Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (26 page)

It was Capone's notion that, in his own words, "When a guy don't fall for a broad, he's through," and from time to time he would test his bodyguards by exposing them to eager, voluptuous women. If they failed to respond enthusiastically enough, he would assign them to a less exacting post or dismiss them altogether.

The Caponeites had a discipline and cohesiveness, a team spirit, equaled only by the O'Banion gang under Dion O'Banion, and like the O'Banionites' esprit de corps, it stemmed from the personal power their chieftain had built up through the subversion of public officials. No documentation exists to support two of the most widely circulated anecdotes concerning Capone's power, but his men firmly believed and gloried in them. According to the first, a hoodlum escaped from the Criminal Courts Building. In the search for him a squad of police rookies, acting on an informer's tip, raided the hangout of a South Side gang affiliated with Capone. They failed to find the fugitive; but the gangsters present were heavily armed, and the zealous rookies confiscated several automatics and shotguns. When they delivered the weapons to their commanding officer and told him where they came from, he was consternated. "Who gave you such orders?" he demanded. "Take the stuff back." The raided gangsters, meanwhile, had complained to Capone, who in turn reproved the commanding officer. The latter thereupon advised the rookies to placate the gang leader lest they be banished to some remote beat. They called on Capone at his Hotel Metropole headquarters. "I understand your captain wasn't to blame," he said affably, "that you boys just made a mistake. All right, I'm going to give you a break. But don't pull another boner."

According to the second apocryphal story, a Capone lieutenant was arrested and held without bail. Capone telephoned the judge. "I thought I told you to discharge him," he said. The judge explained that he was not on the bench the day the police brought in the prisoner, but he had given his bailiff a memo for the alternative judge. The bailiff forgot to deliver it. "Forgot!" Capone roared. "Don't let him forget again."

The attempted murder of Torrio marked the beginning of the longest hottest gang war ever fought in Chicago. The casus belli went beyond Weiss' lust for vengeance. At stake was nothing less than the control of commercialized crime and vice throughout the area.

The gangs realigned themselves mainly, though not entirely, according to ethnic ties. The Irish, Polish and Jewish gangsters tended to rally behind O'Banion's successor. The West Side O'Donnells, for example, and later the Saltis-McErlane gangs, once allies of Torrio, went over to Weiss. The Sicilians, notably the Gennas, and most of the Italians stuck to Capone. So did Druggan and Lake. Some of the lesser gangs like Ralph Sheldon's and a few independent hoodlums shifted back and forth with the changing fortunes of war.

Applying the lessons Torrio taught him, Capone forged a large, heterogeneous, yet disciplined criminal organization. On the top echelon, at his right hand, stood Jake Guzik, business manager; Frank Nitti, risen from triggerman to treasurer, Capone's chief link with the Unione Siciliane and later with the Mafia; and brother Ralph Capone, director of liquor sales. Ralph acquired the nickname Bottles because of his persuasiveness with saloonkeepers who were reluctant to stock Capone merchandise. Though all the brothers except the college-educated Matt and the vanished James worked for the organization at one time or other, only Ralph achieved a position of major responsibility.

On the managerial level, supervising the distribution of liquor, there were Charlie Fischetti and Lawrence "Dago" Mangano. Frank Pope, who managed the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, paid particular attention to the off-track horse race betting and retained 18 percent of the net from all the gambling games, while Peter Penovich, in charge of roulette, craps, blackjack, etc., got 5 percent. From the gambling houses that Capone did not own outright he exacted a share of the profits as payment for political and physical protection. His chief collector was Hymie "Loud Mouth" Levine. Mike de Pike Heisler and Harry Guzik oversaw the whorehouses. For advice on every phase of his operations Capone often turned to Tony Lombardo, an urbane, cool-headed Sicilian seven years his senior, who had prospered as a wholesale grocer in Little Italy.

Next came the specialists and technicians. Every member of the organization carried a card with a name and phone number to call in case of arrest. The number was that of a pay booth in a Cicero drugstore at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifty-second Avenue; the name, Louis Cowan. When anyone phoned for Cowan, the druggist would go to the door and beckon to a small, frail man sitting inside a newsstand. A green limousine was parked at the curb nearby. The newsdealer, who stood barely 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds, would dash to the phone, listen intently, dash out again and, after finding somebody to mind his kiosk, hop into the limousine and drive hell for leather to whatever police station his caller had indicated. Cowan was the organization's chief bondsman, a status sufficiently rewarding to have obviated a pursuit as humble as selling papers; but having sold them on the same corner since boyhood, he chose sentimentally to keep the newsstand, and it now doubled as his office. Capone trusted Cowan to such a degree that he placed in his name several apartment buildings he owned worth about half a million dollars. Whenever Cowan went to the aid of an arrested Caponeite, he would take with him documentary proof of these real estate holdings, which he then put up as security for bail.

On the lower echelons there was a choice assortment of bodyguards, sharpshooters and all-purpose muscle men. James Belcastro, a veteran Black Hander, directed a bombing squad. If competitors attempted to open a still or a brewery in territory the organization considered its own, Belcastro would issue a warning. If the interlopers ignored it, his men would obliterate the property. Speakeasy operators who refused to buy the liquor the organization offered them likewise risked a bombing.

Phil D'Andrea, who became Capone's favorite bodyguard, was a rifleman who could split a quarter in midair. William "Three-Fingered" Jack White was an equally good shot with his left hand, his right having been smashed in boyhood by a brick falling from a building under construction. As sensitive about the loss as Capone was about his facial scars, White always wore gloves in public, the empty fingers stuffed with cotton. Another expert torpedo, Samuel McPherson "Golf Bag" Hunt, tracked his prey with a shotgun concealed in a golf bag. To a detective who once opened the bag, Hunt explained: "I'm going to shoot some pheasants." The first man he ever shotgunned failed to die and was known in gangland thereafter as "Hunt's hole in one."

Antonino Leonardo Accardo, alias Joe Batters, a Sicilian shoemaker's son, committed his maiden offense, a traffic violation, at age fifteen. He was arrested twenty-seven times thereafter on charges that included extortion, kidnapping and murder, none resulting in any penalty more serious than a small fine. Felice De Lucia, alias Paul "the Waiter" Ricca, killed two men in his native Naples before his twenty-second year when he immigrated with false identification papers to Chicago. Both Accardo and Ricca joined the Torrio-Capone gang in its formative stage. So did Sam "Mooney" Giancana, who was rejected for military service as a psychopath. Murray Llewellyn "the Camel" Humphreys, who sported a camel's hair overcoat, also made an underworld name for himself early in life by bringing off a long series of robberies for which he never served a day in jail.

Capone valued none of his young recruits more highly than Jack McGurn-"Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, as he was called after the tommy gun became his preferred weapon. He was born Vincenzo De Mora in Little Italy to one of the Gennas' alky cookers, who died full of buckshot following his sale of some alcohol to the competition. The son, according to legend, determined to avenge the murder, began practicing marksmanship by shooting the sparrows off telephone wires with a Daisy repeating rifle. A promising amateur welterweight prizefighter, he received his alias, McGurn, from Emil Thiery, a well-known trainer who agreed to take him on. The relationship was short-lived. Under pressure in the ring McGurn tended to wilt, and Thiery dropped him.

McGurn was the complete jazz age sheik, a ukulele strummer, cabaret habitue and snaky dancer. An insatiable collector of women, preferably blondes, he parted his curly black hair in the middle and slicked it down with pomade until it lay as flat and sleek as Rudolph Valentino's. He wore wide-checked suits heavily padded in the shoulders, flower-figured neckties and pointed patent-leather shoes. The police ascribed twenty-two murders to McGurn, five of them supposedly committed in reprisal for his father's death. As a gesture of contempt after mowing down a victim, he would sometimes press a nickel into his hand.

In the fall of 1927 Danny Cohen, the owner of a thriving North Side cabaret, the Green Mill, offered McGurn a 25 percent interest. All he had to do was persuade the star attraction, a young comic named Joe E. Lewis, to renew his contract. For a solid year Lewis had been packing the place nightly, and Cohen had raised his pay to $650 a week. But a rival establishment, the New Rendezvous Cafe, promised Lewis $1,000, plus a percentage of the cover charge, and he notified Cohen that he would accept.

The next morning McGurn was waiting for Lewis outside his hotel, the Commonwealth. Lewis repeated his decision. He was opening at the Rendezvous on November 2. "You'll never live to open," said McGurn. Years later Capone, a Lewis devotee from the start, asked him, "Why the hell didn't you come to me when you had your trouble? I'd have straightened things out." Lewis often asked himself the same question.

No harm befell him opening night, but the morning of November 10, a week later, there was a knock at his bedroom door. He let in three men. Two of them carried pistols, and they fractured his skull with the butts. The third had a knife. He drove it into Lewis' jaw, drew it up the left of his face to his ear. Twelve times he struck, gashing his throat and tongue.

Incredibly, Lewis lived. But for months he could barely articulate, and the damage to his brain by the pistol butts left him unable to recognize words. He had to learn again to talk, read and write. He was performing within a year, but a decade passed before he recovered his early success. During his darkest days Capone gave him $ 10,000.

While retaining their identity, several of the smaller gangs became virtual subsidiaries of the Capone syndicate. The most important were the Guilfoyle gang and the Circus gang. Martin Guilfoyle, whose disciples included Matt Kolb, a Republican politician, and Al Winge, an ex-police lieutenant, controlled the liquor and gambling concessions along West North Avenue. The Circus gang, composed chiefly of gunmen and labor racketeers, took its name from its meeting place, the Circus Cafe, at 1857 West North Avenue. The founder was John Edward "Screwy" Moore, better known as Claude Maddox, a Missourian with a criminal record dating from his seventeenth year. These two Northwest Side gangs together served as a counterforce to the North Side Weiss gang.

In addition, the organization had occasional recourse to various independent technicians and specialists-"boxmen" (safe blowers) , cracksmen like Red Rudensky for breaking into government bonded
liquor warehouses, arms merchants. Among the last was Peter von Frantzius, an alumnus of Northwestern University Law School, a member of the National Rifle Association and the owner of a sporting goods store, Sports, Inc., at 608 Diversey Parkway. Capone had been following with passionate interest the reports of Frank McErlane's tommy gun exploits. After his initial failure to remove Spike O'Donnell, McErlane had turned his tommy gun upon other foes with more impressive results. Firing a burst from his car as it sped past the Ragen Athletic Club, Ralph Sheldon's hangout, he had demolished Charles Kelly, who chanced to be standing in front of the building, and maimed a Sheldonite inside. In an attempt to eradicate two beer runners for a rival gang he had sprayed a South Side saloon with about fifty missiles, wounding, though not killing his quarry. Amazed by McErlane's new weaponry, if not his aim, Capone hastened to equip his own arsenal with tommy guns. His brother John and Charlie Fischetti bought the first three for him from a dealer named Alex Korocek. It was Von Frantzius, however, a timid, myopic man with a pencil-line mustache, who became his regular armorer. Sports, Inc., furnished machine guns and other firearms that would figure in some of the most spectacular gang killings of the decade. *

The organization's greatest power derived from those close associates who held political office like Johnny Patton, the mayor of Burnham. Patton was so close an associate as to be a virtual member of the gang. He continued to keep Burnham safe for vice. His chief of police tended bar at the Arrowhead Inn, in which Capone had a controlling interest, and several town officials worked there as waiters. During periods when Prohibition agents maintained too tight a surveillance on the organization's Chicago breweries for them to produce anything except near beer the Arrowhead Inn became an important source of needle beer. Capone's trucks would haul barrels of the legal beverage from the Chicago plants to the roadhouse, with his eighteen-year-old brother Mimi bringing up the rear in a Ford coupe, accompanied by a triggerman, tommy gun at the ready, eyes peeled for hijackers. On their arrival all hands would pitch in. Mezz Mezzrow, who led the Arrowhead jazz band, described the process in his autobiography:

One day along about noon Frank Hitchcock [a part owner] yanked us all out of our pads and took us downstairs. . . . We were called out to the backyard, where we saw some men putting up a large circus tent. . . . When we went inside the tent we saw barrels of beer being lined up in long rows and a large icebox being built off to one side . . . a man named Jack, one of Capone's lieutenants, came along. He gave us a brace and bit, a box of sticks like the butcher uses to peg meat with, and some galvanized pails. Then he yelled, "One of you guys drill holes in these barrel plugs and let three-quarters of a pail run out of each barrel. Then another guy plugs up each hole with these here wooden sticks, to stop the beer from running out." .. .