Scarface and the Untouchable
Page 30
This included the gangster promising to turn his back on both Chicago and the rackets, to start a “useful life,” though how that might be enforced remained unclear. Nitto agreed, taking a guilty plea in late December. By not fighting, he had won the shortest prison sentence of any Capone gangster convicted of tax evasion. He announced his victory to the press.
“I have never committed a crime of moral turpitude,” he lied. “I have never done anything that is condemned by society as morally wrong. I didn’t pay income taxes because the laws were not clear. But if society demands a penalty from me, I am glad to pay it.”
Less than three weeks after Nitto’s arrest, Jack Guzik, too, was found guilty of income tax evasion. Apparently unmoved by the verdict, “Greasy Thumb” got out on bond to await appeal. But the speed of his conviction—under two months since his arrest—sent tremors through the underworld.
“When the witnesses we needed saw those leaders of the Capone organization getting knocked off in rapid-fire order,” Frank Wilson said, “it began to dawn upon them that the United States Government meant business and that Capone, perhaps, after all was up against something he couldn’t beat this time. He’d failed to fix it for the fellows closest to him.”
But to get anyone else to talk, the tax men had to protect star witness Fred Ries. Federal agents bounced him from hotel to hotel, under constant armed guard. The Secret Six paid him $10 a day, but Ries grew stir-crazy, his mood foul. Life on the run didn’t agree with him. The feds feared they might lose his cooperation before Capone went to trial—didn’t Ries understand if he walked out, he’d be dead?
That spring, Wilson visited Robert Isham Randolph to ask if the Secret Six might help get Ries out of the country for a while, and soon Ries was booked on a round-trip voyage to Montevideo, Uruguay.
That way the Six would keep Ries safe and happy until they needed him again—an all-expenses paid vacation, and early forerunner of the Federal Witness Protection Program.
As Frank Wilson chased down every lead, Capone kept pressing for a settlement.
His attorney, Lawrence Mattingly, negotiated with the tax men throughout the spring and summer of 1930. On September 20, Mattingly visited Revenue Agent Louis H. Wilson (no relation to Frank) to seal the deal.
“Mr. Mattingly . . . said it was very difficult to get the facts and figures together,” Louis Wilson recalled. “He took some papers out of his inside coat pocket and in turning them over he would look out the window and talk very slowly, deliberately. Finally he threw the papers over to me. . . . ‘This is the best we can do. Mr. Capone is willing to pay the tax on these figures.’ ”
Mattingly hemmed and hawed, indicating he knew the risk: He was handing over evidence that could be used against his client in court. But this still seemed Capone’s best bet to stay out of prison. The letter roughly sketched the gangster’s financial situation and business history: before 1925, when Torrio turned over Outfit control, Capone had earned no more than $75 a week, not enough to owe any income tax. Since then, as a full financial partner, he’d received one-sixth of the gang’s total profits.
Mattingly said Capone’s “taxable income for the years 1925 and 1926 might fairly be fixed at not to exceed $26,000 and $40,000 respectively, and for the years 1928 and 1929 not to exceed $100,000 per year.”
The government knew this assessment was ridiculous. Capone’s “sources of income are known to us,” one Internal Revenue official said. “We believe he could cash in for $20,000,000. But where has he hidden it? Our men get so far, then they find themselves in blind alleys. . . . We get leads that look good, but don’t materialize.”
Now they had a solid starting point. To convict Capone of a felony, they had to show he knew about his tax debt and willfully chose not to pay it by hiding money from the government. The Mattingly letter proved the first point—the gangster could no longer claim ignorance; his lawyer had admitted, in writing, Capone received taxable income.
And if the feds could establish Capone earned more money than the sums in the letter—that he’d lied—they’d have him on the second point. Just like Jack Guzik, Capone had badly miscalculated. By trying to pay his taxes, he’d given the feds a foundation upon which to build their case.
Yet Capone still seemed convinced he could buy his way out. In November, Commissioner of Internal Revenue David Burnet had a visit from Chicago lawyer Harry Curtis, son of the vice president of the United States. If Burnet’s bureau would drop any and all investigations of Chicago gangsters, the racketeers would pay “at least $3,500,000” to wipe away their tax debts.
Burnet didn’t accept the offer, nor did he when Lawrence Mattingly visited some time later with what some might call a settlement, and others a bribe.
“I have been informed,” Burnet wrote, “that approaches have been made from time to time to various Federal officials in Chicago in the interest of these gangsters with a view to having their cases settled in other than a regular manner.”
In October, Pat Roche decided to take his sixteen-man squad and go on the offensive—if the Capone Outfit felt the heat, maybe they’d turn over the Lingle shooter, most likely a member of a rival gang. Wielding sledge, ax, and crowbar, Roche and his wrecking crew raided gambling joints, bordellos, and speaks in Chicago and the suburbs, arresting one and all, capturing ledgers and other evidence.
Roche’s boss, State’s Attorney Rathbun, exhumed dormant charges against known gangsters and rounded up parole violators. Sky-high bail, courtesy of Judge John H. Lyle, kept hoods behind bars till their court date. This put certain key Outfit players temporarily out of commission.
Judge Lyle was launching his own attack on Capone. Pompous, self-righteous, Lyle hated gangsters almost as much as he loved publicity. At Roche’s urging, the judge cooked up a scheme to use an old vagrancy law—defining vagrants as anyone not “lawfully provid[ing] for themselves,” and/or who frequented “houses of ill fame, gaming houses, or tippling shops.”
“I had within me a warm, tingling sense of satisfaction as I reviewed the possibilities in the law in the case of . . . Al Capone,” Lyle wrote. “If Capone, arrested on a vagrancy warrant, declined to answer questions he would automatically fail to disprove the allegations. I could find him guilty of vagrancy and fine him $200.”
If Capone tried to pay a fine, he’d have to tell where the money came from, which if he told the truth meant criminal charges, and if he lied meant perjury. Failing to pay the fine could send him to the workhouse.
What sounded good in theory flopped in practice. A fleet of squad cars went out in an effort to round up names on the “Public Enemies” list, serving up but a single warrant for a “vagabond” already in custody on an unrelated charge. In the coming weeks, names from that list did appear before the judge—including Ralph Capone and the Guzik brothers—who received a severe scolding from the bench before getting out on bond.
Capone himself avoided Judge Lyle’s roust by staying outside the city limits. In late September, a Chicago Crime Commission investigator reported Capone and six of his bodyguards had attended a high school football game in Cicero. Two police officers paid the gangsters no heed, despite whispers of “There’s Al Capone” rippling through the stands.
Escaping both winter cold and official heat, Capone hid out in Miami. Lyle’s ire grew—he would send Capone to the chair for the murders of Colosimo and Joe Howard, should he ever get the “reptile” before his bench. Lyle had never been much for respecting civil liberties, routinely setting obscenely high bail.
The Illinois Supreme Court, finding Lyle’s use of the vagrancy statute unconstitutional, said, “It sought to punish an individual for what he was reputed to be, regardless of what he actually did.” Still, Capone kept getting hit on all sides—Prohibition agents hitting his speaks and breweries, Roche raiding brothels and gambling joints, and the Intelligence Unit building their tax case, right down to an inventory of the Big Fellow’s silk underwear.
In late October, as Tribu
ne reporter John Boettiger reported, a “wealthy businessman” approached Roche and his boss Rathbun with a message: Al Capone wanted a meet. This intermediary from the world of business may well have been the ubiquitous E. J. O’Hare; Boettiger took pains to conceal the man’s identity. Neither Roche nor Rathbun was interested. Pressed for a meeting, the state’s attorney finally agreed to send a representative to hear Capone out.
The businessman led the representative to a suburban home “surrounded by old elms and beautifully landscaped”—O’Hare was dividing his time between Chicago and St. Louis—and ushered him into a drawing room, where Capone awaited. They shook hands and sat by a fireplace, the businessman leaving them to it.
“Here’s what I want to tell you,” Capone said, “and I won’t be long about it. I can’t stand the gaff of these raids and pinches. If it’s going to keep up, I’ll have to pack up and get out of Chicago.”
The representative told Capone there would be no letup, that things remained hot since the Lingle murder.
Capone said, “Well, I didn’t kill Jake Lingle, did I?”
“We don’t know who killed him.”
“Why didn’t you ask me? Maybe I can find out for you.”
“Maybe you can.”
Capone shifted in the easy chair’s deep cushions. “I know none of my fellows did it. I liked Lingle, and certainly I didn’t have any reason to kill him.”
He offered a possible motive. “I have heard that Lingle was involved in the attempts of the North Side gangsters to open a dog track in the [Chicago] Stadium . . . that Lingle was asked by the Zuta crowd to see to it that the police and the state’s attorney would not bother them, and that Lingle was paid $30,000.”
When “the Zuta crowd” got shut down in their effort, Capone said, “they blamed Jake Lingle, and I think that’s why he was pushed.”
Pushed—underworld lingo for “killed.”
“But I don’t know who they used to do the job,” Capone insisted. “It must have been some fellow from out of town. I’ll try to find out.”
The representative said Capone could do that if he wanted to, but it wouldn’t help him with Roche.
Capone said nothing for a while, then claimed he’d been approached by Bugs Moran and the North Side gang to make peace.
“[Moran] wants to join up with me,” Capone said, “and maybe I can trade off with him for a bit of information on the Lingle murder. I might take him in, if he will tell who killed Jake.”
Capone would succeed in ending the North vs. South Side war by buying Moran out, but Aiello wouldn’t go so quietly.
The ganglord said when he had the name of Lingle’s killer, he’d send it through the businessman connection who was again on hand to drive the representative out of this nice neighborhood from which the Big Fellow would no doubt soon depart, Judge Lyle’s vagrancy charge still looming.
The representative reported back to Rathbun and Roche, who had their doubts about Capone’s offer, with nothing to do but wait for developments.
And continue raiding.
A few days later, another of Capone’s problems walked briskly out of an apartment building on North Kolmar Avenue, apparently on his way to grab a train out of town. Before he got to the waiting cab at the curb, machine-gun fire pelted Joe Aiello from a second-story perch across the way.
The mortally wounded Aiello stumbled into a courtyard, out of the line of fire, only he wasn’t, really: another tommy gun above showered down more burning metal projectiles. Fifty-nine bullets, a pound’s worth, had solved another Capone problem.
The hit, recalling the Hymie Weiss job engineered by Frank Nitto, took careful planning. Aiello, hiding out in a business associate’s apartment, had not shown his face for two weeks. Almost that long, in a pair of machine-gun nests—on either side of the street—killers had been on round-the-clock watch. The hit suggested Nitto’s careful planning—even the path of Aiello’s flight had been predicted.
Five men quickly left their perches—getaway cars, and the night, were waiting.
Capone’s soup kitchen at 935 South State Street.
(Top: National Archives. Bottom: Library of Congress.)
Nineteen
November–December 1930
For several weeks, whoever might be responsible for the charitable endeavor on South State Street remained a mystery—no Salvation Army officer present, no representative of any relief agency supervising. The “keen-eyed, silent men” in charge said nothing beyond inviting the unfortunate in for what the banner above the vacant store’s entry promised: FREE SOUP, COFFEE AND DOUGHNUTS TO THE UNEMPLOYED.
“Today it became known,” the Chicago Evening Post reported, in a puff piece posing as investigative journalism, “that Chicago’s public benefactor is no other than Chicago’s foremost ‘public enemy,’ the notorious Al (‘Scarface’) Capone. The king of gangsters cast in a new role.”
Finally, a bent-nose greeter to the homeless and jobless confirmed this, talking “out of the side of his mouth in the approved gangster fashion.” Tight-lipped the hood wasn’t: “Nobody else was doing it, and Mr. Capone couldn’t stand it seeing so many poor fellows dying of starvation. . . . Somebody had to do something about it, so he opened up this place. Pretty nifty, isn’t it?”
Maybe not nifty, but certainly serviceable—half a dozen long, linoleum-covered tables with benches, the kitchen clean and the counter offering a noon lunch of fresh white bread, vegetable soup and coffee. Three meals a day were served, according to the Evening Post, “at a cost of $2,100” a week.
Much as he might have enjoyed this good publicity, Capone could not afford a visit to the gratis eating establishment—he remained out of town, ducking Judge Lyle’s vagrancy warrant. But Ralph promoted the venture.
“My brother,” Bottles announced, “is feeding three thousand unemployed a day.”
“If machines are going to take jobs away from the worker,” Al would say, “then he will need to find something else to do. Perhaps he’ll get back to the soil. But we must care for him during the period of change.”
The soup kitchen chiefly served those who camped out in Grant Park to the east, or under the tracks at the Dearborn and La Salle Street stations to the west. Some could still afford rooms at the YMCA Hotel on Wabash, or in flophouses around the neighborhood. This was the mean world where the South Loop bumped against the old Levee district.
Newsreel cameramen visited the storefront on a cold and windy day, capturing sweeping shots of the long line of men waiting to get in. Then the news crew ventured inside to interview those fortunate enough to grab a seat. One said he’d had his “first real meal in days, thanks to Mr. Capone’s hospitality.” Others praised the quality of the food, with one going so far as to call it the best soup he’d ever had.
“It wasn’t for our friend Al Capone-ee-oh . . . we wouldn’t eat!” declared a patron who appeared to have rustled up money earlier for alcoholic sustenance. Another remarked as he stood outside, “Look at what Capone is doing for these poor guys. He’s doing all this himself.”
That last point was debatable. Court testimony would reveal Capone and his political cronies had leaned on local merchants for donations of food and other goods. Al then gave the stuff away through his soup kitchen, passing it off as his own charity, with perhaps a few crusts of bread remaining on his dime.
This conspicuous if disingenuous display of benevolence bought Capone a great deal of public good will, which would linger for years. One Chicago Heights resident in 1980 thanked God for Al Capone.
“At that time I was seventeen,” he said, “with nowhere to go. . . . My folks lost everything, and their ten children had to fend for themselves. I found Mr. Capone’s soup line. At least I didn’t starve.”
But the spectacle deeply disturbed a Harper’s magazine writer, who recalled standing outside the soup kitchen while flipping through a souvenir book printed up for tourists, featuring ghastly photos of the city’s most notorious gangland murders.
After a few weeks, Capone turned the operation over to United Charities. But the experience of (briefly) running the soup kitchen convinced him real money was to be made . . . selling milk.
“You gotta have a product that everybody needs every day,” he would say. “We don’t have it in booze. . . . But with milk! Every family every day wants it on the table.”
By the following spring, the Outfit had begun establishing its own dairy business, which in later years would come to control a large portion of the Chicago milk market. While forcing its competitors out of business, it got the city to adopt higher quality standards and date labels for dairy products—though Capone, and his supposed concern for Chicago’s milk-drinking children, would retroactively get the credit.
As Al would often remark to his close associates, “Do you guys know there’s a bigger markup in fresh milk than there is in alcohol? Honest to God, we’ve been in the wrong racket right along.”
* * *
Shortly before the soup kitchen sprang up on South State Street, Judge Lyle received an urgent message from an emissary of Capone’s, labor leader Tommy Maloy.
They met after hours at a Loop restaurant, where Maloy made an enticing offer “straight from the Big Fellow.” Capone, Maloy said, would be willing to fly back to Chicago and turn himself in on the vagrancy charge. Al would even plead guilty, if Lyle would only give him a small fine.