Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  Far from disaffecting his followers, the exposure infuriated them with the opposition, who, they felt, had struck a low blow. D'Andrea lost the election but made great gains in influence. At his next try, two years later, running against a Powers puppet, James Bowler, for Democratic alderman nominee, he split the Nineteenth Ward Italian vote and started a miniature civil war.

  The first casualty was Frank Raimondi, a Powers ward heeler. On February 21, 1916, a gunman shot him down in a Taylor Street saloon. His daughter held the D'Andrea faction responsible. D'Andrea, she said, had long "lorded it over a stricken ward, too afraid of his power to cross him." The press agreed. As for the actual killers, the name most frequently whispered was "Genna."

  D'Andrea again lost the election. He returned to the fray in 1921 as a nonpartisan candidate against Johnny de Pow. The hostilities opened with bombs, one exploding on Powers' front porch, another at a D'Andrea rally, seriously injuring five people, a third and fourth in D'Andrea's home and headquarters. "Conditions in the Nineteenth Ward are terrible," proclaimed Alderman Bowler. "Gunmen are patrolling the streets. I have received threats that I was to be bumped off or kidnaped. Alderman Powers' house is guarded day and night. Our men have been met, threatened and slugged. Gunmen and cutthroats have been imported from New York and Buffalo for this campaign of intimidation. Alderman Powers' forces can't hold meetings except under heavy guard. Owners of halls have been threatened with death or destruction of their buildings if they rent their places to us. It is worse than the Middle Ages."

  D'Andrea's third defeat did not bring a truce. It merely left a lot of old scores to be settled. At 9 A.M. on March 9 Paul Labriola, a Powers true blue, set forth from his home on Halsted Street for the Municipal Court in City Hall where he worked as a bailiff. His wife watched apprehensively from the doorway until he passed out of sight, for he had been receiving Black Hand threats. At the corner of Halsted and Congress streets he ran into a group of D'Andrea followers, among them Angelo Genna, Samoots Amatuna, Frank "Don Chick" Gam- bino and Johnny "Two-Gun" Guardino. The exchange of greetings was frosty. As Labriola started to cross the intersection, a volley of revolver shots dropped him to the pavement. Walking up to the body, Genna stood over it, straddle-legged, and fired three more bullets into it. With his companions he then got into a car and drove off.

  At 1 P.M. the same day the four men entered Harry Raimondi's cigar store on Taylor Street. Raimondi was a renegade from the D'Andrea ranks, suspected of having betrayed the leader's criminal record to the enemy. When his vistors left, he lay dead behind his counter, five bullets in his back. The next Powers partisans to go were Gaetano Esposito, his body dumped from a car to the sidewalk; then Nicolo Adamo, whose wife identified Jim Genna as the assassin; then Paul Notte, who named Angelo on his deathbed. Notte's statement was later disqualified by a magistrate because it had been uttered while the dying man was under the influence of an opiate administered to relieve his pain.

  The militant arm of the Powers faction was not idle either. In swift retaliation it struck down two D'Andrea henchmen, Joe Marino and Johnny Guardino, the latter with a revolver as he stood on a street corner watching some small boys playing ball. At about the same time a car full of Powers hoodlums, cruising Little Italy in search of the foe, halted outside a Taylor Street poolroom and emptied shotguns into it.

  Even though D'Andrea, appalled by the slaughter and fearful for his own life, had renounced Nineteenth Ward politics, the war raged on. A man named Abraham Wolfson, who lived across the hall from the D'Andrea apartment on the ground floor of 902 South Ashland Avenue, received a series of Black Hand-like notes. "He killed oth ers," the first message stated. "We are going to do the same. [signed] Revenge." Then: "You are to move in fifteen days. We are going to blow up the building and kill the whole D'Andrea family. He killed others and we are going to do the same thing. We mean business. You better move and save many lives." After showing D'Andrea the notes, Wolfson moved.

  On the night of May 11, 1921, while D'Andrea's wife and daughters were asleep and D'Andrea was playing cards in a neighborhood restaurant, a car carrying three men parked near an alley behind 902 Ashland. Two of them got out, pried open a basement window with a chisel, crept through it into a coal bin and thence upstairs to the nowvacant Wolfson apartment. There they waited by a window next to the front door. Presently D'Andrea's car, driven by his bodyguard, Joe Laspisa, drew up. Laspisa watched his boss climb the steps of 902 to a stone porch and drove away. As D'Andrea approached the front door, two shotgun blasts caught him full in the chest. He fell, reaching for his revolver, and from the floor fired five times through the shattered porch window. The killers, escaping the way they came, left behind a note pinned to a $2 bill: "This will buy flowers for that figlio di un cane." D'Andrea died in Jefferson Park Hospital, murmuring to his wife and daughters, "God bless you."

  The aldermen's war ended after two more killings. Laspisa and his Sicilian "blood brother," Joe Sinacola, had sworn on D'Andrea's bier to avenge him. They never got the opportunity. Laspisa died on June 24 at the wheel of his car on Death Corner, within sight of the Church of San Filippo Benzi. The next day the pastor, Father Louis Giambastiani, posted an appeal beside the church portals: "Brothers! For the honor you owe God, for the respect of your American country and humanity-pray that this ferocious manslaughter, which disgraces the Italian name before the civilized world, may come to an end." From the pulpit he implored any parishioners with knowledge that might lead to the arrest of the killers to report to the police. None did.

  Of the thirty murders committed during the aldermen's war only one resulted in a trial. Angelo Genna was prosecuted for the murder of Paul Labriola. He was defended by an assistant state's attorney, an inhabitant of Little Italy, Stephen Malato, who resigned his office in order to plead the case. He won it owing chiefly to the scarcity of prosecution witnesses. As Dion O'Banion observed in similar circumstances, "We have a new disease in town. It's called Chicago amnesia."

  Another neighborhood potentate who loaned the Gennas a helping hand on their way up was the Republican ward committeeman, Giuseppe "Diamond Joe" Esposito, a clownish, keg-shaped Neapolitan, rivaling Big Jim Colosimo in the splendor of his jeweled trappings. Fixer for bootleggers, gamblers and vicemongers, illiterate but canny, speaking mangled English but a redoubtable labor union agent, owner of the Bella Napoli Cafe, Lucullan rendezvous of politicians and gangsters, and lord bountiful to the ward's Italian poor, Esposito controlled a substantial block of votes. These he placed at the service of the Republican Senator from Illinois, Charles S. Deneen, whom he greatly admired, even though the Senator carried the banner of reform and professed to be an uncompromising dry.

  On the West Side, between Little Italy and Cicero, there was the Druggan-Lake or Valley gang. Both wearing fedoras and hornrimmed glasses, Terry Druggan, wizened and dwarfish, Frankie Lake, big and bull-like, were the comic turn of Chicago gangland, a vaudeville brother act about to break into a song-and-dance routine. Lake had been a railroad switchman, then a member of the Chicago Fire Department, from which he resigned in 1919 to become Druggan's partner. They both belonged to the Valley Gang, one of Chicago's oldest, dating from the 1890s. Evolved under such leaders as "Big Heinie" Miller, a peerless cracksman; the ferocious brawlers "Paddy the Bear" Ryan and Walter "the Runt" Quinlan; and, before he switched to the O'Banion gang, Two-Gun Louis Alterie, the Valley gang specialized in burglary. Establishing a joint captaincy, Druggan and Lake guided the members into broader, more remunerative fields. They took over the North Side cabaret Little Bohemia. Turning to bootlegging, they decided to traffic exclusively in beer, and they began looking for breweries to buy. Models of piety, the two Irishmen would brook no slight to religion. They once hijacked a beer truck standing in front of a church, and upon recognizing the pair in the front seat as Jewish gangsters, Druggan shouted at them: "Hat's off, you Jews, when you're passing the house of God or I'll shoot 'em off!"

  On the Southwest Side, the Saltis-McErl
ane gang. Joe Saltis was a hulking, slow-witted Pole, a saloonkeeper, so enriched by Prohibition that he bought a summer estate in Wisconsin's Eagle River Country, the playground of millionaire sportsmen. If opposed in his efforts to enlarge his speakeasy holdings, he used primitive methods of persuasion. When a woman who owned an ice-cream parlor refused to convert it into a speakeasy under his control, he clubbed her to death. His principal associates were John "Dingbat" O'Berta, another Pole from the Thirteenth Ward, and Frank McErlane. Dingbat, so nicknamed by his schoolmates after a comic strip character, combined labor racketeering with politics. The apostrophe did not belong to Oberta. He added it to Celticize his name because the Thirteenth Ward numbered thousands of Irish voters.

  Frank McErlane was an alcoholic and a compulsive killer. The Illinois Association for Criminal justice pronounced him "the most brutal gunman who ever pulled a trigger in Chicago." He had the build of a Chinese wrestler, a red face and the beady eyes of a wild boar. When he was drunk, his eyes went glassy, a sign which usually portended some act of violence. He was glassy-eyed one night in a Crown Point, Indiana, barroom when an equally drunken companion challenged him to demonstrate his skill with a revolver. McErlane drew a bead on a stranger picked at random, an attorney named Thad Fancher, and sent a bullet through his head.

  The killer outraced the Indiana police to the state line and successfully fought extradition for a year. When he was finally brought to trial, the prosecution could no longer call its star witness, one Frank Cochran. His skull had been split with an ax. McErlane was acquitted.

  The Saltis-McErlane gang was the first to adopt the weapon that a Collier's crime reporter described as "the greatest aid to bigger and better business the criminal has discovered in this generation . . . a diabolical machine of death . . . the highest-powered instrument of destruction that has yet been placed at the convenience of the criminal element . . . an infernal machine . . . the diabolical acme of human ingenuity in man's effort to devise a mechanical contrivance with which to murder his neighbor." This was the Thompson submachine gun-the "tommy gun," "chopper," "typewriter," "Chicago piano"-named after its co-inventor, Brigadier General John T. Thompson, director of arsenals during World War I. Developed too late (1920) for its intended use in trench warfare ("a trench broom," Thompson called it), it was placed on the open market by the New York corporation Auto Ordnance. It met with scant success among the hoped-for customers. Few military agencies, in the United States or abroad, cared to invest in a firearm that fitted no traditional category,* neither a pistol proper nor a rifle, but something of both. Most law enforcement agencies rejected it as a danger to the innocent bystander. To the general's dismay, however, the tommy gun fascinated the underworld.

  Light enough (81 pounds) for a small boy to operate, the new weapon could fire up to a thousand .45-caliber pistol cartridges a minute; penetrate, at a range of 500 yards, a pine board 3 inches thick; and at closer ranges cut down a tree trunk 23 inches thick, drill through +-inch steel armor plate, reduce a heavy automobile to junk.

  By 1923 Model 21 A, complete with a 20-cartridge capacity box magazine, was retailing at $175. Extra box magazines cost $3 apiece and a 50-cartridge capacity drum magazine, $21. While most cities and states had enacted legislation similar to New York's 1911 Sullivan Law, prohibiting the possession of small, easily concealed firearms, they placed. no restrictions on tommy guns. Anybody could buy as many as he liked either by mail order or from a sporting goods store. The seller was required only to register the purchaser's name and address.

  The tommy gun became the indispensable accessory of every selfrespecting gangster, his ideal weapon of offense and defense and his status symbol. When stricter controls were finally instituted, in the late twenties, he either bought his tommy guns through black market channels at prices as high as $2,000 each or stole them from one of the few police or military arsenals that stocked them.

  On the South Side, Ragen's Colts. Here was an archetypal instance of the gangster-politician symbiosis. Predominantly Irish from the Stockyards district, in ages eighteen to thirty, Ragen's Colts-formally, the Ragen's Athletic and Benevolent Association-started as a baseball team, the Morgan Athletic Club. The star pitcher was a lusty boyo with a highly developed political sense named Frank Ragen. By 1902 the club, numbering 160 members, had broadened its inter ests to embrace soccer, football, wrestling, track and miscellaneous social activities. It held an annual fund-raising minstrel show, a picnic and a ball (which citizens' reform groups regularly denounced for its "debauchery and drunkenness"). The proceeds, augmented by contributions from Ragen and other Democratic Party faithful, paid for a building on South Halsted Street that contained a gym, ballroom and pool hall. The change of name in 1908 followed a Donnybrook that broke out during the annual outing in Santa Fe Park over who should head the club. Ragen won the presidency. The baseball team then became Ragen's Colts, a label which the press and public extended to the general membership of the club.

  Through a combination of Celtic charm and ruthlessness, Ragen rose high in the Democratic Party and was elected city commissioner, one of Cook County's principal governing officers. The club, which he molded into a powerful party arm, grew to such proportions that it adopted the motto "Hit Me and You Hit 2,000." In addition to notable ballplayers, it turned out aldermen, county treasurers, police captains, sheriffs and sundry officeholders. It also turned out a gallery of criminals. They included Harry Madigan, owner of the Pony Inn, a Cicero saloon, who accumulated eight charges of kidnapping and assault to kill during elections, none of them ever prosecuted, thanks to the club's protection; Joseph "Dynamite" Brooks, another saloonkeeper, a barrel-bellied clodhopper, usually drunk and often homicidal; William "Gunner" McPadden, wanted for numerous murders; Danny McFall, appointed deputy sheriff despite his murder of two business competitors; Yiddles Miller, the prizefight referee, a white supremacist as brutish as any Southern red-neck; Hugh "Stubby" McGovern, gambler, larcenist and triggerman, with a record of seven arrests and only two penalties-both trifling fines for petty larceny and carrying concealed weapons; Ralph Sheldon, who organized his own splinter gang.

  At every stage of Ragen's rise the Colts backed him with muscle and firepower. Nor did they confine their operations to a single precinct or candidate. Many politicians all over Chicago, candidates for every office from City Council to the state legislature, owed their victory or defeat to the rampaging Colts. "When we dropped into a polling place," one of them bragged, "everybody else dropped out."

  Racists and 110 percent Americans, the Colts further served as protector of Chicago's white population against the encroachments of Negroes. On a blistering July afternoon in 1919 a Negro boy, swimming off a South Side beach, crossed into segregated waters. From the lakeshore a crowd of white bathers began hurling rocks at him. The boy scrambled aboard a float. A rock knocked him back into the lake, and he drowned. That night the long-smoldering racial tensions of the South Side erupted. Shortly before the first blow was struck, a swaggering youth from Halsted Street warned a group of Negroes (according to their subsequent testimony before a coroner's jury) : "Remember it's the Ragen Colts you're dealing with. We have two thousand members between Halsted and Cottage Grove and Fortythird and Sixty-sixth streets. We intend to run this district. Look out." In the ensuing riot the Colts tore through the Black Belt with guns, bombs and torches, shot Negroes on sight, dynamited and set fire to their homes, looted their shops. The Negroes, many of them war veterans armed with their old service revolvers, returned the attack, toppled over automobiles and streetcars carrying whites, wrecked white property. Before the fury burned itself out four days later, 14 Negroes and 20 whites had been killed and on both sides more than 500 injured.

  With Prohibition the Ralph Sheldon wing of Ragen's Colts added bootlegging to their exploits.

  On the far South Side, the O'Donnell brothers (no relation to the West Side O'Donnells) -Ed "Spike," Steve, Walter and Tommy. Versatile outlaws since boyhood, they were proficie
nt as pickpockets, second-story men, muggers, labor sluggers, bank robbers, political terrorists. Spike, the eldest and the head of the gang, was a raffish, whimsical joker, given to polka-dot bow ties, who had been twice tried for homicide and was suspected of half a dozen other killings. "When arguments fail," he would exhort his troops, "use a blackjack." St. Peter's Catholic Church had no communicant more devout.

  The O'Donnells were a force Torrio should have reckoned with in his blueprint for citywide, intergang organization, but he left them out of his calculations, a rare strategic error that would prove costly. He ignored them because they were leaderless and drifting, Spike O'Donnell, without whom they never ventured a coup, having been confined to Joliet Penitentiary for complicity in the $12,000 daylight robbery of the Stockyards Savings and Trust Bank. Spike, however, had no intention of serving his full five-year sentence. He was too well connected politically for that. On Governor Small's desk there already lay letters urging his pardon from six state senators, five state representatives and a criminal court judge. To support themselves while awaiting Spike's release, his brothers hung around the Four Deuces, performing odd jobs for Torrio and Capone and secretly building up resentment against them.

  Such were the main Chicago gangs at the outset of Prohibition, and it was a measure of Torrio's statesmanship that despite all their old ethnic, political and commercial rivalries-now intensified by the prospect of fantastic riches-he managed to keep them not only at peace for almost three years but, with few exceptions, cooperative in his own ascendancy.