Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

“Perhaps Capone will be safer here than at Holmesburg,” said Herbert Smith, the prison’s notoriously “hardboiled” warden.

  Eastern State appeared just as tough as its warden—a stone castle complete with turrets and battlements, entered by a single arched gate missing only a drawbridge and moat. But this medieval exterior concealed a rare luxury for a prison of its time: a thoroughly modern hospital offering everything from X-rays to cosmetic surgery.

  Capone ended up there soon after arriving; the prison’s intake procedure involved both vaccines and a blood test. The results of that test are not known, but they probably revealed one or more of the sexually transmitted diseases—syphilis and gonorrhea—that plagued Capone throughout his life.

  Shortly thereafter, Capone underwent minor surgery, apparently a circumcision. At the time, some doctors believed the procedure might treat or prevent venereal disease, which explains why Capone would be circumcised as an adult. But if this is the case, it didn’t work; Capone couldn’t shake his syphilis so easily.

  The operation caused a minor stir in prison, as virtually every inmate asked Warden Smith whether Capone would be okay. Smith received numerous phone calls from Chicago, too—including from Capone’s sister, Mafalda, who called as soon as the operation had ended. Upon learning her brother would be all right, Mafalda sighed, “I’m glad,” and hung up.

  While recovering from the procedure, Capone settled into his cell, which was near the front gate in the prison’s “Park Avenue” block. The cell was a little larger than normal, its arched ceiling boasting twin slotted skylights while most had only one. The cement floor, one reporter noted, was obscured by the “soft colors and luxurious texture” of a fine rug. The walls were hung with framed, “tasteful paintings,” the cell basking in a desk lamp’s glow, the desk itself fine polished wood. The easy chair, reading lamp, wardrobe, chest of drawers, and bed fitted with a fine mattress did not seem to be standard prison issue. Nor were the silk underthings worn under the variety of casual clothes and suits. Pleasant music could be heard emanating from a cabinet radio said to be a $500 model.

  The press made much of Capone’s “cheery and homelike” cell; the prisoner said he found it “very comfortable.” Yet Capone had to share a cell built for one inmate with another man, and both enjoyed a level of luxury not unheard of in Eastern State. A previous prisoner had paid for the paintings on the walls, and Capone bought his radio from the earlier inhabitants of the cell.

  “It is by no means the most luxuriously furnished cell in the prison,” wrote the Philadelphia Record. “There are others that are more sumptuous.”

  Warden Smith wanted the public to understand that Capone received no special treatment. He showed the Record the rugs on Capone’s floor, saying they were prison made, cost ninety cents apiece, and could be had by any well-behaved inmate.

  “This man, called a gangster, comes here to me as just another prisoner,” Smith said. “I’m not interested in his past—I’m more interested in his behavior here. He has proved an ideal prisoner, and anyone who behaves gets the breaks.”

  For Al Capone, those “breaks” reportedly included long-distance telephone calls, using the warden’s office for business meetings and attorney conferences, and receiving regular visits from Nitto, Guzik, and brother Ralph. Mae came by train in a coach compartment, as did Theresa and Mafalda, on the rare times they braved the long distance. Al’s wife made sure he didn’t have to eat prison fare, and several of Philadelphia’s many Italian restaurants were only too pleased to deliver regularly to the great man, who gained weight on his prison stay.

  Thanks to Warden Smith’s willingness to let his famous guest use his office, Al made his regular phone calls to Mae on Palm Island and his mother and sister on Prairie Avenue. He and Smith became pals—now and then Al would be driven to the warden’s house for a home-cooked meal.

  In front of one reporter, the warden asked Capone whether he had the run of the prison. Capone laughed.

  “That is funny,” he said. “Let me say right here and now that I’m satisfied here, but if I’m getting away with anything I want to know it.”

  Despite Capone’s incarceration, the ravenous press kept him in the headlines. News stories reported his choice not to go to church and his pick of the Cubs to win the World Series. When the prison doctors prepared to amputate the arm of an inmate who suffered a gunshot wound, Capone reportedly urged them to save the limb however they could.

  “If it takes money,” Capone said, “I’ll be glad to bear whatever expense there is.”

  And the man who made a fortune off prostitution shared his views on the opposite sex.

  “The trouble with women of today,” Capone told the Public Ledger, “is that they get interested in too many things outside of their home. A woman’s home and children mean the real happiness to her. If she would stay there, the world would have much less to worry about the modern woman.”

  One reporter found Capone reading a biography of Napoleon, wearing the “silver-rimmed spectacles” cameras almost never saw. Capone claimed the French emperor was his childhood hero, and viewed the life of this “great little guy” through the prism of his own profession.

  “I’ll have to hand it to Napoleon as the world’s greatest racketeer,” Capone said. “But . . . he didn’t know when to quit and had to get back in the racket. He simply put himself on the spot. That made it easy for the other gang to take him, and they were no dumbbells. If he had lived in Chicago it would have been a sawed-off shotgun Waterloo for him. He didn’t wind up in a ditch as a coroner’s case, but they took him for a one-way ride to St. Helena, which was about as tough a break.”

  The reporter showed Capone an article by Chicago gangland observer Edward Dean Sullivan, which claimed the Outfit took in $70 million a year.

  “That shouldn’t be published,” Capone said. “It’s a pack of lies, and I’m going to start trouble just as sure as you’re born.”

  Then Capone’s self-pity came roaring back.

  “Why can’t I be left alone?” he asked. “I’m a prisoner now, and I mean to make the best of it.”

  He even gave up his efforts to win his freedom, having failed six different times, and settled in to wait for the end of his term. But when that time came, he would leave Eastern State into a world far different from the one he’d left.

  On Thursday, October 24, 1929, the “blue-sky, big money era” making Capone a household name came to an abrupt but inevitable end. The confidence and optimism that had pushed the stock market to new heights gave way to terror as panicked speculators thronged Wall Street, selling everything they had for whatever they could get.

  “The total losses,” reported the following day’s New York Times, “cannot be accurately calculated. . . . However, they were staggering, running into billions of dollars.”

  Telegraph wires carried the chaos to Chicago, ticker tape machines pouring the bad news into the city’s financial center. Investors looked on, stunned, as all their wealth vanished into so much paper.

  “If this goes on much longer,” someone said, “there won’t be a stock market left.”

  To Herbert Hoover, the cause of the crisis seemed obvious. For years, Hoover had watched “the growing tide of speculation” with deepening concern, rightly fearing catastrophe. But his attempts to tame Wall Street had failed, and the president could only criticize the men whose greed had brought the economy to ruin.

  “There are crimes,” Hoover wrote, “far worse than murder for which men should be reviled and punished.”

  The nation’s foremost criminal, no fan of bankers or the stock market, would certainly have agreed. Almost immediately, Capone seemed to realize the shocked nation would be looking for a scapegoat. When news of the collapse penetrated the stone walls of Eastern State Penitentiary, Capone happened to be in conference with a Republican congressman, Benjamin Golder.

  “Listen, Ben,” Capone said, “if those newspaper guys ask you about the stock market crash, tell them
I deny absolutely that I am responsible.”

  Ralph Capone and his attorneys.

  (Authors’ Collection.)

  Herbert Hoover (second from left) and his cabinet playing “Hoover-Ball” on the White House lawn.

  (National Archives.)

  Fourteen

  December 1929–March 1930

  Fred Burke had bigger things to worry about than the collapse of the American economy: he had been widely pegged as a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre machine gunner. And for good reason, since police knew of his propensity for pulling jobs in a police uniform. Also, a Clark Street witness had seen a man missing a telltale front tooth, just like Burke, driving a police car that turned out not to be one. Tried in absentia by the press, Capone’s chief American Boy earned a new nickname—“Killer” Burke.

  After a few months’ vacation in northern Minnesota, bug-eyed Burke holed up in a charming bungalow in Stevensville, Michigan, just south of St. Joseph. Perched on a hill at the edge of Lake Michigan, surrounded by apple and cherry orchards, St. Joseph was a favorite getaway for Chicago businessmen and gangsters. Jack Guzik and Capone bodyguards Louis Campagna and Phil D’Andrea all had homes in the area.

  Burke arrived in September, tail end of tourist season, and started throwing money around, saying he was a wealthy oilman. Some neighbors bought that, while others took him for a bootlegger, not that they minded. He had $320,000 in stolen bonds to live off and a new moll for company. Life was good.

  But Georgette Winkeler, wife of massacre coconspirator Gus Winkeler, said Burke “was a victim of shattered nerves.” And the more strained his nerves, the more dangerous he became.

  On December 14, 1929, Burke got into a fender bender outside St. Joseph. A local cop hopped on Burke’s running board and ordered him to the police station. Burke, returning from an evening of drinking, pulled a .45 and shot the officer three times, then sped off. A few miles down the road, he wrecked his car, but somehow managed to escape by carjacking his way out of town. Back in St. Joseph, the twenty-five-year-old officer died on the operating table.

  Police followed Burke’s trail back to the house in Stevensville, where he’d abandoned his latest girl. They also found stolen bonds and a huge cache of weaponry—two high-powered rifles, a shotgun, seven semiautomatic pistols, more than a thousand rounds of ammunition, and a pair of Thompson submachine guns. Fingerprints taken off a saltshaker confirmed the supposed well-heeled oilman was Killer Burke.

  The St. Joseph authorities brought Burke’s Thompsons to Calvin Goddard in Chicago. Emptying the guns, Goddard noted the same brand of bullets used in the massacre. “The very presence of these cartridges was in itself a highly significant feature,” Goddard wrote, “since . . . this vintage had been on the market for but a short period and had not been distributed since July, 1928.”

  Next, Goddard reloaded the weapons and fired them into his cotton-stuffed wastebasket. “I made long and careful comparisons of the shells and bullets recovered in this test with those from the garage,” the ballistics expert reported. “The result . . . the two guns found in the Burke home were those that had been used in the massacre.”

  The coroner and his jury named Burke as the only known suspect in the massacre. Impressed, the New York police commissioner sent Goddard a bullet taken from the late Frankie Yale, dispatched back in ’28 by three of Capone’s killers. Goddard compared the slug to rounds fired from Burke’s Thompsons, and they matched, linking two of the past decade’s most notorious gang murders.

  For Chicago’s coroner, the ballistics expert’s work marked “the turning point in police methods in the United States.” Even with Burke still on the lam, the case was closed. Goddard couldn’t ask for a better advertisement for his new crime lab.

  The law finally caught up with Burke in March 1931. He’d grown a mustache and undergone plastic surgery making him look “imbecilic” and “insipid,” in Georgette Winkeler’s view. But a wannabe detective in Missouri recognized Killer anyway, from his picture in True Detective magazine, and led police to Burke in the home he shared with his new wife, a farmer’s daughter.

  Burke took the law for killers in cop drag, availing themselves of his own trademark disguise.

  “What are you going to do,” he demanded, “take me for a ride?”

  Then seeing their squad cars—actual squad cars—he cracked a relieved smile. Asked by a reporter if he’d been in on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Burke didn’t bite.

  “Get a spiritualist and go into a dark room and hold hands,” he said. “Maybe you’ll find out.”

  No seance was needed—the evidence spoke from beyond the grave. The St. Joseph cop’s murder took precedence, and Burke stood trial in Michigan. He pleaded guilty, received a life sentence, and died at the Marquette Branch Prison on July 10, 1940, never copping to the Clark Street killings.

  Like an earthquake, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre had shaken the city of Chicago, transforming its criminal landscape. Now, thanks to Burke, a distant aftershock had claimed the life of a policeman a hundred miles away. More and more, the city seemed a nexus of violence.

  “A real Goddamned crazy place,” Lucky Luciano reportedly said of Chicago. “Nobody’s safe on the street.”

  Civic leaders fretted about their city’s reputation, and not just for reasons of pride—insurance rates climbed and investors stayed away. And as the mob moved deeper into labor racketeering, extorting money through threats of strikes or property damage, they increasingly hurt legitimate commerce. By early 1930, Capone had become more than a civic shame—he was bad for business.

  CHICAGO IS NOT ALL GUNMEN, declared a headline in London’s Daily Mail, above an article designed to reassure even the most terrified tourist.

  “City of dreadful reputation,” the piece began, “whose business men wear bullet-proof vests and cower in fear at the explosion of an automobile tyre. Is this a caricature or a reality?”

  The article replied with a caricature of its own—a gentle jaunt about town, from the well-policed northern suburbs to the beaches where children played unattended, their wealthy parents unafraid of kidnappers.

  “To the law-abiding Chicagoan . . . crime would be something remote and far removed were it not that such killings have injured the name of his city,” the Daily Mail said.

  But restoring the city’s good name would take more than a few puff pieces. The city fathers began planning a grand world’s fair, the Century of Progress Exposition, timed for 1937 and Chicago’s centennial—an opportunity to wipe the gangsters from the headlines and place Chicago at the forefront of science and industry. After the stock market crash, civic leaders clung to the fair like a lifeline, even moving it to 1933, in hopes it would bring the economic boost their city so sorely needed.

  But Capone threatened to derail it all.

  “Unless gang rule is wiped out in Chicago before the Century of Progress exposition,” one observer noted, “there will be no visitors here in 1933, for the simple reason that people will be too scared to come.”

  And yet the business elite remained aloof. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre had been shocking enough to prompt a meeting of the Chicago Association of Commerce, the businessmen’s organization dedicated to burnishing the city’s image. Even that notorious crime couldn’t spur them to action—if the gangsters wanted to kill each other, so much the better. Anyway, the boosters argued, the crime situation wasn’t as severe as the press painted it. Statistically, Chicago was only seventeenth in the nation for violent crime.

  Then, on February 5, 1930, two gunmen opened fire on the leafy campus of the University of Chicago, near the construction site for a new hospital, two bullets dropping foreman Philip Meagher, one nearly severing his spine. He survived and Chicago barely noticed the incident, having grown used to gunfire on its streets.

  Both Meagher and his boss, Harrison B. Barnard, belonged to the Association of Commerce. The next day, Barnard visited the group’s new president, Robert Isham Randolph,
forty-six, and laid blame for the crime on labor racketeers—the shooting was a declaration of war on the business community.

  Barnard had come to the right man. Tall and lean, Randolph always appeared a bit sickly, his baggy gray eyes hidden in deep, dark sockets. But he was energetic and charismatic, quick to smile, and solid as a tombstone. More than one reporter noted the Sherlock Holmes resemblance, the high forehead and hooked nose.

  Some called him Bob, others “the Colonel.” He had served in the World War and, as a civil engineer, built bridges and redirected rivers. The Association elected him president in January 1930, to do for their organization what that other great engineer, Herbert Hoover, would for the country. Now, like Hoover, Randolph was on a collision course with gangsters, agreeing with Barnard—they had to retaliate.

  Two days after the Meagher shooting, Randolph declared “a war on crime which will continue as long as I am president of the Association of Commerce.” He met with State’s Attorney John Swanson, who helped plan the raid on Chicago Heights, to inquire why the prosecutor had failed to make more inroads against organized crime. Swanson said his investigators couldn’t build strong cases because their names were on the public payroll, leaving them open to bribes and intimidation.

  If the businessmen wanted to help, they should fund an off-the-books squad of detectives—“a real secret service in which the operatives are not known, perhaps not even known to each other,” free to uncover the evidence Swanson’s men could not. With that kind of backing, the state’s attorney believed he could put any gangster in jail.

  Randolph embraced the idea of a private spy service with himself as its commanding officer. He called a special meeting of the Association of Commerce and laid out the plan; after two hours, Chicago’s wealthiest men remained unconvinced.

  “Oh, the situation may not be so bad as you picture it, Colonel,” one remarked. “Suppose we wait until the mob really does something that will arouse the entire citizenry of Chicago, something really terrible.”