Power
Shortly after he took over Johnny Torrio's empire, it was clear
that his new status had changed Al Capone. He was a major
force now in the Chicago underworld. To underscore his rise in
the world, he moved his headquarters to the Metropole Hotel.
His luxurious suite of five rooms cost $1,500 per day.
He went from near obscurity to cultivated visibility.
His friendship with newspaper editor Harry Read convinced Capone
that he should behave like the prominent figure he was.
"Quit hiding," Read told him. "Be nice to
people." Capone became visible at the opera, at sporting
events and charitable functions. He was an important member of
the community: friendly, generous, successful, supplying
a throng of thirsty customers. In an era where most of
the adult population drank bootleg alcohol, the bootlegger seemed
almost respectable.
According to Bergreen, "buying favorable publicity was only
half the game. Political influence was the
other...Almost every day he drove to the complex that served as both
City Hall and the county building. He did all he could to make
himself seem available, a man with nothing to fear. Always
beautifully dressed, quiet, another political fixer going about his
daily rounds. Capone's political flair, his urge to be seen in
public, was unique among racketeers, who as a rule abhorred
publicity."
In December of 1925, Al took his son to New York for surgery to
relieve his chronic ear infections. Al was devoted to his only
child and the boy's poor health constantly preyed on his mind.
Capone used the visit to New York to transact some business with his
old boss Frankie Yale. The subject was imported whiskey which
was always in short supply since it had to be smuggled over the
Canadian border. It was easier for Yale to get whiskey into
New York than it was for Capone to get whiskey into Chicago, so Yale
had an oversupply. They worked out a deal and Capone would
figure out how to get the whiskey from New York to Chicago.
Yale invited Al to a Christmas Day party at the Adonis Social and
Athletic Club, a fancy name for a Brooklyn speakeasy.
Yale was tipped off that rival gangster Richard "Peg-Leg"
Lonergan was going to crash the party with a bunch of his
thugs. Yale wanted to cancel the party, but Capone insisted
the celebration go forward.
Capone planned a surprise of his own. When Lonergan's men
came to the club around 3 A.M. they were insulting and
obnoxious. Capone gave the signal and all hell broke
loose. Lonergan and his men didn't even have time to draw
their guns they were so surprised at the well-orchestrated
attack.
The Adonis Club Massacre was Al flexing his muscle in his old
stamping ground. It was also a way of displaying Chicago's
gangland superiority over New York. "Chicago is the
imperial city of the gang world, and New York a remote provincial
place," wrote Alva Johnston in the New Yorker. In
Chicago," beer has lifted the gangster from a local leader of
roughs and gunmen to a great executive controlling a big interstate
and international organization. Beer, real beer, like water
supply or the telephone, is a natural monopoly." He then
created a written portrait of Al Capone, the "greatest gang
leader in history."
Back in Chicago at the beginning of 1926, Capone was in excellent
spirits. Not only had he made his mark in New York, but his
whiskey deal would change the face of interstate
transportation. Young men with a thirst for adventure and the
need for money made a good living working as one of Capone's
truckers.
In the spring of 1926, Capone's run of good luck hit a
snag. On April 27, Billy McSwiggin, the young "hanging
prosecutor" who had tried to pin the 1924 death of
Joe Howard on Capone, met with an accident. He left the
home of his father, a veteran Chicago police detective, and went
with "Red" Duffy to play cards at one of Capone's gambling
joints. A bootlegger named Jim Doherty picked them up in his
car.
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Klondike O'Donnell |
Doherty's car broke down and they hitched a ride with bootlegger
"Klondike" O'Donnell, a bitter enemy of Capone. The
four Irish lads went on a drinking binge in Cicero with O'Donnell
and his brother Myles and ended up at a bar close to the Hawthorne
Inn where Capone was having dinner. O'Donnell's cruising
around in Cicero was a territorial insult.
Capone and his henchmen, not realizing that McSwiggin was in the
bar with Myles O'Donnell, waited outside in a convoy of cars until
the drunken men staggered out. Then out came the machine
guns and McSwiggin and Doherty were dead.
Capone was blamed. Despite the blot on McSwiggin's
integrity for keeping company with bootleggers, sympathy was with
the dead young prosecutor. There was a big outcry against
gangster violence and public sentiment went against Capone.
While everyone in Chicago just knew that Al Capone was
responsible, there was not a shred of proof and the failure of this
high-profile investigation to return an indictment was an
embarrassment to local officials. Police took out their
frustrations on Capone's whorehouses and speakeasies which endured a
series of raids and fires.
Capone went into hiding for three months in the summer.
Reputedly some 300 detectives looked for him all over the country,
in Canada and even Italy. In fact, he initially found refuge
in the home of a friend in Chicago Heights and then, for most of the
time, with friends in Lansing, Michigan.
Those three months in hiding made an indelible mark on Al.
He began to see himself as much more than a successful rackeeter.
He started to think of himself as a source of pride to the Italian
immigrant community, a generous benefactor and important fixer who
could help people. His bootlegging operations employed
thousands of people, many of whom were poor Italian
immigrants. His generosity was becoming legendary in
Lansing. While much of this was just his ego getting larger,
Capone had real leadership abilities and was very capable of
extending those talents into areas that were beneficial to the
community. He seriously thought of retiring from his life of
crime and violence.
He couldn't spend the rest of his life in hiding so he decided
upon a calculated but risky course. He negotiated his
surrender to the Chicago police. It was the first step in the
new direction in which he wanted to take his life: exoneration
in the death of McSwiggin, using his vast wealth to finance
legitimate enterprises and set himself up as a hero to the Italian
immigrant community.
On July 28, 1926, he returned to Chicago to face the accusations
of murder. It turned out to be the right decision because the
authorities did not have sufficient evidence to bring him to
trial. For all the public uproar and efforts of the law
enforcement groups, Al Capone was a free man. The authorities
looked impotent.
Capone in his new role as the expansive peacemaker made a last
ditch attempt to create an alliance with Hymie Weiss despite a
recent attempt on his life. He offered Hymie a very profitable
business deal in exchange for peace. Hymie turned him
down. The next day, Hymie was gunned down at the ripe
old age of twenty-eight.
The people of Chicago were tired of reading about gang violence
and the newspapers fanned their anger. Capone held a highly
publicized "peace conference" in which he appealed to the
other bootleggers assembled there to tone down 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 made his point. At the end of the
meeting, an "amnesty" had been negotiated which
accomplished two key things: first, there would be no more murders
or beatings and second, past murders would not be
avenged. For more than two months thereafter, nobody
connected with the bootlegging business was killed.
In January of 1927, one of Al's closest friends, Theodore Anton,
known as "Tony the Greek," was found murdered.
Capone was in tears over the loss of his friend and started to think
more seriously about retirement. He invited a group of
reporters over to his house and cooked them a spaghetti dinner, all
to announce his retirement. Was he serious or just play
acting? He probably was serious about retiring before someone
put a bullet in his skull, but Al's need for power and excitement
kept pushing real retirement into the future.
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"Big Bill" Thompson
(Chicago Sun-Times) |
With the failure of Mayor Dever's reform program, the rise of
Chicago as the imperial gangster city became the most significant
campaign issue in the 1927 election. "Big
Bill" Thompson, assisted by a small fortune in campaign funds
from organized crime, came back into power. It looked as if
the bad guys would have the city in their grip forever.
However, a few tiny blips on the radar screen showed some promise
to eventually make a major impact on the city of Chicago, the
bootlegging business and Al Capone. In May of 1927, the
Supreme Court made a decision that Manny Sullivan, a
bootlegger, had to report and pay income tax on his illegal
bootlegging business. Just because reporting and paying tax on
illegally-derived revenues was self-incrimination, it was not
unconstitutional. With the Sullivan ruling, the small
Special Intelligence Unit of the IRS under Elmer Irey was able to go
after Al Capone.
Unaware and uninterested in Manny Sullivan or Elmer Irey, Capone
became more compulsively extroverted and expansive. He
indulged heavily in his two big passions, music and boxing. He
became close pals with Jack Dempsey, but given the concern over
fixed fights, the friendship had to be very discreet. Always
an opera lover, Capone expanded his patronage to the jazz
world. With the opening of the Cotton Club in Cicero, Al
became a jazz impresario, attracting and cultivating some of the
best black jazz musicians of the day. Unlike so many other
Italian gangsters, Al did not seem to have the deep-seated racial
prejudice and he gained the trust and respect of many of his
musicians. Al extended his generosity and personal concerns to
everybody who worked for him, black or white.
Bergreen describes the way Capone inserted himself into the lives
of those he knew: "He came to dominate them not by shouting,
overwhelming, or bullying, although the threat of physical violence
always loomed, but by appealing to the inner man, his wants, his
aspirations...by making them feel valued, they gave unstintingly of
their loyalty, and loyalty was what Capone needed and demanded; in
the volatile circles through which he moved it was the only
protection he had from sudden death. The highest compliment
other men could pay Capone was to call him a friend, which meant
they were willing to overlook his scandalous reputation, that he had
never been a pimp or a murderer."
"Public service is my motto," Al told reporters around
Christmas. "Ninety percent of the people in Chicago
drink and gamble. I've tried to serve them decent liquor and
square games. But I'm not appreciated. I'm known all
over the world as a millionaire gorilla." The exposure
was becoming a real nuisance. When he left for a trip to the
West Coast, he had police surrounding him at every station.
Los Angeles' toughest detective said "We have no room here for
Capone or any other visiting gangsters whether they are here on
pleasure tours or not."
When Capone came back from the West Coast, he found himself
surrounded by six Joliet policemen with their shotguns aimed at
him. "Well, I'll be damned. You'd think I was Jesse
James. What's the artillery for?" In Chicago, the
police made things as uncomfortable as possible by surrounding his
house and arresting him at the slightest provocation.
