Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (33 page)

A sixth special grand jury brought the investigation to a fumbling close in October. Long before, the question of who killed McSwiggin and why had assumed less importance than the panorama of civic corruption that had been unveiled.

... the McSwiggin case [said the Illinois Crime Survey] marks the beginning of intense public interest in organized crime.... The killing of McSwiggin dramatized to the public the relation between criminal gangs and the political machine. It is true that the coroner's jury and six grand juries were of no avail in solving the murder of an assistant state's attorney and his two gangster companions, but their findings did convince the public of the existence and power of organized crime-a power due in large part to its unholy alliance with politics. The very failure of the grand juries in solving the mystery of McSwiggin's death raised many puzzling and disturbing questions in the minds of intelligent citizens about the reasons for the breakdown of constituted government in Chicago and Cook County and its seeming helplessness when pitted against the forces of organized crime.

August 10, 1926-The First Battle of the Standard Oil Building

SO far the Weiss forces had kept the initiative and struck the hardest blows. They had wounded Torrio and put him to flight, attacked Capone twice and his men a dozen times, killed Tommy Cuiringione. . . .

Hymie Weiss and Schemer Drucci had an appointment in the offices of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago at 910 South Michigan Avenue, the new nineteen-story Standard Oil Building. They were to meet with Morris Eller, political boss of the Twentieth Ward, who had recently been elected a trustee of the department, and John Sbarbaro, gangland's favorite funeral director, as well as an assistant state's attorney. Drucci was then living in the Congress Hotel, four blocks north of the rendezvous, and Weiss joined him there at about 9 A.M. After breakfasting in Drucci's eighth-floor suite, they set out on foot for the Standard Oil Building.

The exact nature of their business remained a secret among the parties involved. It called for a payment of $13,500, which Drucci brought with him in cash. He later referred vaguely to a "real estate deal." Whatever the transaction, it was not consummated that morning. As Weiss and Drucci approached the bronze, neo-Italian Renaissance doors of the building, four men bolted out of a car on the opposite side of the avenue and ran toward them with drawn automatics. Weiss and Drucci, shielding themselves behind a car parked in front of the entrance, pulled their guns out of their shoulder holsters. At that hour of the day the block teemed with people hurrying to work. A bullet nicked an office clerk in the thigh.

The street emptied as people dived for cover into doorways. The shooting went on, chipping hunks of concrete from buildings and smashing windows, until both sides ran out of ammunition. A police flivver then reached the scene. The attackers raced back to their car. One of them fell behind and the others drove off without him. The police recognized the Capone gunman, Louis Barko. Weiss fled into the Standard Oil lobby. Drucci leaped onto the running board of a passing car, held his revolver to the driver's temple and ordered him to keep going. But before the car could pick up speed, the police had dragged Drucci backward to the pavement.

At the stationhouse both Barko and Drucci gave false names and addresses. Drucci denied ever having set eyes on Barko. There had been no gang fight, he insisted. "It was a stickup, that's all. They were after my roll."

August 15-The Second Battle of the Standard Oil Building

Toward midmorning Weiss and Drucci were traveling south on Michigan Avenue in a sedan. As they came abreast of the Standard Oil Building, a car that had been trailing them close behind suddenly shot ahead, swerved to the right, and rammed them. Bullets from the car smashed all their windows. They jumped out and scampered into the building, firing over their shoulders as they ran. ("A real goddam crazy place!" said Capone's Brooklyn schoolmate Lucky Luciano after a visit to Chicago. "Nobody's safe in the streets.")

September 20-The Siege of the Hawthorne Inn

Frankie Rio saw through the ruse first. He and Capone were finishing lunch in the rear of the restaurant, facing the windows and Twenty-second Street. The place was packed, every table taken, this being the day of the big autumn meet at the nearby Hawthorne Race Track. Capone and his lieutenant were sipping coffee when they heard the roar of a speeding car mingled with the clatter of machinegun fire. In the silence after the car passed they rushed to the door with the other startled diners. There were no bullet marks, for the gunner had been firing blanks. Rio understood-a decoy to draw Capone out into the open. He flung himself to the floor, pulling Capone down on top of him, as bullets streaked over their heads, splintering the woodwork, smashing glassware and crockery. There were ten cars in the motorcade that had been moving single file behind the decoy car, and gun barrels stuck out of every window like the quills on a porcupine. The attackers took their time. As each car came abreast of the hotel, it stopped while they systematically sprayed the facade left to right, right to left, up and down. Louis Barko, entering the restaurant during the first burst, fell, a bullet through his shoulder. The cars standing at the curb, scores of them belonging to race fans, were perforated by the hail of lead. Clyde Freeman had driven all the way from Louisiana with his wife and five-year-old son. They were still in the car when the gunners opened fire. A bullet ripped through Freeman's hat. Another gashed his boy's knee. Flying shards of glass from the windshield cut Mrs. Freeman's arm and pierced her right eye. When the last carload of attackers stopped before the hotel, a man in a khaki shirt and overalls got out, carrying a tommy gun. He walked calmly up to the entrance, knelt, thrust the gun barrel through the doorway and, setting the mechanism at rapid fire, emptied a 100cartridge drum in about ten seconds. The driver of the lead car sounded his klaxon three times. The man in khaki returned to the rear car, and the motorcade continued in orderly formation along Twenty-second Street toward Chicago.

The attack had left the restaurant, the hotel lobby and the neighboring storefronts in ruins, but the only human casualties were Barko and the Freemans. As Capone stood up, he showed no fear. His reaction was rather one of awed fascination with the power of tommy guns. He later told his reporter friend Edward Dean Sullivan: "That's the gun! It's got it over a sawed-off shotgun like the shotgun has it over an automatic. Put on a bigger drum and it will shoot well over a thousand. The trouble is they're hard to get."

When he learned that Mrs. Freeman's injured eye would require major surgery and a long hospitalization, he insisted on paying the entire bill. It came to $10,000. He also paid for repairs to the damaged stores adjoining the Hawthorne Inn.

Chief of Detectives Schoemaker, who felt sure he knew the identity of at least five of the attackers, summoned Louis Barko to a lineup and in it put Weiss, Drucci, Bugs Moran, Frank Gusenberg and his brothers, Pete and Henry. Barko, observing the gangster code as scrupulously as Drucci had done after the first battle of the Standard Oil Building, swore they all were strangers to him.

October 4-Truce

Torrio would have applauded Capone's next move. It reflected his mentor's policy of shared spoils ("There's plenty for everybody") . Repressing his natural urge to kill Weiss, he proposed a peace talk. Weiss agreed to a meeting at the Morrison Hotel. Capone prudently refrained from attending himself. He sent Tony Lombardo as his surrogate and, to placate the enemy, authorized him to offer Weiss exclusive sales rights to all the beer territory in Chicago north of Madison Street, a handsome concession. But the minimum price Weiss would accept for peace was the removal of Scalise and Anselmi. Lombardo phoned for instructions. When he transmitted Capone's answer-"I wouldn't do that to a yellow dog"-Weiss stalked out of the hotel in a fury.

October 11-The State Street Ambush

The three-story rooming house at 740 North State Street, kept by a Mrs. Anna Rotariu, had a curious literary association. The property belonged to the prolific crime writer, Harry Stephen Keeler (The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro, Sing Sing Nights and fifty-three others) . He was born and reared in the house and wrote some of his thrillers there, moving away after his marriage in 1919. Next door, at 738, stood the old Dion O'Banion flower shop. William Schofield now ran it, and Hymie Weiss used the rooms above as his headquarters.

Early in October, a young man calling himself Oscar Lundin, or Langdon, rented lodgings from Mrs. Rotariu. He wanted a room on the second floor, facing State Street, but all the front rooms were occupied. So he agreed to take a back room until one should fall vacant, as it did on October 8. It was a dismal, musty room, small and meanly equipped with a pair of straight-backed wooden chairs, an old oak dresser, a tarnished brass bedframe, a tin food box, a gas ring, a shelf holding a few cracked plates and stained cutlery. But Lundin appeared delighted.

The same day that he came to Mrs. Rotariu's house a pretty blond woman, giving her name as Mrs. Theodore Schultz and her address as Mitchell, South Dakota, rented a front room on the third floor of an apartment building at 1 Superior Street, which ran at a right angle to State Street, south of the flower shop. Lundin's windows commanded an unobstructed view of the east side of State Street from Holy Name Cathedral to the corner, while Mrs. Schultz's windows overlooked both front and rear entrances of the flower shop. Anybody approaching or leaving the immediate neighborhood in any direction had to pass within close visual range of one or the other rooms.

Lundin occupied his quarters for only one day. After paying a week's rent in advance, he vanished. Two men, who had been visiting him during his stay, then moved into the room. As Mrs. Rotariu described them, one was about thirty-five years old, wearing a gray overcoat and gray fedora; the other, considerably younger, wore a dark suit and light cap. Mrs. Schultz also vanished after paying a week's rent, and two men, believed to be Italians, took possession of her room.

Hymie Weiss spent a large part of October 11 in the Criminal Court Building, four blocks from his headquarters, watching the selection of a jury in the trial of Joe Saltis and Lefty Koncil for the murder of Mitters Foley. The trial held a special interest for Weiss, as evidenced by the list of veniremen in his pocket and the list of state's witnesses in a safe back at his headquarters, documents whose later discovery would give substance to the rumor that he had disbursed $100,000 to ensure an acquittal.

When the court recessed for the day, Weiss left the building with four companions. There was his driver and factotum, Sam Peller; Paddy Murray, his bodyguard and a part-time beer runner; Benny Jacobs, a Twentieth Ward politician and private investigator for lawyers; and William W. O'Brien, one of Chicago's leading criminal lawyers, who headed the Saltis-Koncil defense staff. Four years earlier O'Brien had defeated a move to disbar him for having tried to suborn two assistant state's attorneys. His reputation was further blemished when he refused to name the gangster who shot him in a South Side saloon.

At about 4 P.M. Peller parked Weiss' Cadillac coupe in front of Holy Name Cathedral, opposite the flower shop, and the five men started across State Street. The swarthy pair in Mrs. Rotariu's room ing house had been waiting for two days, their chairs drawn up to the windows, tommy guns and shotguns at hand. A hundred cigarette stubs littered the floor. The coverlet of the bed on which they had taken turns napping was splotched with black shoe polish. The two men in the side-street apartment had also been keeping vigil since October 9, chain-smoking and drinking wine, but now they saw they were no longer needed. In their hasty retreat they left behind an automatic shotgun and two bottles of wine.

The date of the construction of Holy Name Cathedral and the Vulgate version of St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (2:10), were carved on the cornerstone-A.D. 1874 AT THE NAME OF JESUS EVERY KNEE SHOULD BOW IN HEAVEN AND ON EARTH. The bullets that poured from the windows of No. 740, as the five men reached the center of the street, chipped off the date and all but six words of the text, leaving