by Gordon Kerr
However, a couple of O’Banion’s associates, ‘Hymie’ Weiss and ‘Bugs’ Moran, were convinced they knew who was ultimately responsible and from then on, Johnny Torrio and Al Capone had to take careful precautions. Torrio even left Chicago for a while which was not a bad idea as, during the next two years, there were a dozen attempts on Capone’s life, in spite of the two bodyguards who accompanied him everywhere he went and the fact that he travelled only at night.
When Torrio returned to the city in January 1925, Moran and Weiss struck. As he left his car to walk to the door of his apartment building they attacked, shooting him in the chest, neck, right arm and groin. Moran then put his gun to Torrio’s head and pulled the trigger to finish him off. But the gun was empty and all Torrio heard was the click of the hammer. He was rushed to hospital where Capone organised security for him, even sleeping on a cot in his room to ensure his old friend was safe.
The incident understandably made a deep impression on Torrio and he was never the same man again. While serving a nine-month sentence for the brewery arrest, he made the decision to get out of organised crime. He called Capone to the prison and handed over all his assets – brothels, nightclubs, gambling joints, breweries and speakeasies.
Capone was now a force to be reckoned with and a very wealthy one at that. He moved his headquarters into a suite at the Metropole Hotel at a cost of $1,500 a day and suddenly he was famous. He was advised by newspaper editor, Harry Read, to cultivate political connections and become more visible. He was seen at the opera, he attended sporting events and charitable functions. He became almost respectable. After all, he was only a bootlegger and everybody drank.
He was still no angel, though. In December 1925, Frankie Yale invited him to a Christmas Day party at one of his speakeasies, the Adonis Club. He told Capone that he had learned that a rival, Richard ‘Peg-Leg’ Lonergan, planned to gatecrash the party with his men and suggested cancelling. Capone told him to let the party go ahead and organised a surprise Christmas present for Lonergan. When the gate-crashers burst into the club at around 3 a.m., Capone calmly gave a signal and Lonergan’s men did not even have time to pull their guns out before being peppered with bullets.
By early 1926, Capone was on top of his game. In the New Yorker magazine, he had been described as ‘the greatest gang leader in history’ and he had done a deal with Yale that would completely change the interstate transportation of bootleg whisky. In April of that year, however, he made his first mistake. He heard that a rival bootlegger, Jim Doherty, was drinking in Cicero. This represented a territorial insult to Capone. What he did not know, however, was that Doherty was in the company of ‘the hanging prosecutor’, Billy McSwiggin.
Capone and his men waited for Doherty outside the bar in which he was carousing and when he staggered out in the company of others, they opened fire with machine guns. Doherty and McSwiggin were killed, creating a huge outcry against gangster violence and especially against Al Capone who, it was widely believed, had been behind the killings. But there was no evidence to implicate Capone and officials and police were embarrassed by the fact that he still walked the streets. The police took revenge, launching a series of raids on his establishments and forcing Capone into hiding while detectives scoured the country and beyond for him, their searches stretching as far as Canada and Italy. All the time, he was with friends in Michigan, reconsidering his life, thinking of giving up his criminal activities, of using his fortune to pursue legitimate business enterprises.
As a first step, he negotiated his surrender to Chicago police, returning in July 1926 to Chicago to face the murder charges that were stacked up against him. Amazingly, the authorities failed to establish enough evidence to bring him to trial and they had to set him free. Back in business, Al sought to make his peace with Hymie Weiss who was still smarting over Dion O’Banion’s demise. Capone offered him a favourable business deal, but Weiss turned it down. The following day Hymie Weiss was gunned down.
As people became more and more disgusted by the violence on their streets, Capone held a bizarre, highly publicised press conference, at which he appealed to fellow bootleggers to end the violence. ‘There is enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the streets. I don’t want to die in the street punctured by machine-gun fire,’ he said. An amnesty was negotiated whereby it was agreed there would be no further murders or beatings and for two months it held. Then, in January 1927, a friend of Capone, Theodore ‘Tony the Greek’ Anton, was killed and they were back where they started.
May 1927 saw the return to power of the corrupt ‘Big Bill’ Thompson but a decision in the Supreme Court put new pressure on bootleggers and especially on Capone. It stated that income tax should be paid even on illegally-derived revenues. This meant that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was now in a position to pursue Al Capone and his money. Capone was unconcerned, however, and carried on much as before, becoming a jazz impresario with the opening of his famous Cotton Club. He seemed to have no prejudices, either racial or social, and helped the careers of many black musicians, including Louis Armstrong.
But they were closing in on him, and wherever he went the police were not far away. When he travelled, he found police at every station en route. They surrounded his house and repeatedly arrested him for the smallest things. He was hounded. Meanwhile, the IRS was making a detailed investigation of his income and expenditure, no easy task as all his business was conducted through third parties and every transaction he made was conducted with cash.
Frankie Yale was becoming a problem to Capone. Their whisky deal was not working as envisaged and there were numerous hijackings, for which Capone thought Yale was probably responsible. On Sunday, 1 July 1928, Yale was drinking in a Brooklyn speakeasy when he was called to the telephone. Whatever he was told on the phone sent him running out to his car. He drove off, but minutes later, as he drove along Forty-fourth Street, he was pushed to the kerb by a black sedan and sprayed by a hail of bullets from several different types of gun – revolvers, sawn-off shotguns and machine guns. Problem solved.
Capone moved from the Metropole to a special suite with its own kitchen at the Lexington Hotel. He had secret doors installed, in case he needed to make a swift exit. Now, seeing the end of Prohibition approaching, he was beginning to invest in other rackets such as unions and protection.
However, Bugs Moran was still a blot on Capone’s landscape. He had twice tried to kill a friend of Capone’s, Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn. Capone agreed that Moran should be assassinated and gave the task to McGurn who put together a crew consisting of some top out-of-town mobsters, Fred ‘Killer’ Burke, James Ray, John Scalise, Albert Anselmi, Joseph Lolordo and, from Detroit’s Purple Gang, Harry and Phil Keywell. They would take part in the most famous incident in gangster history.
The date for the hit was to be Thursday, 14 February, Valentine’s Day. Moran and his henchmen were to be lured to a garage to buy whisky. Four of McGurn’s men would be waiting for them there, dressed in stolen police uniforms and trench coats in order to look as if they were raiding the place.
A man who resembled Moran was spotted by the Keywells and four of the phoney cops went into the garage where they found seven men. They took the men’s guns and lined them up against the wall. They then opened fire with two machine guns. All were killed apart from Frank Gutenberg who was still breathing.
Two of the killers were then marched at gunpoint out of the garage in their trench coats as if they had been arrested by the other two. They got into a stolen police car and drove off.
There was one small problem. Bugs Moran was not one of the dead men. He had been late for the meeting and, seeing the stolen police car outside the garage, had driven past the scene. When police arrived, they found Frank Gutenberg still alive and asked him who had shot him. He replied: ‘No one. Nobody shot me.’ He died shortly afterwards.
Everyone knew that Moran had been the intended target and that Capone was behind it, but there wa
s nothing to connect him to the killings. He had been in Florida, after all. The Valentine’s Day Massacre received massive publicity on a national scale and Capone became the subject of countless books and newspaper articles. He loved the notoriety, employing noted journalist and short story writer, Damon Runyan, as his press agent. President Herbert Hoover announced that the federal agencies were focusing all their efforts on Capone and his associates.
But, Capone had other fish to fry. Three men, Albert Anselmi, Giuseppe ‘Joseph Hop Toad’ Giunta and John Scalise, were causing him problems. So he arranged a meeting with them over a lavish dinner. They ate and drank until midnight, but when Capone pushed his chair away from the table, they realised, as he began to speak of their disloyalty, that they were in big trouble. They had forgotten the old Sicilian tradition of hospitality before execution and, worst of all, they had stupidly left their guns in the cloakroom.
Capone’s bodyguards jumped on them, tying them to their chairs with wire and gagging them. Capone picked up a baseball bat, walked the length of the table and stood behind one of the men. He swung the bat, smashing the man’s shoulders, arms and chest. He then did the same to each of his other guests, reducing them to a pulp. One of his bodyguards then shot each of the three in the back of the head.
The Valentine’s Day Massacre and the subsequent publicity forced the US government to launch a plan to attack Capone on two fronts -– firstly, through Treasury agents searching for evidence of tax evasion and secondly, to gather evidence of breaches of the Prohibition laws. Prohibition Agent Eliot Ness, was the man charged with the second task and he put together a team of young agents to carry it out known as ‘the Untouchables’ because they were impervious to bribery.
Meanwhile, at a conference in Atlantic City in May 1929, the Mob was reorganising in an effort to stop the territorial battles that had become the norm. As part of this, Capone was ordered to hand over his interests to Johnny Torrio to divide up. Capone, of course, had no intention of doing anything of the kind.
After the conference he went to a movie but, on leaving the cinema, he was approached by two detectives who arrested him for carrying a concealed weapon. He was convicted and sent to prison where he remained until the following March. On his release, he was enraged to find that he had been made Public Enemy Number One on a new list compiled by the Chicago Crime Commission, adapted by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, as a list of the Most Wanted criminals.
Things began to get increasingly difficult. His brother, Ralph, was convicted on tax evasion charges in October 1930, and Ness and his ‘Untouchables’ began raiding and closing down Capone breweries at will.
By now, the government had succeeded in infiltrating Capone’s organisation and one agent discovered that when one of his establishments had been raided years previously, a ledger had been taken that contained information that could bring Capone’s empire tumbling down. Miraculously, Capone had not killed the two bookkeepers responsible for the ledgers after the raid had taken place and the man on the inside learned their names. When they were tracked down, both men agreed to cooperate.
Ness, for his part, was out to humiliate Capone. During their raids on Capone’s breweries, the Untouchables had captured dozens of Capone’s trucks which were to be auctioned. Ness called the Lexington and managed to be put through to Capone. ‘Well, Snorkey,’ he sneered, using a nickname only the gangster’s close friends dared use, ‘I just wanted to tell you that if you look out your front windows down onto Michigan Avenue at exactly 11 o’clock you'll see something that should interest you.’ Capone was puzzled and slammed the phone down, but was horrified when at 11, all his trucks slowly drove past the hotel in convoy. He was incandescent with rage.
In spring 1931, the US government started to move. An indictment was returned against Capone for a tax liability of $32,488.81. In June, a second indictment was returned on 22 counts of tax evasion totalling over $200,000. A third arrived a week later. Ness and his team provided evidence that charged Capone and 68 of his gang with 5,000 separate violations of the Volstead Act, the law that had introduced Prohibition.
On the day the trial started, the judge was full of surprises. Realising that there had been efforts to bribe jurors, he arrived in court and ordered that the jury that was to deliberate on the Capone case should be swapped with a jury in another courtroom. Capone was horrified. Worse still, he had pleaded guilty, believing he and his lawyers had a deal with the authorities that would get him a light sentence but the judge was having none of it. Instead of the two-year sentence he had been expecting, he was sentenced to 11 years, fined $50,000 and ordered to pay costs of $30,000. To add insult to injury, as he left the court, an IRS official slapped papers on him announcing that the government was seizing property belonging to him, in lieu of tax. Capone tried to attack him but was restrained.
He went to Atlanta Prison, a tough federal facility, where he enjoyed special privileges. But, in August 1934, he was sent to the new Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay where his privileges ended. He seemed to bear up well, but his health did not. He had contracted syphilis as a young man and it developed into neurosyphilis. By 1938 dementia had set in and the man who had once commanded a huge crime empire went into serious decline.
He was released in November 1939, spending his first six months of freedom in hospital. His health slowly got worse and he was cared for by his wife, Mae. Finally, Al Capone, the most famous gangster of all, died of cardiac arrest, aged 48, on 25 January 1947 with his family at his bedside.
Bugsy Siegel
The eyeball rolled like a blue marble across the room, coming to a halt 15 feet from the socket in which it had spent the past 42 years, staring back eerily at the scene of carnage. It was the first shot that had done it, hitting him in that handsome head of his as he lolled on Virginia’s chintz sofa, reading the newspaper. Another four bullets slammed into his body one after the other, smashing his ribs and destroying his lungs. Three bullets went wide of the target, but the five that hit him were more than enough. At 42 years of age, Benjamin ‘Bugsy Siegel’ Siegelbaum was as dead as they come.
The hit signalled the end of a career that stretched from the crime-ridden slums of Brooklyn to ownership of a 35-room Hollywood mansion and the company of film stars and celebrities. A lot of blood had flowed during that time – much of it caused by Bugsy – but, out in the Nevada desert, stands his memorial, a shimmering complex of hotels and casinos, a Mecca for gamblers, the city of Las Vegas.
The trouble with Bugsy was also what made him a guy you wanted to have around. If a sociopath is a person who has no sense of responsibility, lacks moral sense and guilt and displays no change in behaviour after punishment, then Bugsy was a sociopath. He used people, believed that is what they were there for. Robbery, rape, murder – it did not matter to him. But, as his partner in crime Meyer Lansky once said: ‘When we were in a fight, Benny would never hesitate. He was even quicker to take action than those hot-blooded Sicilians, the first to start punching and shooting. Nobody reacted faster than Benny.’
And that’s how he earned the nickname ‘Bugsy’, a term used by gangsters for men who show no fear or who are willing to do jobs that others balk at. Nonetheless, Bugsy hated the name, although it was a term of endearment, and it would not have been wise to use it to his face. Probably best to stick to plain ‘Mister Siegel’.
Just under six feet tall, black-haired and blue-eyed, Bugsy Siegel was the prototype racketeer and when his friend George Raft played gangster roles in films, it was hard to tell whether he was copying Bugsy or whether Benny, in his life, was copying Raft.
Growing up in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg area was tough in the early 1900s. Irish, Jewish and Italian émigrés huddled together in dire conditions of poverty and disease, desperately trying to make a go of life in the land of the free. It was there that Benjamin Siegelbaum was born, in 1902, to poor immigrant Russian parents. He did not intend to stay poor for long and by his early teens he had devised his first
racket, charging protection money from street vendors.
Around this time, the young Benny bumped into the man who would not only change his life, he would also be instrumental in ending it – the teenage Meyer Lansky, a Polish Jew who would join Bugsy in assembling a notorious gang of ruthless thugs and killers, known as the Bugs and Meyer Mob.
There are various stories of how the two met. One says that Lansky rescued Bugsy from a beating by an equally young Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano after Bugsy had been caught having a fling with a prostitute who worked for Luciano. Another says that Lansky stopped Siegel from shooting someone at a pavement craps game just as the police were about to arrive, saving him from arrest.
However they met, Lansky was a bright kid, later known as ‘the Brain’, who recognised that Jewish boys on the make needed to organise themselves in the same way that the Irish and Italian kids had. So, he formed a gang and its first member was Benny Siegel. ‘I told little Benny that he could be my number two,’ Lansky recalled years later. ‘He was young but very brave. His big problem was that he was always ready to rush in first and shoot – to act without thinking.’
Another gang member, Doc Stather, remembers: ‘Bugsy never hesitated when danger threatened. While we tried to figure out what the best move was, Bugsy was already shooting. When it came to action there was no one better. I’ve never known a man who had more guts.’
The gang contained men who would later become some of America’s most notorious gangsters – Abner ‘Longie’ Zwillman, Lepke Buchalter, future head of the infamous Murder Inc. – the only Mob leader to ever die in the electric chair – and Arthur Flegenheimer, later to achieve fame as Dutch Schultz.
Meyer soon realised that it would be better to have the Sicilian gangs on his side. So he and Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano, began forge an invaluable link.
It was for Luciano, in fact, that Bugs and Meyer carried out their first hit. Lucky was released from prison after serving six months of a one-year sentence for dealing narcotics, wanting revenge on the 19-year-old son of an Irish cop who had set him up. Lansky told him to relax; he and Benny would take care of it. They waited a year to let the dust settle and then instructed Luciano to get out of town, take a vacation. Not long after, the Irish cop’s son disappeared and a massive manhunt was launched. Of course, Luciano was hauled in for questioning, but his alibi was watertight. The boy’s body was never found.
