Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  SO the listing read in the Chicago telephone directory. He had some business cards printed, describing himself less pretentiously as "Alphonse Capone, second hand furniture dealer, 2220 South Wabash Avenue," and he stocked a storefront adjoining the Four Deuces with junk. He never tried to sell any of it. Prospective collectors who made inquiries by phone were told, if anybody answered at all, "We ain't open today." Capone maintained the shop as a cover for illicit dealings. These he handled so expeditiously, he proved so reliable an aide, that Torrio rewarded him with the management of the Four Deuces and a 25 percent share of the profits from all his brothels. In 1920 this came to $25,000. Torrio further promised Capone 50 percent of the bootleg business as soon as it started to produce revenue. They had liked and trusted each other since the early days in New York. They complemented each other, the slight older man, cool, taciturn, reserved, condoning violence only when guile failed; the beefy younger one, gregarious, pleasureloving, physically fearless, hot-tempered. By the second year they no longer stood in the relationship of boss and hireling; they were partners.

  In November, 1920, Capone got bad news from home. For some time his father had been suffering from heart disease, an affliction not improved by the day labor to which he had been reduced after giving up his barbershop. On the evening of the fourteenth he dropped around to the poolroom in Garfield Place, a step from his front door, where Al had once racked up so many victories. While watching a game he collapsed and, carried back to No. 38, died before the doctor came. He was fifty-two. The doctor named as the cause of death myocarditis-inflammation of the cardiac muscle.

  "Al's a good boy," Teresa Capone would always insist. When she became a widow, he opened his arms to her and to his brothers and sisters, bringing them one after the other to Chicago as fast as his means allowed-all except Jim, whose fate was still a mystery. He housed them and fed them, found work for the older boys, and generally, in the Italian family tradition, saw to their welfare. He later had his father's remains exhumed, shipped to Chicago and, having bought Plot 48 in Mount Olivet Cemetery, reburied there under a shaft of black marble with a portrait fastened to the base.

  The first brother to follow Al to Chicago was Ralph, the second oldest after Jim, who also adopted the nom de crime "Brown." At twenty-eight he did not entirely lack underworld experience. He had tended bar in a Brooklyn speakeasy during the first year of Prohibition. He was twice arrested and fined. On the other hand, he had held down more lawful jobs for longer periods than any of his brothers: Western Union messenger at eleven, the year he quit public school; a paper and cloth cutter in the same bindery as Al; streetcar conductor; salesman; longshoreman. When America declared war against Germany, Ralph joined the Marines but got no farther than boot camp on Parris Island, where he was discharged because of flat feet. In Chicago he reverted to bartending in one of the TorrioCapone resorts. He then replaced Al as manager of the Four Deuces. For a time he shared an apartment on South Wabash Avenue with Al and his wife. Charlie and Rocco Fischetti, first cousins of the Capone boys, who had also come to Chicago at Al's urging, lived in the same building. Like Ralph, they rose to the command level of the Torrio-Capone forces.

  In anticipation of his mother's coming to Chicago Al chose a quiet, tree-shaded section of South Prairie Avenue, near St. Colum- banas Church, and there built a two-story, fifteen-room red-brick house. The upstairs parlor of No. 7244 had floor-to-ceiling mirrors and gilded cornices. The bathroom accouterments were imported from Germany and included a seven-foot bathtub. A steel gate led from an alley at the rear into the basement. Here the walls were im pervious to bullets, having been constructed of reinforced concrete a foot thick, and the windows had steel bars set too close together to admit a bomb.

  Al moved into the seven ground-floor rooms with his mother, two sisters, wife and son, while Ralph, who married a girl named Velma Pheasant and had a son and daughter, occupied the eight rooms above. Al enrolled Mafalda in a private girls' school near home, the Richards School, to which he played Santa Claus every Christmas thereafter, driving a Cadillac to the entrance heaped with boxes of candy, baskets of fruit, turkeys and a gift for every student and teacher. The two youngest brothers, John "Mimi" and Matt, also made their home for some years at 7244 South Prairie. Mitzi, a bibulous, girl-chasing youth of eighteen, had barely reached Chicago in 1922 when he was arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $5. Matt, four years younger, had an exemplary record as an adolescent. Al sent him to the Marmion Military School in Aurora, Illinois, then to Pennsylvania's Villanova University. Twenty-seven-year-old Frank Capone completed the family circle. The brothers resembled each other. All had thick, heavy bodies and blunt features, and when assembled in family council, they suggested a small herd of ruminating bison.

  Though by 1922 Capone was known to both the underworld and the police of Chicago, he meant so little to newspaper reporters that the first time they had occasion to mention him they got his Christian name wrong and inadvertently gave the original version of the family name, calling him "Alfred Caponi." One of his own best customers, Al drank, gambled and whored. Early one August morning, after a night of carousal, he was racing his car along North Wabash Avenue with a girl beside him and three men in the rear seat. Rounding the corner of East Randolph Street, he crashed into a parked taxi, injuring the driver, one Fred Krause. Jumping to the sidewalk in a drunken rage, Capone flashed a deputy sheriff's badge (evidence of the political patronage he already enjoyed) , brandished a revolver, and threatened to shoot Krause. From a passing streetcar the conductor yelled at him to put up his weapon. Capone threatened to shoot him, too. His four companions fled. The police arrived before any further violence occurred, and an ambulance intern bandaged the bleeding cabdriver. "Alfred Caponi" was booked on three charges -assault with an automobile, driving while intoxicated, and carry ing a concealed weapon-any one of which would have sufficed to put an ordinary offender behind bars. But like almost every case that was to be filed against "Deputy Sheriff" Capone during the next seven years, it did not even come to trial. He never set foot in court. The charges were not only dropped, but expunged from the record.

  The options open to beer brewers when Prohibition came were, in the main, threefold. They could convert to the manufacture of legal near beer, first brewing the standard product with its alcoholic content of 3 percent or 4 percent, then dealcoholizing it to 2 percent. At considerable financial sacrifice they could lease their breweries or sell them outright. Or they could secretly retain part ownership through affiliation with gangsters. Under this last arrangement the brewers furnished the capital, the technical skills and the administrative experience; the gangsters, fronting as officers and company directors, bought police and political protection, fought hijackers and territorial invaders, took the "fall"-the legal liability-when trouble threatened.

  One of Chicago's leading brewers was Joseph Stenson, scion of a rich and respectable Gold Coast family. He chose the third course. To the dismay of his three older brothers, he took on Terry Druggan and Frankie lake as partners in the operation of five breweries: the Gambrinus, the Standard, the George Hoffman, the Pfeiffer and the Stege. Early in 1920 Torrio became a fourth partner and with Stenson's backing obtained control of four more breweries-the West Hammond, the Manhattan, the Best and the Sieben-as well as a few distilleries.

  While establishing his lines of supply, Torrio approached the commanders of the top gangs with an argument at once simple and irresistible. Most of them were already involved in one phase or another of bootlegging, though not to the exclusion of burglary, safecracking, bank robbery and sundry crimes of violence. The returns from these traditional practices, Tornio contended, did not justify the risks. Bootlegging, on the other hand, promised to make them all millionaires at negligible risk, and he urged them to concentrate their resources on it. As he saw it, the main prerequisite of success was citywide organization based on the principle of territorial inviolability. No speakeasy, no cabaret, no whorehouse in that territory
would be allowed to buy from any alien source. In the event of encroachment by outsiders, of hijacking, the injured party could call on the other treaty members to join in punitive action against the offender. If a gang chose to operate its own brewery or distillery, as some did, it should remain free to do so. Otherwise,.Torrio was prepared to supply all the beer needed at $50 a barrel. He also stood ready to supervise interterritory transactions and to arbitrate any disputes arising out of them. This would give him control of almost 1,000 combathardened hoodlums.

  The gang leaders accepted Torrio's plan. With some of them he reached subagreements. O'Banion's specialty in the liquor traffic, for example, was running whiskey from Canada and cutting it for local distribution, but he felt he must provide beer, too, when his customers demanded it lest they turn to a competitor. Conversely, Torrio preferred to handle beer. Beer was the workingman's drink. Beer was Chicago. The enormous volume consumed left a good margin for profit at a relatively small price per glass. But Torrio had to have hard liquor as well for his city dives and suburban roadhouses. So the Irishman and the Italian submerged their mutual antipathy and agreed to exchange commodities. Beer did not interest the Gennas at all. Their paramount concern was to control Little Italy's alkycooking industry and the liquor market it supplied. Torrio had little difficulty obtaining from them, in return for recognition of their supremacy in Little Italy, safe passage through Genna territory for his beer trucks.

  Peace settled over gangland. Everybody prospered. Torrio and his partners, with a physical plant worth $5,000,000 and working capital of $25,000,000, grossed $12,000,000 a year. Then, during the summer of 1923, Spike O'Donnell came home from Joliet.

  With their leader restored to them, the South Side O'Donnells, who had been smarting for years under Torrio's contemptuous treatment, revolted. Reinforced by thugs imported from New York, notably a dauntless savage named Harry Hasmiller, they began hijacking Torrio's beer trucks and running beer into both his territory and the territory claimed by the Saltis-McErlane gang. Their best beer drummers were George "Sport" Bucher and George Meeghan, who applied a system of salesmanship believed to have been invented by Spike O'Donnell and soon adopted by every gang. It consisted of walking into a speakeasy, fixing the owner with a baleful eye, and informing him that henceforth he must buy his beer from the O'Don nells. The alternative would be horrible damage to the premises and to himself. "Or else" was the standard phrase, and in the mouths of Bucher and Meeghan it usually compelled submission.

  By September the O'Donnell gang had penetrated deep into the South and Southwest sides when the Saltis-McErlane gang, now Torrio allies, struck the opening blow in the "beer war." On the rainy night of the seventh Bucher and Meeghan, accompanied by Steve, Walter and Tommy O'Donnell and Jerry O'Connor, a paroled Joliet lifer, paid a second visit to Jacob Geis' speakeasy at 2154 West Fiftyfirst Street. The first time Geis had not only defied the two drummers, but with the aid of his bartender, Nick Gorysko, bounced them out of the place. Steve O'Donnell told him they were giving him a last chance. Geis still refused to do business with them. He was standing behind the bar, helping Gorysko serve half a dozen customers. The invaders dragged him headfirst across to the other side and blackjacked him, fracturing his skull. When Gorysko showed fight, they knocked him unconscious. Their blood up, they went on to storm five other speakeasies that were getting beer from Torrio, smashed the furniture, and beat up anybody who crossed their path. Their last stop was a friendly saloon, Joe Klepka's on South Lincoln Street, where Spike O'Donnell joined them.

  All this time three McErlane gorillas, led by Danny McFall, a Ragen-trained gunman, had been stalking them. As they slouched against Klepka's bar, slaking their thirst and devouring sandwiches, the avengers burst through the swinging doors, guns drawn. According to the testimony of one of the six customers present, McFall said "Stick 'em up!" and fired a shot over Steve O'Donnell's head. The four brothers and their companions dived through the exits, all except Jerry O'Connor, a slow mover. McFall held him captive at revolver point. McErlane himself then appeared, fat and red-faced, carrying a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun under his gray raincoat. At a whispered word from McFall he withdrew to wait just beyond the swinging doors. Waving his revolver toward the doors, McFall ordered O'Connor to walk out ahead of him. The instant they reached the sidewalk McErlane put the shotgun to O'Connor's head and blew it off.

  Ten nights later, on a stretch of highway a few miles south of Chicago, Bucher and Meeghan were driving two truckloads of beer in tandem. Two men armed with shotguns sprang to the center of the road, halted them, and made them climb down. A car approaching from the opposite direction caught the scene in its headlights. The holdup men shouted to the driver to stop, but he sped on, terrified, as they fired a fusillade of buckshot after him. From the descriptions he later gave the police suspected Frankie McErlane and Danny McFall. The following morning the drummers' bodies were found in a roadside ditch, their arms lashed behind their backs, their heads almost severed by the force of shotgun blasts.

  In December, on the same highway, McErlane and a companion whom the police believed to have been Walter Stevens, bagged two more O'Donnell truckers as they were hauling beer to Chicago, William "Shorty" Egan and Morrie Keane, trussed them up and bundled them into the back seat of their car. Egan, one of the few men ever taken for a one-way ride who lived to tell of it, recalled:

  "Pretty soon the driver asks the guy with the shotgun, 'Where you gonna get rid of these guys?' The fat fellow laughs and says, 'I'll take care of that in a minute.' He was monkeying with his shotgun all the time. Pretty soon he turns around and points the gun at Keane. He didn't say a word but just let go straight at him. Keane got it square on the left side. It kind of turned him over and the fat guy give him the second barrel in the other side. The guy loads up his gun and gives it to Keane again. Then he turns around to me and says, 'I guess you might as well get yours, too.' With that he shoots me in the side. It hurt like hell so when I seen him loading up again, I twist around so it won't hit me in the same place. This time he got me in the leg. Then he gimme the other barrel right on the puss. I slide off the seat. But I guess the fat guy wasn't sure we was through. He let Morrie have it twice more and then he let me have it again in the other side. The fat guy scrambled into the rear seat and grabbed Keane. He opens the door and kicks Morrie out into the road. We was doing about 50 from the sound. I figure I'm next so when he drags me over to the door I set myself to jump. He shoves and I light in the ditch by the road. I hit the ground on my shoulders and I thought I would never stop rolling. I lost consciousness. When my senses came back, I was lying in a pool of water and ice had formed around me. The sky was red and it was breaking day. I staggered along the road until I saw a light in a farmhouse. . . ."

  The O'Donnells were no match for the coalition Torrio had created. The next member of the gang to fall was another beer runner, Phil Corrigan, shotgunned to death at the wheel of his truck. Walter O'Donnell and the New York bravo, Harry Hasmiller, perished together in a running gunfight with a Saltis-McErlane detachment. It was against Spike O'Donnell, on the evening of September 25, 1925, that McErlane first used his newly acquired tommy gun. Driving past the corner of Sixty-third and Western Avenue, where Spike was loitering, he fired a round at him. Lacking practice, he sent every bullet wild. The tommy gun was still a weapon so unfamiliar to the police that they ascribed the multiple bullet holes in the storefront behind Spike to shotguns or some sort of automatic rifle.

  A month later, near the same spot, McErlane machine-gunned Spike's car and wounded his brother Tommy, sitting beside him. Spike finally abandoned the field of combat. Ten times the enemy had tried to kill him, and they had wounded him twice. "Life with me is just one bullet after another," he said with a flash of his old jauntiness. "I've been shot at and missed so often I've a notion to hire out as a professional target." He left Chicago and stayed away for two years.

  The victors defeated the law as well. McErlane, who personall
y accounted for five deaths in the O'Donnell ranks, was charged with the murder of Morrie Keane. Held briefly under a kind of house arrest at the Hotel Sherman by order of State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe, he was unconditionally released. The pressure of public opinion then forced Crowe to seek a grand jury indictment. After months of legal manipulations, an assistant state's attorney nolle prossed the case. Crowe also obtained indictments against McErlane and Danny McFall for the double slaying of Bucher and Meeghan. Those, too, were nolle prossed. A third indictment named McFall as the murderer of Jerry O'Connor. Released on bail, he vanished.

  In several of the beer war massacres Al Capone was placed at the scene by eyewitnesses, none of whom, however, would so testify under oath. "I'm only a secondhand furniture dealer," Capone told the police. When the surviving O'Donnell brothers were brought faceto-face with him at police headquarters and asked if they could connect him with any of the killings, they observed the underworld code of silence, but during later questioning Spike O'Donnell, boiling over with frustration, betrayed his belief in Capone's guilt. "I can whip this bird Capone with bare fists any time he wants to step out in the open and fight like a man," said he.

  THE conquest of Cicero, begun by Torrio and completed by Capone, exemplified in its initial stage the older man's masterly diplomacy, for it was accomplished without a drop of bloodshed. They first had to reckon with the West Side O'Donnells, Klondike, Myles and Bernard, who were entrenched not only in the Chicago Avenue-Madison Street sector, but also in Cicero under the aegis of its political panjandrum, Eddie Vogel. The town's docile president (a title equivalent to mayor), Joseph Z. Klenha, took orders from Vogel, the O'Donnells and Eddie Tancl, a broken-nosed, cauliflowereared ex-lightweight fighter, who retired from the ring after killing a contender called Young Greenberg with a single blow to the jaw and opened a saloon in Cicero, the Hawthorne Park Cafe. But though politically corrupt, Cicero had been relatively free of vice and crime. It was a dormitory town with a population of about 60,000, the majority first- and second-generation Bohemians, employed in the nearby factories of Southwest Chicago, an industrious, law-abiding people. After the day's toil they liked to empty a seidel or two of beer in their neighborhood saloon, and when the same saloon, with its familiar swinging doors, brass footrails and spittoons, went right on serving beer during Prohibition, the idea that they were committing an offense by continuing to patronize it struck them as preposterous. There were no brothels in Cicero, and gambling was restricted to slot machines whose operators shared their profits with Vogel.