Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  As the four executioners left the scene of the crime, they staged a dumb show designed to confuse witnesses. The men in overcoats placed their hands in the air, while the “cops” followed with their guns trained on them. The four walked deliberately to the stolen police car, got in, and sped away. Witnesses believed they had seen two policemen arresting two suspects, not four assassins escaping the scene of the crime. The ploy was as effective as it was clever, but the same could not be said for the results of the assassination.

  As they left North Clark Street, McGurn’s gunmen were convinced that they had accomplished their goal of wiping out the Moran gang. They were greatly mistaken, for “Bugs” Moran himself, their main target, was not among those in the garage. The Keywell brothers, who thought they had identified him entering the building, had mistaken Al Weinshank for “Bugs” Moran; indeed, the resemblance between the two had often been noted. A few minutes late to the meeting, Moran happened to be coming down North Clark Street on foot just as the stolen police car pulled up in front of the S.M.C. Cartage Company. Fearing a raid, Moran, in the company of Marks and Newberry, kept on walking past the garage to safety. By taking this simple precaution, they managed to escape with their lives. Had they been on time to the meeting, the execution would have claimed the lives of ten men. The stolen police car designed to confuse witnesses and victims alike instead scared Moran away; McGurn’s plan, brilliant though it was, had proven too clever by half.

  The first real policeman to arrive at the garage was Sergeant Thomas Loftus, who discovered that Frank Gusenberg, who had received twenty-two bullet wounds, was still alive—but barely. Within minutes, Gusenberg was taken to a nearby hospital, where another policeman, Sergeant Clarence Sweeney, interrogated him.

  “Who shot you?”

  “No one—nobody shot me,” the dying Gusenberg replied.

  For a racketeer, this response was perfectly understandable, for if Gusenberg talked and survived, he would surely be killed at a later date.

  “Which gang was it?” Sergeant Sweeney pressed, and when no reply was forthcoming, he added, softly, “Want a preacher, Frank?”

  “No,” Gusenberg whispered. “I’m cold . . . awful cold . . . Sarge . . . it’s getting dark.”

  Sergeant Sweeney turned up the electric heater in the room, then bent over Gusenberg. “Who was it, Frank?”

  Gusenberg’s lips tightened, but he refused to speak. At 1:35 P.M., his body shivered. It tensed a bit, and relaxed. Three hours after the shooting, Gusenberg was dead. By then word of the appalling event that had taken place at 2122 North Clark Street had begun to spread across Chicago.

  At first, no one knew who the victims were or why they had been killed. Witnesses in the neighborhood—and there were many—testified to seeing policemen entering the garage and leaving with two suspects, but police had no record of any such raid. No one realized, at first, that the executioners wore police uniforms as a disguise. The sense of dismay and confusion was overwhelming. No one knew why seven men had been shot to death. It seemed, that raw St. Valentine’s Day, to be just another eruption of mayhem on the streets of Chicago. For this reason, Chicago reporters, tired of racing to the scene of every gangster hit, were slow to arrive at the 2122 North Clark Street garage.

  The exception to the lethargy afflicting the press was Walter Trohan, the young reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. He was assigned to the coroner’s office, a gruesome beat that brought him dismayingly close to the results of Chicago’s gang wars. In one instance his boss ordered him to find out whether a murder victim had been killed by bullets fired by gangsters or by guards, and when the coroner’s physician refused to investigate, Trohan clutched the corpse by the hair and sawed off the top of the head to get at the bullets. Not even that experience prepared him for his first sight of the results of the mass execution in the garage of the S.M.C. Cartage Company. “I was in the press room when the call came through that six men had been reported killed in a garage at 2122 North Clark Street,” as he recalled. “Johnny Pastor, who usually collected information on births, marriages, and deaths, was the one who actually called it in. I said to the other reporters, ‘Johnny’s got a hell of a story.’

  “ ‘Well, he’s excited, he doesn’t know what it’s all about,’ said the head of the City News Bureau. His name was Isaac Gershman, and he had a complex: he thought he was a great man and a great editor. Well, he wasn’t a great man or editor, but I could always laugh. Gersh always wanted to write the great American novel but never got anything down on paper; he was always talking about it. Anyway, he dictated the lead to me: ‘Five men are reported to have been injured in a fight at 2122 North Clark Street.’

  “I wrote the first bulletin, which turned out to be one of the greatest understatements in gang history. I didn’t think much of it either, at the time. I called each paper with the bulletin, and while I was doing that, Johnny called back and said, ‘Honest to God, it isn’t five men, it’s six, and they’re dead all over the place, and one more’s going to hospital. Honest to God, it’s true.’ Then Gersh said to me, ‘Go up there and take a look.’ I asked if I could take a cab, and he said, ‘The Clark streetcars run in front of the door every five minutes. Take a streetcar.’ So I climbed in a streetcar and went. Fortunately, it was about noon, and most people just didn’t believe it for awhile. North Clark Street was just across the lake and up the hill and the streetcar went pretty fast, and I was there within five minutes, ahead of everybody except one or two policemen. I went on in, said, ‘City Press,’ and walked through a small office with a desk and telephone, bare of furniture, a very poor looking place, and approached the door that led to the garage.

  “I opened the door and walked in. There were just pools of blood everywhere and the dead guys spread out all over as in the movies. I’d seen dead guys before—it was part of my job—but one at a time. I’d never seen that many before. They were sprawled all over and there was blood all over and this wild German shepherd was barking and crazy and lunging on a heavy chain. I was impressed, but I was also interested in running to a phone, calling the office, and getting this story in. By that time Gersh was trying to hide the fact that he made me go in a streetcar.

  “I was in charge of the case for the City News Bureau, turning in yards of copy, everything was something, and I had a young fellow named Kelleher helping me. I sent him across the street from the garage to inquire at rooming houses who had rented rooms there and to lay in wait to watch and see. He failed to find out that somebody had, in fact, rented a room across the street, and instead the police found out about it the next day. I did know that the victims belonged to the Moran gang, and I knew that Moran himself wasn’t among them, and I wondered why they hadn’t gotten him, but we found out later he had overslept. In any case, I knew Capone was behind it because they were rival gangsters fighting for chunks of the rope.

  “There used to be a great row as to who was the first man at the scene. I was, but it didn’t seem to give me any kudos, because sooner or later every reporter who was worth anything came by, and it was really by accident that I got there first, through no willpower, no brilliance. I remember arguing with Mike Fish, a photographer, and he said, ‘I was the first one there.’ I said, ‘No, you weren’t.’ Well, he said, ‘Except maybe for the City News Bureau kid.’ And I said, ‘I was the kid.’ But what difference does it make?”

  As word of the slaughter spread across the city, shocked recognition of the enormity of the event followed—seven men, all of them shot to death in the middle of Chicago, on St. Valentine’s Day, no less. Police descended on the scene in force. Highball, the German shepherd, continued its insane baying, the garage’s brick walls echoing and distorting the noise. Several cops wanted to shoot the animal, but others intervened, declaring that there had been already been too much slaughter. One policeman untied the dog, which immediately bolted for the street. John H. Lyle, the crusading judge who liked to be in the thick of big news stories whether they concerned h
im or not, decided to see the death and destruction for himself. He masked his revulsion at the spectacle of the dead bodies with sententious pronouncements. “The corpses at the base of the red-splattered wall were the inevitable result of the franchise to kill and plunder public officials and a tolerant citizenry had given gangland by default at Prohibition’s beginning nine years earlier,” he grumbled.

  Soon, the mass execution came to be seen as the most vicious slaughter in the history of Chicago, if not the nation. There had been executions involving greater numbers of victims, but none could match the carnage in the garage of the S.M.C. Carting Company for its horror. After his visit, Willis O’Rourke, who wrote for the Chicago Evening American, managed a ghastly joke—“I’ve got more brains on my feet than I have in my head”—but the sight made even the most hardened veterans of Chicago’s gang wars blanch. “I tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said one stunned detective after viewing the spattered blood and tangled bodies at 2122 North Clark Street. “Nothing that’s ever happened in this town since Prohibition can compare with it.” Patrick Roche, a federal investigator, went further: “Never in all the history of feuds or gangland has Chicago or the nation seen anything like today’s wholesale slaughter. I’ve seen Chicago’s booze and vice rackets for years, but never before have seven men been lined up and shot down in cold blood. Never,” he concluded, “has there been such a massacre.”

  That was the word that would always be employed to describe the mass execution in the garage of the S.M.C. Cartage Company: massacre. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as it soon became known across the country and throughout the world. “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn’s failed attempt to assassinate “Bugs” Moran turned into the biggest story to come out of Chicago during the 1920s, perhaps the biggest story ever to come out of that vital, windswept, brawling, city—an event that crystallized Chicago’s entire bloody history into an instant of horror. Newspapers across the country devoted an unprecedented amount of space to coverage of the mass murder of seven men and in the process sold millions of copies. The event impressed itself into the consciousness and the history of the nation like a dark fly caught in gleaming amber.

  Newspapers across the country carried muddled and contradictory accounts of the events in the garage of the S.M.C. Carting Company on the morning of February 14. The most sinister aspect of the confusion was the theory that the Chicago police had been responsible for carrying out the mass murder, a notion propagated by many newspapers:

  WISCONSIN NEWS

  February 15, 1929

  CALLS CHICAGO POLICE KILLERS OF GANGMEN

  FEDERAL DRY CHIEF EXPECTS SLAYERS NAMED TODAY

  CHICAGO—Maj. Fred D. Silloway, assistant prohibition administrator, today advanced the theory that police officers themselves killed six gangsters and one of their guests herded into a North Side gang stronghold yesterday and shot to death, and declared that he believed the names of the actual slayers will be known before night.

  The New York Times edition of the same day offered a more accurate and disturbing account:

  7 CHICAGO GANGSTERS SLAIN BY FIRING SQUAD OF RIVALS,

  SOME IN POLICE UNIFORMS

  VICTIMS LINED UP IN A ROW

  Hands Up, Faces to Wall of Garage Rendezvous,

  They Are Mowed Down.

  ALL TOOK IT FOR A RAID

  Machine Gun Executioners, Wearing Badges,

  Made Swift Escape in Automobile.

  MORAN’S STAFF WIPED OUT.

  Liquor Gang Chief Head Missing—

  Police Chief, Roused by ‘Challenge,’ Declares ‘War.’

  CHICAGO, Feb. 14. Chicago gangland leaders observed Valentine’s Day with machine guns and a stream of bullets, and as a result seven members of the George (Bugs) Moran-Dion O’Banion, North Side gang are dead in the most cold-blooded gang massacre in the history of this city’s underworld. . . .

  Gang warfare in Chicago began with the slaying of Dion O’Banion in November 1924. In the fifty months since then, thirty-eight murders, most of them attributed to the enmity between the North Side band founded by O’Banion and the West Side syndicate established by John Torrio and turned over to Al Capone, have been recorded.

  Today’s massacre marked the end of the proud North Side dynasty which began with O’Banion. O’Banion yielded to Hymie Weiss who was replaced by “Schemer” Drucci, who was succeeded by “Bugs” Moran. And Moran tonight was missing while seven of his chief aids lay dead. . . .

  “It’s war to the finish,” Commissioner Russell said. “I’ve never known of a challenge like this—the killers posing as policemen—but now the challenge has been made. It’s accepted. We’re going to make this the knell of gangdom.”

  The spectacle of a squad of hit men masquerading as police was especially galling to law enforcement authorities, who angrily denied the outlandish assertion. Of course, in Chicago, anything was possible, and the fear that rogue cops were on the loose persisted. McGurn, the evil prankster who had planned the disguise, had done his work well, sowing confusion and discord everywhere. Newspapers, ordinary citizens, lawmen, and bootleggers all clamored for retribution for the mass murder. In Chicago, civic groups posted huge rewards for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrators: $50,000 from the Chicago Association of Commerce, $20,000 from the City Council, another $20,000 from the state’s attorney, and $10,000 from public subscriptions. Despite the reward money, the best efforts of the Chicago Police Department, an ample supply of eyewitnesses, and several damning pieces of evidence, no one would ever be convicted for carrying out the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  • • •

  As the police, the press, and the public sifted through the conflicting details of the massacre, Al Capone was at first mentioned only in passing. His long-standing rivalry with “Bugs” Moran was a matter of record, but as the police discovered when they descended on his suite at the Lexington Hotel and on his Prairie Avenue home, Capone was not in Chicago at the time. He remained in Miami Beach, living quietly, perhaps too quietly, with Mae and Sonny at the Palm Island villa. Examining Capone’s phone records, police discovered he had neither made nor received any calls from Chicago for several days before or after the event. And on the morning the seven murders occurred, Capone himself happened to be in the office of the Dade County solicitor, Robert Taylor, who had summoned the racketeer for a brief chat about his dealings in Miami.

  Taylor began their meeting by asking Capone about his relationship with Parker Henderson Jr., the gullible manager of the Ponce de León Hotel. “You were getting money sent to you under the name of A. Costa,” Taylor said, revealing what the IRS investigators had learned of Capone’s dealings in Miami. “Didn’t you ever send Parker Henderson to the Western Union office to get it for you?”

  “No,” said Capone.

  “Then Henderson never got any money for you?”

  Capone changed his answer. “Well, he did when I bought my home.”

  “You left money with Henderson, $1,000 to $5,000 at a time, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Capone, obviously cornered.

  “You didn’t receive any money by Western Union from Chicago?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  The interview was an embarrassment for Capone, but that scarcely mattered. By inviting the racketeer to his office, Taylor had unwittingly furnished Al Capone with an impeccable alibi for the morning of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  During the next two days Capone was highly visible in Miami, betting on the horses at Hialeah, visiting a dog racing track, stopping in at the McAllister Hotel, doing all he could to look relaxed, unconcerned, at ease. Everywhere he went, he was smiling. On Saturday night, two days after the shootings, Capone threw a large party in his villa. One hundred guests attended, including some of the most powerful men in Miami, and the affair was a model of decorum. In sum, Capone had not acted like a man with something to hide. To be more precise, he acted like a man trying
too hard to convey the impression he had nothing to hide. Take the matter of the lack of calls to Chicago. Capone normally placed calls to Chicago every day; why did they stop around the fourteenth of February?

  The whispers of Capone’s role in the massacre turned to shouts when the police finally caught up with “Bugs” Moran, now a former gang leader. When they asked him who he thought was responsible, Moran replied, “Only Capone kills like that.” On hearing the remark, Capone mocked, “The only man who kills like that is ‘Bugs’ Moran.” Despite all his efforts to feign innocence, Capone was unable to dissociate himself from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre as he had earlier gangland hits. Instead of ending gang warfare in Chicago, the mass execution sanctioned by Capone and carried out by McGurn would only serve to prolong it. What was intended as the final reckoning between the Moran gang and Capone organization became another pointless, bloody slaughter.

  Fearing a new bloodbath, other racketeers fled Chicago in droves. On the afternoon of February 18, the train from Chicago to Miami discharged no fewer than fifty hoodlums from Chicago, including such bootlegging notables as Frankie Lake, Terry Druggan, and Barney Bertsche. The Chicago Tribune estimated that at least 500 hoodlums flocked to Miami in the wake of the massacre. Asked about the sudden influx of Chicagoans, several admitted there had been considerable heat of late in Chicago; that violent city was no place to be, not when they could enjoy the Florida sun. Everyone knew the climate down there was better for their health. The influx of wealthy refugees from Chicago revived Miami’s lagging hotel trade. Rates for rooms doubled, then tripled. And all the customers paid in cash.