To the end of his life Ness never understood why Martino had been assassinated, or the role his investigation had played in hastening the Sicilian’s violent death. To the Capone forces, the forces who had let him live in order to preserve peace with the Unione Sicilione, it seemed Martino had inexplicably betrayed them to Ness. As a traitor, Martino deserved death. By helping to create the misleading impression that Martino was cooperating with the Feds, Ness had inadvertently sent that hapless soldier of the bootlegging wars to his grave.
As a result of Ness’s blunder, the legal outcome of the Chicago Heights raids, though splashy, was ultimately frustrating. Early in May 1929 the Chicago Herald and Examiner declared: “81 INDICTED IN $36,000,000 RUM RING AT CHICAGO HEIGHTS.” Brought by a federal grand jury, the indictments were the result of the raids in which Ness had participated, but the coverage was quick to emphasize that “ ‘Scarface Al’ Capone, reputed head of the ring, escaped indictment. Government prosecutors explained they could not get enough evidence against him.” The reason was simple: Ness and the other agents had been chasing the wrong racketeer; they had focused on Martino, the decoy, rather than the obscure but powerful members of the Capone organization. By hastening Martino’s death, Ness had actually helped Capone strengthen his hold on Chicago Heights.
• • •
On the strength of his spurious success in Chicago Heights, Eliot Ness received a promotion; he moved his field of operations from Chicago Heights to Cicero, the better to concentrate on Capone. Since Al was in jail in Philadelphia at the time on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon, Ness went after Ralph Capone, who was already under indictment for income tax violations. His assignment was to gather enough evidence of bootlegging to persuade a grand jury to indict Ralph for violating Prohibition laws as well. To accomplish his mission, Ness had to demonstrate conclusively that Ralph was indeed handling liquor shipments. As the Feds knew to their profit, Ralph was no genius; he bought and sold liquor as carelessly as he handled his finances. Each day, late in the afternoon, he was on the phone from the Montmartre Café, placing orders and taking deliveries. It was Ness’s idea to tap Ralph’s phone and record the conversations, which would be sure to offer a ready supply of leads.
In recent months, wiretapping had proved extremely effective in tracing liquor shipments throughout Chicago. “After a time it became almost impossible to deliver beer without a good risk of being knocked off by us,” Ness boasted. However, placing a tap on the phone used by Ralph Capone in a corner of the shabby little Montmartre Café proved considerably more challenging, because, he wrote, “It was necessary to get a man up the [telephone] pole in back of the Montmartre, but the neighborhood was never without a guard, or several guards.” To accomplish his goal Ness decided to create a distraction: “In desperation I got my Cadillac touring car out, took down the top, and put my four biggest special agents in the car and started to circle the block. . . . In ten minutes a great deal of interest had been aroused, and the guards got into their cars and followed my four agents from a distance.” Meanwhile, Ness’s tapping expert, another special agent named Paul Robsky, shimmied up the pole, pretending to be a lineman engaged in repair work. Ness’s secretary simultaneously placed a call to the Montmartre. While the secretary bantered with the bartender, Robsky frantically combed the junction box for the correct connection, and when he found it, signaled Ness. “The bridge was made and the telephone tap on the Cicero headquarters of the mob established. This tap was kept alive for many, many months, and we learned a great deal about the operations and personnel of the gang through it.”
Poring over the transcripts of Ralph’s telephone conversations, Ness and his cohorts found two leads worth pursuing. In the first, a man identifying himself as “McCoy” told Ralph, “I’ve got two real big orders I want to place.” And Ralph replied, “You know I don’t take orders here. Call Guzik at the Wabash Hotel.” From this exchange, Ness deduced that “Greasy Thumb” actually ranked higher in the Capone organization than Ralph, which made sense since Guzik was considerably smarter than Ralph. The transcript of the second call was, if anything, even more revealing. In it, a man identifying himself as “Fusco” told Ralph, “I think it’s safe now to reopen that spot in South Wabash Avenue.” Ralph replied, “I don’t know how safe it is, but if you think so, go ahead.” At which point, Fusco asked, “What do you hear from Snorky?” meaning Al Capone, who still languished in Pennsylvania’s Eastern Penitentiary. “Not much new,” Ralph told him. “He’ll be back soon.” Now Ness realized he finally was getting closer to Al Capone himself, and he took the reference to “South Wabash Avenue” to mean that the organization was about to reopen one of its largest breweries, which federal agents had previously raided and closed.
The information gathered from the wiretap proved reliable. A week later, Ness and several other agents surrounded the brewery, then rammed the front door with a truck equipped with a snowplow (which doubled as a bullet shield). “We arrested six men, took two trucks and destroyed beer and equipment valued at one hundred thousand dollars,” Ness recorded with satisfaction.
The raid led to a perilous sequel. The following evening found Ness and his girlfriend driving at a leisurely pace through the Illinois countryside when he noticed “a pair of headlights fixed steadily in my rear-view mirror.” He drove his girlfriend home, walked her to the door, and returned to the car. In the hairy-chested prose of The Untouchables, he recalled, “there was a bright flash from the front windows, and I ducked instinctively as my windshield splintered in tune with the bark of a revolver. Without thinking, I jammed the accelerator to the floor. As my car leaped ahead, there was another flash, and the window of my left rear door was smashed by another slug. . . . Driving madly, I circled the block, taking my gun from the shoulder holster and holding it in my left hand as I doubled back to get behind the car which had ambushed me. Now I wanted my turn, but the would-be assassin had faded into the night.” Driving home, Ness speculated that the attack “had been planned as a ‘welcome home’ present for ‘Scarface Al.’ ”
When Capone finally did leave jail and return to Chicago, Ness expected to find himself in further confrontations of escalating intensity. He did not shrink from them; on the contrary, he eagerly anticipated the gangsters’ assaults. Doing battle with gangsters, “offered a lot of excitement,” in his words. “Besides, I don’t think I could stand the monotony of an office.” This devil-may-care attitude did not endear him to his colleagues. Many of the men with whom he worked considered him a phony, an amateur who belonged in a classroom, gripping a piece of chalk in his hand, not a weapon. Ness’s colleagues especially disliked his self-consciousness, the way he always seemed to be asking himself how his exploits would look, could he get them into the newspapers, what would the girls think. Ness always wanted to play the hero, with emphasis on the word play. Catching Capone was always a game to him, an activity subject to exaggeration and even frivolity. The greatest fraternity stunt that ever was. “It’s funny, I think, when you back up a truck to a brewery door and smash it in. And then find some individuals inside that you hadn’t expected,” he said.
Eliot’s idea of fun was doomed to failure. He was trying enforce a law for which popular support had long vanished, and the victories he did win came about largely because Al Capone remained in a Philadelphia jail cell, isolated from his bootlegging empire. Ness’s job would become much less fun, and far more frustrating, once Capone gained his freedom and returned to Chicago.
• • •
“I can’t believe all they say of him. In my seven years’ experience, I have never seen a prisoner so kind, cheery, and accommodating. He does his work—that of file clerk—faithfully and with a high degree of intelligence. He has brains. He would have made good anywhere, at anything. He has been an ideal prisoner.”
The speaker was Dr. Herbert M. Goddard of the Pennsylvania State Board of Prison Inspectors. The subject was Al Capone.
Goddard had come to know the model
prisoner while performing a minor operation on his nose in mid-August 1929 and, two weeks later, removing his tonsils, which, the doctor explained, had been troubling Al for years. Now the doctor could not lavish enough praise on his patient. “I cannot estimate the money he has given away,” Goddard said in September 1929. “Of course, we cannot inquire where he gets it. He’s in the racket. He admits it. But you can’t tell me he’s all bad, after I have seen him many times a week for ten months, and seen him with his wife and his boy and his mother.”
The public heard no more about the racketeer until he lurched back into the headlines on March 17, 1930, the occasion of his release from the Eastern Penitentiary in Holmesburg, Pennsylvania. Granted two months off for good behavior, Capone had spent ten months behind bars. The manner of his release was every bit as suspect as his confinement had been. To avoid a crush of reporters descending on the prison, Capone was liberated one day ahead of schedule. A car belonging to the warden took him to another prison, Gratersford, where he was held in custody for another twenty-four hours; only then did he actually go free. He immediately took the Broadway Limited to Chicago, where he was met by his brother Ralph and Jack Guzik. The press knew none of this, and to further confuse them, prison officials went to the trouble to stage a mock release at Holmesburg. Police roped off the block in front of the penitentiary, and patrolled the streets, while the warden’s office distributed tidbits of manufactured news to waiting reporters. Although Capone had left the premises the day before, the bulletins conveyed the impression that he was still confined within its stone walls, awaiting the signature of the governor of Pennsylvania on the release papers, although the signature had already been obtained. With such tactics, the prison sustained the ruse until after dark, when the warden, Herbert “Hard-boiled” Smith, appeared before the milling reporters and said, “We certainly stuck one in your eye that time. The big guy went out of here yesterday at dusk in a brown automobile to Gratersford prison. . . . Try and find out where they’ve gone.”
Disgusted by the chicanery surrounding Capone’s release, one reporter called out, “How much did you get for this, warden?”
“You get the hell out of here and stay out,” came the reply.
The next day, in a punning allusion to the racketeer’s chief occupation, the Chicago Tribune headlined: “WARDEN SPIRITS GANGSTER OUT; CAUSES UPROAR.” This was more than a local story. Capone’s release landed him on the cover of Time magazine, an honor normally reserved for tycoons with whom the magazine’s publisher, Henry Luce, was enthralled. But then, what was Alphonse (“Scarface”) Capone, as the magazine called him, if not the leading tycoon of bootlegging and racketeering in the United States? And Capone certainly looked the part in his cover photograph, with his hair neatly combed, his collar just so, and a rose in his lapel. Only the prominent scar on his cheek spoiled the impression of prosperous respectability. Within, the magazine presented a somewhat different story, labeling him the “No. 1 underwordling of the U.S.” but emphasized that he was more of a businessman than a murderer, a man who “wears clean linen, drives a Lincoln car, leaves acts of violence to his hirelings.”
He was even the subject of a new book, Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man, by Fred D. Pasley, the Chicago Tribune rewrite man who had spent the previous six months furiously typing his semicoherent account of Capone’s role in Chicago’s gangster wars. “Poor little rich boy,” the book concludes, “the Horatio Alger lad of prohibition, the gamin from the sidewalks of New York, who made good in a Big Shot way in Chicago—General Al the Scarface, . . . creature of the strangest, craziest fate, in the strangest, craziest era of American history. The story ends—unfinished, like his life—the red thread still unspun by the gods amuck.” Claiming she was completely unbiased, the Tribune’s reviewer called Pasley’s rambling compilation “a book that has more thrills to the paragraph than anything written in our decade.” Although it contained scant biographical information about its thirty-one-year-old subject, its mere existence testified to Capone’s stature; no one troubled to publish books devoted to “Bugs” Moran, “Hymie” Weiss, or Frankie Yale.
In Chicago, the police immediately dispatched a squad of black-and-whites to stake out the Capone home on Prairie Avenue, where they waited three days and nights in the vain hope of catching a glimpse of the elusive racketeer. Only Eliot Ness, still on the case, had any idea of Al Capone’s whereabouts, thanks to the wiretap on Ralph’s hotel. This way Ness learned of a phone call Ralph placed to summon help in dealing with Al. “We’re up in room 718 at the Western,” Ralph said, “and Al is really getting out of hand. He’s in terrible shape. Will you come up? You’re the only one who can handle him when he gets like this. We’ve sent for a lot of towels.” Apparently Al, in celebration of his freedom, had drunk too much and gotten sick in Ralph’s suite. Ness had also tapped the phones at the Capone family residence on Prairie Avenue. One call in particular caught the attention of the young agent. It was placed by Jake Lingle, the reporter who was known to be friendly, perhaps too friendly, with Capone, and it was answered by Ralph, sounding more beleaguered with every passing day. Like everyone else in Chicago, Lingle, now at the Tribune, wanted to know the whereabouts of Al Capone, and when Ralph unconvincingly claimed he had no idea where the Big Fellow was, Lingle growled, “Jesus, Ralph, this makes it very bad for me. I’m supposed to have my fingers on these things. It makes it very embarrassing with my paper. Now get this, I want you to call me the minute you hear from him. Tell him I want to see him right away.” Ralph promised he would, but when Lingle called again, he was infuriated to learn that Ralph refused to produce his brother. “Listen, you guys ain’t giving me the runaround, are you?” Lingle challenged. “Just remember, I wouldn’t do that if I was you.” Lingle’s tone of menace struck Ness as curious, to say the least. What kind of reporter dared to threaten Al Capone’s older brother?
The instant the police guard around his home dispersed, Capone surfaced, fully recovered from his raucous homecoming party at the Western Hotel. He did not seek refuge in his family’s home, nor did he hide out in Cicero or Chicago Heights. Instead, he chose to return to the most visible of all his addresses, the Lexington Hotel on South Michigan Avenue, in the heart of Chicago. He took his seat beneath the framed portraits of that civic trinity—Washington, Lincoln, and “Big Bill” Thompson—and resumed administering his far-flung racketeering enterprises, not only the booze shipments and payoffs but also the brothels and gambling dens, all of which required attention after his ten months’ absence. He was wearing a bandage on his right hand, a legacy of his drunken behavior at the party, but when asked about the injury, he said only, “I burned it on a piece of roast beef.” Reclaiming his racketeering throne, Capone demonstrated that he remained the most powerful, important, and controversial figure in Chicago.
Chicago’s bumbling deputy chief of police, John Stege, loudly insisted that Capone would be arrested on sight, and the racketeer was only too happy to call Stege’s bluff. To demonstrate that he feared no one, not the police, not even the Feds, Capone appeared at police headquarters, taking care to bring a lawyer with him. He asked if the Chicago police wanted to see him for any reason. No, he was told. What about the chief of detectives? No. Then how about John A. Swanson, the state’s attorney? Again, no. Finally, did George E. Q. Johnson, the U.S. attorney, wish to ask him any questions? Absolutely not. Johnson was too shrewd to answer a public challenge from Capone; the prosecutor knew the time would eventually come—in court. But Al had proved his point. If the government was planning a major effort to “get Capone,” he could find no evidence of it.
He then walked to the Federal Building under police guard; once there, he engaged in heated verbal sparring with the assistant state’s attorney, Harry Ditchburne, and Deputy Chief John Stege:
DITCHBURNE: Al, what do you know about the Valentine day massacre of the seven Moran fellows?
CAPONE: I was in Florida then.
STEGE: Yes, and you were in Fl
orida, too, when Frank Yale was murdered in New York.
CAPONE: I’m not as bad as I’m painted. If you sift everything I was ever accused of you’ll find I didn’t do it. I get blamed for everything that goes on here. . . . All I want is not to be arrested if I come downtown.
STEGE: You’re out of luck. Your day is done. How soon are you going to get out of town?
CAPONE: I want to go to Florida some time next week. I don’t know when I have to go to the federal court for trial on the contempt case.
STEGE: You can go because no one wants to put a complaint against you today. But next time you go into the locker.
NASH: [Capone’s lawyer] Lenin and Trotsky and others rebelled against that kind of treatment.
STEGE: I hope Capone goes to Russia.
By the time the argument ended, evening shadows were spreading across Chicago. A weary Capone shrugged his shoulders and told the reporters who had followed him on his rounds, “It’s kind of hard trying to find out who wants me.” Small chuckles. “I made it easy for them. I was willing to face any charge anyone had to make.” He began defending himself before his receptive audience by pointing out the hypocrisy of his accusers. “All I ever did was to sell beer and whiskey to our best people,” he maintained. “All I ever did was to supply a demand that was pretty popular. Why, the very guys that make my trade good are the ones that yell loudest at me. Some of the leading judges use the stuff.” For once Capone spoke the truth. “They talk about me not being on the legitimate. Nobody’s on the legit. You know that and then so do they. Your brother or your father gets in a jam. What do you do? Sit back . . . without trying to help him? You’d be a yellow dog if you did. Nobody’s really on the legit when it comes down to cases. The funny part of the whole thing is that a man in this line of business has so much company. I mean his customers. If people did not want beer and wouldn’t drink it, a fellow would be crazy for going around trying to sell it. I’ve seen gambling houses, too, in my travels, you understand, and I never saw anyone point a gun at a man and make him go in. I never heard of anyone being forced to go to a place to have some fun. I have read in the newspapers, though, of bank cashiers being put in cars, with pistols stuck in their slats, and taken to the bank, where they had to open the vault for the fellow with the gun. It really looks like taking a drink was worse than robbing a bank. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it is.” It was now one of his boasts: he did not rob banks as common gangsters did. That, he knew, was a sure way to bring down the full wrath of the federal government on his operation. In closing, he explained, “People come here from out of town, and they expect when they’re traveling around, having a good time, that they will take a little drink, or maybe go to a night club. They had better not get caught at it, because if they are—in the jug and see the judge the next morning.” With those words, the impromptu press conference concluded, and he returned to the Lexington Hotel, having finally generated some favorable ink for himself.
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