Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Police investigators soon discovered that the real culprit was Frankie Yale. In an effort to link Yale to Torrio, a story made the rounds that Torrio had paid Yale $10,000 for the job, but Yale was far too prominent to kill on commission. In all likelihood, he murdered Colosimo to satisfy his own expansionist goal of ruling the Chicago vice trade. The police duly arrested him in New York and charged him with the murder of James Colosimo, and they located the waiter who placed Yale at the scene of the crime, but as this witness came to realize, testifying against Frankie Yale was hazardous to one’s health. Trembling with fear, the waiter at the last moment claimed his memory failed him, and with that the case against Yale unraveled.

  Years after the event, stories began circulating around Chicago newsrooms that the young Al Capone himself hid in the cloakroom and carried out the deed, said to mark the first step of his rise to the summit of the Chicago rackets. But for the young Capone to have carried out the murder of the most powerful vice lord in Chicago, his mentor’s boss, would have been suicidal. Furthermore, Al Capone had not yet arrived in Chicago at the time of Colosimo’s death. In the end, no one was ever found guilty of the murder of Colosimo, though the Chicago police and racketeers alike continued to insist that Yale had been responsible.

  Although he avoided indictment for murder, Yale’s attempt to destabilize Torrio’s Chicago empire backfired. The removal of “Big Jim” actually consolidated the Torrio organization, which in turn froze Yale out. He remained in New York, plotting the death of rival gangsters closer to home. In February 1922, he himself became the target of an assassination attempt, which occurred the night he traveled from Brooklyn to a racketeers’ ball in lower Manhattan. The bullets flew just as Yale, dressed in a double-breasted suit, spats, black patent-leather shoes, a gray Chesterfield coat, and a fedora, was making his way from his Cadillac to the dance hall. The first volley felled his partners, and Yale hid beneath the car, waiting for help that failed to arrive; the sound of the dance had drowned out the gunfire. Eventually he came out, assuming the assassin had departed, but just as he entered the dance hall, a bullet struck him in the back and tore through one of his lungs. The police believed that a rival Irish gangster, “Wild Bill” Lovett, was responsible.

  Yale underwent surgery at Manhattan’s Gouverneur Hospital and survived, though he was seriously weakened from the attack. Shortly after he went home to Brooklyn, he happened to attend Mass at a nearby church, St. Rosalia’s. It was there that the priest, Father John Costa, found him and began a campaign to persuade Yale to build a new church. Father Costa chose his benefactor well, for the resulting church, the new St. Rosalia’s, towered above the neighborhood, an opulent monument to the self-aggrandizing generosity of Frank Yale. He had long been feared throughout Brooklyn; now he had respect as well. Still, he was hated, and “Wild Bill” Lovett was not the last man to make an attempt on the life of Frankie Yale. The next time, his would-be assassins would come not from Brooklyn but all the way from Chicago.

  • • •

  Within weeks of Colosimo’s funeral, Chicago was again the scene of political pageantry and chicanery. The Republican National Convention came to town in June, and there, in the original smoke-filled room of American politics, the party bosses settled on an obscure Ohio senator named Warren G. Harding as the Republican candidate for president. He proved in harmony with the times, and the chosen candidate of Chicago racketeers, for Harding was a corrupt candidate picked by a corrupt party in a corrupt city. As such he and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, won an easy victory over the Democratic ticket, which consisted of Ohio governor James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the former assistant secretary of the Navy. The watchword of Harding’s presidency was the phrase “return to normalcy,” which meant that the federal government, after the imperial pretensions of the administration of Woodrow Wilson, was planning to do nothing, to abdicate its powers and responsibilities, and, always a popular measure, reduce taxes.

  The tenor of Harding’s relaxed and corrupt administration was echoed in cities and states across the country. The Illinois governorship, for instance, was occupied by Len Small, who was indicted in 1921 for stealing over half a million dollars during his term as state treasurer; Small was acquitted because, it was widely believed, he bribed the jurors. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the administration of the mayor, William Hale Thompson, was proving to be a carnival of corruption. As a public servant, Thompson was a fraud, and everyone knew it, even his backers, who supported him for just that reason. And to his opponents, he was scandal incarnate, the “bad breath of Chicago politics,” in one journalist’s memorable phrase. Thompson was a political cartoon satirizing corruption come to life. Everything about him was oversized. He did not speak, he declaimed as he pointed upward with one long, bony, crooked finger. Behind the laughable façade lay a certain low cunning. “Big Bill” Thompson, as he was called, knew how to take popular stands, to tell the people what they wanted to hear, and what they wanted to hear most of all was that he would turn a blind eye to the city’s vice trade, and, later on, to Prohibition. Thompson obliged; he announced that he was wet, and so was Chicago. There was a small but visible morals squad in Chicago, dedicated to eradicating prostitution; Mayor Thompson, who was married but kept a mistress, shut it down. Every racketeer in town, Torrio and Colosimo included, considered Thompson one of their own. Wherever he went, Torrio carried his membership card in the William H. Thompson Republican Club. Here was a man the racketeers could understand; here was a politician they could work with. They bribed him, and on election night they delivered the votes, whatever it took to keep such a valuable man in power. Even without their help, Thompson demonstrated an ample capacity for low cunning. To enlist the support of Chicago’s huge bloc of Irish voters, he constantly railed against King George V and the horrible conspiracies that malevolent sovereign planned to unleash against the United States. Indeed, said Thompson, England was planning to invade the United States at any moment. Thompson’s preposterous brand of demagoguery made him a laughingstock across the nation, but in Chicago, where isolationism prevailed and anti-English sentiment ran high among the Irish, his rhetoric struck a chord. Running on this platform, Thompson became the dominant figure in Chicago’s rambunctious political life.

  The primary voice calling for reform belonged to the newly created Chicago Crime Commission, backed by a group known as the Secret Six, which consisted of prominent businessmen who wished to preserve their anonymity and their safety. The Chicago Crime Commission differed from other elements in the fray in that it had no political ideology and no aspirations to power. Rather than relying on ballots, bribes, or bullets to enforce its will, the Chicago Crime Commission relied on disseminating information and analysis concerning the nature and extent of corruption in Chicago, all of it mercifully free of inflammatory Prohibition rhetoric. As early as 1919, its director, Colonel Henry Barrett Chamberlin, detected a new trend in Chicago’s racketeering: the emergence of a sophisticated syndicate patterned after legitimate corporations. “Modern crime, like modern business, is tending toward centralization, organization, and commercialization. Ours is a business nation. Our criminals apply business methods,” he observed. “The men and women of evil have formed trusts.”

  Preeminent among such men and women was Johnny Torrio, who inherited Colosimo’s empire amid an atmosphere of corruption that ran from the White House to Chicago’s City Hall. Where the Everleigh sisters had controlled one brothel, and Colosimo several dozen, Torrio oversaw the operation of thousands of speakeasies, brothels, and gambling joints. (Thousands more belonged to other syndicates.) Once Prohibition got under way, his organization was making $4 million annually from beer, almost as much from gambling, $2 million from prostitution—and that was only in Chicago. In the new territory, the suburbs, he reaped an illicit harvest of another $4 million. That represented gross profit, and his expenses were equally impressive, not only the constant bribes but the payroll of the estimated 800 men in his employ. Even
after he had given the police, the mayor, and various aldermen their due, Torrio’s organization cleared several million dollars a year. The organization—which had no name—could take its place beside Chicago’s other major industries, and it was growing faster than most. With increased wealth, Torrio found, came increased hazards. Coinciding as it did with the advent of Prohibition and the ascent of Warren G. Harding, Colosimo’s death created a vacuum so large that not even Johnny Torrio could successfully fill it, though he made a brilliant, concerted, businesslike attempt to do so. Although Torrio had managed to forge alliances with other racketeers in Chicago, he had much to fear from Yale himself, who was just as capable of killing Torrio as Colosimo.

  It was at this critical point in his career—and in the evolution of the Chicago rackets—that Torrio brought the twenty-two-year-old Capone to Chicago. On his arrival in 1921, Capone entered the thriving vice trade, working for Johnny Torrio. His older brother Ralph, who followed him to Chicago a year later, was soon engaged in the same work. The two shared an apartment at the intersection of Farwell and Sheridan Streets while they helped to manage Torrio’s volatile empire.

  Now that he had committed himself to working in the vice trade, Al Capone turned his back on the legitimate career path he had successfully pursued in Baltimore, but no matter what his line of work, he used many of the same skills in his new business that he had in his old: managing was managing, and bookkeeping bookkeeping. Of all racketeering activities, prostitution carried the greatest stigma, and yet it formed a vital part of his initiation into the rackets, for prostitution was not merely a sideline of the rackets, it was the foundation. Even among the racketeers, it carried an aura of disgrace. Those who derived their fortune from brothels habitually diverted attention from the ugly fact by pointing to the hypocrisy of those who sought to suppress vice, but in the end they could never mount an adequate defense of what they did; they could only insist that people always wanted illicit sexual activity, it was human nature, and since someone was going to make money from it, they might as well be the ones to cash in.

  The two Capone brothers managed several small, midlevel brothels, which in practice meant they toiled as shills and janitors. It was routine, even dreary work, neither glamorous nor particularly dangerous. They might just have easily been working in a bathhouse, for their chores were similar—luring customers from the street, making sure the employees were presentable, maintaining a fresh supply of linen on hand, collecting money, and turning it over to the boss, in this case Johnny Torrio.

  One prospective customer vividly recalled his first impression of Al as a small-time brothel manager in Chicago: a “swarthy, heavy-set fellow with hairy arms, and with part of a hairy chest also exposed . . . and a long ugly scar diagonally across his left cheek.” Although his appearance was threatening, his demeanor was engaging, and he invited the young man, named Irle Waller, to drop by his establishment—or his brother’s. Apparently the two places offered the same services at the same prices. Both were decidedly modest, overshadowed by other, better-known, and more expensive bordellos in the neighborhood, bordellos whose girls strolled the streets at lunchtime, not soliciting customers—that would be uncouth—but advertising their wares nonetheless. After a few minutes’ hesitation, Waller, accompanied by several friends, decided to inspect the little brothel Capone managed, wherein they embarked on a journey that began in youthful lust and ended with money. “It was an old, brick, two-story flat-building, weatherbeaten and unpainted, as were all the others in that area,” Waller related of Al’s shabby but efficient whorehouse. Within, the boys confronted

  six or seven girls about twenty years old, in flimsy undergarments called “chemises” or “Teddy Bears” in those days. Oh yes, also high-heeled pumps, usually black patent leather, to enhance them sexually. Some even had fancy extra curls attached to their coiffures. All of this for two dollars, and if and when you chose a girl she led you to a small cubicle. . . . Each cubicle contained a very small bed—with linen clean to dirty, depending on when you arrived. There was a table with a cheap bowl and pitcher of water, a towel, a bar of soap, and a small twenty-five watt electric bulb hanging from a cord in the air.

  She would ask you did you want the first-class job, which was three dollars, or the two-dollar “trick,” also how about venereal protection with a twenty-five cent rubber. When you finished, she would bring out a small coin container for any extra gratuity you might wish to deposit for her alone.

  Of this two dollars, she received one dollar, and then a ten-cent deduction was made for “protection” against raids and for bail and legal service.

  After less than a year managing small brothels, Al received a promotion to the premier position in Torrio’s empire of vice: manager of the Four Deuces. So named because of its address at 2222 South Wabash Avenue, in the heart of the old Levee district, the Four Deuces served as Torrio’s Chicago headquarters. A saloon occupied the first floor where locally produced whiskey sold for twenty-five cents and imported whiskey from Canada or rum from the Bahamas went for seventy-five cents; above, on the second floor, were Torrio’s offices and a horse-betting parlor; a gambling den (poker, roulette, faro, blackjack) occupied the third floor; and finally, at the top of the stairs, there was, in the words of one journalist, “a colorless, no-nonsense sex mill designed for results.” A brief session with a woman at the Four Deuces cost two dollars, and for five dollars, the customer could watch a “circus”: two women going at it with each other. That was the Four Deuces as the world knew it. Then there was the basement, about which horror stories circulated sotto voce. “They snatch guys they want information from and take them to the cellar,” another Chicago pimp, Mike “de Pike” Heitler, explained to the police in 1931. “They’re tortured until they talk. Then they’re rubbed out. The bodies are hauled through a tunnel into a trap door opening in the back of the building. Capone and his boys put the bodies in cars and then they’re dumped out on a country road.” Mike “de Pike” might have been telling the truth, or he might have been boasting; no one, not even Chicago’s law enforcement officials, could say with certainty whether the horror stories were true, but they were sufficient to throw a scare into every racketeer in the city. (Shortly after he told these tales, Heitler was killed, his charred remains recovered from a house that had burned to the ground.)

  Once Torrio took Capone into the business and made him a partner rather than an employee, Al no longer had to shill for customers; he was now a businessman, with an annual income approaching $25,000. However, Al Capone had not come all the way to Chicago to be a glorified pimp, and as he made his way in the rackets, he moved quickly to distance himself from the vice trade as practiced at the Four Deuces. He printed up business cards reading: “ALPHONSE CAPONE—Second Hand Furniture Dealer—2220 South Wabash Avenue,” but there is no record of the ruse having fooled anyone, at any time. Of greater importance, he opened a new office at 2146 South Michigan Avenue, where he displayed a penchant for camouflage. From the street Capone’s place of business appeared to be a doctor’s office: “A. Brown, M.D.” the sign read. There was even a waiting room with bottles of medicinal alcohol on display, but a 1924 raid on the “doctor’s” office disclosed that it was, in fact, the nerve center of the Torrio-Capone organization. Police seized ledgers that revealed how methodical and businesslike Capone had become in his administration of the organization’s enterprises. Each was devoted to a distinct aspect of the business:

  • Names of police and Prohibition agents on the organization’s payroll

  • Itemized income from the organization’s brothels

  • Names of the organization’s breweries

  • The names of the organization’s biggest customers—individuals as well as hotels

  • A list of the speakeasies buying liquor from the organization

  • Truck and boat routes used to transport the liquor from the Caribbean and Canada to Chicago

  Taken together, the books showed that the Torri
o-Capone organization had earned approximately $3 million in each of the last three years. The police estimated that this amount, impressive though it was, amounted to only a fraction of the organization’s total earnings, and a U.S. attorney, Edwin Olsen, declared his belief that the syndicate’s annual gross approached $70 million, making it one of the largest businesses in Chicago, if not the entire Midwest.

  The Torrio-Capone organization offered a $5,000 “reward” for the return of the ledgers, and just before they were to be delivered to the U.S. attorney, a Municipal Court judge by the name of Howard Hayes intervened. Judge Hayes impounded the ledgers, and then, without bothering to inform the city of Chicago, returned the ledgers to Al Capone. The matter, which had briefly threatened to expose the entire Torrio-Capone operation to the scrutiny of the press and prosecutors alike, suddenly dropped from view.