Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  In all, four of the White Handers died in the ambush, while Capone, Scalise, and Anselmi emerged unscathed. The gun battle came to be known as the Adonis Club Massacre; this was the first time, though not the last, that the term massacre would be associated with Capone. The gun battle had important implications for Brooklyn’s thriving rackets. It broke the Irish grip over Brooklyn’s waterfront. Henceforth, the Italians, led by Frankie Yale, were in the ascendancy. And it demonstrated that Al Capone was still a force to be reckoned with in Brooklyn; indeed, he was now more important than his former boss, Frankie Yale.

  The police investigated, but not surprisingly they turned up little of value; anyone who had heard the shots or who had been party to any aspect of the shootout pleaded ignorance or a faulty memory. “Peg-Leg” Lonergan’s sister Anna did her best to imply that Italians were responsible for the slaughter without actually breaking the underworld code and saying so: “You can bet it was no Irish American like ourselves who would stage a mean murder like this on Christmas Day.” Capone, who had engineered the ambush, nonchalantly told the police, “I was visiting my mother for Christmas, and as a favor I was working as the doorman at the club.” Given his preposterous explanation, it was not surprising that he was charged with homicide, but the judge, Francis McCloskey, dismissed the indictment on December 31, 1925, and Capone was free to return to Chicago to greet the New Year.

  The Adonis Club Massacre did more than alter the balance of power between Irish and Italian gangs in Brooklyn; it also had a decisive effect on the balance of power between Brooklyn and Chicago. Until this time, the Gem of the Prairie had been an outpost of the Brooklyn rackets; Johnny Torrio had led the way, followed by Frankie Yale, who had remained in Chicago just long enough to kill “Big Jim” Colosimo, and finally Al Capone had built his empire there. Throughout this process, Chicago had remained within Brooklyn’s sphere, a child that had outgrown its parent. With the Adonis Club Massacre, the Brooklyn rackets henceforth became an adjunct to Chicago. Although Brooklyn was still Frankie Yale’s turf, Capone’s influence there was now decisive, and in the years to come it would only grow. Capone maintained his sway over Brooklyn, as well as Chicago, not simply because he was quick with a gun in a shootout but also because of his bootlegging. Yale, Lonergan, and the other Brooklyn racketeers led gangs, but Capone administered an organization, which made all the difference in the world.

  “Chicago is the imperial city of the gang world, and New York a remote provincial place governed by a proconsul. Even Philadelphia has passed New York in importance in this gunman’s universe,” wrote Alva Johnston in the New Yorker of the new criminal order. Think of it: even Philadelphia was bigger than New York when it came to gangsters; “New York can’t have everything,” Johnston lamented. He noted that New York’s second-rate gangsters “have copied certain technical effects, such as the use of the machinegun and the sawed-off double-barrelled buckshot pistol, from the progressive Westerners, but they have made no headway in the direction of welding all gang interests into one big combination.” Meanwhile, out in Chicago, “Beer has lifted the gangster from a local leader of roughs and gunmen to a great executive controlling a big interstate and international organization. Beer, real beer, like the water supply or the telephone, is a natural monopoly.”

  Explaining how Chicago came to its current prominence, Johnston introduced readers residing elsewhere to a man whose name they probably had not encountered until now:

  After Dion O’Banion, Hymie Weiss, and other Chicago independents had perished in a hopeless struggle against economic law, one man stood out as the greatest gang leader in history—Alphonse Capone, sometimes known as Big-hearted Al because of his extravagance in buying floral pieces, but usually called Scarface Al because of a pretentious scar down the left side of his face. Otherwise he has soft, fat, sentimental features, large red lips with exaggerated curves of sympathy, large eyes with active tear ducts, black eyebrows which contract rather fiercely when certain ideas strike him.

  Al travels in a bullet-proof car. He surrounds himself with eight men selected for thickness of torso who form an inner ring about him when he appears in public. They are tall and he is short, a precaution against any attempt to aim at him through the spaces between their necks. For Al’s protection, the eight men wear bullet-proof vests. Nothing smaller than a fieldpiece could penetrate his double-walled fortress of meat.

  No one had ever accorded Capone the status that Johnston did—the greatest gang leader in history—but it was a judgment that the annals of crime would confirm.

  There had never been a criminal quite like him before. Capone did not operate outside the law, but from within, corrupting it as he went. He was no outlaw, loner, or renegade. He was not antisocial; he was, if anything, ferociously prosocial. He was a businessman, an organization man, but more than that, he was now part of Chicago’s power structure, a mover and shaker in his own right, able to dispense patronage and charity. Of course, he drew a great deal of his strength from the hypocrisy of the political Establishment, especially concerning Prohibition. Unchecked, his rule might well become the law of a corrupt and cynical land.

  Accounts of Chicago’s preeminence in racketeering reached all the way to the nation’s capital. In February 1926, Vice President Charles G. Dawes brought to the attention of the U.S. Senate a statement prepared by a group of concerned prominent citizens in Chicago—lawyers and civic boosters and such—asking for federal assistance to end Chicago’s “reign of terror.” Like nearly all reformers, the group placed the blame not on Prohibition and its blatant hypocrisies but on the convenient scapegoat of the Italians, “a colony of unnaturalised persons,” they called them, “feudists, Black Handers and members of [the] Mafia.” Together, they had created a

  supergovernment of their own in Chicago which is levying tribute upon citizens and enforcing collection by terrorising, kidnapping and assassinations. . . .

  Many of these alien outlaws have become fabulously rich as rumrunners and bootleggers, working in collusion with the police and other officials, building up a monopoly in this unlawful business and dividing the territory among themselves under penalty of death to all intruding competitors.

  Evidence multiplies daily that many public officials are in secret alliance with underworld assassins, gunmen, rum-runners, bootleggers, thugs, ballot box stuffers and repeaters, that a ring of politicians and public officials operating through criminals and with dummy directors are conducting a number of breweries and are selling beer under police protection.

  The Senate listened respectfully to this alarming account of a criminal “supergovernment” and did nothing about it beyond referring it to the Immigration Committee for further consideration.

  • • •

  Capone returned to Chicago at the beginning of 1926 in buoyant spirits. On both personal and professional fronts, his trip to New York had been hugely successful; the immediate threat to Sonny’s health had been removed and his own status in the racketeering world had been greatly enhanced. From his home base, Capone anxiously awaited delivery of his first shipment of alcohol from Frankie Yale’s Brooklyn warehouse, following the agreement they had struck. However, the trucks transporting bootleg whiskey across state lines faced formidable challenges from both Prohibition agents and rival gangs. The poor conditions of the roads, often unpaved, presented additional hazards to inexperienced drivers. It was indeed a risky business.

  Capone entrusted the job of overseeing the transportation of the whiskey to one of his lieutenants with all precautions to be taken in the strictest confidence. No one—especially members of rival Chicago gangs, itching for a chance to interfere—was to know the details of the complex arrangements to deliver Yale’s whiskey to Chicago. “The first shipment was four trucks,” this Capone lieutenant later recalled. “The convoy was to keep in touch by telephone every day so we would know their progress and where they were at all times. We figured it would take them six or seven days—without any major truck re
pairs or breakdowns—to make the trip. We knew all the gangs in Chicago . . . knew about our convoy, and we figured out of all of them Hymie Weiss and his Northsiders would probably try to hijack our trucks. That is why on that day in the early spring of 1926 a carload of body guards and I drove to South Bend, Indiana and met our trucks. It was late in the day when we met them and even though the drivers were tired we decided to drive on through the night to get into Chicago as soon as possible.” The most dangerous part of the journey was “that stretch of road between Gary and Michigan City that runs along the Lake Michigan sand dunes. The hijackers would wait on the side roads back in the dunes and when you came by with your truck load of booze they would come roaring and at gunpoint force you to stop. Then they would place their driver in your truck and leave you standing by the side of the road—that is, if they didn’t kill you. Which happened more than once.” Throughout Prohibition, the Indiana State Police became accustomed to finding a burning truck laden with bootleg alcohol and the charred remains of the unlucky driver.

  To avoid that plight, three of the Capone trucks sped into Chicago along Route 6 and the Lincoln Highway, while the fourth truck traveled at a slower rate in order to lure the rival Northsiders into an ambush. The lieutenant, heavily armed, rode in an ordinary car far behind the last truck. “A few miles east of Gary a touring car came out of a side road and drove up . . . to the side of our truck,” the lieutenant recalled. “It started shining a spot light on it. Up ahead another car pulled out in front of our truck and stopped in the middle of the road. In the car, we knew it was a heist and we surprised the Northsiders by coming up on them with our guns blazing. . . . Two of the Northsiders were left there [for dead] that night.”

  This shipment got through, as did many others, and soon all Chicago reveled in Frankie Yale’s imported whiskey. Eventually the Capone organization employed so many truck drivers that the legitimate interstate trucking industry was transformed. Until that time, drivers had shunned the “northern route” linking New York and Chicago, but now they took to saying: “If Al Capone can haul illegal booze from New York City to Chicago, we can haul legal cargo over the same route.” Many young men with a taste for adventure were willing to run the risks of delivering alcohol for Capone across the northern route because the pay was so generous. Thus Capone came to employ a small army of highly paid, expendable truck drivers, able-bodied young men who had no criminal inclinations but who suddenly found themselves working for gangsters.

  Among them was Jack Richie. He had grown up on a farm in Tiffin, Ohio, and gravitated to Chicago, like so many other young men in search of a bigger and better future, only to find that he could earn no more than $35 a week driving a delivery truck. He lived in a dreary hotel; his chief amusements consisted of listening to Amos ‘n’ Andy on the radio, taking in an occasional White Sox game, drinking bootleg beer at fifteen cents a glass in a speakeasy, and playing poker in the back room. Richie happened to live a few blocks from the Metropole Hotel, Capone’s headquarters, and in time he met various Capone employees in the local saloons. One man offered him a job as a truck driver on the northern route. The pay could run as high as $300 a week: nearly ten times Richie’s salary. One morning, Richie reported to Jack Guzik at the Metropole Hotel, who assured him that he would be paid even during the weeks he did not work, and he could live rentfree in the Calvert Hotel. Richie took the job. “You are now among friends,” Guzik told him as the interview came to a close.

  Richie began making the New York to Chicago runs in February 1926; a round trip required about two weeks. He never traveled alone; a Capone guard, armed with a .45-caliber Colt, machine gun, or sawed-off shotgun always accompanied him. As winter yielded to spring, Richie was constantly reminded of the hazards of his high-paying job; he was often fired at, and one night he was ambushed right on Western Avenue in Chicago but managed to escape. Although his trucks were constantly held up, Capone himself did not bother with the high-risk hijacking game; instead, he put the word out that he would pay the hijackers handsomely for the booze they captured. One way or another, then, he had most hijackers on his payroll. Richie lasted in his job for more than two years, until the day he received an anonymous letter pushed under his door, warning that he might be killed at any time in a hijacking attempt, possibly by Capone’s own men. Taking the threat seriously, he withdrew all the money he had saved from the bank and took the next bus out of Chicago, fortunate to have escaped with his money and his life. His days of driving a truck for Al Capone on the northern route were over.

  • • •

  MCSWIGGIN—William H. McSwiggin, beloved son of Anthony and Elizabeth F. McSwiggin, nee Fitzpatrick, brother of Mary, Helen, Emily, and Margaret McSwiggin. Funeral Saturday, 9:30 A.M., from residence, 4946 Washington-blvd, to St. Thomas Aquinas church. Burial Mount Carmel cemetery.

  For every Jack Richie who managed to survive his dealings with Capone, others were swept into a whirlwind of violence. Among them was William McSwiggin, the youthful “hanging prosecutor” who had vowed to indict and bring Al Capone to trial for the death of Joe Howard in 1924. His murder threw Chicago into its greatest crisis of conscience concerning the spread of gangsters’ power and the threat of violence. It occasioned an outpouring of sympathy, analysis, conspiracy theories, and promises to clean up Chicago (and Cicero); although everyone involved in the investigation believed the so-called “Capone gang” was behind it, no one was ever arrested, much less tried for the murder. Of all Chicago’s gangland killings, the death of Billy McSwiggin remains one of its most complex and intriguing mysteries.

  What is known for certain is that on the last day of his life, April 27, the twenty-six-year-old Billy McSwiggin, as he often did, ate dinner at the home of his parents at 4946 West Washington Boulevard. His father, Sergeant Anthony McSwiggin, was a veteran detective with the Chicago police force with thirty years’ experience. He was honest, widely respected, and in the words of his friend Judge John Lyle, he “idolized his brilliant son.” At about six, “Red” Duffy, also the son of a cop, rang the doorbell and announced he had come to pick up Billy, who left before finishing the evening meal. “I have an appointment with Duffy,” McSwiggin explained. “We are going to Berwyn to play cards.” Though this seemed an unlikely pastime for a tough young prosecutor, gambling the night away in one of Al Capone’s strongholds, it had become a habit for McSwiggin, who in the process developed a nodding acquaintance with members of the Capone organization and even with Al himself, the gangster he had once vowed to indict for the murder of Joe Howard. But time had softened McSwiggin’s desire for vengeance, and he was content to sit and drink Capone’s bootleg booze, while Al, quick to seize the advantage, began referring to “my friend, Bill McSwiggin.” Capone was apparently sincere in his liking for the hanging prosecutor; they were, after all, about the same age, and Capone needed McSwiggin’s goodwill, or at least his indulgence, to conduct business.

  Duffy was not the only one with McSwiggin that night; the third man was another son of a cop, Jim Doherty. A bootlegger and political hack, it was Doherty who was to bring the expedition to grief, for he had incurred the enmity of Al Capone, who held him responsible for the recent assassination of his sometime ally, “Samoots” Amatuna.

  The night that McSwiggin, Duffy, and Doherty set out to play cards in Berwyn found Al Capone at the Hawthorne Inn, brooding on the latest gang war, this one involving two rival bootleggers, brothers named William “Klondike” and Myles O’Donnell. The bitter feeling between the Capone organization and the O’Donnells, which had been building for several months, had become so intense that it could burst into the open at any time.

  Meanwhile, McSwiggin’s expedition to Berwyn did not proceed according to plan. The car carrying the young prosecutor, Duffy, and Doherty broke down almost as soon as they pulled away from McSwiggin’s home. Doherty, who owned the car, deposited it at a garage, and the group, which now included a retired policeman named Edward Hanley, changed vehicles—a change that would
prove fatal. The sleek new Lincoln in which they now rode belonged to “Klondike” O’Donnell; it was the kind of car that bootleggers and gangsters drove, not prosecutors. Rather than playing cards in Berwyn, the men decided to head straight for the heart of Capone’s territory, Cicero, where for the next two hours they were engaged in a raucous pub crawl. Everywhere they went in Cicero that night, the boisterous Irish lads made themselves known, and at some point they were joined by the other O’Donnell brother, Myles.

  At a quarter after eight, the Lincoln sedan pulled up in front of a speakeasy known as Harry Madigan’s Pony Inn located in a nondescript two-story brick building at 5613 West Roosevelt Road, not far from the Hawthorne Inn, where Capone was having dinner. “ ‘Scarface’ was at another table,” a man who gave his name as “Henry Armstrong” later told a reporter. “At about 7:15 an excited, pale stranger came in. He whispered something to Capone. Then they went together to an alcove. Capone gave him a rifle with a big round magazine on it. The stranger went out.” What Capone heard was that the O’Donnells’ Lincoln had been seen cruising around Cicero, a violation of Capone’s territory that amounted to an act of provocation. But Capone did not know that among the men accompanying “Klondike” O’Donnell was Billy McSwiggin, the prosecutor Al liked to call his friend. The “rifle with a big round magazine” that Capone had bestowed on his associate was, of course, a machine gun. Several other Capone henchmen joined the man who had warned Capone. Together they walked to the back of the hotel, entered their waiting automobiles, and formed a five-car convoy consisting of a lead car, two cars following to block traffic if necessary, Capone’s chauffeured limousine trailing at a distance of fifty feet, and finally another car well behind the limousine. The convoy arrived within moments at the Pony Inn. At half past eight, McSwiggin, Hanley, Doherty, Duffy, and the O’Donnell brothers staggered out of the Pony Inn, heading for the Lincoln and the next stop on their spree, and as they did so Capone and his men watched from the safety of their five-car convoy.