Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (27 page)

After we let out the right amount from a barrel, another guy came along with a large pail that had a pump and gauge attached to it. In this pail was a concoction of ginger ale and alcohol, just enough to equal the amount of beer that was drawn off. This mixture was pumped into each barrel, plus thirty pounds of air, and you had a barrel of real suds. I think they got as high as seventyfive bucks for this spiked stuff.

Jack showed up for the next maneuver. That cat was stronger than Samson after a raw steak dinner. He would roll a barrel over so the plug was facing up, then break off the meat stick and place a new plug over the old one. With one mighty swing of a big wooden sledgehammer he would drive the new plug all the way in, forcing the old one clean into the barrel. In all the time I understudied at this spiking routine, I never saw Jack take a second swing at a plug.

Capone, who had assumed the role of father to his younger brothers and sisters, was disturbed when Mimi became attached to a singer in the band. "Get her out of here," he ordered Mezzrow. "If I hear of any more stuff about her and Mimi, you're booked to go too."

"I won't fire her," said Mezzrow, frightened by his own temerity. "She's one of the best entertainers we got around here. Why don't you keep Mimi out of here, if that's the way you feel about it?"

"She can't sing anyway."

"Can't sing. Why, you couldn't even tell good whiskey if you smelled it and that's your racket, so how do you figure to tell me about music?"

Capone turned, laughing, to a group of his henchmen. "Listen to the Pro-fes-sor! The kid's got plenty of guts." He turned back to Mezzrow, the laughter fading. "But if I ever catch Mimi fooling around here it won't be good for the both of you."

Under the presidency of Joseph Klenha Cicero's round-the-clock illicit resorts grew to number more than 100 gambling dens, many hundreds of beer flats, saloons and speakeasies and brothels by the score. Here Capone was the law. The real seat of municipal administration was the Hawthorne Inn. The gang sometimes stored its liquor in the basement of the Town Hall. Once when Klenha neglected to carry out an order, Capone knocked him down the Town Hall steps and kicked him as he struggled to rise. A policeman patrolling the block calmly watched, shrugged, and moved on. Another time, as the town council was about to ratify an ordinance displeasing to Capone, a squad of his toughs marched into the council chamber, dragged the chairman outside, and blackjacked him. The objectionable ordinance was rescinded.

Yet there remained a thorn in Capone's side. This was a young newspaper editor, the youngest, in fact, in the country. Robert St. John was barely twenty-one when an older friend, an advertising man, Jack Carmichael, proposed that they start a weekly newspaper in Cicero. The town already had one paper, the Cicero Life, but St. John agreed with Carmichael that it was growing fast enough to support two. They formed a publishing corporation. Under Illinois law every corporation required at least three directors and so they took in a friend of St. John's, Tom Foss.*
St. John and Carmichael each held 49 percent of the stock, Foss 2 percent. The Cicero Life confined itself to reporting social trivia, but from its first issue in 1922, the Tribune devoted its front page to the activities of the Capone organization and the editorial page to attacking the alliance between the gangsters and the local politicians. At about the same time, in the adjoining town of Berwyn, St. John's brother Archer founded the Berwyn Beacon with a policy identical to the Tribune's.

Capone first tried to starve out the crusaders. Emissaries from both the Hawthorne Inn and the Town Hall roamed Cicero, warning its merchants against advertising in the Tribune. The defiant were subjected to official harassment. The tax assessor would increase the valuation of their property. NO PARKING signs would suddenly appear at the curb in front of their door. Fire and health inspectors would find them guilty of various violations. In exceptionally stubborn cases Capone's strong arm men might intervene with a slugging or bombing. The Tribune managed nevertheless to sell enough space to survive.

Capone tried a new tack. At his instructions Louis Cowan, whose newsstand the Tribune overlooked, felt out St. John about the possibility of selling the paper. He failed to arouse a flicker of interest.

In 1925 the Capone syndicate opened a new brothel on the southern boundary of Cicero, near the Hawthorne Race Track. St. John assigned a reporter to investigate it. Two weeks later the reporter resigned by registered letter. He never revisited the Tribune office, not even to collect the salary due him. St. John took over the investigation himself. The brothel, he discovered, also contained a death chamber. Recalling his experience years later, he wrote:

One night I put on shabby clothes, emptied my pockets of all identification and set out.

The place was a square, unpainted frame building two stories high and the size of a small armory. . . . It was entered through a room large enough for one table and a miniature bar. .. . This was not a drinking establishment. What was served at the bar was near beer, obviously designed to discourage any interest in lingering longer than necessary in this antechamber.. . .

To pass from the bar into the main building, it was necessary to go through a series of three doors only a foot or two apart. The first and third were hinged on the right; the middle one on the left. The bartender was the establishment's "spotter." He controlled all three doors with electric buttons. It was possible for him to allow a client to get through the first door and then lock all three electrically, thus imprisoning the visitor. The establishment's "bouncer" sat at a small table just inside the main building. The barman could communicate with him by house telephone. If a man marked for extermination were to be locked in the, small corridor with the three doors, it was simple for the bouncer to fire a few bullets through the door on his side. Although the place had been open for business only about two weeks, the doors already looked like pieces of Swiss cheese and there were black stains on the floor and walls of the corridor.

The ground floor of the main building was a single large room, its four walls lined with wooden benches. A client coming from the bar took a seat on a bench just to the left or right of the bar door.

The procedure from then on was obvious at a glance. A girl wearing only the two most essential feminine garments would come down from upstairs, enter the large waiting room through a door in the far wall, make a slow circuit of the room, greeting anyone she already knew, and then would go back upstairs, accompanied by the man who occupied the spot on the bench just to the left or right of the far door. The man next to the place now vacated would move into it. This was a signal for all the other bench warmers to move a foot or two closer, ultimately leaving a vacancy by the bar door. The bouncer would then communicate by phone with the barman, who would press his electric buttons and allow another client to enter.

Little conversation was taking place. Traffic moved rapidly. It took about half an hour to get from entrance to exit. In that time nearly one hundred different girls would each have made two appearances. When a man had worked his way to a place by the exit door, he had the privilege of leaving with the next girl going upstairs or, if he had taken a fancy to some particular female employee during the half hour, he could wait for her... .

The closer I got to the exit door, the more frightened I became. I was still not yet a man, although I shaved regularly. . . . I had undertaken to try, almost singlehanded, to crush or at least to drive out of town one of the most powerful underworld organizations America had ever known, but that night I was afraid for many reasons.

During the half hour of waiting I studied the faces of hundreds of girls. I finally found one whom I thought perhaps I could trust. She was older than the others and looked intelligent. I waited for her.

One paid the five-dollar fee just before going upstairs, where there were at least one hundred small rooms.

The girl's name was Helen. I had brought ten ten-dollar bills with me, and handed her one as soon as she had locked the door. Stumblingly I explained that I was a "writer." I had come here only to get "material." Would she be willing just to talk to me for the next fifteen minutes?

I was lucky in the choice I made. . . . She answered every question I asked with what seemed like honesty. .. .

As the night advanced, Helen passed him along to other talkative girls until he had amassed "enough material for a modern Moll Flanders." At about 4 A.M. word reached the upper regions of the bordello that Ralph Capone had arrived to check the night's receipts. St. John left by a fire escape.

The story that filled the entire next issue of the Tribune, one of the longest, most detailed exposes of a whorehouse ever published by a newspaper, sold thousands of extra copies, scandalized respectable Ciceronians and infuriated Capone. A result particularly gratifying to the author was a meeting of clergymen from Cicero and the surrounding Capone-infested communities. It was organized by the Reverend Henry C. Hoover of Berwyn, a tall, bony young man not much older than St. John, whose studious expression was enhanced by a pince-nez. Out of that meeting grew the West Suburban Citizens' Association dedicated to combating gangsterism. As an initial step, a delegation called on local officials like President Klenha and Cicero's chief of police, Theodore Svoboda, on County Sheriff Hoffman and State's Attorney Crowe. Everywhere they were courteously received and promised swift action. No action followed. So the Citizens' Association took the law into its own hands. It appointed an action committee budgeted at $1,000, with no questions asked and no explanations wanted. The committee handed over the money to a member of the Weiss gang. Early one morning, after the last customer had left, the new whorehouse burned to the ground.

The day after the fire Cowan called on St. John. "Capone's sore," he said. "Tell him I'm sore, too," the editor replied. He was sore, he added recklessly, because the gang wouldn't clear out and leave the town alone.

When St. John approached his office two mornings later at about eight thirty, Cowan was already at his newsstand. On the northeast corner of Fifty-second Avenue a policeman was standing in front of a cigar store, reading a newspaper. On the opposite corner another policeman was leaning against a mailbox. As St. John reached the middle of the avenue, he saw a big black car heading toward him at top speed. It screeched to a halt a few feet away. Of the four men who jumped out he recognized Ralph Capone and a hoodlum named Pete Pizak. The two others were unknown to him. Capone stood aside, barking commands. Pizak advanced, holding a pistol by the barrel. The second man had a blackjack, and the third swung a woolen sock with a cake of soap in the toe. Wielded by a skilled hand, this last weapon, striking the base of the victim's brain, could kill without leaving a noticeable mark. Neither of the policemen stirred. St. John flung himself to the ground, curled up into a ball, and covered his head with his hands. After the first few blows he lost consciousness.

In Berwyn the same morning a mayoral election was beginning. Archer St. John, who ran his newspaper all by himself, had announced a special edition that would expose Capone's political alliances. Before he could start the press run, he was hustled into a car at gunpoint, handcuffed, blindfolded, and held prisoner until the balloting ended.

Robert St. John spent a week in the hospital. When he stopped at the cashier's office to pay his bill, he was told that somebody had already paid it. The cashier described this benefactor as dark and husky with a long scar across his cheek.

Before returning to his desk, the young editor went to the Town Hall to see Chief of Police Svoboda. He demanded warrants for the arrest of Ralph Capone and Pete Pizak on charges of assault and battery and "John Doe" warrants against his two other assailants. Svoboda was aghast. He could not, he explained, issue warrants against members of the Capone gang. He implored St. John not to embarrass him. If St. John had to swear out warrants, let him apply to the police of another town. But even if he succeeded, what cop would have the nerve to serve them? St. John stood his ground. At length Svoboda seemed to give in. If St. John came back next day, he promised, the warrants would be ready.

In the morning Svoboda directed him to a room on the second floor. He found it empty. Presently, a bulky figure lumbered through the door, closed it behind him, and turned toward St. John, smiling and holding out his hand. He was impeccably dressed-blue serge suit, blue pocket handkerchief, blue necktie with a diamond stickpin, black homburg and shoes shined to a high gloss. The scar barely showed through the heavy coating of powder. Though they had never spoken, St. John knew Capone by sight.

The gang leader was all conciliation and flattery. He had heard a lot about St. John and was delighted to meet him at last. He hastened to correct any bad impressions St. John might have. "I'm an all right guy," he said. "Sure I got a racket. So's everybody. Most guys hurt people. I don't hurt nobody. Only them that get in my way." Never would he harm a hair of a newspaperman's head. Newspapermen were too valuable to him. They gave his business the kind of advertising no amount of money could buy. He apologized for the beating. He swore that he had forbidden his men to lay a finger on St. John. Unhappily, Ralph and his companions were homeward bound from an all-night party when they spotted the editor, and anger, stoked by alcohol, had got the better of them. As he talked, Capone produced a wad of greenbacks. It was he himself, he disclosed, fingering the cash, who had paid the hospital bill, but, of course, that hardly compensated St. John for the loss of his time. How much was it worth-five hundred? Seven hundred? A thousand? St. John walked out, slamming the door.