by Gus Russo
Inevitably, all elements of Sicilian society were represented in the Unione. Perhaps because it was savvy to the ways of the New World, the gangster component, like the Gennas, often muscled its way into leadership positions in the Unione, but this in no wray reflected the wishes of the illiterate, gullible rank-and-file members. This faction was also the custodian of the darker old-world customs, “blood brotherhood” traditions, and the law of omerta, or silence.
Johnny Torrio, although not Sicilian, numbered among his good friends one Mike Merlo, the Unione president. Merlo gave the Torrio Syndicate his blessing, and by inference its partnership with the Gennas. With his huge gambling and vice empire, Torrio could purchase all the hooch the Gennas and their cottage industry could produce - and then some. A key part of the arrangement held that Torrio would purchase the raw “cooking” materials, with the Gennas supplying the the labor force.
The Torrio-Genna-Unione triumvirate now possessed unmatched power. Throughout the years, the Syndicate would stop at nothing to maintain its control over the Unione leadership. The Torrio-Genna compact was seemingly all-powerful.
In addition to distilleries and breweries in Chicago, Canada supplied prime brands that were smuggled across Lake Michigan. Still more flowed northward from the Caribbean. From his headquarters in the Four Deuces, Torrio oversaw an enterprise that was, thanks to Volstead, now pulling down over $10 million a year from combined booze and vice in greater Cook County.
With thousands of speakeasies, gambling joints, and brothels, Torrio needed to beef up his security operation, especially since countless independent operators had not endorsed the peace pact. Just as Colosimo had reached out to New York years before, Torrio brought his cousin, a bouncer in a Brooklyn brothel, to his aid. Torrio would eventually teach his charge the power of the payoff. “Bribe everyone” was Torrio’s mantra.
The boy from Brooklyn, who had years before worked in Torrio’s gang, was a powerful and fiercely loyal muscleman for his cousin. Soon after his arrival in the Second City, he would be implicated in the decade’s most infamous murder. A witness to Jim Colosimo’s demise, his secretary Frank Camilla, described the fleeing assailant as a heavyset man with scars on the left side of his face, a portrayal that effectively narrowed the field to one: Torrio’s newest imported muscleman. After his own notorious reign in Chicago, this enforcer’s coterie, the Outfit, would achieve a level of success that had eluded even him, Alphonse Capone.
The Capone Years and the Chicago Beer Wars
You get more with a smile and a gun than you get with just a smile.
-Al Capone
He was, like Johnny Torrio, a product of the New York to Chicago, First City to Second City, gangster pipeline. Born in 1899, Alphonse Capone was the last link in the criminal evolutionary chain that gave rise to the Outfit.
As a teenager in New York, Al joined Johnny Torrio’s James Street Gang and tended bar for Torrio criminal associate Frankie Yale at the Harvard Inn. Al Capone was big and driven, but with an uncontrollable temper that got him expelled from the sixth grade for punching a teacher. He also possessed the Look, taking it to the level of an art form. While he was still in his teens, a barroom brawl with another tough guy named Frank Galluccio left him with three deep knife scars on the lower left side of his face and a new nickname, Scarface.
By inducting Capone into his Five Points Gang, Yale turned Capone from just another thug into a full-fledged gangster. As such, Al graduated to the big leagues, where a player had to be able to perform the ultimate sanction without hesitation. At about the same time he committed his first murder for Yale in 1918, a nineteen-year-old Capone lost his heart to Mae Coughlin, an Irish lass two years his senior. Nine months hence, and as yet unmarried, Mae gave birth to Albert Francis “Sonny” Capone on December 4,1918. On December 30, Al married Mae. By this time Al and Johnny Torrio had grown so close that Torrio was named Sonny’s godfather.
After a brief stint in Baltimore, where he made a momentary attempt at the straight life, Capone returned to New York in 1920 to attend his father’s funeral. The homecoming was momentous, since Al fell back in with Johnny Torrio. Capone never returned to Baltimore, or the straight life. In short time, he beat an Italian-hating Irishman named Arthur Finnegan to death. Finnegan’s boss, the terrifyingly dangerous William Lovett, then made it known that Al was a dead man.
For Capone, the call from Johnny Torrio couldn’t have been more timely. Now, just as Colosimo needed Torrio, so too Torrio needed Capone, and Capone had to go on the lam to avoid being eviscerated by Lovett. In Torrio’s Chicago, Capone would go from a $15-a-week mop boy (and occasional whore-beater), to one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the world in a mere six years.
Upon arrival, Capone was given the job of “capper” at Torrio’s Four Deuces. In that capacity, Al, who now used the surname Brown, had the lowly task of standing out in the frigid Chicago night coaxing prospective clients inside. “Got some nice-looking girls inside,” the scar-faced barker would entice. Capone would flash a sense of humor when he handed out his newly struck business card, which read:
AL BROWN
Second Hand Furniture Dealer
2222 South Wabash Avenue
When asked to elaborate as to what sort of furniture he sold, Capone would quip, “Any old thing a man might want to lay on.” After Torrio waxed enthusiastically about their potential empire of booze, Al had his brothers Ralph and Frank join him from Brooklyn. His first cousins, brothers Charlie and Rocco Fischetti, also boarded the New York to Chicago underworld railroad. For a brief time, the quartet lived in the same apartment building on South Wabash Avenue.
In 1923, the newly elected mayor, William Dever, made a serious attempt at clearing the bootleggers out of downtown Chicago. When Dever’s police chief proved immune to bribery, Torrio and Capone were forced to abandon the Four Deuces and find a more hospitable locale. They chose the near west suburb of Cicero, a bleak, depressing town of fifty thousand submissive Bohemians, most of whom found work at the huge Western Electric factory. For Torrio-Capone, the choice was a stroke of genius. The Czech-born, beer-drinking Ciceronians resented prohibition almost as much as they resented people of color. Gangsters arriving was one thing, but God forbid a clean-living “Negro” family wanted in.
Setting up their headquarters at the Hawthorne Inn, the boys systematically took over a town that never stood a chance. The local Republican contingent knew a gift horse when they saw one and quickly struck a deal with their new neighbors.
The Syndicate’s challenge was to guarantee the reelection of Cicero mayor Joseph Klenha. At the time, the local Democrats were making noise about deposing Klenha as a requisite to - if one could believe it - a reform movement. Since a growing number of Cicero’s citizens appeared anxious about the recent gangster immigration, action was needed before reform caught on. Thus on election night more than one dozen touring cars, crammed with Capone’s thugs, hit the streets, ensuring that the vote went the right way. There was nothing subtle about their electioneering technique: voters had gun barrels pointed at them while instructed to pull the Democratic lever; still others were shot, knifed, mugged, and slugged into submission. One of Cicero’s finest, Officer Anton Bican, attempted to intervene and woke up in a hospital. Local officials, knowing they were outmanned and outgunned, sent out an SOS. Some seventy police were dispatched from Chicago, but while they engaged the Syndicate in street battles, the “democratic process” ran its course. During one of the police skirmishes, Al’s brother Frank was killed. It was a tough price for Capone to pay, but Klenha and the Syndicate prevailed.
Before the city had a chance to mop up the bloodstains, one hundred saloons and one hundred and fifty casinos had sprung up in Capone’s Cicero. By the next spring, however, the honorable Mr. Klenha gave an interview to a local paper in which he warned that the boat was about to be rocked. He soon regretted the interview. Klenha stated that while he was appreciative of the Syndicate’s “support” in his elect
ion, he intended to run his office independently of the gangster element.
Upon reading the report, Capone jumped into his touring car and made a beeline to the mayor’s office. This time Capone personally meted out the punishment, beating Klenha unconscious on City Hall steps while nearby cops wisely looked the other way. On another occasion, Capone sent his enforcers directly into a town council meeting, where they proceeded to drag out a councilman who had the temerity to propose legislation inimical to the Syndicate’s interests. Capone later explained that since he had bought Cicero (and Klenha) lock, stock, and barrel, disobedience could not be tolerated. Capone’s forces even dominated the Cicero police station. Tribune journalist Walter Trohan realized this when, arriving at the police station for a scheduled meeting with Capone, Trohan was frisked by Capone’s boys.
Capone was now Cicero’s de facto mayor, and he flaunted his power for all it was worth. When his former employer from Baltimore came through Cicero, Capone decreed that there would be a parade in his honor. Of course no one in Cicero had ever heard of Baltimore’s Peter Aiello, but Capone wanted a crowd, and he got one. Literally thousands lined the streets to cheer the bewildered stranger.
The Syndicate was now grossing $105 million a year, including the combined income from booze, gambling, vice, and to a diminishing degree (about $10 million) from extortion. Capone began dressing in grand style, typified by brightly colored $5,000 suits and custom-made fedoras. His pals nicknamed him Snorky, slang for “elegant.”
Snorky Capone also indulged his passion for music, and in doing so he unwittingly became a major architect of the American musical landscape. Al had always insisted that his speakeasies employ live musicians. In his own home he maintained an expensive grand piano. Now, flush with discretionary cash, the gangster without a racist bone in his body made a momentous decision: he would bring to Chicago the best jazz musicians in the country. The overwhelming majority of these were of African descent and were playing for spare change in the dives of New Orleans, forbidden from playing in the white clubs.
Whereas New Orleans invented jazz, Chicago legitimized it by introducing many soon-to-be-legendary black musicians into the white-attended clubs - and this seminal occurrence was largely due to the efforts of Al Capone.6
But the good times were not to last, for the Syndicate’s weakest link, the North Side Irish gang, was under the leadership of a madman who decided to confront the Italians. Mayor Dever’s crackdown, which resulted in the confiscation of many alcohol stockpiles, had emboldened many gangs; some, like the North Siders, returned to the old days of stealing from one another. Poachings and hijackings began to escalate. But only one gang leader had the temerity to steal from Capone. His cretinous decision set off a chain of events that ruined everything for everybody; it would also precipitate the collapse of Capone’s reign.
Deanie - the Instigator
The disintegration of Torrio’s truce with the North Siders came as no real surprise, given the ethnic rancor that was always just beneath the surface. Even so, the admittedly fragile agreement might have lasted until the Eighteenth Amendment’s repeal a decade later if not for the ambitions of the Italian-loathing North Side baron, Dion “Deanie” O’Banion. Possessed of a venomous tongue, the reflexively hateful Irishman referred to Italians as “greaseballs” and “spic pimps.”
A living contradiction, Deanie O’Banion was a childhood choirboy at Holy Name Cathedral by day, a gang terrorist by night; he was a vicious racist murderer who was always home by five, where he stayed with his loving wife, Viola, for the rest of the evening. A gifted floral arranger, he owned a flower shop; as “the mob’s florist,” Deanie might spend his lunch break blowing a competitor’s brains out. A casual killer, O’Banion was said to have killed more than sixty people. When he branched out still further into bootlegging, he often made his beer deliveries in his florist truck.
Just as Cicero had its Capone, North Side politicians cowered at O’Banion’s terror tactics. While Torrio-Capone dictated Cicero’s election results, O’Banion matched them bullet for bullet in his district’s Forty-second Ward. The irascible Irishman was witnessed “electioneering” with his thugs at polling places, in direct view of election judges and clerks. “I’m interested in seeing that the Republicans get a fair shake this time,” Deanie wailed. He then made a show of checking that his revolver was loaded. Democrats were physically stopped from voting. In one election, his Republicans squeezed by with a scant 98 percent of the vote.
But O’Banion differed from Capone and Torrio in that he was most assuredly certifiably crazy. After his partner, Sam “Nails” Morton died in a horse-riding accident on May 13, 1923, O’Banion’s only moderating influence was gone. O’Banion began to make highly questionable decisions. Even to other gangsters, O’Banion’s behavior became frightening, since it often made no logical sense. First, O’Banion had his enforcer, Louis “Three-Gun Louis” Alterie execute the poor horse that had thrown Morton. On one occasion, O’Banion was nabbed for a safecracking because, after the hit, he and his escaping crew could not resist the temptation to ascend a stagelike Dumpster and belt out a popular song of the day. In his most infamous booze heist, the Sibley Warehouse robbery, he bought the pilfered hooch from the burglars with a fake certified bank check, marked with bank seals. What made the purchase so bizarre was that O’Banion had hired the same forger that the burglars had hired to make the warehouse withdrawal slips they had utilized to acquire the load.7
As his behavior deteriorated, it became apparent that Deanie was the victim of some then unknown mental disorder, a condition that now steeled him to confront the Syndicate powerhouse. During prohibition, O’Banion of course maintained his own breweries, but he decided it was easier to hijack Torrio-Genna shipments. “Let Torrio make the stuff and I’ll steal what I want of it” was O’Banion’s famous battle cry. In addition to stealing the Gennas’ inferior hooch, he thought nothing of pilfering thousands of gallons of Capone’s best alcohol. In one heist he felt compelled to leave a humorous calling card, replacing Capone’s booze with water. Incredibly, the Capone organization often turned the other cheek. They could afford to. But the Genna brothers had never looked the other way in their lives. They spoiled for a fight.
Deanie’s hatred for the Sicilian Gennas was legendary. His innate abhorrence of Sicilians in general was further inflamed by the knowledge that the Gennas, with their rotgut booze, were able to drastically undercut O’Banion’s going price for hooch. Torrio, as per his style, attempted to mediate the rivalry, but O’Banion refused to cut a deal. Despite his own predilection for patronizing whorehouses, O’Banion was said to abhor Torrio’s vice trade, and the murdering florist drew the line at dealing with an immoral whoremaster. Torrio finally washed his hands of the entire affair, knowing full well that the volatile Gennas would whack O’Banion at their first opportunity. But that could only happen if Torrio and the all-powerful Unione leadership sanctioned such a move. It would be O’Banion himself who would guarantee such a consensus.
After numerous skirmishes with the Gennas, O’Banion was poised to create his gangster masterpiece: an imaginative double cross of Torrio himself. In the spring of 1924, Deanie informed Torrio that he was getting out of the booze business. He then offered to sell Torrio his interest in the Seiben Brewery, which was coowned by him and Torrio, for $500,000. Torrio jumped at the offer, further agreeing to attend O’Banion’s final beer loadout on May 19.
One has to wonder about Torrio’s mental state, accepting such an obvious Trojan horse from a man with O’Banion’s reputation. Nonetheless, in the early-morning hours on the appointed date, with their paid-off cops standing guard, Torrio and O’Banion observed the beer trucks filling their tanks at the Seiben warehouse. The operation was suddenly halted when squads of Chicago police converged on the scene, arresting everyone in sight. As they were taken to federal prohibition authorities to be charged with Volstead violations, O’Banion was seen whistling, singing, and generally looking lik
e the cat that had eaten the canary.
When Torrio was booked, he gave his favorite alias, Frank Langley, to the police, knowing that if they discovered his true identity, there was no way to avoid doing hard time. The cheery O’Banion, on the other hand, knew that since this was his first prohibition arrest, he would only receive a puny fine. Laughing uncontrollably, O’Banion sent out for breakfast for all thirty-one detainees.
In fact, the crazy Irishman had been tipped off about the imminent raid and thereby set about planning his crowning masterpiece and ultimate practical joke. While Torrio’s lawyers set about stalling his trial for six months, Torrio and Capone now joined the Gennas in demanding O’Banion’s head. But Mike Merlo, the prestigious president of the Unione, wanted peace. When he died from cancer on November 8, the Syndicate wasted no time, quickly maneuvering Angelo Genna into the Unione presidency. They also set about writing the final scene in the life of the Irish pest.
Torrio customarily sent to New York for Frankie Yale. On November 10, 1924, fresh from muscling the Democrats in a North Side election, O’Banion was working overtime filling floral orders for the huge Merlo funeral. At eleven-thirty in the morning, two of Torrio’s most ruthless hitmen, Albert Anselmi and John Scalise, accompanied Yale into O’Banion’s Flower Shop. Believing the strangers were there to purchase flowers for Merlo, O’Banion extended his hand, effectively preventing him from grabbing his pistol when they shot him six times, point-blank. Typically, there were no arrests, but soon after O’Banion was hit, Scalise and Anselmi were seen sporting $3,000 rings. Like a Second City leitmotiv witnesses refused to come forward. (”Me? I didn’t see anything.”) Another recurring theme was the indifference of the police, who were happy to let the gangsters kill off each other. Chief of Police Morgan Collins said of O’Banion’s demise, “Chicago’s archcriminal is dead. I don’t doubt that O’Banion was responsible for at least twenty-five murders in this city.”
