Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  An ambulance transported Torrio to Jackson Park Hospital, where pandemonium broke out. He was rushed into surgery to remove the bullets, but the doctors gave little hope. Police swarmed everywhere. Al Capone in a “loud, checked suit,” accompanied by a delegation of fifteen members of the organization, many of them armed bodyguards, confronted the cops, crying, “The gang! That gang did it!” over and over, but when pressed to identify the members of the gang, he fell silent, obeying the racketeers’ code never to divulge information about other racketeers, including one’s enemies, to the police. Even Mrs. Torrio was there, a “slim-shouldered figure in a blue serge tailored suit,” her diamonds glittering, preparing herself to become a widow, albeit an exceedingly wealthy one.

  An attempt on the life of Chicago’s leading racketeer was a scoop of major proportions for the city’s dailies, and the Herald and Examiner dispatched Patricia Dougherty to the hospital with the idea that Ann Torrio would be more likely to talk with a woman. “I know you are a reporter,” Ann said when Dougherty appeared at her side in a waiting room. “And I know what you people are saying about my husband. . . . I’ll tell you about him. He’s a wonderful man. Thoughtful. Considerate. Our married life has been 12 years of unbroken happiness. He has given me kindness, devotion, love—everything that a good man can give a woman. Look what he did for his mother! Just last year he took her back to her birthplace in Italy. She left there a poor peasant. She came back the richest woman in the village.”

  “I understand,” Dougherty whispered, gently returning to the matter at hand. “But I was wondering about Capone. I saw him here. Isn’t it true your husband and Capone are good friends?”

  “They are business associates,” Ann replied. “I never met Capone before tonight. He has never been to our home.”

  Realizing that she had already said too much, Ann Torrio turned her attention to her husband. As the anxious hours crept by, the doctors sent word he was expected to live, after all. But for a racketeer who is “on the spot,” as Torrio was, a hospital can be a dangerous place. Take what happened to Frank McErlane, the man the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice once called the “most brutal gunman who ever pulled a trigger in Chicago.” When he was in the hospital recovering from an attempt on his life, his rivals stole into his hospital room and opened fire, but before they finished him off, McErlane reached under his pillow, produced a pistol, and began firing enthusiastically until his attackers fled. So there was nothing to stop the Moran-Drucci-Weiss faction from striking again even here, in Torrio’s room. Capone, always security-conscious, doted on Torrio, and during his recuperation slept on a cot in Torrio’s room to ensure that the helpless older man had round-the-clock protection.

  The Chicago police also interested themselves in Torrio’s welfare and became unusually diligent in tracking down his assailants. They assigned one of their senior detectives, William Schoemaker—“Shoes,” everyone called him—to the case. John Sbarbaro, who led a curious double life as a racketeers’ undertaker and an assistant state’s attorney, attempted to question the victim, but Torrio, a supremely disciplined man, refused to name his attackers. “I know who they are,” he said to Sbarbaro as he lay in agony. “It’s my business. I’ve got nothing to tell you.” Detective Schoemaker and the police subsequently located a boy of seventeen who had witnessed the attempted assassination of Johnny Torrio, and he soon faced a lineup of suspects, including “Bugs” Moran, whom Detective Schoemaker had suspected all along. The youth immediately identified Moran as one of the gunmen. “You’re nuts!” Moran snapped, but his accuser remained adamant: “I saw you shoot that man.” By uttering those words, the boy had instantly put both his life and the lives of his parents in jeopardy, so a judge kept Moran in jail as long as possible. Ultimately the police failed to build a case against Moran, and without Torrio’s assistance their inquiry, which had seemed so promising, was destined to fail.

  Although the unexpected misfiring of the gun had spared Torrio’s life, everything was different for him now. It should have been the best of times for the Torrio-Capone organization; Mayor Dever’s plan to reform the city and enforce Prohibition was at best an empty promise, and there was more money than ever to be made from brothels, bootlegging, and gambling. Instead, it was the worst of times. Torrio was in the hospital, and his lofty, apparently secure position in the Chicago rackets had come to a woeful end, as he himself was the first to recognize. Moran, Drucci, and Weiss had struck twice, and it was inevitable they would try a third time, or as many times as necessary. There was no way to stop them short of killing them, an act bound to give rise to further retribution. So Torrio was caught in a vicious cycle of bloodshed, and he knew he was caught.

  After almost four weeks in the hospital, Torrio was at last able to rise from his bed, and the first order of business demanding his attention was the trial stemming from the Sieben Brewery raid. Torrio astonished police and prosecutors by appearing in federal court on February 9, 1925, though he was obviously frail, and he still wore the bandages on his wounds, most conspicuously on his throat. There Torrio pleaded guilty to the charge of operating a brewery, and Federal Judge Adam Cliffe sentenced him to pay a fine of $5,000 and to serve nine months in the Lake County Jail in Waukegan, Illinois.

  Bringing all his influence to bear, Torrio had an easy time of it in jail. He was soon on cordial terms with the warden, Sheriff Edward Ahlstrom, who provided the prisoner with a clean, private cell equipped with oriental rugs and posh furniture. The sheriff thoughtfully installed bulletproof shutters on the windows to forestall further assassination attempts, and he assigned two deputies to watch over Torrio twenty-four hours a day. An eminent—and generous—bootlegger such as Johnny Torrio deserved no less. A gentleman. So refined. An opera devotee. Nothing like your typical gangster. As the weeks of confinement passed, Torrio grew so close to Ahlstrom that the two men often dined in the sheriff’s home, and after dinner Torrio sat on the porch, greeting visitors such as Al Capone until it was time to return to his cell. Despite his privileged status, Torrio recognized that he had reached the end of his days as a racketeer, at least in Chicago. Once he regained his freedom, he would still be the target of die-hard O’Banion loyalists, and if convicted of violating Prohibition laws a third time, he would likely be sent to jail for the rest of his life. Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the trial was the publicity it generated; he was too well known in Chicago now to conduct business as usual. This was not the way he preferred to operate. Everything was too violent; no one listened to reason anymore. All the treaties he had painstakingly negotiated among the differing racketeering organizations had been violated. As for the machine gun, he had an absolute abhorrence of the weapon. Its use would lead to the end of racketeering, he suspected. On the other hand, he was wealthy; the newspapers were saying he was worth ten, twenty million, but they neglected to include the money he had stashed away in Italy. The rewards were no longer worth the risks.

  After pondering his situation for several weeks, Torrio sent for Capone. Overcoming his resistance to entering a jail, especially one located outside his territory, Al reluctantly traveled to Waukegan in March. What happened next was a passing of the torch. Torrio announced that he was going to retire from Chicago if not from racketeering, and not unexpectedly he was leaving the entire organization to the Capone family, not just Al. Together, the brothers controlled nightclubs, gambling establishments, several breweries, dozens of brothels in Cicero and the surrounding areas, the Four Deuces, as well as lucrative arrangements to supply liquor to thousands of speakeasies in Cicero and the South Side of Chicago. At the same time, they incurred immense obligations: the responsibility of paying off police and other public officials, security measures for themselves and the men who worked for them, and the menace posed by Moran, Drucci, and Weiss.

  • • •

  Torrio served his jail sentence without incident, and when he was freed in the latter part of 1925, a convoy of cars assembled by the Capone organizatio
n whisked him away to safety and anonymity. After several years abroad, Torrio quietly returned to New York, where he eventually lost whatever visibility he had acquired in Chicago, and he pursued an exceedingly low-profile career as a bootlegger, just one of many in a city that did not make an issue of Prohibition the way Chicago did.

  As for the “Terrible Gennas,” the Sicilians who had prodded Torrio and Capone into killing O’Banion, they proved tragically vulnerable. In May, the Moran gang assassinated Angelo, and several weeks later, they attacked Mike, the one who had killed O’Banion in his flower store. Later, Tony, the architect, fell victim to another Italian racketeer. The surviving brothers went into hiding, their reign of terror ended as quickly and as violently as it had begun. Several years later, the Chicago Tribune caught up with Jim Genna in Rome. No longer a feared ganglord, he operated a modest vacuum cleaner agency located in the Piazza di Spagna and yearned for America. The fate of the Gennas served as an object lesson to the six surviving Capone brothers. If they were not exceedingly careful, they would finish as the Genna clan had, either dead or disbanded.

  • • •

  Once he assumed control of the entire syndicate from Torrio in the spring of 1925, Capone had real power in Chicago, and power changed him, and just as importantly, it changed the way everyone regarded him. He was no longer just another hoodlum or racketeer; he was Al Capone, a name to be reckoned with. No longer did he lurk in the shadows of the Hawthorne Inn, going about his business in the secrecy on which Johnny Torrio always insisted. He did all he could to make himself visible, and more than that, respectable, at least by the standards of Prohibition-era Chicago. Thus, in the spring of 1925, immediately after taking the reins from Torrio, Capone moved to the Metropole Hotel. Today the remains of the Metropole stand amid the detritus of a once-bustling neighborhood, a stopping point for the occasional tourist bus, but in its day, the hotel offered a bustling, thoroughly cosmopolitan environment in a thriving neighborhood. It was an impressive structure, seven stories high, prominently situated at 2300 South Michigan Avenue, close to the Loop and the Four Deuces. Only four years earlier, Capone, completely unknown in Chicago, had worked as a pimp at that establishment. Now he occupied a lavish hotel suite in Chicago, another hotel suite in Cicero, a hideaway in Cicero, and a house on South Prairie Avenue: such were the generous wages of sin.

  Capone’s suite at the Metropole consisted of five rooms, numbers 406 through 410; in addition, he maintained two “guest rooms” on the sixth floor and two more on the seventh. The tab for all these rooms came to $1,500 a day. The focal point was his office, in room 406, located in a turret at the corner of the building. Gazing through the broad Chicago windows he could survey his entire South Side domain sprawling beneath him, as orderly and as flat as a map. The Metropole also contained another feature of interest to Capone; a series of tunnels connected its basement to other buildings in the immediate vicinity. The tunnels’ intended purpose was to haul small trucks of coal during the bitter winter months, but for Capone and his men the burrows could also double as escape routes or hiding places in the event of the emergencies that inevitably befell men in their hazardous line of work. Capone’s quarters included other unusual features. Several rooms were devoted to a gym, where his men could toss a medicine ball or work out on a rowing machine or punching bags. (Capone himself rarely used the athletic equipment, however.) There was also an ample supply of girls available to service the men. “When a guy don’t fall for a broad, he’s through,” Capone was supposed to have said by way of explanation. The hotel served as his base of operations until 1928, when he moved across the street to another luxurious hotel, the Lexington.

  From the moment Al Capone moved to the Metropole, all Chicago was aware of his presence. It was as visible an address as there was in the city. The increased visibility was part of his new strategy, one he had begun to deploy cautiously in Cicero, but now, with Torrio out of the way, he pursued with gusto. Tony Berardi, a young photographer for the Chicago Evening American, recalls watching the transformation of Al Capone from a publicity-shy hoodlum to a gregarious emissary from the underworld: “The first time I ever saw the man was at a police station, and naturally, at the beginning, he used to cover his face with his hands, a newspaper, whatever. He never posed for pictures at that point. More than once or twice I saw him try to beat up photographers. He never bothered me, though; I was just a skinny little kid. Every editor wanted to get close to the guy so that they would get firsthand news. Our city editor, Harry Read, was the one who became very close with Capone.” The two men formed an unusual partnership. Capone supplied Read with exclusive stories and interviews likely to draw readers, and Read, in turn, groomed the rising young gangster for success. “Read educated the guy in this respect. He said, ‘Al, look, you’re a prominent figure now. Why act like a hoodlum? Quit hiding. Be nice to people.’ After that, Capone would go to the ball park to see baseball games. He’d go to fights. He became, if you want to put it this way, kind of a gentleman,” Berardi recalls. “That was the one thing about gangsters in those days, they wouldn’t hold up people. They wouldn’t rob a bank. If you got into their territory, you were in trouble, but the public didn’t fear those people because they were never harmed.” Capone made a point of publicizing his relationship with Read as an emblem of the legitimacy to which the racketeer aspired. To set the seal on their mutually beneficial relationship, Capone appeared at the editorial offices of the Evening American one day to bestow on Read a jewel-encrusted pendant with a gold chain. Proud of the gift the city’s most notorious racketeer had just given him, Read responded by inviting the young journalists standing around gawking to come over and shake Capone’s hand, which they did. The close relationship between Capone and Read inevitably gave rise to rumors that the journalist was accepting more than gifts and favors from the racketeer in exchange for favorable coverage, but Berardi, for one, was convinced this was not the case: “There was a lot of talk that he was on the payroll, but Harry Read died a poor man. He only used Capone to get news. Never, never would I believe that he took one nickel from any hoodlum.”

  Even as Capone courted the press he took care to conceal the less acceptable aspects of his life: the guns, the army of enforcers who used them, his drug use, and prostitution. “I never saw him with a woman, nor did any other newspapermen,” said Berardi. “At least fifteen of us got together, and the subject came up, and not one of us ever saw Al Capone with a woman. As far as I know he was a good family man. Much as I didn’t like the guy, I have to admit he was good with kids. He sure helped a lot of people that I heard about when they were in arrears with their rent. He was a charitable guy.” Like Berardi, the gentlemen of the press saw what Capone wanted them to see: a well-dressed, generous, gregarious fixer and bootlegger supplying a thirsty public. “He was one hell of an organizer,” Berardi came to realize. “He was no dummy. He knew how to pick people for certain positions in certain categories. He had people who met with the mayor, with the chief of police, and so on. And they were not all Italians. He had people of every nationality you could think of: Irish, Swedes, Poles, Germans, and Jews, like ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik.”

  Although Berardi appreciated Capone’s administrative abilities, the photographer harbored no illusions about the man. He believed Capone harmed the reputation of all Italians in Chicago by giving them an undeserved reputation as criminals. The racketeer’s effort to build a political base among Italians in Chicago struck Berardi as a sham, a disgrace. “There were roughly 500,000 Italians in the Cook County area,” Berardi says, “and out of that entire group maybe 500 admired Al Capone. Italians were and are honest, hard-working people, and they had no respect for him. I myself didn’t have respect for him. I knew what he was and what he did. He didn’t help the Italian-American people. Christ, if your name ended with an e, i, or o, everyone thought you were a member of Capone’s mob or one of his relatives. He hurt the Italian people, and I didn’t like that because even though I was born and
raised in this country I’m damn proud that my family came from Italy.”

  Berardi and Capone frequently eyed one another at a gymnasium where Berardi, an amateur boxer, trained. “I used to work out there every day,” the photographer recalls. “It was a pretty large gym. On Thursday night they’d put on a show, with seating for anywhere from 300 to 500, and Al Capone would come there damn near every Thursday. He was a sports nut; he loved sports. So he knew me, he saw me boxing. I don’t think he wanted to tangle with me.”

  The two nearly came to blows when they finally met. The occasion was an assignment from Harry Read to photograph Capone in his new office. From the moment he entered the door, Berardi encountered Capone’s elaborate security precautions. “As I got into the elevator carrying about forty-five pounds of photographic material in a large bag,” Berardi recalled, “three or four hoods wanted to know where I was going, and I told them I was going to see Mr. Capone. ‘What have you got in the bag?’ one of them asked. So I took all my photographic equipment out to show him, and then I had to put it all back. I get up to the floor where his office was, and as I enter a couple of other guys wanted to know what the hell was in this bag. I went through the whole thing again. Then, when I got in to see Capone, I said, ‘Did you put those bastards up to do this to me?’ He said, ‘Oh, they were just having some fun.’ ”

  Remembering Berardi from the gym, Capone issued a challenge: “I hear you’re a pretty tough guy. Do you think you can lick me?”