“Al,” said Berardi, “let’s cut out the shit. Let me take your picture and get the hell out of here. If you want to find out how tough I am, why don’t you come by the gym?”
With that Berardi went about his assignment and left the Lexington unharmed.
Henceforth the two men had an uneasy rapport. Berardi was now in the awkward position of earning his livelihood photographing a man he despised, and Capone did whatever he could to ingratiate himself with Berardi. Assigned to cover a horse race at the Hawthorne track Capone controlled, Berardi was surprised to find Al himself at the race that day, accompanied by his usual retinue of five bodyguards. “Kid, how you doing?” he called out.
“I’m doing fine,” said Berardi.
“Why don’t you bet on number 6?”
The odds against the horse Capone recommended were exceedingly long: ninety-nine to one. Before Berardi could reply, one of Capone’s attendants rushed over and stuffed a slip of paper in his jacket pocket. “I looked at it,” Berardi remembered, “and it was a five-dollar ticket on this number 6 horse. When I looked at the Racing Form, I saw he was a steeple chase horse! He’d never run on a flat track. How could this horse win? Well, he broke out in front and stayed out in front, and I don’t think anyone dared catch him. The goddamn horse won by a block. He came down from ninety-nine to one to sixty to one so I collected $300. Capone didn’t bribe me; he just put $300 in my pocket. The following week, they ran the horse again, and he won, and then I heard they destroyed the horse.”
Buying favorable publicity, Capone knew, was only half the game. Political influence was the other, and the new Al Capone did more than bribe journalists and pose for photographers. Almost every day he drove to the complex that served as both City Hall and the county building, where he would walk up and down the street, shadowed by five bodyguards, two in front, two in back, and one walking beside him. He did all he could to make himself seem available, a man with nothing to fear. Always beautifully dressed, quiet, another political fixer going about his daily rounds. He paused to converse with city officials who were on his payroll—or wanted to be. “He did that damn near every afternoon. He’d talk to people just like he was running for office,” Berardi noted in amazement.
Judge John H. Lyle, a self-proclaimed scourge of gangsters, recalled the galling spectacle of Capone working the crowd:
The first time I saw him was in front of City Hall, prior to my election to the bench. I was talking with a City Council colleague, Walter Steffen, and the then Chief of Police, Charles C. Fitzmorris. Capone got out of an automobile accompanied by his bodyguards. We saw aldermen swarm around him to shake his hand.
“Well, Chief,” Steffen said in jest, “looks as though Scarface has come down to take over City Hall.” Fitzmorris flushed and left without a word.
Warren Phinney, a newspaper reporter friend of mine, followed Capone. He told me afterward that the mobster went to the City License Bureau and shook hands with a long line of men waiting to buy licenses for “soft drink parlors.” Then Capone went into the adjoining County Building for another round of handshakes.
To his dismay, Lyle had glimpsed the future of Chicago, and it was Al Capone. If Capone had his way, he would become mayor of Chicago himself, or so the Establishment feared, but they miscalculated. Al wasn’t all that interested in attaining political power, which was too confining. As a racketeer just now hitting his stride, he knew that political office could be bought and sold; no, Capone didn’t want to be the mayor—he wanted to own the mayor, which was a much better arrangement, allowing for more flexibility. If the current mayor, William Dever, that apostle of Prohibition, couldn’t be bought, why, his term would be ending the following year, and already there were rumblings that “Big Bill” Thompson was preparing for a comeback, and he was a politician much more sympathetic to Capone’s inclinations, as wet as Lake Michigan.
Capone’s political flair, his urge to be seen in public, was unique among racketeers, who as a rule abhorred publicity; none of his brothers had any use for it. In contrast to Al’s incessant politicking, his older brother Ralph, for instance, continued to shun attention and refused to change his public demeanor, which was often surly and boorish, more in keeping with the stereotypical gangster. Berardi was left with the impression that Ralph “was a miserable sonofabitch. He was a hood. If he saw you with a camera he’d say, ‘I’ll flush your goddamn camera down the toilet.’ Al was a saint compared to him.” The other, younger brothers, those just serving their apprenticeships, maintained an even lower profile, and as a result, few in Chicago realized that behind Capone’s rise to power and fame stood an extensive family network backing him up at every turn, allowing him the luxury of appearing at City Hall each day while they tended to the routine of the syndicate’s vice, prostitution, gambling, and bootlegging enterprises.
• • •
Even as Capone sought to establish a respectable public presence, events constantly undercut him. In the early months of 1925, a young minister named Henry C. Hoover of Berwyn launched his campaign against Al Capone. Inflamed by the exposés in Robert St. John’s little Cicero Tribune, Hoover had helped to form a vigilante committee calling itself the West Suburban Ministers’ and Citizens’ Association, which attempted to harass Capone by setting fire to his Cicero brothels. After St. John fled Cicero, Hoover continued to pursue Capone, and his efforts culminated in a raid on the Hawthorne Smoke Shop on May 16, 1925. There Hoover, who personally conducted the expedition into Satan’s domain, discovered an array of gambling paraphernalia, just as he expected.
The daytime raid roused a grouchy Al Capone from a sound sleep, and the two men, after months of circling each other, finally came face to face. “This is the last raid you’ll ever pull,” Capone warned Hoover. Later, when he calmed down, he appealed to the minister to “come to an understanding.” The minister refused, of course, and left the premises with his group. Outside the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, Capone’s men broke the nose of one raider and assaulted another, named David Morgan. He recovered from the beating only to be shot at a later date by four gunmen believed to work for Capone. Morgan survived the shooting as well, but it served to frighten off other would-be vigilantes. In sum, the affair generated exactly the type of publicity Capone wanted to avoid. Although Hoover relented, the memory of the raid would return to haunt Capone six years later, when the minister confronted the mobster in federal court.
By the following month, June 1925, Capone had reached the conclusion that his line of work was so risky (albeit profitable) that he tried to obtain life insurance, but this stab at respectability only led him into an embarrassing quandary. An agent called on him in his office at the Metropole Hotel and began to ask the usual questions:
“What is your occupation?”
Capone gave his usual answer. “Dealer in secondhand furniture.”
At the end of the interview, the agent, who knew full well that Capone had as much to do with secondhand furniture as Johnny Torrio had, advised that he would be hearing from the company. Inevitably, Capone’s request was rejected. Capone subsequently approached six other insurance firms, all of whom refused to underwrite his life, each rejection driving home his special, hazardous status. He could buy police captains, aldermen, sumptuous women, but he couldn’t purchase life insurance at any price.
Still obsessed with his personal safety, he adopted a new, state-of-the-art security measure in the form of an armored Cadillac sedan built to his specifications. “The body was of steel construction, the windows of bulletproof glass, and the fenders nondentable,” wrote a reporter, William Pasley, who covered Capone for the Chicago Tribune. “It had a special combination lock so that his enemies couldn’t jimmy a door to plant a bomb under him.” The car cost $20,000—a small fortune in 1925—and weighed seven tons. Capone rode in the car constantly; it became his toy, his status symbol. Pedestrians along Michigan Avenue or Lake Shore Drive became familiar with the sight of Capone’s bulletproof limousine purring alon
g the pavement. They stopped, turned, and hoped to catch a glimpse of its celebrated occupant. Each one said the same thing: “There goes Al.” No one needed to mention his last name. By now everyone in Chicago knew who Al was, and the bulletproof limousine had done more than its share to establish his identity and status. To add to the spectacle, his limousine was always accompanied by a convoy for additional security, as if any were needed. “Preceding the portable fort was a scout flivver,” wrote Pasley, “which darted in and out of traffic, keeping a distance of a half-block, and performing somewhat the same duties as a destroyer to a battleship. Immediately following the fort was a touring car containing the Capone bodyguard. This convoy seemed superfluous considering the invulnerability of the new equipage, but Capone was taking no chances.” No wonder the parade always drew a crowd; Capone had acquired an aura, a mystique. Anyone seeing this convoy pass realized at once that it contained a very important person, indeed. Chicago had seen some flashy gangsters over the years, but none possessed Capone’s flair for conspicuous consumption.
• • •
Capone’s sole respite from the pressures of running his business enterprises these days was the schvitz, a traditional Jewish steam bath. He began to frequent the 14th Street Bath House, located near Chicago’s Jewish ghetto on Maxwell Street. It was Jack Guzik who introduced Capone to the place, and Capone usually came with the Guzik brothers and as many as a dozen other friends and hangers-on. They normally appeared on Wednesdays; the owner posted a sign reading “closed for boiler repairs,” and Al and the boys would have the place all to themselves. Clad only in large towels, they indulged in innocent horseplay, hurling buckets of ice-cold water back and forth. They also used a traditional whip made of birch leaves to flagellate one another’s backs, another old-country custom. To the proprietor of the steam bath, Capone and his gang seemed more like high-spirited kids than dangerous lords of the underworld.
Al also liked to receive an invigorating massage at the schvitz, and this meant placing bonkes on his back. A bonke was a small, wide-mouthed glass jar, and the masseur would begin by inserting a lit match in the bonke to remove the oxygen, then quickly apply the little jar to Al’s broad back. According to custom, the bonke’s gentle suction helped to stimulate the circulation and drew impurities from the skin, or so the masseur insisted. Capone came to love this Russian-Jewish version of a massage, and he always tipped the masseur lavishly for his services. He also liked to tease the owner of the bath house. “Come on,” he would say during a massage, “we’re going to cheder.” In Yiddish, the term meant school, but to Capone it was a euphemism for one of Guzik’s brothels.
Afterward, Al was always hungry, and before he left the schvitz he sent out to a nearby delicatessen for sandwiches—fragrant mounds of brisket of beef. Capone consumed several of these himself and earned a reputation as a fresser, a big eater. Only then, when his body was clean and his belly was full, did he go to cheder.
• • •
Less than a year after taking over from Johnny Torrio, Al Capone was the most important racketeer in Chicago, a city that was fast becoming the nation’s most important center of racketeering. He enjoyed a limitless income from his organization’s management of gambling, vice, and bootlegging activities, and he had achieved a measure of fame in his adopted city. He had access to women and drugs, and he still controlled Cicero. Despite these myriad distractions, he managed to maintain a stable family life. His wife, Mae, rarely ventured far from their home, and his mother, who continued to live with the family, was happiest when she was in the kitchen, cooking large meals for the extended Capone family. His chief source of concern at home was his only child, Sonny. Now eight years old, Sonny was a sickly child whose health was a perennial source of concern in the Capone home. Neighbors saw little of Sonny, who, ill with one infection after another, was generally confined to the house. The fact that he was the only child made every challenge to his health loom large in his father’s mind. Eventually he developed a mastoid infection in his left ear. In the era before antibiotics, mastoid infections often led to surgery, which, even if successful, often left the sufferer with impaired hearing. In search of a cure for his son, Capone contacted prominent doctors in Chicago, but they warned him that a mastoid operation would leave Sonny permanently deaf. In growing desperation he decided to look beyond Chicago to specialists in New York, eventually coming across an ear, nose, and throat specialist by the name of Dr. Lloyd, whose office was located on St. Nicholas Place; Capone, it is said, promised to pay the impressive sum of $100,000, but the surgeon took Sonny Capone as a patient for the customary fee of $1,000. The operation was scheduled for December, and Al traveled with the boy to New York. There was more on Capone’s agenda than this matter; he also planned to do some serious negotiating concerning alcohol shipments with his former employer, Frankie Yale. It promised to be an eventful trip.
The medical procedure was a success insofar as Sonny’s life was spared, though he remained hard of hearing. Relieved of this burden, Al turned to negotiating with Frankie Yale. At issue was Chicago’s supply of bootleg whiskey. Although Chicago received vast amounts of alcohol from Canada, there was never enough whiskey, especially imported whiskey, to meet the demand. Yale happened to be one of the largest importers of whiskey in the East; in “wet” New York, his rum-running operations ran relatively unimpeded by the Coast Guard and elected officials. In fact, his vast warehouse in Brooklyn was overflowing with cases of Scotch and Irish whiskey. So it was mutually beneficial for the two men to arrive at an agreement, which they did. Yale agreed to sell his alcohol to Capone and guarantee safe passage in the New York area; the dangerous business of transporting the alcohol a thousand miles from Brooklyn to Chicago would be Al’s responsibility. Capone was willing to run the risk, and so laid the groundwork for the most important interstate route for alcohol during the Prohibition era. His business arrangements successfully concluded, Capone could have taken the train back to Chicago at that point, but since he was in New York, Yale invited him to attend a celebration on Christmas day. Capone accepted, and in the process he happened upon the most violent and bloody episode in his career.
The plan was for Al to join Frankie on Christmas night at the Adonis Social and Athletic Club, located on Twentieth Street in Brooklyn. Its grandiose name notwithstanding, the Adonis Club was actually a speakeasy frequented by Italians, including many Brooklyn racketeers, who held their convocations in a small room at the back lit by dim orange bulbs. Capone himself had frequented the club in his youth. The Christmas gathering was an annual event, a rowdy stag party featuring the best champagne and chorus girls Yale had to offer. Still, this year promised to be different. At the time, Brooklyn was in the midst of gangland strife, with Yale’s Italians, generally though inaccurately referred to as “Black Handers,” in one camp, and their rivals, the Irish “White Handers,” led by their chief, the murderous “Peg-Leg” Lonergan—so named because he had lost his right leg in a railroad accident. At issue was control of the jobs and payoffs available on Brooklyn’s lucrative waterfront. It had long been an Irish stronghold, though Italians were constantly threatening to move in; every so often, both sides would sit down and arrive at a truce or accommodation, but the grievances ran so deep and tempers so hot that all attempts at peacemaking between the two groups disintegrated into gang warfare.
It was not at all surprising, therefore, that on the day before the party in honor of Capone, Yale received a tip that his arch rival, Richard “Peg-Leg” Lonergan, accompanied by a crew of gunmen, planned to strike when the Christmas bash was at its height. At first Yale intended to cancel the party, but when he heard of the threat, Capone would have none of it; he was determined to go, to let himself be seen. It was important that he not be deterred by threats, especially on his home turf. But first he made preparations, sending for the Gennas’ vicious Sicilian gunmen, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, the men who had been hired to kill Dion O’Banion for $10,000 apiece, plus a diamond ring.<
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Capone, Scalise, and Anselmi arrived at the Adonis Club early on the evening of December 25. There they found over fifty paisani deep in revelry—men with names such as “Chootch” Gianfredo, “Frenchy” Arlino, and “Glass-Eye” Pelicano. An hour later, Yale signaled Capone that Lonergan and his men were in the vicinity, preparing to enter the club. Rather than hide, Capone summoned all his bravado and rushed forward to greet “Peg-Leg” Lonergan. Recovering from his surprise at discovering Al Capone, of all people, in the Adonis Social Club, Lonergan rudely pushed by and headed for the small room at the back, dragging his peg leg across the wooden floor, calling the Italians “dagos” and “wops,” demanding to be served a drink.
As Lonergan and his thugs filled the club, fifty pairs of eyes observed, and fifty hands tightened around fifty barely concealed pistols. Suddenly he called out, “Everybody freeze!” The owner of the club, “Fury” Argolia, doused the lights, and the Italians disappeared beneath their tables.
It was only a matter of seconds until the shooting began. Suddenly, there was the sickening thwack of a meat cleaver sinking into bone and flesh. Argolia himself had buried the cleaver in the skull of a Lonergan man, who fell to the floor in a lifeless, bloody heap. Then more shooting broke out, shots spraying through the dark. By accident or design Lonergan and his men stood in a faint light cast by a chandelier as Capone and his hired assassins, each of them equipped with a .45-caliber revolver and shielded by a sturdy mahogany bar, fired on the Lonergan group from the darkness. After two or three minutes, the shots stopped, and Capone called for “Fury” to turn on the lights. Three bodies that only minutes before had been Lonergan’s handpicked assassins lay on the floor, but Lonergan and two others were still at large. Capone found “Peg-Leg” himself hiding under a piano. Lonergan started to blast away; all the shots were wild. Al moved in to deliver the coup de grâce: three well-aimed shots at Lonergan’s head, and the most feared Irish gangster of the day was dead, his body sprawled over the piano stool. His wooden leg became a trophy cherished by the Italian gangsters who were there that night.
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