Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (8 page)

When a Black Hander was arrested, mutism afflicted the neighborhood. Family, friends, and witnesses would receive letters promising swift and terrible retribution should they break their silence. If the case got as far as the courtroom, threats deluged the district attorney, judge, and jury. On June 22, 1909, Joseph Bertucci stood trial for a Black Hand killing. Bruno Nordi, who had been indicted as an accomplice, turned state's evidence, and his wife also agreed to testify. As Nordi mounted the witness stand, a man slipped into the courtroom, waved a red handkerchief and vanished. After that nothing could prevail upon either Nordi or his wife to utter a word. The case was dismissed.

On January 8, 1910, a sixty-year-old Italian named Beneditto Cinene, living at 500 Oak Street, was shot to death in bed. To every question put by the police sergeant from the Chicago Avenue Station the murdered man's relatives all replied with the same three words: "Me don't know." His son-in-law simply shrugged.

The hostility of native Americans to immigrants was, in the case of the Italians, intensified by the depredations of Black Handers. Demagogues and irresponsible journalists revived all the old nonsense about instinctive Italian criminality. In McClure's Magazine for May, 1912, Arthur Train, a former New York City assistant district attorney, contributed his bias after a six-month tour of Italy. "The Italians from the extreme south," he declared, ". . . are apt to be ignorant, lazy, destitute, and superstitious. . . . The number of South Italians who now occupy positions of respectability in New York and who have criminal records on the other side would astound even their compatriots. . . ."

The truth was that in Chicago, as in New York, the Italians-the majority of Neapolitan, Calabrian, or Sicilian origin-had a percentage of arrests and convictions far lower than their ratio of the population. In 1913 the Italians totaled approximately 59,000. That year 2,972 were arrested for misdemeanors and 1,333 convicted; 392 were arrested for felonies and 108 convicted. The combined convictions represented slightly more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the Italian proportion of the population, which was, as the City Council Committee on Crime observed, "surely so small as to be negligible."

In 1907 the worthies of Chicago's Italian colony organized, under the leadership of the Italian consul, Guido Sabetta, the White Hand Society, with the double object of stamping out Black Hand crime and counteracting the slander against their people. They set an ex ample which was followed by Italian community leaders in other cities. Hiring attorneys and private investigators to assist the authorities, the society brought about the conviction of several Black Handers and drove from the city what it claimed to be the 10 most dangerous. But after this impressive start it met frustration at every turn. In 1910 the Black Handers killed 25 people; in 1911, 40; in 1912, 31. Though the police arrested many suspects-194 following the shooting of one supposed informer-bribery and terrorism continued, and they solved not a single murder. The few imprisoned culprits whom the White Hand had brought to justice were, one after the other, paroled, their co-conspirators having provided the money with which to suborn officials. The society's members began dropping away, unwilling to sacrifice further sums for futile prosecutions. At the same time rank-and-file Italians had come to feel that by publicly acknowledging the existence of crime in their midst the White Hand was bringing opprobrium upon the whole community, and they, too, withdrew their support. As for the native Americans, they had never given the society any support, for they considered the Black Hand atrocities no concern of theirs as long as they were confined to Italians. By 1913 the White Hand had disbanded and the Black Handers extended their reign of terror.

What finally stopped the flow of extortion letters in the twenties was what reduced white slavery: federal intervention. For using the mails to defraud, the federal law set penalties of up to five years' prison and $1,000 fine. The game seemed too hazardous after several Black Handers drew the maximum sentence and were removed beyond reach of corrupt local officials to Leavenworth Penitentiary.

Extortion, however, far from languishing, expanded in new directions. Threats were conveyed by other means. The dread letter signed La Mano Nera was replaced by a voice on the telephone or a personal visit. The character of the victim changed, too. The supply of simpleminded, malleable cafoni began to dwindle after 1914, when new regulations restricted immigration. By then far richer opportunities were beckoning to the professional extortionists in the city which Lincoln Steffens described as "first in violence, deepest in dirt, loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new, an overgrown gawk of a village, the 'tough' among cities, a spectacle for the nation." The skill developed in three decades of bomb throwing and marksmanship with revolver and shotgun was not wasted. Many an ex Black Hander became a prized technician in the swelling ranks of gangdom.

Bombing as a business thrived. Contractors in the field were retained by labor and business racketeers to discipline tradesmen who declined to pay tribute. During the twenties some 700 bombs destroyed millions of dollars' worth of Chicago property. The contractors established a price list:

Black powder bombs-$100

Dynamite bombs-$500 to $1,000 (depending on the risk)

Guaranteed contracts-$1,000 and up

Joseph Sangerman, an officer of the Chicago Barbers' Union, directed one of the busiest bombing crews. His ace was George Matrisciano, alias Martini, a Neapolitan barber's son and a veteran of Little Italy terrorism, who manufactured his own black powder bombs. When a barbershop owner defied the union's dictates, Matrisciano and his four teammates would reduce the shop to rubble.

Colosimo knew what to expect. In his youth he had turned a Black Hand trick or two himself. At first he submitted. He met demands for as much as $5,000. But as the extortionists kept after him, raising the amount each time, he prepared to fight. He commanded plenty of muscle in such subalterns, who had sworn on his Bible to defend him, as his brother-in-law, Joe Moresco; Mac Fitzpatrick, alias W. E. Frazier, a gunman from San Francisco; Billy Leathers; "Chicken Harry" Gullet; Joe "Jew Kid" Grabiner. At the next attempted levy Colosimo wrapped up a bundle of blank paper, armed himself with a revolver, and, accompanied by a brace of his gorillas, concealing sawed-off shotguns, set out for the rendezvous under a South Side bridge well in advance of the appointed hour. After depositing the bundle as instructed, they fell back into the shadows across the street. At midnight three men approached the bundle. They had scant opportunity to verify its contents. The hidden foe opened fire, killing them all.

Colosimo enjoyed tranquillity for a while. Then he heard from still another Black Hand gang. He decided he needed an adjutant wilier than any available to him in Chicago. He thought of his sharp-witted, ruthless little nephew.

TORRIO was thirty-one when he came to Chicago in 1909. Not long after, three more of Colosimo's tormentors were ambushed under the Rock Island Railroad overpass on Archer Avenue and shot to death. Torrio, with his aversion to bloodshed, had taken no direct hand in the massacre. He had only arranged it. He arranged other killings in behalf of his beleaguered uncle. The time for treaties and coalitions was not yet.

The lesson was lost on Sunny Jim Cosmano. He thought he could extract $10,000 from Big Jim. The misjudgment cost him a nearly mortal stomach wound inflicted by buckshot at close range. Two policemen stood guard by his hospital bed, waiting to remove him for questioning to headquarters as soon as he recovered, a trip Cosmano contemplated with no relish. His confederates, wondering how they could spare him the ordeal, consulted "Big Tim" Murphy, one of the few important Irish racket bosses whom the Italian underworld esteemed. Big Tim's advice was succinct: "Knock the cops on the head and carry him out." Four of Sunny Jim's friends paid him a visit, bearing flowers and candy. They also carried guns. They disarmed the policemen. They roped them together back to back, helped the patient dress, and smuggled him out of the hospital to a hideaway, where he convalesced, untroubled by interrogators.

Torrio's mother, Maria Caputa, was living with him in Chicago, and when Big Jim bought the restaurant that became famous as Colosimo's Cafe, she lent her name to the deeds. For a time Mama Maria and Papa Luigi Colosimo ran the place. Torrio had a small interest in it, which he sold to Mary Aducci, the wife of a Colosimo lieutenant. She remained Big Jim's partner for many years. He later took in a third partner, "Mike the Greek" Potzin, a gambler and whoremaster.

Torrio's services to Colosimo went far beyond planning the liquidation of Black Handers. He was an organizational genius. Years later Elmer L. Irey, chief of the Enforcement Branch of the U.S. Treasury, called him "the father of modern American gangsterdom." With the cool, soft-spoken little New Yorker as his gray eminence, Big Jim consolidated his holdings to become the foremost Chicago racketeer of his era. Starting with the Saratoga, of which his grateful uncle had made him the manager, Torrio was soon supervising all the Colosimo brothels, and he put them on a sounder business footing. He next reorganized the adjunctive saloons and gambling dives. Under his guidance the Colosimo-Van Bever white slave ring captured the Levee market. Torrio saw personally to the greasing of police and political palms. When Colosimo branched out into the protection racket, Torrio collected the dues, using no persuasion other than a quiet word of warning, a thin smile, and an icy stare. He suffered a slight setback when he was arrested along with several members of the white slave ring, following the transportation of a dozen girls from St. Louis to Chicago. Maurice Van Bever and his wife, Julia, paid a $1,000 fine and went to jail for a year. Five others received lesser sentences, among them the prosecution's star witness, Joe Bovo, the pimp who had delivered the St. Louis cargo. But the court freed Torrio because Bovo would not testify against him. It was Torrio's first court appearance. Colosimo, shielded by Coughlin and Kenna, was not even questioned.

The year Torrio came to Chicago the armies of reform were beginning to gather strength. Crisis after crisis shook the Levee, toppling some of its vice lords, but Torrio steered his uncle safely through all of them. On the night of October 18, 1909, the English evangelist Gipsy Smith, accompanied by three Salvation Army bands, led 2,000 faithful to the red-light district. By the time they got to Twenty-second Street 20,000 curious Chicagoans were marching with them. As the harlots and their madams looked on in stunned disbelief from behind closed shutters, the bands struck up and the con gregation joined Smith in the hymn "Where He Leads Me I Will Follow." Marching back and forth through the Levee, they knelt before the most notorious brothels like the Everleigh Club and Colosimo's Victoria, recited the Lord's Prayer and sang "Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?" Smith climaxed the invasion with a prayer for all of the Levee's fallen women.

One immediate result was not what the evangelist intended. Many of the youths in the great throng, who might never have set foot inside "this hellhole of sin" had not Gipsy Smith led them there, remained to taste the forbidden fruits. The district had never been livelier. "We are glad of the business, of course," said Minna Everleigh, wickedly, "but I am sorry to see so many nice young men coming down here for the first time."

The long-range repercussions, however, advanced the cause of rectitude. The evangelist had focused the attention of powerful church and civic groups on the extent of prostitution and white slavery in Chicago. Two months after Smith's march the Federated Protestant Churches, representing 600 parishes, passed a resolution demanding the appointment of an investigative Vice Commission. The Republican mayor, Fred A. Busse, an obese barroom brawler and crony of racketeers, found it expedient to comply. The commission's blunt 400-page report, published the following year, enumerating the city's brothels and estimating their enormous profits, jolted the normally apathetic citizenry. The newspapers joined in the clamor for reform.