Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Thirty minutes later, Lewis regained consciousness. He was in excruciating pain as blood continued to flow from the wounds in his head and neck. He attempted to get to his feet, but he immediately slipped to the floor. He next tried to use the telephone to summon help, but when he reached for it he knocked it off the table, out of reach. His last hope was to open the door and crawl into the corridor, and after an intense struggle he managed to drag himself into the hallway, where a bellboy discovered him on the verge of death. He was rushed to a hospital, where a surgeon, Dr. Daniel Orth, spent seven hours sewing up the wound and saved Lewis’s life. The patient recuperated in the hospital as two Drucci-Moran-Weiss gunmen stood guard.

  The Tribune of November 9, 1927 carried the earliest detailed explanation for the savage attack:

  CABARET MAN’S FEARS TOLD AS STABBING CLEW

  Policeman Says Lewis Was Threatened.

  Joseph Lewis, the cabaret singer and comedian who was so seriously wounded by knife thrusts yesterday in his room at the Commonwealth hotel, 2757 Pine Grove avenue, that physicians hold little hope for his recovery, had lived for months in constant dread that he would be assassinated.

  This was reported to Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph Nicolai last night by Police Captain Joseph Goldberg, a close friend of Lewis. “. . . Lewis mentioned Jack McGurn, who has quite a reputation as a strong arm man, as one who had threatened him if he made a change. The way Lewis put it was that McGurn had an interest in the Green Mill and was going to take him for a ride if he went to the other café. . . .”

  Mr. Nicolai and Assistant State’s Attorney Emmet Byrne tried to talk to the victim at the Columbus Memorial hospital last night, but he was unable to articulate or write. He communicated to them by nods that there were three assailants.

  He also nodded assent when he was asked if he could tell the name of one of the assailant, but was unable to write his name.

  Under the tutelage of a priest, J. A. Heitzer, Lewis gradually regained his powers of speech, but when police finally presented him with one of his attackers and asked the victim to identify the man, Lewis refused to cooperate. In disgust, the police let the suspect go, but the matter did not end there.

  Six days later, gunmen opened fire on Lewis’s attacker and on McGurn; the thug died, and McGurn, though wounded, lived. Lewis, now more or less recovered from his wounds, declared his intention to return to the New Rendezvous. The joint was sold out within an hour of his announcement, and the night Joe E. Lewis appeared there after his attack was unforgettable. He staggered on stage with his head still bandaged, his right arm in a sling, his voice garbled. But the audience cheered him on, and he returned to the New Rendezvous night after night, going through this same bizarre routine for three weeks. There were those who considered Lewis’s determination to perform despite his injuries a magnificent display of courage, and there were those who considered it a pathetic display of drunkenness. In either case, he acquired the sobriquet “The Man the Mob Couldn’t Kill,” and he became one of the more extraordinary sights of Chicago, a symbol of what gangsters like Al Capone had done to the city; everybody who was anybody in vaudeville came to watch Lewis stumble through his comedy act, and the sight struck fear in them, for they all became convinced that the gangsters could do to them what they had done to Joe E. Lewis.

  At the end of his stint, a group led by Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Tom Mix, representing show business, and “Bugs” Moran, representing gangland, held a benefit in Lewis’s honor that netted $14,000. He was supposed to use it to retire from the stage and open a secure little business, but Lewis drank more than ever and recklessly gave the money away.

  Seeking to blunt the horrible publicity McGurn had brought to his organization, Capone intervened. “Why the hell didn’t you come to me when you had your trouble?” he told Lewis. “I’d have straightened things out.” Mollified, Lewis returned to his original habitat, the Green Mill, on the same terms as Moran had offered him, and he began to frequent the Capone-controlled dog track in Cicero, another place where Al could give him money by suggesting which dogs to bet on. There Lewis accidentally encountered his nemesis, Jack McGurn. On this occasion the two men glared at one another. They belonged to the same organization now; both worked for Capone. After a tense interval, McGurn yielded by looking away. Not a word had been uttered, yet Lewis convinced himself that he had the upper hand. Given McGurn’s psychopathic personality and fierce pride, that was unlikely, but Lewis did enjoy the protection of Al Capone, whom he continued to serve faithfully for the remainder of his liquor-sodden career.

  As the story of Joe E. Lewis gained currency, other performers who came through Chicago lived in mortal terror of Capone. Among the most celebrated of that era was Harry Richman, a vaudeville headliner who sang in a low, tuneless growl and oozed a smarmy charm unique to the period. Richman’s source of concern about Al Capone involved the performer’s first wife, who had later married Frankie Lake, a Chicago bootlegger. Richman did not know whether Lake was an ally or enemy of Capone; either way, Richman believed his life was in jeopardy. “Gangsters were known to be very touchy about their girls,” Richman told himself. “They could get instantly, murderously sore at anybody who had had anything to to do with the girls, even if it had been years before.”

  At the time, Richman was starring in a popular musical revue, George White’s Scandals, a blend of music, topical satire, and chorus girls. Each year the revue offered a new edition, which opened on Broadway and later embarked on a lucrative national tour. When the Scandals brought him to Chicago in 1927, Richman’s fear of Capone turned to absolute terror. “On opening night I was so nervous I could hardly tie my necktie,” Richman wrote. “I must have spilled forty dollars’ worth of imported cologne after I shaved. They had told me that Capone was going to be out front. I immediately went to the asbestos fire curtain and, looking through the peephole, I scanned the audience to see if Capone was there. Sure enough, there he was in the first row, . . . and on either side of the stage I could see his hired guns sitting with their hands inside their coats, ready for action.”

  Richman refused to go on. George White, the producer of the Scandals, materialized to instruct his star, “The show must go on.” To which the entertainer replied, “If I’m alive.” White pushed him through the curtains onto the stage, as Richman told himself, “If I’m going to get killed, I’ll sing my last song better than I ever did it before.” Richman sang his opening number from start to finish and lived to hear the crowd roar in approval. But he was still terrified, having decided that Capone’s gunmen were preparing to shoot him down during his next number. He was exhausted by the intermission, when the stage manager hurried to his side and said, “Harry, Al Capone wants to see you!”

  “If you bring him back,” Richman warned, “I’ll kill you.”

  “You’d better kill me now. He’s got thirty-eight bodyguards out there, and if he wants to he can blow up the entire theater.”

  Before these words had died away there was a knock on the door, and Richman speechlessly beheld the “the ruler of the underworld.” Capone rushed forward, gripped the entertainer under the arms, and bellowed: “Richman, you’re the greatest!”

  “My knees knocked and tangled in a mixture of fear and relief,” Richman recalled of the moment. Despite Capone’s jolly tone, he was convinced that gangster would shoot him at any time. Summoning his courage, he asked about Frankie Lake, who had married his first wife.

  “Frankie Lake,” Capone hastened to explain, “don’t mean a damn thing in this town. If he ever bothers you, you let me know. If anybody ever bothers you, let me know.” And he proceeded to invite Richman to a party after the show.

  “Mr. Capone,” Richman stammered.

  “Call me Al.”

  “Al,” said Richman with immense relief, “I’m your boy.”

  Richman tagged along at the party, which he discovered was populated in roughly equal measure by bodyguards and chorus girls. “After five or six glas
ses of champagne I began to think he was a likable person,” Richman recalled of Capone that memorable night. “It was hard for me to believe that this man had been responsible for all the horrible things I’d heard about him. He was so nice to me.”

  This shift in perception of Capone from homicidal monster to a generous fan was a refrain echoed by an ever-increasing number of entertainers, but Richman’s reaction was particularly extreme. He had expected Capone to kill him at any moment, yet now he was unable to resist the man’s charisma. “My champagne-induced infatuation with Capone overcame me to such an extent that I even followed him into the can,” Richman continued. “While he stood at the urinal he kept strewing twenty-dollar bills on the floor. The attendant, picking them up, kept saying, ‘Yes, suh, Mr. Capone, you the greatest man in the world.’ ” After Capone washed his hands and departed, the attendant confided, “Mr. Richman, I pray to God he come in here and pee every twenty minutes.” With such gestures Capone reassured himself as well as those around him that he was not a monster, that he was, after all, a beneficent man, everybody’s pal.

  At the conclusion of the party, Capone, in his limousine, escorted Richman, who rode in his champagne-colored Rolls-Royce, to the Metropole Hotel, the two luxury vehicles flanked by Capone’s convoy of four scout cars. When they arrived at the hotel, Capone bade goodnight to Richman and ordered the scout cars to accompany the entertainer to the Drake Hotel, where he was staying. “Instead of going home in a casket,” Richman noted with relief, “I was going home in my own automobile.”

  Nor did Richman’s dealings with Capone end that night; he soon had occasion to sense the power of the Capone mystique. A man for whom ostentation was a way of life, Richman liked to go about town with a $1,000 bill in his pocket, trying to use it in coffee shops and restaurants. Not surprisingly, he soon found himself the victim of holdups; night after night, as he roamed the city in his conspicuous Rolls-Royce after the show, a group of small-time hoods would force his car to the side of the road and fleece him of his money and his jewelry. After several of these episodes, Richman telephoned Capone for help and received an invitation to the Hotel Metropole, where the racketeer continued to hold court.

  Richman discovered that Capone ran the hotel like an armed camp. There was a guard posted on each floor, checking off guests as they entered and exited the elevator, and Richman was forced to run a gauntlet of three bodyguards who energetically frisked him. Only after these preliminaries were concluded was he finally ushered into Capone’s presence. “There was an American flag on the wall behind Al’s desk, showing his love for his country,” Richman noted, “and apparently commemorating some battle, too, for the wall was riddled with bullet holes.”

  “Harry, my boy, what can I do for ya?” Capone boomed. Richman explained that he was sick and tired of being robbed. Capone responded, “I’ll fix that,” and invited the entertainer to go for a drive with him. Taking a ride with a racketeer in Chicago was a risky proposition at best, but Richman had nothing to fear on this occasion. They went downstairs to Capone’s waiting limousine and, trailed by the four scout cars, drove along the streets, admiring the brilliant autumn foliage. Overcome by the sight, Capone remarked, “Ain’t that the most beautiful son of bitch you ever seen in your life?” They then drove back to the hotel at a leisurely rate and returned to Capone’s office. Al sat heavily in his seat, pressed a button with one chubby fingertip, and an assistant entered, carrying a small package. “There’s your stuff,” Capone explained. Astonished, Richman tore through the contents; there were his $1,000 bills and his gaudy jewelry, all restored to him as if by magic. He looked up and tried to thank the magician who had accomplished this feat, but Capone halted him. “Forget it, kid. You’re a great entertainer, Richman. I love ya like a kid brother.” He summoned another assistant, who brought a note that Capone signed. “Put this in yer pocket,” Al instructed, “and if you get into any trouble, use it.” Richman carefully folded the talisman, placed it in his pocket, and departed.

  Richman was held up again that night; a gang of men stopped his Rolls-Royce, ordered him out, and robbed him at knifepoint. “You can take anything I have,” Richman told them, “but before you do, will you reach into my inside coat pocket and take out the piece of paper in there and read it?” But his assailants refused to do as he asked; they took his wallet and jewelry and fled. As Richman suspected, that was the not the last time he would see them. The following night they robbed him again, following the same modus operandi. Finally, on the third night, Richman recalled, “I used a magic word: ‘Capone.’ ” The men did read the letter, as Richman insisted. It said, “Anybody who harms Mr. Richman in any way, shape, or form will have to account to me,” and it was signed, “Yours truly, A. Capone.”

  The letter had its intended effect on the robbers, who gathered to marvel at the contents and especially the signature. One by one they made their apologies to Richman, praising the Scandals and explaining that they had no idea he was a friend of the great Al Capone, of whom they were as terrified as Richman himself had once been. They returned to their car and prepared to drive off, but not before one of them called out, “Hey, how about a couple of tickets?”

  “What names shall I leave them under?” Richman asked.

  The men, on second thought, decided not to call attention to themselves in this manner and disappeared into the Chicago night, leaving Richman alone with his money and his jewelry. It was as though he had come to a kingdom ruled by a legendary potentate, who took with one hand and gave with the other, and then mixed up the taking and the giving until they merged in a flurry of self-aggrandizement.

  Capone deployed the same combination of intimidation and seduction to win the trust of another rising young entertainer who was just making his name in Chicago, the comedian Milton Berle, who received a summons from a stranger to make an unscheduled, private appearance before an invited audience at the Cotton Club in Cicero. This was Ralph’s place, a popular nightclub the Chicago Crime Commission had labeled a notorious “ ‘whoopee’ spot.” Berle respectfully demurred; although he was not actually afraid for his life, he knew if he went to Cicero he would be forced to miss one of his scheduled performances at the Palace Theater in Chicago, so he offered to appear when he was finished, near midnight. “That’s too late,” the messenger told him. “They’d really like you a lot earlier. The mayor’s a busy man. He can’t stay out late at night.”

  Even the idea of performing before “Big Bill” Thompson failed to persuade Berle. “I’ve got to be on stage here at ten o’clock—I got a contract with the Palace—and it’s at least twenty miles each way right through Chicago to the Cotton Club. It can’t be done,” he insisted, exaggerating the distance to make his point.

  Berle’s mother accompanied her son on his tours, and when she heard of the invitation, she insisted he make the time to comply, partly because she was afraid of the consequences if he did not and partly because she herself wanted to meet the famous Al Capone. Berle acquiesced, and soon he and his mother were riding to Cicero in a bulletproof limousine sent by the Capone organization. “I don’t know how fast the driver was going,” Berle recalled, “but I know we never stopped for one traffic light.”

  Arriving at the Cotton Club, Berle went directly to the stage, trying vainly to discern who was in his audience as he went through his routine. As he finished, he was approached by a “heavy-set man with thick lips.”

  “I really want to thank you for making time for us in your busy schedule, Mr. Berle,” the man said.

  Berle grasped his outstretched hand and felt a wad of bills migrating into his palm. “That’s when I realized the polite, soft-spoken man was Al Capone,” Berle remembered. He studied his hand, which now held perhaps twenty C-notes, $2,000. “No thanks, Mr. Capone,” Berle said. “I don’t need this.”

  “I don’t need it either,” Capone replied. “And you did a great job. The mayor really got a boot out of you.”

  Berle held his ground. “I was ask
ed to come out here. I wasn’t hired. And besides, I might need a favor from you some day.” Capone relented and allowed Berle to return the money as deftly as he had received it. Mrs. Berle then had her opportunity to shake the hand of Al Capone, and the comedian and his mother returned to the limousine for the return trip at breakneck speed to Chicago. Berle made his ten o’clock appearance at the Palace with five minutes to spare.

  • • •

  Many other rising young performers who passed through Chicago on their way to fame found themselves drawn into Capone’s orbit for a brief, giddy whirl. Even if they were too green to recognize him for who he was, Capone was drawn to them with a bizarre urgency. Such was the experience of Larry Adler, who played the harmonica with a virtuosity previously unknown for that modest instrument. At the time he encountered Capone, Adler was just a kid, fifteen years old, in the midst of a frenetic vaudeville tour, and his itinerary brought him to Chicago’s Oriental Theatre.

  At a cast party a man approached Adler, asked him a little about himself, determined that he was Jewish—“You’re a Yid, right? Thought so, I can always tell. . . . Ya go to shule?”—and suddenly began lecturing him on the importance of going to synagogue every Saturday. The stranger explained that he was a Catholic, and he found the time to attend Mass. Adler, who was young and not especially interested in religion, protested that he had half a dozen shows on weekends; it was impossible to take time off and go to shule even if he wanted to. Scowling, the man lectured Adler about the importance of writing to his parents. But I do write, Adler protested. How often? Every week, Adler replied—well, maybe every other week. “Look, kid,” the man said, “getcha coat, gowwan back to your hotel, this ain’t no party for a kid like you anyway. When ya get back, siddown and write a letter your mother and father, right?” The astonished Adler found himself agreeing to the order—he seemed to have no choice—and before he left, the stranger offered a final word of advice: “This Saturday you’re gonna go to shule, I don’t give a damn how many shows you got to do, right?”