During May, Public Enemy Number 1 was in and out of court on at least three occasions as he found to his dismay that bearing the label “Public Enemy” became a self-fulfilling prophecy. In years past, he had successfully eluded the bullets of rival gangsters, but he was not equal to the war of words that had been declared against him. House-bound on Palm Island, he became listless, moody, withdrawn; he seemed to be passing through life as if he were a ghost, and perhaps he was; he could live with being Al Capone, no matter what they said about him, but being Public Enemy Number 1 was unendurable. Beneath the brooding, he was furious. Why, they didn’t understand the first thing about him, these hypocritical gentlemen of the Chicago Crime Commission. Men like them paid him for booze on Saturday and condemned him on Sunday. In his own mind, Capone saw himself as a hero to his people, and he had endeavored to play that part since the days he ran with the Navy Street boys in Brooklyn. Now they called him a supercriminal, Public Enemy Number 1. The label was overwhelming, it was insulting, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Although Capone lived quietly in Miami Beach during the spring and early summer of 1930, his every action became newsworthy—reported and dissected in newspapers in the United States and England. Everything he did acquired sinister overtones. If he stayed indoors, he was holding secret meetings; if he went shopping, it was to distract attention from his nefarious activities. If he belched, the roar was reminiscent of machine guns. When he flew to Cuba for the day, the local newspapers warned against the possibility that he would turn Havana into another Chicago. Each day the Chicago newspapers gleefully described the legal net inexorably tightening around Public Enemy Number 1.
FLORIDA SUES TO OUST CAPONE; FIGHT HIM HERE
CAPONE DENIED WRIT TO STOP MIAMI ARRESTS
MIAMI JURORS HINT CAPONE IS A BAD INFLUENCE
CAPONE SEIZED IN MIAMI
MIAMI POLICE ARREST CAPONE FOR THIRD TIME
AL CAPONE ARRESTED AGAIN; FACES TWO PERJURY CHARGES
SET AL CAPONE’S MIAMI PERJURY TRIAL FOR JULY 8
CAPONE HIRES LAWYERS AS U.S. PROBES INCOME
LAWYERS CALL CAPONE’S MIAMI TRIAL “FRAMEUP”
CAPONE EAGER TO QUIT MIAMI AND COME HOME
Then, just as the law appeared to be closing in on Public Enemy Number 1, he escaped, at least temporarily. On the advice of his lawyers, he boldly charged S. D. McCreary, the safety director of Miami, with false arrest, and on May 27 Public Enemy Number 1 appeared in court—not as a defendant but as a plaintiff. He had come to testify against his tormentor.
Public Enemy Number 1 told the court, “I saw Mr. McCreary at the [police] station when they tried to take my valuables. I asked them for a receipt and they said that they didn’t give them. Mr. McCreary said, ‘Take them off of him and throw him in the jail.’ They placed me in one cell . . . and a little later they changed me to a cell that had no air. . . . He left word that I was to have nothing to eat or drink. He told me this in front of three witnesses. He tried to make me miserable. I was not allowed to use the telephone or send out word. They also had orders not to give me blankets,” he added, eliciting laughter. (It later emerged that McCreary had thrown Capone’s valuables, including more than a thousand dollars, his watch, and other personal items, into a toilet.)
“What did they charge you with?” asked Warren L. Newcomb, a justice of the peace who was acting as judge and, when the mood came over him, as jury.
“Nothing at all,” Public Enemy Number 1 shot back.
The following day, the city commissioner, John C. Knight, took the stand; Public Enemy Number 1 had charged him as well as several other city officials with conspiracy to arrest him. On this occasion, Justice Newcomb asked most of the questions, and, in the process, demonstrated that he was not going to permit the plaintiff to be arrested time and again without a warrant just because the newspapers had taken to calling him Public Enemy Number 1. In one charged exchange, Knight explained that he considered the plaintiff a “menace to the community” based on information in newspaper and magazine accounts. At this point, Justice Newcomb subjected the commissioner to a humiliating catechism.
“Do you believe in the Constitution of the United States?” Newcomb inquired.
“Yes, sir.”
“You believe it should not be violated?”
“Yes.”
“You believe that unless you can place a specific charge against a man he should not be arrested?”
“My feeling about that, Mr. Newcomb, is that if a man has leprosy it thereby creates a menace to the community.”
“Where would you suggest this man live?” asked one of Capone’s lawyers.
“I don’t know,” Knight said.
“He is an American citizen, isn’t he?”
“I cannot answer that question.”
“He has as much right to walk the streets of Miami as you have.”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Do you believe in mob rule?” asked Justice Newcomb.
“No, sir.”
“Do you believe in the law taking its course?”
“Yes, sir.”
In that case, Newcomb lectured, “You don’t believe that Capone should be arrested and placed in jail incommunicado at any time without having a specific charge against him.”
The following day, Public Enemy Number 1 was vindicated when the city manager rescinded the order to arrest the racketeer on sight. To ensure that Capone was not harassed again, Justice Newcomb declared him a “state witness” and warned that anyone who interfered with him would have to answer the consequences. Finally, McCreary was ordered to pay court costs. With that, Capone won a small but significant victory and was able to keep the police at bay in Miami if nowhere else. In the morning, Capone beheld a headline calculated to make him grin, for once: “PEACE JUSTICE MOVES TO AID OF ‘CITIZEN AL’.”
Within days, the state of Florida attempted to oust Capone by padlocking the Palm Island villa because it was a “public nuisance.” Again, Capone made a point to appear in court throughout the hearings, attracting attention if only because of his clothing. “During the five days of the court proceedings,” the Chicago Tribune noted, “he has worn five entirely different outfits, with motifs of white, tan, blue, green, and gray, respectively.” On this occasion Circuit Judge Paul D. Barns ruled that the state of Florida could not carry out its plan because “the only cause of annoyance is the mere presence of Al Capone upon the premises.” So Capone the colorful won this case, too, and kept his house open.
The city of Miami immediately retaliated by issuing a warrant for his arrest, with which he was served even before he arrived home to celebrate this latest victory. In this instance, he was accused of perjury. S. D. McCreary, the safety director who, Capone said, prevented him from calling his lawyer and confined him to a cell without blankets, charged that Public Enemy Number 1 was a bold-faced liar. No one paid attention to McCreary’s claim, and by now the pattern was clear. The Miami law enforcement authorities would not be able to force Capone to leave their city. It was not supposed to end this way, with Capone hobbling the local law enforcement authorities and a judge lecturing everyone about Capone’s constitutional rights, but that is exactly what happened. Again and again he had demonstrated his resourcefulness in the courts.
At the moment of victory, Capone suddenly alienated his lawyer, Vincent Giblin, who had sent Capone a bill for $50,000. This was a lot of money, but not in light of the value of the freedom and peace of mind Giblin had been able to win for Capone. Nonetheless, he refused to honor the debt. Normally, Capone paid substantial fees without complaint to lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. Perhaps on this occasion he failed to understand what Giblin had done to deserve such a large fee; perhaps he simply did not have enough money on hand. In any event, Giblin would not put up with this kind of treatment from Al Capone or anyone else, and one day he simply arrived at the Palm Island villa without warning, rushed over to Capone, and, clutching the racketeer by the
shirt, said that if he were not paid that instant he would bash in Al’s face. Amazed and, for once, intimidated, Capone reluctantly led the lawyer up to the master bedroom, where Capone stashed his cash in the chest at the foot of the bed. He opened the chest, scooped out a handful of bills, and handed them to Giblin. When he later counted the money, the lawyer realized he had still not been paid in full, and he sued Capone for the rest of the fee.
As a result of this episode, Capone lost the best lawyer he had ever had. Without the benefit of Giblin’s vigorous protection, he was vulnerable once again. Since his appointment as a U. S. attorney for Chicago two years earlier, George E. Q. Johnson had devoted his best efforts to assembling a case against Al Capone. During that time, the investigation had grown to include the FBI, the IRS, the Secret Six, the Chicago Crime Commission, and even President Hoover. Despite the countless man hours these agencies had devoted to the cause and the reams of newsprint their efforts had generated, they had come up with next to nothing with which to indict Al Capone. It was true they had gotten Ralph Capone convicted of tax evasion, but Ralph Capone was not Public Enemy Number 1. In fact, neither the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago nor the IRS Intelligence Unit had been able to gather sufficient evidence against Al Capone to obtain an indictment. After two years, they were beginning to look foolish and inept. And the longer Al Capone remained free, the better he looked, stronger and bolder and entitled to his freedom now that he had endured the government’s scrutiny.
That situation was permanently altered on June 9, 1930, when a shot rang out in the Chicago Loop. If not heard around the world, the shot made headlines across the country and pitched the city headlong into a new crisis. Not even the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre had caused an outcry of such intensity, and the reason for all the shouting was quite simple: for the first time, the victim of a gangland slaying was not a gangster but a reporter, and in this instance the unlucky reporter happened to be Al Capone’s friend and contact at the Chicago Tribune, Jake Lingle.
• • •
According to one tally, Chicago had been the scene of 530 gangland slayings since the start of Prohibition a decade earlier; set against this statistic was the unwritten but fervently held rule of the era that gangsters shed the blood only of other gangsters. Journalists, like women and children, were strictly hors de combat. At least they were until the afternoon of June 9, when a Tribune reporter was assassinated in front of hundreds of witnesses. No one doubted that it was a gangland assassination, and theories inevitably invoked the name of Al Capone. But Alfred “Jake” Lingle, police reporter, was not what he appeared. Although he worked for the Tribune, Jake Lingle, in fact, proved the rule that gangsters did kill only their own kind.
Until the shooting, recalls his Tribune colleague Walter Trohan, “Jake Lingle was known as a friend of Al Capone’s. He could approach Capone and ask what he was doing. In general Lingle was known to have a lot of underworld contacts.” Although Trohan and the others at the paper did not consider Lingle dishonest, “he was a ham actor, a show-off. He and another police reporter liked to put on a big act in which they borrowed a hundred or two from each other and paid it back the next day to show they were big shots. We didn’t have that kind of money.” Another Tribune reporter recalls Lingle’s swagger at poker games: “He would take money out of his billfold, sometimes a pile of thousand-dollar bills. We’d ask him about this. And we all accepted his story that he had inherited a lot of money from a rich uncle.” There was no rich uncle, of course. A journalist who looked into the matter discovered that Lingle inherited just $500 from his father. At the Tribune, Lingle made $65 a week, not a bad salary for a reporter but hardly enough to stuff a billfold.
This was Chicago during Prohibition, not the Columbia School of Journalism, and many reporters augmented their meager salaries with money acquired through job-related scams. They quickly realized how to obtain free tickets, free meals, a box of good Cuban cigars, a bottle of imported Scotch, and, on occasion, cash in return for a favorable story. For this reason, reporters got a lot of attention but little respect, especially from other reporters. The prevailing attitude was expressed in The Front Page, the 1928 hit play written by two celebrated graduates of Chicago newsrooms, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. “Journalists!” exclaims Hildy Johnson, a character closely modeled on an actual reporter of the day, Hilding Johnson of the Herald and Examiner. “Peeking through keyholes! Running after fire engines like a lot of coach dogs! Waking people up in the middle of the night to ask them what they think of Mussolini. Stealing pictures from old ladies of their daughters that get raped in Oak Park. A lot of lousy, daffy, buttinskis, swelling around with holes in their pants, borrowing nickels from office boys. . . . I don’t need anybody to tell me about newspapers. I’ve been a newspaperman fifteen years. A cross between a bootlegger and a whore.” That was a fairly accurate portrait of the real-life police reporter, Jake Lingle.
Bribery was a fact of life in certain Chicago newsrooms. When a young reporter named Vern Whaley came to Chicago “with a lot of hay on my shoulder” and landed a job as the boxing correspondent for the Chicago Evening Post at $45 a week, he thought he was doing well until he met a “big, tall Irishman named Jack O’Keefe” who had just read one of Whaley’s boxing articles. “I want to shake your hand,” he told Whaley, who recalls, “He grabbed my hand, and when I got my hand back there were five $100 bills in it. I said, ‘What’s it for?’ ” And O’Keefe said, ‘I want you to buy yourself a new hat with that.’ ‘I could buy a haberdashery with that kind of dough,’ I told him.” After repeatedly experiencing this generosity, he decided he had better talk to his editor. Whaley confessed that back in Des Moines, where he worked on the Register for $25 a week, his superiors warned him against taking money in return for anything he wrote, but here in Chicago, “every time I write something somebody comes up and hands me a bill. And I feel guilty taking this money because I know it’s wrong.” In only six weeks, he had socked away over $4,000 from the bribes, and he was still a green kid from Iowa, who refused to spend it because he figured he would have to give it back when he was found out. When Whaley finished his story, his editor “looked shocked, as if he’d been hypnotized. He didn’t say anything to me. He just got out of his chair, shaking his head, looked out the window at Wacker Drive and didn’t say anything. Then he starts to talk, but his back’s still to me, and he says, ‘Well, Vern, the budget doesn’t permit me to give you any more salary right now, but’—and he turns and looks me right me in the face—‘take all you can get.’ ”
For Whaley, Lingle, and others like them the opportunities for corruption in Prohibition-era Chicago were endless. Soon after he switched to the Tribune, Whaley was invited to a sportswriters’ lunch hosted by Al Capone; it was, he discovered, a standing invitation to a weekly gathering. The topic under discussion at these lunches was always the same: who would win the fights. The term for a fixed fight, he learned, was a “Barney,” but not all of the fights were Barneys, though many were. And the funny thing was, Whaley says, “some of the best fights I ever saw were Barneys.” Soon Whaley, like so many others, fell under Capone’s spell. “The booze was good, the meal was great, and at the end, Capone himself got up and passed around this box of Havana cigars. Now those cigars must have cost a buck and a half apiece, they were great big ones, and I was smoking nickel cigars at the time. White Owls. Well, I lit up Capone’s cigar and I puffed on it a couple times, and it was exotic, it was so delicious. And as I started to describe the joy of smoking that cigar, the other guys looked at me like I was crazy, and Capone sat at the end of the table, smiling. When I got up to leave, I’m still puffing on this cigar, and he says, ‘Here, Vern, here’s a gift.’ He gave me fifty of those expensive cigars. I could never smoke a cheap cigar again for the rest of my life.” Walter Trohan recalled attending another Capone soiree, this one attended by the press and politicians alike in a West Side restaurant. “People were fawning over Capone,” he remembers. “They were payin
g court to him, delighted to go up to him and shake his hand. I got highly indignant and turned around and left, even though the drinks were free.”
Although Lingle was only one of many journalists close to Capone, the reporter flaunted the connection. He wore a diamond-studded belt buckle Capone had given him, and he liked to startle his Tribune colleagues by claiming he was responsible for fixing the price of beer in Chicago. In reality, Lingle no more fixed the price of beer than Billy Sunday did. Although he was no bootlegger, Lingle was an informer, and that was a dangerous occupation in Chicago. Even worse, he had a penchant for double- and triple-crossing those close to him. Says Trohan: “Shortly before he was shot, Jake went to the city editor and wanted him to fire me because he thought I had insulted him. The point was that Jake had come to me and asked me to fix a couple of property taxes for two gals. It was a common thing, like fixing a speeding ticket. I took ’em to an assistant state’s attorney, and I said, ‘Jake Lingle asked me to have you take care of ’em,’ and he said, ‘What are they?’ and I said in a wisecracking way, ‘I don’t know—one of Jake’s rackets.’ When this got back to Lingle, it made him very angry, because he was above the rackets. Or pretended to be. He was on the take, I’m sure. That’s why he was so touchy about my remark, but at the time I knew nothing about it.”
In addition to accepting money and favors from bootleggers, Lingle also acted as a liaison between the Tribune and the Chicago police. In this area he did have some real clout; in fact, he was the man who selected Chicago’s next chief of police. “Our managing editor,” says Trohan, “was a fine gentleman named Edward Scott Beck, who greatly helped to build the Tribune into a powerful paper. He was then in his seventies and lived on the Near North Side. Whenever he’d hear of a gambling joint, a speakeasy, or a house of prostitution in the neighborhood, he’d go to Lingle and say, ‘Have the chief of police raid this place and close it.’ And that was what Lingle would do.” At this time, according to Trohan, a real estate scandal erupted at City Hall, and the Tribune came to play a major role by exposing it. As a result, John Stege, the chief of police who had engaged in so much pointless verbal sparring with Capone, resigned; to mollify the paper, the Thompson administration, being run by Samuel Ettelson, the corporation counsel, in Thompson’s absence, allowed the Tribune to select Stege’s successor. The Tribune editors in turn went to their police reporter, Jake Lingle, for a recommendation. “He picked a fellow named Bill Russell,” Trohan recalls, “who had been a copper in his neighborhood when he was a kid. He was a good man, a nice fellow. Crime was important news, and it was very important for the Tribune to have a friendly chief of police and get a fair break.” That was how deals were struck in Chicago; the interested parties—in this case the Police Department, the Tribune, City Hall, and the Capone organization—worked together through middlemen and arrived at compromises. Thus, through his man Jake Lingle, Al Capone was able to approve the city’s next chief of police. Lingle had done a great service for Capone; he had earned his keep. That was why he could afford to live in the Stevens Hotel, own a country house, and drive a flashy car. That was why he could bark at Ralph Capone on the telephone. Only in Chicago could a man function as a kingmaker in the Police Department and the confidant of gangsters—and have his byline in the newspaper.
Capone Page 53
