Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  Apparently only the death of someone in this room would spur civic action. Randolph, with an ironic smile, declined the honor of becoming a martyr to gangster bullets.

  Then one attendee stood, white-haired with a drooping mustache and pince-nez glasses. Probably the richest man present, Samuel Insull owned a network of utility companies valued at $3 billion. Recently he’d poured a fortune into erecting the “tallest opera building in the world,” which opened six days after the stock market crash.

  Insull said the situation was already “bad enough” and agreed to back Randolph’s plan, adding, “you can put me down for ten per cent of any amount of money you want to raise.”

  This show of support came from a man who displayed a thirst for power and a gift for corruption rivaling any gangster’s (he’d once hired bodyguards from Capone). Insull’s financial empire was essentially a pyramid scheme of holding companies propped up by manipulated stocks and catastrophic debt; he shamelessly purchased politicians, keeping one United States senator on a monthly retainer.

  With Insull’s golden blessing, Randolph’s plan could not fail. Other members of the association kicked in large sums, $25,000 or more.

  On February 8, Randolph announced formation of a “Citizens’ Committee for the Prevention and Punishment of Crime,” declaring no one would be safe from its prying eyes.

  “If our information shows that the police should be hit, then the police will be hit,” Randolph said, not exempting the legislature, either. “And we’re going to keep on working until we have dragged the city out of the mire.”

  How many, the Chicago Daily News asked, were on the committee?

  “There may be a hundred—or there may be six,” Randolph said, “but in any event it obviously would be wrong to announce who they are.” The News reporter ran with Randolph’s figure, giving the committee its catchy nickname: the Secret Six.

  Members, besides Randolph and Insull, included philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, Western Electric vice president C. L. Rice, phone company executive William Rufus Abbott, and stockbroker George E. Paddock. That indeed made six, but building contractor Harrison Barnard, who’d put the plan in motion, lent his support as well; and several members of the Chicago Crime Commission also took part, among them Frank Loesch.

  Randolph claimed the Six had bottomless financial resources. “If the needed sum be $1,000,000 or $2,000,000 or $5,000,000,” he wrote, “the business men of Chicago will furnish it.” But the gathering Depression had a chilling effect even on this affluent crew, putting a crimp in Randolph’s fund-raising. He would later estimate his total budget more conservatively at $350,000.

  Most of the Six were Protestants; two were Sons of the American Revolution. Randolph was as close as Chicago came to old money, with roots stretching back to Virginia in the 1600s. His ancestors had lived next door to George Washington, and his family lent its name to Randolph Street in the Loop. As an upstanding native Chicagoan, Randolph took great offense at Capone—that “dirty, vicious killer”—becoming the face of his city.

  “He doesn’t belong to us,” Randolph insisted, pointing out that Capone was a New Yorker born and bred.

  But when Randolph called the gangster a “dago bootlegger,” or referred to one of his own operatives as “a little ‘Red’ wop,” he revealed his distaste for more than just Capone’s Brooklyn background. Frank Loesch, described by one observer as “a xenophobic bigot,” made this explicit.

  “The real Americans are not gangsters,” claimed the man who not long ago asked Capone for a favor. “Recent immigrants and the first generation of Jews and Italians are the chief offenders, with the Jews furnishing the brains and the Italians the brawn.”

  Men like Randolph objected not only to Capone’s illicit business, or to the threat he posed to their aboveboard ones, but to his very identity—the presence of this first-generation Italian-American in their city, their country.

  Randolph remained the front man of the Secret Six, its only known member and chief booster. He denied the Six were in any way vigilantes. “We didn’t choose to get into this,” he said, “but we were forced into it. . . . We will resort to no extralegal methods and any talk of vigilants [sic] is ridiculous.”

  But at times he admitted his men employed “all sorts of devious and extra-legal means of securing information” because they were “forced to fight fire with fire”—a civilized alternative to lynch law, a release valve for the pent-up frustrations of a city sick and tired of slaughter.

  “Even now,” Randolph said in 1931, “it wouldn’t take much effort to arouse the American Legion in Chicago to go down to Cicero one night and burn the place up and string the gangsters up on telegraph poles.”

  The Secret Six’s original purpose was to hunt down the men who shot Meagher, but that fell quickly by the wayside. Their unnamed and unnumbered operatives began gathering all kinds of intelligence, offering rewards, paying off tipsters, even tapping phone lines.

  “We wasted a lot of money,” Randolph admitted, “because our best information was purchased from stool pigeons.”

  Their biggest operation seems to have been setting up a working speakeasy in Cicero as a listening post. The project cost about $12,000, but lasted only five or six months before the proprietor they hired skipped town. Whatever they learned they passed on to the authorities, especially John Swanson and George E. Q. Johnson. Those prosecutors—understaffed, underfunded, and overworked—welcomed the help, and publicly aligned themselves with the Six. But desperation had driven them into a dangerous experiment, one they’d come to regret.

  Randolph promoted the Six at every opportunity, writing, lecturing, liberally consenting to interviews. He seized upon the dramatic potency of its nickname to inflate the group into a fearsome intelligence agency that had the city’s gangsters running scared. His claims didn’t impress Chicago’s hard-bitten reporters, but Randolph knew the real battle for Chicago’s future lay with the American people.

  “Give us the benefit of the doubt,” he implored non-Chicagoans. “I assure you that when you come to Chicago . . . for the Century of Progress Exposition, you needn’t bring a bodyguard with you. If you are timid, I will give you an escort from the Secret Six.”

  With the tax case against Ralph Capone coming up in the spring, George Johnson prepared a new line of attack. Bottles, as his nickname suggested, handled the Outfit’s main source of revenue—beer distribution.

  “Take their money away,” Johnson told the Tribune, “and they dry up like a weed that has been cut down.”

  In early 1930, Alexander Jamie sent his special agents into Cicero to find out where Ralph got his booze. Jamie’s right-hand man, Eliot Ness, led the charge.

  Joining Ness were two other special agents who’d worked on the Heights case—bright, buoyant Marty Lahart and thirty-nine-year-old Samuel M. Seager.

  Lahart’s opposite in almost every way, the lanky, long-faced Seager served with distinction in the Great War, slogging through mud, rain, and heavy fire as his artillery company chased the Germans across France. Wounded in action, he never fully recovered. Back in the States, Seager—known by his middle name, Maurice—worked as a chiropractor and a prison guard before joining the Prohibition Bureau in June 1928.

  Memories of death row, and perhaps the war, plagued Seager, giving him a perpetually downbeat cast. As an investigator, he was steadfast, dependable, and as sober as the driest dry. His only weakness, as far as Ness could tell, was a serious fear of germs that all but paralyzed him whenever he entered a hotel bathroom.

  The special agents focused on three of Ralph’s Cicero nightspots—the Cotton Club, the Greyhound Inn, and the Montmartre Café. These popular “whoopee” joints, known for some of the best jazz in Chicago, hired mostly African-American musicians but catered exclusively to whites. Bottles ran them with an iron fist.

  “Ralph was always hitting porters and slapping people around,” a musician recalled. “He wasn’t very likable, as Al was. I never had any
problems with Ralph, but you could see what he would do if some girl got out of line.”

  Each club had a round-the-clock, heavily armed guard. Pianist Luis Kutner remembered running into those watchdogs during a visit to the Greyhound with an unknown young singer. Chicago made Bing Crosby nervous, and what they found at the Greyhound didn’t exactly put him at ease—Capone’s “boys patrolling the streets armed to the teeth like a small army.”

  Crosby got out of the limousine and saw all the machine-gun-toting mugs and asked Kutner, “Is this a jazz joint or World War Two?”

  Mounting a direct assault on any of Ralph’s joints would be a waste of time—the next night, it would be doing business again. The clubs were more valuable open, anyway—as an information source.

  Although Al got credit as an organizational wizard, Bottles kept things running behind the scenes, and—like any other business exec—couldn’t do his job without the telephone. He spent much of each day taking orders, supervising distribution, and fielding customer complaints. Ness, Lahart, and Seager would turn that against him.

  Wiretapping had been legalized only two years before, when the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Seattle bootlegger on wiretap evidence. The Court gave law enforcement permission to tap any phone line they wished, without asking for a warrant. And the feds wouldn’t hesitate to use this new weapon against gangsters.

  Ness’s investigation hinged on wiretapping the Montmartre Café at 4835 West Twenty-Second Street. Despite the unassuming plain brick storefront with its large windows, and a neon sign inviting visitors to dine and dance, the Montmartre served as Ralph’s main headquarters. If the special agents could tap its phone line, they’d have a direct line into the clearinghouse for local liquor traffic.

  Ness, Lahart, and Seager rented a basement apartment three blocks away, on the same phone circuit as the café. Now all they had to do was find the terminal box and link their line to Ralph’s. But once they found it, they realized putting in a tap would be all but impossible.

  The junction box sat high on a telephone pole behind the café in the alley, which Capone’s gunmen patrolled at all hours. To make the tap, a lineman would have to scale the pole, open the box, and rack the entire board, checking each and every line.

  The 150 lines weren’t labeled; finding the right one took listening in for a voice the lineman recognized. Someone from the Prohibition Bureau would have to call the Montmartre and chat with whoever answered long enough for the tapper to find the right line. All the while, the lineman would be hanging there, an easy target for a tommy-gun-toting thug. The operation would simply take too much time—no one could climb up, make the tap, and get out fast enough to avoid being spotted.

  “In desperation,” Ness recalled, “I got my Cadillac touring car out, took down the top, and put my four biggest special agents in the car”—hoping the mob would mistake them for rival gangsters. Eliot’s audacious plan was to have them drive around the café as slowly and suspiciously as possible, drawing the armed guards away from the alley.

  That should give Ness and the lineman an opening to sneak in the alley and tap the wire. At a prearranged time, Ness’s secretary would call the café and try to strike up a conversation with one of Ralph’s men. By then, the lineman would have to be up the pole, ready to find her voice. If the guards didn’t take the bait, if the secretary couldn’t keep some guy on the line, if the lineman got to the box too late . . . the plan would fail.

  And if Ness and his man were still in the alley when the guards came back, they just might end up dead.

  One afternoon, probably in January or early February, the carload of special agents began conspicuously circling the block around the Montmartre in plain view of the pearl-hat hoods. Braving a Chicago winter in their open-topped car, they could hardly not be noticed by the gangsters. Ness waited and watched from afar, hoping the guards would fall for the ruse, but nothing. . . .

  Finally, after about ten minutes, the hoods hopped in their own car and tailed the agents at a safe distance. Ness and the lineman rushed down the alley. The secretary would be calling any moment—every second lost raised their chance of discovery. The lineman, in a pair of climbing spikes, wrapped a leather strap around the pole and began clambering up. Ness remained at the base of the pole, eyes darting from the man above to the mouth of the alley, hand on the .38 in his topcoat pocket. But what good would a revolver do against a Thompson submachine gun?

  Minutes crawled past. Ness kept checking his watch, counting seconds that felt like hours. Yet again, he glanced up at the man still searching for the right line.

  “Suddenly he gave me the high sign that he had found it,” Ness recalled. “The bridge was made and the telephone tap on the Cicero headquarters of the mob established.”

  The lineman shut the junction box and clambered down the pole. He and Ness hurried away.

  “This tap was kept alive for many, many months,” Ness recalled, “and we learned a great deal about the operations and personnel of the gang through it.”

  The rest of the investigation would be less nail-biting. After securing taps on Ralph’s other Cicero operations, the special agents spent weeks at their respective listening posts, waiting by the phone. They passed the time as best they could till the phone started to buzz, a call coming in on one of Ralph’s lines. Then they’d grab a pencil and listen in, jotting on a yellow legal pad. They processed hundreds of calls, many idle chatter. Ness, eager for action, chafed at being stuck in a Cicero basement apartment. But the more they listened, the more they learned about the Outfit’s vast liquor racket.

  Meanwhile, the Intelligence Unit kept running down leads from the records seized in Chicago Heights. Nels Tessem traced a $1,000 check made out to Frank Nitto back to the Schiff Trust and Savings Bank, where he found evidence of $742,887.81 in untaxed income. Nitto had made most of that money before 1927, with the three-year statute of limitations about to expire on March 15.

  Shortly before the clock ran out, Johnson won a secret indictment against Nitto for income tax evasion. Somehow, the Enforcer got word and disappeared before the feds could arrest him. But Nitto’s life, like Ralph’s, had just become considerably more complicated.

  Weekdays at seven A.M., as the nation’s capital stirred, anyone passing by the White House would hear strange sounds from the south lawn—the voices of fifty- and sixty-year-old men, calling out like kids on a playground, laughing, shouting. The most powerful men in Washington—Herbert Hoover and his cabinet—were delighting in a new game the press called “Hoover-ball.”

  The paunchy commander in chief, not one to exercise for its own sake, enjoyed tossing around a six-pound sphere with his “Medicine Ball Cabinet.” But between whoops of joy came weightier, decidedly joyless subjects, as even on the playing field, Hoover could not escape the economic blight sweeping across the country.

  On Hoover’s watch, the United States was transforming, and not for the better. Long lines of shabbily dressed men, overcoats tattered, fedoras battered, faces haggard, haunted city streets. Some sought shelter in boxcars, quickly renamed “Hoover Pullmans.” Others inhabited metropolises of tarpaper shacks springing up in public parks, and empty lots, and on the outskirts of town—“Hoovervilles.”

  Chicago’s own Hooverville appeared later that year, on the edge of Grant Park. The residents practiced what their mayor called “a sort of communistic government,” sharing whatever they had and scrounging for sustenance amid the trash bins of nearby hotels. They even put up crudely lettered street signs; the mayor lived “at the corner of Prosperity Road and Easy Street,” according to the New York Times.

  “Building construction may be at a standstill elsewhere,” he said, “but down here everything is booming.”

  The president, once renowned as a great humanitarian, seemed not to know what to make of it. Unwilling to give federal aid to the starving, he wrote, as if to explain the situation, that many citizens “left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling a
pples.”

  The deeper the Depression grew, the further Hoover divorced himself from reality. The day after the stock market crashed, Hoover proclaimed, “The fundamental business of the country . . . is on a sound and prosperous basis.” Four months later, he assured the nation “that the worst effects of the crash” would pass within sixty days. In June 1930, he told a group of concerned citizens, “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over.”

  The dour president spoke of prosperity, but no one could afford to buy it. One advisor wrote Hoover that summer, “I am sure that under present conditions you could not carry the election [today]. The public, generally speaking and without regard to party, thinks the administration to date has been a failure.”

  Hoover had come into office with the reputation of a man who could achieve almost anything; now his administration seemed capable of nothing. To turn things around, Hoover needed to show the American people that their government still worked; he had to prove that this onetime wonder worker could still achieve what seemed impossible.

  Before the crash, Hoover had put in motion his program to reform the criminal justice system. His administration tapped the biggest names in law enforcement—among them August Vollmer and Frank Loesch—to serve on a national commission. Chaired by a former attorney general, the Wickersham Commission delivered its preliminary report on October 28, 1929—Black Monday, the day before the climax of the stock market crash. They kept on throughout the crisis, searching for meaningful solutions to the problems of Prohibition.

  On March 15, Hoover welcomed commission member Frank Loesch to the White House. Loesch explained how crime had infected every level of his city—gangsters owning the cops and courts, the governor helpless. Only federal intervention could restore the city’s ability to govern itself.

  Loesch, of course, was hardly the first to make this argument. Only now, with his political future evaporating, did the president take a serious interest. And the media hysteria surrounding Capone’s imminent release from prison in Pennsylvania finally pushed the president into action—he could not tolerate having such a flagrant criminal paraded before the public as a celebrity. Hoover knew convicting Capone would mean “much more than just sending a gangster to jail.” Like the president himself, Capone had become a symbol of government ineptitude and incompetence, and the breakdown of the rule of law.