Read Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Online
Authors: John Kobler
Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (40 page)
The killers abandoned the Nash along with their weapons on Thirty-sixth Street between Second and Third avenues. The serial numbers on two .45-caliber revolvers led detectives to Parker Henderson, who was then brought to New York. He had, he admitted before a grand jury, bought the revolvers for Capone, but he insisted that, after he delivered them, .he never saw them again. The tommy gun, meanwhile, was traced to Peter von Frantzius' Chicago sporting goods store. "In my opinion," said New York's Police Commissioner Grover Whalen when the grand jury had disbanded without indicting anybody, "there was enough evidence not only to get an indictment but a conviction as well."
A white ribbon fluttering from a wreath of roses and orchids at the Yale funeral, the most spectacular New York had ever witnessed, bore an ominous promise spelled out in gold letters-WE'LL SEE THEM, KID.
The Yale murder reopened the War of the Sicilian Succession. Two months later the Aiello forces, restored to full strength in their Little Sicily bastion, staged yet another of those daylight street shootings for which the city had become world-famed. The Chicago address of the Italo-American National Union was 8 South Dearborn Street, the Hartford Building. There, in an eleventh-floor office, Tony Lombardo normally spent the afternoon attending to his presidential duties. On the afternoon of September 7, just as he finished work, a phone call came from Peter Rizzito, a North Side merchant, and it kept him at his desk for almost fifteen minutes. According to the rumors that circulated later, Rizzito was a false friend and secret Aiello ally, whose real purpose had been to detain Lombardo while the enemy gang set a trap in the street below. Lombardo left the office at about four thirty with two bodyguards, Joseph Ferraro and Joseph Lolordo, whose older brother, Pasquale, was a Unione politician. They turned into Madison Street, moving with effort through the dense crowd of shoppers and office workers. As they passed a restaurant midway down the block, Lolordo heard a man's voice behind him saying, "Here he is," then four shots. Lombardo pitched forward, half his head torn away by dumdum bullets. Ferraro fell beside him, two bullets in his back. Lolordo saw two men running in opposite directions, one wearing a dark suit, the other dressed in gray. Drawing his revolver, he started after the man in gray. A patrolman stopped him and wrested the revolver from him. The killers escaped.
At Ferraro's hospital bedside Assistant State's Attorney Samuel Hoffman asked him to name his murderers. Ferraro gave no answer. "You're going to die," Hoffman told him. Ferraro remained silent to the end, which came two days later. Though Lolordo had seen both killers clearly, had begged the patrolman who disarmed him to let him pursue them, he insisted at the coroner's inquest that he could remember nothing.
Lombardo was the fourth Unione president to die by an assassin's hand since political terrorists shot Anthony D'Andrea in 1921. He was not the last. During the next three years the presidency proved lethal to every incumbent, as well as to several candidates. But the emoluments, if one lived long enough to enjoy them, were too tempt ing to resist. Under Unione control the alky-cooking cottage industry had grown to embrace the majority of Chicago's immigrant Italian households. There were about 2,500 home stills constantly bubbling away, producing the raw material for a multimillion-dollar bootleg market.
In the race to succeed Lombardo as Unione president Pasquale Lolordo outstripped Peter Rizzito and took office on September 14. Rizzito died soon after, shot down in front of his Milton Street store near Death Corner, whether by order of Capone or of Joe Aiello was never disclosed. The same week the Caponeites launched a machinegun attack against Aiello headquarters, wounding Tony Aiello and an aide. In various subsequent skirmishes they killed four Aiello gunmen and lost two of their own.
Lolordo lasted less than five months. Under the delusion that the Aiellos were friends he invited three of them to his North Avenue apartment for a drink. They shot him as he was proposing a toast. His wife, Aleina, hearing the gunfire from the next room, rushed in to see them finish him off with a second volley. In her grief she identified Joe Aiello as one of the killers from a photograph the police showed her, but once mistress of herself again, she fell silent like a good Sicilian widow.
Thus, Joe Aiello finally won the presidency of the Unione Siciliane. He held it almost a year. Then, on the evening of October 23, 1930, as he left a friend's house at 15 North Kolmar Avenue, he was caught in a crossfire from two machine-gun nests that had been set up in nearby flats rented ten days earlier, a well-tested Capone tactic. The hour of Joe Aiello's death was commemorated by the floral piece de resistance at his funeral-a clock face made of roses with the hands pointing to eight thirty.
Aiello's Capone-supported successor, a macaroni manufacturer named Agostino Loverdo, also reigned for a year before he was killed in a Cicero dive.
One of the rare few Unione presidents to survive his tenure was the Capone bodyguard Phil D'Andrea.
DURING the summer of 1928 Capone shifted his Chicago headquarters from the Metropole to the Lexington, diagonally across the street. The Lexington had formerly ranked among the city's most select and imposing hotels. President Cleveland once addressed Chicagoans from the balcony opening off its colonnaded grand ballroom. If no longer select, it was still imposing with its bay windows and turreted corners, the sweep of its lofty public rooms from the main entrance on South Michigan Avenue through to Wabash, its lobby rising a full story to a circumambient shopping gallery.
Of the Lexington's ten floors Capone and his entourage occupied the entire fourth, most of the third, and rooms scattered throughout the hotel where they put up their women. When Capone wished to dine in his six-room suite, for which he paid $18,000 a year, the food and wine were brought to him on rolling tables from a fourth-floor kitchen the management had installed for his exclusive use. His private chef, who lived next to the kitchen, partook of each dish and bottle before they were served, a precaution in force ever since the Aiellos tried to have Capone poisoned. At night little Louis Campagna slept on a cot in front of Capone's bedroom door.
To conceal his comings and goings, Capone devised an escape hatch that necessitated the cooperation of both the Lexington management and the owners of the adjacent office building. Convoyed by half a dozen bodyguards, he would ride the freight elevator to
the second floor and slip into a maids' changing room. There a fulllength mirror, hinged at one side to the wall, masked a door that had been cut to Capone's specifications. Swinging aside the mirror, he would step through to the office building and walk down two flights to a side entrance where his car and driver would be waiting.*
On rare occasions Mae Capone shared her husband's hotel suite, but hardly ever did she accompany him to a theater, nightclub or racetrack. Few members of the gang and still fewer outsiders came to know her. In the tradition of the old-country Italian dons Capone confined the women of his family to a kind of purdah in either his Prairie Avenue or Palm Island house.
At the time he moved to the Lexington his mistress was a plump, blond, teen-age Greek whom he had salvaged from one of his suburban brothels. He installed her in a two-room suite on the floor above him. When Capone, his family or a member of his gang needed medical attention, they consulted a Dr. David V. Omens, who was also an investor in the Hawthorne Kennel Club, drawing dividends of as much as $36,000 a year. The Greek girl went to him one day, complaining of a genital sore. Owens diagnosed syphilis and began a series of arsphenamine injections. He then urged Capone to take a Wassermann test, but the thought of a needle penetrating his vein and withdrawing blood horrified the gang leader. Neither the doctor's assurance that the pain would be negligible nor his graphic description of the slow devastation inflicted by untreated syphilis could persuade him to it. There was nothing the matter with him, Capone insisted.
He had been established at the Lexington for three months when Frank Loesch went to him with his plea in behalf of the Chicago voter. Whether Republicans or Democrats won, an honest election was bound to fill the county offices with anti-Thompsonites sworn to crush Capone. It seems at first blush that in acceding to Loesch he acted against his own interests. No doubt vanity played a part. It must have deeply gratified him, this hat-in-hand appeal from the illustrious president of the Chicago Crime Commission. Capone craved admiration and gratitude and continually sought to win them with a show of civic spirit or the distribution of largesse. His munificent gifts to his followers, his ostentatious gratuities of $5 to newsboys, $20 to hatcheck girls, $100 to waiters, his donations of food, fuel and clothing to the destitute-he saw to it that they all were publicized.
But his vanity was not so blind as to betray him into any real peril. The Thompson machine was doomed in any event. Moreover, though Capone might wish it to prevail, he had reason to feel secure no matter how the majority voted. Two administrations had risen and fallen since he came to Chicago. Neither had seriously hampered his operations. Under both he had weathered reform crusades, raids, police shake-ups, grand jury investigations. Officeholders had come and gone; the system remained intact. What had he to fear from a new administration? Capone could afford to grant Loesch's flattering petition, and so there took place what Loesch remembered as "the squarest and the most successful election day in 40 years"-a Republican victory, but a repudiation of Big Bill Thompson.
In the national elections Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith. The Chicago vote was 650,000 for Hoover, 629,000 for Smith. Soon after his victory, the President-elect visited Miami as the guest of the Southern chain store magnate J. C. Penney. The Penney estate on Belle Isle was not far from Palm Island, a circumstance that gave currency to several indestructible fictions. According to one of these fictions, the sounds of revelry at night from No. 93, of shooting, shouting and females screeching, disturbed Hoover's sleep, and he vowed then and there to crush Capone. According to another persistent version, Hoover was miffed because the newsmen paid more attention to Capone than to him, on one occasion turning away from him in a Miami hotel lobby and flocking to the gang chieftain. It is a fact that early in his Presidential career Hoover ordered an all-out attack against Capone, but personal pique had nothing to do with it.
Liquor continued to produce the bulk of Capone's profits. The necessity for diversification, however, was a lesson learned early from Johnny Torrio, who saw that Prohibition could not last forever, and he applied it so astutely that even had Repeal come much sooner than it did, he could have recouped a good deal of his loss through other sources. Some were entirely legitimate. The New Orleans pinball machine company, for one, in which he invested as a partner 'of Phil Kastel. He also acquired a 25 percent interest in his favorite Levee nightclub, the Midnight Frolics, where, sealed off from the ordinary customers by bodyguards, he would turn up two or three nights a week to hear *Joe E. Lewis sing "Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long," stamp his feet to the rhythms of Austin Mack and his Century Serenaders, and drink whiskey out of a teacup. He seldom brought women with him, and he never danced.