Capone’s cocaine habit has escaped notice, in part because he made a point of discouraging any of his organization’s men from dealing in cocaine or its even more dangerous cousin, heroin. He hated hopheads (heroin users), railed against them, and insisted that any of his men caught using the drug would be fired—or worse. But Capone habitually took a stand on one issue in which there was some gray area, some dispute about what was right and wrong, to avoid another issue where there was none. He admitted to being a bootlegger and even a gambler, for instance, but never a pimp (which he assuredly was). In the same way he denounced heroin while indulging his own cocaine habit.
• • •
As Al Capone cavorted in his suburban fortress, life in Cicero appeared to return to normal. Even Robert St. John, who had editorialized against Capone, later claimed that Cicero’s reputation for violence was undeserved. “Ninety-nine percent of Chicago never saw a gangster, never heard a shot fired, never had any contact with all this to-do,” he declared. In reality, however, little had changed; the racketeers were, if anything, even more deeply entrenched. Now, instead of guns, they used their control of the Cicero government to resolve “problems.” A merchant who advertised in St. John’s newspaper, for instance, suddenly found his property assessment raised, and thus subject to higher taxes. Or inspectors descended on his place of work, finding violations invisible to the naked eye. “No parking” signs appeared like mushrooms in front of his store, warding off the customers. All these headaches disappeared once the offending merchant switched his advertising from St. John’s Cicero Tribune to the less controversial Cicero Life.
Watching his advertising dwindle as a result of the pressure applied by the Capone-controlled government, St. John decided to strike back with his most daring exposé yet: an account of a visit to a Capone-controlled brothel. Knowingly or not, St. John had singled out the area in which his nemesis was the most sensitive and vulnerable, for, as Joe Howard had discovered at the cost of his life, nothing could be more calculated to infuriate Al Capone, the improver of roads and fixer of elections, than to be branded as a pimp.
Although he was well known to the Capone henchmen by now, St. John insisted on doing his own reporting for the story: “One midnight I put on shabby clothes, emptied my pockets of all identification, and set out.” He drove to the brothel, which was located in a nondescript frame house on a deserted stretch of road near Cicero’s Hawthorne Race Track. Posing as a customer, he lingered in a small bar in the front, then passed through a series of doors controlled by electric buttons. Bullet holes pockmarked the doors, and it seemed that anyone the organization wanted to kill was simply lured into the passageway, trapped between the automatic doors, and shot to death. Passing safely through this gauntlet, St. John entered a larger room, where he sat waiting on a bench as the girls (“All were blasé and businesslike in their attitude, as if they were selling ninety-eight cent sweaters in a department-store bargain basement”) slowly entered the room and left with whoever was sitting on the hot seat at the end of the bench. Once a seat became vacant, everyone on the bench shifted one place closer to the end. The atmosphere was not, St. John noted, especially glamorous or enticing. Indeed, the hallmark of Capone brothels was their efficiency, not their luxury; they were thoroughly up-to-date, veritable factories of sin, the carnal equivalent of the Western Electric plant, “the very antithesis of pleasure,” in St. John’s words.
The undercover reporter bumped from place to place until at last he sat on the edge of the bench, terrified of being recognized (after all, he told himself, “I had undertaken to try, almost singlehanded, to crush . . . one of the most powerful underworld organizations America had ever known”) and anxious about what he would say to the girl he selected. Finally, he paid his five dollars and went upstairs with a young girl who introduced herself as Helen. When they were alone in a small room, one of perhaps a hundred in the brothel, St. John admitted he was engaged in research, though he stopped short of specifying his true mission. St. John stealthily interviewed Helen and another prostitute until four o’clock in the morning and, in his own estimation, accumulated “enough material for a modern Moll Flanders,” including details of Al Capone’s visits. He then jumped to safety from a second-story window and drove home to set down his sensational story.
When the exposé ran in the next issue of the Cicero Tribune, a great hue and cry went up. Until this time, St. John had stood alone in defiance of Capone. He and his one-horse newspaper had done more to assail the racketeers and expose their nefarious tactics to public scrutiny than all the police and politicians in the entire city of Chicago. Now, at last, St. John had allies. Right-thinking citizens formed committees, ministers denounced the growing tide of sin, and indignant delegations besieged City Hall. “Everywhere they went they were received with the courtesy due groups of distinguished citizens and gentlemen of the cloth,” St. John observed. “Everywhere they were given promises of action. Yet the weeks went by and nothing happened.” Civic rage at what the Capone organization was doing to Cicero—its reputation no less than its property values—mounted until a minister in a neighboring town arranged to retain the services of an experienced arsonist. One morning, when the brothel St. John had visited was empty of prostitutes and customers alike, the lonely wooden building was destroyed in a fire that had obviously been carefully timed. “Here was another ‘crime’ for which I was indirectly responsible,” St. John wrote, “but as long as no lives were lost in the fire I refused to let it bother my conscience. Alphonse Capone, even if he had no fire insurance, would not have to change his scale of living.”
The burning of the Capone brothel had, at a stroke, redefined the terms of the conflict between the racketeers and the good people of Cicero. The anonymous minister’s tactics were worthy of racketeers everywhere, and they amounted to something Al Capone could understand. The destruction was a public affront, and Capone had no choice but to arrange for a public retaliation against St. John. Still, as the young editor of the Cicero Tribune, St. John was to a certain extent protected from harm by the role he had carved out for himself in such a brief period; it would not do to create headlines reading “Young Journalist Found Dead,” which would be certain to bring down the wrath of the newspapers if not the entire city on the Capone organization. For that reason, it was more desirable to humiliate him than to kill him.
Days after the brothel’s destruction, Al put St. John on notice. The messenger in this case was Louis Cowen, a bit player in the Capone organization determined to carve out a larger role for himself. Al liked him; Louis could be useful. He stood perhaps five feet tall, and he was a news dealer whose stand happened to be located directly beneath the offices of the Cicero Tribune at 52nd Avenue and 25th Street. So Capone took up little Louis Cowen, gave him money and a fancy car, and made him the organization’s professional bail bondsman. The arrangement was a clever one, and Capone’s use of Cowen revealed the racketeer’s newfound sophistication in business matters. In return for the car, money, and status Capone conferred on him, Cowen was required to post bail for any Capone racketeer who was arrested. The plan worked this way: Al Capone transferred perhaps half a million dollars in apartment buildings to Cowen, who owned the real estate in name only. Every man in the Capone organization carried Cowen’s business card and was ordered to call Cowen in the event of an arrest. The number printed on the card did not connect with an office; rather, it rang a public phone located in a drugstore near Cowen’s news stand; it was here, in this public phone booth, that he conducted his business dealings, with the druggist frequently summoning Cowen to the phone. Once he received his orders, the diminutive news dealer would jump into his limousine and drive to the police station, display proof of the real estate he held in his name, and put up whatever amount was required to get the Capone man out on bail.
Now Cowen’s assignment was to threaten St. John on behalf of the Capone organization. St. John knew exactly who Cowen was; every so often the little man would sidle
up to St. John to discuss selling the Cicero Tribune, always meeting with a rebuff. But this time he wanted St. John to know that Al and Ralph were extremely angry with the Cicero Tribune. Cowen delivered the threat with all the posturing he could muster, and when he was finished the indignant journalist told the little man that he was angry, too, “angry that the whole lot of them had not yet decided to get out of Cicero and leave the town alone.” As St. John came to realize, his response was “a juvenile and reckless thing to have said.”
Two days later, as the young editor was walking to work, he crossed the intersection and saw a black sedan speeding toward him; it was the kind of car that police and gangsters alike favored. “The brakes shrieked, the car stopped, and four men jumped out,” he recalled.
I felt just as Frank Capone must have felt, except that I recognized two of the men coming towards me. One was Ralph Capone himself. The second was Pete Pizak. . . . Pete had a gun in his hand. The others were reaching their pockets.
I had time to do something Frank Capone had not had time to do. Instinctively I dropped to the ground and curled myself up in a ball like a cat, with my head buried.
Pete Pizak, to my relief, did not pull the trigger of the gun. He used the butt as a club. Someone else had a cake of soap in a woolen sock. . . . The third man used a blackjack. Ralph directed the operation. They were trying to aim at my head, but I had it buried. As I wiggled and squirmed, most of the blows landed on my arms and legs. They must have succeeded in hitting me at least once on the head, however, because suddenly everything went black.
Two policemen present at the start of the beating stood by and watched as the Capone organization settled its score with St. John. The only individual who attempted to come to the victim’s rescue was the Cicero Tribune’s society editor, but the lone, unarmed woman could do nothing to stop the violence.
When Ralph, Pizak, and the two other men had finished their work, they returned to their black sedan and drove directly to the hotel Al Capone called home in Cicero, but the brutality of the Capone organization did not end there. St. John had a brother named Archer, also a newspaper editor. Archer’s base was in Berwyn, the town next to Cicero and thus of considerable strategic value to the Capone organization. In emulation of his gallant brother, Archer St. John was preparing to run an exposé of the Capones’ designs on Berwyn in his own publication, whose staff consisted of only himself. Just before the article ran, Capone henchmen kidnapped him; they handcuffed, blindfolded, and confined their captive to a remote hovel—all on the same day that Robert received his beating. Archer’s captors released him in the woods sometime later, and he eventually found his way home, though he was still badly shaken. His exposé never appeared, but the beatings received by the St. John brothers had considerable shock value; the Chicago Tribune ran a banner headline—“BOY EDITORS BEATEN; KIDNAPPED”—above an account of the Capones’ skulduggery.
Even after this, the Brothers Capone were not quite done with the Brothers St. John. After the beating he received on the streets of Cicero, Robert spent a week recovering in the hospital. Discharged, he went to the cashier’s office where he was dumbfounded to hear that his bill had just been paid in full. “He was rather dark complexioned,” the cashier said of St. John’s benefactor, “about your height, but much huskier, and he was very well dressed, all in blue, with a diamond stickpin. He didn’t give his name. Just said he was a friend of yours.”
St. John accepted the anonymous charity, and even before he returned to his office at the Cicero Tribune he resumed his quest to rid Cicero of the Capones. He approached a young man in the police department whom he considered his good friend, “as clean-cut as a college basketball player,” and demanded that he draw up warrants for the arrest of Ralph Capone and the other thugs who participated in the beating, which could easily have maimed or killed St. John. “Al likes you,” said his friend, displaying a surprising intimacy with the organization. “He likes all newspapermen. But he likes Ralph better. So take it easy, kid!” St. John was not about to take it easy on Capone and insisted on the warrants. At length his friend reluctantly agreed, and he instructed St. John to return the following morning at nine o’clock sharp.
The next day, the journalist reappeared exactly on schedule and was shown to an office on the second floor of Cicero’s modest police station. As he waited in an office, another man joined him, a man with a scar on his left cheek, a scar he had tried to hide, unsuccessfully, beneath a layer of flesh colored talcum powder. “He was impeccably dressed in a blue suit, white stiff collar, blue tie pierced by a sizable diamond, black well-polished shoes, blue pocket handkerchief, and black hat at a jaunty angle,” St. John recalled. The man extended his arm in greeting.
“Glad to meet you, St. John,” said Al Capone. “We’ll get this over quick.”
So began their tête-à-tête—in the police station, of all places, but this was Cicero, where the force was in the employ of Al Capone, and what better way to drive the point home to a hotheaded, misguided young journalist than to meet him in that stronghold of the law. They were both young, these two men discussing the future of Cicero, St. John barely twenty-two, Capone just four years his senior, but both were seasoned beyond their years—battle-hardened soldiers who had seen too much of war to return to innocence.
Capone began by launching into an impassioned defense of his activities in Cicero. “Sure I got a racket. So’s everybody. Name me a guy that ain’t got a racket,” he asked rhetorically. “Most guys hurt people. I don’t hurt nobody. Only them that get in my way. I give away a lot of dough. Maybe I don’t support no college or build no liberries, but I give it to people that need it, direct.” By this Capone meant that his organization employed hundreds of errand-runners and paid off hundreds more not to interfere. “What in the hell good is a college, anyway? I know some guys that went to college. Are they as smart as I am? . . . I even got college men working for me, would you believe it? Yes, and Harding was a college man and see where it got him! He’s as dead as Cicero. . . .” Capone hastened to explain he meant “the guy named Cicero, the Greek.” He moved on to the substance of his meeting with St. John, which was to insist that the Cicero Tribune’s bold exposés had actually helped the Capone interests because they created priceless publicity. “Take the Ship,” Capone explained. “How can I advertise? I’d like to buy a page in the Chicago Tribune every day. Come to the Ship. Best gambling joint in the country. But I can’t advertise. So you guys write stories . . . and I get my advertising for free. Why should I get sore?” Capone let the thought hang in the air as he flourished a gold cigarette holder, inhaled deeply, and apologized, after a fashion, for the beating his brother had administered to St. John, claiming it was all a misunderstanding; the boys had been drunk and forgot their manners. “I tell them, ‘Let the kid alone.’ And when I tell ’em something there ain’t no argument. But the other morning the boys had been boozing it up . . . and they forgot what I told them and they made a mistake and now I gotta straighten it out.”
The racketeer produced a fat roll of money—mostly $100 bills, St. John noticed—and made his offer.
“Now look, you lost a lotta time from your office.” He carefully removed three bills from the roll.
“I guess you lost your hat.” One more bill.
“You had to get your clothes fixed up.” St. John watched him peel away two more bills.
“I’ve taken care of your hospital bill, but there was the doctor.” Al continued to peel off the bills, until St. John had lost count.
If Capone thought his stratagem would end their vendetta, he was abruptly disillusioned. “I was suddenly filled with contempt for him,” St. John wrote. “It obviously was beyond his comprehension that there existed anyone anywhere who did not have his price.” The young journalist, his body still aching from the beating, made no reply. He abruptly left the room, slamming the door after him, spurning Capone and a roll of bills fat enough to choke a horse.
In the end, Al Capone�
��s bankroll prevailed over the power of the free press in Cicero. Once more he sent Louis Cowen forth to warn St. John that the Capone organization viewed the Cicero Tribune’s latest exposé with displeasure, and once more St. John rebuffed him, but Cowen’s riposte caught the journalist off guard: “Maybe you don’t know who owns the Cicero Tribune now.”
Cowen proved all too correct; St. John discovered to his dismay that Al Capone had pressured the paper’s principal investors into selling their interest, which the racketeer promptly placed in Cowen’s name, just as he had with the Cicero real estate. St. John held stock in the company, but he was now employed by the same Capone organization he had risked his reputation and indeed his life to condemn. He now found himself subject to the same blandishments to which Cowen had succumbed: a high salary, a sleek new limousine, whatever it took to keep him happy.
The idea of working for Louis Cowen, the cocky, obnoxious little man who had taunted him over the months, was too much for St. John to bear. “Well, Mr. Publisher,” he said, “I guess you and your scar-faced friend have won. Say good-by to him for me.” With those words he walked out of the Cicero Tribune, went home, gathered his possessions, and left Cicero forever. “I telegraphed a newspaperman’s employment agency and said I wanted a job as far away from Cicero, Illinois, as I could get and still be in the United States. They offered me a position in Rutland, Vermont, and I accepted.” St. John’s adventurous career in journalism continued, and he subsequently became a distinguished foreign correspondent (in which capacity he was given to comparing Al Capone’s methods to those of Adolf Hitler) and broadcaster, but he never returned to the town where he had gotten his start.
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