by John Kobler
The Bundesen jury recommended "that the said Burke, now a fugitive from justice, be apprehended and held to the Grand jury on the charge of murder as a participant in said murder [i.e., of James Clark]. . . ." Burke was captured the following April, but the Michigan authorities refused to surrender him to Illinois, preferring to try him for the murder of Patrolman Skelly. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Michigan State Penitentiary and died there.
Efforts by sundry agencies, both public and private, to discover the identities of the other St. Valentine's Day Killers continued for years and flushed a rich assortment of suspects.* But the only man who can be said with moral certainty to have had a hand in the massacre was Fred Burke.
THERE were twenty-seven of them, Sicilians all. Whitespatted and velvet-collared, their fingers ablaze with diamonds, carrying shiny new matched leather luggage, they strode into the hotel with a proprietary air and demanded the best accommodations. They came from Chicago, Gary, St. Louis, Buffalo, New York, Newark and Tampa. The first contingent of eleven men arrived at dawn in touring cars, and by midmorning the deliberations were in full swing.
As a non-Sicilian, Capone could not participate, but he had representation. The majority were Chicagoans, among them Pasquale Lolordo, who owed his rise in the Unione Siciliane largely to Capone's helping hand, and Joe Giunta, who had not yet turned traitor to Capone. The next biggest group were the New Yorkers, three of whom, Joe Profaci, Joe Magliocco and Vincent Mangano, would each head a Mafia family. (Thirty years later Profaci figured among the 100-odd delegates to the great gangster conclave on the estate of Joe Barbara in Apalachin, New York.)
Some authorities date the beginning of modern nationally organized crime from that meeting held in a suite at Cleveland's Hotel Statler on December 5, 1928. Certainly, it was the first such meeting of which any record exists. Theretofore the loose links between the scattered Mafia cells, as well as between the branches of the quasirespectable front organization, the Unione Siciliane, had been main tained chiefly through a national president who would travel from one to another.
A record of the Cleveland meeting exists because a desk clerk disliked the look and manner of the flashy out-of-towners. After assigning them rooms on the seventh floor, he reported their presence to the policeman patrolling the block. The patrolman notified headquarters, and in the course of the morning a squad of detectives interrupted the conference. Arrested on "suspicion," the conferees were taken to police headquarters, fingerprinted, photographed and questioned about their business in Cleveland. The detectives could obtain no very illuminating answers, and lacking any legal cause for further action, they let their captives go.
What the Sicilians talked about remains conjectural. In all probability the agenda included the national presidency of the Unione Siciliane, vacant since Yale's death, and the distribution of corn sugar, vital to whiskey production, of which the local supply was monopolized by a Cleveland Mafioso. But more important than any specific topic was the fact that gangsters from six states had come together to discuss common problems. It indicated a step toward the kind of confederacy that Torrio had always advocated and that Capone had striven to establish among the Chicago gangs.
Coincidentally, Torrio had just returned to America after five years abroad and, his nerve recovered, was resuming his relationships in the New York and Chicago underworlds.
On February 17 a deputy United States marshal served Capone with a subpoena to appear in Chicago the following month before a federal grand jury investigating bootlegging. He had not set foot in the city since December, 1928, and now, with Moran alive and howling for his blood, he was so reluctant to do so that he decided to plead illness. He had undergone a mild bout of bronchitis in January, and the young Miami physician who treated him, Dr. Kenneth Phillips, obligingly furnished an affidavit dated March 5, deposing:
... that since January 13th, 1929, said Alphonse Capone has been suffering with broncho-pneumonia pleurisy with effusion of fluid into the chest cavity and for six weeks was confined to his bed at his home on said Palm Island, and has been out of his bed only for ten days last past, but has not fully recovered from said disease . .. that, in the professional opinion of affiant, the said Capone's physical condition is such that it would be dangerous for him to leave the mild climate of southern Florida and go to the City of Chicago, state of Illinois, and that to do so would, in the professional opinion of affiant, imperil the safety of the said Capone, and that there would be a very grave risk of a collapse which might result in his death from a recurrent pneumonia... .
Chicago Tribune.
Jake Lingle.
His murderer (?), Leo Vincent Brothers.
His death in the underpass.
Above left: Joe Saltis.
Above right: Tony "Mops" Volpe.
Left: Frankie Yale at the height of his power as Brooklyn gang lord and Unione Siciliane bigwig.
United Press International.
Below left: Edward "Spike" O'Donnell.
Below right: Frank McErlane.
Above left: Jack Zuta.
Above right: Frank Lake.
I SOME FRIENDS AND FOES
Right: James "King of the Bombers" Belcastro.
Below left: William "Klondike" O'Donnell.
Wide World Photos.
Below right: Mayor William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson.
Chicago Tribune.
United Press International.
At Chicago's Comiskey Park, Capone, surrounded by bodyguards, watches with paternal pride as Gabby Hartnett of the Cubs autographs a baseball for twelve-year-old Sonny Capone.
Capone's winter retreat on Palm Island, Miami.
Wide World Photos.
Fishing from his motor cruiser, moored off Palm Island.
Brown Brothers.
Sports-loving Capone watches the action at a Miami prizefight training camp.
At heavyweight Jack Sharkey's training camp shortly before the Sharkey-Young Stribling world championship fight in 1929. Left to right: Bill Cunningham, ex-football star, Al Capone and Sharkey.
United Press International.
The slaughter of seven O'Banionites on St. Valentine's Day, 1929 (the seventh does not appear in this picture, having crawled to the door of the S-M-C Cartage warehouse before collapsing), left the Caponeites masters of the Chicago underworld.
Peter von Frantzius, "the armorer of gangland," whose Chicago sporting goods store the police suspected of having furnished the tommy guns used in the St. Valentine's Day massacre.
Wide World Photos.
Fred "Killer" Burke, the only man of whom it can be said with moral certainty that he pulled a trigger in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Machine Gun Jack McGurn, who helped plan, if he did not take part in, the St. Valentine's Day massacre, was himself machine-gunned in a Chicago bowling alley on St. Valentine's Day seven years later. Here detectives read the comic valentine that the killers left on his body.
John Scalise.
Albert Anselmi.
Joe "Hop Toad" Giunta.
After dinner with Capone.
Armed with this affidavit, Capone's lawyers requested Federal Judge James H. Wilkerson to postpone the hearing for forty days. The judge allowed them only a week. The U.S. attorney had meanwhile discovered that during the time Capone was supposedly incapacitated he spent the better part of a morning in the Dade County solicitor's office, attended the races at Hialeah and the Sharkey- Stribling fight in Flamingo Park, flew to Bimini, and sailed to Nassau. Charged with contempt of court, he was left at liberty, pending trial, under a $5,000 bond.
The state was as yet no more prepared to try Scalise and Anselmi for the St. Valentine's Day massacre than they had been to try McGurn. But the need never arose. According to the account generally accepted,* Capone learned of their disloyalty from Frankie Rio. With Giunta installed as president of the Unione Siciliane and Scalise and Anselmi as his vice executives, they were talking and acting as if they co
nsidered Capone superfluous. "I'm the big shot now," Scalise had been heard to brag. Rumor further attributed to the trio a move to wrest from Capone control of both bootlegging and business rackets.
At first Capone would not believe it, not of the men he had refused to sacrifice to Hymie Weiss' vengeance, to whose defense in the Olson-Walsh murder trials he had contributed so generously. To convince him, Rio contrived a test.
Early in May Capone invited the Sicilians to dinner at the Hawthorne Inn. During the meal he and Rio pretended to quarrel. Rio slapped him in the face and stalked out. The Sicilians took the bait. The next day they approached Rio, full of sympathy. Capone, they said, deserved a lesson. Rio agreed, cursing and uttering terrible threats against his leader. At this Scalise disclosed that the Aiellos had a standing offer of $50,000 for anybody who could get rid of Capone. Why not combine forces? For three days, at a lakeside hideaway, the four men explored ways and means. Then Rio reported to Capone.
The Sicilians' execution, following a banquet at the Hawthorne Inn, occurred on May 7. Their bodies were loaded into the back seat of their own car, which the driver abandoned near Hammond, Indiana. When the coroner examined the bodies, he found hardly a bone unbroken, hardly an area of flesh without bruises.
And so no one remained to stand trial for the St. Valentine's Day massacre.
Both Capone and Torrio attended the all-important conference held at the President Hotel in Atlantic City five months after the Cleveland meeting. Cutting across all the old ethnic and national divisions, there gathered around the table not only Italians and Sicilians, but also Jews, Irish and Slavs, more than thirty gangsters in all. From Chicago came Frank McErlane and Joe Saltis; the Caponeites, Jake Guzik, Frank Nitti and Frank Rio; from Philadelphia, Max "Boo Boo" Hoff, Sam Lazar and Charles Schwartz; from New York, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano and Arthur Flegenheimer, alias Dutch Schultz; from Atlantic City itself, the political boss and numbers racketeer, Enoch J. "Nucky" Johnson. . . .
The conference lasted three days from May 13 through 16, 1929. The main subjects of discussion were disarmament, peace and amalgamation on a nationwide scale. "I told them," Capone disclosed later, "there was business enough to make us all rich and it was time to stop all the killings and look on our business as other men look on theirs, as something to work at and forget when we go home at night. It wasn't an easy matter for men who had been fighting for years to agree on a peaceful business program. But we finally decided to forget the past and begin all over again and we drew up a written agreement and each man signed on the dotted line."
Under this agreement all gangs were to renounce assassination and the use of firearms and to join in a defensive, nonviolent alliance against overzealous police and their informers. The country was divided into spheres of influence. Small gangs were to disband and their individual members to accept the jurisdiction of a single territorial organization; Chicago's North and South Side gangs were to merge under Capone's leadership; the Unione Siciliane was to reorganize from top to bottom with a new national president. An executive committee was formed to arbitrate all disputes and mete out punishment for violations of the agreement. Torrio served as chairman.
Bugs Moran did not attend the conference. With remnants of his gang he was still seeking an opportunity to kill Capone. Also, as Capone knew, a good many Chicago Sicilians had sworn to avenge Scalise, Anselmi and Giunta. Thus threatened, physically and nervously depleted, Capone adopted the same course as Torrio when the North Siders were tracking him. He had himself jailed.
There was a detective on the Philadelphia police force, James "Shooey" Malone, with whom Capone had been friendly ever since they had met at the Hialeah racetrack the year before. As soon as the conference ended on May 16, Capone telephoned a Philadelphia ally, asking him to deliver a message to Malone. With Rio he then drove to the city, arriving toward 7 P.M. They went to a movie on Market Street. When they came out two hours later, Malone and another detective, John Creedon, were waiting for them.
"You're Al Capone, aren't you?" said Malone for the record.
"My name's Al Brown," Capone replied. "Call me Capone if you want to. Who are you?" The detectives flashed their badges. "Oh, bulls, eh? All right, then here's my gun," and he handed over a .38caliber revolver, thereby establishing grounds on which to convict him for carrying a concealed weapon. He prodded Rio, who likewise surrendered a revolver. What greater loyalty could a bodyguard show than to follow his master into prison?
The police magistrate before whom they were arraigned shortly after midnight fixed bail at $35,000 each. They had only a few thousand between them, and the two lawyers Capone had sent for, Bernard L. Lemisch and Cornelius Haggerty, Jr., accused the police of railroading their clients into jail. But Capone was content.
Philadelphia's director of public safety, Major Lemuel B. Schofield, hailed the arrest as a triumph of police vigilance and proudly accepted the felicitations that poured into his office. Burning with curiosity, he had the two prisoners brought to him that very night. Capone was subdued, polite, responsive, but Rio, who had begun to chafe under restraint, shouted that he was being robbed of his rights. "Listen, boy," Capone told him. "You're my friend, and you've been a faithful pal, but I'll do the talking." The bodyguard gave no more trouble.
"Did you know that assistant state's attorney who was knocked off a couple of years ago?" Schofield asked Capone.
"Yes," said Capone. "Little Mac was a fine fellow. He was a great friend of mine, always trying to help everybody. I was talking to him just before he was shot."
The conversation turned to the Atlantic City conference. The major lent an eager ear, and Capone poured bathos into it. "I'm tired of gang murders and gang shootings," he said. "I'm willing to live and let live. I have a wife and eleven-year-old kid, a boy, whom I idolize, and a beautiful home in Florida. If I could go there and forget it all, I'd be the happiest man in the world. It was with the idea of making peace amongst the gangsters that I spent the week in Atlantic City and got the word of each leader that there will be no more shooting."
"What are you doing now?" Schofield asked.
"I'm living on my money. I'm trying to retire."
"You should get out of the racket and forget it."
"I've been trying to, but I can't do it. Once you're in, you're always in. The parasites trail you, begging you for favors and dough. You fear death and worse than death; you fear the rats who would run to the cops, if you didn't constantly satisfy them with money."
"How can you have peace of mind?" Schofield wanted to know.
"Well, I'm like any other man. I've been in the, racket long enough to realize that I must take the breaks, the fortunes of war. Three of my friends were killed in Chicago last week [Scalise, Anselmi and Giunta]. That certainly doesn't get you peace of mind. I haven't had peace of mind in years. Every minute I was in danger of death. Even on a peace errand you're taking a chance on the light suddenly going out. I have to hide from the rest of the racketeers, even to the point of concealing my identity under assumed names in hotels and elsewhere when I'm traveling. Why, when I went to Atlantic City, I registered under a fictitious name."
The deluded director of public safety announced afterward: "I had a most interesting discussion with Capone on the racket in the United States. He was in a reminiscent mood and seemed to be at the point where he was anxious to be at peace, not only with gang sters but the law. In a quiet, gentlemanly manner he told me he was on an errand of peace when Detectives Creedon and Malone grabbed him."
In the morning the chief of detectives confronted Capone. "You are charged with being a suspicious character and carrying concealed deadly weapons. What have you to say?"
Capone had nothing to say. He laughed. Had he ever been arrested before? Once, he allowed, in Joliet for the same offense, but he was not held. In fact, he had never seen the inside of a prison. What about New York? Wasn't he arrested in New York? "Yes, eighteen years ago. Pardon me, I'm a little twisted. I guess I'm not fu
lly awake. I was arrested in New York about three or four years ago. I was picked up on suspicion of murder [Pegleg Lonergan], but I was discharged. I was also arrested in Olean, New York, on a disorderly charge...."
In his Prairie Avenue home Capone's mother, an austere figure in black silk, intermingling a few words of broken English with Italian, presided over a living room full of puzzled, overwrought Italians. Her daughter Mafalda, who had just graduated from Lucy Flower High School at the age of eighteen, said: "Of course, Al would carry a gun. Would anyone expect him to walk the streets anywhere without protection?" Her black hair hung loose to her shoulders, and she wore an apple-green silk negligee, having gotten out of bed with a severe cold to help her mother entertain the sympathizers. "Probably the Philadelphia police and the judge, too, wanted some publicity. After it quiets down a little they will let him go, because they could not expect him to go unarmed."
Mama Teresa passed a tray laden with soft drinks and snacks. Mae Capone and Sonny, Mafalda explained, had gone to the Florida house for the winter, Matt was in his second year at Villanova, and Bert (Albert John) in a boys' prep school. "If people only know Al as I know-him," she said, "they wouldn't say the things about him they do. I adore him. And he's mother's life. He's so very good, so kind to us. People who only know him from newspaper stories will never realize the real man he is."
With his parting words to Major Schofield Capone had asked him to notify Mae Capone at once "in case I get a bad break." He got a very bad break. Taken before judge John E. Walsh in the criminal division of the Municipal Court, he pleaded guilty, assum ing he would draw a light sentence, perhaps three months, time enough to plan his next moves in safety, while his associates reduced the dangers threatening him on the outside through diplomacy or warfare. Judge Walsh imposed the maximum sentence of one year. As Capone, incredulous, was led off with the hapless Rio to Philadelphia's Holmesburg County Prison, he tore a diamond ring from his finger and handed it to Attorney Lemisch, instructing him to forward it to his brother Ralph. Between arrest and imprisonment barely sixteen hours had elapsed.
