Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  After watching Balsamo’s men extort money from neighborhood businessmen, Capone decided to try it himself. He built a small crew of youths who could serve as muscle—among them his cousin Charlie Fischetti—and had them shake down his fellow shoeshine boys. The racket started small but grew to such an extent Balsamo’s men took notice and put a stop to it.

  Yet at home, Al Capone was a polite, dutiful son, bringing money and food to his family, thanks to his secret life as a thief and errand boy for gangsters. The praise from his family, especially his mother, inadvertently propelled him toward a life of crime.

  In the sixth grade, when a teacher at P.S. 133 struck him for insubordination, the fourteen-year-old Al supposedly struck her right back. He never set foot inside the school again, or perhaps he just dropped out to work and help support his family.

  Bigger and stronger now, on his way to a burly but nimble five foot ten, Al developed into an outstanding pool player; he was also capable of knocking a man out with a single blow. By his midteens, he was affiliated with the South Brooklyn Rippers and later the Forty Thieves Juniors, the latter with ties to Torrio’s friend Uale, who by now was diversifying into loan-sharking, the protection racket, and even a line of cigars.

  Uale decided to mimic the profitable College Inn near Coney Island with his own Harvard Inn, which he operated under the assumed last name Yale. For this, Yale needed men who were more than simple street-gang thugs—young Al Capone, six years Frank’s junior, had the necessary skills. Tough and strong, capable of violence but affable and well liked, Al would matriculate as a bouncer-cum-bartender at the Harvard Inn.

  The Harvard Inn was no nightclub for college students—its customers were dockworkers and low-life criminals, and sometimes their families and friends. Capone kept busy maintaining order and keeping the clientele’s glasses brimming; a show-off pastime of the young bartender, when business was slow, was shooting at beer bottles and shearing off their necks. But much as he admired and imitated the superficially slick Yale, he still had plenty to learn.

  On a sultry evening in 1917, Frank Galluccio drifted into the Harvard Inn with his girl on one arm and his sister on the other. Pretty little sis in her clingy dress caught Al’s attention, and he brushed near her when she was swaying by, but his sly comments got no response.

  Capone tried something more direct: “You got a nice ass, honey, and I mean it as a compliment. Believe me.”

  The grinning gorilla broadcasting this crass remark was too much. Galluccio demanded an apology. Capone, realizing he’d overstepped, approached the table, ready to calm things down.

  Galluccio was slight—five feet six and under 150 pounds—but a street tough, a small-time criminal, and already drunk. Capone towered over him, bigger, wider, obviously stronger. But Galluccio leapt forward with a knife, cutting three quick slashes down Capone’s left cheek—a long one four inches down, two smaller ones along his left jaw and on his throat.

  As Capone reeled, Galluccio hurriedly collected the girls and bolted. No one bothered taking pursuit; everyone’s attention was on stopping Al’s bleeding and getting him to a hospital. Thirty stitches closed his wounds but left scars that would become his unwanted calling card.

  Later, Yale settled both Capone and Galluccio down, and no follow-up mayhem occurred. Eventually, on occasional New York trips, Capone would hire as a bodyguard the man who disfigured him. Maybe Al learned playing it cool only got you killed—better to take out the other guy first.

  Why get killed over some skirt, anyway? Sex was readily available in the streets, and at the Harvard Inn and the Brooklyn brothels where he collected for Yale. In the process, Capone contracted the disease he dealt with the rest of his life.

  * * *

  Even as he was consorting with prostitutes and loose women, young Al was on the lookout for a life’s partner. Mary Josephine Coughlin was a lovely dark-haired Irish girl from Red Hook, a nicer part of Brooklyn where rows of well-tended houses sported windows with lace curtains. Two years older, Mae (as everyone called her) lived with her sisters and widowed mother; a breadwinner now, she held a clerical post at the box factory where Al worked days while helping Yale out nights.

  Mae’s apple cheeks, arresting green eyes, and wavy brown hair immediately seized Al’s attention. Her musical laugh and broad, winsome smile—made all the more prominent by a marked overbite—gave her a singular beauty, and her personality seemed remarkably in tune with his. Like Al, Mae enjoyed having a good time, going out dancing and drinking with friends.

  She possessed a definite independence, her burgeoning romance with Capone crossing several cultural boundaries. Irish girls traditionally married older men, while Italian boys usually chose younger brides, making the twenty-year-old Mae an unusual partner for the eighteen-year-old Capone.

  Perhaps the love affair began at the factory, or at one of the dance halls where young people socialized across ethnic lines. The pair dressed stylishly, though Mae was tasteful and Al gaudy. While Al’s second job might have been a mystery to her, he was clearly striving to be more than a box- or paper-cutter.

  Dancing became a favorite pastime for the couple, and Al was surprisingly graceful. Daniel Fuchs, Capone’s Navy Yard contemporary, reported Al was “something of a nonentity, affable, soft of speech and even mediocre in everything but dancing.” Yet Al and Mae shared a strong physical attraction, and the couple wound up after hours in back at the box factory. Soon Mae got pregnant.

  Al wanted to marry this smiling, plucky Irish girl, but Mae’s mother rejected him. To the Irish, Italians were “colored”—this despite both groups being Catholic and often spurned by white Protestants.

  As Mae’s pregnancy progressed, Al made frequent visits when her mother wasn’t around. When Mae could no longer work, Al helped her family out, gradually building relationships with Mae’s brothers and sisters. But her mother remained unmoved.

  Mae gave birth December 4, 1918, to a sickly, two months premature boy, Albert Francis Capone—“Sonny” would deal with the side effects of congenital syphilis all his life. With Mae insisting on keeping the baby, her mother gave in, and on December 30, 1918, at the bride’s neighborhood church, Alphonse Capone and Mary “Mae” Coughlin were married.

  After the devastation of the 1871 fire, Chicago reinvented itself as it rebuilt. City leaders made sure the new technology of the railroads converged with the ships that moved among the Great Lakes. Already a major slaughterhouse for the cattle that grazed in the plains to the west and south, the center of the Near South Side was one large barnyard of animals waiting for the knife. Here the urban east met the Wild West. Unlike New York, Chicago had miles of adjacent prairies, and its leaders were expanding the city at an amazing rate by the end of the 1800s.

  As a gateway to the west, Chicago’s downtown in the prefire days always had a large transient male population of pioneers, cowhands, and prospectors passing through to make their fortunes farther west. A major industry developed downtown to profit off these visitors by offering gambling, drink, and women, as well as outright theft. The grafters who ran the downtown gambling joints, saloons, and brothels had a lot of votes, resulting in Chicago being underpoliced for all of the nineteenth century. Crime became one of the city’s major industries.

  As the manager of several boxers, Johnny Torrio visited Chicago many times. He almost certainly met James “Diamond Jim” Colosimo, a major political player in Chicago’s First Ward, home to a sprawling red-light district just outside the Loop, Chicago’s downtown business district. By 1909, with gang wars heating up in Brooklyn, Torrio had made the move to Chicago, and by 1914 he was Colosimo’s right-hand man.

  For all his wealth and influence, Colosimo yearned for respectability and recognition as a successful man of business. He opened a posh café called Colosimo’s at Twenty-First Street and Wabash, while a short block away at 2222 South Wabash, the Four Deuces, his four-story house of gambling and prostitution, ran wide-open under Torrio’s watch.

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p; That left Diamond Jim to focus his energies on his restaurant, including its entertainment, particularly Dale Winter, an attractive, blue-eyed thrush who wore an air of virtue despite a figure-hugging white gown, its bosom bedecked with a red rose. Even as he paid her top dollar, Colosimo lavished Dale with furs and jewelry, seeing in her the respectable good girl of his dreams. He decided in 1919 to divorce his wife, a brothel madam. But while Colosimo busied himself with his new love and the diamonds that studded his clothes and filled his pockets, outside events began to reshape his fate.

  For more than a century, a growing coalition of moralists and progressives had worked to abolish alcohol from American life. Their reasons varied greatly, from the misguided to the pernicious. Advocates for women’s rights, who knew all too well the damage liquor could do to a family, found themselves allied with immigrant-hating nativists, who sought to exterminate the saloon not so much because it might gobble up a breadwinner’s paycheck but because it represented an outpost of a foreign culture.

  Yet they all agreed alcohol was inherently a vile and treacherous substance, which inevitably dragged all drinkers down the road to debauchery and despair. Take away the opportunity to drink, and Americans would become healthier in body and soul, morally upright and mentally sound.

  In 1919—after decades of lobbying and grassroots organizing, of rewriting textbooks and federal law—the drys finally won the chance to put their ideas to the test. That year saw the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, making illegal “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” inside the borders of the United States. Consumption and purchase of alcoholic beverages, however, remained legal. The new law gave Americans exactly one year to bid farewell to the bottle; it would go into effect at midnight on January 17, 1920.

  Prohibitionists heralded this new dry era as a day of salvation, the moment when Americans would exchange freedom to imbibe for liberty from crime and vice. In Norfolk, Virginia, the evangelist Billy Sunday presided over an elaborate funeral for booze, attended by a crowd of ten thousand. “Heaven rejoices,” Sunday told the Demon Rum. “The devil is your only mourner.”

  Most Chicagoans gave that notion a Bronx cheer. The city, which later voted five to one to stay wet, wasted little time in defying the dry law. Less than an hour after Prohibition took effect, six masked men stole a shipment of “medicinal” liquor from a Chicago rail yard. Within minutes, four barrels of booze were looted from a warehouse in another part of town, while a group of bandits hijacked a truckload of whiskey elsewhere in the city.

  That same day Al Capone turned twenty-one.

  Alcohol was a key component of the Colosimo operation—which comprised not only the precious café but his suburban roadhouses, where prostitution was on the menu. Pop-eyed pimp Jack Guzik, a Torrio crony, learned of a brewery at Twentieth and Wabash available for sale, cheap, and hit Colosimo up for a loan. The jowly Guzik had a head for business—he saw a rich future in bootlegging and left his brothers to run the family brothel business.

  Torrio also saw the kind of money to be made from Prohibition—like prostitution, something was now illegal that large numbers of people desired. Police payoffs could easily be expanded to booze—Torrio just needed the means to brew and store the stuff.

  Brewers who wanted to sell out, or go into business with bootleggers willing to distribute the banned product, were eager to talk. That Colosimo’s restaurant was no First Ward dive, but a high-hat nightclub attracting both upper-class society and the better-behaved denizens of the underworld, helped facilitate negotiations.

  But Diamond Jim Colosimo had no interest in across-the-board bootlegging. All he wanted from Torrio was a supply for their operations, while other Chicago gangs were entering the racket, servicing a whole new market, more lucrative even than brothels. Neighborhoods often railed against the latter, but what Chicago neighborhood didn’t want its saloons back?

  On March 31, 1920, Colosimo was granted a divorce from his wife, Victoria, who netted $50,000. Johnny Torrio frowned on this. During the day, Torrio traded in corruption and sins of the flesh; but by night he was the faithful husband of his loving wife, Anna. The couple maintained a quiet middle-class life at home, listening to the Victrola and playing card games. Divorce just wasn’t done.

  On April 17, Colosimo and Dale Winter wed in Southern Indiana at a hotel-casino. Victoria took her generous divorce settlement and married a Neapolitan grocer-cum-bartender in California. Back in Chicago, Colosimo nestled Dale in his mansion on nearby Vernon Avenue, and returned to his happy life. He had everything—money, a lovely, gifted new wife, and an ever-growing prominence in high society.

  On May 11, Torrio called Colosimo with word two trucks loaded down with fine whiskey would roll up at 4:00 P.M.—Colosimo himself had to be there to seal the deal. Diamond Jim left before four to go to the café, a .38-caliber revolver in his pocket. He took his standard tour of the facility, checking on various staff members, then went out to the lobby to wait for the delivery.

  Two shots exploded the silence.

  Colosimo dropped facedown on the floor, blood spilling from his skull, dead long before the doctor and police came. The murder was close-up, a bullet in the head, leaving powder burns. With his diamond ring, loaded revolver, and $120 on him, the motive could hardly be robbery.

  Suspicion settled on spurned ex-spouse Victoria, though she was across the country at the time; still, she had underworld contacts—by divorcing his wife, Colosimo had provided the perfect smoke-screen motive for his own murder.

  A funny fact emerged: Torrio’s old pal Frankie Yale was in the city that day. A stranger in Chicago, he made the ideal torpedo to remove Colosimo and do Torrio a favor, while laying the groundwork for a lucrative trade in alcohol between the East Coast and the Midwest. Yet despite matching a witness description, Yale was never charged.

  Colosimo’s passing established the pattern for lavish gangster funerals to come, with judges, elected officials, and criminals marching in procession behind a hearse festooned with thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers.

  But Diamond Jim was soon forgotten, even if the café bearing his name continued for decades. A $10,000 payment to Frankie Yale bought Torrio a criminal operation worth millions, clearing the way for expansion into large-scale bootlegging.

  In 1919, the Italians in Brooklyn were battling the Irish for control over the docks. Al Capone stepped into a poor choice of waterfront tavern, running into a profanely insulting Mick, whom he promptly beat to a pulp.

  The cops could be bought, but the Irish mobsters wanted blood—Al’s. The throttled victim worked for mobster Dinny Meehan, whose minions were on the lookout for a burly young brawler with some distinctive scars. Frankie Yale likely arranged a job in Chicago for young Capone with Torrio, who needed trustworthy men, expanding his influence after Colosimo’s murder—perhaps Johnny even remembered a plump kid who ran errands back in the day.

  Avoiding an accelerating gang war in Brooklyn, young Capone headed west. He could hardly imagine that even more violence awaited him.

  He would already be in Chicago when, on November 14, 1920, his father died of heart failure at the pool hall where Gabriel and his son had so often played. With the family losing its main source of income, Al now had his mother and siblings to support halfway back across the country.

  Money needed to be made.

  Alexander Jamie early in his federal career.

  (National Archives.)

  Young Eliot Ness (left) with Jamie’s son, Wallace.

  (Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University.)

  Two

  1850–1923

  Eliot Ness considered himself “the thrifty and industrious son of thrifty and industrious parents,” immigrants who had made it into the American upper middle class. Not rich but far from poor, they raised their son with love but firmly—for those who played fair, they taught the boy, the land of opportunity worked as advertised.

 
“What I now appreciate most about my father,” Ness said, “is the way he took the time to give me quiet lectures separating right from wrong. He made sure I recognized the importance of hard work, honesty, and compassion.”

  The Ness surname came from the farm near Ålvundfjord in Norway where Eliot’s father, Peder Johnsen Ness, was born out of wedlock on March 31, 1850. Norwegian surnames in those days derived from where you lived: Peder Johnsen Ness meant “Peder, son of John, who lives on Ness farm.”

  Peder grew up in a pastoral world of striking beauty, rich meadows and craggy peaks hugging the edges of fjords, the deep, icy seawater fingers carved into the coast by ancient glaciers. But the boy’s early years were marked by tragedy—his carpenter father died when Peder was seven, his mother taken by pneumonia when he was thirteen.

  Work became Peder’s salvation. From the beginning, he was tireless and meticulous, apprenticing as a baker at sixteen, mastering his craft in three and a half years. Peder spent his twenties plying his trade in and around the Norwegian capital city of Christiania (Oslo), saving for a ticket to America. On April 22, 1881—less than a month after his thirty-first birthday—he set sail for the States, never to return.

  When he arrived at Castle Garden at the southern tip of Manhattan, Peder had just fifty Norwegian kroner in his pocket. There’s no reason to suppose he knew anyone in America, and he couldn’t speak the language. Not that Peder expected America to welcome him with open arms. He shared the attitude of another Norwegian immigrant, who wrote home saying, “There are better and more numerous chances for young men here than in Norway . . . [but] one must work, for here nothing may be had for nothing.”

  Peder knew all about hard work, which had brought him this far, and he knew his future depended on it. Marking his break with the old country, he Anglicized his first name to “Peter” and set out for the Midwest. In all likelihood, Peter had his sights set on Chicago: work was plentiful in the factories and stockyards of the South Side, its skies filled with grime, its air thick with the stench of slaughter. The city was growing with the hunger of an unruly child: a baker could do well feeding that appetite.