Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  When a petition from Miami Beach protested “the invasion of Al Capone,” a neighbor on Palm Island stood up in the gangster’s defense. “Al Capone’s the best protection we can have on Palm Island,” he said. “As long as he’s here there’ll be no trouble.”

  On March 22, the Capone attorneys won a temporary restraining order protecting their client from arrest for just being in Florida. The governor wasn’t having any: “He may for a time wrap about himself the technicalities of the law, but he will not establish headquarters in Florida.”

  Capone, arriving in Miami on April 20, told the press, “I have no interest in politics, either in Chicago or Miami. I am here for the rest I think I deserve, and all I ask is to be left alone. I have done nothing in violation of the law in Miami and I will not.”

  On April 22, the local state’s attorney sued to padlock the Palm Island estate as a public nuisance—“the scene of repeated liquor law violations . . . frequented by law violators . . . habitual loafers, illegal dealers in liquor, and gamblers.”

  Accompanied by Mae, Sonny, and brother Albert, Capone came to court on April 26 to contest the padlock petition.

  “Capone is charged with no crime,” his attorney argued. “He is not under indictment and has a perfect right to live in Florida.”

  “It is no crime for rattlesnakes to live,” replied the prosecutor, “but if you were to keep rattlesnakes in your backyard where they would be dangerous to your children and your neighbors, they should be exterminated.”

  In later proceedings, the state’s attorney would argue Capone’s “reign of terror” in Miami had negatively impacted property values.

  While his attorneys fought for him in court, Al took a Havana getaway with Chicago Evening American editor Harry Read, brothers Albert and John, his doctor, a lawyer, and two bodyguards. At the Sevilla Biltmore, some of the entourage signed the register with false names, though impudently Capone did not. They spent their first day in a third-floor suite, handing out $5 tips to waiters, barbers, and manicurists, before indulging in the pleasures of Cuba.

  Back in Miami by early May, Capone, his brother John, a visiting Chicago alderman, and a bodyguard decided to take in a matinee of a Fu Manchu movie starring Warner Oland. But as they drove toward the theater, they encountered two police detectives ordered to arrest Capone on sight.

  Al asked to see their warrant, but the cops didn’t have one. Instead, they took the whole entourage to the station, where the ganglord asked to call his lawyers. The police refused. Capone tried to win their sympathy by falling back on a familiar lie—that he’d served in the Great War.

  “I was in the army, too,” the police chief told him. “Don’t talk to me. Shut up.”

  Al insisted his brother be released, and demanded a receipt for his valuables; neither request was granted. According to Capone, Director of Public Safety Samuel D. McCreary ordered the police chief to file the gangster’s things “in the shit house.” Then McCreary took their guest to a windowless cell and told him he would be arrested whenever he showed his face in Miami.

  “I asked him even if my mother and wife and kid was there would he pick me up,” Capone recalled, “and he said he would. I said, ‘If you was me what would you do?’ He said, ‘I would not want to be you.’ ”

  The safety director ordered the prisoner be kept isolated, prevented from contacting anyone, and denied food and blankets.

  “I wonder how he would feel,” Capone huffed, “without no blankets.”

  When lawyers arrived to spring him, things got physical. The police, under orders to search anyone visiting Capone, sent one attorney fleeing the station, chasing him down the block before hauling him back for a frisk. The circus finally ended in court with the judge tossing out the charges.

  But Capone’s attorneys failed to get an injunction requiring a warrant for any arrest of Al Capone, the judge preferring to rule on any such violations as they came. And the violations came, all right.

  On May 13, the day after a grand jury report blamed him for dragging their city down to Chicago’s level, Capone and three companions were arrested at a boxing match and jailed overnight, where after some huffing and puffing Al settled in to play cards with his cellmates.

  On May 19, at another boxing match, he was arrested for the third time in ten days, getting off on a $100 bond.

  Back in Miami, Capone’s lawyers charged Director of Public Safety McCreary with false imprisonment for the May jailing. The judge told McCreary if this harassment continued, he would toss the director in jail.

  Elsewhere, the Miami city commissioners were harassing Capone as well, coming up with a new law defining an illegal vagrant as anyone “having some visible means of support acquired by unlawful or illegal means or methods.”

  Capone himself did his best to appear normal—a legitimate businessman, a family man. He and his boy really did have a warm, loving relationship, with father-and-son fishing trips, afternoons swimming and loafing around the pool, evenings playing board games, listening to music, while Mae sat by quietly approving.

  When his son’s Miami schoolmates begged for a swim in the family’s Palm Island pool, Al and Mae—with written parental permissions—entertained fifty of Sonny’s friends.

  “The lawns were decorated,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “and fried chicken, cake, soda pop, balloons and noise makers were provided the youngsters, who spent the afternoon splashing in the pool and romping over the terraces.”

  Perhaps the success of the swimming party inspired Capone to mount a banquet (sans baseball bats) for a select fifty of Miami society. His chef, formerly of Colosimo’s, put on a sumptuous spread, portraying the host not as a beast but a gourmand. The number of invitations accepted to the evening of dining and music was not made public, nor the guest list itself, and those who attended weren’t talking.

  On June 10, a judge heard the prosecution’s pathetic case as to why Capone should be denied access to his own home. Seemed guests had been served alcohol—not a crime under Prohibition. Another prosecution witness, the president of a major Miami department store (who’d apparently attended the recent banquet), said he too had seen alcohol served. Also, some of the guests were not entirely sober. Imagine!

  The department store magnate said some of Capone’s associates had asked his help breaking their boss into polite society. But the witness—also president of the local country club—admitted Capone was not welcome among Miami’s upper crust. The members at his club wouldn’t even discuss the matter.

  “Why not?” asked Capone’s attorney.

  “It wouldn’t do,” the witness replied. “He is what we call a gangster.”

  Capone clearly took great offense at this, sitting forward, muttering to himself.

  Other witnesses described Capone as a risk to their community—armed men patrolled the gangster’s estate.

  “He harbors people who are dangerous to us,” said a local real estate developer. “I want to live in peace and quiet, not among gangsters.”

  On June 14, the judge dismissed the case. But similar courtroom harassment would continue.

  Yet Capone never lost his affection for his southern home.

  “I like Florida,” he said. “I like it here because it’s different. I want a home for my people. I want a place for my mother, my wife, my boy . . . and my friends. Why shouldn’t a fellow have a place where he can go when he’s tired?”

  Even after convincing President Hoover to bring the full might of the federal government down on Capone, Frank Loesch had lost none of his determination to personally make life miserable for Chicago’s gangsters. He took particular offense at known criminals walking the streets of his city without fear of arrest and conceived a means of bringing their liberty to an end.

  In April, Loesch asked Col. Henry Barrett Chamberlin—the Crime Commission’s gaunt, aristocratic operating director—for “a list of the outstanding hoodlums” who were known, but unproven, murderers.

  Chamberlin
came up with one hundred or so names, which Loesch whittled down to twenty-eight. Naturally, Capone made the list, as did his brother Ralph, Jack Guzik, Frankie Rio, and Jack McGurn. So did two of Capone’s biggest rivals, Joe Aiello and Bugs Moran, though the latter had already passed the peak of his power. Yet Loesch left off some of the prime movers in Chicago’s gang scene—notably Frank Nitto, whose influence in the Outfit continued to grow.

  On April 23, Loesch sent his list to George Johnson, State’s Attorney John Swanson, and other Chicago officials. He outlined all the ways these gangsters could be harassed—from arrest, raids, and deportations to publishing their home addresses and investigating their income tax.

  “The purpose,” Loesch said, “is to keep the light of publicity shining on Chicago’s most notorious gangsters,” to subject them to “constant observation” by law enforcement, and discourage “law abiding citizens” from “dealing with those who are constantly in conflict with the law.”

  Chamberlin put the matter bluntly to the Herald and Examiner: “Gangsters must be made to understand Chicago will not tolerate them. This plan will do that. We’ll arrest them and jail them and subject them to expenses for counsel until they’re so sick of it they will leave.”

  But to win the kind of publicity Loesch and Chamberlin hoped for, the Crime Commission needed something catchy the newspapers couldn’t resist. Several lackluster phrases were floated. Finally the Tribune hit the bull’s-eye with its banner headline of April 24: LIST 28 AS “PUBLIC ENEMIES.”

  The New York Times ran an almost identical headline that same day—soon the one-two punch would be drummed into the American psyche.

  “The phrase ‘public enemies’ caught the popular fancy at once,” one gangland observer wrote. Newspapers ran with it; books and movies turned it into a national catchphrase. And all that publicity gave these gangsters the wrong kind of celebrity.

  No one suffered more from the bad press than Capone, who’d taken such pains to project himself as the public’s friend, servant of anybody who wanted a good time. “I never heard of anyone being forced to go to a place to have some fun,” Capone said. “I have read in the newspapers, though, of bank cashiers being put in cars, with pistols stuck in their slats, and taken to the bank, where they had to open the vault for the fellow with the gun.”

  Al wondered if taking a drink was really worse than robbing a bank.

  But the “public enemies” list did away with any distinction between outlaws and gangsters. “Public enemy” became indelibly linked with Capone, and the Crime Commission kept up the heat by doing everything they could to tarnish his reputation.

  They cast Capone as the enemy of the very public he always claimed to serve. And not just any enemy, but the one who outshone them all. “Capone is the most dangerous, the most resourceful, the most cruel, the most menacing, the most conscienceless of any criminal of modern times,” Chamberlin said. “He has contributed more to besmirch the fair name of Chicago than any man living or dead.”

  Initially, the “public enemies” list was not numbered or ranked. The Tribune printed it in alphabetical order, while the Herald and Examiner, bowing to Capone’s celebrity, put him first. Soon the Trib began calling him “the chief public enemy” and “the No. 1 public enemy.”

  Over time, the phrase would revise itself into an enduring nickname for the gangster, rivaling even “Scarface.” Unlike that hated sobriquet, this new designation demanded action, casting Capone as an all-American villain who cried out for someone to take him down. Other crooks would assume the mantle in later years, but Capone would be the first—and most notorious—“Public Enemy Number One.”

  State Street in the Loop, 1930.

  (Library of Congress)

  Sixteen

  March–June 1930

  Through the winter and into the spring, raids by police and State’s Attorney John Swanson choked the flow of liquor into Chicago.

  “Beer deliveries have fallen off almost 90 percent,” a reporter revealed shortly before Capone’s release from the Pennsylvania pen. “The hard liquor business is in almost as bad a condition.” The impact of the Depression on many Capone customers added to the downturn.

  “Capone,” the reporter wrote, “will return to find his business just about paying expenses.”

  Eliot Ness and the other special agents keeping tabs on the wiretaps in Cicero heard plenty of proof the Outfit was short on booze. The bootleggers knew their phones might be tapped, so much of the time they stayed vague about their product, referring simply to “bum stuff” or “good stuff.” But they couldn’t hide the fact they rarely had enough stuff, good or bad, to meet demand.

  “Have you got any? . . . Are you going to have any or not?” asked a bootlegger named Vic, in a conversation Maurice Seager recorded on February 24.

  “I don’t know yet,” the other man said.

  When Vic called back later, a different bootlegger, Dutch, picked up the phone. Ness had taken over the listening post, and he heard Vic complain about his lot in life.

  “I’m in a swell spot now,” Vic said.

  “Why,” Dutch asked, “what’s the matter?”

  “My joints ain’t working and somebody else is making all the dough. . . . I ought to have my head examined.”

  “Well, you’ll smarten up some day.”

  Monitoring these taps brought Ness into a strange intimacy with the men he hunted. Listening in on the Montmartre line, Ness heard one gangster brag to another about a gang rape.

  “Well,” Ness recalled the man saying, “we settled Miss High-Hat’s hash last night. She wouldn’t go for so-and-so, would she? Well eighteen of us showed her how wrong she was.”

  This conversation stuck in Ness’s memory for the rest of his life, helping shape his understanding of the criminal mind.

  “The criminal, you see, has time on his hands,” Ness explained. “He hasn’t respect for one kind of law—be it gambling or bootlegging—and he won’t have respect eventually for any kind of law.”

  At other times, the bootleggers spoke like working stiffs, complaining about customers and bosses, joking about drunken escapades, hinting they’d like a new career. They spoke in insider lingo, coded or nearly so, which the agents sometimes struggled to interpret.

  Yet guns and liquor filtered easily into their talk, the way butchers speak of cleavers and meat. Even plotting violence, they could be remarkably banal.

  Maurice Seager recorded a conversation between Dutch and a man named Pete.

  “Say, Dutch,” Pete asked, “I want to collect a bill in East St. Louis, have you got anyone there?”

  “I might have, how much is it?”

  “Thirty-eight hundred—it’s not a legitimate bill, you know, the guy is a businessman, he sells what we do.”

  “Will I get $800 if I get it?”

  “Yes,” Pete assured him, “if you get the guy here, we will make him pay.”

  “All right, when you get here, we will talk about it.”

  Then Pete casually switched the conversation to weapons. “Say,” he asked, “have you got the little one there?”

  “No, Little Mike took it. I let him.”

  “I mean the sawed-off one.”

  “Yes, I know, Little Mike has it.”

  “What have you got?”

  “My own, the one I always carry.”

  Other wiretapped conversations revealed the tight links between crime and politics.

  One bootlegger asked another to “help their man who is running for Congress.” Ness recalled hearing gangsters discuss two candidates for office, one a reform candidate, the other a well-known Capone ally. The reformer, Ness learned, was secretly working with the Outfit. No matter who won the election, Capone couldn’t lose.

  Nor would the Big Fellow suffer much from the latest spate of raids. The hardship fell mostly on low-level suppliers, while corruption kept their bosses well insulated.

  One afternoon, as Marty Lahart listened in on the Greyhound
Inn line, someone delivered a whispered warning of an impending raid: “The state’s attorney is on the way.”

  Lahart hurried to the club as cars pulled away just before the raiders arrived. Didn’t take much of a detective to figure out the Outfit had a leak in the state’s attorney’s office, or that Swanson’s raids wouldn’t drive Capone out of business anytime soon.

  Even with all this heat, Ralph had little sympathy for men who couldn’t deliver. On March 11, shortly after 11:00 P.M., “Barnback” phoned Ralph’s office in search of product.

  “Say, I’m out of beer and got a party here,” Barnback said. “I need some right away.”

  “All right,” Ralph’s man replied, “I’ll go right away.”

  “Make it snappy. I’m all out.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Ralph’s man called Barnback. “Say, I was going out for some beer,” he said, “but [Bottles] don’t want to let me go. He’s raising hell.”

  Before Barnback could respond, Ralph grabbed the phone. “Say, what’s the matter with you fellows?” he demanded. “Can’t you take care of that place?”

  “Let me explain.”

  “Explain nothing.”

  “Goldie had the ticket, but he was off today.”

  They were speaking in bootlegger code, but Ralph’s nastiness needed no translation.

  “You’re not going to get it,” he snarled.

  “Let me explain, Ralph.”

  But Ralph had already hung up.

  Barnback kept trying till 1:00 A.M., getting nowhere with Ralph, who was still “raising hell,” according to his man. The product-needy caller’s problem remained unsolved, but the special agents had solved theirs—the boss was on record admitting his role in an illegal enterprise. The transcript went into their growing conspiracy file.

  They also listened in as Bottles spoke with his lawyer, George Murdock, about the impending tax trial. As an afterthought, Ralph asked Murdock to help “fix up” that year’s tax returns. If nothing else, Al’s brother had finally learned the importance of paying Uncle Sam his slice.