Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  But Lingle wanted more. His influence made him feel invulnerable when in fact his position was extremely vulnerable. Acting as a double agent or even a triple agent was too thrilling to resist. Not satisfied with playing this extremely tricky role, he agreed to inform on Capone for the federal government. On June 8, Frank Wilson, the dogged IRS investigator, visited the publisher of the Tribune, Robert McCormick, to request an interview with Jake Lingle, “whom I heard had many underworld contacts.” As Wilson wrote in his autobiography, Special Agent, “Colonel McCormick was cooperative and promised me an interview with Lingle inside of forty-eight hours.” McCormick went so far as to promise Wilson, “I’ll get Lingle to go all the way with you.” The appointment was scheduled for June 10.

  One day before his appointment with Wilson, Jake Lingle left the Stevens Hotel bound for the Tribune, where he advised his editor that something was stirring in Chicago’s rackets, something on the North Side: “I’ve been trying to find ‘Bugs’ Moran—he’d tell me, I think, what the dope is.” Go to it, said his boss. Since the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre had decimated its ranks, the Moran outfit had continued to function in a reduced capacity, still controlling bootlegging in a tightly circumscribed territory on the North Side, and while Moran’s clout could not compare to Capone’s, “Bugs” was still a presence in Chicago.

  It was a fine day, and Lingle strolled through the Loop toward what was known as “The Corner,” the intersection of Clark and Randolph, reputedly a meeting place for racketeers, but he soon forgot all about “Bugs” Moran and the North Side and decided he would do what he liked best, which was to fritter away the afternoon at the track. He headed for the Illinois Central Railroad station, where a train bound for the Washington Park racetrack was scheduled to depart at 1:30 P.M. He broke his jaunty stride long enough to purchase a racing form, then entered an eighty-five-foot long pedestrian tunnel running beneath Michigan Avenue to the train terminal. A thin young man, well turned out, began to follow him, and as Lingle neared the end of the tunnel, the young man produced a revolver, closed in on Lingle, and, holding the gun inches from the back of the reporter’s head, fired once. Lingle fell to the ground, the racing form in his hand and a lit cigar clenched between his teeth. He was thirty-nine years old at the time of his death. The shot echoed throughout the tunnel, the killer fled up the staircase, and a woman screamed. Several bystanders chased the killer along Randolph Street, through an alley, onto Wabash. Policemen joined the race, but in the end the killer got away, though not before dozens of people had seen him.

  The next day, the murder of Jake Lingle dominated all the Chicago newspapers, but his employer, the Chicago Tribune, was now itself a part of the story. And when people in Chicago referred to the Tribune, they usually meant its imperious publisher, Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick.

  Even by the rather extravagant standards of Chicago tycoons, McCormick qualified as a great eccentric. He was, in all likelihood, the only newspaper publisher who buried his wife with full military honors, the only newspaper publisher ever to have made a habit of walking the streets of his city disguised as a blind man, accompanied by a Seeing Eye dog. He was an intimidating presence. Nobody called him “Bob,” “Robert,” or even “Mr.” He was always known as “the Colonel.” He came by his high estate as the scion of not one or even two but three dynasties: the Medills, the Pattersons, and the McCormicks. Born in 1880, he attended Groton and Yale before taking his place in the family business, which he successfully administered. In a 1934 analysis of McCormick’s paper, Fortune magazine proclaimed, “The Tribune is a great money-maker. It dominates the Chicago newspaper field in circulation and advertising linage. Its circulation (except on Sunday when the Hearst paper is still ahead) is about two and a half times that of its only morning competitor, the Herald and Examiner. Almost twice as many people buy the Tribune as buy the Chicago Daily News.”

  Those who worked for the Colonel held him in awe, even as they chuckled at his eccentricities. “He was a great man in the sense that he was trying to educate his readers instead of pandering to them,” said Walter Trohan, echoing the sentiments of many. For instance, McCormick insisted the paper heed his idiosyncratic notions of grammar: no s in “island,” only one z in “jazz”; “freight” became “frate,” and “clue” “clew,” “synagogue” “syn-agog,” and so on through the language. Some said McCormick inherited his linguistic ideas from his grandfather; others believed he was taking revenge on one of his Groton masters. More significantly, he made the Tribune into a forum for his convictions about everything from world affairs (the paper was notoriously isolationist) to Prohibition (the paper vehemently opposed it).

  At the time the Lingle scandal broke, McCormick, the man who inherited an empire, had already had one memorable encounter with Capone, the man who’d stolen an empire. The occasion was a threatened strike by the Newsboys’ Union, which was allied with the Capone organization, in early 1929. In his account, McCormick related how he headed off the strike personally and put Capone to flight.

  The publishers called a meeting to hear the demands. I arrived late. As I entered an outer office, I saw several swarthy, evil-looking men who eyed me coldly. Inside I saw to my amazement that Al Capone brazenly had invaded the meeting with the aim of terrorizing those present. I ordered Capone to leave and to take his plug-uglies with him. I knew his reputation but I also knew he had never killed anyone himself and I didn’t think he’d start then. Capone got out. He didn’t muscle in on the newspapers. We continued to expose him.

  The truth was more complicated. Capone happened to be present at the meeting because his man in Mayor Thompson’s City Hall, Daniel Serritella, was also the head of the Newsboys’ Union. Although McCormick tried to give the impression that he dealt with the mob-controlled union against his will, he did employ Moe Annenberg’s brother Max as the director of circulation for the Tribune. Max owed his job to his ties to both Serritella and Capone, and he used those connections to assure the Tribune’s commercial success.

  In light of this arrangement, Serritella’s eyewitness account offers a more plausible version of the meeting between Capone and McCormick and highlights Annenberg’s role, which McCormick had conveniently omitted:

  A little over two years ago, Max Annenberg, director of circulation of the Chicago Tribune, . . . told me the Tribune was having some trouble with their chauffeurs and drivers. . . . Annenberg said he wanted to treat the [news] boys right and that he wanted to reach someone who could get the executive committee to fix the strike up.

  I told him that as president of the newsboys’ union there was nothing I could do. Then Max Annenberg said he would call up Capone and see if he could do anything in the matter, which he did and made an appointment with Capone to meet him in the Tribune’s office. I attended this meeting, at which Capone agreed to use his influence to stop the strike, which prevented the same. Max Annenberg then brought in Robert McCormick, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, and introduced McCormick to Capone. McCormick thanked Capone for calling off the strike for the Tribune and said, “You know, you are famous, like Babe Ruth. We can’t help printing things about you, but I will see that the Tribune gives you a square deal.”

  As a result of these negotiations, the Tribune found itself in the peculiar position of denouncing Capone even as it relied on his “muscle” to facilitate its circulation. But the idea of maintaining an arm’s length relationship with Capone made McCormick uneasy and fearful of assassination. Coping with the threat in the manner to which he was accustomed, he purchased a bulletproof Rolls-Royce to ferry him between his office in the Tribune tower and his 800-acre estate in Wheaton, Illinois.

  Insulated by his wealth and position, McCormick lived in a different world from that of his reporters. At the time of Lingle’s murder, he let the impression stand that he had never heard of the man and had no idea that anyone so closely involved with the Capone organization worked at the Tribune. Fred Pasley, the Tribune reporter, claim
ed in his early book on Capone, “[Lingle’s] obscurity was such that Colonel Robert R. McCormick, editor and publisher, was unaware of his identity.” This excuse was widely accepted, in part because McCormick seemed so remote, but it was false. Days earlier, Frank Wilson of the IRS had approached McCormick about Lingle; the two men had discussed Lingle’s contacts with Capone, and in the end, the publisher himself had offered to produce Jake Lingle. And Lingle was killed the day before he was to keep an appointment with the IRS that McCormick had arranged. All of which meant that McCormick had known all along who Jake Lingle was. Furthermore, McCormick knew that Lingle maintained close contacts with the Capone organization—as did anyone who saw his diamond-studded belt buckle and read his newspaper articles. But it wouldn’t do for the publisher of the Chicago Tribune to admit that he knowingly employed a reporter closely connected to the Capone organization, not when the paper had been crusading against Capone with ferocious headlines and damning editorials. Crime was the big story in Chicago at the time, and the Tribune stood to lose all credibility on that issue if the truth came out. That was why Lingle’s murder was so alarming to McCormick and the Tribune; it threatened to expose how one of the the paper’s most influential reporters had closely collaborated with Al Capone. It was bad enough that the paper had to rely on the likes of Max Annenberg and Capone to ensure its circulation; to hint that Capone controlled its reporting as well would have been devastating.

  McCormick chose the safer course of feigning ignorance and taking refuge in a display of shock, dismay, indignation—the emotions befitting the publisher of a great newspaper. Vern Whaley, who by now had moved to the Tribune, remembers that on the morning after Lingle’s murder, “Colonel McCormick called a staff meeting in the city room, and he was livid with rage. He addressed the whole editorial staff, a hundred and fifty people. The place was jammed. I thought he was going to have a stroke, but he swore in strong language that the Tribune was now going to avenge Jake Lingle’s death. He would take care of that crime syndicate. It was a hell of a meeting.”

  In life, Lingle had been a fixer for the Capone organization; in death, McCormick portrayed him as a martyr to the Capone organization. The Tribune posted a reward of $25,000 “for information which will lead to the conviction of the slayer or slayers,” and other Chicago dailies also kicked in, more than doubling the amount. McCormick’s paper backed the reward with furious words, beginning with an editorial devoted to the Lingle murder.

  THE CHALLENGE

  The meaning of this murder is plain. It was committed in reprisal and in attempt at intimidation. Mr. Lingle was a police reporter and an exceptionally well-informed one. His personal friendships included the highest police officials and the contacts of his work made him familiar to most of the big and little fellows of gangland. . . . What made him valuable to his newspaper marked him as dangerous to killers. . . . It is war. There will be casualties, but that is to be expected, it being war. . . . The challenge of crime to the community must be accepted. It had been given with bravado. It is accepted and we’ll see what the consequences are to be. Justice will make a fight of it or it will abdicate.

  In its splendor and pageantry, the funeral of Alfred Lingle was worthy of a dignitary, indeed, it was worthy of any gangster, not excepting Dion O’Banion. The Police Department, the Fire Department, the American Legion, even the Navy all sent delegates to march through the streets of Chicago. Prominent judges, aldermen, and prosecutors appeared in the procession, and Bill Russell, whom Lingle had arranged to be appointed the chief of police, served as the head pallbearer. Born a Jew, Lingle was buried as a Catholic at Mt. Carmel Cemetery, the final resting place of so many other racketeers; it was only a few paces from his tombstone to the elegant obelisk commemorating Dion O’Banion. At the graveside, recalls Walter Trohan, “The priest delivered a sermon that Lingle was a hero, having been killed by gangsters, but many people thought the priest had his fingers crossed when he gave that sermon, that even he suspected that Jake wasn’t so good.”

  The investigation into Lingle’s murder turned up evidence that the slain reporter was indeed not “so good.” For this, the credit belonged not to the Chicago Tribune, which continued to mourn Lingle as a martyr, but to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which hastened to publish details of Lingle’s career as a fixer, the Capone belt buckle he proudly wore, and his prodigal spending. And the Post-Dispatch had received its information from Frank Wilson of the IRS. Lingle, it will be recalled, was supposed to meet with Wilson on June 10, the day after the reporter was murdered. Just after Lingle’s death, Wilson questioned Frankie Pope, who managed gambling dens in Cicero for Capone, and Pope told Wilson that Lingle was not what he seemed. “Jake,” said Pope, “was a fixer.” Wilson passed this lead on to to a reporter at the Post-Dispatch, John T. Rogers, who began investigating Lingle’s double life. The resulting exposé sent shock waves through Chicago, especially its newspapers, and the Tribune in particular, for just prior to publishing his article, Rogers called McCormick to tell him of its disturbing contents. McCormick reacted with a show of outrage, but he was powerless to stop the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from going forward. “It was not Lingle’s career as a reporter on which the searchlight of investigation has been focused,” Rogers wrote. “It was his life of ease, enjoyment and plenty, and the power he wielded in police affairs, that has aroused the curiosity not only of the new police commissioner but of the Tribune itself, and turned the inquiry for the moment on the man and the mysterious sources of the large sums of money that passed with regularity through his bank account.”

  A separate investigation into Lingle’s finances yielded disturbing details of his shady practices. In a period of two years, he had accumulated nearly $64,000 in his account at the Lake Shore Trust and Savings Bank, and he had plunged heavily into stocks in partnership with his friend, Police Chief Russell. But Lingle always needed more money; at the time of his death he had lost a quarter of a million dollars in the stock market. The growing tide of scandal and corruption forced the resignation of both Lingle’s friend Bill Russell, the chief of police, and the deputy chief, John Stege, who had uttered so many memorable and empty threats against Capone. The revelations also brought grief to Colonel McCormick, and his rivals were quick to embarrass him. “Big Bill” Thompson, whom the Tribune had vilified for years, seized the opportunity to mock the newspaper. At press conferences, he made political hay out of the Tribune’s misery by calling the paper the “Lingle Wrecking Crew” or the “Lingle Evangelistic Institute.” The lines drew hearty laughter from reporters toiling for rival papers.

  In the end, McCormick was forced to repudiate Lingle. It would no longer do for his newspaper to build the slain reporter into a martyr; the Tribune suddenly denounced him as a scoundrel who had deceived everyone around him. “Alfred Lingle now takes on a different character, one in which he was unknown to the management of the Tribune when he was alive,” the paper claimed. “The reasonable appearance against Lingle now is that he was accepted in the world of politics and crime for something undreamed of in his office and that he used this in undertakings which made him money and brought him to his death.” In its defense, the Tribune lamely argued, “There are weak men on other newspapers and in other professions, in positions of trust and responsibility greater than that of Alfred Lingle.”

  Pressing the attack on racketeers to deflect attention from its own sins, the Tribune initiated a splashy antigangster campaign. McCormick assigned Lingle’s boss, Robert M. Lee, the city editor, to enlist the support of Judge John Lyle, who remained eager to see his name in the headlines. “Is the law helpless against the gangsters?” Lee asked the judge. “Can’t some way be found to haul them into court and make them answer questions under penalty of prison if they lie?” And then Lee spoke words certain to endear the cause to Lyle: “You can be sure that the newspapers, the civic organizations and all the decent people will line up solidly behind you.” It had long been Lyle’s dream to run for mayor of Chicago, so th
e carrot of support Lee dangled was naturally most attractive. Lyle agreed and immediately swung into action, meeting regularly with Tribune representatives and assigning law clerks to dig up statutes to be used against the gangsters. In the end, they unearthed obscure ordinances concerning “vagrancy” and “vagabonds,” two extremely elastic terms. Lyle conveyed the impression that the idea of trying Capone and the other Public Enemies as vagrants was an original one, when in fact the state of Florida had already tried the same tactic, but with little success. However, he was convinced that Capone could be convicted as a vagrant in Chicago. Once convicted, he would not spend much time in jail on a vagrancy charge—the law called for only modest fines and sentences—but Lyle predicted banner headlines and great publicity. And from there it would be only a short step to the mayor’s office.