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He resumed his relationship with Johnny Torrio, who had during the intervening years expanded his racketeering empire with the quiet cunning of a visionary. Torrio had abandoned the hotly contested streets of Brookyn for the comparatively open spaces of Chicago. The opportunities were enormous: gambling, brothels, and…illegal alcohol."
Torrio beckoned from Chicago and early in 1921 Al accepted. Armed with his knowledge of business and his experience with the brutal Frankie Yale, Capone had a good resume for a career in crime.
Capone Arrives
It was into this vast criminal enterprise that Torrio brought twenty-two-year-old Al Capone from his honest bookkeeping job in Baltimore. The money and opportunity for advancement was an order of magnitude greater, but the disgrace of managing brothels bothered Al. It was 1921 and Capone had turned his back on respectability forever. With his business acumen, soon Al became Torrio’s partner instead of his employee. Al took over as manager of the Four Deuces, Torrio’s headquarters in the Levee area. The Four Deuces was a speakeasy, gambling joint and whorehouse all in one. Soon his brother Ralph would come to join him in Torrio’s business.
At this time, Al became associated with a man that would be his friend for life, Jack Guzik. Incredibly enough, Guzik’s large Jewish Orthodox family made their living through prostitution. Closer in lifestyle to Torrio, Guzik was a devoted family man who acted like an older brother to Al. Once again, Capone showed his ability to step outside the Italian community as he had in marrying his Irish wife. Now his closest friend was Jewish. Capone’s lack of prejudice and ability to create alliances outside of the Italian gangster community would be invaluable in creating his destiny.
Capone Moves Up
For several years after Capone arrived in Chicago, things were comparatively quiet among the various gangs that had carved up Chicago’s rackets. Nonetheless, reform-minded William E. Dever succeeded the spectacularly corrupt Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson. With city government nominally in the hands of an earnest reformer, the daily process of payoffs and corruption became more complicated. Torrio and Capone decided to put many operations out of the city into the suburb of Cicero, where they could purchase the entire city government and police department.
Capone made it clear that he wanted an all-out conquest of the town. He installed his older brother Frank (Salvatore), a handsome and respectable-looking man of twenty-nine, as the front man with the Cicero city government. Ralph was tasked with opening up a working-class brothel called the Stockade for Cicero’s heavily blue-collar population. Al focused on gambling and took an interest in a new gambling joint called the Ship. He also took control of the Hawthorne Race Track.
For the most part, the Capone conquest of Cicero was unopposed, with the exception of Robert St. John, the crusading young journalist at the Cicero Tribune. Every issue contained an expose on the Capone rackets in the city. The editorials were effective enough to threaten Capone-backed candidates in the 1924 primary election.
On election day, things got ugly as Capone’s forces kidnapped opponents’ election workers and threatened voters with violence. As reports of the violence spread, the Chicago chief of police rounded up seventy nine cops and provided them with shotguns. The cops, dressed in plain clothes, rode in unmarked cars to Cicero under the guise of protecting workers at the Western Electric plant there.
Frank Capone, who had just finished negotiating a lease, was walking down the street when the convoy of Chicago policemen approached him. Someone recognized him and the cars emptied out in front of him. In seconds, Frank’s body was riddled with bullets. Technically, the police called it self defense, since Frank, seeing the police coming at him with guns drawn, had drawn his own revolver.
Al was enraged and escalated the violence by kidnapping officials and stealing ballot boxes. One official was murdered. When it was all over, Capone had won his victory for Cicero, but at a price that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Capone’s temper stayed under control for about five weeks. But then, Joe Howard, a small-time thug, assaulted Capone’s friend Jack Guzik when Guzik turned him down for a loan. Guzik told Capone and Capone tracked Howard down in a bar. Howard had the poor judgment to call Capone a dago pimp and Capone shot Howard dead.
At the age of twenty five after only four years in Chicago, Capone was a force to be reckoned with. Wealthy, powerful, master of the city of Cicero, he became a target for lawmen and rival gangsters alike. He was keenly aware that the next lavish gangster funeral he attended could be his own. The fragile peace that Torrio had constructed with other gangs was blown apart by Prohibition. Gangland murders were reaching epidemic proportions.
Dion O’Banion
While Capone’s name was often linked with these murders, the fact was that there were many other gangsters responsible that Capone and Torrio had tried to keep in line. One flamboyant example was Dion O’Banion who had a burgeoning bootlegging and florist business. Schoenberg describes him as having a perennial-boy likability. Dion "never acted tough. His habit of calling even enemies ’swell fellow’ mirrored an ingrained cheeriness and courtesy. He chronically beamed at the world; it amounted to a fixed grin, belied only by unblinkingly cold blue eyes. He was an indefatigable handshaker and backslapper, though never at the same time: at least one hand stayed free to go for one of the three gun pockets tailored into his clothes."
O’Banion was known for bizarre behavior which included gunning down a man in front of crowds of people for the flimsiest of reasons and then killing a man after meeting him at Capone’s Four Deuces, which dragged Capone into a murder investigation needlessly. There was a growing sense of realization that something was going to have to be done about Dion O’Banion’s irresponsible and childishly impulsive behavior.
The worst problem was the antagonism between two Torrio-Capone allies –Dion and the Genna brothers, who were close friends of Torrio. The dispute arose when the Gennas started selling cheap rotgut booze to O’Banion’s customers. While it didn’t really hurt O’Banion’s vast beer income, it was the principle that mattered to Dion. Then Dion hijacked a truckload of the Genna’s liquor and Torrio wondered how he was going to keep the peace this time.
O’Banion offered Torrio an out. Dion offered to retire to Colorado if Torrio bought out his interest in the Sieben Brewery. Knowing full well that there was going to be a raid, O’Banion arranged to close the deal with Torrio at the brewery. Not only did Torrio end up in jail, but O’Banion refused to return the money for a now padlocked brewery. Even worse, he bragged about how he had tricked Torrio. His fate was sealed.
Mike Merlo, the head of the Unione Sicilana in Chicago, a group that provided national cover to gangsters of that era, died of cancer. A huge funeral was planned in which Dion, florist to the gangs, naturally had a large role. Frankie Yale, head of the powerful New York branch, agreed with Torrio and Capone that Angelo Genna, who Dion had just humiliated over a gambling IOU, would take over the Chicago branch.
2 days after Merlo’s death on November 10, 1924, Dion was in his flower shop fixing flowers for the Merlo funeral when 3 gangsters came into the shop. Dion’s employee left the men alone to their business. O’Banion had expected the visit to pick up a wreath. He greeted the men and prepared to shake hands. One of the men pulled O’Banion’s arm and knocked him off balance.
Dion’s employee heard six gun shots and ran to help his boss who was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. The three men had vanished. It seems certain that two of the men were the vicious Silician assassins John Scalise and Albert Anselmi. There is some confusion as to whether the third man was Frankie Yale, who was in town for Merlo’s funeral, or Mike Genna. None of the likely murderers ever came to trial.
Dion’s funeral was a celebration for Torrio and Capone because they took over Dion’s excellent bootlegging territory and they had finally rid themselves of a dangerously unpredictable colleague. What they didn’t appreciate at the time was the aftermath of Dion’s death and what it meant to them personally. While the police scratched their heads over who killed O’Banion, Dion’s friend "Hymie" Weiss knew exactly who was responsible and he vowed revenge.
Bugs Moran
From that moment on, Capone and Torrio looked over their shoulders constantly for "Hymie" Weiss and another Dion associate, Bugs Moran. "Hymie" Weiss’s real name was Earl Wajciechowski, which he shortened to Weiss. The nickname "Hymie" stuck somehow and everyone assumed he was a Jewish gangster, when he was in fact a very devout Catholic. George Moran was a violent and unstable man who got the nickname "Bugs" because everyone thought he was nuts or "buggy".
Torrio was so concerned for his life that he decided to leave Chicago for awhile and went to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Capone was just as worried and took every possible security measure. Still, over the next 2 years, the former colleagues of Dion O’Banion would make a dozen attempts to assassinate Capone.
"Although he himself was unarmed as a mark of his status, he never went anywhere without at least two bodyguards, one on either side. With the exception of his home on South Prairie Avenue, he was never alone. He traveled only by car, sandwiched between bodyguards, with a trusted, armed chauffeur named Sylvester Barton…he preferred to travel under cover of night, risking travel by day only when absolutely necessary."
In January of 1925, twelve days after the Weiss-Moran gang tried to assassinate Capone, Johnny Torrio came back to Chicago. He and his wife Ann were just returned from a shopping trip and got out of their car to walk to the door of their apartment building.
Torrio walked behind her carrying packages. Weiss and Bugs Moran jumped out of a car and, thinking that Torrio was still in his automobile, fired wildly, wounding the chauffeur. When they finally saw Torrio, they shot him in the chest and neck, then his right arm and his groin. Moran held a gun to Torrio’s temple and pulled the trigger, but the firing chamber was empty and poor Johnny Torrio, the peacemaker, heard only a faint click.
At the hospital, Capone took over while surgeons removed the bullets in Torrio’s raw body. The hospital was a dangerous place for a gangster. The security was rotten, so Capone arranged for Torrio’s security on his own, which included Al sleeping in his room on a cot making sure that his beloved mentor was safe.
things would never be the same for Torrio. He wanted out of this life of violence. He wanted to retire and live quietly on his substantial earnings. He called Al to the jail in Waukegan in March of 1925 and told him that he was retiring from the Chicago rackets and going to live abroad. Torrio was turning over his vast assets to Al and the rest of the Capone brothers. It was an amazing legacy: nightclubs, whorehouses, gambling joints, breweries and speakeasies. Capone’s power increased immensely.
Power
Shortly after he took over Johnny Torrio’s empire, it was clear that his new status had changed Al Capone. He was a major force now in the Chicago underworld. To underscore his rise in the world, he moved his headquarters to the Metropole Hotel. His luxurious suite of five rooms cost $1,500 per day. He went from near obscurity to cultivated visibility.
In December of 1925, Al took his son to New York for surgery to relieve his chronic ear infections. Al was devoted to his only child and the boy’s poor health constantly preyed on his mind. Capone used the visit to New York to transact some business with his old boss Frankie Yale. The subject was imported whiskey which was always in short supply since it had to be smuggled over the Canadian border. It was easier for Yale to get whiskey into New York than it was for Capone to get whiskey into Chicago, so Yale had an oversupply. They worked out a deal and Capone would figure out how to get the whiskey from New York to Chicago.
Yale invited Al to a Christmas Day party at the Adonis Social and Athletic Club, a fancy name for a Brooklyn speakeasy. Yale was tipped off that rival gangster Richard "Peg-Leg" Lonergan was going to crash the party with a bunch of his thugs. Yale wanted to cancel the party, but Capone insisted the celebration go forward.
Capone planned a surprise of his own. When Lonergan’s men came to the club around 3 A.M. they were insulting and obnoxious. Capone gave the signal and all hell broke loose. Lonergan and his men didn’t even have time to draw their guns they were so surprised at the well-orchestrated attack.
The Adonis Club Massacre was Al flexing his muscle in his old stamping ground. It was also a way of displaying Chicago’s gangland superiority over New York. "Chicago is the imperial city of the gang world, and New York a remote provincial place," wrote Alva Johnston in the New Yorker. In Chicago," beer has lifted the gangster from a local leader of roughs and gunmen to a great executive controlling a big interstate and international organization. Beer, real beer, like water supply or the telephone, is a natural monopoly." He then created a written portrait of Al Capone, the "greatest gang leader in history."
Hanging Prosecutor
In the spring of 1926, Capone’s run of good luck hit a snag. On April 27, Billy McSwiggin, the young "hanging prosecutor" who had tried to pin the 1924 death of Joe Howard on Capone, met with an accident. He left the home of his father, a veteran Chicago police detective, and went with "Red" Duffy to play cards at one of Capone’s gambling joints. A bootlegger named Jim Doherty picked them up in his car.
Doherty’s car broke down and they hitched a ride with bootlegger "Klondike" O’Donnell, a bitter enemy of Capone. The four Irish lads went on a drinking binge in Cicero with O’Donnell and his brother Myles and ended up at a bar close to the Hawthorne Inn where Capone was having dinner. O’Donnell’s cruising around in Cicero was a territorial insult.
Capone and his henchmen, not realizing that McSwiggin was in the bar with Myles O’Donnell, waited outside in a convoy of cars until the drunken men staggered out. Then out came the machine guns and McSwiggin and Doherty were dead.
Capone was blamed. Despite the blot on McSwiggin’s integrity for keeping company with bootleggers, sympathy was with the dead young prosecutor. There was a big outcry against gangster violence and public sentiment went against Capone.
While everyone in Chicago just knew that Al Capone was responsible, there was not a shred of proof and the failure of this high-profile investigation to return an indictment was an embarrassment to local officials. Police took out their frustrations on Capone’s whorehouses and speakeasies which endured a series of raids and fires.
Al Goes Into Hiding
Capone went into hiding for three months in the summer. Reputedly some 300 detectives looked for him all over the country, in Canada and even Italy. In fact, he initially found refuge in the home of a friend in Chicago Heights and then, for most of the time, with friends in Lansing, Michigan.
Those three months in hiding made an indelible mark on Al. He began to see himself as much more than a successful rackeeter. He started to think of himself as a source of pride to the Italian immigrant community, a generous benefactor and important fixer who could help people. His bootlegging operations employed thousands of people, many of whom were poor Italian immigrants. His generosity was becoming legendary in Lansing. While much of this was just his ego getting larger, Capone had real leadership abilities and was very capable of extending those talents into areas that were beneficial to the community. He seriously thought of retiring from his life of crime and violence.
He couldn’t spend the rest of his life in hiding so he decided upon a calculated but risky course. He negotiated his surrender to the Chicago police. It was the first step in the new direction in which he wanted to take his life: exoneration in the death of McSwiggin, using his vast wealth to finance legitimate enterprises and set himself up as a hero to the Italian immigrant community.
On July 28, 1926, he returned to Chicago to face the accusations of murder. It turned out to be the right decision because the authorities did not have sufficient evidence to bring him to trial. For all the public uproar and efforts of the law enforcement groups, Al Capone was a free man. The authorities looked impotent.
Capone in his new role as the expansive peacemaker made a last ditch attempt to create an alliance with Hymie Weiss despite a recent attempt on his life. He offered Hymie a very profitable business deal in exchange for peace. Hymie turned him down. The next day, Hymie was gunned down at the ripe old age of twenty-eight.
The people of Chicago were tired of reading about gang violence and the newspapers fanned their anger. Capone held a highly publicized "peace conference" in which he appealed to the other bootleggers assembled there to tone down the violence. "There is enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the streets. I don’t want to die in the street punctured by machine-gun fire." He made his point. At the end of the meeting, an "amnesty" had been negotiated which accomplished two key things: first, there would be no more murders or beatings and second, past murders would not be avenged. For more than two months thereafter, nobody connected with the bootlegging business was killed.
In January of 1927, one of Al’s closest friends, Theodore Anton, known as "Tony the Greek," was found murdered. Capone was in tears over the loss of his friend and started to think more seriously about retirement. He invited a group of reporters over to his house and cooked them a spaghetti dinner, all to announce his retirement. Was he serious or just play acting? He probably was serious about retiring before someone put a bullet in his skull, but Al’s need for power and excitement kept pushing real retirement into the future.
Palm Island Estate
Capone left for Miami where the weather was much better than the Chicago winter, but the reception by the local community was chilly. He and Mae and Sonny rented a huge house for the season and started to look for a permanent residence. Through a middleman, he bought the 14-room Spanish style estate at 93 Palm Island which had been built by brewer Clarence Busch. Over the coming months, he would invest a small fortune in redecorating his new palace in Miami, securing it like a small fortress with concrete walls and heavy wooden doors.
The Palm Island estate came to the attention of IRS Intelligence Unit watchdog Elmer Irey. He chose Frank J. Wilson to head up the job of documenting Capone’s income and spending. The job was monumental: despite Capone’s lavish spending, everything was transacted through third parties; despite Capone’s incredible wealth, every transaction was on a cash basis. The major exception was the very tangible assets of the Palm Island estate, which was evidence of a major source of income.
In parallel government move, George Emmerson Q. Johnson, a member of the Scandinavian "old boy’s network" in the Midwest, was appointed U.S. attorney for Chicago. Johnson targeted Capone with unbridled passion. In the spring of 1928, the violence preceding the April primary election began to escalate out of control. Johnson himself was the target of bomb threats. It was not clear who was orchestrating all of this violence, but this time the targets were not gangsters but U.S. Senator Charles Deneen, a reformer, and a judge. The unabashedly corrupt Mayor Bill Thompson was presumed responsible since the victims were people who opposed him, but Al Capone, still in Florida, was the scapegoat.
While Mae Capone spent the spring of 1928 on an extravagant decorating spree, Al dedicated himself to establishing himself as a legitimate citizen of Miami. In spite of the outward show of respectability, Al quietly made plans to solve pressing problems caused by his old boss Frankie Yale. The liquor supply deal that Capone and Yale had negotiated was experiencing too many hijackings, which Capone believed Yale had initiated.
Al called six of his Chicago partners to Florida to figure out how to handle the problem with the powerful Yale:
"Toward midafternoon on July 1, a Sunday, Frank Yale, his jet-black hair and dark skin set off by a Panama hat and light-gray summer suit, was drinking in a Borough Park speakeasy when the bartender called him to the phone. What he heard sent him hurrying out to his car parked nearby. A few minutes later on Forty-fourth Street a black sedan crowded him to the curb; bullets from a variety of weapons — revolvers, sawed-off shotguns, a tommy gun –nailed him to the seat. The tommy gun was the first ever used to kill a New York gangster."
Like in the bootlegging business, Capone ran into the same old antagonist Bugs Moran. Moran had tried twice to murder Al’s friend and colleague Jack McGurn. When Capone went to Palm Island for the winter, Jack McGurn went to visit him in early February to discuss the enduring problems with Bugs and his North Siders gang.
St. Valentine’s Day
Neither McGurn nor Capone ever thought that the planned assassination of Bugs Moran would be an event that would be notorious for many decades to come. Capone was lolling so lavishly in Florida, so how could he be held responsible for the murder of a bootlegger. "Machine Gun" McGurn was given complete control of the hit.
McGurn put together a first rate team of out-of-towners. Fred "Killer" Burke was the leader and was assisted by a gunman named James Ray. Two other important members of the team were John Scalise and Albert Anselmi who had been used in the murder of Frankie Yale. Joseph Lolordo was another player, as were Harry and Phil Keywell from Detroit’s Purple Gang.
McGurn’s plan was a creative one. He had a bootlegger lure the Moran gang to a garage to buy some very good whiskey at an extremely attractive price. The delivery was to be made at 10:30 A.M. on Thursday, February 14. McGurn’s men would be waiting for them, dressed in stolen police uniforms and trench coats as though they were staging a raid.
McGurn, like Capone, wanted to be far away from the scene of the crime so he took his girlfriend and checked into a hotel. Establishing an airtight alibi was uppermost in his mind.
At the garage, the Keywells spotted a man who looked like Bugs Moran . The assassination squad got into their police uniforms and drove over to the garage in their stolen police car. Playing their part as police raiders to the hilt, McGurn’s men went into the garage and found seven men, including the Gusenberg brothers who had tried to murder McGurn.
The bootleggers, caught in the act, did what they were told: they lined up against the wall obediently. The four assassins took the bootleggers’ guns, and opened fire with two machine guns, a sawed-off shotgun and a .45. The men slumped to the floor dead, except for Frank Gusenberg who was still breathing.
To further perpetuate this charade, the two "policemen" in trench coats put up their hands and marched out of the garage in front of the two uniformed policemen. Anyone who watched this show believed that two bootleggers in trench coats had been arrested by two policemen. The four assassins left in the stolen police car.
It was a brilliant plan and it was brilliantly executed except for one small detail –the target of the entire plan, Bugs Moran, was not among the men executed. Moran was late to the meeting, seeing the police car pulling up just as he neared the garage. Moran took off, not wanting to be caught up in the raid.
Soon, real policemen came to the garage and saw Frank Gusenberg, on the floor, dying from twenty-two bullet wounds.
"Who shot you?" Sergeant Sweeney asked him.
"No one –nobody shot me," whispered Gusenberg. His refusal to implicate his executioners continued until his death a short time later.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the target of the very cleverly organized assassination attempt was Bugs Moran and the most obvious beneficiary, had the attempt been successful, was Al Capone. Even though Al Capone was conveniently in Florida and Jack McGurn had an airtight alibi, the police, the newspapers, and the people of Chicago knew who was responsible. The police could hardly arrest Capone with no evidence. McGurn was smart enough to marry his girlfriend Louise Rolfe, better known as the "blonde alibi," who could not testify against her new husband. All charges against him were dropped. No one was ever brought to justice for the spectacular assassination.
The publicity surrounding the St. Valentines Day Massacre was the most that any gang event had ever received. And it was not only local publicity. It was a national media event. Capone ballooned into the national conscious and writers all over the country began books and articles on him. Bergreen saw the massacre as endowing Capone with a grisly glamour: "There had never been an outlaw quite like Al Capone. He was elegant, high-class, the berries. He was remarkably brazen, continuing to live among the swells in Miami and to proclaim love for his family. Nor did he project the image of a misfit or a loner, he played the part of a self-made millionaire who could show those Wall Street big shots a thing or two about doing business in America. No one was indifferent to Capone; everyone had an opinion about him…"
Capone thought he had more pressing matters to resolve. Evidence was mounting that two of his Sicilian colleagues were causing Capone problems. Kobler describes the famous scene in which Capone met the problems head on:
"Seldom had the three guests of honor sat down to a feast so lavish. Their dark Sicilian faces were flushed as they gorged on the rich, pungent food, washing it down with liters of red wine. At the head of the table, Capone, his big white teeth flashing in an ear-to-ear smile, oozing affability, proposed toast after toast to the trio. Saluto, Scalise! Saluto, Anselmi! Saluto, Giunta!
"When, long after midnight, the last morsel had been devoured and the last drop drunk, Capone pushed back his chair. A glacial silence fell over the room. His smile had faded. Nobody was smiling now except the sated, mellow guests of honor, their belts and collars loosened to accommodate their Gargantuan intake. As the silence lengthened, they, too stopped smiling. Nervously, they glanced up and down the long table. Capone leaned toward them. The words dropped from his mouth like stones. So they thought he didn’t know? They imagined they could hide the offense he never forgave — disloyalty?
Capone had observed the old tradition. Hospitality before execution. The Sicilians were defenseless, having, like the other banqueters, left their guns in the checkroom. Capone’s bodyguards fell upon them, lashing them to their chairs with wire and gagging them. Capone got up, holding a baseball bat. Slowly, he walked the length of the table and halted behind the first guest of honor. With both hands he lifted the bat and slammed it down full force. Slowly, methodically, he struck again and again, breaking bones in the man’s shoulders, arms and chest. He moved to the next man and, when he had reduced him to mangled flesh and bone, to the third. One of the bodyguards then fetched his revolver from the checkroom and shot each man in the back of the head."
Public Enemy # 1
Although Al didn’t understand it at the time, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the subsequent ocean of publicity, some of which glamorized Capone and some of which demanded justice, catalyzed the government forces against him. After just a few days in office, Herbert Hoover pressured Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury, to spearhead the government’s battle against Capone.
Mellon commissioned a two-pronged approach: to get the necessary evidence to prove income tax evasion and to amass enough evidence to prosecute Capone successfully for Prohibition violations. Once the evidence was collected, the Treasury agents were to work with the U.S. Attorney, George E. Q. Johnson to initiate prosecution of Capone and the key members of his organization.
The man charged with gathering the evidence of Prohibition violations –bootlegging –was Eliot Ness, who began to assemble a team of daring young agents like himself. The biggest effort was led by Elmer Irey of the IRS Special Intelligence Unit, who redoubled his ongoing efforts shortly after Hoover’s mandate. While there was doubt that Capone could be successfully prosecuted for Prohibition violations in Chicago, regardless of the weight of evidence, Mellon felt sure that with the Sullivan ruling the government could get Capone on tax evasion.
Capone was, at least initially, unaware of the forces put in motion against him and generally did not let concerns about federal agents interfere with business. In mid-May, 1929, Capone went to a conference in Atlantic City where gangsters of all types from all over the country met to talk about cooperation rather than mutual destruction.
To keep violence and rivalry to a minimum, they divided up the country into "spheres of influence." Torrio became head of an executive committee which would arbitrate all disputes and punish renegades. The conferees had decided that Capone should surrender his Chicago criminal empire to Torrio to divvy up on his own terms. Capone had no intention of going along with carving up his empire or turning it over to Johnny Torrio.
Capone Arrested
Taking off his 11 1/2 carat diamond pinkie ring, Capone gave it to his lawyer to pass on to Ralph and was packed off first to the Holmesburg County Jail and finally to the Eastern Penitentiary where he stayed until March 16, 1930. He left the running of the business to his brother Ralph, Jack Guzik and Frank Nitti "The Enforcer."
Another setback to Capone came when Ralph was indicted on tax evasion charges in October of that year. Wanting to send a message to other gangsters, federal agents led Ralph away from a boxing match in handcuffs. Persistent civil servant Elmer Irey had been investigating Ralph for years. Ralph was nowhere near as smart as his brother Al when it came to hiding his wealth and financial transactions. He was sloppy, greedy and dumb — a natural target for an ambitious Treasury agent named Eliot Ness, who wiretapped his phones, and Nels Tessem, a highly-talented IRS agent, who scrutinized every financial transaction that Ralph made. Nitti and Guzik also had their days in tax court as a result of this determined and exhaustive investigation.
With Al in jail and Ralph, Guzik and Nitti running the business, Ness was given the mission of collecting enough evidence of Capone’s bootlegging to convince a grand jury that Capone was violating Prohibition laws as well as evading income tax. Ness had his men tap Ralph’s phones continuously. With the intelligence Ness gathered, he was able to ram the front door of Capone’s South Wabash brewery with a truck outfitted with a snowplow on the front. Emboldened by this frontier lawman approach, Ness and his "Untouchables" continued to wiretap and shut down Capone breweries.
In mid-March of 1930, Capone was released from jail, a few months early because of good behavior. A week later, Frank J. Loesch, the head of the Chicago Crime Commission, put together a Public Enemies list which was headed by Alphonse Capone, Ralph Capone, Frank Rio, Jack McGurn, and Jack Guzick, all Capone colleagues. The list was publicized in the newspapers and quickly adapted by J. Edgar Hoover as the FBI’s list of the "Most Wanted" criminals. So now, Al Capone, who wanted so much to legitimize himself as a contributing member of the community was Public Enemy Number One. He was enraged, humiliated and thoroughly insulted.
In that same month, Elmer Irey went to Chicago to meet with the agent-in-charge Arthur P. Madden to map out their battle strategy. It became clear to both of them that they needed an insider in the Capone organization if they were going to be successful in the short-term. Before he went back to Washington, Irey spent two days hanging around the lobby of the Lexington Hotel, posing as a salesman. Once he developed a feel for the kinds of thugs that lived there, he came up with a brilliant idea: he would find two undercover agents who could, posing as gangsters, infiltrate the Capone organization.
"The obvious choice was Michael J. Malone….He was a good actor, with an ability to blend into any background. He had nerves of steel and a sharp intelligence. His dark, almost Mediterranean looks and his ability to speak Italian made him an ideal candidate for infiltration into the Italian-dominated Capone empire" (Ludwig, Smyth). Another undercover agent was selected to be his partner in this venture.
Malone would take the name De Angelo and the other agent Graziano. Major efforts were made to create false identities for the two men as small-time Brooklyn racketeers. They knew that every single detail of the forged identities would be scrutinized and that their lives depended upon how well they studied for their parts.
Neither Graziano nor De Angelo could ever be seen or heard talking to Irey or Madden, so an intermediary had to be found. The third agent in this venture was Frank J. Wilson, a 43-year-old star in the agency. Wilson would not only be the contact man for Graziano and De Angelo, he was to coordinate intelligence and evidence and perform some of the investigations himself.
Infiltration
In June of 1930, Wilson got approval from the eccentric publisher of the Chicago Tribune to question one of his reporters. Jake Lingle was a friend of Al Capone’s who flaunted the relationship. Bergreen believed that Lingle wanted more than the profitable connection he had to the mob. "His influence made him feel invulnerable when in fact his position was extremely vulnerable. Acting as a double agent or even a triple agent was too thrilling to resist. Not satisfied with playing this extremely tricky role, he agreed to inform on Capone for the federal government."
Lingle’s appointment was June 10, but he got a bullet in the back of his skull the day before.
The uproar was deafening. Capone rode it all out at his home in Miami Beach. When asked about Lingle, Capone said, "newspapers and newspapermen should be busy suppressing rackets and not supporting them. It does not become me of all persons to say that, but I believe it."
Meanwhile, Irey’s Mike "De Angelo" checked himself into the Lexington Hotel, dressed himself in flashy expensive clothing and hung around the hotel bar, quietly reading the newspapers. Eventually the Capone soldiers struck up a conversation with him and started to ask him questions about his background.
"We want the McCoy about you," one of the gangsters told him. "You look like maybe you’re on the lam and might be open to a proposition –and how do you know, we might have something for you."
De Angelo played along: "matter of fact, I am open for something, but it’s got to be good. If you want it straight, why I come out here in the first place is I didn’t know but what maybe I could tie in with the Big Boy."
The gangster told him they had to do some checking first, but to hang around for a few days and they’d give him an answer. De Angelo hoped he hadn’t screwed up any of his fabricated identity or he would be a dead man. A few days later, he was invited to meet with the mob and Capone himself at a big party. Fully aware that Capone would wine and dine a traitor and beat him to death with a baseball bat, De Angelo went to the party with trepidation. Fortunately, Irey’s thoroughness in crafting his agent’s background paid off handsomely. De Angelo was made a croupier in one of Capone’s Cicero gambling joints.
Just before Ralph Capone’s trial, De Angelo found out that the mob was going to focus on the government’s witnesses. It was good intelligence because Irey arranged for extra protection of the government witnesses. The result was a guilty verdict for Ralph and no damage to government witnesses.
A few months later, De Angelo was joined by Graziano, who got a job checking on Capone’s beer deliveries. Just before Christmas, they uncovered a plot on Wilson’s life and caught it just in time. Now that the Capone organization knew about Wilson, Irey wanted to reassign him, but Wilson wouldn’t have it. This attempt on his life made him all the more determined to get Capone.
Paydirt
The real intelligence paydirt came in a conversation between Graziano and one of Capone’s employees. "The income tax dicks ain’t so smart. They’ve had a record book of Al’s for five years that could send him to jail, only they’re too dumb to realize it."
It turned out that the mountain of records taken from a raid years earlier on the Hawthorne Hotel included a ledger that documented the financial operations of the Hawthorne Smoke Shop for the years 1924-1926. What Irey needed now was to figure out the identity of the two bookkeepers who made those entries. The handwriting didn’t match up with any of Capone’s men. Chances were that Capone had them disposed of when the ledgers were seized.
Graziano took a huge risk and asked the man who told him about the ledgers if the bookkeepers had been "taken care of." The gangster replied, "they weren’t exactly taken care of because they were only a couple of dopes, but they left town five years ago when the smoke shop was raided." Incredibly enough, the gangster then told Graziano their names: Leslie Shumway and Fred Reis.
In the early months of 1931, Irey’s men located Shumway in Miami, working ironically at Hialeah racetrack where Capone made almost daily visits when he was in residence. Frank Wilson went to Miami to have a conversation with Shumway and escaped from city with the bookkeeper in tow just a half hour before a car full of goons came looking for the Shumway. Fred Reis had gone to ground in Peoria, Illinois. Both men agreed to cooperate fully and were given maximum security and protection.
The Plea Bargain
Finally, the government’s mission was coming to closure in the early spring of 1931. Facing a six-year statute of limitations on some of the earlier evidence, the government had to prosecute the 1924 evidence before March 15, 1931. A few days before that deadline, on March 13, a federal grand jury met secretly on the government’s claim that in 1924 Al Capone had a tax liability of $32,488.81. The jury returned an indictment against Capone that was kept secret until the investigation was complete for the years 1925 to 1929.
On June 5, 1931, the grand jury met again and returned an indictment against Capone with twenty-two counts of tax evasion totalling over $200,000. A week later, a third indictment was returned on the evidence provided by Ness and his team. Capone and sixty-eight members of his gang were charged with some 5,000 separate violations of the Volstead Act, some of them going back to 1922. The income tax cases took precedence over the Prohibition violations.
Capone was facing a possible 34 years in jail if the government completely won its case. Capone’s lawyers presented U.S. Attorney Johnson with a deal. Capone would plead guilty for a relatively light sentence. Johnson, after discussing the offer with Irey and the new Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills, accepted the deal and agreed to recommend a sentence between 2 and 5 years.
Why would the government after all its efforts take accept such a light sentence? First of all, despite the government’s extraordinary efforts to hide Shumway and Reis, there were very real concerns about them living to testify. Capone had put a bounty of $50,000 on each of the bookkeeper’s heads. There was also some doubt that the six-year statute of limitations would be upheld by the Supreme Court. An appeals court had already ruled on a three-year statute of limitations for tax evasion. Then there was an enormous potential for jury tampering, both through bribery and intimidation.
When word of the deal leaked, the press was outraged that Capone would get off with such a light sentence.
Capone went into the courtroom on June 16 a fairly happy man. When Capone pleaded guilty, Judge Wilkerson adjourned the hearing until June 30. Capone told the press he was entertaining offers from the movie studios to make a film of his life. He was in excellent spirits when he appeared for sentencing in front of Wilkerson at the end of the month.
Judge Wilkerson had a little surprise for Al. "The parties to a criminal case may not stipulate as to the judgment to be entered," Wilkerson said firmly. He made it quite clear that while he would listen to Johnson’s recommendation, he was not bound to go along with it. "It is time for somebody to impress upon the defendant that it is utterly impossible to bargain with a federal court." It was a shock to Capone. The deal, the plea bargain was kaput and Al was clearly worried. Capone was allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and a trial was scheduled for October 6.
The Trial
Capone spent his summer of freedom in his old hideout in Lansing, Michigan, seemingly resigned to the trial. However, behind the scenes his organization had procured the list of prospective jurors and began bribing them by every means possible.
Wilson got word of the bribery and went with Johnson to Judge Wilkerson with the evidence that Capone’s gang was bribing and threatening the potential jurors. Judge Wilkerson was neither surprised nor concerned. "Bring your case to court as planned, gentlemen," he told them confidently. "Leave the rest to me."
On October 6, 1931, fourteen detectives escorted Capone to the Federal Court Building. Security was very, very tight. Capone was brought in through a tunnel to a freight elevator.
The crime czar was well dressed in a conservative blue serge suit. No pinkie rings or any other gaudy gangster jewelry this time. Every major newspaper had dispatched its top talent. It was the "Who’s Who" of newspaper journalism. The question was posed to Al repeatedly, "Are you worried?"
"Worried?" Capone answered with a smile, "Well, who wouldn’t be?" As Bergreen notes: " At that moment, however, he was feeling quite confident. He assumed that his organization had gotten to the jury and all that was required of him was to show up in court each day, appearing polite and respectful, until his inevitable acquittal. And even then he would be sure to act magnanimous and tell the press that there were no hard feelings on his part, he knew the government boys were just doing their job."
Judge Wilkerson entered the courtroom. He wore no robes over his dark suit. "Judge Edwards has another trial commencing today," he announced. "Go to his courtroom and bring me the entire panel of jurors. Take my entire panel to Judge Edwards." Everyone was shocked, but no one more than Capone and his lawyer Michael Ahern. The new panel of jurors, most of whom were white men from rural areas, had never appeared on any list of Capone’s and had never been approached for bribery. These jurors would be sequestered at night so that the Capone mob couldn’t get to them.
On October 17, Johnson gave his final summation to a jury composed of men with farm backgrounds like his own. After his opening statement, he turned his attention to Capone himself. "I have been a little bewildered in this case at the manner in which the defense has attempted to weave a halo of mystery and romance around the head of this man. Who is he? Who is this man who during the years that we have considered here has so lavishly expended what he claims to be almost half a million dollars? Is he the little boy out of the Second Reader, who succeeded in finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, that he has been spending so lavishly, or maybe, as his counsel says, is he Robin Hood? But was it Robin Hood in this case who bought $8,000 worth of diamond belt buckles to give to the unemployed? No. Was it Robin Hood in this case who paid a meat bill of $6,500? Did that go to the unemployed? No, it went to the house on Palm Island. Did he buy these $27 shirts to protect the shivering men who sleep under Wacker Drive at night? No.
"At any time, at any place, has this defendant ever appeared in a reputable business? Has there appeared a single instance of contact with a reputable business? What a picture we have in this case: no income, but diamond belt buckles, twenty-seven- dollar shirts, furnishings for his home — $116,000 that is not deductible from his income. And yet counsel comes here and argues to you that the man has no income!"
Late Saturday night, October 17, 1931, after nine hours of discussion, the jury completed its deliberation and found Capone guilty of some counts, but not all counts of tax evasion. The following Saturday, Judge Wilkerson sentenced Capone to eleven years, $50,000 in fines and court costs of another $30,000. Bail was denied and Capone would be led to the Cook County Jail to await eventual removal to a federal penitentiary.
"Capone tried to smile again," said the New York Times, "but the smile was bitter. He licked his fat lips. He jiggled on his feet. His tongue moved in his cheeks. He was trying to be nonchalant, but he looked as if he must have felt –ready to give way to an outburst of anger. It was a smashing blow to the massive gang chief. His clumsy fingers, tightly locked behind his back, twitched and twisted."
As Capone left the courtroom, an official of the Internal Revenue Service slapped liens on his property so that the government could satisfy its tax claims. Capone lost his temper and tried to attack the man, but was restrained by the marshals who had him in custody.
The Final Chapter
Initially, Al was a prisoner at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta and quickly became its most famous prisoner. There were charges almost immediately that he was living "like a king." While that was certainly an exaggeration, he clearly lived better than the rest of the prisoners. He had more socks, underwear, sets of sheets, etc. than anyone else. He maintained these extravagances by virtue of a hollow handle in his tennis racket in which he secreted several thousand dollars in cash.
In 1934, Attorney General Homer Cummings took over the prison on Alcatraz Island to warehouse dangerous, intractable criminals. In a radio address, Cummings explained that "here may be isolated the criminals of the vicious and irredeemable type so that their evil influence may not be extended to other prisoners."
In August of 1934, Capone was sent to Alcatraz. His days of living like a king in prison were gone. "Capone would run nothing on or from Alcatraz; he wouldn’t even know what was happening outside. There would be no smuggled letters or messages.
All incoming letters were censored, then retyped by guards with prohibited subjects omitted, which included the faintest whiff of business or the doings of former associates. Censors excised even mention of current events. No newspapers were allowed; magazines had to be more than seven months old. The only source of news was new arrivals. At best, prisoners could write one letter a week, rigorously censored, and only to their immediate family members. Only immediate family could visit, only two of them each month, and they had to write the warden for permission each time. Visitors and prisoners made no physical contact. They sat on opposite side of plate glass… No one could smuggle money into Capone, and he could not have spent it anyway." (Schoenberg).
How did Capone manage with the loss of popularity and status? He seemed to do reasonably well and got along better than most from the standpoint of adjustment. The same was not true of his health. The syphilis that he had contracted as a very young man was moving into the tertiary stage called neurosyphilis. By 1938, he was confused and disoriented.
Al spent the last year of his sentence, which had been reduced to six years and five months for a combination of good behavior and work credits, in the hospital section being treated for syphilis. He was released in November of 1939. Mae took him to a hospital in Baltimore where he was treated until March of 1940.
Sonny Capone seemed to be a remarkably friendly and well-adjusted young man, despite his very unusual background. In 1940, he married an Irish girl and settled in Miami. Sonny and Diana provided Al and Mae with four granddaughters, which were treated with lavish attention.
For his remaining years, Al slowly deteriorated in the quiet splendor of his Palm Island palace. Mae stuck by him until January 25, 1947 when he died of cardiac arrest at age 48, his grieving family surrounding him. A week before, Andrew Volstead, author of the Volstead Act that ushered in the era of Prohibition from 1920 to 1933, died at the age of 87.
"In his forty-eight years, Capone had left his mark on the rackets and on Chicago, and more than anyone else he had demonstrated the folly of Prohibition; in the process he also made a fortune. Beyond that, he captured and held the imagination of the American public as few public figures ever do. Capone’s fame should have been fleeting, a passing sensation, but instead it lodged permanently in the consciousness of Americans, for whom he redefined the concept of crime into an organized endeavor modeled on corporate enterprise. As he was at pains to point out, many of his crimes were relative; bootlegging was criminal only because a certain set of laws decreed it, and then the laws were changed".
end…
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