Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  The most effective squad of collectors operated under the command of Tropea the Scourge, and consisted of Baldelli the Eagle, Vito Bascone, et al. Within a few weeks they had raised more than $50,000.

  Scalise and Anselmi finally went to trial for the murder of Detective Olson on October 5. On the eleventh, during the selection of a jury, the home of Detective Sweeney, the state's star witness, who, like other witnesses, had been receiving threats through the mail all summer, was demolished by a bomb. So many veniremen were threatened that it took three weeks to complete the jury. Two of the jurors finally selected had to be guarded by police day and night.

  Seldom had clearer-cut proof of guilt been presented in a criminal court. Numerous eyewitnesses to the shooting on Western Avenue identified Scalise and Anselmi. Their tall and elegant young chief counsel, Michael J. Ahern, whose clientele included Capone and other top-ranking gang lords, never attempted to refute the evidence, but enunciated a curious principle in vindication of killing policemen. "If a policeman detains you, even for a moment, against your will," he argued, "you are not guilty of murder, but only manslaughter. If the policeman uses force of arms, you may kill him in self-defense and emerge from the law unscathed."

  The defendants broke into broad grins as the jury found them guilty of manslaughter only and fixed their penalty at fourteen years in the penitentiary. The mother of the slain detective, an aged deaf mute, had been present throughout the trial. When a companion explained the verdict to her in sign language, Mrs. Olson's fluttering fingers spelled out: "I cannot understand why they did not send the murderers of my son to death on the gallows. The verdict is a blow to justice."

  The cry of outrage from both police and public moved the presiding judge William V. Brothers to announce that the defendants would be returned to his court without delay to face trial for the murder of Detective Walsh. Three months passed.

  In late October Torrio was released from Lake County Jail. Three automobiles full of bodyguards, provided by Capone, waited for him at the gates and convoyed him nonstop through Chicago to Gary, Indiana. In Gary he boarded a train to New York where his wife met him and a few days later they sailed for Italy. From there, every year, Torrio continued to send Capone's son a $5,000 birthday bond.

  In preparation for the second Scalise-Anselmi trial the fund raisers of Little Italy redoubled their efforts, though Samoots Amatuna was no longer there to spur them on. A few weeks earlier the North Siders and the West Side O'Donnells had joined forces with the main object of preventing what Amatuna was struggling to achieve-the reconstruction of the disintegrated Genna gang under his leadership. On the evening of November 13, before accompanying his betrothed, Rose Pecorara, to a performance of Aida, Amatuna dropped into a Cicero barbershop for a shave and manicure. Two men entered after him, walked up to his chair, and drew revolvers. Amatuna leaped to his feet and crouched behind the chair. The first man fired four shots, all misses. Then the second man fired, and each of his bullets found its mark. On his deathbed in Jefferson Park Hospital Amatuna asked a priest to marry him and Rose Pecorara, but he died before the ceremony began. (This second shooting in a barbershop prompted the proprietor of a Michigan Avenue barbershop, patronized by gangsters, to keep the chairs facing the door at all times and never to cover a client's face with a towel.)

  Though the police could make no arrests for want of witnesses willing to talk, the identity of Amatuna's assailants was common knowledge in the underworld. Schemer Drucci fired the first volley, and Jim Doherty, who abetted Myles O'Donnell in the killing of Eddie Tancl, fired the second. Three days later, returning from Amatuna's funeral, Eddie Zion was ambushed and killed. Two weeks after that Bummy Goldstein was murdered in a drugstore. Having no weapon of his own at the time, the assassin filched a shotgun from a police car parked nearby.

  These deaths suited Capone because they cleared the way for Tony Lombardo's accession to the presidency of the Unione Siciliane. Upon taking office, Lombardo composed a paean to his fellow immigrants and to himself:

  Chicago owes much of its progress and its hope of future greatness to the intelligence and industry of its 200,000 Italians, whose rise in prestige and importance is one of the modern miracles of a great city.

  No people have achieved so much from such small beginnings, or given so much for what they received in the land of promise to which many of them came penniless. Each life story is a romance, an epic of human accomplishment.

  Antonio Lombardo is one of the most outstanding of these modern conquerors. . . . He was one of hundreds who cheered joyously, when, from the deck of the steamer, they saw the Statue of Liberty, and the skyline of New York, their first sight of the fabled land, America. With his fellow countrymen he suffered the hardships and indignities to which the United States subjects its prospective citizens at Ellis Island without complaint, for in his heart was a great hope and a great ambition.

  Mr. Lombardo ... accepted the hardships as part of the game, and with confidence in his own ability and assurance of unlimited opportunities, began his career. . . .

  The year 1925 ended for Capone with some extramural carnage.

  Nostalgia occasionally drew various members of the Capone family back to Brooklyn. Capone's mother especially loved to revisit her old neighborhood and when she did, Frankie Yale, Lucky Luciano or another of her son's New York colleagues would provide a bulletproof Cadillac, chauffeur and bodyguard.

  What brought Al and Mae Capone to Brooklyn in late December was the illness of their only child. At the age of seven Sonny Capone had developed a deep mastoid infection, necessitating radical surgery. The parents preferred to have New York surgeons perform it. They consulted three of them, who agreed that the risks were high, but un avoidable. "I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars if you pull him through," Capone said. The operation took place the day before Christmas. The boy survived it, but was left partially deaf and had to wear a hearing aid.

  "It was Christmas Eve," Capone recalled, "when my wife and I were sent home to get some sleep. We found her folks trimming the Christmas tree for her little nieces and nephews and it broke her up."

  The following night, according to Capone's version of events, "a friend of mine dropped in and asked me to go around the corner to his place to have a glass of beer. My wife told me to go: it'd do me good. And we were no sooner there than the door opens and six fellows come in and start shooting. My friend had put me on the spot. In the excitement two of them were killed and one of my fellows was shot in the leg. And I spent the Christmas holidays in jail."

  It is probable, however, that Capone himself planned the killings well in advance as a service to old associates and a defense of local Italian gang interests. His friend's place was none other than the tawdry haunt of his youth, the Adonis Social Club, where he once practiced marksmanship in the cellar, shooting at beer bottles. Orange bunting festooned the main room, and crude lettering pinned to it spelled out MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR. Ragtime rhythms drifted from a tinny piano in the back barroom. There, hell-roaring drunk, his one good leg firmly planted on the bar rail, stood the redheaded chieftain of Brooklyn's Irish "White Hand" gang, Richard "Peg-Leg" Lonergan, author of at least twenty murders and the terror of the borough's Italian colony. Guzzling with him were such lesser White Handers as his best friend, Aaron Harms; Cornelius "Needles" Ferry, a drug addict; James Hart; "Ragtime Joe" Howard; and Patrick "Happy" Maloney.

  Ever since Capone could remember, Irish gangsters had controlled Brooklyn dock labor. First "Wild Bill" Lovett, then after he was mysteriously murdered in 1923, Lonergan, his brother-in-law, had held the stevedores in thrall, squeezing a few pennies out of every pay envelope. But lately Italian gangsters had been challenging the Irish monopoly, and the White Handers had responded by killing a few of them.

  Lonergan's presence in the Adonis Social Club, traditionally an Italian dive, was an added provocation, and he aggravated it by loudly referring to both the regular customers and the management as "dagos
" and "ginzos." He chased away some Irish girls who walked in on the arms of Italian escorts, shouting after them, "Come back with white men!"

  Capone arrived at about 2 A.M. of the twenty-sixth with several companions, including his local bodyguard, Frank Galluccio, the forgiven assailant who inflicted his facial scars years before. Besides the White Handers there were about ten other roisterers in the place, the majority Italians like the owners, "Fury" Agoglia and Jack Stabile, alias Stickum; the bartender, Tony Desso; and the waiters and bouncers, George Carozza, Frank Piazza and Ralph Damato. The instant Capone and his party sat down at a table in the back room somebody turned out the lights and bullets began to fly. Chairs and tables toppled over; glassware shattered; screams rent the air as the customers piled hatless and coatless into the street.

  Shortly after, when Patrolman Richard Morano of the Fifth Avenue Police Station passed the place on his early-morning rounds, it was dark and silent. In the gutter, near the entrance, he came upon the body of Aaron Harms, the back of his head shot off. With his flashlight Morano followed a trail of blood through the club door into the back room. Lonergan and Needles Ferry, both shot through the head, lay in front of the piano. The sheet music on the rack was open to "She's My Baby."

  Another patrolman found James Hart a few blocks away, crawling along the sidewalk. He had been shot in the thigh and legs and was taken to the Cumberland Street Hospital.

  After rounding up everybody thought to have visited the Adonis Social Club that night and obtaining only vague and contradictory information, the police arrested the owners, their four employees and Capone, who was still so little known outside Chicago that the Brooklyn Daily Eagle mistook him for a "club doorman."

  Lonergan's sister Anna, the widow of Wild Bill Lovett, attributed the slaughter to "foreigners." "You can bet it was no Irish American like ourselves who would stage a mean murder like this on Christmas Day," she said.

  The seven suspects were arraigned in Homicide Court and held without bail pending Hart's recovery, for on his testimony rested the only hope of a conviction. Hart not only refused to testify, but denied having set foot in the Adonis Social Club the night of the shooting. He was wounded in the street, he insisted, by stray bullets from a passing car. The court released the prisoners on bail bonds of $5,000 to $10,000 and later dismissed the case.

  Capone got back to Chicago as Tropea and his crew were stepping up their money-raising campaign in behalf of Scalise and Anselmi. Contributors to the first fund were proving reluctant to give more, and Tropea decided upon stern measures. When the late Angelo Genna's brother-in-law, the lawyer Henry Spingola, who had already subscribed $10,000, rejected another demand for the same amount, Tropea invited him to dinner. He chose Amato's Restaurant on South Halsted Street, a favorite resort of local celebrities, and, in fact, the opera stars Desire Defrere and Giacomo Spagony were there that evening, January 10. After an elaborate meal, Spingola started for home at about nine o'clock. Two men, waiting across the street in a car driven by Baldelli, cut him to pieces with shotgun fire.

  The brothers Agostino and Antonio Morici, macaroni manufacturers and purveyors of yeast and sugar to Little Italy's whiskey distillers, had also contributed handsomely to the first defense fund. Declaring their generosity at an end, they hired bodyguards to protect them against Tropea's wrath. Unfortunately, the bodyguards did not accompany them on the snowy night of January 27, when they drove north toward the Lakeside Place house they had recently bought from the fugitive Jim Genna. With Baldelli at the wheel, the collectors overtook them and filled them with buckshot, sending their car hurtling into a signboard.

  The friends and family of the murdered men were quick to retaliate. In the case of Tropea his fellow gangsters intervened when they discovered that he had been pocketing part of the defense funds. On February 15 two shotgun blasts, delivered as the Scourge was strolling along Halsted Street, ended his career. Nine days later Vito Bascone's body was found in a ditch in Stickney, a bullet hole between his eyes and the index finger of each hand shot off, presumably when he lifted them in last-minute supplication. At the bottom of a stone quarry nearby lay the ruins of Baldelli's car which had been rolled into it from the road above. The body of Baldelli himself turned up the same night on an ash heap in a North Chicago alley. He had been beaten, kicked, hacked, and finally shot.

  Tony Finalli died of shotgun wounds on March 7. Felipe Gnolfo survived three attempts against his life but succumbed to a fourth in 1930, bringing the number of killings attributable to the ScaliseAnselmi fund-raising drive to eight.

  In the second trial, begun on February 7, the same difficulties were encountered completing a jury. Of the first 246 veniremen called, all but 4 managed to disqualify themselves. One of them, Orval W. Payne, told judge Brothers why: "It wouldn't be healthy to bring in a verdict of guilty. Pressure is brought to bear on our families. I'd have to carry a gun for the rest of my life."

  The defendants won an acquittal thanks mainly to two defense witnesses who swore that Mike Genna fired at the detectives before they fired at him. In May Scalise and Anselmi went to Joliet to begin the fourteen-year sentence imposed by judge Brothers after the first trial. But Chicago had not heard the last of them.

  The day Bascone and Baldelli were killed the Vice President of the United States, Charles G. Dawes, presented to Congress, at the request of the Better Government Association of Chicago and Cook County, a petition demanding a federal investigation of outlawry in the area:

  There has been growing up in this community [the petition read] a reign of lawlessness and terror, openly defying not only the Constitution and laws of the State of Illinois, but the Constitution and laws of the United States.

  There has been for a long time in this city of Chicago a colony of unnaturalized persons, hostile to our institutions and laws, who have formed a supergovernment of their own-feudists, black handers, members of the Mafia-who levy tribute upon citizens and enforce collections by terrorizing, kidnapping and assassinations.

  There are other gangs, such as the O'Donnells, the McErlanes, Ragens Colts, Torrio and others, some of whom are citizens of the United States.

  Many of these aliens have become fabulously rich as rum-runners and bootleggers, working in collusion with police and other officials, building up a monopoly in this unlawful business and dividing the territory of the county among themselves under penalty of death to all intruding competitors.

  Evidence multiplies daily that many public officials are in secret alliance with underworld assassins, gunmen, rum-runners, bootleggers, thugs, ballot box stuffers and repeaters, that a ring of politicians and public officials operating through criminals and with dummy directors are conducting a number of breweries and are selling beer under police protection, police officials, working out of the principal law enforcement office of the city, having been convoying liquor-namely alcohol, whisky and beer-and that one such police officer who is under Federal indictment is still acting as a police officer... .

  The petition went on to list breweries so operated. It concluded with a tabulation of Chicago bombings perpetrated during 1925, more than 100 of them, only a few of which led to prosecution and none to any serious penalties. Congress referred the petition to the Immigration Committee.

  The petitioners hurled their harshest accusations at the state's attorney. Few officeholders had ever promised so much and delivered so little. When first elected in 1921 with Big Bill Thompson's Republican slate, Crowe manfully told the Cook County police, "You bring 'em in and I'll prosecute 'em." The cases he actually prosecuted were vastly outnumbered by the hundreds of indictments he failed to follow up. Though he successfully prosecuted Fred Lundin, mainly to wreck the Thompson clique with whom he had broken, he never acted upon the true bills returned against thirty-nine other peculating members of the Board of Education.

  During Crowe's first two terms the number of murders in Cook County almost doubled, an increase he attributed, logically enough, to Prohibition. Of the 349
victims, 215 were gangsters killed in the beer wars. Yet despite the size of Crowe's staff-70 assistant state's attorneys and 50 police, the largest in the history of the office-it obtained only 128 convictions for murder, none involving gangsters, and only 8 murderers went to the gallows. Bombings during the same period totaled 369 without a single conviction. While the rise of gangsterism accounted for a good deal of these statistics, only its partnership with police and politicians could explain the low percentage of convictions. There were 2,309 convictions for major crimes of every kind in 1921; in 1923 there were 1,344. Of the felony charges brought before the Municipal Court in 1923, 23,862 were either reduced to lesser offenses or dropped altogether.

  The state's attorney was a man of professorial mien, heavy-browed, with a small, sharp nose, small eyes obscured by thick tortoiseshellrimmed lenses, and a thin mouth frequently arched in an expression of lofty scorn. He craved power and in pursuit of it drew upon a gift for oratory. Crime inspired some of his loftiest flights. "Give me plenty of judges," he once declaimed, "so I can try the killer while the blood of his victim is still warm!"

  Robert Emmett Crowe was of Irish extraction, born in Peoria in 1879. For three years after graduating from Yale Law School he practiced privately with the Chicago firm of Moran, Mayer & Meyer. He married Candida Cuneo, the daughter of an Italian merchant who founded Chicago's oldest wholesale produce firm. At thirty he entered politics as an assistant state's attorney on the staff of John E. W. Wayman, the Republican politician, tolerant of the Levee's vice and gambling overlords until reform groups obliged him to close the redlight district. Under the Democratic administration of Mayor Carter H. Harrison, Jr., begun in 1914, Crowe served a year as an assistant city corporation counsel and a year as a Cook County circuit court judge. In 1919 he was named chief justice of the Criminal Court, the youngest man, at thirty-eight, ever to have sat on that bench. By then he had joined the Thompson faction, which two years later carried him to the post of state's attorney. It was in the same elections that Thompson won the mayoralty for the second time and Len Small, the governorship.