Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  The disguises may have been unnecessary, but they did add a certain flair—something out of the Sherlock Holmes stories young Eliot had so loved.

  And since Ness and White were essentially barhopping on the government’s dime, they might as well enjoy themselves.

  Prohibition agents built cases by “making buys”—patronizing speakeasies, often over a period of several days, and recording what they ordered. Some went far above and beyond the call of duty, one agent claiming to have consumed “seven hundred glasses of alcohol and seven hundred glasses of moonshine whisky” in fourteen days.

  The Bureau required its men to be drinkers on the job and abstainers off the clock. Alcoholism became a serious if ironic occupational hazard.

  If Ness had never taken a drink before, he certainly did now, in the line of duty . . . and found that he liked it. His friends and colleagues insisted he didn’t drink socially during Prohibition. But Ness already displayed hallmarks of an addictive personality as an adrenaline junkie, workaholic, and compulsive risk taker, hungry for thrills.

  Ness’s drive earned the admiration of E. C. Yellowley, who remembered the young agent as “always on the job and an extremely hard worker.” When Ness and White busted a pair of Pullman porters bringing Canadian liquor in on trains bound from Detroit, Yellowley made sure the press got the story. A photographer captured the seized bottles in a carefully arranged tableau, with Ness, White, and Yellowley posing like hunters with their trophies, Jamie at Ness’s side.

  The porters had smuggled an estimated forty cases of whiskey and champagne into the city every day before Ness and White shut them down—a significant leak, to be sure, but one Chicago would hardly miss. The bust and its attendant publicity made something of a sideshow, designed to demonstrate Yellowley’s boys were on the job.

  Ness’s work remained largely unglamorous, and not at all newsworthy, chiefly rousting penny-ante bootleggers caught with cans of liquor in their cars or stills in their basements. Such cases joined tens of thousands of others clogging court dockets around the country.

  Desperate judges, overcome by the onslaught, gladly gave out fines in exchange for pleas of guilty, fixing the plea bargain as a standard part of American courtroom practice. Bootleggers who could afford a fine were back on the street in no time; those too poor to pay went to jail. Either way, the booze kept flowing, as did money into Capone’s pockets.

  Ness had no illusions about Prohibition—the public didn’t believe in it, and to “legislate against human nature,” as he put it, was pointless. After one raid south of the city, he called up his fraternity brothers and invited them to help dispose of the evidence. Ness didn’t partake, according to his friend Armand Bollaert.

  “But nevertheless, he was looking out for our best interests,” Bollaert said.

  Or perhaps Ness felt since his frat brothers were going to drink anyway, they might as well get their booze direct from the government, and not subsidize a bootlegger.

  Money, Ness knew, was a far more corrosive substance than alcohol. And thanks to Prohibition, the love of it was eating away at the workings of government. Rather than trying to dry up the city, Ness sought to attack the sources of that money—the gangs sullying Chicago and its politics.

  But, surrounded by graft, hemmed in by corruption, Ness often felt powerless—like a “white knight on a broken-down horse,” as one friend put it. Eliot hated it when people assumed he was on the take like any other agent. He seethed at how the bootleg barons remained, in their way, untouchable. Every arrest he made only drove home the futility.

  But those early arrests brought Ness to the attention of a powerful man who shared his frustrations: Chicago’s new federal prosecutor.

  A slight, taciturn man of fifty-three with a wild graying mane, George E. Q. Johnson looked, some said, like a poet. Chess master was more like it—a crusader who went about his job, grimly unemotional. When the new federal prosecutor spoke about organized crime—“crime with riches”—he would fix the listener with an icy stare, his brow hard over wire-frame glasses, his voice reedy through clenched teeth.

  Johnson despised gangsters, considering them “human in form only,” but perhaps hated corrupt officials more.

  “I don’t take the least credit to myself for refusing money,” he told the Tribune. “It merely had no attraction for me.”

  Ness and Johnson had a lot in common. Both were sons of Scandinavian immigrants, taught by their fathers to prize hard work and honesty above all else. Johnson, too, was christened without a middle name, but had adopted two middle initials—the “E” for Emerson, after his father’s literary hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson; the “Q” only there, he wryly noted, to help you find “which George E. Johnson in Chicago you are looking for.”

  Like Ness, Johnson was ambivalent about Prohibition, but believed the law, no matter its flaws, had to be enforced.

  “If you are going to rid the city of crime you must take crime without any process of selection,” he explained. “You will have to root it up wherever you find it and shake its roots out to the glare of pitiless publicity.”

  Johnson came from a hardscrabble Iowa farm, but got his start as a lawyer in Roseland. His law office sat just down the street from one of the Ness bakeries, and he knew Peter Ness well enough to have met the young Eliot.

  In 1927, after Johnson’s appointment as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, the prosecutor encountered a grown-up Eliot Ness, who he found to be “a very intelligent investigator . . . courageous and a hard worker.” The only flaw in Ness’s character Johnson could discern “was that he was perhaps too suspicious of everyone and reluctant at times to trust even those working with him.”

  Overall, Johnson would remember Ness as “one of the best prohibition agents in the service”—making the youthful agent especially valuable, given what Johnson was planning. For while Ness was making his bones rousting nickel-and-dimers, Johnson had studied up on the big shots.

  He dispatched a journalist to comb through newspapers to build an index of Chicago’s gangs, allowing him to chart their operations and seek out weak spots. He kept the project to himself, telling the press he would speak “only with indictments and verdicts.”

  But as Capone’s power grew, so did Johnson’s anger. He hated these gangsters, despised them for their arrogance—their attempts to pass themselves off as legitimate businessmen turned his stomach.

  When the time was right, the prosecutor intended to rip them out of the city like the weeds he knew they were. And the gardener he’d put in charge would be a young man from his own neck of the woods.

  Capone with Mae (on his right) at the races.

  (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  Seven

  1927

  Following the treaty negotiated at the Hotel Sherman, the Outfit’s trucks could haul beer openly through the city without risking arrest or a hijacking. Al Capone whittled his retinue of bodyguards down to one, and seemed delighted with his newfound freedom.

  It’s “just like the old days,” he told a reporter from the Herald and Examiner. “They stay on the North Side, and I stay in Cicero and if we meet on the street we say ‘hello’ and shake hands. Better, ain’t it?”

  Capone emphasized how peace had benefited the lives of his wife and son. “The reason I wanted to stop all that [violence] was because I couldn’t stand hearing my little kid asking why I didn’t stay home,” he said. “I had been living at the Hawthorne Inn for fourteen months. He was with his mother way out on the South Side.”

  Capone went on, “He’s been sick for three years—mastoid infection and operations one right after another—and I’ve got to stay here 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!’ ”

  A rumor went around that Capone planned to quit and leave for Europe. On January 23, a reporter found Capone dressed for housework and holding a pot of spaghetti at the front door of his South Pra
irie Avenue house.

  “I positively have retired,” the gangster said, before going back inside. “I am out of the booze racket and I wish the papers would let me alone.”

  But after an official with the Cook County highway police took credit for kicking Capone out of Cicero, the ganglord went to the Herald and Examiner and said nobody had driven him out. “I have merely transferred my headquarters. . . . I’m not leaving Chicago. I’m a business man and I’ve got plenty to keep me here.”

  Al explained that he’d left Cicero’s Hawthorne Hotel because, “I found that my business took in a bigger area than it used to, and I needed a central headquarters.”

  Quietly Capone set up operations in Chicago at the Hotel Metropole at Twenty-Third and Michigan, near the now-padlocked Four Deuces. Al took a corner suite with a view on his South Side kingdom. Portraits of George Washington, Big Bill Thompson, and Abraham Lincoln supervised from a nearby wall.

  Capone soon occupied most of the seven-story hotel, which provided lodging (for gunmen and their molls), a gymnasium, and administrative offices. The Metropole lobby brimmed with young men in loud suits swollen with shoulder holsters. For many Capone hoods, the criminal life was rarely exciting; mostly it was one long wait for their next assignment.

  But orders were slow to come. Even at the height of the Beer Wars, gunmen were mostly defensive, a hoodlum purgatory on the lobby floor protecting the heavenly corporate offices above; other thugs lingered outside breweries and on trucks, discouraging hijackers. Such gunmen were paid big for little; the gym was available to keep them in shape and alert.

  Chicago’s mayor since 1923, William Dever had brought strong management to the city and reduced the many debts accumulated under the prior administration’s mismanagement, though his efforts to contain deficit spending were often overruled by the City Council. Yet he had managed to build considerable infrastructure and had laid the foundation for the planned World’s Fair.

  Nonetheless Dever faced a serious challenge in 1927 from a buffoon who shouted “America First” as he ranted against the King of England. Many Chicagoans considered Big Bill Thompson an embarrassment—on a recent campaign appearance, the eccentric once-and-future mayor had brought along a birdcage with two rats named for an opponent and a ward boss. But voters knew he represented a wide-open town—any “frivolous” concerns about Thompson’s competence were left to the eggheads who wrote books and read the news.

  Thompson knew just how to capitalize on this populist sentiment. He appeared at campaign rallies carefully choreographed to present him as the “friend of the plain people,” and told voters to beware a host of enemies—from the universities to the newspapers to the elite outsiders angling to run the city.

  “Yes, they lie about Bill Thompson . . . ,” he would say, “but they rob you . . . everybody robs you! . . . They call you low-brows and hoodlums . . . they call me that, too. . . . We low-brows got to stick together. . . . Look who’s against us!”

  Thompson’s posturing as a common man was insultingly ironic; he came from a wealthy family while his opponent had worked his way up from slaving in a tannery. Yet that mattered little to the voters, in part because Dever’s failed campaign against crime helped turn the city against him. Closures of speakeasies and gambling joints, and overzealous police raids on homes where alcohol was cooked, only added to Dever’s unpopularity. The mayor’s old slogan—“Dever and decency”—now got him more laughs than support.

  “Away with decency,” the voters would reply, “give us our beer!”

  Dever also suffered from an inability to raise the kind of campaign funds Thompson could easily get from bootleggers, speakeasy proprietors, and gamblers.

  “The Dever administration,” Thompson declared, “has made one of the greatest records in Chicago’s history for closing up business.”

  By “business,” Thompson meant the illicit variety; Mayor Dever hadn’t shut down any legal establishments.

  “When I’m elected,” Thompson went on, “we will not only reopen places these people have closed, but we’ll open ten thousand new ones.”

  Thompson’s promise of ten thousand new speakeasies reached its intended audience—Al Capone, who threw his support (at least $100,000 worth) behind Big Bill.

  On April 5, 1927, Thompson beat Dever by more than eighty-three thousand votes. For a Chicago election, things were relatively quiet—a couple of bombings, two election judges kidnapped, a dozen voters harassed. The only fatality happened the day before—Vincent “Schemer” Drucci, killed when he resisted cops who picked him up on a roust, a Capone enemy gone without Outfit involvement. On the negative side, Bugs Moran, nicknamed “the Devil” by the Capone crowd, rose to chief of the North Side mob.

  Thompson took office on April 11, promising to “give the old town the greatest ride for prosperity she ever had!” The ride began when Thompson rehired the corrupt police chief Dever had fired, with an order to throw the crooks “out in ninety days!” In fact, Thompson chose one of those crooks—Capone crony Daniel Serritella—as Chicago’s new city sealer. Ostensibly in charge of protecting consumers by checking scales, Serritella was really a fixer with an office in City Hall easily accessible to aldermen and others. He’d performed much the same role during the campaign, ferrying money from Capone to Big Bill.

  The rest of the country viewed Thompson’s reelection as a new low for Chicago. The city had chosen as its mayor a “political blunderbuss,” in the words of one journalist—“indolent, ignorant of public issues, inefficient as an administrator, incapable of making a respectable argument, reckless in his campaign methods and electioneering oratory, inclined to think evil of those who are not in agreement or sympathy with him, and congenitally demagogical.”

  Many saw Thompson as a product of the special cocktail of corruption and bluster that animated local life.

  “They was trying to beat Bill with the better-element vote,” observed the humorist Will Rogers. “The trouble with Chicago is that there ain’t much better element.”

  But others recognized Big Bill as the symptom of a deeper rot permeating the country—“a striking example,” wrote the Indianapolis Star, “of the potency of demagoguery and appeals to prejudice in American elections.”

  For one sociologist, writing in Century Magazine, Thompson’s victory proved that democracy itself had failed—not just in Chicago, but in any major metropolis.

  “The people were not fooled,” he wrote. “They knew that a vote for Thompson was a vote for Thompson and the ‘boys.’ ”

  The old, open form of government—“the kind of democracy visioned by Thomas Jefferson”—had given way to cabals of crooks, grafters, and party bosses who cut their deals behind closed doors.

  “That is essentially what has come to power with Thompson,” this sociologist wrote. “His election is the triumph of the gang.”

  By that standard, Capone should have had little to worry about. The peace agreement had mostly held, and with Thompson now in the mayor’s office, enough money was rolling in to keep the gangs happy and decrease the violence.

  Still, for some—like Joseph Aiello, heading up another Sicilian clan in the old Genna territory—there was no such thing as “enough money.” Capone’s control of the Unione Siciliana had prevented Aiello from taking over the Genna alcohol racket in its entirety. So Aiello—who resembled Eddie Cantor minus the comedy—offered $35,000 to the chef at Capone’s favorite restaurant, “Diamond Joe” Esposito’s Bella Napoli Café, to poison their famous customer’s soup.

  The chef—figuring there was scant likelihood of both serving that dish and living to enjoy Aiello’s tip—warned Capone.

  Next Aiello put a $50,000 price tag on Capone’s head, intended to attract out-of-town torpedoes. But Al had contacts and informants far and wide. Led by Gus Winkeler, former members of the Egan’s Rats gang out of St. Louis would prove to be effective Capone allies in the Aiello attacks.

  Lanky Winkeler, a graduate of teen street gangs,
had been an ambulance driver in the Great War, racing through flying bullets and falling shells. In peacetime, he found work in St. Louis as a top-notch getaway driver. Winkeler and two other ex-Rats, fellow veterans Robert Carey and Raymond Nugent, were among the best at the ransom racket in the Midwest. Snatching a bootlegger, gangster, or gambler was a popular hustle during Prohibition. Kidnapping—not yet a federal crime, the targets unlikely to go to the law—could bring in several thousand dollars.

  Winkeler first floated into Capone’s orbit after his crew kidnapped Detroit gambler Henry Wertheimer. They drove their captive to Chicago and hid him away in a North Side apartment, then sat back and waited for a payoff call from Wertheimer’s associates. But the call they got was from Al Capone himself, who ordered the kidnappers to the Hawthorne Hotel. Winkeler figured fleeing would be fatal, and persuaded his accomplices to go along with Capone’s summons—their only option.

  “Al Capone is a swell fellow,” Gus later reported to his wife. “He talked to us like a Dutch uncle trying to show us we were in the wrong racket and couldn’t last long at it. He told us snatching was a rotten business and begged us to quit. Then he set up the drinks and took us to a swell feed.”

  Winkeler’s two cronies got drunk. Capone might have had them killed, but instead filled their pockets with cash, while a quite sober Winkeler passed. Capone drew Gus to one side, encouraging him to give up the “bum” snatch game and come see him for real work. The ganglord had a genuine dislike of kidnapping, built on fears for his family and coworkers. But Egan’s Rats were known for their toughness, and Capone—in the face of Aiello and other challenges—could use guys like that. Wertheimer was let go and Winkeler went on staff with the Outfit.