| CHEAP EXCUSES (This won't be easy...) |
JOHNNIE DILLINGER
There he was in tiny Mooresville, Indiana,
devoted to baseball but otherwise bored to
tears, and a delinquent older friend got him
drunk on local moonshine and talked him into
mugging a poor old grocer who had closed up
for the night and was taking his money home.
Mr. Morgan fought back, the gun went off by
accident, Ed Singleton split, and Johnnie
Dillinger got himself busted by worriedly asking
some tavern patrons if Mr. Morgan was okay.
That was his first offense, his little pistol had
gone off accidentally, and a crabby judge threw
the book at him—ten-to-twenty friggin’ years!—
and when paroled in 1933 they didn’t even let
him out in time to be with his dying mother!
Sheeee....
And now what was he supposed to do? No
jobs at the height of the Depression, especially
for ex-cons. Nobody liked banks, because they
were folding up (with everybody’s savings!),
foreclosing on mortgages, sometimes even
prearranging their own robberies and then
inflating the take. He had no choice but to
spring his prison pals (who, being habitual
criminals, certainly had not been a very good
influence) and do a little bank robbing himself,
just to make ends meet.
When his buddies sprung him from the jail in
Ohio, he chewed out Harry Pierpont for
shooting Sheriff Sarber, who’d treated him right.
In November of 1933 some snitch tipped off
the cops that Dillinger was getting a ringworm
or something treated at a doctor’s office in
Chicago, just off Wilson Avenue, and the
Chicago and East Chicago police showed up.
Luckily for John, they got their cars tangled up
before they could begin their chase, and the
East Chicago police got close enough to loose
some buckshot into the driver’s-side door. John
and girlfriend Billie Frechette still managed to
get away and the cops shot up one of their own
cars, leaving reporters to believe that they had
encountered withering gunfire.
That little stunt got John recognized at last
and named Public Enemy No. 1 in Chicago,
whose cops had bought the “Public Enemy”
idea that the Chicago Crime Commission—not
the FBI—had cooked up with three years earlier
to besmirch Al Capone.
Everybody knows about the hotel fire in Tucson
that led to the gang’s arrest and John’s
extradition to Crown Point, Indiana. They wanted
to try him for the killing of Officer O’Malley
outside the Merchant’s National Bank in East
Chicago, but that was an accident. O’Malley
wouldn’t stop shooting at Dillinger, and while
slugs were bouncing off his bulletproof vest he
chided the cop for persisting in his folly. Finally,
out of patience, he let go with his submachine
gun—shooting at the officer’s legs! It wasn’t
really his fault that O’Malley fell into the line of
fire, and John later said he felt bad about it—for
O’Malley had children and all.
Anyway, John was locked up in the Crown
Point jail, run by a lady sheriff who had told him
she would “tolerate no monkey business,” and
where John and Prosecutor Estill threw their
arms around each other during a press
conference. (Okay, so Estill was flustered, did
what a reporter asked, and for doing that lost
his bid for reelection. Big deal.)
What nobody knew at the time is that sleaze-
ball lawyer Louie Piquett had decided to hitch
his wagon to Dillinger’s star. He dispatched his
assistant, Art O’Leary, down to Crown Point
where O’Leary managed to slip John a business
card with a message on the back: “Hire no
lawyer but this one. Gang raising funds.”
That got John to yelling for Piquett's
services, and somebody, maybe O'Leary,
somehow contacted Baby Face Nelson whose
crummy little gang included Homer Van Meter,
John’s running buddy from prison days. Van
Meter persuaded the irascible runt Nelson that
they should front some bribe money to help
John escape, and then take him in to give the
Nelson gang some class.
O’Leary himself worked out the wooden
pistol prank. A Chicago woodworker made it and
O’Leary managed to get it to John, along with
bribe money to Jailer Blunk. (You can read all
the details in Dillinger: The Untold Story that I did
with old Mr. Girardin back in 1994.)
So Dillinger walks out, steals the sheriff’s
car, and heads for Chicago with his ostensible
hostages, singing “Git along, li’l doggie, git
along” and letting them out near Peotone with
what few bucks he had. And three days later he
hits the bank in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on
March 6, 1934, with the Baby Face Nelson gang!
Actually, Piquett was a pretty damn good
lawyer, at least for John’s purposes. It took
awhile before the robbery was blamed on
Dillinger, and before news of it even reached
Chicago Piquett had written the following
flowery letter to a lady who thought the Lord
must have had a hand in securing John’s
freedom.
Ain’t that something? Especially when you
know that Piquett, O’Leary and Billie had spent
the day of March 3 anxiously awaiting news of
the escape, and if Billie ended up cheerfully
drunk and passed out, well…girls will be girls.
Needless to say, everybody wondered how
Dillinger could escape, reconstitute a gang, and
hit a bank in only three days.
That was easy. The “new” Dillinger gang was in
fact the Baby Face Nelson gang, and Dillinger
had to explain to the pissed-off Baby Face that
he couldn’t help how the newspapers described
it. (Probably said he didn't really like all the
notoriety he acquired by busting out of Crown
Point, because of the heat it brought
down.)
Nelson’s feathers were further ruffled when
the Justice Department (now they wanted John
for car theft!) posted a $10,000 reward for his
capture and only $5,000 for Baby Face.
Nelson (his real name, Lester Gillis, likely would
have caused bank personnel to snicker)
remained a grumpy little fart, but conceded that
John’s membership had now made the gang
first-class.
John probably let him save face by
suggesting he cut up the money, and may have
politely counseled him that his shooting cops
unnecessarily was bad for public relations.
Same when things were starting to fall apart
a few months later. He and Van Meter were
living out of a red panel truck on the back roads
of Indiana when two East Chicago cops pulled
up, and Homer ruined their day with his machine
gun. Dillinger told O’Leary only that “they
wanted money,” implying it was a shakedown,
probably instigated by “Zark” Zarkovich, the
crooked-cop boyfriend of Anna Sage who later
put him on the spot.
By that time, however, John was so
notorious that everybody wanted to collect the
bounty on his head—or otherwise cut a deal
with the Feds. They were trying to nail Jimmy
Murray, at whose Rainbo Barbecue place
Dillinger had stayed, because of his wife’s
stolen bonds and for selling a car to
gangmember Harry Copeland; and they were hot
on Piquett’s trail over John’s cosmetic
surgery.
But it was Anna’s efforts to sweet-talk Melvin
Purvis into helping her avoid deportation as
"morally undesireable" that set him up. John
probably knew her already from her
whorehousing days in Gary and East Chicago;
probably knew that Zark helped funnel the bribe
money to Crown Point; and Piquett probably
knew the slut from handling illegal abortions,
making it hard to say just how they got
acquainted. But thinking she had it fixed, she
dropped a dime to Zarkovich, who insisted that
his East Chicago buddies participate in
bushwacking John or the deal was off.
So when Dillinger, Anna and little Polly
Hamilton (Billie had since been busted) came
out of the Biograph on July 22, 1934, it was
blam!, blam! blam! And from all indications, it
was Zark who got off with John's belt full of “git”
money. Later he claimed he’d killed Dillinger
himself, and his widow eventually auctioned his
service revolver for $26,000!
I’m leaving out a lot, so you gotta read the
book. But think of it this way: Johnnie’s career
was only 14 months, but he personally tried to
avoid killing anybody; he treated Racine bank-
teller Emily Patzke kindly, kept his arm around
her so she wouldn’t fall off the running board,
and tied her to a little tree with only a shoe
string, which she kept as a souvenir. He also
went far out of his way to get medical treatment
for a badly-wounded John Hamilton; he didn’t
kidnap nobody; and, most of all, he was
instrumental in compelling banks to beef up
their security!
Mary Kinder, his first girlfriend, put it like
this: “Johnnie's just an ordinary fellow. Of
course he goes out and holds up banks and
things, but he's really just like any other fellow,
aside from that.”
And late in his short life, in a moment of
melancholy, John himself remarked: “I'd like to
have enough money to enjoy life; be clear of
everything--not worry, take care of my old man,
and see a ball game every day.”
My late Aunt Meta was a student nurse at Cook
County that night, saw his body before vast
crowds descended on the morgue, and I’m sure
she wept. (Well, she probably felt bad, anyway.) I
know that my sainted daddy, who didn’t much
like cops or any other authority figures, and
obviously had soft spot for Johnnie Dillinger,
would tell me as a kid, “Well, I don’t necessarily
approve of what he done, but ya gotta give him
credit!”
Good ol’ Dad. Meanwhile, I want to thank
Richard Crowe for hosting The John Dillinger
Died For You Society’s annual festivities on
Dillinger Day outside the Biograph. He even
hires the bagpiper who sends shivers down
everyone's spine with his melancholy skirling of
“Amazing Grace.”
And I’d like to thank Rick Mattix for
continuing to peddle the Society’s membership
cards that make everyone an assistant
treasurer, authorizing them to induct other
members for whatever they will pay—and to
keep it, because “John would have wanted it
that way.”
There he was in tiny Mooresville, Indiana,
devoted to baseball but otherwise bored to
tears, and a delinquent older friend got him
drunk on local moonshine and talked him into
mugging a poor old grocer who had closed up
for the night and was taking his money home.
Mr. Morgan fought back, the gun went off by
accident, Ed Singleton split, and Johnnie
Dillinger got himself busted by worriedly asking
some tavern patrons if Mr. Morgan was okay.
That was his first offense, his little pistol had
gone off accidentally, and a crabby judge threw
the book at him—ten-to-twenty friggin’ years!—
and when paroled in 1933 they didn’t even let
him out in time to be with his dying mother!
Sheeee....
And now what was he supposed to do? No
jobs at the height of the Depression, especially
for ex-cons. Nobody liked banks, because they
were folding up (with everybody’s savings!),
foreclosing on mortgages, sometimes even
prearranging their own robberies and then
inflating the take. He had no choice but to
spring his prison pals (who, being habitual
criminals, certainly had not been a very good
influence) and do a little bank robbing himself,
just to make ends meet.
When his buddies sprung him from the jail in
Ohio, he chewed out Harry Pierpont for
shooting Sheriff Sarber, who’d treated him right.
In November of 1933 some snitch tipped off
the cops that Dillinger was getting a ringworm
or something treated at a doctor’s office in
Chicago, just off Wilson Avenue, and the
Chicago and East Chicago police showed up.
Luckily for John, they got their cars tangled up
before they could begin their chase, and the
East Chicago police got close enough to loose
some buckshot into the driver’s-side door. John
and girlfriend Billie Frechette still managed to
get away and the cops shot up one of their own
cars, leaving reporters to believe that they had
encountered withering gunfire.
That little stunt got John recognized at last
and named Public Enemy No. 1 in Chicago,
whose cops had bought the “Public Enemy”
idea that the Chicago Crime Commission—not
the FBI—had cooked up with three years earlier
to besmirch Al Capone.
Everybody knows about the hotel fire in Tucson
that led to the gang’s arrest and John’s
extradition to Crown Point, Indiana. They wanted
to try him for the killing of Officer O’Malley
outside the Merchant’s National Bank in East
Chicago, but that was an accident. O’Malley
wouldn’t stop shooting at Dillinger, and while
slugs were bouncing off his bulletproof vest he
chided the cop for persisting in his folly. Finally,
out of patience, he let go with his submachine
gun—shooting at the officer’s legs! It wasn’t
really his fault that O’Malley fell into the line of
fire, and John later said he felt bad about it—for
O’Malley had children and all.
Anyway, John was locked up in the Crown
Point jail, run by a lady sheriff who had told him
she would “tolerate no monkey business,” and
where John and Prosecutor Estill threw their
arms around each other during a press
conference. (Okay, so Estill was flustered, did
what a reporter asked, and for doing that lost
his bid for reelection. Big deal.)
What nobody knew at the time is that sleaze-
ball lawyer Louie Piquett had decided to hitch
his wagon to Dillinger’s star. He dispatched his
assistant, Art O’Leary, down to Crown Point
where O’Leary managed to slip John a business
card with a message on the back: “Hire no
lawyer but this one. Gang raising funds.”
That got John to yelling for Piquett's
services, and somebody, maybe O'Leary,
somehow contacted Baby Face Nelson whose
crummy little gang included Homer Van Meter,
John’s running buddy from prison days. Van
Meter persuaded the irascible runt Nelson that
they should front some bribe money to help
John escape, and then take him in to give the
Nelson gang some class.
O’Leary himself worked out the wooden
pistol prank. A Chicago woodworker made it and
O’Leary managed to get it to John, along with
bribe money to Jailer Blunk. (You can read all
the details in Dillinger: The Untold Story that I did
with old Mr. Girardin back in 1994.)
So Dillinger walks out, steals the sheriff’s
car, and heads for Chicago with his ostensible
hostages, singing “Git along, li’l doggie, git
along” and letting them out near Peotone with
what few bucks he had. And three days later he
hits the bank in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on
March 6, 1934, with the Baby Face Nelson gang!
Actually, Piquett was a pretty damn good
lawyer, at least for John’s purposes. It took
awhile before the robbery was blamed on
Dillinger, and before news of it even reached
Chicago Piquett had written the following
flowery letter to a lady who thought the Lord
must have had a hand in securing John’s
freedom.
Ain’t that something? Especially when you
know that Piquett, O’Leary and Billie had spent
the day of March 3 anxiously awaiting news of
the escape, and if Billie ended up cheerfully
drunk and passed out, well…girls will be girls.
Needless to say, everybody wondered how
Dillinger could escape, reconstitute a gang, and
hit a bank in only three days.
That was easy. The “new” Dillinger gang was in
fact the Baby Face Nelson gang, and Dillinger
had to explain to the pissed-off Baby Face that
he couldn’t help how the newspapers described
it. (Probably said he didn't really like all the
notoriety he acquired by busting out of Crown
Point, because of the heat it brought
down.)
Nelson’s feathers were further ruffled when
the Justice Department (now they wanted John
for car theft!) posted a $10,000 reward for his
capture and only $5,000 for Baby Face.
Nelson (his real name, Lester Gillis, likely would
have caused bank personnel to snicker)
remained a grumpy little fart, but conceded that
John’s membership had now made the gang
first-class.
John probably let him save face by
suggesting he cut up the money, and may have
politely counseled him that his shooting cops
unnecessarily was bad for public relations.
Same when things were starting to fall apart
a few months later. He and Van Meter were
living out of a red panel truck on the back roads
of Indiana when two East Chicago cops pulled
up, and Homer ruined their day with his machine
gun. Dillinger told O’Leary only that “they
wanted money,” implying it was a shakedown,
probably instigated by “Zark” Zarkovich, the
crooked-cop boyfriend of Anna Sage who later
put him on the spot.
By that time, however, John was so
notorious that everybody wanted to collect the
bounty on his head—or otherwise cut a deal
with the Feds. They were trying to nail Jimmy
Murray, at whose Rainbo Barbecue place
Dillinger had stayed, because of his wife’s
stolen bonds and for selling a car to
gangmember Harry Copeland; and they were hot
on Piquett’s trail over John’s cosmetic
surgery.
But it was Anna’s efforts to sweet-talk Melvin
Purvis into helping her avoid deportation as
"morally undesireable" that set him up. John
probably knew her already from her
whorehousing days in Gary and East Chicago;
probably knew that Zark helped funnel the bribe
money to Crown Point; and Piquett probably
knew the slut from handling illegal abortions,
making it hard to say just how they got
acquainted. But thinking she had it fixed, she
dropped a dime to Zarkovich, who insisted that
his East Chicago buddies participate in
bushwacking John or the deal was off.
So when Dillinger, Anna and little Polly
Hamilton (Billie had since been busted) came
out of the Biograph on July 22, 1934, it was
blam!, blam! blam! And from all indications, it
was Zark who got off with John's belt full of “git”
money. Later he claimed he’d killed Dillinger
himself, and his widow eventually auctioned his
service revolver for $26,000!
I’m leaving out a lot, so you gotta read the
book. But think of it this way: Johnnie’s career
was only 14 months, but he personally tried to
avoid killing anybody; he treated Racine bank-
teller Emily Patzke kindly, kept his arm around
her so she wouldn’t fall off the running board,
and tied her to a little tree with only a shoe
string, which she kept as a souvenir. He also
went far out of his way to get medical treatment
for a badly-wounded John Hamilton; he didn’t
kidnap nobody; and, most of all, he was
instrumental in compelling banks to beef up
their security!
Mary Kinder, his first girlfriend, put it like
this: “Johnnie's just an ordinary fellow. Of
course he goes out and holds up banks and
things, but he's really just like any other fellow,
aside from that.”
And late in his short life, in a moment of
melancholy, John himself remarked: “I'd like to
have enough money to enjoy life; be clear of
everything--not worry, take care of my old man,
and see a ball game every day.”
My late Aunt Meta was a student nurse at Cook
County that night, saw his body before vast
crowds descended on the morgue, and I’m sure
she wept. (Well, she probably felt bad, anyway.) I
know that my sainted daddy, who didn’t much
like cops or any other authority figures, and
obviously had soft spot for Johnnie Dillinger,
would tell me as a kid, “Well, I don’t necessarily
approve of what he done, but ya gotta give him
credit!”
Good ol’ Dad. Meanwhile, I want to thank
Richard Crowe for hosting The John Dillinger
Died For You Society’s annual festivities on
Dillinger Day outside the Biograph. He even
hires the bagpiper who sends shivers down
everyone's spine with his melancholy skirling of
“Amazing Grace.”
And I’d like to thank Rick Mattix for
continuing to peddle the Society’s membership
cards that make everyone an assistant
treasurer, authorizing them to induct other
members for whatever they will pay—and to
keep it, because “John would have wanted it
that way.”
BIG AL CAPONE
Fred Pasley, his first biographer, called Al Capone
the “Horatio Alger of American Crime,” and it’s not
hard to see why.
He grew up in the violent slums of Brooklyn, got
the scars on his face in a knife fight at Frankie Yale’
s Harvard Inn (no relation to Boston’s), lammed it to
Chicago to work for ex-New Yorker Johnnie Torrio,
turned 21 the day National Prohibition went into
effect, and by 1925 he had worked his way up to
leadership of the world's greatest booze empire.
Okay, so there had been some killings. Vice-
monger and restaurateur Big Jim Colosimo was too
love-smitten with his young songbird Dale Winter to
see Prohibition’s vast opportunities and he had to
go, but that was Torrio’s call and Al was just a pupil
who couldn’t buck his mentor.
Torrio then presided over the peaceful and
prosperous expansion of Chicagoland's
bootlegging until the obnoxious North Side mobster
Dean O’Banion (who scornfully referred to his
Italians friends as “spaghetti benders”) ripped-off
Mr. Torrio in a brewery deal and had to be bumped—
the city’s famous “handshake murder”—in his North
State Street flower shop in November of 1924.
Unfortunately, the rowdy Northsiders retaliated
and a badly wounded Torrio, seeing all his good
work being undone, said the hell with it, turned his
empire over to Al, and retired to New York as
gangster emeritus. Alas, wasting O’Banion launched
the Chicago Beer Wars that would bedevil Al all the
way to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Going back a few months from O’Banion, it may well
be that Al didn’t have to knock off Joe Howard in
Heinie Jacob’s saloon just because Howard
roughed up Jake Zuta, who immediately went
whining to Al. But the joint was only a block away,
Howard probably was drunk and abusive, and Al
didn’t have his feet under him yet. The pistol went
off probably by accident.
That certainly taught Al the folly of unnecessary
violence, for after that all his shootings were
defensive. (That later event--the battering and
killing of Scalise and Anselmi--was doubtlessly
cooked up by some reporter, for they both look
pretty good in their morgue pictures.)
Anyway, Al was minding his own business in the
Hawthorne Hotel restaurant when O’Banion’s North
Side successor, Hymie Weiss, led a motorcade
down the main street of Cicero and blew hell out of
the place with machine guns and shotguns.
What did Al do? First, he generously paid for
damage to his hotel and the cars parked in front,
and he even paid the medical bills for a lady who
had been cut by flying glass. But seeing the writing
on the walls (a lot of bullet holes), he had no choice
but to set up a little machine-gun nest three weeks
later, and Hymie shuffled off his mortal coil.
That wasn’t retaliatory so much as preemptive,
because, despite his Jewish-sounding moniker, his
real name was Earl Wojiekowski, and he was a really
trigger-happy Catholic Polack who maybe thought
the name Hymie Weiss would fool people into
thinking he was disinclined to violence.
Later, when the West Side O’Donnells tried to
push their own lousy beer on one of Al’s Cicero
tavern owners, he had to discourage them with
more machine-gun fire that, strictly by accident,
took out Assistant State’s Attorney William
McSwiggin.
That upset a lot of people who thought Al had
deliberately killed a public official, always a
protected species. It took six grand juries to
conclude that McSwiggin was simply partying with
some bootlegger friends and standing too close.
Weiss’s successor Schemer Drucci got himself
killed by the cops while resisting arrest, saving Al
the trouble, but that only left Bugs Moran to
become chief of the North Side gang. Al had to
dodge more bullets; and his best boy, “Machine
Gun” Jack McGurn, nearly became machine-gunned
Jack McGurn thanks to the Northsiders, who also
shot up his snazzy car with him still in it.
Then Bugs hooked up with the nut-case Joe
Aiello, his Little Sicily neighbor, who put a $50,000
price on Al’s head! Mr. McGurn sent the out-of-town
bounty hunters home in boxes, but that didn’t stop
Aiello and Moran from successively knocking off
the two gentlemen who Al supported for leadership
of the Unione Siciliana. Tony Lombardo bought it on
the busiest street in downtown Chicago, and Patsy
Lolordo was wasted in his own home after chatting
and drinking with two supposed friends who set
him up to be killed as soon as they departed.
This was the final straw. The previous summer Al
had been forced to deal roughly with his one-time
employer, Frankie Yale, who not only was
sabotaging his own booze shipments to Chicago,
but also had teamed up with Aiello. Al had to send
his American Boys (as he called the former Egan’s
Rats who had abandoned St. Louis) all the way to
Brooklyn to deal with that traitor, who was dead
before his Lincoln coupe crashed into a house.
When Moran didn’t heed that lesson and then
helped kill his two Unione hopefuls, Al’s men took a
crack at him coming out of a North Side nightclub.
That was in January of 1929, and Al figured Moran
would call a meeting of his top lieutenants to plot
dastardly revenge. Al took off for Miami (or maybe
he was already there; I forget), leaving Frank Nitti to
deal with Bugs.
That was a big mistake. Nitti handed the
assignment over the Willie Heeney, who in turned
handed it over to Claude Maddox, whose Circus
Gang had already established a beachhead on
North Avenue, where the American Boys quietly
hung out. Maddox (a former St. Louis boy himself)
posted lookouts across from the North Clark Street
garage, just around the corner from Moran’s hotel,
where the Northsiders often met. But how was he to
know that Bugs would assemble his group on St.
Valentine’s Day? (The hijacked whiskey, Detroit’s
Keywell Brothers as lookouts, Jack McGurn as the
mastermind, is all nonsense; go back to the site
page about the Massacre, or to our St. Valentine’s
Day Massacre book.)
So what happens? What happens is that on the
morning of February 14 Maddox has to be in court
and leaves Fred Goetz, aka George Zeigler, in
charge. And when the phone call comes in from
lookout Byron Bolton mistakenly reporting that
Moran had arrived at 2122 North Halsted, a booze
depot masquerading as the S-M-C Cartage Co.,
Goetz scrambles his American Boys. They’re
actually in two tricked-out detective squad cars,
one in back and one in front. And when nobody in
the garage admits to being Moran, they stupidly kill
all seven. But they miss getting Bugs Moran!
Which is how Al Capone went from being a role
model for the youth of Chicago—the Babe Ruth of
American Gangsters—to Public Enemy No. 1!
And that was damn shame. His American Boys blew
it, committing the gangland crime of the century and
sending the cops into a saloon-closing frenzy that
cost the Outfit many millions of dollars. It also got Al
called on the carpet at the country’s first
nationwide gangster convention in Atlantic City,
after which he slunk off to Philadelpha and got
himself conveniently arrested for packing a piece,
which he rarely did in Chicago. This permitted
Chicagoans (who had previously treated him real
nice) to start crowing at Philly’s instant-justice
system and to begin denigrating him in editorial
cartoons that no newspaper had dared publish
before he was locked up!
Ever since the McSwiggin accident he’d been
seeking peace, but catching hell as bodies kept
piling up on his doorstep. All because the rascals
wouldn't quit shooting at him, but couldn't hit
anything! (Well, they did manage to hit other
Southsiders, but not Al.)
After the Pineapple Primary of 1928, the Chicago
Crime Commission’s Frank Loesch had gone to Al,
hat in hand, pleading with him to quell the violence
before that year's national elections—and he did
just that, assuring Loesch he could control the
Dagoes…I mean the Italians…with a few phone
calls, and then he would dispatch the cops to “jug
all the other hoods” before the voting started. For
once, Loesch said later, Chicago had an honest
election. (At least nobody got hurt.)
Al was also calling meetings at downtown hotels
to argue for peace, explaining how he deplored
Chicago’s corruption. He bemoaned:
“Graft is a byword in American life today. It is law
where no law is obeyed. It is undermining this
country. The honest lawmakers of any city can be
counted on your fingers. I could count Chicago's on
one hand….
“The worst type is the Big Politician who gives
about half his time to covering up so that no one
will know he's a thief. A hard-working crook can buy
these birds by the dozens, but he hates them in his
heart….
“A crook is a crook, and there's something
healthy about his frankness in the matter. But the
guy who pretends he's enforcing the law and steals
on his authority is a swell snake.”
Meanwhile, though, Al’s personal flamboyance and
quotability had made him a lightning rod for
everything that was wrong with Chicago. This
earned him an interview by a prestigious reporter
for the equally prestigious Literary Digest, and he
sure enough came off as a champion of the
American value system, denouncing “Reds,”
sympathizing with the poor, and promising to run
his rackets in the American way. He even ended up
with his picture on the cover of Time.
He already had grumped that “When I sell liquor,
they call it bootlegging; but when my patrons
service it on silver trays on Lake Short Drive, they
call it hospitality.”
And after his hounding by a finally-invigorated
press, he threw up his hands: “I’m through…. Let’s
the good citizens of Chicago get their booze the
best way they can.”
Well, we all know what happened next. The IRS
bean-counters nailed him for some niggling
accounting errors and off he went to prison on a
ten-year sentence! This, after he had agreed to pay
the government every nickel it thought he owed,
and when the Supreme Court had ruled only three
years earlier—just for him, it would seem— that
even illegal income was taxable. Even the
newspapers thought that was dirty pool.
They shipped the poor devil to Leavenworth, and
then, just to show off, moved him to the brand-new
federal prison for the worst of the worst—Alcatraz!—
as if he were a flight-risk or something.
As late as 1938, the year before he had mentally
deteriorated to the point of being released (hell, he
could barely sign his name to ask for a doctor) Look
magazine was still proclaiming him a fearsome
gangster who would come back out and regain
control of American crime!
It was over forty years after he’d finally croaked
that the American Bar Association retried him
posthumously and voided his conviction. It was as if
a bunch of lawyers had belatedly agreed he was
less crooked than the politicians of his day, and that
he had in fact had taught us all a valuable lesson:
The importance of practicing Safe Sex.
Fred Pasley, his first biographer, called Al Capone
the “Horatio Alger of American Crime,” and it’s not
hard to see why.
He grew up in the violent slums of Brooklyn, got
the scars on his face in a knife fight at Frankie Yale’
s Harvard Inn (no relation to Boston’s), lammed it to
Chicago to work for ex-New Yorker Johnnie Torrio,
turned 21 the day National Prohibition went into
effect, and by 1925 he had worked his way up to
leadership of the world's greatest booze empire.
Okay, so there had been some killings. Vice-
monger and restaurateur Big Jim Colosimo was too
love-smitten with his young songbird Dale Winter to
see Prohibition’s vast opportunities and he had to
go, but that was Torrio’s call and Al was just a pupil
who couldn’t buck his mentor.
Torrio then presided over the peaceful and
prosperous expansion of Chicagoland's
bootlegging until the obnoxious North Side mobster
Dean O’Banion (who scornfully referred to his
Italians friends as “spaghetti benders”) ripped-off
Mr. Torrio in a brewery deal and had to be bumped—
the city’s famous “handshake murder”—in his North
State Street flower shop in November of 1924.
Unfortunately, the rowdy Northsiders retaliated
and a badly wounded Torrio, seeing all his good
work being undone, said the hell with it, turned his
empire over to Al, and retired to New York as
gangster emeritus. Alas, wasting O’Banion launched
the Chicago Beer Wars that would bedevil Al all the
way to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Going back a few months from O’Banion, it may well
be that Al didn’t have to knock off Joe Howard in
Heinie Jacob’s saloon just because Howard
roughed up Jake Zuta, who immediately went
whining to Al. But the joint was only a block away,
Howard probably was drunk and abusive, and Al
didn’t have his feet under him yet. The pistol went
off probably by accident.
That certainly taught Al the folly of unnecessary
violence, for after that all his shootings were
defensive. (That later event--the battering and
killing of Scalise and Anselmi--was doubtlessly
cooked up by some reporter, for they both look
pretty good in their morgue pictures.)
Anyway, Al was minding his own business in the
Hawthorne Hotel restaurant when O’Banion’s North
Side successor, Hymie Weiss, led a motorcade
down the main street of Cicero and blew hell out of
the place with machine guns and shotguns.
What did Al do? First, he generously paid for
damage to his hotel and the cars parked in front,
and he even paid the medical bills for a lady who
had been cut by flying glass. But seeing the writing
on the walls (a lot of bullet holes), he had no choice
but to set up a little machine-gun nest three weeks
later, and Hymie shuffled off his mortal coil.
That wasn’t retaliatory so much as preemptive,
because, despite his Jewish-sounding moniker, his
real name was Earl Wojiekowski, and he was a really
trigger-happy Catholic Polack who maybe thought
the name Hymie Weiss would fool people into
thinking he was disinclined to violence.
Later, when the West Side O’Donnells tried to
push their own lousy beer on one of Al’s Cicero
tavern owners, he had to discourage them with
more machine-gun fire that, strictly by accident,
took out Assistant State’s Attorney William
McSwiggin.
That upset a lot of people who thought Al had
deliberately killed a public official, always a
protected species. It took six grand juries to
conclude that McSwiggin was simply partying with
some bootlegger friends and standing too close.
Weiss’s successor Schemer Drucci got himself
killed by the cops while resisting arrest, saving Al
the trouble, but that only left Bugs Moran to
become chief of the North Side gang. Al had to
dodge more bullets; and his best boy, “Machine
Gun” Jack McGurn, nearly became machine-gunned
Jack McGurn thanks to the Northsiders, who also
shot up his snazzy car with him still in it.
Then Bugs hooked up with the nut-case Joe
Aiello, his Little Sicily neighbor, who put a $50,000
price on Al’s head! Mr. McGurn sent the out-of-town
bounty hunters home in boxes, but that didn’t stop
Aiello and Moran from successively knocking off
the two gentlemen who Al supported for leadership
of the Unione Siciliana. Tony Lombardo bought it on
the busiest street in downtown Chicago, and Patsy
Lolordo was wasted in his own home after chatting
and drinking with two supposed friends who set
him up to be killed as soon as they departed.
This was the final straw. The previous summer Al
had been forced to deal roughly with his one-time
employer, Frankie Yale, who not only was
sabotaging his own booze shipments to Chicago,
but also had teamed up with Aiello. Al had to send
his American Boys (as he called the former Egan’s
Rats who had abandoned St. Louis) all the way to
Brooklyn to deal with that traitor, who was dead
before his Lincoln coupe crashed into a house.
When Moran didn’t heed that lesson and then
helped kill his two Unione hopefuls, Al’s men took a
crack at him coming out of a North Side nightclub.
That was in January of 1929, and Al figured Moran
would call a meeting of his top lieutenants to plot
dastardly revenge. Al took off for Miami (or maybe
he was already there; I forget), leaving Frank Nitti to
deal with Bugs.
That was a big mistake. Nitti handed the
assignment over the Willie Heeney, who in turned
handed it over to Claude Maddox, whose Circus
Gang had already established a beachhead on
North Avenue, where the American Boys quietly
hung out. Maddox (a former St. Louis boy himself)
posted lookouts across from the North Clark Street
garage, just around the corner from Moran’s hotel,
where the Northsiders often met. But how was he to
know that Bugs would assemble his group on St.
Valentine’s Day? (The hijacked whiskey, Detroit’s
Keywell Brothers as lookouts, Jack McGurn as the
mastermind, is all nonsense; go back to the site
page about the Massacre, or to our St. Valentine’s
Day Massacre book.)
So what happens? What happens is that on the
morning of February 14 Maddox has to be in court
and leaves Fred Goetz, aka George Zeigler, in
charge. And when the phone call comes in from
lookout Byron Bolton mistakenly reporting that
Moran had arrived at 2122 North Halsted, a booze
depot masquerading as the S-M-C Cartage Co.,
Goetz scrambles his American Boys. They’re
actually in two tricked-out detective squad cars,
one in back and one in front. And when nobody in
the garage admits to being Moran, they stupidly kill
all seven. But they miss getting Bugs Moran!
Which is how Al Capone went from being a role
model for the youth of Chicago—the Babe Ruth of
American Gangsters—to Public Enemy No. 1!
And that was damn shame. His American Boys blew
it, committing the gangland crime of the century and
sending the cops into a saloon-closing frenzy that
cost the Outfit many millions of dollars. It also got Al
called on the carpet at the country’s first
nationwide gangster convention in Atlantic City,
after which he slunk off to Philadelpha and got
himself conveniently arrested for packing a piece,
which he rarely did in Chicago. This permitted
Chicagoans (who had previously treated him real
nice) to start crowing at Philly’s instant-justice
system and to begin denigrating him in editorial
cartoons that no newspaper had dared publish
before he was locked up!
Ever since the McSwiggin accident he’d been
seeking peace, but catching hell as bodies kept
piling up on his doorstep. All because the rascals
wouldn't quit shooting at him, but couldn't hit
anything! (Well, they did manage to hit other
Southsiders, but not Al.)
After the Pineapple Primary of 1928, the Chicago
Crime Commission’s Frank Loesch had gone to Al,
hat in hand, pleading with him to quell the violence
before that year's national elections—and he did
just that, assuring Loesch he could control the
Dagoes…I mean the Italians…with a few phone
calls, and then he would dispatch the cops to “jug
all the other hoods” before the voting started. For
once, Loesch said later, Chicago had an honest
election. (At least nobody got hurt.)
Al was also calling meetings at downtown hotels
to argue for peace, explaining how he deplored
Chicago’s corruption. He bemoaned:
“Graft is a byword in American life today. It is law
where no law is obeyed. It is undermining this
country. The honest lawmakers of any city can be
counted on your fingers. I could count Chicago's on
one hand….
“The worst type is the Big Politician who gives
about half his time to covering up so that no one
will know he's a thief. A hard-working crook can buy
these birds by the dozens, but he hates them in his
heart….
“A crook is a crook, and there's something
healthy about his frankness in the matter. But the
guy who pretends he's enforcing the law and steals
on his authority is a swell snake.”
Meanwhile, though, Al’s personal flamboyance and
quotability had made him a lightning rod for
everything that was wrong with Chicago. This
earned him an interview by a prestigious reporter
for the equally prestigious Literary Digest, and he
sure enough came off as a champion of the
American value system, denouncing “Reds,”
sympathizing with the poor, and promising to run
his rackets in the American way. He even ended up
with his picture on the cover of Time.
He already had grumped that “When I sell liquor,
they call it bootlegging; but when my patrons
service it on silver trays on Lake Short Drive, they
call it hospitality.”
And after his hounding by a finally-invigorated
press, he threw up his hands: “I’m through…. Let’s
the good citizens of Chicago get their booze the
best way they can.”
Well, we all know what happened next. The IRS
bean-counters nailed him for some niggling
accounting errors and off he went to prison on a
ten-year sentence! This, after he had agreed to pay
the government every nickel it thought he owed,
and when the Supreme Court had ruled only three
years earlier—just for him, it would seem— that
even illegal income was taxable. Even the
newspapers thought that was dirty pool.
They shipped the poor devil to Leavenworth, and
then, just to show off, moved him to the brand-new
federal prison for the worst of the worst—Alcatraz!—
as if he were a flight-risk or something.
As late as 1938, the year before he had mentally
deteriorated to the point of being released (hell, he
could barely sign his name to ask for a doctor) Look
magazine was still proclaiming him a fearsome
gangster who would come back out and regain
control of American crime!
It was over forty years after he’d finally croaked
that the American Bar Association retried him
posthumously and voided his conviction. It was as if
a bunch of lawyers had belatedly agreed he was
less crooked than the politicians of his day, and that
he had in fact had taught us all a valuable lesson:
The importance of practicing Safe Sex.
“I'd like to have enough money to enjoy life;
be clear of everything--not worry, take care of
my old man, and see a ball game every day.”
be clear of everything--not worry, take care of
my old man, and see a ball game every day.”
"Whatever else they may say, my booze has been
good and my games have been on the square.
Public service has been my motto.”
good and my games have been on the square.
Public service has been my motto.”
Joe Howard,
probably drunk
and abusive,
tormented Mr.
Zuta, who
complained to Mr.
Capone, whose gun
probably went off
by accident.
probably drunk
and abusive,
tormented Mr.
Zuta, who
complained to Mr.
Capone, whose gun
probably went off
by accident.
Dale, Big Jim & Big Jim Croaked
McSwiggin
shouldn't have
gone out
partying with his
bootlegger
buddies without
letting Al know
ahead of time
and saving
himself a lot of
grief.
shouldn't have
gone out
partying with his
bootlegger
buddies without
letting Al know
ahead of time
and saving
himself a lot of
grief.
| Al counsels Chicago big-wigs on importance of peace. |
| J. Edgar was less than amused at John's pranks and popularity. |
