Capone
Page 14
The last time he had organized a parade, Capone had been a boy leading his gang through the hostile streets of Brooklyn, banging on pots and pans as they went and shouting a slogan of defiance: “We are the boys of Navy Street, and touch us if you dare!” Now he was a man, but he still had his parade, and the streets were no longer hostile; they belonged to him. He remained faithful to the dreams of his youth as few ever can. Moving through the crowd, greeting the men he had “invited” to turn out, Capone relished the merriment (albeit enforced) in the streets of Cicero. More than any racket, it was a sign that he had arrived. Never again would his enjoyment of la mala vita be so innocent, carefree, and childlike as it was on this day.
• • •
Throughout the winter of 1923-24 no one in Cicero dared to defy the Capone brothers, with one crucial exception: the Cicero Tribune. This was not the august Chicago Tribune, one of the most powerful and autocratic newspapers in the Midwest, with all its financial resources and prestige. This Tribune was a tiny new venture managed by an unknown journalist named Robert St. John, who at age twenty-one burned with the reckless optimism of youth and who set out to make a name for himself as a journalist. The son of a pharmacist, St. John had grown up in Oak Park, one of Chicago’s most handsome suburban communities, and had been attracted to Cicero for the same reason as Capone: it was a prosperous, quiet, overlooked industrial area offering a promising location for a new business. “I started the paper with a partner named Oscar Palmer,” St. John recalled of those early days in Cicero. “He was a businessman and an advertising man, and we both thought there was a great opportunity in Cicero because it was a community composed largely of first- and second-generation Bohemians from Czechoslovakia. They were good, law-abiding citizens who simply wanted their beer. They were very much against crime and prostitution and gambling and all the rest of it, and so we thought there was a great opportunity there for a newspaper that would be on the side of the people and against the Capones.”
The Cicero Tribune appeared once a week, and it soon attained a circulation of approximately 10,000 copies. On the front page of each issue, St. John, playing the role of crusading journalist to the hilt, ran an exposé of the Capones’ growing influence on the town. In response, Capone henchmen “harassed my reporters almost immediately, either bribed them or threatened them. There were frequent telephone threats,” St. John says, and as a result, “I had a big turnover of reporters.” The harassment only made the young editor more determined and defiant. Within its pages, the Cicero Tribune’s editorials continually denounced the Capones’ sinister influence.
In advance of the April 1, 1924, primary, St. John uncovered fresh details of the Capone organization’s plan to ensure that its slate, which consisted entirely of Republicans, met with no Democratic opposition. Through informants he learned that one of the Capone-backed candidates, unhappy that even the lowest flunky in the Capone organization was making more than he did as a member of the Cicero Town Board, demanded a cut of the Torrio-Capone take in Cicero. In response, St. John wrote, Capone “delivered a speech which . . . could not be reproduced in type, for it was embellished with unprintable profanity and expletives.” At the end of his tirade, he turned on his brother Frank, castigating him for choosing such stupid candidates and then giving him a new mandate.
“Why don’t you make Cicero a real town?” he bellowed. “Improve it! Fancy it up! Why don’t you pave all the streets with concrete? It might cost ten or twenty grand a city block, but my God, these Hunkies [i.e., the Bohemians or “bohunks” of Cicero] make dough at Western Electric, don’t they? They can afford it. I know a contractor who’d be happy to give you boys a 20-percent kickback. Pave the streets with cement! Make the dump an up-to-date place!” This was no idle boast; Capone was determined to leave his mark on Cicero as a master builder as well as a hustler. In fact, as the primary approached, it was apparent that Capone had ambitions extending beyond prostitution and gambling; he wanted political power as well. He did not simply want to corrupt or control the powers that be, he wanted to be the government, raking in, money from the roulette wheel with one hand and spending it on public works with the other. No other racketeer in Chicago, and certainly not the recessive Johnny Torrio, had any ambition remotely approaching Al’s; all they wanted to do was get rich quickly and quietly and live to enjoy their wealth.
Al got his way. He ran notices for hearings concerning the proposed pavement in the Cicero Tribune’s rival, the Cicero Life, in the process squelching any criticism that paper might have chosen to print. Once the plan became public knowledge, no one dared question it. Frank, again representing the Torrio-Capone organization, supervised the bidding on the paving contracts, ensuring that kickbacks were included. “If the other bidders protested,” St. John recalled, “it was easy to send Frank Capone to see them and explain that in the interests of their personal health and in view of their natural desire for a happy old age it was not advisable for them to do any future bidding on Cicero paving jobs.” The Cicero Tribune covered every detail of the rigged bidding, and as the bitter winter of 1924 relented, it seemed possible that the Capone organization’s hand-picked candidates might go down in defeat at the polls. The little newspaper’s crusade against the racketeers brought favorable mail as well as a flood of glory-seeking job applicants. In fact, all the Chicago newspapers were following the power struggle, and on the eve of the primary, the Chicago Daily News reckoned that before the day was over three men would be killed in Cicero.
Robert St. John shook his head in disbelief at the dire prediction.
• • •
Election day in Cicero.
Fair skies, chilly weather, brisk winds.
Large automobiles paraded up and down the streets, some trailing large, flowing Republican (i.e., Capone) banners, while others sported smaller Democratic regalia. But as the morning progressed, the seemingly festive tone turned ugly. Election workers for the Democrats, men whose job it was to get out the vote, began to disappear. The experience of one unlucky Democratic worker—Stanley Stanklevitch—proved typical; he was kidnapped by men he had never seen, blindfolded, and confined to a cellar until three o’clock the following morning. Finally he was led to a car and tossed out on the streets of Cicero. He went directly to a hospital to treat the wounds he had received during the day.
The threat of harm spread to the voters, as well. “Polling places were raided by thugs and ballots torn from the hands of voters waiting to drop them into the boxes,” reported the Chicago Tribune, which predicted the election in Cicero offered a taste of things to come for all of Chicago. “Women were frightened away from the polling places and many a voter was sent home with a broken head without having cast his ballot.” One voter told of being kidnapped and confined to a basement with eight others whose sole offense was that they intended to vote Democratic in Cicero that day.
Word of the mounting violence in Cicero soon traveled to Chicago, reaching the ears of a county judge, Edmund K. Jarecki. Alarmed, Judge Jarecki burst into the office of Mayor Dever, demanding that Chicago send in its police force to calm the city of Cicero. Dever wearily explained that the Chicago police had no jurisdiction in the town of Cicero, which had its own police force, but, he pointed out, the judge himself could deputize citizens to preserve order in Cicero, if he chose, and there was nothing to prevent him from selecting Chicago policemen for the assignment. Within minutes, the judge conferred with Chicago’s chief of police, who assembled a contingent of seventy cops in nine “flivver squads”; their ostensible mission was to protect the 20,000 workers at the Western Electric plant from gunfire in the streets of Cicero. Before departing, the riot squad assembled at Chicago’s Lawndale police station, where they were issued shotguns. However, there were several irregularities about this brigade. The policemen were all in plain clothes, and they rode in unmarked sedans. The danger of the situation was that Capone’s organization drove around Cicero in precisely the same type of plain black sedan.
“They tell us at headquarters there’s a lot of shootin’ and stuff goin’ on in Cicero,” the driver later told St. John. “I know that if there’s shootin’ the Capones must be mixed up in it, and the first thing I see when we get here is a man I know is Capone’s brother. What’s wrong with that?” What was wrong became apparent within seconds. The lead police car shrieked to a halt, and the nine sedans behind it quickly followed suit, narrowly avoiding a chain-reaction collision. “It was not difficult to imagine what had gone through his [Frank Capone’s] mind in that split second when life and death hung in the balance,” St. John wrote. “He heard the screaming of brakes, turned quickly, saw thirty or forty men in ordinary street clothes leaping from a long line of seven-passenger black touring cars. . . . He reached with his right hand for his right rear trousers pocket.” Before Frank could identify his pursuers or fire a shot, his slender body was hurled backward by the force of dozens of bullets. Concealed within their cars, the policemen fired their shotguns at him until he fell to the streets of Cicero, and they continued to fire bullets into the lifeless body until their guns were empty. One of the policemen, Sergeant Philip McGlynn, was generally credited as the man who shot Frank Capone, but he was certainly not alone in firing on the victim.
“When we rolled over his corpse,” St. John recalled, “his hand was still on his revolver. For the first time I understood that newspaper cliché about a body ‘riddled’ with bullets. No one ever determined how many shots were fired, but a sizable percentage of the Chicago detectives, seeing a Capone reach for a gun, had acted in a manner generally described by coroners’ juries with the expression ‘homicide committed in self-defense.’ ” Privately, St. John held himself responsible for Frank’s death; it was his paper, after all, that had run the exposés leading to the death of a man who, while hardly blameless, did not deserve summary execution on the streets of Cicero.
Frank Capone had died about midday, and Al, when he heard the news, went white with fury. Together with his brother Ralph, he went to the Cicero morgue to identify Frank’s body. All at once it was apparent that his ambitious scheme to take over Cicero had turned to waste and tragedy. Even Al Capone was astonished at how reckless and overpowering the Chicago police had been. The death of Frank became a turning point in Capone’s career as a racketeer. From now on he would become the dedicated outlaw, determined to crush and control. Frank’s death also thrust Al even further into prominence. Had he lived, it is likely that Frank, the most businesslike of all the Capone brothers, would have taken a leading role in the family’s affairs, and it is entirely possible that he would have become the most influential Capone, a low-profile racketeer in the Torrio mold, but it was not to be. His corpse was soon lying on a slab at the Cook County morgue, photographed by Chicago’s newspaper photographers. Thus Frank became the first member of the Capone family whose photograph appeared in the Chicago papers, and it was his death mask.
Before he began mourning for his older brother, Al demanded vengeance in Cicero that day. It was early in the afternoon, and the polls were still open. All across town, Capone henchmen continued to kidnap election officials and steal ballot boxes. One election official who resisted was killed. He was the second man to die in Cicero that day, and St. John realized to his horror that the Daily News’s prediction at which he had scoffed might become true after all. He had through his newspaper done more than anyone else to expose the Capone family’s racketeering in Cicero; would he be the next man killed?
That night, the votes were counted, and considering the reign of terror the Capone organization had visited on Cicero, the race turned out to be surprisingly close. The Capone-backed Republican candidate for president of the village board, Joseph Z. Klenha, received 7,878 votes, and his Democratic opponent, Rudolph Hurt, 6,993, a difference of less than a thousand ballots. The rest of the Capone-backed Republican slate won over their opponents by similar margins. The people had spoken, the guns had roared, and when the smoke cleared, it was apparent that Al Capone had won his battle for Cicero, but the price—his brother’s life—was beyond reckoning.
Once he had absorbed the magnitude of the defeat the Capone forces had dealt him, St. John decided to visit a Cicero saloon to console himself. There, over a glass of beer, he caught sight of one of his valued contacts in the community; he was a garrulous former prizefighter-turned-bootlegger and self-styled philosopher named Eddie Tancl. “When I could get him alone at a table in the corner he would talk about life and death, the theater, music and even poetry with a freshness of approach and expression which was more stimulating than the beer he sold,” St. John remarked. However, the place was so crowded that night with men excitedly discussing the election that St. John found conversation with Tancl or anyone else impossible, and he decided to leave. As his hand touched the door, a shot rang out and Eddie Tancl crumpled on the floor, killed without apparent reason by a drunk. It was minutes before midnight, and St. John immediately went to the phone and dialed the Chicago Daily News.
“Your reputation is safe,” he told the reporter who had written the gruesome prediction concerning election day. “Cicero has just obliged you with its third murder of the day. Good night.”
• • •
From the moment Frank Capone fell dead on the streets of Cicero, a spirited debate over who was to blame filled the Chicago newspapers. Both sides advanced their arguments. The police pointed out that Frank had been arrested for carrying concealed weapons only five days earlier, but it was equally true that a judge had dismissed the complaint and returned the weapons to Frank for purposes of self-protection. The irony of the situation was apparent; had Frank been unarmed, he would have lived to celebrate the results of the Cicero elections. Although his plan to preserve order in Cicero had turned into a fiasco, Judge Jarecki refused to accept blame. “Practically all the dirty work was done by Chicago gangsters hired to go there and swing the election,” he said in his defense. “Chicago’s best gunmen were there to kill or terrorize whatever voters and workers were opposed to whichever candidates were friends of the gunmen.” What he failed to mention was that he had been responsible for sending many of those gunmen to Cicero.
At the inquest into Frank’s death, Al Capone, using his alias, Al Brown, testified, but he had little to say—or to admit. Photographed by the newspapers, he appeared that day to be a somber-looking young man wearing a dark coat and holding a black fedora in his hands, his eyes cast down. Gangsters? Gambling? Rigged elections? He insisted he knew nothing of these matters; he was only a used-furniture dealer. Frank, said Al, happened to be in Cicero on election day “to buy a coffee shop.” Although several eyewitnesses testified that Frank Capone had not fired a shot, the police told a much different story to the coroner’s jury, insisting Frank had lured them into a pitched gun battle. They said he fired on them twice as he ran away, and he would have fired a third time had his gun not jammed. It was only then that he suddenly fell to the ground. Robert St. John, who had seen the entire event unfold, knew that it hadn’t happened that way, that Frank had been startled by the police, reached for his gun, and was dead before he was able to pull it out of his pocket. But the coroner’s jury formed a different impression. After hearing the hastily assembled evidence, the jury returned a verdict that Frank had been killed while resisting arrest, and the police were “justified” in taking his life.
• • •
CAPON
E—Salvatore Capone, beloved son of Theresa and the late Gabriel, brother of James, Ralph, Alphonse, Erminio, Humbert, Amadea, and Mafalda. Funeral Saturday at 9 A.M. from late residence, 7244 Prairie Avenue.
So read the family’s death notice for Frank (“Salvatore”) Capone in the Chicago Tribune on Thursday, April 3, 1924. His last rites turned out to be the largest, most lavish gangster funeral Chicago had seen since the death of James Colosimo. “GANGLAND BOWS AT SLAIN CHIEF’S BIER,” declared the Chicago Daily News of the scene at the Capone home on Friday night. “Dressed in their best, bringing their womenfolk and thus tacitly declaring a truce, the kings, princes, nobility, and commonality of the underworld gathered in hundreds yesterday to pay their past respects to their late brother in arms, Frank Caponi,” the Chicago Tribune reported. For two blocks in every direction the streets were packed with a “curious commingling of those who were simply curious, of those ‘in the racket,’ of neighbors and friends of the simpler ways of the slain gunman’s days,” said one reporter of the sight. “There were many hard faces and harder fists in the crowd.”
Within the Capone home Frank’s body was laid out in a silver-plated coffin engraved with his name. Candles placed at the head and foot of the bier burned steadily, their glow playing over his motionless features, glinting off the coffin’s cold, polished surface. In the front hall, Theresa, Al, and Ralph, all of them attired in black, greeted the neighbors, family friends, and members and allies of the Torrio-Capone organization.
The opulence of the coffin was exceeded only by the extravagance of the flower arrangements, estimated to have cost $20,000, all provided by the preferred florist of Chicago’s racketeers, Dion O’Banion, of whom it was said, “He could twist a sheaf of roses into a wreath or chaplet so deftly and gently as not to let fall a single petal.” The baby-faced, ambidextrous, musicloving O’Banion walked with a limp, his left leg four inches shorter than his right. But there was more to O’Banion than his angelic façade. He had spent his youth in Chicago’s Little Hell as a petty thief and singing waiter, and his floral business concealed the fact that he was also a major bootlegger and racketeer in his own right, in many ways Johnny Torrio’s Irish counterpoint on Chicago’s North Side. In fact, Mayor Dever’s chief of police, Morgan Collins, went so far as to describe O’Banion as “Chicago’s arch-criminal.” O’Banion, the police said, had arranged for the deaths of at least twenty-five of his enemies. Although he was never tried for the murders, he went about the city with no fewer than three pistols on his person at all times concealed in pockets thoughtfully provided by his tailor. At election time, he proved so effective at getting out the vote in his North Side wards that a popular saying went, “Who’ll carry the 42nd and 43rd?” Answer: “O’Banion, in his pistol pocket.”