Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (34 page)

EVERY KNEE SHOULD HEAVEN AND EARTH.*
Ten bullets hit Weiss, killing him almost instantly. Murray, pierced through by fifteen bullets, fell dead beside him. O'Brien, with bullets in his arm, thigh and abdomen, dragged himself to the curb. The first policeman on the scene found Peller, shot in the groin, begging people in the swelling crowd to take him to a doctor. Jacobs, bleeding from a leg wound, was supporting himself against a mailbox.

The killers ran down a back staircase, climbed through a groundfloor window into an alley, and made a clean getaway. The only clue to their escape route was a tommy gun dropped on top of a dog kennel, a block south of Superior Street. Detectives searching the ambush counted thirty-five empty tommy-gun shells and three fired shotgun cartridges. On the bed they found a gray fedora bearing the label of a Cicero haberdashery near the Hawthorne Inn. They also found in Weiss' pockets, along with the list of veniremen, $5,300 and in Paddy Murray's pockets, $1,500. O'Brien was carrying $1,500.

O'Brien, Peller and Jacobs all eventually recovered, but none had any helpful information to offer the coroner's jury. No trace of the killers was ever uncovered. Nor were the accomplices who rented the rooms for them ever identified.

While the Sbarbaro embalmers were preparing Weiss' body for burial, Capone in slippered, shirt-sleeved ease, puffing on a rich cigar, received the press at the Hawthorne Inn. "That was butchery," he said in the course of several interviews, as he dispensed cigars and drinks to the reporters. "Hymie was a good kid. He could have got out long ago and taken his and been alive today. When we were in business together in the old days, I got to know him well and used to go often to his room for a friendly visit. Torrio and me made Weiss and O'Banion. When they broke away and went into business for themselves, that was all right with us. We let 'em go and forgot about 'em. But they began to get nasty. We sent 'em word to stay in their own backyard. But they had the swell head and thought they were bigger than we were. Then O'Banion got killed. Right after Torrio was shot-and Torrio knew who shot him-I had a talk with Weiss. `What do you want to do, get yourself killed before you're thirty?' I said to him. [Weiss died at the age of twenty-eight; he was a year older than Capone.] 'You'd better get some sense while a few of us are left alive.' He could still have got along with me. But he wouldn't listen to me. Forty times I've tried to arrange things so we'd have peace and life would be worth living. Who wants to be tagged around night and day by guards? I don't, for one. There was, and there is, plenty of business for us all and competition needn't be a matter of murder, anyway. But Weiss couldn't be told anything. I suppose you couldn't have told him a week ago that he'd be dead today. There are some reasonable fellows in his outfit, and if they want peace I'm for it now, as I have always been.

"I'm sorry Hymie was killed, but I didn't have anything to do with it. I phoned the detective bureau that I'd come in if they wanted me, but they told me they didn't want me. I knew I'd be blamed for it. There's enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street. I don't want to end up in the gutter punctured by machine gun slugs, so why should I kill Weiss?"

The rhetorical question brought a growl of disgust from Chief of Detectives Schoemaker. "He knows why," he told the reporters, "and so does everyone else. He had them killed." Chief of Police Collins agreed. It was his contention that when Capone went to New York at Christmastime, he hired more bodyguards, bringing the total to eighteen, and picked four of them to kill Weiss. Asked why, then, Capone remained at liberty, Collins replied: "It's a waste of time to arrest him. He's been in before on other murder charges. He has his alibi."

A group of Hymie Weiss' boyhood classmates at St. Malachy's School bore his bronze casket with silver fittings to the Sbarbaro hearse. The last rites of the church having been denied him, he was buried in unconsecrated ground at Mount Carmel Cemetery. The floral tributes and general display fell considerably below gangster standards. The only underworld figures of any stature to attend were Schemer Drucci and Bugs Moran, who now jointly ruled the O'Banionites, and Maxie Eisen, the fish and meat market racketeer.

No important politicians attended Weiss' funeral, but placards fastened to the mourners' automobiles advertised a number of political candidates-JOHN SBARBARO FOR MUNICIPAL JUDGE . . . JOE SAVAGE FOR COUNTY JUDGE . . . KING-ELLER-GRAYDON FOR SANITARY DISTRICT TRUSTEES. . . .

October 21-The Hotel Sherman Treaty

The revelations that followed Weiss' death held a disagreeable surprise for Capone. He still assumed Joe Saltis and Frankie McErlane to be his allies. The 200-odd saloons they operated with Dingbat O'Berta had been a major outlet for his beer and whiskey. But it now appeared from the lists of veniremen and state's witnesses found in Weiss' possession that a shift of allegiance had occurred; these supposed allies must have secretly entered into a pact with his enemies. Further investigation by Capone indicated that Saltis had been about to throw his saloon business Weiss' way. Such perfidy would normally have demanded a crushing reprisal, but Capone, in his eagerness to reestablish peace among the gangs and restore territorial boundaries as they existed in Torrio's prime, decided to overlook it for the moment.

The initial impetus toward peace came this time from Saltis. Terrified of what Capone might do to him, he turned for advice to Dingbat O'Berta, who was awaiting a separate trial for the murder of Mitters Foley. Dingbat consulted Maxie Eisen, whom the underworld respected as a man of rare wisdom and experience. It was Eisen's opinion that Saltis' safety, once he regained his freedom, lay in a general armistice, and he offered to try to arrange it. He went first to Tony Lombardo and asked him to sound out his patron. Lombardo reported back to Eisen the next day: Capone desired nothing so much as peace. After two pourparlers in the office of Billy Skidmore, the ward heeler, court fixer and gambling magnate, the gang leaders and their chief adjutants, thirty men in all, convened at the Hotel Sherman, which stood within the shadows of both City Hall and police headquarters. They came, as agreed, without arms or bodyguards. The Capone delegates numbered, besides Al Capone, his brother Ralph, Tony Lombardo, Jake Guzik and Ed Vogel of Cicero. From the North Side there were Drucci; Bugs Moran; Potatoes Kaufman; Frank Foster, alias Citro, an importer of Canadian whiskey; Jack Zuta, whoremaster and director of the O'Banionites' vice operations; and, from the O'Donnell gang, the brothers Myles and- Klondike. Billy Skidmore and Christian P. "Barney" Bertche, another prominent figure in the gambling world, formerly a safecracker, were present. While loosely affiliated with the North Siders, Skidmore and Bertche each ran his own independent gambling houses. Ralph Sheldon was the only member of his gang on hand, and Maxie Eisen represented the Saltis-McErlane-O'Berta interests.

Little effort was made to keep the meeting secret. A detective from across the street sat in as an observer. Reporters, though excluded from the meeting room itself, waited in the corridor outside and were apprized of every development. Eisen opened the meeting with an appeal to common sense. "Let's give each other a break," he said. "We're a bunch of saps, killing each other this way and giving the cops a laugh." Capone, who dominated the proceedings as much by the force of his personality as by the size and power of his organization, then submitted a five-point treaty:

1. All standing grievances and feuds to be buried-a general amnesty.

2. The renunciation of violence as a means of settling intergang disputes; arbitration instead.

3. An end to "ribbing" (a common weapon of psychological warfare among gangsters, involving malicious gossip. If A wished to destroy B without risking an open attack, he might tell C that A was plotting against him, thus inciting C to strike first. Or he might feed the press a story about A sure to enrage C) .

4. No more stealing another gang's customers; no encroachments upon their established territories.

5. The head of each gang to punish violations committed by any member.

According to the reapportionment of territory, the O'Banionites were to withdraw from all the sectors they had invaded since O'Banion's death and confine their activities to the Forty-second and Fortythird wards. There and there only they could enjoy exclusive franchises to the sale of beer and liquor, to prostitution and gambling. This limitation imposed no great hardship, for the two wards constituted a densely populous business and residential area almost five miles square, stretching east to west from Lake Michigan to the Chicago River and north to south from Belden Avenue to Wacker Drive. The Saltis-McErlane gang was to divide equally with the Sheldon gang a portion of southwest Chicago, roughly three miles square, lying between the lake and the river. Skidmore and Bertche could operate their gambling houses as before, but under Capone's jurisdiction. For the smaller gangs, like Marty Guilfoyle's, Capone made provision out of his holdings. The determination of the O'Donnells' territory he reserved to a later meeting, and in view of their grievous offenses against him it would depend on how scrupulously they observed the terms of the treaty. This left to Capone nearly all Chicago below Madison Street and most of the suburbs, a domain embracing about 20,000 speakeasies and only he and his top executives knew how many roadhouses, gambling dens and brothels.

"I told them we're making a shooting gallery out of a great business," Capone recalled later, "and nobody's profiting by it. It's hard and dangerous work and when a fellow works hard at any line of business, he wants to go home and forget it. He don't want to be afraid to sit near a window or open a door. Why not put up our guns and treat our business like any other man treats his, as something to work at in the daytime and forget when he goes home at night? There's plenty of beer business for everybody-why kill each other over it?"

He added reasons of paternal sentiment. "I wanted to stop all that because I couldn't stand hearing my little kid ask why I didn't stay home. I had been living at the Hawthorne Inn for 14 months. He's been sick for three years-mastoid infection and operations-and I've got to take care of him and his mother. If it wasn't for him, I'd have said: `To hell with you fellows! We'll shoot it out.' But I couldn't say that, knowing it might mean they'd bring me home some night punctured with machine gun fire. And I couldn't see why those fellows would want to die that way either."

The conferees accepted the treaty with little argument. "We shook hands and made peace and we promised each other that if anything ever came up between us that made us mad, we'd get together and talk it over peaceably and straighten it out."

The meeting adjourned to Diamond Joe Esposito's Bella Napoli Cafe for a peace celebration. It was a night of ghastly gaiety. "A feast of ghouls," a reporter whom Capone allowed to join the revels called it. Arm in arm, back-slapping, howling with laughter, former enemies recalled how they had tried to kill one another, merrily described the tortures they had inflicted on their captives, boasted of old murders to the victims' friends.

"Remember that night when your car was chased by two of ours," one hoodlum asked another, playfully prodding him.

"I sure do."

"Well [roguish chuckle], we were going to kill you, but you had a woman with you."

They doubled up with glee.

In the deepening vinous haze the atmosphere grew cloying with expressions of remorse, entreaties for forgiveness, sentimental tears, oaths of eternal friendship. Each gang leader made a speech. "You know," said one of them, "I'd never have had my boys shoot any of yours if it hadn't been for the newspapers. Every time there'd be a little shooting affair the papers would print the names of the gang who did it. Well, when any of my boys were shot up and the papers came out with the right hunch as to who did it, I just naturally decided that in honor I'd have to have a few guys bumped myself."

On November 7 Hymie Weiss' last complot bore posthumous fruit. The jury acquitted Joe Saltis and Lefty Koncil, and the separate pending trial of Dingbat O'Berta was removed from the court calendar. "I expected a different verdict on the evidence presented," said Judge Harry B. Miller in a wistful understatement. "I think the evidence warranted a verdict of guilty." Special Prosecutor McDonald, whose grand jury had indicted the trio, was blunter. "A number of unusual and significant circumstances arose both prior to and during the prosecution of the trial," he said. "Prior to the trial two of the state's important witnesses disappeared, the immediate members of their families either refusing or being unable to give any information or clue as to their whereabouts. . . ... He spoke of the discovery in Hymie Weiss' safe of "the identical copy of the list of the state's witnesses that had been furnished counsel for the defendants by order of the court," and he concluded: "In addition to these significant facts, certain of the state's witnesses testified to having been threatened with violence in the event they testified against the defendants, and of having been approached with offers of bribery for either withholding their testimony or testifying falsely."

The day before Christmas the Illinois Supreme Court granted Scalise and Anselmi, who had served seven months of their fourteenyear sentence in Joliet, a new trial on their lawyer's plea that if they were guilty of murder, the sentence was "but a mockery of justice" and if guilty of only manslaughter, "an injustice." They were released on bail of $25,000 to await the third trial.

They returned to an underworld where all was peaceful. "Just like the old days," as Capone remarked to a reporter. "They [the O'Banion gang] stay on the North Side and I stay in Cicero and if we meet on the street, we say `hello' and shake hands. Better, ain't it?"