• • •
Capone’s penchant for publicity drew the attention of Ness and a small group of agents, who staked out the Lexington, looking for trouble. They found it when they ran into a minor hoodlum named Frankie Frost, who led the agents on a wild car chase through the streets of Chicago. Ness and his men did manage to capture Frost, but even when he was subjected to intensive grilling and, one suspects, physical abuse, Frost refused to divulge anything of Capone’s operation. The episode suggested the futility of Ness’s quest, for now that Capone himself was back in Chicago, no one dared talk to an honest cop; it was just too dangerous. “Acquiring the poise which comes with power, Capone had become even more dangerous,” Ness was forced to admit, and he proceeded to echo what so many other of Capone’s antagonists had come to realize: “Together with his ruthlessness, he had the quality of a great businessman. Under that patent leather hair he had sound judgment, diplomatic shrewdness and the diamond-hard nerves of a gambler, all balanced by cold common sense.”
Although Ness endowed Capone with superhuman attributes, Capone, for his part, took little notice of the young agent. Only in Ness’s recollections does the racketeer appear to be aware of Ness’s existence. If Capone loomed as the ultimate villain in Ness’s mind, Ness was, at most, an annoyance to Capone. Befitting his lowly status, Ness never received an invitation to sit down with Capone in the big suite at the Lexington Hotel, never had a chance to confront him directly. Ness kept expecting his adversary to behave like a gangster and make large, crude moves; instead, Capone behaved more like a businessman—insulated and subtle.
Unable to penetrate Capone’s stronghold at the Lexington, Ness decided to shift tactics. If he could not get to Capone, he would attempt to cripple his breweries. Relying on information gathered through wiretaps, Ness and his men planned a large-scale raid using a ten-ton truck outfitted with a battering ram. On the night of June 13, they drove their ungainly truck to a suspected Capone brewery at 2108 South Wabash Avenue. As Ness rode shotgun, the truck smashed through the doors. The agents jumped down from the truck, arrested five men, and spilled as much bootleg beer as they could. Soon after, they employed their battering ram truck to shut down another Capone brewery. It appeared that Ness had finally found a reliable way to thwart Capone, and he planned a new series of raids.
Then, nothing. Ness raided what promised to be a functioning brewery, only to find a deserted warehouse. He tried again, relying on what seemed to be reliable information supplied by the wiretaps, only to face another “dry hole.” In time he began to suspect that if he could tap Capone’s phone lines, Capone (or his lieutenants) might be doing the same to him. For once, Ness guessed correctly. As nimble as ever, the Capone organization had lately begun to bribe telephone and electrical workers, who obligingly installed sophisticated taps on the agents’ phone lines. Through them, the organization had been receiving advance warning of the raids and had shut down the breweries before Ness appeared. Thus Capone had contrived to beat Ness at his own game.
Soon after, the Capone organization dispatched a young man known as the Kid to have a chat with Ness. (He was not Tim Sullivan, the caddie whom Capone called “the Kid.”) This was a clever choice for a go-between, because Ness had previously used the Kid as an informer and was inclined to believe the Kid’s information. On this occasion, the Kid sauntered into Ness’s office in the Transportation Building. As they began to talk, Ness revealed his frustration with the unsuccessful raids on the Capone breweries. The Kid explained that since Al had returned to Chicago, the word had spread that anyone who tipped him off to a raid would receive a $500 reward. As Ness absorbed this piece of information, the Kid produced a large envelope and gingerly placed it on Ness’s desk, apologizing as he did so. Ness opened the envelope, and, as he expected, found money—a pair of crisp new thousand-dollar bills, to be exact. “They said that if you take it easy, you’ll get the same amount—two thousand dollars—each and every week,” the Kid informed him.
Incensed, Ness shoved the envelope and its contents into the Kid’s pocket so roughly that the young man feared Ness was about to hit him. In his reconstruction of events, Ness told the Kid, “Listen, and don’t let me ever have to repeat it: I may only be a poor baker’s son, but I don’t need this kind of money. Now you go back and tell those rats what I said—and be damn sure you give them back every penny or so help me I’ll break you in half.” Perhaps Ness was not quite so bold and eloquent in reality, but in any event he refused the bribe. Still, the attempt forced him to realize anew how difficult it would be for him, or for anyone, to subdue Al Capone.
As he left work that evening, Ness, already profoundly disturbed by the day’s events, experienced one final humiliation: his car had been stolen. He believed he knew who was responsible.
• • •
Although Al Capone had rather easily outwitted Eliot Ness, the racketeer was still unable to resume business as usual. Other law enforcement officers who were considerably more seasoned and effective assailed every corner of his empire.
In Miami Beach, police arrested “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn. The irrepressible triggerman had unwisely called attention to himself by emptying a machine gun into cans of soda pop floating in the bay behind the Capone estate. Shortly afterward, a sheriff’s posse equipped with a search warrant raided Capone’s Palm Island estate, seizing whiskey and champagne and arresting two of Capone’s young brothers, John and Albert, as well as four Capone employees, including his Cicero operative, Louis Cowen.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, Ralph was about to stand trial for income tax evasion. And on March 23 a federal grand jury indicted yet another Capone aide for income tax evasion. He was Frank Nitti, the so-called “Enforcer” who had assisted Jack Guzik in running the Capone organization during the ten months Al had spent in jail. Like the charges against Ralph Capone, the Nitti indictment came about as a result of Nels Tessem’s unequaled talent for snooping through financial records. Once again, Tessem began with a single piece of evidence, in this instance a check for $1,000, endorsed by Frank Nitti. Although the check had been cashed at the Schiff Trust and Savings Bank, that institution strenuously disclaimed any knowledge of Nitti. Undeterred, Tessem audited the bank’s books for the day on which the check had been cashed and discovered that they were exactly $1,000 short. “Who told you about this?” asked Bruno Schiff, the president of the bank. “No one,” said Tessem. Realizing the game was up, Schiff admitted that Nitti had indeed banked with Schiff Trust. As he produced a secret ledger of all the Nitti deposits, Schiff explained that Nitti had insisted on keeping his transactions off the books.
Tessem now had his evidence of Nitti’s concealed income. In the end, Nitti had proved to be smarter than Ralph in his financial dealings, but not smart enough to elude Special Agent Tessem’s scrutiny. According to the indictment, Nitti owed nearly $160,000 in back taxes on an unreported income of $742,887.81 for the years 1925 through 1927. Nitti immediately went into hiding, but it was plain that he would have to give himself up soon to face charges, just as Ralph was about to do.
With both Ralph Capone and Frank Nitti indictments to his credit, Tessem turned his attention to the most important financial partner, Jack Guzik. Familiar with how the racketeers attempted to conceal their money, Tessem made short work of turning up Jack Guzik’s aliases, but he was baffled when he learned of a new wrinkle Guzik had added. Instead of making his withdrawals in cash, Guzik received cashiers’ checks, and these had been prepared by a Fred Ries. This was no alias; Ries was in fact a cashier employed at one of the Capone gambling dens, and he frequently made both deposits and withdrawals for Guzik. Of all the leads Tessem had uncovered, Ries seemed the most tantalizing, the most likely to lead to Al Capone himself. Tessem turned over his findings to Frank Wilson of the IRS, who continued to scour financial records in search of Al Capone’s income. Tiring of his cramped office, Wilson took it upon himself to track down Ries, only to discover that the cashier had inexplicably disappeared. It w
as vital to find him, for the government’s case against Capone hung in the balance.
Finally, in Washington, D.C., the White House was focusing on Capone with renewed vigor provoked by the outburst of publicity surrounding his release from jail. Johnson’s boss, G. A. Youngquist, the assistant attorney general, began pressuring George E. Q. Johnson to resume his tax evasion case against the racketeer. Johnson didn’t need to be told; he had been pursuing the matter all along, but nothing would be worse than getting Capone all the way to trial only to see the racketeer acquitted. To gather sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction would take time. This was Al Capone they were dealing with after all, not his clumsy brother Ralph, and Al knew enough not to leave any fingerprints on his financial dealings. On the last day of March, Youngquist reported to the White House: “In reference to Al Capone, I called up Johnson in Chicago and got in touch with the Internal and Prohibition bureaus here, and asked that they start immediately, both of them, to see what they could find. . . . There is a possible prospect of getting a tax evasion indictment against him, but they haven’t got enough yet. He is very clever. He is three or four times removed from the actual operation. There is just one small item. That is some money transmitted to him by telegraph in Florida in 1928, but even that was transmitted to someone else down there for him.”
Although Capone continued to elude an indictment for tax evasion, other, more subtle challenges to his economic power loomed. America was entering an era of wrenching social disruption. Capone had gone to jail at the end of the Roaring Twenties and come out at the beginning of the Great Depression; in his ten-month absence, society had changed drastically. During the next four years, the aggregate value of all goods and services produced each year in the United States would decline from approximately $104 billion to $56 billion. In Iowa, for example, the price of wheat plummeted to eight cents a bushel, and a severe, prolonged drought dealt an additional blow to the farm economy. The economic collapse dealt a devastating blow to millions of Americans. Families broke up and a ghostly army of vagabonds, hoboes, and drifters roamed across the country in a futile search for work, a meal, a chance, anything. A popular song of the day, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” evoked the bleak fellowship of sudden impoverishment, a sense of hopelessness and dread growing in the hearts of Americans. “What was this gray lipless shape of fear that stalked their lives incessantly—that was everywhere, legible in the faces, the movements and the driven frenzied glances of the people who warmed on the streets,” asked Thomas Wolfe, in his 1935 novel, Of Time and the River. “What was this thing that duped men out of joy, tricked them out of all the exultant and triumphant music of the world, drove them at length into the dusty earth, cheated, defrauded, tricked out of a life by a nameless phantom, with all their glory wasted?” For millions of unemployed, disillusioned Americans, the unavoidable answer was the Depression.
Chicago’s corrupt and incompetent politicians left the city especially vulnerable to economic disaster. A task force investigating the financial crisis reported, “Mismanagement by Mayor Big Bill Thompson and his friends, and lethargy on the part of the public have reduced Chicago to bankruptcy.” The chairman of the group, Silas Strawn, offered no hope of a recovery. “I’m at my wit’s end,” he said. “This is the most serious situation ever confronting an American city—and everybody stays asleep.” The lack of money meant that schoolteachers, policemen, and firemen could no longer be paid. Thousands dropped from the city’s payroll into unemployment. Hundreds of vagabonds filled its parks each night.
At the same time, the newspapers estimated the wealth of the recently freed Al Capone to hover around the $40-million mark, and they claimed racketeering cost Chicago $150 million a year in uncollected taxes and lost business, but Capone himself found little consolation in these statistics when he confronted evidence of the toll the Depression was taking. A few days after his return to Chicago, he visited Burnham, the suburb whose government he controlled, and where he had spent so many carefree afternoons playing golf with his pals. In all of Burnham, he discovered, only three people (excluding those employed by City Hall) still held their jobs; one was the milkman, the other was the mailman, and the third was the schoolteacher, and she was getting paid only one month for every three she worked. When he checked up on the Sullivan family, he discovered that Tim, his former caddie and boxing protégé, earned a few pennies shining shoes, Mrs. Sullivan toiled as a scrubwoman, and Babe, Al’s former girlfriend, had vanished along with the jewelry he had lavished on her. “We practically lived on the three-day-old bread dad brought home from a bakery,” Timothy recalled.
As for Capone, he himself appeared to be unusually depressed. “He looked worn and tired,” in Timothy’s words. “All he could talk about was how the government was trying to destroy him.” No longer was he greeted as a popular Robin Hood figure; the workingman cared little whether Capone was “legitimate” or “illegitimate.” His picture beaming from the cover of Time magazine, Capone appeared to be another tycoon exploiting the masses. Conditioned by his months of confinement, he remained oblivious to the Depression and obsessed with his own predicament. “I’m sick of being shot at, sick of being trailed around by a bunch of hyenas watching for a chance to kill me,” he complained. “If I go to a race track or drop out to see the greyhounds run, I don’t know whether I’ll get back alive. If I step into a joint to buy a pack of cigarettes it’s even money I get a load of buckshot instead. Do you think I’d be fool enough to read a paper by a window in my own home? If I did, the chances are I’d be dead before I had time to glance over the headlines.”
Giving voice to concerns on which he had brooded for countless hours in jail, Capone lashed out at the press, in particular. “I’ve been accused of all the murders that have happened in Chicago in the last ten years,” he complained. As a result, people have “got me pegged for one of these bloodthirsty monsters you read about in story books—the kind that tortures his victims, cuts off their ears, puts out their eyes with a red-hot poker, and grins while he’s doing it. Now get me right—I’m no angel. I’m not posing as a model for youth. I’ve had to do a lot of things I don’t like to do. But I’m not as black as I’m painted. I’m human. I’ve got a heart in me. I’ll go as deep in my pocket as any man to help any guy that needs help. I can’t stand to see anybody hungry or cold or helpless. Many a poor family in Chicago thinks I’m Santa Claus. If I’ve given a cent to the poor in this man’s town, I’ll bet I’ve given a million dollars. Yes, a million.”
He emphasized one facet of his character calculated to appeal to the public: Al Capone, the devoted family man. “Ask my wife about my private life,” he challenged the press. “I live like any other businessman. Home every evening for dinner. Then smoking jacket, slippers, an easy chair, and a good cigar. I don’t chase around with women. And I’m not much of a drinker. . . . I’m nuts about music. Music makes me forget I’m Al Capone and lifts me up until I think I’m only a block or two from heaven. With me, grand opera is the berries.” But when a reporter asked him why, if life as a racketeer was so dangerous and loathsome, Capone did not simply retire, as he frequently promised in years gone by, Al replied from bitter experience: “Once in the racket, you’re in it for life. Your past holds you in it. The gang won’t let you out. And me settle down? Don’t make me laugh. If I did, I’d get mine so quick at the end of sawed-off shotgun it would be nobody’s business. . . . Murder, murder—that’s all this racket means. I’m sick of it. I’d give half my fortune to get out of it. If I could go to Florida and live quietly with my family for the rest of my days, I’d be the happiest man alive.”
• • •
The trial of Ralph Capone for income tax evasion commenced on April 9, three weeks after Al’s release from prison. The name of the presiding judge had become all too familiar to the Capones: the Honorable James H. Wilkerson of the U.S. District Court. Although George E. Q. Johnson, who masterminded the government’s case, did not advertise it as such, the trial w
as intended as a test case for Ralph’s younger brother Al, who was yet to be indicted. As such, it proved eminently successful, at least from Johnson’s perspective. The trial took just two weeks, during which the government prosecutors efficiently presented their evidence that Capone had failed to file income tax returns for the years 1922 to 1925. They also had the benefit of Nels Tessem’s damning analysis of Ralph’s financial misdealing at the Pinkert State Bank in Cicero. The four-foot stack of Ralph’s bank records uncovered by Tessem was so heavy that it had to be wheeled into court on a cart. In the face of the overwhelming evidence against him, Ralph was forced to admit that he had opened accounts under assumed names, but he tried to excuse his behavior on the grounds that it was a necessary procedure for a gambler to follow. And, by the way, he said, he was no bootlegger. He did admit that he was related to a certain Al Capone, also known as “Scarface,” “Snorky,” and the “Big Fellow,” but he could not say how Al earned his money. If the government wanted to know, they would have to ask Al himself about it.
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