The Outfit (6 page)

The
New York Times
was leaked the story by sources in “official circles.” It ran a front-page investigative piece on October 26, 1935, in which it named the participants in the momentous powwow. The article concluded: “Torrio is the power behind the scenes. The gang under his tutelage has seized control of the rackets.” When Reles/Twist gave details of the meeting to authorities in 1941, he broke a gang rule so sacred that his very existence was put in jeopardy. Thus on November 12, 1941, his body was found after having fallen (or been pushed) from his sixth-floor room in New York’s Half Moon Hotel.

The national Commission, as it was often called, would meet from time to time over the coming decades and facilitate the takeover of Hollywood, the founding of Las Vegas, and a national network of bookmaking and other sundry chicanery. Although both the New York and Chicago gangs would profit from the new cartel, the bosses from the Windy City would enjoy a far longer reign, while the New Yorkers routinely decimated their own ranks with internecine infighting, instigated in part by their adherance to old-world “Mafia” rules and rivalries. Chicago’s bold decision to abandon ancient ceremony allowed its bosses to outlive and outsucceed their Eastern counterparts. As for Johnny Torrio, he would eventually retire to Brooklyn, where he died on April 1957 at seventy-five, extreme old age for a gangster.
⁸

Al Capone was now a twenty-six-year-old tycoon, albeit one embroiled in a nasty gang war. His operation devoured $300,000 a week in overhead, which consisted largely of meeting the thousand-man payroll and official graft disbursements. The Capone Syndicate set up new headquarters in Chicago’s Metropole Hotel, where it appropriated between fifty and sixty rooms on two floors. The gang had its own private elevator, service bar, and wine vault, bringing its total hotel tab to $1,500 per day.

The Unione Siciliana Wars

Both warring gangs knew that victory was assured to the faction that held sway over the Unione, which in turn lorded over the massive Sicilian home distillery network. Not surprisingly, the fight for control over the Unione involved gallons of spilt blood. On May 26, 1925, Unione president Angelo Genna and his brother Mike were killed. Some believe Capone himself was behind the Genna hits, as he may have heard they were about to make a power play against him. Soon Tony Genna was killed by Joseph “the Cavalier” Nerone, who had links to Capone, and who was himself soon whacked by a Capone enemy. In the rabid feeding frenzy, Sam and Pete Genna fled to Italy, which proved wise, since within weeks, Angelo’s successor, twenty-six-year-old Sam “Samoots” Amatuna met the business end of an assassin’s rifle.

Chicago was now the capital of unsolved murders. Murder counts routinely topped those in New York, a city with twice the population. In a five-year period, there were 136 gang killings, with only one conviction. It remains an amazing fact that - federal prohibition laws excluded - no top member of Capone’s Syndicate was ever convicted of any local crime in Chicago.

With the Gennas gone, filling the Unione power vacuum became everyone’s obsession. Joey Aiello, a prosperous Italian bakery owner who coveted the top Unione post, formed an alliance with the North Siders in a plan to kill Capone and take over the Syndicate. Aiello extended a blanket offer to the nations’ gangsters: any man who killed Capone could collect a $50,000 bounty. Aiello once offered a cook $35,000 to poison Al, but the frightened would-be assassin confessed to Capone, who then had his men riddle Aiello’s bakery with two hundred machine-gun rounds. In short time, there were more than a dozen attempts on Capone. On one occasion, Aiello brought in two out-of-town murderers, who promptly made their return trip in body bags. On September 20, 1926, North Siders Bugs Moran, Hymie Weiss, and Vincent Drucci fired more than a thousand rounds into the Hawthorne Inn restaurant where their prey was eating. But no matter what they tried, the North Siders could not hit their mark. Capone retaliated by having his boys kill as many North Side triggermen as they could hunt down.

The war of attrition with the North Siders was only one facet of Capone’s world in 1926. Capone faced additional vicissitudes to the south, where the O’Donnell gang had begun encroaching on Capone’s territory, undercutting the Syndicate’s booze prices and stealing its customers. When the O’Donnells began moving in on Cicero, they pushed the wrong button. On the night of April 27, after Capone was tipped off that the South Siders were heading to a bar in Cicero, he dispatched a thirty-man, five-car motorcade that included Capone himself. Capone obviously venerated Machiavelli’s theory of massive retaliation.

When the stalkers located the O’Donnell car parking curbside by the Pony Inn, onlookers were once again treated to the recurring spectacle of a drive-by drama. As a bonus, they witnessed a rarity: Capone himself was one of the gunmen. In what would prove to be one of the Syndicate’s biggest miscalculations, to say nothing of its worst display of marksmanship, they murdered the wrong guy. The unfortunate soul was a twenty-five-year-old assistant state’s attorney named Bill McSwiggin, who, for reasons never determined, was out drinking with the O’Donnells. Some have opined that McSwiggin’s link to the O’Donnells represented a kind of Irish solidarity; others claimed that McSwiggin was on the take, for although he had a tough reputation, with seven death penalties obtained in eight months, he had never sought capital punishment for a gangster.

Despite six grand juries impaneled to study the McSwiggin killing (at a cost of $200,000), no indictments were obtained. But the death of the young prosecutor both inflamed and united Chicago’s citizenry. With Capone hiding in Michigan for the next four months, police sought reprisal, ransacking Capone’s speakeasies, gambling joints, and whorehouses, some beyond repair. His most lucrative suburban brothel was burned to the ground.

When Capone returned in July, he reported to the police, who had sought him for questioning. As to the charge that he had killed McSwiggin, Al said, “Of course I didn’t kill him. Why should I? I liked the kid. Only the day before he was up at my place, and when he went home, I gave him a bottle of Scotch for his old man.” Fully aware that the rising antigang sentiment would not be mollified so easily, Capone embarked on an ambitious public relations campaign aimed at convincing the public that he was a victim of circumstances. As a prelude to the kinder, gentler next phase of his regime, Capone decided to broker an intergang peace conference.

On October 4, 1926, Capone sent out invitations to all the gangs announcing another Torrio-style peace summit. His invitation to Judge John H. Lyle to act as arbiter was met with indignant refusal, while North Sider Hymie Weiss RSVP’d that if he attended, it would be with grenades exploding and shotguns blasting. Weiss was obsessed with avenging Deanie. “I want the heads of [O’Banion’s killers] Anselmi and Scalise,” Weiss demanded of Capone. Al was willing to go to great lengths to end the gang wars, but there was no way he could deliver the heads of his own Syndicate members. Capone later told a cop friend that Weiss was a madman. “When a dog’s got rabies, nobody’s safe,” Al said. “The dumb thing’s just got to be killed.” One week later, Weiss, leaving a court hearing to seat a jury for a murder indictment against him, was murdered in front of the late Deanie O’Banion’s flower shop by gunmen firing from the second story of a rooming house.

With the Weiss matter settled, the October 20 conference at the Hotel Sherman - located directly across the street from the chief of police headquarters - proceeded as scheduled. All the surviving major gang leaders showed up. One of the North Siders opened the proceedings by imploring, “Let’s give each other a break. We’re a bunch of saps, killing each other this way.” Al Capone later described his presentation: “I told them we’re making a shooting gallery out of a great business, and nobody’s profiting.” He also made reference to his newly awakened paternalism. “I wanted to stop all that because I couldn’t stand hearing my little kid ask why I didn’t stay home,” Al said. “I had been living at the Hawthorne Inn for fourteen months. He’s been sick for three years . . . and I have to take care of him and his mother. If it wasn’t for him, I’d have said, To hell with you fellows. We’ll shoot it out.’” Years later, Capone would expound on this theme to Babe Meigs, publisher of the
Chicago Evening American:
“I can’t tell you what it does to my twelve-year-old son when the other schoolchildren, cruel as they are, keep showing him newspaper stories that call me a killer or worse.”

The conference produced results, albeit temporary ones. Among the adopted treaty’s provisions: a “general amnesty” mandated that retributions cease; signees would solve disputes with arbitration, not gunfire; discrete territories were agreed to with no poaching of customers. The conference ended in a glow of good fellowship and a standing ovation.
⁹

Despite Capone’s best efforts, Chicago’s era of tranquillity would be short-lived. The Hotel Sherman peace treaty held fast for only ten weeks. On January 6, 1927, the North Siders killed Capone’s buddy and the owner of the Hawthorne Inn’s restaurant, Theodore Anton. Although Capone sobbed openly for his friend, he adhered to the Hotel Sherman agreement and sought no retribution. Days later, Joe Saltis of the West Side ordered the killing of a runner for Ralph Sheldon, with whom Saltis had agreed to share the district. Capone, a friend of Sheldon’s, could restrain his primal urges no longer. He ordered the execution of two of Saltis’ hit men, and soon thereafter Saltis himself retired to Wisconsin. While Capone busied himself with gang wars and conferences, his empire continued to expand. As the millions poured in, Capone did not neglect the task of keeping the upperworld powers in check. It turned out that the conquest of Cicero was just the prelude to the main event. Now fully cognizant of the power of political liaisons, and experienced in the ways of “electing” a mayor, Capone tried his hand at the real plum: Chicago’s City Hall.

Choosing former mayor Big Bill Thompson as the recipient of his largesse, Capone put the laissez-faire pol back in office virtually single-handedly. The transplanted son of wealthy Bostonians, Thompson had been displaced in 1923 by reform candidate William Dever after many of Thompson’s appointees were convicted in a payola scheme. It was widely known that the short-on-intellect Thompson was really just a front for power-broker businessmen Fred Lundin and William Lorimer. What was most important for Capone’s interests was that Thompson, an unabashed defier of Volstead, had years before given wide berth to Johnny Torrio’s operation.

Capone spent $250,000 on Thompson’s campaign. The requisite thugs, numbering about a thousand, hit the streets to the sound of broken arms and legs of Thompson opponents. During the primary, Capone’s sluggers heaved so many grenades into polling places where his opponent was favored that the contest was nicknamed the Pineapple Primary. After his election, Mayor Bill Thompson disappeared on an extended fishing trip, while the real power, Capone and his Syndicate, set up shop in the Second City.

Now firing on all cylinders, Capone also attempted to ingratiate himself with his most avowed enemy - the newly formed Chicago Crime Commission (CCC), a private organization representing business leaders and citizens who shared the vision of a gang-free Chicago. Al brought seventy-six-year-old Frank J. Loesch, president of the CCC, to one of his headquarters, the Lexington Hotel. Seated below portraits of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Mayor William Thompson, Loesch asked Capone to keep his thugs away from polling booths in an upcoming election. “All right,” Al said. “I’ll have the cops send over the squad cars the night before the election and jug all the hoodlums and keep ’em in the cooler until the polls close.” True to his word, seventy cop cars worked all night, rounding up the hoods. “It turned out to be the squarest and most successful election in forty years,” Loesch later said.

Meanwhile, the struggle for control over the Unione Siciliana was unrelenting. The North Siders, led by Bugs Moran, wanted Unione copresident Joe Aiello to preside over the powerful organization and were seconded by New York chapter president Frankie Yale. Capone, however, installed Tony Lombardo as president of the Unione, and Yale was promptly murdered. When Capone moved to murder Aiello, his gang went to the jail where Aiello was being held (on suspicion of trying to kill Capone). In a stunning display of audacity, a train of taxis carrying Capone’s assassins showed up at the police station to hit Aiello while he was in custody. After entering Aiello’s cell, Capone’s boys decided to merely put the fear of God into Aiello and drive off. Upon his release, Aiello fled town and went into hiding for a year in New York.

Meanwhile, Capone’s man Tony Lombardo changed the tarnished Unione’s name to the Italo-American National Union. When Lombardo was killed on September 7, 1928, Capone had four of the Aiello brothers killed in return. One can scarcely imagine why anyone would now want the virtual death sentence that was the Unione presidency, but Capone somehow found more candidates. And so Lombardo’s successor turned out to be one Pasqualino Lolordo, who was killed on January 8, 1929. Temporarily, Aiello achieved his goal and assumed the top post.

The Massacre

Those silly Irish bastards. They have more guts than sense. If only we’d hooked up, I could have been president.

-Al Capone, on the St. Valentine’s Day massacre

The war for the Unione - and for that matter Chicago itself - reached its climax in the only manner that was ever really viable: a massacre. It occurred on February 14, 1929, St. Valentine’s Day. Since Bugs Moran had been stealing Capone’s booze, it was decided that he could be lured into a trap by setting up a buy of “stolen” Capone hooch. After disguising a black rental car as a police patrol wagon by mounting a fake siren on its top, four shooters dressed as cops met seven members of the North Side gang in a garage at 2122 North Clark Street at 11 A.M. to make the transfer.