Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  • • •

  On February 23, Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, the coroner of Cook County, held an inquest on the bodies of the seven victims of the massacre. In unsparing detail it showed that each man had been shot at least fifteen times, most frequently in the back and head. Furthermore, judging from the angle of the bullets, it was possible to deduce that some of the men had been shot while they were on the floor. The description of the wounds suffered by the optometrist, Reinhart Schwimmer, was typical of the others and ran as follows:

  There are sixteen bullet wounds of entrance in the middle of the back, twelve of which are in a small group just to the left of the spinal column, and are each about one-fourth inch in diameter. And the perforations were . . . about the size of buckshot. There were seven of these buckshot recovered from the chest cavity. There is a ragged perforation of the scalp and skull with inverted edges resembling a bullet wound of entrance, located on top of his head, about four inches above and posterior to the left eyebrow. . . . The track of this bullet from its entrance is backward and to the right, with extensive laceration of the brain substance, with exit to the right side of the head. It came out in a large hole.

  After examining the bodies, the investigators turned their attention to the bullets themselves. The massacre happened to occur at the moment when the science of ballistics was just gaining acceptance. The nation’s recognized authority on the subject, Major Calvin Goddard, demonstrated that each weapon left a distinctive “fingerprint” on the bullets it fired. Thus a trained investigator could match scratches on the surfaces of bullets and shells with distinctive marks inside the barrels of the weapons from which they had been fired. Goddard was based in New York; learning of his work, a group of wealthy Chicago businessmen induced him to move to Chicago, where they financed a laboratory for him at Northwestern University. At first, his mission was to demonstrate that the Chicago police were not the gunmen in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. To this end he tested every machine gun captured by the police (although it was highly unlikely that the police, had they been culpable, would have been foolish enough to return the murder weapons). Just as Goddard was coming to the conclusion that police weapons had not been employed in the massacre, he was presented with a rare opportunity to demonstrate his ballistic science. His benefactor was Fred “Killer” Burke, the gunman in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  During most of 1929, Burke remained in the Chicago area, living quietly with his wife under an assumed name, Fred Dane, in a small suburban house located right on Lake Shore Drive. He might have resided there indefinitely, had he not become involved in a drunken driving accident. One night in December 1929 Burke sideswiped another car on Main Street in nearby St. Joseph, Michigan; insult led swiftly to injury as Burke, drunk and enraged, fired four shots into a young police officer, Charles Skelley, who was attempting to arrest him. Skelley later died in the hospital, and the police launched a manhunt for his killer. At that point Burke vanished for over a year. During this time, Major Goddard studied the bullets and shells employed in the Skelley shooting; under the microscope, their markings matched those on the bullets retrieved from the body of Frankie Yale as well as the victims of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The identical markings meant the same weapon had been used in all three assassinations, and after protracted labor the police managed to trace the weapon to Burke, who they belatedly realized had been masquerading as “Fred Dane.”

  Finally, in March 1931, police discovered that he was hiding out at his father-in-law’s farm in Milan, Missouri. Although he had grown a mustache to cover a telltale scar on his lip, his distinctively ugly mug was still eminently recognizable. At the farm he took the precaution of sleeping in a bed next to an open window; an escape car was parked just outside. None of these precautions helped when the police descended on the farmhouse early on the morning of March 26, while he was fast asleep. Like other gangsters, Burke had little fear of the police, but he was absolutely terrified of rival gangsters. His first thought on seeing strange men encircle his hideout was that his captors were hoodlums masquerading as cops, just as Burke had disguised himself for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and he fully expected the impostors to “take him for a ride.” He demanded that they produce their credentials. They did so, and Burke, relieved that mere cops had come for him, went along quietly. Extradited to Michigan, where he was wanted for the murder of Charles Skelley, Burke stood trial and was sentenced to life in prison. Although justice had been served, Fred “Killer” Burke was never tried, much less convicted, for his leading role in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  The evidence linking Jack McGurn to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre proved even more tantalizing than the evidence linking Burke. The police arrested McGurn in his hotel suite and brought him down to headquarters, where two eyewitnesses placed him at the scene of the massacre. McGurn was held without bail. At this point the inventive McGurn produced one of the most famous alibis in the history of American crime: he insisted he had nothing to do with the seven deaths on St. Valentine’s Day because he had been with his girlfriend, Louise Rolfe, at the Stevens Hotel from nine o’clock the previous night until three o’clock in the afternoon of the fourteenth. Thus it was impossible for him to have been in the vicinity of North Clark Street. Police and prosecutors devoted months to breaking what the newspapers came to call McGurn’s “blonde alibi,” and when they appeared close to achieving their goal, McGurn trumped them all by marrying Rolfe. Now that she was his wife, Rolfe could no longer testify against McGurn. On December 2, 1929, all charges against him were dropped, and he was freed from jail. McGurn had contrived to outwit the police, but his pivotal role in the Capone organization had come to an end, and he spent the remainder of his years on the fringe of the rackets, his income and his fame steadily dwindling. Never again would he have occasion to perpetrate the mayhem that had marked the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the next time he made headlines, it would be as a victim rather than a suspect.

  • • •

  As the police investigation into the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre continued throughout the winter and spring of 1929, the public’s concern with Chicago’s gang warfare in general and Al Capone in particular intensified. Prior to the massacre and the subsequent investigation, Capone had generated headlines and inspired editorials across the nation; now he attained the status of a national phenomenon, a fixture in the public consciousness, the best-known gangster of the era. His involvement with the massacre endowed him with a certain grisly glamour. His gregarious, flamboyant persona inspired much of this fascination; he was not at all the grizzled fugitive from justice that people expected of a murderer. There had never been an outlaw quite like Al Capone. He was elegant, high-class, the berries. He was remarkably brazen, continuing to live among the swells in Miami and to proclaim his love for his family. Nor did he project the image of a misfit or a loner; he played the part of a self-made millionaire who could show those Wall Street big shots a thing or two about doing business in America. No one was indifferent to Capone; everyone had an opinion about him and what they thought he represented. The drys condemned him as the archenemy of Prohibition, and wets pointed to the Capone phenomenon as the inevitable outcome of the unenforceable law.

  In New York City, editors began commissioning articles about Capone, paying fifty cents a word, then seventy-five, and finally the unheard-of sum of $1 a word. (This was 1929, and the engine of the American economy was still racing.) Overnight, writing about Capone became a cottage industry. Suddenly every journalist in Chicago was at work on his own I-was-at-the-scene-of-the-crime-and-the-body-was-still-warm reminiscence, and each account made Capone the personification of that city’s culture of crime. No longer was his name a synonym for bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution—the “light pleasures,” as he liked to call the services he provided; now it was a synonym for murder.

  In the pages of Harper’s Monthly, John Gunther, one of Chicago journalism’s brighter stars, declare
d, “Crime in Chicago has been so psychologically successful, one might say, that it takes such a romantically excessive episode as the recent St. Valentine’s Day massacre to stir the citizens at all.” He then reckoned the cost of racketeering, not in lives but in dollars. “Murder in Chicago costs from $50 up,” he announced. “To kill me, a newspaper man, would probably cost $1,000. To kill a prominent business man might cost $5,000, a prominent city official, $10,000. To kill the president of a large corporation, or a great power magnate, would cost a great deal more, probably $50,000 or $100,000.” All this, he insisted, was a matter of “recorded, public fact,” and no one doubted him. He listed no less than ninety-one rackets flourishing in Chicago, and concluded, “three million people are being held up by 600 gangsters. What the hoodlums are hitting at is the very essence of business enterprise in the United States.”

  Nearly all these postmassacre accounts pointed to Capone as the most prominent and elusive of all racketeers. No one else approached his power and influence over daily life in Chicago, or perhaps anywhere in the nation. “Probably no private citizen in American life has ever had so much publicity in so short a period as . . . Capone,” the New York Times observed on May 26. By then Fred D. Pasley, a veteran reporter with the Chicago Tribune, was at work on the first book devoted to the career of the thirty-year-old racketeer. Al Capone, he called his exposé, adding a cynical subtitle: The Biography of a Self-Made Man. Fearing that the book would do further damage to his image, Capone reacted with characteristic vanity and bravado. He declared that he would write his autobiography or sponsor an authorized account of his life designed to portray him in the best possible light as a family man, a successful entrepreneur, and a public benefactor.

  Despite the danger inherent in excessive publicity, Capone reveled in the attention he received and his newfound celebrity status. He invited gossip columnists and journalists into his home for “off-the-record” chats designed to cultivate sympathy and to convey the impression that he was just another retired millionaire living quietly in Florida. He encouraged Damon Runyon, who wintered on Hibiscus Island, close to Capone’s villa, to act as his press agent and apologist. Runyon came to the role quite naturally, for he had no qualms about his friend’s criminal activities. He liked Al, he could use Al in his articles and stories, and that was enough for him. He advised Capone to give the impression that he had retired from Chicago and bootlegging. At the moment, Jack Sharkey was in Miami training for a prizefight with Young Stribling in Flamingo Park. The event drew Capone like a magnet. To cultivate a new image for Capone, that of a benign and peaceful retired bootlegger, Runyon deftly arranged for his pal to visit the Sharkey training camp and, breaking a taboo, to be photographed with the fighter. Runyon’s paper, the New York American, ran the result, which showed Capone standing between Sharkey and Bill Cunningham, a former All-American football star. Al, tieless, grinned as he held a straw hat in his gloved hands and strained at the seams of his suit. Runyon also wrote the carefully worded text accompanying the picture: “The somewhat portly person is none other than ‘Scarface’ Al Capone, once a well-known Chicago gangster, now residing quietly in Florida, who has never been photographed. Although the police have lately mentioned his name in connection with the Chicago rum massacre—which Capone says he knows nothing about—the hitherto shy Al consented to pose with—guess whom?—Jack Sharkey, the sunshine of Miami Beach.”

  The photograph was just the beginning of Capone’s involvement with the Sharkey-Stribling bout. Days before the fight, the promoter, Tex Rickard, suddenly died from an attack of appendicitis. Capone, Jack Dempsey, and other Miami boosters rushed to fill the vacuum. With Runyon’s assistance Al threw a memorable prefight party for sixty sportswriters who had converged on Miami to cover the fight. Westbrook Pegler, Paul Gallico, Sid Mercer—all the big names were there. And Runyon, of course. The party itself was in Capone’s image. As soon as the guests arrived at 93 Palm Island, they were searched for weapons, and when they entered the house they encountered a dance band, the best imported liquor, and the main attraction, Al Capone, who impressed all with his reserve. At one point during the festivities, he excused himself to give Runyon and several others a tour of his wine cellar. Meanwhile, the wife of Jack Koefed, a sportswriter for the New York Post, decided to take a dip in the pool. She went to the women’s changing room, located in a small building at the far end of the pool, close to the bay, and sat on a bench to take off her shoes. Instead of the smooth surface she expected, the bench was hollow and appeared to contain a number of sharp objects. She raised a corner of the tarpaulin cover and beheld a small arsenal of shotguns and machine guns. She screamed, and Capone’s henchmen swooped down and removed the offending weapons. In the confusion someone wandered into Mae’s bedroom and stole her jewelry. Estimated value: $300,000. Mae complained bitterly—surely her husband could use his powers to ensure the swift return of her diamonds and rings—but Al proved far more reluctant to harm a sportswriter who stole from his wife than a rival racketeer who stole from his business. Gallico and Pegler alluded to the theft in their columns, suggesting that the thief should come forward, but Mae’s jewelry was never returned.

  The next day, there was another uproar at 93 Palm Island when a small airplane circled over Biscayne Bay, approached the house, and released a bomb, which exploded in midair. The great noise sent Al and a bunch of his henchman fleeing into the yard; several men attempted to shoot down the plane, which began to circle back. On the second pass, the plane released a small parachute. The thugs dove for it as it fell to earth. They discovered it contained a note. Speculation as to its contents ran rampant; this could be the start of gangster war in the air over Miami Beach. However, the note demanded neither blood nor money from Al Capone; instead, it demanded tickets to the Sharkey-Stribling fight. It turned out that Eddie Nirmaier, the pilot of the plane, had flown Al and his friends to Bimini Island in the Bahamas for a picnic several weeks earlier. Capone had paid for the flight and promised the pilot complimentary tickets to the boxing match—tickets he had forgotten to deliver. Irked, Nirmaier retaliated by dropping fireworks on Palm Island; that explained the noise and the lack of damage. Capone’s response to the airborne reminder was swift and sure. “By the time I got out of my plane,” Nirmaier said, “Capone’s chauffeur was driving up with my tickets.”

  On the night of February 27, 40,000 fans—“the most picturesque mob in fight history,” in the words of Damon Runyon, who was qualified to pass judgment—converged on Flamingo Park. Capone made every effort to present a bella figura in his new tuxedo as he distributed $100 bills with a grin and a handshake. He startled observers by sitting with his old friend Jack Dempsey, who ostentatiously cleaned Capone’s seat in the manner of an usher. Westbrook Pegler later described Dempsey’s behavior as an “exchange of amenities between two professionals having much in common.” Then the crowd watched Sharkey take Stribling in ten lackluster rounds. It wasn’t much of a fight, but the event helped to boost Miami’s image as an up-and-coming city. Capone’s visibility gave many the distinct impression that he had not retired after all. In fact, only one day after the fight, the Chicago Tribune proclaimed, “MIAMI DESTINED TO BE RULED BY KING SCARFACE— Capone Making Things Hum at Winter Resort.” “King Scarface,” the story charged, “controls most of the slot machines in Florida.” And an unnamed Miami resident commented, “He is putting his profits into solid concerns. They tell me one of the biggest hotels in Miami Beach is owned by Scarface, and he will invest in other ventures. . . . If Capone gets to control enough of the interests in this resort isn’t it natural to assume that he will some day swing the whip?”

  • • •

  In newspapers across the country a consensus formed that Al Capone was no longer Chicago’s problem, he was now a national issue. Despite a newly invigorated IRS Investigative Unit and the presence of a zealous U.S. attorney, George E. Q. Johnson, in Chicago, the fact remained that Capone and other racketeers flourished as never before. Someth
ing had to be done about them at the highest levels. The outgoing president, Calvin Coolidge, had not lifted a finger, and his successor, Herbert Hoover, gave no indication as to his views on the matter. As the public clamor to do something about Capone and Prohibition grew, Colonel Robert McCormick, the imperious publisher of the Chicago Tribune, journeyed to Washington to pay a call on Hoover. Although McCormick was a fanatical Republican, he was also an ardent foe of Prohibition, which he held responsible for atrocities such as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. As McCormick knew, Prohibition agents were hopelessly ineffectual, and he advised the president that the Department of Justice should cease victimizing ordinary drinkers and instead concentrate on the principal bootleggers who were the source of corruption of Chicago. For instance, McCormick said, “they’re not touching Al Capone.”

  Hoover’s response caught McCormick by surprise:

  “Who is Al Capone?”

  The newspaper publisher hastened to provide the president with a thumbnail sketch of the nation’s most capable and elusive bootlegger and to summarize the sorry attempts of Chicago’s local law enforcement agencies to bring him to justice. In McCormick’s opinion it would be futile to attempt to convict Capone for violating Prohibition. Only the scheme to apprehend him for failure to pay his income tax offered a realistic chance for success. “At once I directed that all the Federal agencies concentrate upon Mr. Capone and his allies,” wrote Hoover in his memoirs. “It was ironic that a man guilty of inciting hundreds of murders, in some of which he took a personal hand, had to be punished merely for failure to pay taxes on the money he had made by murder.”