After a stint in Ralph’s club, Hinton found work in a cleaning and pressing shop run by his uncle. Hinton soon discovered that this modest establishment was a front; his uncle’s real business was delivering “alcohol and whiskey to all the apartment houses in the neighborhood. When it was time for the tenants to pay their rent, they would give a party on a Saturday night and invite all their friends to come over and fry up a lot of chicken and have whiskey. People would come and pay for the food and drink, and that way they got their rent money together. And they bought their whiskey from us, from my uncle. Al Capone saw the potential in this, and he came over to my uncle and a guy named Jim Thomas, who had connections with the numbers racket. Capone told these guys: ‘You buy all the alcohol from me for six dollars a gallon and sell it for eighteen dollars. You keep twelve dollars for every gallon of alcohol. I’ll handle all the police, you won’t have to worry about protection. I’ll furnish the transportation. All you have to do is deliver the alcohol and collect the money. Just don’t buy from anybody but me.’ ” Hinton recalls that Capone would appear at the cleaning and pressing shop every Saturday. “He was sort of plump, and he’d walk in with several guys. The police would all be standing around, waiting for him. They would line up just like they were waiting for a bus. He would come in with a bag of money, and he’d pay every policeman five dollars.”
Such payoffs greased the wheels of the bootlegging business, but the primary reason for Capone’s success was his ruthless elimination of all competition. No other outsiders supplied the neighborhood, but Capone did permit his local distributors to distill their own concoctions. In fact, Hinton’s uncle’s partner, a man named Pete Ford, built and maintained a still with Capone’s blessing across the street from the cleaning and pressing shop. Says Hinton, “Capone kept his gallon cans of alcohol in the back of the place. We would take a case of bottled whiskey, pour it in the tub, mix it with alcohol, and make three cases.” Before they sold the result, they carefully disguised it to look like bonded whiskey. “A black guy with a funny eye used to come with a big sheet of stamps to go over the top, sealing the bottle of whiskey. We’d sit back and clip these sheets into strips, and we’d fill the bottles and put this strip over. And we sold this for five dollars a pint. Everybody was making lots of money. My uncle wore a silk shirt, and he kept almost $1,000 in his breast pocket. He was a big eater, and he’d sit back there and eat and just answer the phone as people ordered his whiskey. Then we’d fill up this truck and go deliver it. And he would let me drive. That was how I learned to drive a car. I was fifteen years old, and I was delighted to be involved.”
Hinton’s brief, highly paid career as a bootlegger came to a brutal end the day he drove Pete Ford to a delivery at Forty-sixth and Drexel. As they approached their drop-off, a car suddenly plowed into them, hurling Hinton through the windshield in a shower of glass and throwing Ford to the street. The two of them lay in a pool of blood and bootleg alcohol, waiting for an ambulance. “They took me to the hospital. Police came but nothing happened because Al Capone had covered the whole thing,” Hinton recalls. “Everything on my right side was broken. One of my fingers on my right hand was hanging off, one I used to play the bass. The doctor said, ‘I’d like to cut that finger off.’
“ ‘Please don’t cut my finger off,’ I screamed. It was just hanging. Al Capone got my mother and brought her down to the hospital. He said to the doctor, ‘Don’t cut that finger off, don’t cut it off.’ And what Al Capone said, went. So they put it back together all wrong, but I’ve never had any problems with it. He took care of all the hospital costs.”
Hinton was discharged from the hospital with his finger and his hopes for a career as a musician more or less intact, thanks to Al Capone. Hinton’s boss, Pete Ford, was not so lucky. He died from the injuries he had sustained, and soon after that a black “strong-arm” named Slim Thompson, who was also affiliated with the little bootlegging operation, turned up dead. No one knew why he had been killed, but his death was said to be connected with the accident. The ordeal and its aftermath roused Hinton from his reverie of bootlegging glory. He left the business and its promise of fast money, and he never again drove a car. In the years to come, Milt “Judge” Hinton went on to play in several of Ralph Capone’s nightclubs and later on with performers as diverse as Charlie Parker, Mahalia Jackson, Bing Crosby, and Aretha Franklin.
Capone’s sense of rapport with blacks, to say nothing of the protectiveness the teenage Hinton experienced, was singular for Italians of his generation, most of whom dismissed blacks as melanzane, and who cautioned their children not to play with them. Yet here was Capone, organizing the black bootleggers, protecting them from the police, and increasing their profits at the same time. And for all these services he laid down but one inviolate condition: “Just buy your alcohol from me.” As a result Capone became, if not quite the hero he was to certain Italians, a benign figure; he was the only racketeer to exploit the outsider status common to both groups, each of them oppressed, shunned, thrown back on themselves. Capone’s willingness to become involved with blacks, to look after them even while profiting from them, displayed yet again his ability to build a broad-based economic coalition, which in turn made him a potent political force. In contrast, the Chicago Establishment based its authority on excluding the blocs Capone welcomed. The city fathers attempted to enforce a caste system, declaring themselves the ruling class while subjecting the lower orders to Prohibition, which they themselves felt free to ignore.
• • •
More than bootlegging attracted Capone to blacks; he was also enthralled by their vital music. But as another jazz musician, Fats Waller, discovered, playing for Capone could be an experience in terror, a command performance before a volatile tyrant. A product of Harlem, Waller was a lyricist, vocalist, and pianist of immense talent; best known for his song “Ain’t Misbehaving’,” he possessed an ability to laugh, joke, leer, pun, and parody his way through the songs he played. When Capone first heard of him, the “harmful little armful,” as Waller called himself, was holding court at the piano in the Sherman House, a favorite gathering place for many of Capone’s men. One night a Capone gunman stopped the show by waving a machine gun at the crowd; he warned the audience to sit still while he searched for a “friend.” During the sweep, the Capone forces herded the audience and Waller into the men’s room, and Waller, petrified, refused to come out until police arrived and assured him he was safe. (Given the conditions under which jazz musicians played, was it any wonder that Chicago jazz came to be known for its distinctive edge and bite, a nervousness never felt down in New Orleans?)
Not long after this incident, Waller himself was kidnapped at gunpoint as he left the Sherman House; four men bundled him into a waiting limousine, which sped off into the night. That Waller was black and his captors white added to his terror, and during the drive his imagination was inflamed with the horror of violent death. Instead, the limousine proceeded to Cicero and pulled up in front of the Hawthorne Inn, where the four men ordered Waller out of the car and shoved him into a lounge where a party was in progress. There they ordered him to sit down at the piano and play. Waller sensed he would live a while longer, and he eventually realized he was at a birthday party in honor of Al Capone. In fact, Waller himself was the present Capone’s men gave to their boss. Giddy with relief, Waller played on and on. Capone in turn expressed his pleasure by plying Waller with champagne and filling his pockets with bills whenever he played a request. Waller claimed this was his first taste of champagne, and once he recovered from the shock of his enforced ride to Cicero, he had a marvelous time, for Waller loved a party as much as Capone did, so much so that the party lasted for three days, after which Waller went home exhausted and hungover, his pockets bulging with thousands of dollars.
No matter how generous and charming Capone was, the violence inherent in his milieu was always there, intimidating the jazz musicians who worked for him, and if they were not celebrities on the order of Fat
s Waller, they had to rely on their wits and luck rather than their reputations, to protect them. Among the latter group was Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, a young Chicago-bred saxophonist with a taste for the low life. As he played his way through “Capone’s University of Gutbucket Arts,” a campus of brothels and nightclubs, Mezzrow became familiar with Capone himself: “Al always showed up surrounded by a gang of triggermen—they sat in a corner, very gay and noisy but gunning the whole situation out of the corners of their eyes. Al’s big round face had a broad grin plastered on it and he was always good-natured.” In contrast to his genial but businesslike older brother, young Matthew Capone, whom Mezzrow knew as Mitzi, hung around, trying to make himself useful. “His job was to follow the beer trucks out to Burnham, riding in a small Ford coupé with . . . another protection man, to make sure the load wasn’t hijacked. Their cute little Ford tagged along behind those big trucks like a harmless pup, nobody ever guessing that it was loaded up with tommy guns.”
When he was not escorting beer deliveries, Mitzi spent much of his time chasing the women who performed in Capone’s jazz clubs, but when he fell for a girl singer named Lillian, “a sandy-haired, pleasant girl who was more sedate than the other chicks,” Al stepped in. “Fire that girl,” he ordered Mezzrow. “Get her out of here. If I hear any more stuff about her and Mitzi you’re booked to go too.”
“I won’t fire her,” Mezzrow said, doing the unthinkable, defying Al Capone. “Why don’t you keep Mitzi out of here, if that’s the way you feel about it?”
“She can’t sing anyway,” said Al in disgust.
“Can’t sing? Why you couldn’t even tell good whiskey if you smelled it and that’s your racket, so how do you figure to tell me about music?”
Mezzrow reminded himself he was “talking to Mr. Fifty Caliber himself” and quickly fell silent. Normally, defiance from a Capone subordinate would have occasioned a beating, shooting, or even a one-way ride, but Mezzrow occupied a privileged position in the kingdom of Capone, akin to a court jester. Al indulged his musicians.
After an awkward interval, he burst into laughter. “Listen to the Professor,” he cried. “The kid’s got plenty guts.” Mezzrow caught his breath, but Al suddenly lowered his voice. “But if I ever catch Mitzi fooling around here it won’t be good for the both of you, see.”
“Mezz” saw—and lived.
Like Milt Hinton, Mezzrow, though primarily a musician, also dabbled in bootlegging. Ordered to appear in a large circus tent, Mezzrow expected to play his saxophone. Instead, he was confronted by barrels of beer stacked in rows, and the next thing he knew a Capone henchman handed him a brace and bit and a galvanized pail. “Mezz” wasn’t going to make music that day; he was going to make beer. “One of you guys drills holes in these barrel plugs and let three-quarters of a pail of beer run out of each barrel,” the henchman instructed. “Then another guy plugs up each hole with these here wooden sticks, to stop the beer from running out.” Mezzrow did as he was told, acquiring the rudiments of the brewer’s art as it was practiced under the Capone regime:
After we let out the right amount from a barrel, another guy came along with a large pail that had a pump and gauge attached to it. In this pail was a concoction of ginger ale and alcohol, just enough to equal the amount of beer that was drawn off. This mixture was pumped into each barrel, plus thirty pounds of air, and you had a barrel of real suds. I think they got as high as seventy-five bucks a barrel for this spiked stuff.
Although Capone liked to brag about the quality of his beer and whiskey, the stuff was, as Mezzrow, Hinton, and countless others knew from experience, highly adulterated. The musicians who drank it as they played the night away suffered from the effects of home brewed alcoholic poison, and they had seen others go blind or insane from booze. Perhaps the best-known jazzman to succumb to the effects of bootleg alcohol was Bix Beiderbecke, a horn player who was never without his hip flask of whiskey, and who died of its effects in 1931, when he was only twenty-eight. In time, the musicians, seeking a safer high, began to experiment with marijuana, which they believed was less damaging than rotgut, and compared to some of the toxic booze concoctions they drank, it probably was. Eventually, one of the best-known dealers in jazz circles was “Mezz” Mezzrow himself, who specialized in a potent weed imported from Mexico.
Although Mezzrow managed to flit past the Capone flame without scorching his wings, another performer in the Chicago scene was not so lucky. In the latter months of 1927, a story began to circulate through show business circles throughout the country. The story sowed more terror than any number of newspaper accounts of grim bootlegging murders, largely because the victim was a performer himself, Joe E. Lewis, who had fallen afoul of Capone’s prize gunman, Jack McGurn. More than that of any other show business figure, Lewis’s career afforded an object lesson in the perils of working for the Capone organization, indeed, of doing business with racketeers in general.
A comedian and singer who had risen from poverty on New York’s Lower East Side, Lewis had become a fixture at the Green Mill, a popular speakeasy located on Chicago’s North Side, where he was paid $650 a week, much of which he squandered on booze, for Lewis was an alcoholic. In Prohibition-era Chicago most speakeasies belonged to one syndicate or another, and the Green Mill happened to be the particular favorite of Al’s debonair bodyguard, Jack McGurn. As McGurn had risen through the ranks in the Capone outfit, Al had rewarded him with a share in the Green Mill, in which McGurn took inordinate pride; no longer just a $150-a-week bodyguard, he was a somebody, a boss in his own right, and he jealously guarded his employees. Then, in August 1927, a rival speakeasy, the Rendezvous, offered Lewis $1,000 a week, plus a cut of the joint’s profits from gambling. Although the offer came through the manager, an established bootlegger called John Fogarty, the Rendezvous actually belonged to the Capone syndicate’s principal rival, the Moran-Drucci-Weiss gang. Employees did not jump from one place to the other without repercussions.
Only a day after he had agreed to bolt the Green Mill, as he was leaving his suite at the Commonwealth Hotel, Lewis was accosted by McGurn; since the two men knew each other, Lewis was not unduly afraid. Although McGurn had impressed the folks in Lansing, Michigan, as the well-mannered, subservient, soft-spoken bodyguard of Al Capone, here in Chicago, Illinois, he was known as “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, the assassin reputed to have sent twenty-two men to their deaths without a trace of remorse. As the two men strolled along Diversey Parkway, McGurn asked Lewis why he was leaving the Green Mill, and his simple question received a simple answer: “My contract’s up. I’m not renewing.” McGurn quietly informed him otherwise. “I’m sorry,” Lewis said, “I start at the Rendezvous on November second.”
“You’ll never live to open,” McGurn murmured.
Disbelieving his ears, Lewis replied, “I’ll reserve a table for you,” and walked on alone.
More than a contract was at stake. The two men were also rivals for the same girl, who was first attracted to Lewis but subsequently abandoned him for McGurn, who, after he was done with her, assigned her to a cheap Capone brothel. Stung by her betrayal, Lewis refused to take orders from the man who had stolen and degraded his girl.
On the second day of November Lewis made good his threat to move to the New Rendezvous. The joint was packed that night, and Lewis took care to enter with a bodyguard, only to receive a threat not from a hoodlum but from a police captain (such was the extent of Capone’s control of the Chicago Police Department) by the name of Joseph Goldberg, who told Lewis he would live much longer if he returned to the Capone fold. Lewis ignored the threat, and the show opened with an appearance by a dozen strippers, called “Daughters of Eve,” who warmed up the audience until Lewis appeared onstage in a white suit, clutching a drink. After an hour of harmless patter and songs, he ventured to ridicule McGurn before the audience. The show ended uneventfully, and Lewis went home to the Commonwealth. He returned to the New Rendezvous every night for a week, and it appeared that he had suc
ceeded in facing down McGurn’s threat. As Lewis knew, as everyone knew, gangsters only kill gangsters. Deciding there was no further need for protection, Lewis dismissed his bodyguard.
The morning of November 9 found Lewis asleep in his room at the Commonwealth Hotel. A knock on the door roused him. Still groggy, Lewis opened the door, and three men rushed in, one armed with a .45-caliber automatic, who whispered, “Just one favor, Joe. Don’t yell.” Another man, this one carrying a .38, struck Lewis on the back of the head. The comedian, still conscious, slumped to the floor at the feet of the third man, who wielded a hunting knife. More blows to the head, and when Lewis was unconscious, the man with the knife inserted the blade into the victim’s jaw as deeply as the blade would go. He removed the blade and dragged the tip of the knife across Lewis’ neck. He then tore the skin on Lewis’ face and scalp and peeled back the flaps. When he finished his butchery, the comedian was covered with blood seeping from his neck; every beat of his heart pumped more blood from his body.
The attackers fled, taking care to shut the door after them. Their modus operandi suggested they had done this before. No matter how brutal the attack on Lewis, and it was exceedingly brutal, it was not intended to kill him; one bullet would have accomplished that goal. Rather, he was supposed to survive and to serve as a warning to others who contemplated defying the dictates of the racketeers.
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