Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  The year Torrio came to Chicago the armies of reform were beginning to gather strength. Crisis after crisis shook the Levee, toppling some of its vice lords, but Torrio steered his uncle safely through all of them. On the night of October 18, 1909, the English evangelist Gipsy Smith, accompanied by three Salvation Army bands, led 2,000 faithful to the red-light district. By the time they got to Twenty-second Street 20,000 curious Chicagoans were marching with them. As the harlots and their madams looked on in stunned disbelief from behind closed shutters, the bands struck up and the con gregation joined Smith in the hymn "Where He Leads Me I Will Follow." Marching back and forth through the Levee, they knelt before the most notorious brothels like the Everleigh Club and Colosimo's Victoria, recited the Lord's Prayer and sang "Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?" Smith climaxed the invasion with a prayer for all of the Levee's fallen women.

  One immediate result was not what the evangelist intended. Many of the youths in the great throng, who might never have set foot inside "this hellhole of sin" had not Gipsy Smith led them there, remained to taste the forbidden fruits. The district had never been livelier. "We are glad of the business, of course," said Minna Everleigh, wickedly, "but I am sorry to see so many nice young men coming down here for the first time."

  The long-range repercussions, however, advanced the cause of rectitude. The evangelist had focused the attention of powerful church and civic groups on the extent of prostitution and white slavery in Chicago. Two months after Smith's march the Federated Protestant Churches, representing 600 parishes, passed a resolution demanding the appointment of an investigative Vice Commission. The Republican mayor, Fred A. Busse, an obese barroom brawler and crony of racketeers, found it expedient to comply. The commission's blunt 400-page report, published the following year, enumerating the city's brothels and estimating their enormous profits, jolted the normally apathetic citizenry. The newspapers joined in the clamor for reform.

  Busse, meanwhile, had been succeeded by a cultivated, debonair Democrat, Carter H. Harrison, Jr. Like most of Chicago's officials, whether corrupt or honest, like Busse before him, Mayor Harrison believed that a red-light district, tolerated though not legalized, offered the best chance of containing and controlling prostitution. Abolition, they argued, would not eliminate the evil; it would only disperse it. But to appease the reformers, Harrison ordered the police to clean out the flats and houses of assignation along South Michigan Avenue skirting the Levee. Inside the Levee the only major casualties were the Everleigh sisters, who had been brash enough to distribute a glossy illustrated brochure advertising their establishment ("Steam heat throughout, with electric fans in summer, one never feels the winter's chill or summer's heat in this luxurious resort. Fortunate indeed, with all the comforts of life surrounding them, are the members of the Everleigh Club . . ."). Incensed, Mayor Harri son determined upon the immediate extinction of the bagnio. The sisters quit Chicago and the brothel business forever, settling eventually on New York's Central Park West, where they lived in affluence and dignity to an old age.

  The reform movement in Chicago coincided with a sweeping governmental investigation of white slavery throughout the country. In New York a girl who had traveled the Colosimo-Van Bever circuit defied threats of death and publicly exposed the system. Pending indictments against the white slavers, she was whisked away for safekeeping to a hideout in Bridgeport, Connecticut. There, according to neighborhood witnesses, two men called for her in a car, showing Department of justice credentials and saying they required an affidavit from her. The next morning her body, torn by a dozen slugs, was found sprawled across a grave in a cemetery outside Bridgeport. From the neighbors' descriptions the investigators identified the two callers as members of Torrio's old James Street gang, but they could prove nothing. The case against Colosimo collapsed. Upon this happy denouement Big Jim handed Torrio a percentage of all his brothel and gambling interests.

  After routing the Everleigh sisters, the Chicago police relapsed into inertia. Torrio, however, harbored no false optimism. He convinced Colosimo that the days of the Levee as a center of unbridled crime and vice were numbered and that they should plan for the future. What prompted their first major step was the new mobility of the American pleasure seeker. In six years, from 1908 to 1913, the registration of motor vehicles in the United States increased tenfold to a total of 1,192,262, and they were used a great deal more for pleasure than for business. One by-product was the roadhouse. It occurred to Torrio that the hinterland, with its meager police force, offered scope for the expansion of the vice industry. Colosimo agreed. All they needed was the compliance of rural officials.

  They established their first suburban foothold in tiny Burnham, 18 miles from the Levee, on the Illinois-Indiana border. The president of the incorporated village, or "boy mayor," as everybody referred to him because he had taken office before the age of twenty, having run a Burnham saloon since his fourteenth year, was John Patton. He proved a willing pawn so that by the time a second reform wave smote the Levee Torrio and Colosimo were ready to launch their first country brothel.

  In October, 1912, under the renewed pressure of church and civic groups, the hitherto laissez-faire state's attorney, John E. W. Wayman, mounted a massive attack against the Levee. After the first day of arrests and padlockings, the principal brothelkeepers organized their own committee, with Colosimo as chairman. A meeting at Big Jim's cafe was followed by a phenomenon that momentarily paralyzed the hand of reform. Obeying their masters' instructions, the Levee girls donned their gaudiest finery and scattered through Chicago's respectable residential districts. Hips swaying, raucous as macaws, they preempted tables in the most sedate restaurants, tried to book rooms in the most elegant hotels, rang private doorbells and begged for lodging. . . . Even the Vice Commission had to concede that sudden mass eviction from the Levee might be a mistake, and the raids were suspended.

  The reformers were not so easily put off. They persisted until, in November, 1912, Chicago became the first American city to close its red-light district. But just as the advocates of toleration had forewarned, the measure did not thwart the vice magnates. New resorts sprang up elsewhere in the city and the suburbs. (The Vice Commission survey twenty years later showed that 731 Chicago brothels were still in operation, only about 300 fewer than in 1912.) Nor did the Levee red-light district stay closed. Although it never quite recovered its pristine blatancy, many of the brothelkeepers either reopened their original premises as soon as the raids slackened or camouflaged them as hotels, saloons, and cabarets.

  Colosimo's first Burnham roadhouse kept open twenty-four hours a day with ninety girls working in three shifts. It earned $9,000 a month, of which Torrio took half. They next acquired the Speedway Inn, putting Jew Kid Grabiner in charge, then the Burnham Inn, which Torrio supervised. None of these roadhouses stood more than a few feet from the Indiana line so that in the event of a raid the girls and their guests could avoid arrest by scurrying across it. Warnings came through a network of gas station attendants, short-order cooks, roadside fruit sellers and the like, posted along the approaches to Burnham. When danger threatened, they would press a buzzer connected by electric wiring to an alarm in the roadhouse. The customers, mostly laborers in the area's steel mills and oil refineries, tended to be uncouth types, destructive as rampaging rhinoceroses when drunk, and it was common practice to nail down the chairs and tables lest they brain one another with them.

  Other vice entrepreneurs set up shop under the protective wing of the boy mayor until Burnham, which measured barely one mile square, was a citadel of boozing, gambling and whoring. Nobody did business there for long, however, without Torrio's consent. When a pot-valiant hoodlum known as "Dandy Joe" Fogarty, who resented the Italian's supremacy, staggered out to the middle of the Burnham Inn dance floor one night and shouted loud enough to be heard above the jazz band: "I'll get that wop!" bullets silenced him. Two Torrio lieutenants, "Sonny" Dunn and Tommy Enright, were detained by the local constabulary,
but only for an hour or two.

  The affairs of Colosimo and Torrio were not progressing quite as smoothly in the Levee. One police inspector had been sentenced to the Joliet Penitentiary, two others suspended, and a superintendent of police dismissed for graft. Mayor Harrison had then appointed a retired Army officer, Major Metellus L. C. Funkhouser, to the newly created post of Second Deputy Police Commissioner, with the power to investigate and prosecute vice offenders independently of the regular police. Funkhouser established a Morals Squad and chose as its director Inspector W. C. Dannenberg, whose past feats included the jailing of Maurice and Julia Van Bever.

  Deeply disturbed by these appointments, the Levee vice bosses convened again under Colosimo's chairmanship. They agreed that the Morals Squad must be stopped if not with money, then with murder. Chicken Harry Gullet was delegated to offer Dannenberg $2,200 a month to protect the brothels. The inspector arrested him for attempted bribery. During the following weeks his Morals Squad arrested about 2,000 panders and their women, and he brought charges of graft against the regular police assigned to the Levee. The latter, captained by one Michael F. Ryan, circulated Dannenberg's photograph among the brothelkeepers so that they could spot him during raids. Colosimo and his colleagues voted to kill Funkhouser, Dannenberg, and various members of the Morals Squad. At about this time Torrio sent for Roxie Vanilli, his cousin and a veteran of New York's Gyp the Blood gang.

  Among those attending the whoremasters' conclave had been Roy Jones, who ran a saloon at 2037 South Wabash Avenue. On an April night in 1914 a man named Isaac Henagow, whom the Levee sus pected of being a Morals Squad stool pigeon, dropped in for a drink. Shortly, Jim Franche, popularly known as Duffy the Goat, a Colosimo minion, walked up to him with a drawn revolver, shot him through the heart, and bolted.

  Mayor Harrison revoked Jones' license. When the Levee politicians failed to get it restored, the saloonkeeper concluded that he had been double-crossed. Embittered, he took to drink and in his cups would prattle about the plot to decimate the Morals Squad. Colosimo offered him $15,000 to leave the country. Jones refused. Colosimo tried to frame him on a white slavery charge. Jones finally fled to Detroit. By that time his drunken revelations had reached Inspector Dannenberg's ears.

  Later in April, a police sergeant from the Morals Squad was knifed to death while investigating Henagow's murder. Then, on July 16 Dannenberg led a raid against the Turf, a brothel at 28 West Twentysecond Street. When he and his men left the scene, after packing the girls into a patrol wagon, they found themselves surrounded by a mob of howling hoodlums. They started to walk toward Michigan Avenue. The mob followed, throwing stones at them. Behind the mob rolled a big red automobile, and inside sat Torrio, flanked by Roxie Vanilli and Mac Fitzpatrick. As the mob grew more menacing, the raiders halted and drew their guns, all but Dannenberg, who went on to the station house to book the prostitutes. At that moment two sergeants from the regular police, Stanley J. Birns and John C. Sloop, came around the corner of Michigan and Twenty-second. Mistaking Dannenberg's men for thugs, they, too, whipped out their revolvers. The red car braked, and its passengers got out. Who fired first and at whom was never established. But when the combatants ceased fire, Birns lay dead, and three of Dannenberg's men were bleeding from multiple wounds. The red car was gone. A third officer from the Twenty-second Street Station, Sergeant Edward P. O'Grady, arriving after the shooting, ran into Torrio and Fitzpatrick as they were helping Vanilli, who had also been wounded, climb back into the car. They disclaimed any knowledge of the skirmish, and he let them drive away. Other witnesses, however, reported that they had seen shots fired from the red car. An autopsy performed on Birns seemed to confirm this. The bullets extracted from his body were dumdums, a type commonly used by gangsters, whereas the regulation police issue were .38-caliber bullets. In all probability Birns had been accidentally killed by dumdums intended for Dannenberg. Commenting editorially, the Chicago Tribune explained:

  There are three reasons why the tragedy of the levee could not have been avoided. First, is Alderman "Hinky Dink" Kenna... . The levee exists because it is by the denizens of the levee that he rolls up the voting power which causes such men as Carter Harrison and Roger Sullivan [state Democratic boss] to consult him as a political peer„ and County Judge Owens to have him as a trimmer.

  Second, is "Bath-house" John Coughlin. . . .

  Third, is Captain Michael Ryan of the Twenty-second Street Police Station. He is the Chief of Police of the First Ward. The "Hink" put him there. The "Hink" and the "Bath" keep him there. He has been denounced as either notoriously corrupt or incompetent. But Funkhouser, Dannenberg, Gleason [the Chicago chief of police] and Hoyne, himself [the new state's attorney], cannot budge Ryan from that station. They have all tried and failed.

  When State's Attorney Wyman closed the levee, there was one set of dividing lines he could not touch. They were the lines marking out the police district. They are there now. Captain Ryan's instructions to his subordinates are their only instructions-they are the instructions carried out. Chief Gleason and First Deputy Schuettler may send the Funkhouser squads and the Dannenberg squads to make raids, but they cannot force Ryan to make raids. And no matter how many raids they make and how they show Ryan up, he is still on the job, in complete control of his precinct lines.

  In other cities the one "ring" has been found to be a clique of gambling kings who ruled the situation; in Chicago the "ring" is extended to the formation of a complete wheel.

  Ryan is the hub. His plainclothes policemen, his confidential men, are the spokes, and sections of the rim are the "Big Four" or the "Big Five" as conditions happen to be at the time, the dive owners and keepers controlling strings of saloons and resorts that travel along without interruption.

  But more important than any or all of these parts-the one thing without which the wheel could not revolve-is the axle, and this axle is the "little fellow" to every denizen of the district, or "Hinky Dink." Men in uniform in Ryan's district are told to keep their eyes straight, ignoring what is going on behind doors and windows, and watching only for disturbances in the street. They are told to do police duty as if the social evil did not exist around them.

  For the first and last time in his life Colosimo was jailed. He spent half a day in a police station lockup before the Magistrates' Court accepted bail. The police also arrested Van Bever, Joe Moresco, and Vanilli, among others, and the court released them the same day. No indictments followed. Faced with the usual wall of silence, the state's attorney dropped all but one of the cases for lack of evidence. The single exception was Duffy the Goat. He actually stood trial for the murder of Isaac Henagow. The jury found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to hang. He obtained a new trial because of some technical irregularities. This time the jury acquitted him on his plea of self-defense, despite the testimony of eyewitnesses that Henagow never raised a hand against him.

  One of Mayor Harrison's last important official acts was to transfer Captain Ryan to a precinct remote from the Levee and replace him with Captain Max Nootbar, who proceeded to purge the Levee with such vigor that one veteran brothelkeeper declared: "I've seen reform come and reform go, but this is honestly the first time since the closing of the old Custom House Place and Federal Street tenderloin that it looked as if it might stick."

  Harrison also withdrew the liquor license recently granted to Colosimo for his refurbished establishment on South Wabash Avenue. But the splendrous cafes did not long remain dark. The mayoral election of 1915 swept into office a Republican candidate in whom were conjoined about equal parts of ineptitude, buffoonery and rascality. William "Big Bill" Hale Thompson, Jr., was destined to become the hero of every pimp, whore, gambler, racketeer and bootlegger in Chicago.

  In 1900 the nonpartisan Municipal Voters' League, an organization dedicated to the overthrow of predatory politicians, was seeking a nominee it could support for Second Ward alderman. One Republican citizens' group proposed Bill Thompson, a towering athlete with a snag
gled front tooth who had brought glory to the Chicago Athletic Association in half a dozen different sports. By way of recommendation the chairman of the sponsoring group pointed out: "The worst you can say about Bill is that he's stupid."

  Thompson, who was then thirty-five, harbored only the feeblest interest in government. He had agreed to run to win a $50 bet. Born in Boston and reared in Chicago, he came from a line of New Eng land military and naval officers. His father amassed a fortune as a Chicago real estate dealer. He wanted the same kind of gentleman's education for his son that he himself had received back East, but mental effort pained Billy. The only reading he enjoyed were dime thrillers about the Wild West, and they filled him with longing for the life of a cowboy. He struck a bargain with his father: He would spend part of every winter at school in Chicago and the rest of the year on the Western range. He quickly adopted the idiom, manners and drinking habits of a frontiersman, and he never entirely discarded them. Between trips to Utah, Wyoming and Nebraska he attended a Chicago preparatory school, then a business college. His father's death in 1891 ended the Wanderjahre. He stayed home to keep an eye on the family real estate business. It was during his leisure hours-actually, most of the day-that he distinguished himself as an all-star athlete, the idol of Chicago youth.

  As the Republicans' victorious "reform" alderman, Thompson was conspicuous by his absence. He had added sailing to his sporting skills, and he preferred racing a yacht on Lake Michigan to the tedium of aldermanic responsibilities. At what point political ambition seized him is not clear, but in 1902 he appeared on the Republican slate as a candidate for Cook County commissioner. He developed a natural gift for campaign tent oratory. He knew instinctively how to tickle the prejudices of ethnic and national groups. Though his bullroaring platform speeches ranged in content from the banal to the inane, Chicago's Irish and Italian voters responded enthusiastically when he vilified the British, calling them "seedy and untrustworthy." He won the election.