Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  A SPIRIT of rebellion was stirring inside the Mafia. (Or the Syndicate, the Outfit, the Mob, Cosa Nostra. The terms are interchangeable, "almost a matter of semantics," as Attorney General Robert Kennedy once put it, each used in its time by the press or the police-if hardly ever by the members themselves-to designate the same loose-knit national confederacy of Italian and Sicilian gangster "families.") A conflict threatened between an old-world gang tradition and a businesslike, Americanized approach to organized crime, between the "Mustache Petes" and the "Young Turks."

  For decades the American Mafia families had been ruled by stiffcollared Sicilian despots with handlebar mustaches, who styled themselves Boss and aspired to the national title of Boss of Bosses. Parochial and bellicose, they organized their families along military lines with underbosses and soldiers. They shunned alliances with nonSicilian gangs and would admit no mainland Italians to their ranks. Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria, who headed the predominant New York family during the twenties and carried considerable weight among Sicilian gangs all over the country, typified the Mustache Petes. "An outfit runs on its own," he insisted, "and knocks off anybody in its way." He acknowledged Peter "the Clutching Hand" Morello as Boss of Bosses. Masseria allowed exceptions to the ban against non-Sicilians in the cases of Vito Genovese, a Neapolitan, and Frank Costello, a Calabrian, and one or two others, who rose high in his family, and he had a friendly understanding with Dutch Schultz, a Jew converted to Catholicism. Otherwise Joe the Boss observed strict orthodoxy.

  The Young Turks wanted no Boss of Bosses. They preferred the American system of delegating authority, of rule by committee instead of dictum. They were prepared to welcome Italians as fellow Mafiosi whatever their native province (though none of these radicals ventured so far as to propose non-Italians for membership) and to ally themselves with other gangs regardless of ethnic differences. They rejected warfare, making allowance only for the liquidation of individuals who imperiled the common purpose. In sum, they stood for the kind of ecumenism Torrio had always urged and Capone had practiced when possible. Out of their insurgency evolved organized crime as it flourishes in America today, still dominated by Italians, but with a board of directors to determine national policy and numerous non-Italian associates participating.

  By the late twenties nearly every Mafia family harbored its Young Turks. In the Masseria family they included Genovese, Costello and the Sicilian Lucky Luciano, whom Joe the Boss looked on as a son. Capone had maintained liaison with them ever since the Atlantic City conference.

  Masseria and many members of his family were natives of Sciacca, a town on the west coast of Sicily. New York's second most important Mafia family came mainly from the region bordering the Gulf of Castellammare, on the northwestern coast. It was headed by Salvatore Maranzano, who conducted his business, principally bootlegging, behind an office door marked REAL ESTATE high up on the ninth floor of the Grand Central Building, overlooking Park Avenue. In February, 1930, Masseria moved to take over the Castellammarese by arranging the murder of one of their top men, Tom Reina, and foisting upon them a lieutenant from his own ranks, Joseph Pinzola. In reprisal both Pinzola and the Masseria-supported Boss of Bosses, Peter Morello, were killed. The feud, which lasted more than a year, is known to Mafiologists as the Castellammarese War. Frantic with fear and hatred, Masseria decreed the execution of every Castellammarese in the country. The casualties in both camps totaled about sixty, many of them occurring in Massachusetts, Ohio and Illinois, as well as in New York and New Jersey.

  Luciano, Genovese and Costello reaffirmed their loyalty to Mas seria. Dutch Schultz and Ciro Terranova, the Bronx artichoke racketeer, also fought on his side, and Capone contributed money to his war chest. But secretly they considered Maranzano the lesser of two evils. Luciano paid him a visit.

  For five months the Castellammarese had been trying to trap Masseria, but he stuck close to his heavily guarded redoubt at 65 Second Avenue. It was his trusted Lucky Luciano who finally lured him away by convincing him that he knew how to ambush Maranzano and inviting him to a tactical discussion with Genovese and Terranova. On April 15, 1931, they took him for lunch in Terranova's car to his favorite Coney Island restaurant, Scarpato's. Terranova's hand shook so when he pushed the key into the ignition (according to what the Maranzano soldier Joseph Valachi told the McClellan Committee thirty-two years later) that somebody else had to drive, though apparently Masseria never noticed. As a result of his nervousness, the Artichoke King lost face with his co-conspirators. "Ever since then," Valachi recalled, "Ciro Terranova was getting what was called buckwheats, you know, like he was being stripped, you know, a little at a time he was being taken, his power was being taken from him. After a while he took it so hard he died from a broken heart."

  Genovese and Terranova did not tarry long at Scarpato's. They left before lunch. After eating lobster and sharing a bottle of wine, Luciano and Masseria played cards. By three thirty they were the only customers in the place. Luciano excused himself to go to the men's room. During his absence "persons unknown" entered. When he rushed back, having heard gunfire, as he told the police, Joe the Boss' blood was staining the tablecloth. He had been shot in the head and back six times. His right hand held the ace of diamonds.

  An armistice was declared, and to a hired hall in the Bronx flocked almost 500 combatants from both camps to pay homage to the victorious Maranzano. It had been a costly war, and Maranzano gave a series of five $6-a-plate banquets to raise money for his depleted treasury. Luciano and Capone each bought $6,000 worth of tickets. The total came to $115,000. But Maranzano committed a calamitous diplomatic blunder. "Now it's going to be different," he promised. "We are going to have-first we have the boss of all bosses, which is myself."

  The Young Turks had not obliterated one Mustache Pete only to enthrone another. They could count as potential allies among the Castellammarese a number of young, forward-looking future leaders like Giuseppe Profaci and Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno. Maranzano recognized his danger. He told Valachi: "We have to go to the mattress again." (That is, carry mattresses from hideout to hideout to sleep on during the hostilities.) He handed him a list of the proscribed. Capone headed it, followed by Costello, Luciano, Genovese, Vincent Mangano, Joe Adonis, Dutch Schultz and four or five others.

  But the rebels struck first. For executioners they went outside the Mafia to the Jewish gang chieftain Meyer Lansky, who assigned to them four killers. Shortly before two o'clock on the afternoon of September 11, the quartet, flashing fake detective badges and brushing aside the visitors crowding Maranzano's reception room, stepped into his office. They left the Boss of Bosses with four bullet holes in his body, six knife thrusts, and his throat cut. During the next fortyeight hours, in cities across the country, about forty Mafiosi of the old school were purged from the parent body.

  The coup d'etat brought Luciano to the top of the heap, and he lost no time instituting the reforms the Young Turks had fought for. Eschewing the title Boss of Bosses, he remodeled the whole system. Each family head would remain autonomous within his own district but would defer to a national commission when it came to issues affecting the common welfare. The old clannishness that had set Sicilians against mainland Italians gradually yielded to a spirit of cooperation. "Don Vitone" Genovese, a Neapolitan, was the second most prestigious figure, after Luciano, in the reorganized cartel. Though never technically members of the Mafia, many non-Italian gangsters became intimately affiliated with it, attaining positions of immense power. While Luciano took prostitution and narcotics as his special provinces, the major gambling concessions of Florida and the Bahamas fell to Meyer Lansky. His partner, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, occupied the same spot in Nevada and California. Louis "Lepke" Buchalter largely controlled New York's garment district extortion racket; Dutch Schultz, its policy games; Frank Erickson, its bookmaking. Abner "Longy" Zwillman came to control practically every New Jersey racket. Under the generalship of Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, the gang known as Murder, Inc. fre
quently served as a punitive instrument for the Mafia. In Brooklyn alone it fulfilled scores of contracts. Give-and-take, strength in union, coexistence-these were the guiding principles in the new era of organized crime.

  The winds of change promised to carry Capone to still greater heights. He was only thirty-one. His organizational skill and personal magic were recognized throughout the underworld. Luciano so valued his good opinion that he sent an emissary to Chicago to justify in Capone's eyes the murder of Maranzano. Unquestionably, there would have been a seat for Capone at the council table of the national commission. . . .

  If only he had paid his income taxes.

  IF found guilty on every count in the three indictments, Capone faced a possible maximum prison sentence of thirty-four years. His legal staff comprised the flower of the Nash-Ahern firm. In addition to Thomas Nash and the elegant Ahern, it included foxy little Albert Fink, a Dickensian figure, round in the face and belly, with gold-rimmed eyeglasses riding the tip of his clever nose and a habit of exclaiming at critical moments, "Oh, my consciencel" They offered U.S. Attorney Johnson a compromise: their client would plead guilty if assured of a lighter sentence. After consulting Wilson, Irey, Attorney General William Mitchell and Secretary of the Treasury Ogden Mills, who had succeeded Mellon, Johnson agreed to recommend a sentence of two and a half years. The consensus had been that gang terrorism might yet prevent the government's star witnesses from testifying. Also, there was no certainty that the Supreme Court would uphold the six-year statute of limitations. If only a three-year limitation were applicable to tax evasion, as a U.S. District Court of Appeals had recently ruled, it would, in Capone's case, preclude prosecution for all the years covered by the indictments.

  Capone's banana-yellow summer suit matched his bright spirits as he boarded the elevator in the Federal Court Building on the morning of June 16. A judge who tried to enter it at the same time was waved back by the operator. "You can't use this, bud," he said. "It's reserved for Al Capone." Upon Capone's plea of guilty judge Wilkerson adjourned the hearing until the thirtieth.

  Taking for granted, as did the entire American press, that Capone would get off with a light sentence, the New Republic commented: ". . . the incident can only be described as a victory for its central figure. . . . The defeat is Chicago's." "... a devastating criticism of our legal machinery," said the St. Paul News and the Louisville Courier-Journal: "It is not conducive to American pride that gangsters, guilty of every abomination . . . should be found guilty only of failing to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains." A cartoon by Daniel Fitzpatrick in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch showed a burglar jimmying a safe while Uncle Sam reminds him: "Don't fail to report this in your income tax."

  On July 29, the day before his return to judge Wilkerson's court, Capone, wearing white-bordered black silk pajamas, chatted amiably with reporters in his Hotel Lexington suite. Referring again to his offers from movie producers, he explained why he had turned them all down. "You know, these gang pictures-that's terrible kid stuff. Why, they ought to take them all and throw them into the lake. They're doing nothing but harm to the younger element of this country. I don't blame the censors for trying to bar them. Now, you take all these youngsters who go to the movies. You remember reading dime novels, maybe, when you were a kid. Well, you know how it made you want to get out and kill pirates and look for buried treasure-you know. Well, these gang movies are making a lot of kids want to be tough guys and they don't serve any useful purpose."

  Contemplating his imprisonment, he observed: "I've been made an issue and I'm not complaining. But why don't they go after all these bankers who took the savings of thousands of poor people and lost them in bank failures? How about that? Isn't it lots worse to take the last few dollars some small family has saved-perhaps to live on while the head of a family is out of a job-than to sell a little beer, a little alky? Believe me, I can't see where the fellow who sells it is any worse off than the fellow who buys and drinks it."

  He prophesied an end to gang warfare as a result of his efforts. "I have always been opposed to violence-to shootings. I have fought, yes, but fought for peace. And I believe I can take credit for the peace that now exists in the racket game in Chicago. I believe that the people can thank me for the fact that gang killings here are probably a thing of the past."

  What would become of his gang during his absence? "It's really a shame to disabuse the public, to destroy one of their most popular myths. But, honestly, there is not, nor has there ever been what might be called a Capone gang."

  That evening he gave a farewell dinner at the New Florence Restaurant. Mike Malone, still playing his role of fugitive gangster, was invited. "Sorry you're going away, Al," he said. But Capone was not downcast. A two-and-a-half-year sentence, with reduction for good behavior, seemed easy enough to bear, considering the alternatives. "Johnny'll look after things while I'm away," he said, hugging Torrio, who had come from New York to console his former protege.

  Pea green was the color of the linen suit Capone selected for his courtroom appearance on the thirtieth. Beaming on the spectators, he waited to hear the sentence. It never came. Instead, Judge Wilkerson, tense with repressed anger, announced: "The parties to a criminal case may not stipulate as to the judgment to be entered. . . . The Court may not now say to the defendant that it will enter the judgment suggested by the prosecution."

  Ahern leaped to his feet. "We were led to believe that the recommendation would be approved by the Court," he protested. "Unless we had been confident that the Court would act according to the recommendation agreed upon the plea of guilty would never have been entered."

  The judge's anger mounted. "The Court will listen . . . to the recommendation of the District Attorney. The Court will listen to the recommendation of the Attorney General. . . . But the thing the defendant cannot think, must not think, is that in the end the recommendation of the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury, all considered, the Court is bound to enter judgment according to that recommendation. It is time for somebody to impress upon the defendant that it is utterly impossible to bargain with a federal court."

  He permitted Capone to withdraw his plea of guilty and plead not guilty. He scheduled the trial for October.

  On top of these ominous developments came a blow to Capone's professional standing. In its second roster of twenty-eight Public Enemies the Chicago Crime Commission assigned the No. 1 rank to his superintendent of breweries, Joe Fusco, and No. 2 to Ted Newberry. It did not even mention Capone.

  By late summer Capone's optimism had returned, and he told the journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr.: "Oh, they are only trying to scare me. They know very well there'd be hell in this city if they put me away. Who else can keep the small-time racketeers from annoying decent folks?"

  He professed concern about the effect of the Depression upon the American way of life. "This is going to be a terrible winter. Us fellas has gotta open our pocketbooks, and keep on keeping them open, if we want any of us to survive. We can't wait for Congress or Mr. Hoover or anyone else. We must help to keep tummies filled and bodies warm. If we don't, it's all up with the way we've learned to live. Why, do you know, sir [here, one suspects, Vanderbilt substituted his own ideas and vocabulary], America is on the verge of its greatest social upheaval? Bolshevism is knocking at our gates. We can't afford to let it in. . . . We must keep [the American worker] away from red literature, red ruses: we must see that his mind remains healthy. For, regardless of where he was born, he is now an American."

  He deplored America's loss of ideals, or so Vanderbilt quoted him. "People respect nothing nowadays. Once we put honor, truth, and the law on a pedestal. Our children were brought up to respect these things. The war ended. We have had nearly twelve years to straighten ourselves out, and look what a mess we've made of our life!"

  A week before the trial Wilson heard again from O'Hare. Capone, he reported, had procured the list of veniremen from which the jury would be chosen and his men were busy tr
ying to bribe some of them with prizefight tickets, cash and job offers, and threatening to kill or maim others. O'Hare had copied ten names from the list Nos. 30 through 39. Wilson showed them to Johnson, and together they took them to Wilkerson, who sent for the complete veniremen's list. The names of Nos. 30 through 39 tallied with those O'Hare had jotted down. "Bring your case into court as planned, gentlemen," said the judge. "Leave the rest to me."

  O'Hare's activity as an undercover agent did not end with the Capone case. He developed a taste for the work. Despite his long, profitable association with gangsters, he had detested them from the first, and he went on informing against them to both county and state police, undaunted by Wilson's warning that some policeman in the pay of gangsters would betray him. At the same time, as president of the Sportsman's Park racetrack in Stickney, developer of legal dog tracks in Illinois, Massachusetts and Florida, manager of the Chicago Cardinals' pro football team, real estate investor, owner of an insurance company and two advertising agencies, he became a rich and respected business leader, the sins of his past forgotten.

  Ensign Edward Henry O'Hare graduated from Annapolis in 1937. Five years later President Roosevelt awarded Lieutenant O'Hare the Congressional Medal of Honor for "one of the most daring single combat flights in the history of aviation." On February 20, 1942, piloting his Grumman Wildcat over the Pacific, he had brought down five Japanese medium bombers. The following year Lieutenant Commander O'Hare died in aerial combat. In 1949 Chicago's International Airport was renamed O'Hare Airport.