by David Ward
Chicago in 1926 was in the midst of what has been called “the lawless decade.” The great national experiment, Prohibition, had given rise to the bootlegging business, creating an environment in which organized crime could thrive. Rival gangs ran prostitution, gambling, and extortion rackets along with their illegal liquor sales. These enterprises generated vast sums of money, and the gangs battled for control of distribution networks and territory.
At the same time, local government and law enforcement agencies were rife with corruption. Criminal entrepreneurs, emboldened by the presence of police officers, judges, and politicians on their payrolls, made little attempt to hide their activities, and violence spilled over into the streets for all to see. Gangs would abduct victims on the street and take them “for a ride” or drive past targets in their homes or businesses or while they were walking on the street, guns blazing from several cars.
Gang warfare in Chicago had been heightened by the arrival of Capone, a New York thug who took over the leadership of the Johnny Torrio organization and worked to expand its influence. Between 1922 and the end of 1925, gangsters killed 215 other gangsters in Chicago, and police killed 160. In the first ten months of 1926, 96 gangsters died in gang conflicts in and around Chicago, and police killed 60 more. Between 1927 and 1930 more gangsters died, “many of them on city streets.”5
The public was alarmed by the rise in violence, and aware of widespread official corruption. However, as long as Chicago’s gang members were gunning down mostly their own kind, public reaction remained muted.
The significance of the McSwiggin case was that it revealed a link between organized crime and law enforcement at the highest level in the state of Illinois. The public knew that Chicago mayor “Big Bill” Thompson was Al Capone’s candidate, but corruption at the state level was more difficult to countenance. And Capone’s seeming immunity made the public realize that both local and state government were powerless to prevent, control, or punish criminal wrongdoing.
McSwiggin’s murder case represented a turning point in the fight against organized crime. It set into motion a series of events that would involve the federal government much more deeply in the anticrime effort and ultimately lead to the opening of the federal prison on Alcatraz island as a place to securely incarcerate the country’s most dangerous felons.
Lawlessness, law enforcement’s impotence, and the danger to public safety posed by gangsters and outlaws—both real and perceived—had to worsen, however, before the federal government began to respond with special measures.
AL CAPONE AND MOB VIOLENCE IN CHICAGO
During the remainder of 1926, gun battles between the Capone mob and Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran continued. In August two incidents occurred in broad daylight on the crowded streets of downtown Chicago. In both cases, Capone mobsters fired at Weiss from speeding automobiles, smashing windows, and forcing passersby to run for cover. Incidents such as these prompted Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a dominant figure in organized crime in New York City, to remark after a visit to Chicago, “A real goddamn crazy place . . . nobody’s safe in the streets.”6
In 1927 Big Bill Thompson ran again for mayor despite condemnation of his candidacy in the press. One newspaper editorial claimed, “Thompson is a buffoon in a Tommyrot factory, but when his crowd gets loose in City Hall, Chicago has more need of Marines than any Nicaraguan town.” The Capone organization worked hard for Thompson’s election, contributing $260,000 and using every technique to assure a Thompson victory. (It was during this campaign that Capone was said to have advised the citizens of Chicago to “Vote early and vote often.”)7When Thompson won the election, the last hope civic leaders had for controlling organized crime in the city vanished. Adding to the despair, the ability of gangsters to literally get away with murder was dramatically illustrated again a year later by one of the most notorious episodes of criminal violence in American history.
On February 14, 1929, seven men who worked for Bugs Moran were in a warehouse on North Clark Street in Chicago, waiting for some empty trucks to take to Detroit, where they were planning to pick up smuggled Canadian whiskey. A Cadillac touring car of the type used by detectives pulled up in front of the warehouse. Five men, three in police uniforms, got out and entered the warehouse with drawn guns. The seven occupants were told to line up facing a wall. When they complied they were cut down by machine gun fire. Neighbors, hearing what sounded like pneumatic drills, saw several men come out of the warehouse with their arms raised, followed by men in police uniforms holding guns on those in front of them. The “police” and their captives climbed into the automobile and drove off.
Inside the warehouse a dog owned by one of the victims began to howl. As the howling went on and on, one resident walked over to the warehouse to investigate. He looked inside and began yelling that everyone inside the garage was dead. He was not quite correct; Frank Gusenberg, who had been hit by fourteen machine gun bullets, was miraculously still alive. Rushed to a hospital, he was questioned by a detective with whom he had gone to school. “Frank, in God’s name what happened? Who shot you?” “Nobody shot me,” Gusenberg replied. The detective told him that his brother Pete was dead, that he was dying, and asked him to reveal the names of the killers. Gusenberg refused, uttering as his last words, “I ain’t no copper.”8
Chicagoans were horrified by the slaughter on North Clark Street. Headlines declared that the incident indicated a “Return to Frontier Lawlessness” and a “Complete Breakdown of Law and Order.” One headline stated, “Police Unable to Cope with Mass Daylight Murder” and another asked, “Are We Under Gang Rule?”9 The public was fascinated by the incident, which went down in American history as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Newspapers printed close-ups of the corpses upside down “so that readers would not have to turn the page around to identify the victims.”10 The warehouse where the murders took place became a tourist attraction.
There was endless speculation about who was responsible for the killings. Rival gangster Bugs Moran commented, “Only Capone kills like that.” The public and the press, who regarded the Chicago police as corrupt, did not seriously question the report that policemen had been involved. Frederick D. Silloway, the local Prohibition administrator, made this announcement:
The murderers were not gangsters. They were Chicago policemen. I believe the killing was the aftermath to the hijacking of 500 cases of whiskey belonging to the Moran gang by five policemen six weeks ago. . . . I expect to have the names of these five policemen in a short time. It is my theory that in trying to recover the liquor the Moran gang threatened to expose the policemen and the massacre was to prevent the exposure.11
Al Capone had an unbeatable alibi as to his own direct involvement in the massacre—he was being questioned by agents of the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s Intelligence Unit at the time of the killings. But Moran was out for revenge. To take the heat off, Capone arranged to have himself arrested in Philadelphia by a detective friend on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon. Taken before a judge with the understanding that if he pleaded guilty he would receive only three months in jail, Capone was surprised to get a sentence of one year and to be taken promptly to Philadelphia’s Holmesburg County Prison. Three months later he was transferred to Eastern Penitentiary, where he received what is called “preferential treatment”:
Warden Herbert B. Smith made him more comfortable, giving him a cell to himself and letting him furnish it with rugs, pictures, a chest of drawers, desk, bookshelf, lamps and a $500 radio console. As his work assignment, he drew the untiring one of library file clerk. For ordinary inmates visiting hours were limited to Sundays, but Capone’s friends and family could come any day. From the warden’s office he was allowed to telephone whomever he chose, and he spoke often to his lawyers, his underworld colleagues and various politicians. . . .
The reporters Capone was willing to talk to had little difficulty getting to him either and they filled column after column with the minutiae of his daily e
xistence. CAPONE GAINS ELEVEN POUNDS . . . CAPONE DOESN’T GO TO CHURCH ON SUNDAYS . . . CAPONE PICKS CUBS TO WIN 1930 FLAG. . . . He bought $1,000 worth of arts and crafts produced by his fellow prisoners and mailed them to friends as Christmas gifts. He donated $1,200 to a foundering Philadelphia orphanage. Such Samaritan deeds, described at length by the press, aroused a good deal of sympathy for Capone. A civil engineer from Chicago, a total stranger to him, coming to Philadelphia on business, obtained permission to visit him, clasped his hand and told him, “Al, we’re with you.”12
Capone’s outstanding behavior allowed the jailers to reduce his sentence by two months and on March 17, 1930, he was smuggled past reporters in the warden’s car and driven to a nearby town where his own men picked him up and drove him back to Chicago.
HELP FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
Capone’s ability to evade arrest, let alone conviction, for any of the crimes he was believed to have committed, as well as his control of police officials, prosecutors, and city, county, and state judges, was growing along with his status as a benefactor of the poor. Thus community leaders began to look to the federal government for help in regaining control over their city. In 1929 Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, went to Washington, D.C., to urge President Herbert Hoover to have Prohibition agents stop “victimizing ordinary drinkers and instead concentrate on the principal bootleggers who were the source of corruption in Chicago. For instance . . . Al Capone.” McCormick was surprised that Hoover replied, “Who is Al Capone?” But after being briefed by McCormick and advised that Chicago police and courts had failed to bring Capone to justice, Hoover began asking his secretary of the treasury, “Have you got this fellow Capone yet. . . . I want that man in jail.”13 The Chicago Daily News publisher also led a delegation of civic leaders to Washington, D.C., to ask President Herbert Hoover to intervene. What the delegation wanted was an efficient, incorruptible criminal justice apparatus that would take over—and win—the battle against gangland in the nation’s second largest city.
In spring 1930 Frank Loesch, the head of the Chicago Crime Commission, announced the establishment of a “public enemies” list:
[It ranked] outstanding hoodlums, known murderers, murderers which you and I know but can’t prove . . . and there were about 100 of them, and out of that list I selected 28 men. . . . I put Al Capone at the head . . . the purpose is to keep the light of publicity shining on Chicago’s most prominent . . . and notorious gangsters to the end that they may be under constant observation by the law enforcing authorities and law-abiding citizens.
This list, as noted by Capone biographer Lawrence Bergreen, had significance “far beyond Chicago . . . it was reproduced in newspapers across the country . . . and continues to this day.”14 Becoming Public Enemy no. 1 made Al Capone the most notorious gangster in American history and brought to the nation’s attention dozens of other hoodlums and outlaws who seemed to operate successfully outside the law.
The trips to the nation’s capital by the newspaper publishers and other influential citizens of Chicago produced two federal initiatives. One, mounted by Eliot Ness and his Prohibition agents, was intended to break up Al Capone’s bootlegging business under the provisions of the Volstead Act. The second involved an effort by Frank Wilson and Internal Revenue Service agents to charge and convict Capone—who had never filed an income tax return—of tax evasion.15 It was the second strategy that finally brought him down.
IRS agents, operating under the assumption that they must produce evidence of income from illegal activities, had been unsuccessful in finding witnesses who were willing to testify against Capone before a grand jury. The break the government needed came when Agent Frank Wilson, working alone one evening, happened to open the drawer of an old file cabinet in a storeroom near the offices he and his men were using; inside he discovered a package wrapped in brown paper containing the three bound ledgers that had been picked up during the raid on one of Capone’s establishments after the murder of McSwiggin. The books had not been examined at that time; they had been turned over to the IRS for safekeeping, placed in the file cabinet, and forgotten. As he examined the ledgers, Wilson realized that they constituted the financial record of an enormous gambling operation, along with many notations of payments to “Al.” The IRS investigators immediately launched a search for the bookkeeper and by matching handwriting samples from bank deposit slips, voting registers, police records, and bail bond certificates to the penmanship in the ledgers they were able to identify the writer as one Leslie A. Shumway.
Shumway was located at one of Capone’s businesses where he worked as a bookkeeper. Warned that failure to cooperate would force the investigators to send out word that he was being sought to testify, with the likely result that Capone would have him “bumped off,” Shumway agreed to help the government in return for being hidden in California until the trial. With a key witness now able to link Capone to a source of income on which taxes had not been paid, the United States attorney, George E. Johnson, quickly assembled a grand jury and Capone was indicted for failing to pay $32,488.81 in taxes on an income of $123,102.89 in 1924. Twenty-two additional counts were then added, based on IRS calculations that Capone made at least $1,038,655.84 during the years 1925–1929 and should have paid $219,260.12 in taxes. The charges carried a sentence of up to thirty-four years in prison.16
To establish evidence of illegal income, the prosecution presented a parade of witnesses who described purchases Capone had made from them. The final witness, Fred Reis, a cashier in one of Capone’s gambling houses, provided a critically important piece of evidence—a check endorsed by Capone. This check was the only piece of paper that government investigators had been able to find that bore the defendant’s signature. In its closing argument the prosecution described Capone’s lavish lifestyle, saying that he lived “like a bejeweled prince in a palatial home,” bought “expensive motor cars” and “jewelry in vast amounts.” “Does anybody think that this man did not have a huge income?” asked the prosecutor. “He had an income that called for his paying to the government a substantial income tax.”17
Despite defense attempts to portray their client as a generous man who would not cheat on his income tax—“A tinhorn or a piker might try to defraud the government, but not Alphonse Capone”18—the jury returned a guilty verdict after less than a full day of deliberations. One week later, on October 24, 1931, Alphonse Gabriel Capone, alias Alphonse Brown, alias Al Brown, alias Scarface Brown, alias Scarface Capone, alias A. Costa, alias Scarface Al, returned to the courthouse for sentencing. Judge James Wilkerson imposed two consecutive five-year terms in federal prison, to be followed by one year in the county jail, fines amounting to $50,000, and $7,692.29 in court costs.
Capone was housed in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, where his presence soon produced problems for federal authorities. Reports reached Judge Wilkerson that Capone was receiving special privileges and conducting business from the jail. The Chicago Herald and Examiner reported, “Capone Runs Underworld from Cell, U.S. Reveals: Al Living in Luxury.” Capone, the newspaper contended, was living not in a cell but in a dormitory, “where he has the use of a comfortable hospital cot, a soft mattress, clean linen and a private shower.”19 There were allegations that alcohol was consumed in the jail, that a woman put on an “obscene” performance, and that his hoodlum pals were given free access to the jail after regular visiting hours. Despite an investigation that disputed most of these claims, the public again got the message that Capone’s influence and money allowed him to receive special treatment.20
On May 2, 1932 the United States Supreme Court rejected an appeal of Capone’s conviction and two days later he was hustled into a U.S. marshal’s vehicle and, accompanied by fifteen police cars, driven to a railway station to board the Dixie Flyer to the federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Georgia. Bureau of Prisons officials had decided that Leavenworth Penitentiary, closer by, was not a good choice for Capone’s confinement because a number of hi
s associates were already in that prison.21
Once Capone was in a federal prison many miles away from Chicago, the assumption was that his power and money would no longer bring him special privileges. But Atlanta’s warden, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Justice Department soon faced the problem of conveying the right image about the consequences of criminal wrongdoing for the country’s master criminal, even in one of the government’s highest-security penitentiaries.
A WAVE OF CRIME ACROSS
THE COUNTRY’S MIDSECTION
While Chicagoans were preoccupied during the 1920s and early 1930s with the activities and antics of Al Capone and other Chicago-area gangsters, law enforcement agencies across the Midwest and the Southwest experienced a troubling wave of bank robberies, ransom kidnappings, and jail escapes. The exploits of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin Karpis, and Ma Barker and her sons Dock and Fred captured the attention of newspaper reporters and their readers across the country and supplied the basis for gangster legends and Hollywood movies for decades to come. And to a public increasingly concerned that crime in America was getting out of hand, these outlaws also provided compelling evidence of an extraordinary threat.22 Criminals of this new class who used fast cars, carefully planned their crimes, and moved quickly and safely across state boundaries were not only difficult to capture but very likely to escape once in custody.
