Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  O’Banion’s vengeance-thirsting partner, Hymie Weiss, gripped a ready shotgun, “Bugs” Moran a .45 automatic. The driver, out to help Torrio with his packages, caught a bullet in the leg while Johnny sprinted toward the apartment.

  Moran’s slug ripped into Johnny’s arm, sending him spinning, scattering packages, giving Weiss a clear shot. Weiss’s shotgun blasted, chewing into Torrio’s neck, chest, and stomach. Torrio crumpled, leaking blood from five major wounds. Moran rushed over and thrust his gun at Johnny’s head, but the weapon was empty.

  As Moran reloaded, the driver of the Caddy honked—a van was rounding the corner. Time to scram before witnesses got close enough to identify them.

  Torrio looked to be dead or dying, just bloody meat in a winter topcoat. But an ambulance tried anyway, conveying the gang boss to Jackson Park Hospital, where Capone came and stayed until his mentor miraculously made it through.

  A young witness tagged Moran as one of the would-be assassins, but Mr. and Mrs. Torrio weren’t interested in identifying anyone, and soon the case was dropped. Other solutions would be found.

  On February 9, shaken but alive, Torrio paid the $5,000 fine and took new if temporary residence in Lake County Jail—where the sheriff could keep him away from the city’s maelstrom of violence.

  In March, Capone came to the jail at Torrio’s bidding. With his lawyers present, Johnny turned his operations over to his protégé—nightclubs, casinos, brothels, breweries. Wealthy and alive—and no doubt wanting to stay that way—the former boss would receive a percentage of profits, available to consult as needed . . . but at a safe distance. Al might not have been surprised—Torrio had fled gang violence before—though perhaps had not expected the complete control Johnny ceded him.

  Capone had gone to the jailhouse confab as an ex-pimp and mob enforcer. He left as head of perhaps the most powerful and profitable criminal enterprise in the world. Spring was just around the corner, and Al Capone was twenty-six years old.

  Eliot Ness’s Treasury Department credentials.

  (Carolyn Wallace, ATF photographer / Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives)

  Four

  1925–1926

  Under Torrio and Capone, sleepy little Cicero transformed, its once peaceful, prosperous streets now lined with speakeasies and gambling joints.

  Local government became an arm of the Outfit. In one editorial, the Chicago Tribune argued Cicero had effectively seceded from the United States and become “The Free Kingdom of Torrio.”

  “Nearly all the activities conducted under Torrio’s administration are against the law,” the Tribune wrote. “It is said that the majority of the citizens do not care for this but cannot do anything about it.”

  Once Capone took over from his mentor, he maintained his powerful hold with a thuggish brutality found mainly in fascist dictatorships. His men broke up one town meeting by slugging a trustee, while Capone himself punished the mayor for disobedience, shoving him down the City Hall front steps, kicking him while a police officer watched.

  Efforts were made to cover up such brazen violence, but Cicero soon became known around the country—and eventually abroad—for its system of gangster governance.

  “If you are in doubt when you pass from Chicago to Cicero, use your nose,” a Chicago saying went. “If you smell gunpowder, you’re in Cicero.”

  By the spring of 1925, most of Capone’s opposition had been driven out of Cicero or silenced, with one prominent exception—newspaper editor Robert St. John. Distinguished, trimly mustached, St. John—just twenty-three—had cofounded the Cicero Tribune three years earlier.

  He’d viewed Capone’s rise with righteous indignation, while acknowledging certain inherent talents. The gangster “had great executive and organizational ability,” enough to rise to the top of a major corporation in other circumstances. Or, St. John later wrote, Capone “might have wound up as a Hitler or a Mussolini, for he had that ruthlessness typical of a dictator in disposing of his opposition.”

  St. John dedicated his newspaper to exposing the sleaze and corruption unleashed in Cicero. No saint himself, the editor went undercover as a john at a Capone brothel, paying for a prostitute’s time and then convincing her to tell her story. He moved room to room, gathering material from various fallen angels.

  The grim, industrial nature of the place moved St. John to write, “Here in this place on the edge of Cicero, Scarface Al Capone had taken sordidness and made Big Business of it.”

  The Outfit initially responded to St. John’s work via various forms of harassment, threatening and bribing his reporters, and convincing advertisers to stop buying space. They also used their hold on local government, the Cicero Tribune receiving scant help from city officials in compiling the most basic material for news stories. Those businesses still advertising in the paper could suffer a sudden hike in property taxes.

  Yet Capone refrained from attacking St. John directly, claiming to like and respect newspapermen. As St. John wrote, Capone “knew that [the press] too, had to supply a thirsty public with the strong drink it demanded.”

  On April 6, 1925, the journalist caught sight of a scuffle in the street outside his office. Four gangsters with a grudge, led by Ralph Capone, leapt out of a car and attacked a policeman, beating and kicking him, until he managed to flee into a store.

  St. John mistook this for a holdup, rushing down to try to stop it. He carried a deputy policeman’s badge, but the gangsters beat him unconscious, anyway.

  That same day, in neighboring Berwyn, a car pulled up beside St. John’s brother, Archer, and its passengers opened fire. Then a brace of hoods got out, dragged Archer—wounded in the arm—into the vehicle, and sped off.

  Archer also ran an upstart newspaper, the Berwyn Tribune, railing against local corruption. The paper planned a special Election Day edition attacking the current mayoral administration and revealing Capone’s efforts to seize power. Without their editor, the Berwyn Tribune couldn’t go forward with their exposé, but it ultimately didn’t matter—the mayor lost anyway, and Archer was released, after being held captive for forty-eight hours.

  Meanwhile, brother Robert lay in the hospital, recovering from injuries courtesy of Ralph and his thugs. When he went to pay his bill, it had been taken care of.

  “He was rather dark-complexioned,” the cashier said of the man who’d covered the Cicero Tribune publisher’s hospitalization, “about your height but much huskier, and he was very well dressed, all in blue, with a diamond stickpin. He didn’t give his name. Just said he was a friend of yours.” The mystery man also “had a scar on his left cheek.”

  This attempt to buy St. John off only infuriated the publisher further. He went to the local police chief to swear out warrants against Ralph and the other attackers, but was told to forget it. Al Capone, the chief claimed, had taken a liking to the young journalist, but still wouldn’t hesitate to kill him.

  When St. John refused to cooperate, the chief told him to come back the next morning. When he did, the chief directed him to his office, where the editor was soon joined by Al Capone.

  The gangster offered his hand; St. John refused it.

  “I’m an all-right guy, St. John, whatever they say,” Capone insisted. “Sure I got a racket. So’s everybody.”

  Capone said he’d like to promote his businesses with full-page ads in the Chicago Tribune, only with brothels and casinos that was impossible.

  But the Cicero Tribune put stories about him, Capone said, “right on the front page and I get my advertising for free. Why should I get sore?”

  He produced what St. John later described as “the biggest roll of bills I’ve ever seen,” all hundreds. Then Capone began counting them off, listing the various inconveniences St. John had suffered—time away from the office, missing hat, ruined clothes.

  St. John considered the stack of cash. Capone had charmed him, and he had to admit at least some of what the gangster said made sense.

  Then St. J
ohn turned and walked out silently, slamming the door behind him.

  Capone couldn’t pay the newspaperman off, but he could buy him out—or, at least, his paper. Sometime after his meeting with the gangster, St. John learned Capone had acquired a controlling interest in the Cicero Tribune.

  Through an emissary, Capone said St. John could stay in charge and collect the paper’s profits; his difficulties with advertisers and local government would vanish. But the gang, of course, would have a say in what he wrote.

  St. John left town, integrity intact. He would not return for some sixty years, until TV personality Geraldo Rivera brought him back to share his memories before the opening of a supposed “vault” beneath Capone’s old headquarters.

  While Capone took the reins of Torrio’s crime combine, Eliot Ness prepared to embark on his own business career.

  But as a senior at the University of Chicago, studying business administration and political science, he lacked any drive for the commercial path. His grades, though respectable, had slipped since Fenger High. A restless, adventurous soul, he couldn’t stand “the monotony of an office” and came to dread the prospect of a life spent balancing books or trading stocks.

  In this, he was far from alone. The pointless chaos of the Great War had raised a generation hell-bent on escaping the mundane, Victorian rhythm of their parents’ lives.

  The Lost Generation, as historian Frederick Lewis Allen put it, embraced “the eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die spirit” the doughboys had brought back from the trenches. Women were wearing makeup and smoking cigarettes, hemlines retreating toward their knees like a losing army. Men welcomed females into social drinking, a formerly all-male preserve Prohibition had invaded.

  College students of both sexes reveled in newfound freedom, scorning classes for sports, dances, and “petting parties.” With parents paying their tuition, these kids had plenty of money to fund fast cars, sharp clothes, and endless parties, the latter fueled by pricey bootleg liquor.

  Unlike many of his peers, who were flush with disposable income, Eliot had to work his way through school, a steady series of jobs devouring much of his free time. He worked as a checker for the Pullman Company, where his boss later told a proud Emma Ness that Eliot “could always count on a job anytime he wanted it.” Later he kept books for a real estate firm on South Michigan Avenue, not far from the resurrected Ness bakery where he worked part-time.

  His campus reporter position with the Chicago Herald and Examiner gave him a glimpse of the hardboiled, fast-talking world of Chicago journalism. His fellow reporters, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, would soon immortalize this environment in their classic play The Front Page.

  Yet somehow Ness found time for extracurricular activities. He had a passion for athletics, and enrolled at the University of Chicago in part to watch the Maroons play football at Stagg Field. He joined the varsity tennis squad, playing obsessively until nobody in his circle could beat him.

  He also pledged a fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, though he’d never before been much of a joiner. Fraternities dominated campus life in the 1920s, setting trends, serving as gatekeepers, and keeping track of who was who. For a shy student like Ness, Sigma Alpha built confidence and social status. And, of course, frat parties were the best place to meet eligible young women, at mixers open to a privileged few—members of the “right” fraternities and sororities. The Greeks taught each other how to dance, what “lines” to deploy, and which women were “too fast.” Frat culture shaped Ness’s lifetime attitude toward women. Socially, he enjoyed an easy intimacy with the opposite sex—he knew how to flatter, how to flirt.

  “Eliot had a tremendous line,” recalled Marion Hopwood Kelly, a friend’s wife. “He was one of the most attractive men I have ever seen or known.”

  But Ness struggled to push past flirtation into any serious relationship. He remained closed off, something of a traditionalist—marriage, kids, those were the goal. And he picked up a frat boy’s suspicion of “loose” women—not that it stopped him from encouraging feminine attention.

  Ness “had the girls swooning,” recalled fraternity brother Armand Bollaert. “We used to double-date, and we used to have some very interesting escapades.”

  Ness’s calm, steady, “almost priestly” demeanor didn’t fit the frenetic Jazz Age beat.

  “He wasn’t handsome or flashy,” Kelly recalled, “but women were drawn to him. Sometimes I think it was because they wanted to mother him.”

  The conventional wisdom of Prohibition held that “girls simply won’t go out with the boys who haven’t got flasks to offer,” but Ness apparently didn’t need one. “He didn’t drink at all,” Bollaert asserted, although Eliot didn’t begrudge those who did.

  This was unusual at a time when, as the University of Chicago’s student handbook observed, “In order to be collegiate, one must drink.” But as the son of Christian Scientists, their church allied with the Prohibition movement, Ness had almost certainly grown up in a liquor-free home.

  Ness received his bachelor’s degree on June 16, 1925, arming himself to enter the world of business. Whether deliberate or instinctive, he put himself on an alternate career path.

  He took up the martial art of jiu-jitsu because, he told a friend, “I liked it.” He spent hours on the police department’s firing range, working to become a crack shot. The young man who had once bowed out of playing war still disliked guns, and always would. But he hated the gangsters who used them—cowards who shot their victims in the back.

  Ness seemed to be emulating his childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes, that master of “the Japanese system of wrestling” known as “baritsu,” who could write the Queen’s initials on the wall with a revolver.

  Closer to home, Eliot had another role model, encouraging his interest in police work, right beside him on the pistol range. No detective was needed to deduce that Alexander Jamie was grooming his brother-in-law to become his brother-in-arms.

  Since joining the Bureau of Investigation in 1918, Jamie had made himself indispensable to the Chicago office. He knew the city, building a strong network of informants. Unlike his energetic young brother-in-law, however, Jamie preferred desk work to fieldwork and virtually took over the office—assigning cases, monitoring reports, and dealing with personnel.

  This didn’t sit well with J. Edgar Hoover, who sent him back into the field. Yet Jamie kept his sights set on becoming the Chicago office’s special agent in charge, and clearly had his young brother-in-law in mind for second in command.

  But Jamie surely knew the Bureau wouldn’t hire someone fresh out of school, whose knowledge of detective work came largely from the pages of mystery stories. As Jamie himself had done back in 1917, Eliot needed to find a job in the private sector to boost his qualifications.

  Ness became an investigator for the Retail Credit Company, which proved the perfect place to learn the basics of detective work. He chased credit “skippers,” learning to trace individuals who didn’t want to be found. He also prepared credit reports from a variety of sources to weigh the trustworthiness of each person or firm.

  J. P. MacDowell, manager of the Retail Credit office in Chicago, remembered Ness as “a bright, energetic, clean-cut young man” who “had the respect of those working with him.” MacDowell said the company “regretted losing” him, but it’s doubtful Ness felt the same way.

  He longed for a job offering a little more action, and he hung around for only a year, the minimum needed to build his résumé. But that delay was all it took to destroy his chances of joining the Bureau, as by then his brother-in-law had managed to run afoul of J. Edgar Hoover.

  That September, Hoover picked Jamie and several other agents for “a special assignment” in Washington, D.C., and ordered them to report to the capital immediately. This, Hoover stressed, was not a transfer, but temporary duty lasting “two months or four months or even longer.”

  The other agents, scattered across the country, quickly obeyed, but Jami
e refused—he and his wife had put down roots in their city. They’d built a home, they both had jobs, and couldn’t simply pack up and leave. Jamie had spent years constructing a political network in Chicago, and he had no intention of starting all over again in D.C.

  For Hoover, this was rank insubordination, and the director demanded his agent’s resignation. Jamie complied, but started rounding up “certain influential friends” in business and politics who could put pressure on the attorney general, Hoover’s boss. Pulling strings had always worked for Jamie before.

  Hoover, on the job for less than eighteen months and still reshaping the Bureau, wanted men immune to political influence, who understood “efficiency and obedience to discipline” were their only means of getting ahead. To him, Jamie’s brand of politicking was a cancer that would destroy the Bureau if not eradicated.

  Hoover intended to make an example of Jamie, and told the assistant attorney general “that there is no prospect of [Jamie’s] reinstatement because of his refusal to obey the orders of the Bureau.”

  Jamie didn’t stay unemployed for long, knowing exactly where to take his G-man skills. The Treasury Department’s Prohibition Unit was fighting a losing battle to purge itself of corrupt and inept agents, some offices losing as much as 30 percent of their men.

  With a desperate need for new recruits, the Unit could hardly turn down an applicant who, as Jamie’s immediate supervisor described him, was “absolutely honest, capable, dependable, trustworthy, loyal, with much ability, and very efficient.” And so on January 18, 1926, Jamie joined the Prohibition Unit. By the end of the year, he’d become assistant Prohibition administrator for Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

  Still, the new position was a definite step down. Prohibition agents were reviled and distrusted throughout the country, “a corps of undisguised scoundrels with badges,” as H. L. Mencken put it. Everyone knew the Prohibition boys locked up only small-timers—the poor, minorities, immigrants—while killers walked the streets and swells flouted the law.