Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (36 page)

Thompson's return to City Hall for a third term heralded an era of bloodshed, racketeering and civic corruption which made the earlier Chicago seem a model of law and order. His first appointments set the tone of his administration. For chief of police he brought Michael Hughes back from obscurity in the Highway Patrol Department. A cousin of State's Attorney Crowe, Hughes had resigned as chief of detectives during Mayor Dever's term when censured for attending the testimonial banquet to Dion O'Banion. For city controller Thompson chose his former chief of police, Charles Fitzmor- ris, who once publicly admitted: "Sixty percent of my police are in the bootleg business," and for city sealer, Daniel Serritella, who proceeded to pervert the function of his office by conspiring with merchants to short-weight the consumer. Serritella served as Capone's agent in the City Council. For corporation counsel of Chicago the mayor appointed his old friend Samuel Ettelson, who also represented the financial pirate Samuel Insull. Morris Eller's pay as sanitary trustee was augmented by the pay of city collector. Dr. Arnold Kebel, the Thompson family physician, became the new health commissioner.

Not long after the election a Daily News reporter asked a deputy commissioner of police, William P. Russell, how it happened that policy numbers racketeers were operating openly in his district. "Mayor Thompson was elected on the open town platform," Russell replied. "I assume the people knew what they wanted when they voted for him. . . . I haven't had any order from downtown to interfere in the policy racket and until I do get such orders you can bet I'm going to keep my hands off. . . . Personally, I don't propose to get mixed up in any jam that will send me to the sticks. . . . If the downtown authorities want this part of the city closed up, the downtown authorities will have to issue an order. I'm certainly not going to attempt it on my own."

No such order ever came. But Russell's discretion was remembered in his favor. He eventually succeeded Hughes as chief of police.

Within a month of the election Capone had enlarged his Hotel Metropole headquarters to fifty rooms, reserving the Hawthorne Inn as a secondary base for suburban operations. The Metropole was convenient to both City Hall and the Police Department. From the former came a steady stream of purchasable magistrates, administrators and politicians. From the latter-in effect, a garrison of mercenaries at the disposal of the highest-paying condottiere-came police officers to collect their reward for such services as escorting consignments of liquor to their destination, warning of raids about to be staged to pacify the reform element, furnishing Capone's triggermen with officially stamped cards, reading: "To the Police DepartmentYou will extend the courtesies of this department to the bearer." Phil D'Andrea wore the star of a Municipal Court bailiff and drew a salary of $200 a month from the city. Usually, the police either ignored the crimes committed by D'Andrea and his brethren or entered them in the records as "unsolved." Capone estimated the total payoff to police from all sources at $80,000,000 a year. His own payroll listed roughly half the entire Chicago police force.

Sunday morning after church was the time for conferences and money changing hands. Then the Metropole teemed with police, politicians and gangsters. But their activities were not confined to business. They could slake their thirst at a blind pig operated in the lobby by a ward boss. Capone and his lieutenants had their own upper-story service bars. The management gave them storage space in the basement for their private stock of wines and liquor, more than $100,000 worth. Accessible women freely roamed the hotel. Nearly every top Caponeite had a favorite whom he set up in one of the suites. Several rooms were given over to gambling. Capone was a compulsive gambler and an unlucky one, who seldom staked less than $1,000 on a throw of dice and as much as $100,000 on the spin of a roulette wheel or a horse race. At the horse or dog track he never backed his choice to place, only to win. Because he lost so heavily and lived so extravagantly, Capone could accumulate no great fortune. He told the Tribune police reporter, Jake Lingle, his favorite newspaperman and the best informed on underworld activities, that he had dropped almost $10,000,000 on horse races alone since coming to Chicago.

The Hotel Metropole was a landmark in the First Ward where Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna had long reigned. Capone reduced them to the status of satellites. Summoning them to his suite, he warned them that their continued prosperity would depend on their usefulness to the gang; without the gang's backing, they could not hope to win reelection and enjoy their old privileges. "We don't want no trouble," Capone said, using a favorite expression. The aldermen put up no resistance. "My God, what could I say?" Kenna told his followers after the meeting. "Suppose he said he was going to take over the organization. What could we do then? We're lucky to get as good a break as we did."

How high Capone's stock rose under the new Thompson administration was patent on May 15, when the Italian flier Commander Francesco de Pinedo, circling the globe as Mussolini's goodwill ambassador in his hydroplane the Santa Maria II, landed on Lake Michigan off Chicago's Grant Park. The welcoming committee consisted of the Italian consul, Italo Canini; the president of the city's Fascisti, Ugo Galli; the collector of customs, Anthony Czarnecki; officers of the Sixth Air Corps; Mayor Thompson's personal representative, judge Bernard Barasa; and Al Capone. Capone was among the first to shake De Pinedo's hand as he stepped ashore. Some Chicagoans questioned the propriety of including Capone. This drew a sorry admission from the police. An anti-Fascist demonstration was expected, they claimed, and they were not sure of being able to prevent a riot. So they had asked Capone to serve on the committee, believing that he could quell any riotous anti-Fascisti. As it happened, the need never arose. The demonstrators were few and orderly.

The month of June brought Capone a satisfaction of another kind. The third trial of Scalise and Anselmi, to whom he had been rendering moral and material aid ever since they had killed Detectives Walsh and Olson two years before, began on the ninth. The familiar problem of completing a jury-100 veniremen got themselves excused-delayed the proceedings a week. Taking the witness stand on June 22, Scalise admitted he fired a bullet-only one-at the detectives. The burden of Counselor Nash's summation was that his clients had acted in self-defense against "unwarranted police aggression." The jury voted "Not guilty." "There's nothing more to be done," said Detective Walsh's widow. "My husband and his friend were killed by these men who now have a crowd waiting to shake their hand. I give up."

Capone gave a banquet to celebrate the acquittal. Champagne was the principal beverage, vintage champagne imported from Canada at $20 a bottle, and it flowed abundantly as toast after toast was drunk to the jury that set the guests of honor free. More than 100 celebrants jammed the dining room, among them the elite of the Little Italy underworld. The life of the party was a flip, strutting, bandboxical Sicilian gunman, a crony of Scalise and Anselmi, Giuseppe Giunta, called Hop Toad because of his nimbleness on a dance floor. The festivities reached a climax in a sham battle with popping champagne corks for missiles. Surveying the merry, drenched and drunken scene, Capone could hardly have imagined that three of his guests would soon join a conspiracy to destroy him. They were Hop Toad Giunta, Scalise and Anselmi.

"The War of the Sicilian Succession," as one crime reporter called it, became inevitable when Tony Lombardo, with Capone's backing, attained the coveted presidency of the Unione Siciliane. The runner-up was Joseph Aiello, who with his eight brothers and countless cousins had replaced the Gennas as the kingpins of Little Italy's alky industry. He was a squat, black-browed figure, who lived regally in a three-story mansion. What appeared to be leather-bound volumes covered the living room walls from floor to ceiling. They were imitations, masking a store of arms and explosives. For years Aiello and Lombardo had been profitably associated both as powers in the Unione Siciliane and in the cheese import, bakery, brokerage commission, alky cooking and other businesses. Political contention within the Unione damaged the relationship, and it broke up alto gether after Lombardo won the presidential election. Bent upon eliminating his opponent as well as the gang chieftain behind him, Aiello formed an alliance on the North Side with the O'Banionites, now captained by Bugs Moran, and on the West Side with Billy Skidmore, Barney Bertsche and Jack Zuta.

The word spread through gangland that the Aiellos would pay $50,000 to anybody who killed Capone. Between the spring and fall of 1927 four free-lance out-of-town torpedoes came to Chicago-Tony Torchio from New York, Tony Russo and Vincent Spicuzza from St. Louis and Sam Valente from Cleveland. Capone's intelligence network must have been functioning at top efficiency because none of the mercenaries lasted more than a few days after they got to Chicago. Each was found tommy-gunned to death, a nickel clutched in his hand-Jack McGurn's signature. During the same period four local Aiello adherents fell before the fire of a gunner, or gunners, never identified. A fifth victim, a barman named Cinderella, was trussed up after death, stuffed into a sack, and left in a ditch. For this killing the police arrested McGurn and a fellow Capone bodyguard, Orchell De Grazio, who had been seen near the ditch, but lacking any other evidence, they let them go.

The Aiellos tried poison. Knowing Capone to be a frequenter of Diamond Joe Esposito's Bella Napoli Cafe, they offered the chef $35,000 if he would lace his minestrone with prussic acid. The chef agreed, then developed qualms, and betrayed the plot to the intended victim.

Faced with eleven unsolved gang killings in less than six months, the new chief of detectives, William O'Connor, felt he should make some sort of reassuring public gesture. Accordingly, he announced he was organizing a special armored car force to wipe out gangsters. He said he wanted volunteers from the police ranks who had fought overseas in World War I and knew how to handle a machine gun. To the squad thus formed, he then issued an order of stupendous irresponsibility. "Men," said he, "the war is on. We've got to show that society and the police department, and not a bunch of dirty rats, are running this town. It is the wish of the people of Chicago that you hunt these criminals down and kill them without mercy. Your cars are equipped with machine guns and you will meet the enemies of society on equal terms. See to it that they don't have you pushing up daisies. Make them push up daisies. Shoot first and shoot to kill. If you kill a no torious feudist, you will get a handsome reward and win promotion. If you meet a car containing bandits, pursue them and fire. When I arrive on the scene, my hopes will be fulfilled if you have shot off the top of their car and killed every criminal inside it." Chief O'Connor did not say what he would do if they mowed down innocent bystanders.

Tony Lombardo lived with his wife and two small children in a spacious suburban villa at 442 West Washington Boulevard, north of Cicero. Directly opposite stood an apartment building with flats renting by the week. On November 22 a stool pigeon's tip led O'Connor's detectives to one of the flats. They found an array of machine guns trained on the Lombardos' front door. The gunners were not around. The stool pigeon then suggested they raid a certain flat 10 miles away at 7002 North Western Avenue. There the detectives uncovered a cache of dynamite. The absent tenant had left behind a key to a room in the Rex Hotel, still farther north on Ashland Avenue. Making their third call of the day, the detectives burst in upon Angelo Lo Mantio, a young gunman from Milwaukee, Joseph Aiello and two of his cousins. They whisked the lot off to the detective bureau. Lo Mantio proved a frail reed who quickly broke under questioning and confessed that the Aiellos had brought him to Chicago to kill Capone and Lombardo. A second ambush, he added, had been set up for Capone on South Clark Street. Hinky Dink Kenna owned a cigar store at 311 South Clark, which he used as his political headquarters. Capone often stopped by for a chat. Across the street was the Hotel Atlantic. The windows of Room 302 framed the cigar-store entrance, and to the sills Lo Mantio had clamped high-powered rifles.

It was probably some official on Capone's payroll who notified him that Lo Mantio and Aiello had been taken to the detective bureau lockup. Within an hour of their arrival, a fleet of taxis drew up before the thirteen-story building and disgorged a score of men. A policeman, glancing casually out of an upper-story window, took them at first to be detectives bringing suspects to the bureau for questioning. But none entered the building. They scattered, some to the street corners and down side streets, others into doorways and alleys. Presently, three men started toward the bureau's main entrance. One of them reached inside his overcoat to shift an automatic from holster to side pocket. As the policeman recognized Louis "Little New York" Campagna, a stubby, hook-nosed ex-Five Pointer, whom Capone had recently added to his corps of bodyguards, the incredible truth burst upon him: Capone gangsters, out to kill Aiello, had surrounded the detective bureau and were about to lay siege to it. His startled cry sent dozens of detectives flocking to the street. They seized the trio, disarmed and handcuffed them and hustled them to the lockup. They were lodged in a cell adjoining Aiello's, and a detective who understood Sicilian dialect, posing as a prisoner, listened from a cell nearby. This is what he heard:

Campagna: "You're dead, friend, you're dead. You won't get up to the end of the street still walking."

Aiello (terrified) : "Can't we settle this? Give me fourteen days and I'll sell my stores, my house and everything and quit Chicago for good. Can't we settle it? Think of my wife and baby."

Campagna: "You dirty rat! You've broken faith with us twice now. You started this. We'll finish it."

When his lawyer obtained his release on a writ of habeas corpus, Aiello did not venture into the street. He ran, quaking, to Chief O'Connor and begged him to provide police protection. Conscious of the newspaperman within earshot, O'Connor replied: "Sure, I'll give you police protection-all the way to New York and onto a boat. The sooner you go the better. You can't bring your feud ideas here and get away with it, so you'd better start back. You'll get no police protection around Chicago from me." Upon seeing Aiello's wife and small son, whom the lawyer had brought to the bureau, he relented and let a pair of policemen escort them all to a taxi.