Now the police descended en masse and captured Campagna as well as two other Capone gunmen, but the conflict did not end there. Demonstrating a perverse flair for incompetence, the police locked the Capone crew into a cell adjacent to Aiello’s.
“You’re dead, friend, you’re dead,” Campagna whispered through the bars to Aiello, in Sicilian dialect. “You won’t get to the end of the street still walking.”
“Can’t we settle this?” Aiello pleaded. “Give me fourteen days and I’ll sell my stores, my house and everything and quit Chicago for good. Can’t we settle it? Think of my wife and baby.”
“You dirty rat! You’ve broken faith with us twice now. You started this. We’ll finish it.”
Freed by the machinations of his lawyer, Aiello implored the police to protect his life, and a detective told him, “Sure, I’ll give you police protection—all the way to New York and onto a boat.” That night Joseph Aiello and two of his brothers fled Chicago and spent the next two years in remote Trenton, New Jersey, plotting the death of Al Capone.
Had the Keystone cops staged the Aiello drama, the spectacle would have had them rolling in the aisles. Only in Chicago, it seemed, was this sort of law-and-order farce possible, with the police dashing through the streets in their flivvers, pretending to investigate crimes that their superiors had no interest in pursuing, actually hoping the whole thing would blow away before it implicated cops and prosecutors alike.
With the removal of the latest threat to his life, Capone could not resist the temptation to hold a press conference and boast that he was now the most powerful as well as the most brazen racketeer in all Chicago. “When I was told Joey Aiello wanted to make peace, but that he wanted fourteen days to settle his affairs, I was ready to agree,” he explained. “I’m willing to talk to anybody any place to bring about a settlement. I don’t want trouble. I don’t want bloodshed. But I’m going to protect myself. When someone strikes at me, I’m going to strike back. I’m the boss. I’m going to continue to run things. They’ve been putting the roscoe on me now for a good many years and I’m still healthy and happy. Don’t let anybody kid you into thinking I can be run out of town. I haven’t run yet and I’m not going to. When we get through with this mob, there won’t be any opposition and I’ll still be doing business.”
It was an emotional, foolish outburst, completely at odds with his earlier resolution to quit the rackets. Events would later compel Capone to take back every word he said.
• • •
Richard Hart placed his three sons in a row. He then distributed cigarettes, and each of the young boys stuck one in his mouth, unlit. Their father stepped back several paces until he stood even with the row of boys. He then drew his revolver and took aim. From a distance, it seemed as though he aimed straight at the boys’ heads, but his real target was the cigarette each held between clenched teeth.
The boys closed their eyes as their father cocked his trigger eye and the moment of firing approached. The gun went off with a loud crack, but the boys knew not to move, not to react in any way. One by one, the cigarettes broke in two; half fell to the ground, and half stayed in the boys’ mouths. When the last shot died away, the boys opened their eyes, and their father, his pistol returned to its holster, walked toward them, smiling.
They were good boys.
• • •
The Hart family had moved around quite a bit over the last few years, as “Two-Gun” Hart, now a special agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, pursued Indian bootleggers on various reservations. The oldest brother of Al Capone was still a hero back in Homer, Nebraska, the wrinkle in the prairie to which he faithfully returned between assignments. Although the Morvace shooting had tarnished his luster, the newspapers still considered him good copy, an authentic if controversial legend in their midst. At the Winnebago Indian reservation south of Homer, ran one account, Hart displayed his courage by cornering three men, probably drunk, who had held up a deputy marshal. “Drop those guns,” he ordered, and for once he prevailed through words alone. The administration of justice was not always that clean and simple. In tiny Walthill, Nebraska, just beyond the Winnebago reservation, an Indian stole two horses. “Hart was notified,” ran the account, “jumped into his flivver and gave chase, caught sight of the red man and gained steadily on him. He began firing. . . . Hart shouted ‘Stop or I’ll kill you.’ By this time the chase had covered many miles and the horse fell exhausted. The Indian jumped off and ran up the hill. Both men ran out of cartridges but neither knew the other had no more. Hart pursued the Indian up the hill with level revolver and the Indian surrendered.”
Wherever he went, he was effective, if violent, but everyone knew how mean Indians could get, especially when they were liquored up, so Hart had more latitude in dealing with them than with whites. At the same time, he liked the Indians, though he never trusted them. He had seen what life on a reservation did to the Indians, often reducing a capable individual to a helpless ward of the state, drifting from one monthly government check to the next, drinking away the money he had done nothing to earn. Hart had no idea how to solve the Indian problem, but he believed he knew best how to handle them, drunk or sober.
In the summer of 1926, when Al sought refuge at Round Lake, the Hart family moved to the Cheyenne River Indian reservation located in central South Dakota. The government quarters consisted of ten houses beside the river, surrounded by tall piles of chopped wood necessary for getting through the cold months. On August 19, his son Harry was born there, the last of Richard Hart’s four children. Soon after the family returned briefly to Homer and then moved farther west as “Two-Gun” resumed his quest for glory.
Hart accepted an assignment in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, close to the Washington State border and the Spokane Indian reservation. Once again his exploits enlivened the local papers, who found Hart ready to give extended interviews detailing his exploits. The dispatches followed him across the state line to Spokane, Washington, site of another Indian reservation:
“TWO-GUNS” SLEUTH PACIFIES NORTHWEST INDIANS
(A.P.) “Two-Guns” Hart, picturesque chief of Indian reservation police, once again proved that he performs as the hero of any good thriller should. On Uncle Sam’s payroll the name appears as Richard J. Hart, special federal officer, but the Indians on the reservations that know him as the representative of the “Great White Father” long ago named him “Two-Guns” thanks to his ambidexterity with a sixshooter. . . .
Hart has had a hand in the capture of more than 20 murderers while covering 12 reservations. In the last year he brought in three Indian killers. He has been a cowboy soldier and police officer. A “beat” of more than 200 square miles with supervision over more than 800 is Hart’s domain. He travels by foot, in car, horseback, on snow shoes and skis. In summer he has tracked men by the imprints they made in soft pine needles in forests and in winter he has followed them through snow. Under him are three Indian police. His work is different from that of his regular officers or detectives for the criminals he captures are outdoor men and there are a few informers who aid him. “The Indian who kills a man is different from the white,” Hart says. “For he will not talk about it and has no regrets. He usually feels that he was justified and forgets and he rarely has a guilty conscience.”
Throughout this period, “Two-Gun” Hart was in the papers as often as his brother Al, but the papers were local, not the huge Chicago dailies, and the stories told not of his latest murder charge or indictment; instead, they extolled his derring-do in rounding up drunken Indians and recalcitrant bad men, and no one reading them would have guessed that the heroic “Two-Gun” Hart, who “performs as the hero of any good thriller should,” was kin to the man who was emerging as the nation’s most notorious racketeer.
At home, his wife, Kathleen, pasted these and other articles detailing his exploits into her scrapbook, along with photographs of Hart on the job or pretending to be, for the one thing he loved better than telling reporters about his adve
ntures was posing for pictures. “He loved to dress up,” his son Harry remembers. “No doubt about it. And he loved to be photographed.” One striking photograph taken at a carnival shows him attired in Western regalia, holding an absurdly long revolver in his hand, holding up four female “bootleggers” dressed in furs. The women all have their hands in the air, and they appear to be squealing through their barely suppressed laughter. It was all in fun, “Two-Gun” Hart’s idea of a joke. Another photograph found him posing insolently beside a moving picture marquee advertising Buck Jones in The Branded Sombrero. Let others act, his expression seemed to say; Hart lived a true-life Western. There are others: Hart on horseback, twirling a lasso. Smoking a cigarette, posing with an Indian. He was also proud of his muscular physique, and in several photographs he poses as a bare-chested wrestler in black tights about to engage a rival. Through his constantly changing costumes he expressed the various facets of his nature: menacing, heroic, victimized, haughty.
Wherever he went, his behavior gave rise to oft-repeated stories. “I got to know a fellow in Sioux City,” Harry Hart says, “and when I told him who I was, he said, ‘Heck, I used to ride horses with your dad. I knew him real well. The first time I met him was in a hotel downtown, and he was real cruddy looking, all dirty and all that stuff. He was with some guys, and he told these guys, “I know you’re bootleggers. I’m going to go upstairs now, and when I come back down you’d better be here because I’ll git you, I’ll find you.” And they stayed there. Meanwhile he went upstairs, and when he returned, here he comes in a nice fancy white suit and a big ten-gallon white hat, all dressed up, with two guns on the sides. That was your dad. That was him.’ ”
• • •
In the summer of 1927 President Calvin Coolidge and his wife decided to flee the heat and pressure of Washington, D.C., for a summer vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. A state-owned game lodge consisting of twenty rooms became the summer White House. They arrived on June 15; uppermost on Coolidge’s mind at the time was the question of whether he should seek reelection the following year. As he pondered his decision amid the natural splendor, the president inadvertently created a furious local controversy by declaring that he did not use a fly when fishing, as local custom dictated; he preferred a hook and worm. He again raised eyebrows when the Sioux Indians adopted him as their “Leading Eagle,” and he posed for photographs in an elaborate cowboy costume, complete with chaps engraved with the letters C-A-L. This was not what the American public had come to expect from the man from Vermont, who eventually reached the conclusion that he would not, after all, run for reelection.
During his sundry misadventures out west, the hapless Coolidge was accompanied by several bodyguards drawn from the ranks of the finest law enforcement officers to be found in that wide-open part of the country. Among this elite group was Richard “Two-Gun” Hart, who had received a special commission to serve as Coolidge’s bodyguard during the trip. It was a signal honor for Hart, evidence that he had managed to overcome questions about his conduct raised by the shooting of Ed Morvace in 1924. Of all the roles he had played during his career, this was the most satisfying to his vanity and to his desire to live out the mythology of the Wild West. Had anyone troubled to check Hart’s past a little more deeply, they would have realized the extent of the fictional identity he had created. Had Coolidge known that one of his trusted bodyguards was Al Capone’s brother, he would have been horrified, and the nation would have been horrified. But no one checked, and no one knew.
So it was that each Capone brother subscribed to opposing notions of crime, punishment, and justice. While “Two-Gun” Hart spent his days tracking down bootleggers in the wilderness or safeguarding the president of the United States, his brother Al Capone dodged attempts on his life, ruthlessly expanded his racketeering empire, and forged a new antihero for the Jazz Age: the urban gangster, the man who was a law unto himself.
* * *
1. A pseudonym.
CHAPTER 6
The Jazz Age
AL CAPONE ADORED OPERA, but the real music of his time and place was jazz. As he maneuvered and blasted his way into prominence as a bootlegger, jazz musicians—many of them capable and a few of them absolutely brilliant—gravitated to Chicago, where they delighted audiences with their effervescent music. Thanks to this migration of talent, Chicago was by 1927 the center of the jazz world, and as a by-product of his control of the nightclubs and saloons on the South Side, Al Capone and his brother Ralph became Chicago’s most important jazz impresarios. Despite the existence of Prohibition, their nightclub empire flourished openly. Perhaps their best-known establishment was the Cotton Club, the Cicero nightspot where every jazz musician of consequence aspired to entertain. At the Cotton Club and most other nightspots, the musicians were mainly black and the audience entirely white, and the patrons included Mayor Thompson as well as numerous aldermen, judges, and other public officials. As for the police, they came as guests, not to make arrests. So effective was the Capones’ control of local government that Prohibition seemed not to exist on their turf, except as a rumor or an echo of distant gunfire.
Al Capone had never planned a career as a jazz impresario, but he took to the role with enthusiasm largely because it brought him into contact with some of the best-known and most capable performers of the day, all of whom, he was flattered to note, depended on him for employment. To the musicians burning to make names for themselves or simply desperate for work, the Capone brothers, Al and Ralph, were the men to see. Although the majority of the musicians were black, Al, unlike Ralph and all other racketeers, extended himself to them and gradually won their respect and admiration. His behavior was all the more remarkable because at that time Chicago’s black community was invisible to most whites. The six Chicago dailies refused to cover the Black Belt, as it was called, although the leading black newspaper, the Defender, did an able job for its constitutents. Compared to other ethnic groups such as the Jews and Italians, to say nothing of the Irish, the Black Belt’s political clout was insignificant. However, Capone, as an equal opportunity employer and corrupter, drew no racial distinctions. Everyone was welcome to join his coalition.
Among the young musicians of Chicago’s Black Belt who owed their careers to Al Capone was Milt “Judge” Hinton, a renowned jazz bassist often described as the most recorded musician of all time. The Capones gave Hinton his start as both a musician and as a bootlegger, and one memorable day Al himself saved Hinton’s career from disaster. Hinton’s story was emblematic of many blacks who fled the intense prejudice of the South and came to Chicago in search of a better life. Born in Mississippi in 1910, he moved with his family to Chicago’s South Side because, he recalls, “Everybody came to Chicago. There was a tremendous need for unskilled labor at the stockyards, for porters in the hotels and for redcaps at the railroad stations. And these were good jobs, better than what black folks had in the South. So they migrated by the thousands, like my family.”
Once these families found apartments and employment, usually at wages higher than they had ever known in the South, Hinton continues, “we wanted our kind of music. We had all these great nightclubs all over the South Side. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver from New Orleans, and Duke Ellington from New York—all these guys were working in the clubs and big hotels in Chicago; that’s what made Chicago the center of jazz. If you were in Texas and a good musician, you tried to get to Kansas, but the big jazz was in Chicago.” Soon-to-be-famous musicians abounded; Hinton’s mother was a piano teacher, and her pupils included Nat King Cole. When Hinton grew older, he attended the predominantly black Wendell Phillips High School, whose music director, Major N. Clark Smith, trained any number of ambitious and talented students. “Out of this school came a lot of great musicians who made names for themselves in Duke Ellington’s band and Cab Calloway’s band,” says Hinton. “Major Smith even organized a youth band outside of the school to represent the Chicago Defender in the hope of going around th
e country to play. Lionel Hampton and Nat King Cole were in that band.”
Meanwhile, Hinton struggled to find a job playing his instrument of choice, the violin. “When Al Capone opened the Cotton Club in Cicero, he wanted all black musicians and all black entertainment, so he got a fellow from Mississippi, Walter Bond, a young clarinet player, to get the band together,” Hinton remembers. “All my peers had a chance to get in this band, but they were not using violins.” Unable to find work at the Cotton Club, the young Hinton delivered newspapers instead, earning $9.25 a week “while all my friends playing trombones and saxophones had a chance to get into Al Capone’s band and make $75 a week. I was very much discouraged. I didn’t know if I could get me a horn, so I eventually decided to get a bass. After all, what is a violin but a bass with four strings?” With his musical ability and training, he proved a quick study on the bass, and before long he was playing one-night stands in his neighborhood while maintaining his paper route. “All the big black bands had bass players in them, and if one of the bass players got drunk and didn’t show up, it was ‘get the kid,’ and that’s how I got my apprenticeship. By this time I was getting to know the bass well and getting to know musicians. Then, one day my mother said to me, ‘Now listen, you can’t come in here at five o’clock in the morning from playing a gig and change clothes and go deliver those newspapers. You’ve got to go to school.’ ” The young Hinton was at a crossroads, but just then Ralph Capone opened up a a new nightclub, and he gave Hinton a job there as a bass player. “Ralph was a pretty tough guy, really mean and cheap, not like Al,” Hinton observes. “Ralph was always hitting porters and slapping people around. He wasn’t very likable, as Al was. I never had any problems with Ralph, but you could see what he would do if some girl got out of line.”
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