Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (53 page)

In its final report the July grand jury declared itself unable to substantiate any of Brundige's allegations against his fellow newspapermen.

The prime physical clue to Lingle's assassin was the revolver he dropped in his flight. It was a snub-nosed .38-caliber Colt, a detective special, also called a belly gun because triggermen commonly carried one stuck inside their trouser waistband. The manufacturer's serial number had been filed off. The die that stamps the number on a gun leaves two impressions. The second, deep in the metal and invisible to the eye, is known as the tattoo. Colonel Goddard had developed a process for raising the tattoo. He would grind down the surface as far as the second impression, polish it, and treat it with an etching solution of alcohol and acids. Coroner Bundesen telephoned the number thus uncovered to the Colt factory in Hartford, Connecticut, and within the hour the revolver was identified as one of six delivered in June, 1928, a year before the Lingle murder, to-who else?-Peter von Frantzius. Though the gunsmith had committed no crime under the still-lax gun laws, Bundesen, a detective and a young Tribune reporter, John Boettiger, managed between them to terrify him into revealing the purchaser. He named Frank Foster, a Sicilian, born Citro, a veteran O'Banionite and one of the first bootleggers to im port Canadian whiskey. Another North Sider, Ted Newberry, accompanied him when he bought the six revolvers, and it was at Newberry's insistence that Von Frantzius filed off the serial numbers. Both Newberry and Foster had recently defected to the Capone ranks.

Since none of the witnesses to Lingle's murder recognized Foster from the photographs the police showed them, the investigators concluded that he himself did not pull the trigger, though he probably knew who did and was therefore an accessory to the crime. Failing to find him in his accustomed Chicago haunts, they launched a nationwide search. It ended in Los Angeles, to which Foster had fled two days after the murder. He was extradited and indicted as an accomplice of the murderer, but following his lawyers' fourth demand for trial, State's Attorney Swanson conceded the evidence to be insufficient to warrant further prosecution and entered a nolle prosequi.

The case against Foster was one of many to collapse.

A few days before Lingle died, John J. "Boss" McLaughlin, a former state legislator and political fixer for the North Side gang, opened a gambling house at 606 West Madison Street. Commissioner Russell promptly closed it. McLaughlin thereupon telephoned Lingle at the Tribune, asking him to intercede. A reporter, whom Lingle signaled to listen in on an extension, later reconstructed the conversation verbatim from his notes.

MCLAUGHLIN-Swanson told me it was all right to go ahead and I don't see why Russell is butting in.

LINGLE-I don't believe Swanson told you any such thing, but if it's true, you get Swanson to write a letter to Russell, notifying him that it's all right for you to go ahead.

MCLAUGHLIN-DO you think Swanson is crazy? He wouldn't write such a letter.

LINGLE-Well, Russell can't let you run. That's final.

MCLAUGHLIN-(cursing) I'll catch up with you and it won't be long either.

McLaughlin was picked up within hours of the murder. "Why, I wouldn't hurt a hair of Jake's head," he assured Roche. "I liked Jake. I might have asked him a favor or two, but I certainly never wished him harm." In the absence of any evidence other than a threat uttered in anger, Roche let him go.

At their zenith, before the St. Valentine's Day massacre, Bugs Moran's North Siders extended their protection to one of Chicago's most elegant gambling houses, the oddly named Sheridan Wave Tournament Club on Waveland Avenue, which Julian "Potatoes" Kaufman operated in partnership with Joey Brooks, alias Josephs. Admission was by invitation only. Liveried attendants served food and drink at no charge to the fashionable clientele, who nightly enriched the owners by tens of thousands of dollars. Twenty-five percent of the gross went to Moran, and Lingle was rumored to receive 10 percent. When, in June, 1928, the police under Commissioner Michael Hughes raided the club, judge Harry Fisher, he who had ruled dog racing to be legal, professed to view it as "an orderly private athletic club," and he enjoined the police "from annoying, molesting or in any manner interfering with the complainant in its lawful conduct of its members."

A year later, following the decline of Moran's prestige, Hughes' successor, Russell, directed another raid. This time the club stayed dark for a year before Kaufman and Brooks, with Moran's backing, determined to reopen it. Engraved invitations to the first nightJune 9-were sent to the old clientele. Lingle had demanded a 50 percent cut. The partners refused. "If this joint is opened up," Lingle was reported to have said, "you'll see more squad cars in front ready to raid it than you ever saw before in your life."

So they decided to kill him. Jack Zuta, the whoremonger, who had become Moran's business manager, supposedly supervised the details, paying the labor racketeer Simon Gorman $20,000 to recruit a killer from among his cohorts. The choice, according to Roche's source, fell on one James "Red" Forsythe, who vanished immediately after the murder.

Zuta was a familiar figure around the detective bureau. He had been brought there frequently. Whining and servile, he was thought capable, if sufficiently frightened, of sacrificing his own mother. Captain Stege once reduced him to quaking terror by saying: "You're doomed. I've told that to 14 other hoodlums who have sat on that same chair you're sitting on and all of them are dead."

The North Siders despised Zuta for his cowardice, yet tolerated him because, next to Jake Guzik, he probably had the best business brains in the underworld. When, on June 30, the police arrested him along with a woman companion, Leona Bernstein, and two men, Solly Vision and Albert Bratz, and took them to Roche, a tremor of apprehension ran through the gang. Though Zuta did not, in fact, incriminate anybody during the twenty-four hours he was detained, reports to the contrary leaked out of the bureau. He sensed as much, for when freed at 10:30 P.M. on a writ of habeas corpus, he implored a detective, Lieutenant George Barker, to escort him and his companions to safety. Because one was a woman, Barker agreed to drive them in his Pontiac through the Loop to the El station on Lake Street, thirteen blocks north. Bratz and Leona Bernstein sat in the front seat. Solly Vision sat behind with Zuta.

They were edging slowly into the Loop, by night as bright as high noon with its million dollars' worth of newly installed candlepower, when Zuta's fear took shape. Peering out the rear window, he saw a blue sedan bearing down on them. On the running board stood a man wearing a tan suit, a boutonniere and a Panama hat. "They're after us!" Zuta screamed, flinging himself to the floor. Bratz vaulted the front seat and crouched next to him. As the sedan drew alongside, the man on the running board took a .45-caliber automatic from a shoulder holster and emptied it into the tonneau of the Pontiac, while the driver and another gunman in the rear seat fired revolvers at the windows. Jamming on his brakes, Barker leaped to the street, gun in hand. The sedan halted, too, and as the summer nighttime strollers scattered in panic, gangsters and detective traded shots. Stray bullets hit a bank guard and a motorman, whose streetcar had been blocked by the besieged Pontiac. The motorman died in the hospital. (G. K. Chesterton was less than accurate when, six months later, following a visit to Chicago, he glibly wrote in the New York Times Magazine: "Chicago has many beauties, including the fastidiousness and good taste to assassinate nobody except assassins.")

Ammunition exhausted, the driver of the sedan shifted into first and started north up State Street. Barker stepped back into his car. His three passengers had vanished. He sped after the gunmen, but with a trick new to gang combat, they escaped him. Through a specially installed injection pump they forced massive quantities of oil into the intake manifold, thus laying down from the exhaust a dense, black smoke screen that covered the street from sidewalk to sidewalk. By the time Barker had crawled through it they were gone.

In the middle of State Street he spotted a revolver that one of the killers had thrown from the sedan. Delivered to the Goddard labora tory, it told an interesting story. A month earlier Sam "Golf Bag" Hunt had been arrested for trying to shoot Leo Mongoven, Public Enemy No. 27 and a Moran bodyguard. Searching the receptacle that gave Hunt his sobriquet, they confiscated a shotgun, a .38-caliber revolver mounted on a .45-caliber frame and shells for both weapons. To obliterate the serial numbers, the symbol # had been stamped over them, a Caponian technique. The revolver discarded on State Street bore the same symbol.

Zuta stayed out of sight for a month. He finally surfaced under the alias J. H. Goodman at the Lake View Hotel, a roadhouse by the shore of Upper Nemahbin Lake, in Wisconsin, 25 miles west of Milwaukee. The barroom had a coin-operated player piano, and on the evening of August 1 Zuta was idly feeding it nickels while half a dozen couples lindy hopped around the dance floor. Five men came in, Indian file, the first holding a tommy gun, the others sawed-off shotguns and revolvers. Zuta had just popped another nickel into the slot, causing the piano to thump out a hit of the hour-"Good for You, Bad for Me." The fusillade slammed him against the keys.

Sixteen bullets were extracted from Zuta's body. Several proved to be of a type used almost exclusively in the model of the revolver removed from Sam Hunt's golf bag. Applying his etching process to the Hunt weapon, Goddard discovered the number, communicated it to the manufacturer, and shortly established, as the ultimate consignee, the Capone organization. At the same time a frequenter of the Lake View Hotel identified Ted Newberry from photographs as one of Zuta's assassins. Though neither piece of evidence proved sufficient to bring the turncoat gangster to trial, both added weight to the theory that Capone had ordered the killing. (On the fatal evening Capone presided at a banquet in Cicero's Western Hotel for a hundred of his loyalists.) But the motive-whether to avenge Lingle or to prevent Zuta from telling what he knew about the assassination-remained forever obscure.

Zuta, a methodical man, had kept records of his business transactions under aliases in safe-deposit boxes at different banks. Roche's inquiries led him to two of them, and he obtained warrants to open them. Chicagoans had long been inured to revelations of politicocriminal chicanery, but what Zuta's caches disgorged dumbfounded the most blase. They included canceled checks, ranging in amounts from $50 to $5,500-a total of $8,950-payable to two judges and Judge Harry Fisher's brother, Louis, the dog track lawyer; two state senators; two police officers; a chief deputy coroner; an assistant business manager of the Board of Education; a city editor; and the William Hale Thompson Republican Club. There was a letter from Evanston's Chief of Police William 0. Freeman.

DEAR JACK:

I am temporarily in need of four "C's" for a couple of months. Can you let me have it? The bearer does not know what it is, so put it in an envelope and seal it and address it to me.

Your old pal, BILL FREEMAN

P.S. Will let you know the night of the party, so be sure and come.

A card signed by Charles E. Graydon, sheriff of Cook County, notified whomever it might concern that "The bearer, J. Zuta, is extended the courtesies of all departments." Letters dated June, 1927, from an ex-Caponeite, Louis La Cava, who had been banished when he attempted to appropriate Cicero territory, suggested another reason why Capone might have wished to eliminate Zuta.

I'd help you organize a strong business organization capable of coping with theirs in Cicero. You know you have lots of virgin territory on the north side limits border line and they are going to try and prevent me from lining up with you and thereby starving me out, until I go back to them, begging for mercy. . . . I have heard the Big Boy is stopping my brothers from making a living... .

A balance sheet showed the North Siders' gross revenue from gambling at their apogee, before the St. Valentine's Day massacre. In a single week (November 6-12, 1927) it totaled $429,146. Roughly a fourth of that went for police protection.

During the four months since Lingle's death the police, casting a dragnet over the Chicago underworld, had hauled in and questioned about 700 criminals of record. Rathbun and Roche followed dozens of trails to their dead ends. Again and again the compass needle of suspicion had swung back to Capone. Lingle took $50,000 from him (so it was whispered along the grapevine) as the price of official sanction for a new dog track on the West Side but never delivered, a capi tal offense in Capone's domain. The reporter's considerable knowledge of Capone's financial transactions-if, as Frank Wilson had thought possible, he could have been persuaded to share it with the government-would have constituted another reason for killing him. But no evidence supported any of these hypotheses.