Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  Someone yelled, “Catch him!” to a traffic cop, who joined the pursuit as the shooter cut down an alley, dropping a gray silk glove, which was all the cop caught up with.

  Quickly to the scene came Outfit favorite Capt. Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert, Commissioner of Detectives John Stege, and Police Commissioner William Russell. The latter had stayed Lingle’s close friend since beat cop days; “Jake’s like a son to me,” the chief often said. Seeing his pal on the cement with the inside of his head leaking out must have shaken Russell. Some said Lingle helped Russell land his job, that the reporter’s influence with the chief had—in the words of Edward Dean Sullivan—made a lowly legman “a major power in the underworld.”

  At the morgue, when the coroner searched the body, only $65 was found. Seemed a Trib reporter had taken fourteen C-notes from Jake’s pocket to get to the widow Lingle . . . but also to protect the paper’s rep from so suspiciously thick a bankroll.

  “The meaning of this murder is plain,” stated a Tribune editorial, ignoring or unaware of that early danger sign. “It was committed in reprisal and in an attempt at intimidation.” The paper declared war: “There will be casualties, but that is to be expected. . . . Justice will make a fight or it will abdicate.”

  The Herald and Examiner briefly forgot their rivalry with the Trib to close ranks. The day after the murder, a huge photo of Lingle ran on the Examiner’s front page under a bold headline: REPORTER KILLED BY GUNMAN: CAPONE GANGSTER ACCUSED. They considered the crime “a new high point in ruthless outlawry,” and called on Chicago to finally bring an end to the lawlessness that had blackened its name from coast to coast.

  “This city is in a state of political corruption that will not cure itself,” the editorial continued. “It can only get worse unless decent Chicagoans take matters in hand, insist upon honesty and efficiency from men elected to office and in the police department, or throw the crooked incompetents out.”

  The city was all but numb to gangland shootings—Lingle’s murder was the eleventh in ten days. But gangsters were expected to kill their own, not journalists. To the papers, a line had been crossed—the Fourth Estate itself was suddenly a target, and that would not do.

  Both the Tribune and the Herald and Examiner offered rewards of $25,000 for information leading to the killer’s capture. The Chicago Evening Post offered an additional $5,000, and civic groups kicked in more, for a grand total of $55,750—an astronomical sum in the early days of the Depression.

  Tribune publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick viewed the murder as a reprisal for his paper’s strong anticrime stance. Never mind that McCormick had no idea who Lingle was. “A Tribune man had been killed,” Fred Pasley wrote, “and [McCormick] was putting the vast resources of the Tribune into action not only to solve the murder, but to expose to public view that pyramid of crime and its hookup.”

  Discreetly, McCormick followed the Secret Six’s lead and got in touch with State’s Attorney John Swanson, offering to bankroll the investigation. McCormick funded independent prosecutor Charles Rathbun and lead investigator Pat Roche. Collaboration between various reward-posting papers proved short-lived, as did withholding news about the investigation until Swanson released it, so as not to jeopardize the investigation.

  The press did agree that Commissioner Russell should be removed from the police investigation. Russell resigned as chief but retained his rank of captain, becoming commissioner in charge of the Detective Bureau, replacing a transferred Stege. Though less visible to the public, Russell remained actively involved with the Lingle inquiry.

  Echoing the McSwiggin case, the “martyred reporter” story fell apart fast. Lingle was shown to be “a $65-a-week legman” who somehow made $60,000 a year. He had a home on the West Side, a summer place in Indiana, and a room at the Stevens Hotel. He was driven around in a chauffeured Lincoln, bet hundreds on horse races, and shared a speculative brokerage account with former chief Russell.

  More and more, Jake Lingle seemed like something out of Damon Runyon. “A prize specimen of the era,” Pasley called him, someone claiming he’d “fixed the price of beer” in Chicago, and had won the label “unofficial chief of police.” He had mingled with millionaires and high-ranking Illinois politicians, and sported a diamond-decorated belt buckle given to him by a special pal.

  “A Christmas present,” Al Capone said of the ostentatious gift. “Jake was a dear friend of mine.” The relationship was no surprise—Capone biographer Pasley believed “Lingle’s multifarious activities included the post of liaison man for Capone.”

  The legman had been seen attending boxing matches with Al and the boys, hanging around the Hawthorne Hotel, and as a guest at the Palm Island estate. Providing police protection to Capone’s rival gangs at a high price for low return, Lingle got on the wrong side of Moran and the North Siders.

  But the friendship between Capone and Lingle had showed signs of fraying in recent years. Back when Al had been imprisoned for two days in the McSwiggin inquiry, the Big Fellow’s meals were delivered exclusively by the trusted Lingle. Then the reporter took advantage, going to Al’s personal tailor and charging four or five suits at a crack to his pal. And Jake’s failure to provide police protection for the dog tracks he’d advised Capone to invest in may have cost the gangster a cool million.

  If Capone’s good feelings for Lingle had dimmed, so did the Tribune’s, whose attitude toward their fallen brother had changed noticeably by June 30.

  “Alfred Lingle now takes on a different character,” an editorial said, “one in which he was unknown to the management of the Tribune when he was alive. He is dead and cannot defend himself, but many facts now revealed must be accepted as eloquent against him.”

  The editorial granted Lingle’s inability to write stories, but noted his skill at gathering information from police circles, while finding him entwined in a world of politics and crimes “undreamed of” by the great newspaper.

  Nonetheless, the stand of the Tribune was firm: “That he is not a soldier dead in the discharge of duty is unfortunate considering that he is dead . . . [but] of no consequence to an inquiry determined to discover why he was killed, by whom killed and with what attendant circumstances.” Not a soldier, then, but a reporter—defined by Hecht and MacArthur in The Front Page as “a cross between a bootlegger and a whore.”

  Eliot Ness’s movements in the first part of 1930 remain largely obscure, yet it’s clear he was doing plenty.

  When he wasn’t raiding Ralph’s Cotton Club, he kept working in the shadows—monitoring the wiretaps on the Montmartre and other Outfit hot spots, gathering evidence and biding his time. The waiting came to an end on June 12, 1930—the same day Jake Lingle was laid to rest in a gangster-worthy coffin of silver and bronze—when Ness made his first direct hit on Al Capone.

  The sign out front identified the garage at 2108 South Wabash as an auto parts supplier, but Alexander Jamie suspected a major Capone brewery. Spring rain dampened the pavement as Jamie led Ness and the other special agents around back, under the clattering tracks of the L, armed with a search warrant.

  When the agents tried to enter through the rear, they ran into a pair of heavy steel doors, barred shut. Half an hour later they had crowbarred and sledge-hammered their way in, which of course gave anyone inside ample time to escape. The only arrest was a probable lookout.

  Inside, the special agents found one of the largest Capone breweries ever raided in Chicago—fifty thousand gallons of beer in wooden barrels waiting for speakeasy delivery. Massive fermenting vats, filled to the brim, held 150,000 gallons of foamy brew still in the process of cooking.

  The feds estimated the brewery turned out a hundred barrels a day. At the going rate of $55 per, Jamie, Ness, and company had cost Capone more than $38,000 in weekly revenue, to say nothing of the seized equipment and product. George E. Q. Johnson declared it the opening salvo in his campaign of economic warfare against Capone.

  But Jamie wasn’t content with simply shutting the pl
ace down—he seized ledgers and records, as well as canceled checks bearing the name of a suspected Capone henchman who now ran Colosimo’s restaurant. This evidence, Jamie told the Tribune, might seed a conspiracy case linking Capone to the brewery.

  Jamie had good reason to feel confident. His men had secretly secured a wiretap on Capone’s headquarters in the Lexington Hotel, just around the block from the raided brewery.

  As they listened, the special agents heard Frankie Rio, Jack McGurn, and the Guziks discussing the beer trade, referring constantly to “Snorky”—a slang term meaning “stylish” or “up-to-date” in a teasing yet affectionate way. This, they gathered, was Capone’s nickname among the Outfit’s elite, which he much preferred to the despised “Scarface.”

  The same day as the Wabash raid, the tap picked up evidence of a conference between “Snorky” and four top bootleggers, perhaps to discuss the loss of their brewery. This—the only meeting of Capone’s inner circle the feds ever became privy to—gave the special agents their first concrete proof linking Capone to the beer business.

  Ness would long remember the special agents’ struggle to batter their way inside that garage. The next time he raided a Capone brewery, he wouldn’t let steel doors slow him down.

  That same summer, Ness got caught up in the hunt for Jake Lingle’s killer, thanks to his acquaintance with Lt. Col. Calvin Goddard. The ballistics expert, now ensconced at Northwestern, had restored the filed-off serial number on the murder weapon using the same chemical process he’d applied to a St. Valentine’s Day tommy gun.

  This helped police identify the revolver as one of six sold by Peter von Frantzius, the dealer who’d supplied the Thompsons used at the massacre. The purchaser was a former North Sider who joined up with the Capones, Frank Foster (real name Ferdinand Bruna).

  “This town is getting too hot for me,” Foster told his friends, shortly after the Lingle murder. “I’m going to lam.”

  And he did.

  Ness had crossed paths with Foster weeks before Lingle died. Cruising past the Lexington Hotel with Marty Lahart, Ness spotted Foster and another suspicious character—both wearing the pearl-gray hats of the Capone crowd—drive off, with Foster at the wheel. The special agents tailed the gangsters, who quickly made them and tried to shake them. Ness and Lahart forced the car to the side of the road, then ordered Foster to get out and stand for a frisk, finding a snub-nosed .38.

  After running Foster in on a concealed-weapon charge, Ness brought the gun to the Northwestern Crime Lab, where Calvin Goddard gave him a basic lesson in ballistics. The Colonel fired Foster’s gun into a cotton-filled wastebasket, then showed Ness how he might compare the spent bullet to one found at a crime scene. Goddard filed the slug away with scores of other test bullets, should Foster’s gun ever turn up as evidence, while Ness took the weapon itself back to his Transportation Building office and locked it in a file cabinet.

  Later that summer, Ness received a call from Pat Roche, former Intelligence Unit man now working as a state’s attorney investigator on publisher McCormick’s dime. Roche explained the gun Ness confiscated came from the same batch of six as the Lingle murder weapon, and asked Ness to hang on to it.

  Ness checked to make sure the gun was still where he’d left it. But when he opened the drawer he saw the revolver was missing.

  Searching the cabinet for the gun, unsuccessfully, he discovered carelessly arranged papers—had someone been rifling through the special agents’ files? Ness suspected the Capone Outfit, but gangsters need not have invaded the Transportation Building to make the search—someone in the office might have taken a bribe, even one of their select squad of special agents.

  In any case, the gun was gone.

  Ness felt a growing sense of dread—had he inadvertently provided the weapon for Lingle’s murder?

  Then he remembered the test bullet fired at Northwestern—and dashed to the crime lab to ask if Goddard had held on to it. Goddard said yes, and brought the Foster slug out; he sat down at his comparison microscope, examining it alongside the one taken from Lingle’s skull.

  When Goddard determined the bullets had been fired from two different weapons, the news felt to Ness like an eleventh-hour acquittal. He would long remember this moment as “one of the most graphic and emphatic examples of the newly developed ballistics science.”

  In July, Foster turned up in Los Angeles, where he was arrested and extradited back to Chicago. Although he didn’t fit eyewitness descriptions of the shooter—Foster was short and dark, the killer tall and blond—he matched the likely accomplice. But he refused to say what he’d done with the guns purchased from von Frantzius, and the authorities could produce nothing else tying him to the crime. Some observers believed they weren’t trying very hard.

  In June 1931, after several continuances, Foster’s case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

  Meanwhile, Pat Roche and his men were at work.

  They interviewed eyewitnesses and gathered good descriptions of the shooter; they tracked down the car whose passengers had hailed Lingle with a betting tip, and who turned out to be racing fans, not mobsters.

  Lingle’s Capone belt buckle directed Roche to the North Side, despite rumbles of the Jake-and-Al friendship turning rocky. Of course, the Outfit might have known that Special Agent Frank Wilson was looking to interview the reporter, which kept Capone himself in the running.

  But the prime suspects remained the North Siders, bolstered by an anonymous tip labor racketeer James “Red” Forsythe was involved. A dragnet was set up to find the elusive Forsythe; an anonymous informant claimed crafty Nitto had hired Forsythe to get rid of the legman and tag the North Side for it. And another tip vaguely implicated Grover Dullard, a North Side gambler associated with Bugs Moran, the Aiellos, and prostitution czar Jack Zuta.

  Pudgy little Zuta was reigning vice boss and business manager of the Moran-Aiello alliance, though Bugs disliked the glorified pimp. Just the same, Zuta took over for Moran and Joe Aiello, both of whom had gone into out-of-state hiding after the Lingle shooting.

  To Walter Noble Burns, Jack Zuta was “a noisome, slime-bred creature, utterly conscienceless, but suave, unctuously ingratiating and plausible . . . depraved and soulless . . . a rat, a poltroon, and a traitor who would not hesitate, if cornered, to turn on his friends and betray them to save his own life.”

  But Fred Pasley, also obviously no fan, gave Zuta credit as having “a shrewder mind than the run of the mill criminals,” considered by some the “brains” of the Moran bunch.

  And ruling for Moran in absentia laid the Lingle hit at his feet—of the top three in the North Side mob, only Zuta was around to take credit or blame. Fear that the glorified pimp couldn’t hold up under police grilling—that he would “spill his guts”—meant his own boys were as likely to hit him as the Capone Outfit.

  Roche was eyeing Zuta, too, prompted by several recent clashes between Lingle and North Siders—the reporter had double-crossed Moran-connected gamblers, pocketing fifty grand for a bogus dog-track authorization. And the Biltmore Athletic Club—where among the exercises undertaken were shuffling cards and tossing dice—had been raided by Roche himself, despite the Unofficial Chief of Police getting paid for protection. Also, Jake had insisted on a raise of his take from 10 to 50 percent on Moran’s posh, popular Sheridan Wave Tournament Club, post–St. Valentine’s Day. When he didn’t get it, he made sure the club couldn’t reopen.

  On June 30, Chicago police captured Jack Zuta in his apartment, hauling him down to police headquarters on the Near South Side.

  “I’ll be killed the minute I leave this building,” he immediately insisted. “Don’t stand around looking sleepy! Do you cops want me killed? . . . My God, I’m a goner—I know it.”

  Even surrounded by blue uniforms, Zuta stayed away from windows, and requested a cell facing no other building. The vice lord, his latest moll, and two cronies—Leona Bernstein, Albert Bratz, and Solly Vision—were held on a disorderly conduct char
ge overnight, and questioned the next day by Roche and others. When they were let out on bail at 10:25 P.M., Jack demanded passage to a “safe spot.”

  Lt. George Barker, the stocky plainclothes head of the bomb squad, said he would take the Zuta party to where they could easily get transportation to their North Side turf. They all piled into Barker’s Pontiac and headed north on State.

  Zuta, his two cronies, and the moll got comfortable as Barker drove into the Loop, State Street nearly a ghost town. At Quincy Street, a dark-colored sedan surged up behind them. Zuta yelled, “Here they come! It’s all over now. They’ll get us sure,” and ducked down to the floor.

  The vice lord’s pal Solly, in the front seat, clambered over and down next to Jack, a rather ungentlemanly move leaving Leona and Bratz to shrink into the corners of the otherwise exposed backseat. The sedan came up on the driver’s side, three men in it, one stepping out on the running board wearing a flashy Panama hat, a flower in his lapel, a tan suit with creased trousers—and a shoulder holster, from which he drew a .45 automatic.

  The snappy dresser fired seven rounds into the back of the car. A buddy in the sedan’s backseat began emptying his pistol as well, and the sedan’s driver—steering one-handed—started firing off rounds, too.

  Barker yanked his emergency brake, leapt out, and began blasting away with his revolver. A single cop against three hoodlums, he stood like a Wild West gunfighter in the street and gave it back to them. The hoods had figured their surprise attack would take Zuta down with little trouble, but the detective’s unanticipated response shook them. The driver hit the pedal and the sedan roared off.

  Barker got behind the wheel, laughing as he said, “I’ll bet I winged them,” but he was talking to himself: Zuta and his cronies had taken off on foot.