As the cop drove after the gunmen’s sedan, the hoods unleashed a new gadget: their car had a rigged exhaust that laid down a smokescreen. Barker kept on their tail nevertheless, but his car soon sputtered to a halt, its fuel tank punctured by a stray bullet, letting the gunmen escape.
In the melee, two bystanders caught bullets—a streetcar driver, fatally, and a night watchman on the way to work, his arm clipped.
Like his boss Moran, Zuta went into hiding, forfeiting his bond. Had the vice monger’s allies made a preemptive strike, knowing Jack would likely fold up and squeal? Or had Capone been avenging the death of his pal Jake Lingle?
Pat Roche was certain of one thing.
“If we can learn from Zuta who was shooting at him,” he said, “we may have the solution of the Lingle murder.”
In mid-July, at 1:00 A.M., St. Louis Star reporter Harry T. Brundidge—due to testify in Chicago about his exposé of crooked Chicago newspapermen—interviewed Al Capone on the sun porch at Palm Island.
Capone slipped an arm around the reporter’s shoulder.
“Listen, Harry,” Al said. “I like your face. Let me give you a hot tip. Lay off Chicago and the money-hungry reporters.”
When the reporter asked why, the ganglord explained: “I mean they’ll make a monkey out of you before you get through. No matter what dope you have to give that grand jury, the boys will prove you’re a liar and a faker.”
The reporter found Capone friendly, chatty, and something of a big, overgrown kid. He also considered Public Enemy Number One an intelligent subject with “a dark, kindly face, big sparkling eyes,” the trademark scar only adding to his bearing. If you didn’t know better, Brundidge wrote, you might think him “as harmless as a big St. Bernard dog.”
Earlier that evening, the reporter had arrived unannounced outside the big iron gates of the Capone estate, where a tough-looking guard said Capone was out, meeting with his attorneys. When would he get back? Brundidge asked. A shrug.
The reporter sat on the grass and waited. When Capone’s big black limo finally pulled up, the gangster got out and, after Brundidge introduced himself, said pleasantly, “This is a surprise. Come on in.”
Now, as they spoke on the sun porch, moonlight glimmering on Biscayne Bay, Capone asked, “What brings you here?”
“I thought I would ask you who killed Lingle.”
“Why ask me? The Chicago police know who killed him.”
“Was Jake your friend?”
“Yes, up to the very day he died.”
“Did you have a row with him?”
“Absolutely not.”
“It is said you fell out with him because he failed to split profits from handbooks.”
“Bunk. The handbook racket hasn’t been really organized in Chicago for more than two years, and anyone who says it is doesn’t know Chicago.”
The reporter asked why Capone, on his release from the Pennsylvania pen, hadn’t given his friend Lingle the inside story. Capone responded dismissively, as if he didn’t remember the incident.
Brundidge asked, “What about Jake’s diamond belt buckle?”
“I gave it to him.”
“Do you mind stating what it cost?”
“Two hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Why did you give it to him?”
“He was my friend.”
Asked about Lingle’s involvement in various rackets, Capone shrugged, but in his opinion newspapermen should be working against the rackets, not backing them. And he should know—he’d had “plenty” on his payroll.
The impromptu host escorted his uninvited guest around the house and grounds—swimming pool, bathhouse, private pier, boathouse, speedboat, luxurious cruiser. The two wandered through the well-tended grounds by a coral grotto, surrounded by many trees, flowers, and ferns.
Capone spoke of his love for the area, and how he’d refused to be chased out by “a little clique,” or harassing police. He claimed to be “out of all rackets,” intending to make Miami his home, going to Chicago only now and then.
The tour extended to the seventeen-room house, “tastefully appointed” under Capone’s personal direction—no mention of Mae’s role. Capone walked the reporter out, past the gates to a sedan the host had provided for the ride back to the hotel.
After publication of the mostly flattering article, Capone called the more controversial revelations “deliberate lies,” including such tidbits as the Chicago police knowing who killed Lingle and Scarface’s boast of having “plenty of newspapermen on his payroll.”
Brundidge stood behind his story.
Twilight was easing into night outside the Lake View Hotel, a resort and roadhouse on Upper Nemahbin Lake near Delafield, Wisconsin, twenty-five miles from Milwaukee. Inside all was bright and cheery, as young couples danced to player piano music, courtesy of one nickel after another being dropped into the slot.
He was a pudgy, pasty-faced character with the kind of rectangular, hooded-eyed face that looks depressed even when it smiles. But he was a snappy dresser, in a brightly banded straw hat, silk shirt, four-in-hand tie, and tweeds. Despite his naturally solemn mug, Mr. Goodman—at the resort for three weeks now—seemed genial and, well, nice.
None of the several dozen dancing couples would guess Mr. Goodman was Jack Zuta, chicken-hearted prostitution czar. And Mr. Goodman did not suspect his life of crime and sin was about to catch up with him, by way of two cars pulling up outside.
Five men got out, while the drivers remained with their rides. They trooped single file into the bar carrying assorted weapons—a tommy gun, two sawed-offs, a pair of pistols. Moving into the bright world of the adjacent dance hall, they didn’t see Zuta at first, his back to them as he dropped one last nickel into its slot.
A peppy new tune started up—“Good for You, Bad for Me”—the couples swinging to the occasion. Zuta turned to beam at these fun kids and, looking across a sea of youth, saw a row of gunmen.
Zuta was a natural runner, but fear froze him, his face blister white, his eyes wild. The young dancers scattered while the party of five crowded in. The machine gun impolitely burped bullets, punctuated by the coughing of sawed-off shotguns and the blurts of revolver fire, gun barrels issuing flame and smoke and slugs.
Zuta fell on his face, dead but not dead enough for one gunman, who walked over to the splayed corpse and fired twice into its head.
The gangsters fled in an automobile with stolen Chicago plates.
In the weeks ahead, Goddard would link some of the Lake View Hotel bullets to the Capone gang. And the Roche investigation would become a comedy of errors, when their Lingle suspect, Foster—thought to be the accomplice, not the shooter—was identified as the killer by a traffic cop prone to hallucinations from a head injury.
But Roche had also raided a North Side mob business office, just two blocks north of Lingle’s Tribune Tower newsroom, and turned up a set of ledgers for Moran’s and Zuta’s operations. These and Zuta’s own files would document police and political corruption better than ever before. Still, while Roche relished the dirt he now had on dozens of bent officials, he was no closer in locating the man who pulled the trigger on Lingle.
On the night Zuta was so thoroughly killed, Al Capone returned to Chicago to play host to one hundred close friends at the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero. On the business side, he was back to assess the damage of various federal raids in June and July, courtesy of Roche, Johnson, Jamie, and Ness.
But perhaps Al also intended to underscore having done what the local law could not: avenge his friend Jake Lingle’s death.
Frank Nitto (center) with Pat Roche (far left) after Nitto’s arrest, October 31, 1930.
(Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum [ALPLM])
Eighteen
June–October 1930
With Jake Lingle’s execution, tax investigator Frank Wilson lost more than a potential informant—his chances of getting anyone else to talk died, too. If the mob could kill Lingle, no one
in their orbit was safe.
“Every witness we needed was dumb as an oyster when it came to talking about Capone,” Wilson said. “They were a hundred times more afraid of being killed by Capone guns than they were of having to serve a prison term for perjury.”
Wilson reached out to Chicago reporters for assistance, to no avail. In St. Louis, he called on an old friend, John T. Rogers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Like Lingle, Rogers worked both sides of the crime beat, with a knack for making friends with unsavory characters. Every Christmas, cards and gifts filled Rogers’s mailbox.
“The whores and hoodlums always remember me!” he’d say.
Rogers owed Wilson a favor for helping expose a corrupt judge for a Pulitzer Prize–winning story. Now Wilson badly needed to talk to E. J. O’Hare, still seeking to prove Capone’s taxable income by linking him to Hawthorne Kennel Club profits. Rogers knew O’Hare, head of that dog track, from covering the Jack Daniel’s distillery trial back in ’25, after “Fast Eddie” cheated George Remus. With his Post-Dispatch editor’s blessing, Rogers agreed to serve as intermediary between Wilson and O’Hare.
In June, Wilson returned to St. Louis for a meeting with Rogers and O’Hare. Fearful of getting “knocked off,” the glib lawyer agreed to speak only confidentially. Then O’Hare admitted he’d incorporated the dog track in 1927 with Capone, Jack Guzik, Frank Nitto, and Johnny Patton.
These names had appeared on stock certificates, but Capone and Nitto had theirs struck off, after word of the deal got out. Wilson reported back to Washington, certain Capone “received a big cut of the proceeds from the track.” But after scouring the operation’s books, he found no proof of “unreported income of the Hawthorne Kennel Club.” Once again, a dead end.
Maybe the lead hadn’t panned out, but its source certainly did. Despite fears of reprisal, O’Hare had no problem passing along secrets of the Outfit’s operations, soon becoming Wilson’s most trusted informant.
“I saw my undercover man, Eddie, infrequently,” Wilson wrote, “but I was in almost constant touch with John Rogers. . . . When there was a missing link in a puzzle, I slipped the word to John.” The St. Louis reporter would meet secretly with Wilson and say, “Eddie said here’s the answer. . . .”
Wilson considered O’Hare a naïve businessman in over his head who wanted out. “He didn’t then realize that he was in the gang for keeps,” Wilson wrote of O’Hare, “and could not drop out if he wanted to. . . . I thoroughly sympathized with Eddie as I fully realized the serious predicament into which he unconsciously had been enticed.”
More than anything else, O’Hare feared his son, Butch, might follow him into the gambling business. Butch had a wild streak his father hoped to tame with military school. O’Hare often told his daughters, “If we have a war, Butch will become an admiral; if not, I fear he will become nothing.” Wilson felt O’Hare’s concern over his son’s future had convinced him to turn on Capone.
But “Artful Eddie” was not the innocent he’d sold himself to be—O’Hare understood what he was getting into with the Outfit, and had no intention of getting out. He also knew the feds had enough evidence from the dog track to send him away on his own income tax rap. Maybe Wilson used that as leverage; maybe he didn’t have to.
O’Hare figured to stay out of jail by cooperating. But he also had another agenda, one to which Wilson seemed oblivious—the federal drive to get Capone had brought unwanted attention to the entire Outfit. Raids, arrests, indictments, and screaming headlines were cutting into everybody’s bottom line—including O’Hare’s.
Like Chicago’s legitimate businessmen—and their private police force, the Secret Six—O’Hare knew Capone and his notoriety were bad for business. That made O’Hare eager to give the feds the prize they sought—the Big Fellow—in hopes they might lay off everybody else. He would have to act fast, with the tax men swinging through the Outfit like a wrecking ball.
Next up was Jack Guzik. Though filing tax returns since 1927, Guzik declared an income well below his actual take. The Intelligence Unit, digging through the records at Pinkert State Bank, uncovered tens of thousands of dollars in cashier’s checks purchased by one “J. C. Dunbar.”
Guzik endorsed many of these checks. To prove this represented taxable income, the agents had to identify its source, finding Dunbar and getting him to testify. But so far, they had no leads. “Dunbar” was clearly an alias. But for whom?
Probably with O’Hare’s help, Wilson identified “Dunbar” as Fred Ries, cashier for several Capone-controlled Cicero gambling joints. A handwriting sample, compared with the cashier’s checks, confirmed Ries filled them out. But Guzik and his brother-in-law, Louis Lipschultz, had spirited the cashier away for safekeeping. Then, in late August, Wilson learned from a postal inspector that Lipschultz sent a certified letter to Ries, with money and instructions to flee to California. Wilson and Nels Tessem followed the letter to St. Louis. As soon as Ries got his mail, the tax men served him a subpoena.
Bald, with thick eyebrows on a long, sour face, Ries telegraphed his hatred of cops with a beady-eyed glare.
“When we questioned him regarding his employment in the gambling establishments in Cicero,” Wilson recalled, “he cleverly denied any knowledge of the facts which could be used by the government as evidence against Al Capone, Jack Guzik or other principals in that organization.”
Wilson and Tessem, wary of Ries again slipping their grip, held the cashier as a material witness. They returned him to Illinois and locked him up at the Danville county jail under a $15,000 bond, keeping his location a secret so the Outfit couldn’t bail him out to save or kill him.
Eventually Ries opened up, outlining in detail his work at a Cicero casino known variously as the Hawthorne Smoke Shop and the Ship—each Dunbar check represented a day’s gambling profits, over and above the $10,000 “bank” kept on hand. Jack Guzik had instructed Ries to give these profits to Bobby Barton, Guzik’s driver, collector, and all-around stooge.
Simply handing over bags of cash might risk theft, Ries decided, and instead bought cashier’s checks under various assumed names. Cash, of course, would have left no trace, whereas checks left a paper trail leading right back to Guzik, arrested on income tax evasion on September 30.
Federal agents shuffled Ries from Milwaukee to Highland Park, working to keep him alive till the trial. While Ries’s testimony heavily implicated Guzik, Capone remained untouched. Ries said he’d seen Al around the casino a few times; he’d heard that Capone, his brother Ralph, and Frank Nitto made up the syndicate running the place. But such hearsay was inadmissible, and—unlike Guzik—the others never dealt directly with Ries, at least as far as he was willing to admit.
One night in September, Frank Wilson took stock of how he’d spent his summer. Holed up in his cramped, claustrophobic office, he laid out all the evidence he and his men gathered in their hunt for Capone.
“By midnight I had decided that it amounted to just about nothing,” Wilson recalled, “and was ready to go home.”
Wearily, he gathered up the papers to put them away, but the file cabinet was locked, and he couldn’t find a key. Tired, impatient, cranky, he found an unlocked cabinet in a nearby storeroom and opened it, looking to leave his papers and sort it all out tomorrow.
“As I was doing this I uncovered a ledger,” Wilson wrote. “It had been lying there in that file for about five years and the label on it didn’t mean a thing to me. But curiosity made me open it.”
He flipped through the dusty book, taking in the headings. On one page, he saw payments to “Town,” “Ralph,” “Pete,” “Frank,” “J & A,” “Lew,” and “D.” His breathing grew faster—the ledger appeared to document the profits of a major gambling house, nearly $600,000 from 1924 to 1926. But the raid took place in the suburbs, an unlikely site for a casino that size.
Then he spotted a simple notation: “Frank paid $17,500 for Al.” Wilson felt certain that “Al” was Al Capone.
“As soon as I lo
oked inside that book,” Wilson said, “I knew we had our case.”
Proving it would be another matter. The ledger, dating to the McSwiggin murder crackdown, had been misfiled. The book bore no identifying marks, not where it came from nor what it represented. Nowhere did the name “Capone” appear. To use it in court, Wilson would have to trace the ledger to its source, and the person or persons who’d filled it out.
Handwriting from three individuals was apparent. During their investigation, the Intelligence Unit gathered script samples from several members of the Outfit, which they compared to the ledger, searching for matches. They found two—both Hawthorne Smoke Shop employees. But the bulk of the entries, apparently made by the casino’s bookkeeper, remained unidentified.
Wilson turned to E. J. O’Hare, who said the Smoke Shop books were kept by a meek little man named Leslie A. Shumway. The two had a history—Shumway and O’Hare had been indicted back in 1929 for allegedly conspiring to give perjured testimony about local dog tracks. The agent already had a handwriting sample from Shumway not matching any ledger entries.
But Shumway’s script was in pencil, while the book had been filled out in ink—perhaps when Shumway used a pen, his handwriting differed. Wilson got hold of something Shumway wrote in ink, and compared it to the ledger—a perfect match.
He set out to find the bookkeeper.
On October 31, the Intelligence Unit traced Frank Nitto to an apartment in Berwyn. Nitto had grown a mustache, not enough of a Halloween disguise to keep Pat Roche from making him and putting on the cuffs. The arrest brought Nitto into a limelight he’d always worked to avoid. A reporter in court called him “a velvet glove over an iron hand,” with “no suggestion of the grim name—the Enforcer—he won in the Capone organization.”
If the government had understood Nitto’s importance in the Outfit—his relative anonymity having served him well—George E. Q. Johnson might have been less receptive to a plea bargain. The prosecutor, overworked and understaffed, doubted the strength of his case; he remained focused on nailing his bigger and flashier target—Capone. Ultimately he agreed to an eighteen-month sentence, with the possibility of parole in as little as a year, if Nitto met certain conditions.
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 29
