Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (67 page)

Prominent in his testimony about the first group were . . . Sam "Mooney" Giancana; Anthony Accardo; Felice De Lucia (Paul "the Waiter") Ricca; and Rocco Fischetti. Among the associates he named Murray "the Camel" Humphreys and Gus Alex [a pro- t6g6 of Jake Guzik]... .

He emphasized that the power of the Chicago organization rests in a single characteristic . . . -the ability of the group to commit murder and other acts of violence without fear of retribution... .

Chicago's Superintendent of Police Orlando W. Wilson had earlier reported to the committee that since 1919, 976 gangland murders had been committed in the Chicago area. Only two of the murderers were convicted.

In the rosters of the Chicago Mafia and its associates, submitted to the committee by Captain Duffy, all four surviving Capone brothers figured among the gangsters controlling the West Side.

A fifth black marble gravestone took its place in the Mount Carmel plot in February, 1967. After ailing for several years with a weak heart, Matt Capone was dead at fifty-nine.

CAPONE BROTHER RUNS S. W. SUBURB VICE RING

A man who reluctantly bears one of the most chilling names in the annals of crime-Capone-now reigns as overlord of a growing vice and gambling empire in the southwest suburbs....

Leader of this crime syndicate expansion move is Alberto Capone, aging (62) brother of the late Al Capone.

Alberto uses the name Bert Novak. He has also gone by the name of Albert Rayola... .

Capone operates out of two bases in Suburban Hickory Hills-Castle Acres Motel . . . and Hickory Lodge Cocktail Lounge... .

Both places are within shouting distance of the Hickory Hills City Hall, seat of what is probably the shakiest suburban administration in the Chicago area, or perhaps the nation. . . .

Mayor Thomas Watson admitted that he lived in fear since his election in the 13,000 population suburb as a reform candidate in April, 1967.

Three days after Watson's election, early morning shotgun blasts damaged his parked auto. Watson has also received frequent terror-type anonymous phone calls... .

he Better Government Association] is convinced that [Ca pone] is the principal syndicate man behind the rising tide of gambling and vice in such nearby suburbs as Crestwood, Alsip and Willow Springs... .

Chicago Sun-Times, January 19, 1969

An avid golfer, the last of the active Capone brothers would appear on the suburban links, wearing a golfing glove studded with costume jewelry.

Until 1970, the Hawthorne Inn, renamed the Towne Hotel, remained a meeting place of the Chicago syndicate. Rossmar Realty, Inc., whose president was Joseph Aiuppa, an early Capone triggerman and latterly the ranking Cicero Mafioso, owned the hotel, as well as the adjoining Turf Lounge, a gangster rendezvous since Capone's day. On May 24, 1964, the Sun-Times had reported under the headline STATE POLICE BREAK UP DICE GAME IN CICERO GAMING FORT:

State police battered down steel doors to raid a barboot [Greek dice] game in a basement of a Cicero coffee house and arrested 15 men fleeing through a network of catacombs.

The raiders, armed with crowbars, sledgehammers, axes and an FBI warrant, said it was the most impregnable gambling fortress they had ever broken into.

When the officers, led by State Chief of Detectives John Newbold, entered the one-story coffee house at 2208 South Cicero (which runs at right angles to 22nd Street) in the suburb, it was empty.

By tapping and pounding on the walls, the detectives turned up a secret door in a panel. This led to an empty back room. Here in the floor was a trapdoor encased in steel straps that was bolted shut from below.

After several minutes of sledge-swinging, the raiders broke through and found themselves in an underground passage that led to another steel door.

This door took another several minutes of similar ax and crowbar work before it yielded. Crashing through, the police found an elaborate barboot dice game layout. They arrested four men as keepers. . . .

Spilling out into catacombs were 11 other men who were arrested as players. . . .

It was the third time in slightly more than a year that the big barboot game had been knocked over.

King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Noon recess. On the steps of the Federal Building Capone forces a smile for the thousands who gathered in the streets.

Investigators and prosecutor. Left to right: Elmer L. Irey, chief of the Internal Revenue Service's enforcement branch; U.S. Attorney George E. Q. Johnson; Frank J. Wilson, who directed the investigation of Capone's tax delinquencies; and Arthur P. Madden, head of the Chicago tax intelligence unit.

Wide World Photos.

The defendant and his counsel. Left: Michael Ahern; right: Albert Fink.

Capone on the eve of his trial.

Brown Brothers.

The raiders found an underground passageway leading to the Towne Hotel... .

On February 17, 1970, a fire, starting in the kitchen, totally destroyed the hotel. When state officials questioned Aiuppa about the ownership, he invoked the Fifth Amendment sixty times.

Since the mid-sixties, when Sam Giancana expatriated himself to avoid the attentions of the FBI, the head of the Chicago syndicate and a member of the Mafia's national council has been the Capone bodyguard, a suspected co-planner of the St. Valentine's Day massacre, Tony Accardo.

Sonny Capone's efforts to earn a living had not been rewarding. A man of unexceptionable ethics, he quit his first postwar job as a used car salesman in disgust over his employer's fraudulent practices, such as turning back speedometers. He next apprenticed himself, at $75 a week, to a printer, in whose shop he hoped to buy a half interest if he could persuade his mother to advance the money, but she decided against it. Through his brother-in-law, a detective in the Miami Police Department, he met several officers. They thought highly of him. A marksman of tournament quality, he joined their pistol team, became a member of the National Pistol Association of America and the Florida Peace Officers' Association. Of his wife, whom he taught to shoot, the society page of the Miami News carried this account (April 6, 1958) :

Diana Capone, a slender, red-haired Miami Shores housewife, owns three pistols. She is an expert with each of them. To prove it she won 20 trophies in the recent Flamingo Open Pistol Shoot....

The soft-spoken, blue-eyed mother of four daughters does her big talking with a gun. She asks no odds from the men. . . .

Diana often beats [her husband] in a match.

"It makes Albert awfully proud . . . ," she says.

After the Grotto failed, they moved to Hollywood, Florida, where Sonny worked for a tire distributor. On the morning of August 7, 1965, he went shopping at the Kwik Chek Supermarket near his home. As he wheeled his groceries past a drug counter, an irresistible impulse overcame him. He pocketed two bottles of aspirin and a box of radio transistor batteries, costing all together $3.50, none of which he needed or wanted. A store detective saw the theft and arrested him.