Early in the investigation, Wilson sought the help of Art Madden, the IRS’s local agent, who warned that attempting to convict Capone for income tax evasion “would be as easy as hanging a foreclosure sign on the moon.” Later, Wilson oversaw a small staff, but he was still woefully underequipped. “For a base of operations the government gave me and my three assistants an overgrown closet in the old Post Office Building with a cracked glass at the door, no windows, a double flat-topped desk, and walls that were peeling as if they’d been sunburned. I could hardly scratch my head without sticking my elbow in somebody’s eye.”
Escaping the confines of his office, Wilson spent days familiarizing himself with Chicago. He visited Cicero a number of times, took note of the city’s gambling joints, saloons, and brothels, but still he failed to find a paper trail leading to Capone. An agent working with Wilson on the investigation complained, “His sources of income are known to us. We believe he could cash in for $20,000,000. But where has he hidden it? Our men get so far, then they find themselves in blind alleys. Just as an example we discovered $100,000 in cash which his brother, Ralph, had secreted in a safety-deposit box. Pin money.” Evidence of Capone’s financial dealings proved elusive largely because gambling, vice, and bootlegging—the entire spectrum of Capone’s rackets—were all-cash businesses. In the rare instances when the organization used checks, these were signed not by Capone but by Jack Guzik or other surrogates. Despite these tantalizing clues, Wilson failed to grasp how the financial arrangement worked. The paradox of Capone’s being among the wealthiest men in Chicago while leaving no record of earning any income drove the investigator to distraction. “It was common talk that he [Capone] got a cut of every case of whisky brought into Cook County,” Wilson wrote of that fallow period, “that he ran a thousand speakeasies, a thousand bookie joints, fifteen gambling houses, a luscious string of brothels; that he controlled half a dozen breweries. . . . He tore around in sixteen cylinder limousines, slept in $50 French pajamas, and ordered fifteen suits at a time at $135 each. His personal armed forces numbered 700, equipped with automatic weapons and armored automobiles. And I couldn’t show that this satrap of Chicago earned more than $5,000 a year!” Meanwhile, Wilson’s wife wondered why he was agonizing. “You’re certainly making a mountain out of this Curly Brown case,” she told him. “He can’t be such a big shot. I never see a word about him in the papers.”
Because of Capone’s acquisition of the former Busch villa, the IRS had better results in Miami. This tangible asset was evidence that he did, in fact, enjoy a substantial income. The nature of the transaction revealed Capone’s growing financial sophistication, as the Treasury Department memorandum explained:
In the course of the investigation of Al Capone, it was reported that he had purchased a magnificent home in an exclusive section of Miami, Florida. An investigation in Florida disclosed that the original owner sold the place to a real estate operator [Henderson] for $40,000: $2,000 in cash was paid as a binder and upon delivery of the deed $8,000 in one thousand dollar bills was paid to the seller by the real estate operator, leaving a mortgage of $30,000 due on the property. It was then found that the deed was in the name of “Mae” Capone, the wife of Al. When this fact was learned, the insurance companies withdrew their policies on the basis that the Capones were not a good risk.
As Irey and his IRS investigators continued their efforts to unravel the complex and hidden tangle of Capone’s finances, the appointment of a new U.S. attorney in Chicago marked the beginning of a fresh effort to prosecute the racketeer. At first glance, the changing of the guard in the federal prosecuter’s office seemed an event of little consequence, and the appointee, George E. Q. Johnson, appeared as unlikely an adversary of Al Capone as Elmer Irey. Born on July 11, 1874, in Harcourt, Iowa, and reared on a farm on Wisconsin, George Emmerson Q. Johnson—the Q. stood for nothing, it was designed solely to distinguish him from all the other George Johnsons—had put himself through law school and risen through the ranks of the prosecutor’s office in Chicago, helped along by its Scandinavian-American old-boy network. In February 1927, President Coolidge appointed him a U.S. attorney. At fifty-four, Johnson was tall, wiry, and slightly rumpled. With his unruly hair parted in the center, his round wire-rimmed spectacles, and his tweedy suits, he might have been mistaken for a poet or a perhaps a drama critic—that is, until he opened his mouth, when it became apparent that he combined a scholarly demeanor with an unlimited capacity for indignation in the face of injustice. That last quality set him apart from nearly every other cynical, battle-weary veteran of Chicago’s futile war on gangsters, and it came directly from his rural, frugal background. For a lawyer of Johnson’s status, the appointment entailed a financial sacrifice (though not by the standards of most people). At the time, federal judges made about $10,000 a year, a state’s attorney or district attorney slightly more, and a U.S. attorney such as Johnson earned $15,000. These salaries paled in comparison to what corrupt public officials could reap. One of the most sought-after posts was the sheriff of Cook County; the pay was low, but it was rumored the holder of that office could make a quarter of a million dollars from bribes and shady deals on the side.
Ethnic rivalry gave extra heat to Johnson’s zealous prosecution of Capone, for Johnson believed his rural, Swedish roots accounted for his incorruptibility. “I come of Swedish farmer stock,” Johnson remarked, “and my bringing up made the thought of taking money when in office abhorrent. . . . It merely had no attraction for me.” By the same token, he could not help but note that the racketeers he prosecuted were overwhelmingly Italian, which he assumed accounted for their criminal proclivities. An element of class warfare was also present in the prosecutor’s campaign against Capone. There was, on one hand, the urban immigrant class from which Capone had sprung, which was predominantly Italian, Irish, and Jewish; then there was the rural Scandinavian class in which Johnson and many other federal and state investigators had their roots. (Not the police, however, whose immigrant, urban backgrounds resembled those of the gangsters.)
Eventually, however, Johnson came to respect his adversary’s formidable abilities. “My father said many times that Al Capone could have been a brilliant businessman,” his son, George E. Q. Johnson Jr., notes. “My father meant that he had the organizational ability, cunning, intellect, and street smarts it took to succeed.” Beyond that, the U.S. attorney came to realize he also shared an unnerving set of characteristics with Capone. Both men sprang from large families—nine siblings to be exact. Both required bodyguards to protect their safety from constant threats. And both had only one child, a son, and the boys were the same age. “It became a joke—not a very funny one—that some day I would grow up to prosecute Sonny,” the younger Johnson recalls. It was as if Capone were Johnson’s inverted image, with one family dedicated to doing good and the other to perpetrating wrong.
From the moment he took office, it was apparent that Johnson took his responsibilities with the utmost seriousness. Unlike his predecessors, he refused to fight his battles against the racketeers in the press. He had heard enough of William Dever’s unfulfilled promises and “Big Bill” Thompson’s blatant lies to know that he would accomplish nothing by making his plans public. In addition, he refused to tolerate Chicago’s traditional complicity in underworld activities. He distanced himself from the corrupt elements of law enforcement—the police captains, aldermen, and assistant district attorneys who participated in the profits of the Capone organization in return for protection. Instead, he began to educate himself about Chicago’s underworld by reading newspaper accounts covering the last several years. Chicago’s dailies, he came to realize, provided highly reliable information on all the players and their rackets, better information than the police had collected. He retained a journalist to compile an index-card file of all the men and their organizations, and with this database at his fingertips, Johnson, a man of keen analytic powers, became the first person in a position of authority to gain a thorough knowle
dge of Chicago’s gang structure and gang warfare.
What particularly galled Johnson about Capone and his organization was their pretense at respectability. “Organized crime was a business and the gangsters worked with a great deal of arrogance,” he said later. “Some of them posed as political leaders and they had the temerity to go to public banquets where public men were.” Above all there was Al Capone, whom Johnson described as a “man of unbelievable arrogance,” his brother Ralph, who, Johnson learned, handled most of the organization’s brothels now that Al was so interested in becoming respectable, and their right-hand man, Jake Guzik. Johnson was a man of principle, and the prominence of “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, that pimp, offended him deeply, and he reacted on a personal level. “I live in a quiet neighborhood, where there are homes and home-owning people,” Johnson explained, “and he established himself just around the corner from me, and nearly all the gangsters, strange to say, are married and bringing up families. He is the conniver and corrupter of the crowd. Al Capone represents the force and spectacular leadership.” Not only that, but the Guzik family dog and the Johnson family dog, an English pit bull, got into fights whenever they crossed one another’s paths. It was bad enough that Al Capone wanted to control Chicago’s government and Ralph Capone managed its brothels, but to have Jake Guzik and family living around the corner—that was the ultimate indignity, an affront to all right-thinking citizens. For all these reasons, George E. Q. Johnson bent every effort to exposing these men to the scrutiny of the law.
• • •
Oblivious to the government forces quietly massing against him, Capone remained in Miami, but his attention was focused on Chicago. The city was convulsed by a violent, no-holds-barred primary election scheduled for April 8. Months in advance of that date, the corrupt administration of Mayor Thompson had begun to reap a whirlwind of civic discontent. Although Thompson himself was not up for reelection until 1931, many significant city offices were at stake, and the primary was generally considered a referendum on his administration. To the surprise of absolutely no one, his new administration had wreaked havoc on the city. Rackets flourished as never before. Near the end of 1927, the Employers’ Association of Chicago compiled a list of twenty-three businesses susceptible to racketeering; they included cleaning and dyeing, dental laboratories, window-cleaning, groceries, garbage removal, drug stores, florists, shoe repair stores, glaziers, bakers, butchers, fish vendors, even photographers. “Any man who dares to oppose certain kinds of racketeers or refuses to pay tribute to them is in actual physical danger,” the Association concluded.
The increase in racketeering was matched by an increase in violent crime. In 1928, “Big Bill” ‘s first full year in office, the city was the scene of 367 murders, approximately one a day. (In comparison, 200 murders were committed in New York during the same period.) Although the Chicago police managed to make some arrests, the death penalty was never carried out despite a rising public clamor to use this ultimate threat to deter crime. Thompson’s financial record was equally disastrous. Ordered to testify before a grand jury about the source of Thompson’s campaign fund, Homer K. Galpin, the fund’s manager, went into hiding for eighteen months. As the Thompson administration wore on, the city was tardy in collecting taxes, neglected to pay its bills, and ran up nearly $300 million in debt. Thus Chicago became, a journalist wrote, “a panhandler on the doorsteps of its bankers.”
Despite the civic emergency and sense of crisis, no one dared to step forward to try to rescue the city. Popular opinion held that gangsters ruled Chicago, and popular opinion was correct. Chicago got the gangsters it deserved; they were flashy, extremely wealthy, and up-to-the-minute in their methods as they learned to imitate America’s corporate culture. There was no longer any serious opposition to them in Chicago. William Dever, once the city’s preeminent voice for reform, never returned to the political arena. He toiled quietly as a bank executive, and two years after his defeat, he died from cancer, briefly mourned and then forgotten, a man of principles who was profoundly at odds with his time. Even in the absence of effective opposition to his administration, Thompson remained vulnerable simply because so many people despised him. Although he was the anti-Prohibition candidate, a stance that should have endeared him to voters, he had failed to anticipate that voters and newspapers alike held him accountable for Chicago’s ever-increasing crime rate and its reputation as a center of crime—a reputation that was not limited to the United States. The city under Thompson had become known across the land as a haven for gangsters, the mayor himself the butt of endless jokes:
To the Editor of The New York Times:
GARRETT, Ind., Jan 9 [1928].—Just passed through Chicago today. Wanted to go up and see my old friend Mayor Thompson, but had English breakfast tea for luncheon and was afraid he would smell it on my breath.
You can kid about Chicago and its crooks, but they have the smartest way of handling their crooks of any city. They get the rival gangs to kill off each other and all the police have to do is just referee and count up the bodies. They won’t have a crook in Chicago unless he will agree to shoot at another crook. So viva Chicago!
Yours unhit,
WILL ROGERS
There was worse to come. In late January, the home of the city controller, Charles C. Fitzmorris, was bombed, followed by a similar attack several days later on another public official. Then, on February 17, the New York Times carried a headline that was to be repeated over the next six weeks with minor variations: “CHICAGO BOMBERS WRECK JUDGE’S HOME—Explosion Throws Him and Wife From Bed—Third Official Attacked.” The victim in this instance had especially interesting connections, for he was John Sbarbaro, Judge Sbarbaro, who, as will be recalled, served as the undertaker of choice to slain racketeers. Lately his involvement in their activities had increased—his garage doubling as a drop-off for bootleg booze—and what better and more secure storage place than a judge’s garage? No longer would it serve as the scene of shady transactions, however, for the blast had demolished it. Judge Sbarbaro himself claimed to be mystified by the bombing; perhaps, he said, he had been too tough on some of the criminals who had come before him in court, and they were intent on revenge. Many reporters quoted this explanation; no one believed it.
In March, the intensity of the violence increased several notches. Early on the twenty-first, “Diamond Joe” Esposito, a Republican ward boss, received a threatening telephone call; that night, as he was walking home between two bodyguards, a car pulled alongside him. As it slowly rolled past, several men concealed within the car began firing on Esposito. Riddled with bullets, he collapsed on the sidewalk while his wife and three children looked on in horror. The men in the car flung their weapons out the window and sped away. By the time his wife reached him, he was dead. Curiously, his bodyguards escaped unharmed; perhaps they had received a warning of the assassination. In any event, the men who killed Esposito were never found. Soon after, another prominent political figure, “Big Tim” Murphy, a racketeer and bootlegger, was assassinated.
The next round of violence attracted nationwide attention, for the victims were not gangsters or even quasi-gangsters and thus fair game according to the generally accepted rules governing Chicago’s rackets. The first was a U. S. senator, Charles S. Deneen, who led a faction of dry reformers determined to oust the Thompson administration. A bomb exploded in Deneen’s home and partly destroyed it; only by chance was no one killed in the blast. The second victim was a judge, John A. Swanson, the Deneen-backed candidate for state’s attorney, whose home was also blasted on the same night. There were many other bombings of lesser figures—sixty-two such attacks in six months, according to one tally; in all, 115 bombs would rock Chicago that year.
Fear of bombings inflicted additional psychic damage. For instance, all Chicago was transfixed by the news that a bomb consisting of seventeen sticks of dynamite had been found at the busy Water Street Market. The fuse was charred along half its length, testimony to what might have occu
rred had it not been extinguished by an unexpected snowfall. If the bomb had exploded, the blast would have damaged an entire city block and taken countless lives. At about the same time, George E. Q. Johnson, the new U.S. attorney who was quietly pursuing Capone, became the victim of bomb threats. One morning his wife answered the phone; a strange voice told her that her house would be “blown to bits” if her husband did not “curtail his activities on behalf of the Deneen faction.” At about the same time the wife of Thomas O. Wallace, a Deneen candidate for clerk of the Circuit Court, answered her phone. “You tell your husband he’d better get out of politics, for if he don’t we’ll blow his house up,” a voice told her. Telephone threats to kidnap the children of candidates likewise abounded.
The violence—as well as the threat of violence—was all the more frightening because no one knew who was responsible; as Sbarbaro’s comment suggests, even the victims were afraid to name names. Confusion reigned. The police did nothing. “There are fifty places in the city where dynamite can be purchased just as a person buys a package of cigarettes,” Chief Hughes said in an attempt to shrug off criticism, but neither he nor anyone else attempted to shut those places down.
The mayor, displaying his characteristic guile and cynicism, held the Deneen camp responsible for all the violence, although most of the bombs’ targets happened to be politicians who opposed Thompson. “The bombs are the work of the Deneen faction, because they expect defeat,” Thompson claimed, and he went on to insist that Deneen’s men had also gunned down Esposito, that fine man and loyal Republican. “Big Bill” speculated that Deneen, a committed dry, had imported a cadre of corrupt Prohibition agents who directed attacks on wet candidates: “Deneen is filling this town with Dry agents from Washington, who run around like a lot of cowboys with revolvers and shotguns. Our opponents would have us believe we don’t know how to run our town. Vote for the flag, the Constitution, your freedom, your property, as Abraham Lincoln and William Hale Thompson would like to have you do.” Thompson’s crony, Robert E. Crowe, the state’s attorney, further muddied the waters by insisting that Deneen and Swanson had planted the bombs in a vain bid for political advantage. “The public is not going to be fooled by their dangerous methods of campaign,” he claimed. “After having bombed the homes of friends of mine and having made no headway, they are now bombing their own homes to create the impression that the forces of lawlessness are running the town.”
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