Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (30 page)

The brothers Agostino and Antonio Morici, macaroni manufacturers and purveyors of yeast and sugar to Little Italy's whiskey distillers, had also contributed handsomely to the first defense fund. Declaring their generosity at an end, they hired bodyguards to protect them against Tropea's wrath. Unfortunately, the bodyguards did not accompany them on the snowy night of January 27, when they drove north toward the Lakeside Place house they had recently bought from the fugitive Jim Genna. With Baldelli at the wheel, the collectors overtook them and filled them with buckshot, sending their car hurtling into a signboard.

The friends and family of the murdered men were quick to retaliate. In the case of Tropea his fellow gangsters intervened when they discovered that he had been pocketing part of the defense funds. On February 15 two shotgun blasts, delivered as the Scourge was strolling along Halsted Street, ended his career. Nine days later Vito Bascone's body was found in a ditch in Stickney, a bullet hole between his eyes and the index finger of each hand shot off, presumably when he lifted them in last-minute supplication. At the bottom of a stone quarry nearby lay the ruins of Baldelli's car which had been rolled into it from the road above. The body of Baldelli himself turned up the same night on an ash heap in a North Chicago alley. He had been beaten, kicked, hacked, and finally shot.

Tony Finalli died of shotgun wounds on March 7. Felipe Gnolfo survived three attempts against his life but succumbed to a fourth in 1930, bringing the number of killings attributable to the ScaliseAnselmi fund-raising drive to eight.

In the second trial, begun on February 7, the same difficulties were encountered completing a jury. Of the first 246 veniremen called, all but 4 managed to disqualify themselves. One of them, Orval W. Payne, told judge Brothers why: "It wouldn't be healthy to bring in a verdict of guilty. Pressure is brought to bear on our families. I'd have to carry a gun for the rest of my life."

The defendants won an acquittal thanks mainly to two defense witnesses who swore that Mike Genna fired at the detectives before they fired at him. In May Scalise and Anselmi went to Joliet to begin the fourteen-year sentence imposed by judge Brothers after the first trial. But Chicago had not heard the last of them.

The day Bascone and Baldelli were killed the Vice President of the United States, Charles G. Dawes, presented to Congress, at the request of the Better Government Association of Chicago and Cook County, a petition demanding a federal investigation of outlawry in the area:

There has been growing up in this community [the petition read] a reign of lawlessness and terror, openly defying not only the Constitution and laws of the State of Illinois, but the Constitution and laws of the United States.

There has been for a long time in this city of Chicago a colony of unnaturalized persons, hostile to our institutions and laws, who have formed a supergovernment of their own-feudists, black handers, members of the Mafia-who levy tribute upon citizens and enforce collections by terrorizing, kidnapping and assassinations.

There are other gangs, such as the O'Donnells, the McErlanes, Ragens Colts, Torrio and others, some of whom are citizens of the United States.

Many of these aliens have become fabulously rich as rum-runners and bootleggers, working in collusion with police and other officials, building up a monopoly in this unlawful business and dividing the territory of the county among themselves under penalty of death to all intruding competitors.

Evidence multiplies daily that many public officials are in secret alliance with underworld assassins, gunmen, rum-runners, bootleggers, thugs, ballot box stuffers and repeaters, that a ring of politicians and public officials operating through criminals and with dummy directors are conducting a number of breweries and are selling beer under police protection, police officials, working out of the principal law enforcement office of the city, having been convoying liquor-namely alcohol, whisky and beer-and that one such police officer who is under Federal indictment is still acting as a police officer... .

The petition went on to list breweries so operated. It concluded with a tabulation of Chicago bombings perpetrated during 1925, more than 100 of them, only a few of which led to prosecution and none to any serious penalties. Congress referred the petition to the Immigration Committee.

The petitioners hurled their harshest accusations at the state's attorney. Few officeholders had ever promised so much and delivered so little. When first elected in 1921 with Big Bill Thompson's Republican slate, Crowe manfully told the Cook County police, "You bring 'em in and I'll prosecute 'em." The cases he actually prosecuted were vastly outnumbered by the hundreds of indictments he failed to follow up. Though he successfully prosecuted Fred Lundin, mainly to wreck the Thompson clique with whom he had broken, he never acted upon the true bills returned against thirty-nine other peculating members of the Board of Education.

During Crowe's first two terms the number of murders in Cook County almost doubled, an increase he attributed, logically enough, to Prohibition. Of the 349 victims, 215 were gangsters killed in the beer wars. Yet despite the size of Crowe's staff-70 assistant state's attorneys and 50 police, the largest in the history of the office-it obtained only 128 convictions for murder, none involving gangsters, and only 8 murderers went to the gallows. Bombings during the same period totaled 369 without a single conviction. While the rise of gangsterism accounted for a good deal of these statistics, only its partnership with police and politicians could explain the low percentage of convictions. There were 2,309 convictions for major crimes of every kind in 1921; in 1923 there were 1,344. Of the felony charges brought before the Municipal Court in 1923, 23,862 were either reduced to lesser offenses or dropped altogether.

The state's attorney was a man of professorial mien, heavy-browed, with a small, sharp nose, small eyes obscured by thick tortoiseshellrimmed lenses, and a thin mouth frequently arched in an expression of lofty scorn. He craved power and in pursuit of it drew upon a gift for oratory. Crime inspired some of his loftiest flights. "Give me plenty of judges," he once declaimed, "so I can try the killer while the blood of his victim is still warm!"

Robert Emmett Crowe was of Irish extraction, born in Peoria in 1879. For three years after graduating from Yale Law School he practiced privately with the Chicago firm of Moran, Mayer & Meyer. He married Candida Cuneo, the daughter of an Italian merchant who founded Chicago's oldest wholesale produce firm. At thirty he entered politics as an assistant state's attorney on the staff of John E. W. Wayman, the Republican politician, tolerant of the Levee's vice and gambling overlords until reform groups obliged him to close the redlight district. Under the Democratic administration of Mayor Carter H. Harrison, Jr., begun in 1914, Crowe served a year as an assistant city corporation counsel and a year as a Cook County circuit court judge. In 1919 he was named chief justice of the Criminal Court, the youngest man, at thirty-eight, ever to have sat on that bench. By then he had joined the Thompson faction, which two years later carried him to the post of state's attorney. It was in the same elections that Thompson won the mayoralty for the second time and Len Small, the governorship.

Crowe's tenure was not without merit. He transformed the office of state's attorney, expanding its scope of operations and recruiting vigorous, ambitious young law school alumni. The normal quota of judges available to the state's attorney was six. Crowe's oratory in appeals to administrative and civic committees brought about an increase of twenty. His eloquence further obtained for his budget an extra $100,000 a year with which to retain special assistants, and at his urging 1,000 policemen were added to the city force.

Crowe recognized the folly of Prohibition and the unenforceability of the Volstead Act, and he repeatedly inveighed against them. Eighty percent of the Cook County population, he contended, was wet, and this included most judges and jurors. "A specimen of the idiocy to which the dry law reduces otherwise sane men," he said in a notable speech, "is the recent wordy war between Mayor Dever and the United States District Attorney [Edwin A.] Olson in Washington. Dever says the town is dry because he dried it up and because he threatened to report Olson to President Coolidge, which made Olson get busy. Olson testified that in spite of all his efforts, which eventually dried the town, it again became wet because the mayor's police are corrupt. In other words, each of these officials says the town is dry because he dried it and wet because the other fellow hasn't dried it. That is, it is both wet and dry!

"I'll tell you something: the town is wet and the county is wet, and nobody can dry them up. They holler about Sheriff Hoffman permitting the county to run wide open. Well, it is wide open. But for every dive in the county there are two in the city, and everybody in Chicago knows it except Dever.

"Why don't I get busy and stop it? For the simple reason that I am running a law office, not a police station. If Chicago wants things cleaned up, let somebody bring the law violators in here and I'll send them to the penitentiary. But I will not be both arresting officer and prosecutor."

Among Crowe's major court victories (as he never tired of reminding the public) was the breakup of a statewide auto-theft ring. He also assigned one of his crack assistants, Charles Gorman, to the prosecution of Fred "Frenchy" Mader, president of the Building Trades Council. With bombs and threats of strikes Mader had been extorting from Chicago construction firms 10 percent of the costs whenever they put up a new building. Despite the bribery of jurors and the intimidation of witnesses, Mader and forty-nine members of his gang were convicted. They served no prison sentence. Governor Small pardoned them all.

"Probably the worst handicap this office confronts is Len Small's parole and pardon system," said Crowe. "He lets them out as fast as we put them in. It takes us two weeks to get the guilty man convicted and it takes the Governor two seconds to sign his name on a pardon blank. In 1923, for example, I put 59 burglars and 97 robbers in Joliet, and Small released 88 burglars and 97 robbers!"

But first and last Crowe was the total politician, a magisterial player of the power game. A running mate of Thompson and Small in the 1921 elections, he broke with their machine over the control of Chicago's richest single source of patronage and graft-the Police Department. Thompson had chosen for police chief Charles C. Fitzmorris, a former city editor on William Randolph Hearst's Chicago American and no admirer of Crowe. The state's attorney formed his own anti-Thompson, anti-Small cabal within the party fold.

The co-drafters of the petition to Congress, Dean Edward T. Lee of Chicago's John Marshall Law School, and Dr. Elmer T. Williams, director of law enforcement for the Better Government Association, accused Crowe of consorting with criminals. He once attended a banquet given by the Gennas, they charged. "Liarsl" retorted Crowe and dismissed the whole petition as a publicity stunt, part of a political campaign to "put over Diamond Joe Esposito and others like him" in the coming primary. Diamond Joe thereupon revealed that during the previous elections, when he refused to support Crowe's c ndidacy, Crowe sent Jim Genna to him with threatening messages. Throughout his first term, Diamond Joe maintained, the state's attorney kept vengefully persecuting him; again and again his detectives raided the Bella Napoli Cafe.

The recriminations were still echoing when there occurred a murder that would lead to the fullest disclosure yet of the complicity between public officials and outlaws. As the Illinois Crime Survey summarized it, the cause celebre involved "most of the aspects of organized crime."

THE questions tantalized Chicagoans all that spring and summer: What had an assistant state's attorney been doing, driving around Cicero with four notorious hoodlums? What had he been doing, drinking bootleg beer with them, when only a few months earlier he had tried hard (or so it seemed at the time) to send two of them to the gallows?