Several days later, at the beginning of May, Capone returned to Chicago. The next several weeks would prove extraordinarily eventful for him, even by the exaggerated standards of his life. What brought Capone back against his better judgment was an appalling rumor that Scalise and Anselmi, the Sicilian gunmen who had helped to carry out the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, had suddenly shifted their loyalty away from Capone and toward the new head of the Unione Sicilione, Joseph “Hop Toad” Guinta, who had formed an alliance with another enemy of Capone, Joseph Aiello. Worse, Capone heard that Scalise had taken to boasting, “I am the most powerful man in Chicago.” These words could only be regarded as a Sicilian challenge to Capone’s preeminence. Capone had always been careful to keep that volatile stronghold, the Unione Sicilione, in his camp. Any disagreement with the group was liable to be lethal, and Scalise and Anselmi, unlike the incompetents in the now disbanded Moran gang, were capable of killing Capone on the first attempt, if they so desired.
Before Capone acted to break up the conspiracy forming against him, he decided to submit Scalise and Anselmi to a loyalty test. He invited the men to dinner along with Frankie Rio, a Capone lieutenant of unquestioned devotion. At the dinner, Rio and Capone became embroiled in a shouting argument. To the astonishment of Scalise and Anselmi, Rio actually slapped Capone on the cheek before rushing out of the restaurant. Impressed, the Sicilian gunmen secretly met with Rio the next day, offering to involve him in a plot to kill Capone and seize control of all his rackets. What Scalise and Anselmi did not know, however, was that the argument between Capone and Rio had been staged for their benefit. Without realizing it, they had taken Capone’s bait. Rio spent the next three days negotiating with Scalise and Anselmi and then reporting to Capone on their treachery. At the end of that time, Capone had decided precisely how he would dispose of the Sicilians and their colleague, Guinta. He would throw a banquet to honor these distinguished gentlemen.
On May 7, Capone, his inner circle, and the three traitors convened for a banquet at a roadhouse in Hammond, Indiana, yet another small town he controlled. That Capone wanted to cross state lines for the gathering should have sent up a red flag to the prospective guests; anyone who committed a crime, say murder, in Indiana and quickly slipped across the state line into Illinois would be considerably harder to catch. Yet Capone’s colleagues were compelled to attend; their absence would be taken as a sign of betrayal. So the guest list was lengthy, consisting of nearly a hundred of Capone’s closest allies in Chicago. The feasting and toasting lasted well into the night, until Al’s mood suddenly turned sour and full of recrimination against Scalise, Anselmi, and Guinta. He accused of them of being traitors, which was the equivalent of passing a death sentence on them. “This is the way we deal with traitors,” he said, and before the three men could move, they were bound to their chairs. Capone approached them with a baseball bat in hand and methodically battered each man within an inch of his life.
Savage as the beating was, it was not the end. Once Capone finished, a group of gunmen appeared, their weapons at the ready. Subsequent events were reconstructed by Dr. Eli S. Jones for the coroner of Lake County, Indiana:
Scalise threw up his hand to cover his face and a bullet cut off his little finger, crashing into his eye. Another bullet crashed into his jaw and he fell from his chair. Meanwhile, the other killers—there must have been three or four—had fired on Guinta and Anselmi, disabling them. Anselmi’s right arm was broken by a bullet. When their victims fell to the floor, their assailants stood over them and fired several shot in their backs.
Thus did Capone demonstrate that he, and he alone, was still the most powerful man in Chicago.
In the morning, the three disfigured corpses were found on an empty stretch of highway near Wolf Lake, Indiana. Scalise and Guinta were heaped in the back of an abandoned car, while Anselmi’s body lay on the ground nearby. Dr. Francis McNamara, who examined the bodies, stated that never in his thirty years as a jail physician had he seen such damage done to a human body. Scalise and Anselmi were transported home to Sicily for burial, while Guinta, in his tuxedo and dancing pumps, was buried in the final resting place of so many other Chicago gangsters and their victims, Mt. Carmel Cemetery.
Within days of the murders, word began to circulate through Chicago that Al Capone had been present and somehow involved. In fact, Chicago law enforcement authorities and Judge John H. Lyle, who had become a student of Capone, became convinced that Al himself had carried out the executions, bludgeoning his victims with a baseball bat and then shooting them in the head in full view of his lieutenants to serve as an object lesson concerning the consequences of betrayal. Although Capone left the actual shooting to others, the triple murder of May 7 ranks as the most inhuman and violent episode of his entire career. It was true that he believed that Scalise, Anselmi, and Guinta were about to kill him, and he struck in self-defense. Nevertheless, the grotesque manner in which he arranged for them to die displayed sadistic behavior new to Capone, and the entire episode suggests that his neurosyphilis was having ever more drastic and unpredictable effects on his personality.
As the story of the triple murder spread, Capone’s associates and family members who were not present at the banquet denied that Al would have been capable of such monstrous behavior. That was not the Al they knew—quiet, courteous, respectful, generous. They liked to believe that he tolerated the violence and brutality of life in the rackets solely as a means to an end and was not himself a sadistic person, certainly not a cold-blooded killer. The triple murders put the lie to the legend of Capone as a benevolent tyrant who protected his own from the depredations of outsiders. He had long insisted he was better than a common hoodlum, yet the events of May 7 argued that he was far worse, and far more dangerous.
• • •
Three days after taking a baseball bat to Scalise, Anselmi, and Guinta, Capone slipped out of Chicago, ostensibly to attend a prizefight in Atlantic City, New Jersey, then a fashionable beach resort attracting celebrities who pretended to be annoyed whenever journalists spotted them strolling along the famous boardwalk. On this occasion Capone’s interest in sport served as a pretext for his real mission, which was to attend a nationwide gathering of racketeers who had convened to form a commission charged with the responsibility of resolving disputes among its members in a peaceful, businesslike fashion. At least, that was the stated reason for the gathering. As Capone would discover over the course of the next several days, there was also a hidden agenda: his jealous rivals wanted to strip him of his power and his profits, and the ill will generated by the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre provided them with just the excuse they needed to do so.
“From what I hear there is plenty of shooting going on between these mobs, and guys getting topped left and right,” wrote Capone’s friend Damon Runyon in a story called “Dark Dolores,” a lightly fictionalized account of the gathering that first appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine, of all places. “Also there is much heaving of bombs, and all this and that, until finally the only people making any dough in the town are the undertakers.” In Runyon’s version, a character named Black Mike Marrio, who is a “Guinea, and not a bad-looking Guinea, at that, except for a big scar on one cheek which I suppose is done by somebody trying to give him a laughing mouth,” runs the show, insisting that someone above the fray must act as mediator—Chief Justice Taft, perhaps, or maybe President Hoover. Unable to interest these men in the proceedings, the assembled hoodlums finally settle on Dave the Dude—Runyon’s fictional version of Frank Costello, who was, next to Capone’s boyhood acquaintance Lucky Luciano, the most powerful racketeer in New York. “You see,” Runyon writes, “Dave the Dude is friendly with everybody everywhere, and is known to one and all as an alright guy, and one who always gives everybody a square rattle in propositions of this kind.” Just as Runyon’s merry gangsters settle down to business, they are distracted by various “dolls” circling the conference, and soon several of them, including Black Mike, are att
racted to one doll in particular by the name of Dolores Dark. It seems that her admirers had been responsible for killing her boyfriend, and to get revenge, Dolores flirtatiously leads them down to the beach one night and into the water, where they all swim after her toward extinction.
Runyon’s fanciful retelling of the conference glosses over the serious business that was transacted among the racketeers who had assembled in Atlantic City that warm spring weekend. Preceded by a reputation as a mass murderer, Al Capone was by far the most notorious. The atrocity of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and it was compounded by word of three more barbarous murders that he lately supervised. The moment he was sighted in Atlantic City, the city’s director of public safety, W. S. Cuthbert, issued an order “to pick up Al Capone if he is found . . . and arrest him as an undesirable.” To appear less conspicuous Capone came with but a single bodyguard, a face new to the racketeering scene. A graduate of the Circus gang, Tony Accardo eventually assumed the leadership of the Chicago organization. That was years later, after Capone’s death; for now Accardo betrayed his lack of experience by taking time off from the conference to visit a tattoo parlor, where he had a bird imprinted on the back of his right hand. When he moved his fingers the bird appeared to flap its wings. “Kid,” Capone advised, “that will cost you as much money and trouble as it would to wear a badge with the word ‘thief’ on it.”
Capone and Accardo eluded arrest because the boss of Atlantic City’s rackets, “Nucky” Johnson, had the foresight to pay the local police not to do their job. (“Nucky” was short for Enoch as well as “Knuckles,” Johnson’s other nickname.) “Nucky” was not so lucky in his choice of hotels. He had booked his guests at the posh Breakers, a restricted hotel, and the management there refused to allow the Jewish gangsters, of which there were many, to register. Capone was so offended by the insult that he got into a shouting match with “Nucky.” “I think you could’ve heard them in Philadelphia,” Luciano said later, “and Capone is screamin’ at me that I made bad arrangements. So Nucky picks Al up under one arm and throws him into his car and yells out, ‘All you fuckers follow me!’ ” Using all his clout, “Nucky” arranged for the visitors to stay at the equally plush Ritz, but when Capone reached the new hotel he was still furious enough to tear portraits adorning the walls of the hotel and hurl them at the hapless “Nucky” Johnson. Luciano later commented, “Everybody got over bein’ mad [at the Breakers] and concentrated on keepin’ Al quiet. That’s the way our convention started.” The outburst was highly unusual for Capone, who normally prided himself on his restrained behavior in public. Taken with the fact that only days before he had bludgeoned three men with a baseball bat, it was apparent that he had reached the limit of his inner resources. His undiagnosed neurosyphilis was slowly but inexorably advancing on his brain, exaggerating his behavior. What had been mood swings now became terrifying homicidal outbursts.
Capone’s violent behavior confirmed the worst suspicions of the other participants. A virtual Who’s Who of racketeering in America, they included Jack Guzik from Chicago, “Boo-Boo” Hoff and “Nig” Rosen from Philadelphia, Moe Dalitz and Chuck Polizzi (real name—Leo Berkowitz) from Cleveland, Longy Zwillman from Newark, and John Lazia from Kansas City. The most influential crowd came from New York, and although they quarreled fiercely among themselves, the men from New York believed they, not Capone, stood at the center of the gangster world, and they were united against their common enemy, Al Capone, whose excesses and thirst for publicity were making it so difficult for every other racketeer in America. They also harbored one special grudge against Capone: he was the man who had killed Frankie Yale, and what was worse, he had done it on their turf, in Brooklyn, without consulting them. Even if they had silently cheered Yale’s death, they could never condone Capone’s arrogance. So the New Yorkers came to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
In addition to Luciano and Costello, the boys from New York included “Dutch” Schultz, Albert Anastasia, Louis Lepke, Meyer Lansky, and, most surprisingly, Johnny Torrio, who had emerged from his quiet retirement. The gangster’s gangster, Torrio was the only man who maintained friendly relations with both Capone and the New York mobsters; as such he played a pivotal role in the gathering. Many of those assembled would have dearly loved to draw their revolvers and shoot one another on sight; instead, they turned to Torrio, the éminence grise of racketeering, to mediate their ferocious disputes. It was Torrio’s judgment that the time had come for Capone to step aside. His penchant for violence had jeopardized business for all of them, and Torrio remained convinced that racketeers would prosper through negotiation rather than assassination. “There are two ways to power,” he explained. “A Capone can rule for a while by blood and terror, but there will always be some who fight him with his own weapons. On the other hand, the man who can make money, big money, for others will eventually be regarded as indispensable.”
The groundwork for the conference had been laid the year before at a meeting in Cleveland. Many of the same racketeers now in Atlantic City had attended the earlier gathering, where they had vowed to beat their automatic weapons into slot machines and stills. Capone had given some thought to attending the Cleveland conference but decided against it at the last moment because he believed, probably correctly, that the group would try to limit his unfettered control of Chicago. The thought of other racketeers conspiring behind his back made him uneasy, and he later regretted his decision. Thus, he made the effort to appear in Atlantic City, although the conference could not have come at a worse moment for him.
The conference, running from May 13 to May 16, offered a startling commentary on the depredations of Prohibition and the chaotic state of American society at this moment. The gathering offered dramatic proof that racketeering was no longer a local issue. Furthermore, it conjured up the specter of a national criminal network functioning as a shadow government with huge financial resources and vast political influence at its disposal. However, it was not a conference in the conventional sense. Most of the business was transacted not in smoke-filled rooms or at banquets but out on the windswept boardwalk, where the “delegates” rented rolling chairs equipped with canopies; seated two abreast, the racketeers conversed as an attendant gently pushed them. Alighting at the end of the boardwalk, they removed their shoes and socks, rolled their custom-tailored pants up to their knees, and strolled along the sand beside the gently lapping waters of the Atlantic Ocean, discussing how to apportion the rackets in cities across the country. This was Johnny Torrio’s vision of racketeering: a cartel of businessmen coming together to discuss common concerns in a peaceful, dignified manner.
Shunned by jealous rivals, Capone found himself excluded from most of the wheeling and dealing, but he did renew one alliance when he encountered Moses Annenberg on the boardwalk. Moe Annenberg had made his name as a brutally effective circulation manager for the Hearst papers in Chicago; he later moved to Milwaukee and San Francisco in roughly the same capacity. Seven years earlier, he had seized control of the Daily Racing Form, the bookies’ Bible, and began to build an empire of his own. By 1926 he had left Hearst to manage a network of wire services and racing sheets; eventually, the Philadelphia Inquirer would become his best-known, most prestigious holding. Despite the respectable façade, Moe Annenberg did business with racketeers as an equal. Indeed, he was, according to some accounts, the most powerful non-Italian racketeer in the nation. A singularly unattractive and unpleasant man, he excelled in a difficult, often dirty business. The ultimate realist, Annenberg realized he could not afford to ignore Capone, even when the racketeer was in disgrace.
Annenberg’s presence at the conference aided certain favored journalists, who received a detailed, if self-serving account of the meeting’s accomplishments and resolutions. Indeed, one of the reasons for the conference was the need to generate some favorable publicity and to cultivate a lenient attitude in the public. The gangsters who strolled the boardwalk in Atlantic City a
nd huddled in the corridors of the Ritz during those mild days of May wanted to leave the impression that they were as civic-minded as the characters in a Damon Runyon story, harmless purveyors of the “light pleasures.” They selected Robert T. Loughran of the United Press to announce the accomplishments of the fledgling racketeers’ commission to the world. He was told that the merry gangsters had agreed to forget their grievances and had adopted a fourteen-point plan that sounded like a racketeer’s version of the Treaty of Versailles. The major resolutions relevant to Capone included the following:
• All killings were to be abolished. Henceforth, all controversies were to be settled by the Commission. Members must relinquish all machine guns.
• Johnny Torrio will manage the new Commission.
• Al Capone’s organization will be disbanded immediately.
• Torrio will be in charge of finances, paying Commission members each week.
• Joseph Aiello (Capone’s sworn enemy) will head the Chicago branch of the Unione Sicilione.
• Capone will surrender the Ship and all his other gambling establishments to the Commission.
Each of these points was, of course, an insult to Capone, and each was motivated by the other racketeers’ desire to reprimand him publicly as they helped themselves to portions of his enormous income. The big winner of the plan was Torrio, who, according to the Commission’s estimates, would receive annual revenue as high as $15 million a year from the former Capone holdings. These included earnings at three racetracks, which each generated approximately $1 million a year; nearly $7 million from gambling establishments in Cicero and Chicago; $2 million from prostitution; and another $3 million from beer.
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