political patronage he already enjoyed) , brandished a revolver, and threatened to shoot Krause. From a passing streetcar the conductor yelled at him to put up his weapon. Capone threatened to shoot him, too. His four companions fled. The police arrived before any further violence occurred, and an ambulance intern bandaged the bleeding cabdriver. "Alfred Caponi" was booked on three charges -assault with an automobile, driving while intoxicated, and carry ing a concealed weapon-any one of which would have sufficed to put an ordinary offender behind bars. But like almost every case that was to be filed against "Deputy Sheriff" Capone during the next seven years, it did not even come to trial. He never set foot in court. The charges were not only dropped, but expunged from the record.

The options open to beer brewers when Prohibition came were, in the main, threefold. They could convert to the manufacture of legal near beer, first brewing the standard product with its alcoholic content of 3 percent or 4 percent, then dealcoholizing it to 2 percent. At considerable financial sacrifice they could lease their breweries or sell them outright. Or they could secretly retain part ownership through affiliation with gangsters. Under this last arrangement the brewers furnished the capital, the technical skills and the administrative experience; the gangsters, fronting as officers and company directors, bought police and political protection, fought hijackers and territorial invaders, took the "fall"-the legal liability-when trouble threatened.

One of Chicago's leading brewers was Joseph Stenson, scion of a rich and respectable Gold Coast family. He chose the third course. To the dismay of his three older brothers, he took on Terry Druggan and Frankie lake as partners in the operation of five breweries: the Gambrinus, the Standard, the George Hoffman, the Pfeiffer and the Stege. Early in 1920 Torrio became a fourth partner and with Stenson's backing obtained control of four more breweries-the West Hammond, the Manhattan, the Best and the Sieben-as well as a few distilleries.