O’Banion’s lavish floral arrangements for Frank Capone included a six-foot-high heart woven of red carnations and an equally impressive lyre fashioned of lilies and orchids. On the evening before the funeral, the interior of the Capone house on South Prairie Avenue, reported the Chicago Tribune, “was banked with a profusion of blossoms. When every nook and cranny from the kitchen to the attic had been fairly choked with these delicate tributes, they were heaped up on the front porch and hung from the balcony. . . . By nightfall the entire terrace was covered with brilliant blossoms. Finally the lack of space made it necessary to festoon the trees and lamp posts in front of the house with wreaths, immortelles and hanging baskets.” Within the house, mourners trod across a carpet of 3,000 roses, “ground into powder under the heels of scores that passed the silver-plated coffin.” The perfume of crushed blossoms, however sweet, did little to soothe the raw and sullen mood. There had been a festive air about “Big Jim” Colosimo’s funeral, but Frank Capone’s youth—he was not yet thirty at the time police gunned him down—ensured that the tone of his last rites was entirely tragic; instead of singing, there was wailing. Outside, hundreds of curiosity seekers jammed the street as darkness fell. Not everyone in attendance wished the Capones well. Police Chief Collins dispatched the same cops who had shot Frank to death to observe his funeral.
The next morning brought chilly spring weather, with gray skies and rain threatening. At 9:30 Frank’s silver-plated coffin was rolled from the house, transported carefully down the nine front steps to the street and into the back of a waiting hearse. A funeral cortege consisting of no fewer than one hundred cars—fifteen of them bearing flowers—proceeded deliberately to Mt. Olivet Cemetery, where a canopy covered the open grave site. There a priest addressed the throng: “You people here to-day show by your overflowing numbers that you have a great affection for this man. . . . Pray for him and aid him in paying his atonement.” As women sobbed, the silver-plated coffin was lowered into the ground, and clumps of earth heaped upon it.
Throughout the wrenching spectacle and afterward, Al refused to talk to reporters covering the event and kept in the background, aware that his relative anonymity afforded perhaps his best defense against the forces of law and order, the same forces that had taken Frank’s life without reason or remorse. To judge from the newspaper coverage of his brother’s death and burial, there was still considerable confusion about who Al Capone really was or how he spelled his name, and little recognition of his growing influence in Chicago’s rackets. The papers gave his first name as “Alfred” or “Toni.” He was usually described as the manager of the Four Deuces, and one newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, called him “Scarface,” the first appearance in print of that sinister nickname. This description was assuredly not of Al’s devising; it was the inspiration of an unknown journalist who had just succeeded in coining the most famous gangster nickname of all time. Yet no matter how the press portrayed him or misspelled his name, Al Capone kept a discreet public silence that masked his private agitation. He was not about to forgive or forget Frank’s death, and only Johnny Torrio’s counseling restraint kept him from mounting a full-scale war against the Chicago Police Department. Finally, a trivial incident triggered all his barely contained fury and frustration, and at a stroke Al “Scarface” Capone abruptly acquired a notoriety that would follow him to the end of his life.
• • •
Friday, May 8, 1924: a cool, cloudy spring day barely five weeks after Frank’s funeral. On the corner of Twenty-second and Wabash, near the Four Deuces, Jack Guzik, Al Capone’s partner in prostitution, encountered a small-time hoodlum named Joe Howard. At twenty-eight, Howard still lived with his elderly mother above her fruit stand while he freelanced as a small-time safe blower, bank robber, and whiskey highjacker. Without warning, Howard, who may have been drunk, lurched in Guzik’s direction and asked him for a loan. “Nuts to you,” the pudgy little racketeer replied, and walked on. Suddenly Howard lunged straight for Guzik, shouting, “You dirty little kike!” and slapped him on the face.
Rather than fighting back, the pudgy, decidedly unathletic Guzik tracked down Al Capone, whom he found at the Four Deuces, told him of Howard’s reckless behavior, and the two of them went in search of the offender. They quickly located him in a bar managed by one “Hymie” Jacobs, at 2300 Wabash. Prohibition was then so lax in Chicago, especially on the South Side, that Jacobs did not even bother to pretend that his drinking establishment was anything other than what it was: a saloon.
As the two men entered, Howard, who was drinking with another smalltime hood named Tony “Mouth” Bagnolia, glanced up and said, “Hello, Al.”
“What’s the idea of pushing Guzik around?” Capone shouted.
“Listen, you Dago pimp, why don’t you run along and take care of your broads?” Pimp: it was the ultimate insult to Capone, because it was true.
His nerves frazzled with anxiety and grief over Frank’s recent death, Capone impulsively reached in his pocket, pulled out his pistol, and before anyone could stop him, emptied it; four bullets struck Howard in the face, two in the shoulder, and he fell to the floor of the saloon, still grinning, but dead.
It was now 6:30 in the evening, the light just beginning to fade from the overcast sky, and at this hour, in this busy neighborhood, there was no way to disguise the murder that had just occurred. At least four bystanders had seen Capone shoot Joe Howard. Capone fled the scene of the crime. The police arrived shortly afterward, took charge of the body, and began their inquiries; they were followed by reporters. “I am certain it was Capone,” the chief of police was quoted as saying, “and I know just how it was done.”
What should have been an open-and-shut case quickly turned into a tantalizing mystery, as one by one the eyewitnesses, realizing that their lives might be in jeopardy if they cooperated with the police, developed a highly selective (and suspect) form of amnesia. On arriving at police headquarters, the saloon proprietor, “Hymie” Jacobs, now claimed not to have recognized either Capone or Guzik. At the moment the shots were fired, Jacobs said, he happened to be “stooping behind the counter with his head in the safe looking for a package of nickels.” As for Al Capone, Jacobs claimed he’d heard of him but never met the man. Another eyewitness to the murder, Tony “Mouth” Bagnolia, failed to live up to his nickname, claiming he was in the back of the saloon at the time of the shooting, too far away to get a good look, and while he did admit he heard someone call out “Hello, Al” shortly before the gunfire, he couldn’t be certain it was Al Capone. Meanwhile, the police undertook a futile search for Capone at the Four Deuces as well as his home on South Prairie Avenue, and by the early hours of the morning, they had decided that Capone himself might not be involved after all. There seemed to be an endless number of men with a motive for killing Howard, who had been in and out of trouble for years, and none of the other suspects enjoyed the protection of Johnny Torrio.
While the police were suspiciously lenient with Capone, the daily papers made the most of the vicious killing, and the following morning bleary-eyed citizens of Chicago were greeted with sensational headlines in huge boldface type, the letters two inches high, introducing an audacious new racketeer to the public, a man known as “Al Brown”:
GUNMAN KILLED BY GUNMAN
“FOUR DEUCES” OWNER HEADS MYSTERY FEUD
‘Al’ Brown Vanishes After Shooting.
“Another murder in the liquor and crime serial was accomplished last night,” read the lead in the Chicago Tribune, which furnished only a sketch of Capone’s identity and role in the rackets, though it was damaging enough: “Alphonse Capone, vice lord of the south side bad lands where he is better known as Al Brown of ‘Four Deuces’ fame, is sought as the slayer.” As if declaring him a murderer was not enough, the Tribune published his photograph; his careful grooming announced that he was no longer the roughneck from the Gowanus section of Brooklyn; he looked very much the prosperous young businessman. It was hard to imagine this studious-loo
king young man harming anyone.
One law enforcement agent was not so easily swayed, however. As assistant state’s attorney, William H. McSwiggin had won a reputation as the “hanging prosecutor” of Chicago because of his ability to win death penalties. The young prosecutor, a heavyset man who wore thick glasses, now drew a bead on the man who called himself Al Brown. Over the next few weeks he questioned a series of witnesses, and despite their evasions, he became persuaded that Al Capone had indeed killed Howard, although he failed to assemble a case that would convince a jury to return a death penalty against the malefactor. A month after the killing, when it was apparent the investigation had come to naught, Capone himself suddenly appeared at a Chicago police station, where he declared, “I hear the police are looking for me. What for?” He was immediately taken to the Criminal Courts Building and ushered into McSwiggin’s presence. The two bulky young men, each determined to get his own way, confronted one another. The prosecutor was Irish, the suspect Italian; this was an ethnic rivalry Capone understood from his youth in Brooklyn, where the Irish had been the chief rivals of the Italian gangs. Capone hotly proclaimed his innocence to the Irish prosecutor. “I’m a respectable businessman,” he insisted. “I’m a second-hand furniture dealer. I’m no gangster. I don’t know this fellow Torrio. I haven’t anything to do with the Four Deuces. Anyway, I was out of town the day Howard was bumped off.” All lies, which Capone figured was just what the Irish prosecutor deserved.
Undeterred by the suspect’s denials and the witnesses’ faulty memories, McSwiggin insisted he would still be able to indict Capone for the murder of Joe Howard, and the inquest continued, but without the desired result. On July 22, the jury considering the evidence concluded its deliberations with the following statement: “We, the jury, find that Joe Howard came to his death on the premises at 2300 South Wabash Avenue, from hemorrhage and shock due to bullet wounds in the head, face and neck; said bullets being fired from a revolver or revolvers in the hand or hands of one or more unknown, white male persons, in the vestibule of said saloon on said premises.” So there would be no indictment, no trial, no conviction of Alphonse Capone for the murder of Joe Howard, but that was not the end of the matter for Bill McSwiggin, renowned for his tenacity. He refused to consider Joe Howard just another casualty of the beer wars, as the police did, and forget the matter. Bill McSwiggin never forgot anything, especially the Italian, Al Capone. Nor would Capone neglect the “hanging prosecutor.”
• • •
Once the excitement surrounding the murder of Joe Howard abated, Capone returned to the haven of Cicero, becoming ever more entrenched. He abandoned the modest Anton’s Hotel for its more impressive neighbor, the Hawthorne Inn, located at 4833 Twenty-second Street, which the Torrio organization owned. Capone saw to it that the building’s windows were equipped with bullet-proof steel shutters, and armed sentries milled in the dark lobby. Security was ubiquitous, the ambience menacing. “Entrance was through a passageway, twenty-five feet long . . . leading to the lobby,” recalled a reporter.
The chairs, settees, lounges . . . were so arranged as to front on the passageway. The visitor, therefore, found himself in the center of a kind of stage, undergoing a visual onslaught. His coming had been tipped off by a lookout at the street door who had pressed a warning buzzer. There were never fewer than a dozen ostensible idlers in the lobby—fellows with indigo-stippled chins and eyes as expressionless as those of a dead mackerel; the Capone bodyguard. They gazed from behind newspapers and through a haze of cigarette smoke amid a silence that was earsplitting. The bellhops, the room clerk, and the girl at the telephone switchboard were on the Capone payroll.
The organization’s new headquarters also sheltered the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, which served as a gambling establishment and a gathering place for the Capone organization. The liquor flowed, seventy-five cents for a shot of (Torrio-Capone) whiskey, twenty-five cents for a glass of (Torrio-Capone) beer, and the money rolled in; the Hawthorne Smoke Shop Inn handled as much as $50,000 a day on the horses alone, and over at Lauderback’s, another gambling joint, it was not unheard of for $100,000 to change hands at roulette. Prohibition-era Cicero could now boast of being home to over 100 saloons and 150 gambling dens, most of them controlled, directly or indirectly, by the vast Torrio-Capone syndicate. The sheer amount of money was something new; Johnny Torrio had never seen anything like it, and Al Capone had never expected to. The economy of the 1920s, inflated by relaxed regulation, increased speculation, and a conviction that the economic bubble would never burst, benefited racketeers at least as much as stockbrokers and speculators. Capone and his lieutenants strolled around Cicero with thousands of dollars jammed in their pockets, more money than they had ever expected to see in their entire lives, with the promise of more, always more, where that came from. “The impecunious hoodlum of 1920, who had thought $25,000 a year a fairly snug salary, was now disbursing, in the booze traffic alone, $25,000 a week in payrolls,” marveled one reporter. The racketeers’ lingo reflected the inflated amounts of money being thrown around. They called hundred-dollar bills “leaves”; twenty-five dollars was just “two bits.” Smaller bills, the fives, tens, and twenties, did not even merit names. The basic monetary unit became the “grand”: $1,000.
The Hawthorne Inn became the symbol of Capone’s presence in Cicero, but it lacked one essential for a racketeer: privacy. Al’s real retreat was a large, handsome building he acquired at 1600 Austin Boulevard, on a quiet, treelined residential street in Cicero. Built of tan brick and highlighted by ornamental masonry, the hideaway appeared to be a small apartment building, but Capone was its sole resident. On closer inspection, it became apparent the place was a fortress. An eight-foot-high brick wall surrounded the backyard, a tunnel connected the garage to the building, and the front door was made of steel. It shut with a clang that became a familiar sound in the neighborhood, and a bar within snapped into place to secure it. Bodyguards were posted at the front, and they constantly scrutinized the area. Within, the appointments were solid, middle-class, except for the bedroom. There Al Capone constructed a palatial lair for himself, complete with a mirrored ceiling. Of course this was not a retreat he shared with Mae and Sonny, who remained on South Prairie Avenue. It was here that he came with his pals and all their teenage mistresses to drink, to party, to make love until dawn and sleep to noon.
Al Capone came into his own in Cicero, the city in which he succumbed to the dark lure of the racketeer’s life. It was one thing to be Frankie Yale’s muscle or Johnny Torrio’s protégé, but to rule his own turf, his own town, was intoxicating. At twenty-five, up from the streets of Brooklyn, he was besotted with his newfound power, the girls who flocked to the racketeers, the illicit whiskey, and the great white drug, cocaine.
The evidence of Capone’s use of cocaine is limited but compelling. Years later, in 1938, just prior to his departure from the federal penitentiary at Alcatraz, he was given the most thorough medical examination of his life, in the course of which the prison’s physician noted Capone’s “perforated nasal septum.” By far the most likely cause for this hole in the wall of cartilage separating his nostrils: cocaine. This was evidence of more than casual use. To burn a hole like that in his septum required his snorting tens of thousands of dollars of the drug. Since Capone had been in jail since 1931 at the time of the medical examination, the most likely time for him to have used the drug was during the early and mid-1920s, when cocaine was the drug of choice among the wealthy and fashionable of the era, and flappers wore little spoons around their necks to scoop the innocuous-looking white powder into their nostrils. It was just a distraction, a harmless high, or so people thought.
As a brothel manager, Capone was surrounded by cocaine users; the drug was his for the asking. So there was nothing unusual about Capone’s use of cocaine; it would have been more remarkable for him to avoid the everpresent drug. But it is noteworthy that he snorted enough to perforate his septum, an indication of addiction rather than casual
or even repeated use. Thanks to the proceeds from the rackets he managed, though, Capone had the financial resources to support the habit, and its effects went far beyond his nasal septum. His behavior also underwent marked changes. Every time he snorted cocaine, he experienced its distinctive, exhilarating rush of self-confidence approaching omnipotence, and the manic restlessness it induced. What better time to dream of controlling not just Cicero but the rackets of the entire city of Chicago. And why stop at Chicago? Why not the entire country? What better time to plot the assassination of his rivals? The term assassin originally meant “eater of hashish,” referring to the ancient assassins of the East who prepared themselves for battle by ingesting the drug. So the racketeers’ assassins nerved themselves with drugs before murdering their modern-day adversaries. As the effects of the drug wore off, he would experience the darker side of cocaine use, the wearying, draining aftermath: depression, a strange wheezing in his nostrils, and a craving for more. For Al Capone there was always more; he could afford anything, including enough cocaine to burn a hole in his nose. If the scars he bore on his cheek bore witness to the external violence of his adolescence, the wound to his septum, internal and hidden to everyone but a physician, testified just as eloquently to the havoc cocaine wreaked on his psyche.
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