Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (44 page)

Coroner Bundesen, meanwhile, had summoned before his blueribbon jury every gun dealer in the county. Among them was Peter von Frantzius, the reputed armorer of gangland. Could he tell the jury anything about recent sales of tommy guns? Yes, Von Frantzius admitted, he had sold six to a Frank H. Thompson. He understood that the buyer was acting for the Mexican consul general., whose government wanted them to put down revolutionaries. The police knew Thompson as an ex-convict, safecracker, hijacker, rum-runner and, lately, middleman in arms deals. He was then wanted for attempting to machine-gun his wife and her lover in his hometown of Kirkland, Illinois.

Thompson surrendered to Bundesen. He confirmed his purchase of the tommy guns but mentioned a different consignee-James "Bozo" Shupe, subsequently killed. Shupe, the police knew, was a close associate of Scalise, Anselmi and Joseph Giunta, the current, Capone-backed president of the Unione Siciliane. On these thin grounds they arrested the three Sicilians. Giunta they were obliged to release almost immediately for lack of evidence, but new witnesses placed Scalise and Anselmi in the fake police car. They, too, were indicted and freed on bail of $50,000 each.

Two days later Assistant State's Attorney Stansbury added three more names to the list of alleged assassins, making the total six instead of five. The first was Joseph Lolordo, a natural suspect, being the brother of the Unione Siciliane president whose murder Moran possibly engineered. During the World War Lolordo served with a detachment of machine gunners, and Stansbury ascribed most of the St. Valentine's Day gunnery to him. He had since disappeared.

The disclosure of the second and third names followed a piece of information furnished by a prominent Chicagoan. The collision on Clark Street had also been witnessed by H. Wallace Caldwell, president of the Board of Education. Passing close to the Cadillac, he had noticed that the driver in police uniform lacked an upper front tooth. That distinguishing mark fitted one of Egan's Rats, Fred "Killer" Burke. At the time of the massacre he was a fugitive under indictment in Ohio for bank robbery and murder. So was his constant companion, James Ray. Their modus operandi, when robbing banks, was to wear police uniforms.

McGurn's alibi before the grand jury-his "Blonde Alibi," as the press called her-was Louise Rolfe. He never left her side at the Hotel Stevens, he swore, from 9 P.M. of February 13 to 3 P.M. of February 14. The state's attorney thereupon had him indicted for perjury, but before McGurn could be tried on that charge, he married Louise. A wife cannot be obliged to testify against her husband.

As for the murder charge, under an Illinois statute if the accused demanded trial at four separate terms of court and the state was not prepared to prosecute him, then the state must discontinue the case. Between the spring and winter of 1929 McGurn made four demands for trial. None was met, and on December 2 he walked out of the courtroom a free man. By then the authorities had revised their version of his role in the St. Valentine's Day massacre. They concluded that though McGurn may not have accompanied the firing squad, he served as its logistician. To prove this, however, they had still less evidence.

During the early stages of Coroner Bundesen's inquest a detective giving testimony referred to the cartridges and shells collected from the Clark Street warehouse. Asked by the foreman of the blue-ribbon jury, Burt A. Massee, what purpose was served by preserving them, he explained the principles underlying the relatively new science of forensic ballistics. Every firearm, he said, leaves its own characteristic marks on the bullets passing through it. The bore of a rifle, for example, imprints distinctive ridges on the sides of the bullet. The firing pin makes an indentation on the primer; the tooling of the breech imparts concentric circles to the base of the shell when the shell recoils against it. Each part of the mechanism coming into contact with shell or bullet writes its signature, and like fingerprints, no two markings are identical. Thus, with a microscope and various measuring instruments, the expert could match a bullet with the weapon that fired it.

Unfortunately, the detective added, the Chicago Police Department lacked the equipment for such analyses. This struck foreman Massee and a juror named Walter E. Olson, both prosperous and civic-spirited businessmen, as an inexcusable deficiency. With a group of other wealthy Chicagoans, whose interest they enlisted, they put up the money for a scientific crime detection laboratory to be installed at Northwestern University. Completed by 1930, it was the first of its kind, the model for many others, including the FBI Laboratory. To direct it, Major Calvin H. Goddard, the country's foremost authority on forensic ballistics, was brought from New York. The first case to absorb his attention was the St. Valentine's Day massacre and his findings dispelled once for all the still-lurking suspicion that real policemen took part in it.

Complying with the request of the coroner [Goddard reported], I have tested out various Thompson machine guns in the hands of the police of the City of Chicago. I examined altogether some eight Thompson machine guns, five in the hands of the Chicago police, one at Melrose Park Police Headquarters and two in the possession of the Cook County Highway police. I fired a number of rounds of ammunition of the same caliber, type, make, and vintage as used in the murder, through each of these. The bullets were recovered undeformed from a receptacle of cotton waste into which they were fired and each bullet and empty shell was numbered with the number of the gun from which it had issued. The bullets and shells so recovered were carefully compared with specimens of the fatal bullets and shells. In no instance did I find a duplication of markings to indicate that any of the police weapons had been employed in the killings.

Without the weapons, Goddard could reach no positive conclusions. Almost a year elapsed. Then, on the evening of December 14, 1929, in St. Joseph, Michigan, Patrolman Charles Skelly overtook a hit-and-run driver, forcing him to the curb. As he jumped onto his running board, the driver shot him three times and continued his flight. Skelly died in the hospital. The fugitive's car was found on U.S. Highway 12, near St. Joseph, cracked up against a telephone pole. The registration papers in the glove compartment bore the name Fred Dane and an address on the city outskirts. There, in addition to a Mrs. Fred Dane, who professed to know nothing of either her husband's business affairs or his whereabouts, the police found $319,850 in stolen negotiable bonds and an arsenal that included two tommy guns and men's shirts with the laundry marking FRB. One of the policemen guessed the initials stood for "Fred R. Burke," the long-sought man with the missing front tooth. The St. Joseph authorities immediately notified Chicago, and at the urgent request of Coroner Bundesen the district attorney personally delivered the tommy guns to the Northwestern Crime Laboratory. The drums contained bullets of various makes. Many were of the same make as those gathered in the Clark Street warehouse. Selecting thirty-five of these, Goddard fired twenty through one of the tommy guns into a container of cotton waste and fifteen through the other.

The result of these studies was to demonstrate conclusively that the two guns found in the Burke home were those that had been used in the St. Valentine's Day massacre. . . . I did not devote unnecessary time to pinning various of the fatal bullets to one particular gun but satisfied myself by determining that the single bullet from the body of Reinhardt Schwimmer had been fired by one of the two guns and that one of the bullets from the body of James Clark had issued from the other.

That was not all. The New York police submitted to Goddard the bullets that had been taken from Frankie Yale's body a year and a half earlier. They, too, proved to have been fired by one of Burke's tommy guns.

The Bundesen jury recommended "that the said Burke, now a fugitive from justice, be apprehended and held to the Grand jury on the charge of murder as a participant in said murder [i.e., of James Clark]. . . ." Burke was captured the following April, but the Michigan authorities refused to surrender him to Illinois, preferring to try him for the murder of Patrolman Skelly. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Michigan State Penitentiary and died there.

Efforts by sundry agencies, both public and private, to discover the identities of the other St. Valentine's Day Killers continued for
years and flushed a rich assortment of suspects.*
But the only man who can be said with moral certainty to have had a hand in the massacre was Fred Burke.

THERE were twenty-seven of them, Sicilians all. Whitespatted and velvet-collared, their fingers ablaze with diamonds, carrying shiny new matched leather luggage, they strode into the hotel with a proprietary air and demanded the best accommodations. They came from Chicago, Gary, St. Louis, Buffalo, New York, Newark and Tampa. The first contingent of eleven men arrived at dawn in touring cars, and by midmorning the deliberations were in full swing.

As a non-Sicilian, Capone could not participate, but he had representation. The majority were Chicagoans, among them Pasquale Lolordo, who owed his rise in the Unione Siciliane largely to Capone's helping hand, and Joe Giunta, who had not yet turned traitor to Capone. The next biggest group were the New Yorkers, three of whom, Joe Profaci, Joe Magliocco and Vincent Mangano, would each head a Mafia family. (Thirty years later Profaci figured among the 100-odd delegates to the great gangster conclave on the estate of Joe Barbara in Apalachin, New York.)

Some authorities date the beginning of modern nationally organized crime from that meeting held in a suite at Cleveland's Hotel Statler on December 5, 1928. Certainly, it was the first such meeting of which any record exists. Theretofore the loose links between the scattered Mafia cells, as well as between the branches of the quasirespectable front organization, the Unione Siciliane, had been main tained chiefly through a national president who would travel from one to another.

A record of the Cleveland meeting exists because a desk clerk disliked the look and manner of the flashy out-of-towners. After assigning them rooms on the seventh floor, he reported their presence to the policeman patrolling the block. The patrolman notified headquarters, and in the course of the morning a squad of detectives interrupted the conference. Arrested on "suspicion," the conferees were taken to police headquarters, fingerprinted, photographed and questioned about their business in Cleveland. The detectives could obtain no very illuminating answers, and lacking any legal cause for further action, they let their captives go.

What the Sicilians talked about remains conjectural. In all probability the agenda included the national presidency of the Unione Siciliane, vacant since Yale's death, and the distribution of corn sugar, vital to whiskey production, of which the local supply was monopolized by a Cleveland Mafioso. But more important than any specific topic was the fact that gangsters from six states had come together to discuss common problems. It indicated a step toward the kind of confederacy that Torrio had always advocated and that Capone had striven to establish among the Chicago gangs.

Coincidentally, Torrio had just returned to America after five years abroad and, his nerve recovered, was resuming his relationships in the New York and Chicago underworlds.

On February 17 a deputy United States marshal served Capone with a subpoena to appear in Chicago the following month before a federal grand jury investigating bootlegging. He had not set foot in the city since December, 1928, and now, with Moran alive and howling for his blood, he was so reluctant to do so that he decided to plead illness. He had undergone a mild bout of bronchitis in January, and the young Miami physician who treated him, Dr. Kenneth Phillips, obligingly furnished an affidavit dated March 5, deposing:

... that since January 13th, 1929, said Alphonse Capone has been suffering with broncho-pneumonia pleurisy with effusion of fluid into the chest cavity and for six weeks was confined to his bed at his home on said Palm Island, and has been out of his bed only for ten days last past, but has not fully recovered from said disease . .. that, in the professional opinion of affiant, the said Capone's physical condition is such that it would be dangerous for him to leave the mild climate of southern Florida and go to the City of Chicago, state of Illinois, and that to do so would, in the professional opinion of affiant, imperil the safety of the said Capone, and that there would be a very grave risk of a collapse which might result in his death from a recurrent pneumonia... .