Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (57 page)

Wilson heard frequently from O'Hare thereafter, either directly or through Rogers. It was O'Hare who told him where to look for Fred Ries, who exposed to him the structure of the Capone dog track management, who verified the true percentage of the gambling profits that went into Capone's pockets-not one-sixth, but more than half.

You be sure to take good care of yourself. The veiled warning echoed in Wilson's mind when O'Hare called him one morning toward the end of November. Fantastic as it sounded, Capone, he said, acting against the judgment of cooler heads, had imported five gunmen from New York with a contract to kill not only Wilson, but also Arthur Madden, the chief of the Chicago tax intelligence unit, Pat Roche and U.S. Attorney Johnson. Mike Malone confirmed the report. The contract called for payment of $25,000. The gunmen had arrived in a blue Chevrolet sedan with New York license plates.

Wilson took O'Hare's advice to move himself and his wife to another hotel immediately. "They know where you keep your automobile and what time you get home at night and what time you leave in the morning." Telling the Sheridan Plaza desk they were going to Kansas, the couple drove to the Union Station, then circled back and took a room at the Palmer House. A twenty-four-hour guard was assigned to them and to each intended victim.

Pat Roche ordered his detectives to bring in Capone, but forewarned by the Cook County police, he eluded them. Then Arthur Madden, hearing that Johnny Torrio was in Chicago, gave him a message for Capone: "If those hoodlums aren't out of town by tonight, I'm going after them myself with two guns." With the murder plot known to the authorities, the members of Capone's cabinet prevailed upon him to call it off. Torrio telephoned Madden. "They left an hour ago," he said.

Having abandoned wholesale murder as a solution of his tax problems, Capone tried bribery. In New York Joseph H. Callan, former special assistant to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue and now an executive of the Crucible Steel Company, received a visit from an emissary calling himself "Smith." He bore an offer from Capone for Elmer Irey and asked Callan to transmit it-$1,500,000 in cash if there was no conviction. Callan showed him the door.

In February, 1931, four months after Shumway had been identified as the keeper of the Ship books, John Rogers relayed a message from O'Hare that sent Wilson dashing off to Miami. Lou Shumway was working there as a cashier at either a horse or dog track. While looking for him, Wilson saw Capone at Hialeah, "a jeweled moll on either side of him [he wrote later] . . . occasionally raising huge binoculars to his eyes, greeting a parade of fawning sycophants who came to shake his hand-a veritable Shah of Persia. . . . Good God, I thought. When a country constable wants a man, he just walks up and says, 'You're pinched.' Here I am with the whole U.S. Government behind me, as powerless as a canary."

He found Shumway, a pole-thin man, his hands unsteady, at the Biscayne Kennel Club. When, green with terror, he disclaimed any knowledge of the Ship ledgers, Wilson presented two alternatives. He could go on pretending ignorance, in which case a deputy sheriff would publicly and noisily hand him a subpoena, thereby letting the Capone gang know that he had been found. To ensure his permanent silence, Wilson added, they would probably kill him. Or he could cooperate with the government and rest assured of the same protection as Ries. Shumway chose the second alternative.

"Orders and directives relating to my work were issued to me by Frank Pope and Pete Penovich," he deposed. ". . . the only other person whom I recognized as an owner of the business was Mr. Alphonse Capone." He also described the raid that the West Suburban Citizens' Association forced the county police to stage against the Smoke Shop in 1925. This led Wilson to interview the Reverend Henry Hoover and Chester Bragg, the vigilante who had guarded the entrance to the gambling dive during the raid. Bragg swore to the self-incriminating words Capone let slip in his rage-"I own the place."

Two years had elapsed since the government charged Capone with contempt of court for failing to answer a subpoena summoning him to Chicago from Miami. Now at last, on the morning of February 25, he entered the Federal Court Building once again. His arrival caused a work stoppage. Hundreds of clerks and stenographers deserted their posts to steal up to the sixth-floor courtroom for a glimpse of him. "No, I'm not going into the movies," they heard him tell the reporters. He wore a bright-blue suit woven of material soft as cat's fur, a blue-and-white-striped tie and gray spats. His girth had swollen to 250 pounds. Phil D'Andrea stood warily at his side, clenched fists thrust into the pockets of his chesterfield. "Neither am I going to write my autobiography. I've been offered as high as two million dollars, but I'm not going into the literary business."

Having waived jury trial, Capone pleaded guilty before judge Wilkerson. A short, bristle-browed, testy man, the judge listened to seven prosecution witnesses give the lie to the deposition signed by Capone's Miami doctor to the effect that bronchial pneumonia prevented his patient from traveling. There was the airplane pilot who flew Capone to Bimini when he was supposedly confined to bed, the policeman who helped him park his car at the Hialeah racetrack, the steamboat officer who talked to him aboard a Nassau-bound pleasure craft. . . .

As Capone left the courtroom at the noon recess, two police sergeants arrested him on the vagrancy warrant issued by judge Lyle. Taking him to the detective bureau, they gave him a sandwich and coffee, then fingerprinted him, photographed him, and asked him his occupation. "Real estate," said Capone. The hearing was set for March 2.

In Judge Wilkerson's court on February 27 Capone was approached by a blushing girl reporter. "I wanted to ask you a question," she said, "but I'm so flustered I can't remember what it was." Capone smiled encouragingly. "Oh, I remember, I wanted to ask you what you think of the American girl."

"Why, I think you're beautiful," said Capone.

The judge's secretary, equally flustered, rushed out of his chambers to tell the defendant, "London is on the wire."

"I'm sorry, lady," Capone said, "but there's nobody in London that would be calling me, not even King George."

Wilkerson found him guilty and later fixed the penalty at six months in the Cook County jail, releasing him on a bond, pending appeal. "I ain't worrying about a cell," said Capone. "I'm not there yet. There are other courts."

In the vagrancy case he proved to be right. Judge Lyle recalled bitterly: "Waiting until I was on temporary assignment in another court, Capone . . . appeared before a judge who had been a severe critic of my high bond policy. The mobster maintained his perfect batting average in Chicago courts. After three continuances the case was dismissed."

Before Wilson transferred Shumway to a safe hiding place, a federal grand jury quickly and secretly convened to hear the cashier's testimony. There was good reason for haste. The preponderance of his disclosures about Capone's income referred to the year 1924. Together with figures supplied by Ries and O'Hare, they showed a tax liability, not counting penalties, of $32,488.81 on a net income of $123,102.89, but under a six-year statute of limitations tax offenses committed in 1924 would be barred from prosecution after March 15, 1931. The grand jury returned an indictment on March 13. At the request of U.S. Attorney Johnson it agreed not to make its verdict public until the investigation had been completed for the years 1925 to 1929.

The April mayoral elections brought final defeat to Capone's political idol, Big Bill Thompson. In the Republican primary he had won over judge Lyle, a victory which moved Capone to exult: "Lyle tried to make me an issue and the public has given its answer." But Thompson lost to Anton J. Cermak, who modeled his Democratic machine on Tammany Hall, by 194,267 votes, the biggest majority in the history of the Chicago mayoralty. Cermak never attempted to purge Chicago of gangsterism, only of the Capone gang in favor of others who had supported his campaign. On February 15, 1933, immediately after greeting President Roosevelt in Miami, he was fatally shot by Giuseppe Zangara. Some historians have dismissed the general assumption that Zangara intended to assassinate Roosevelt but hit Cermak by accident. Disenfranchised Caponeites, they contend, guided Zangara's hand. It is a belief the victim himself expressed on his hospital deathbed.

The federal grand jury convened again on June 5, this time openly, and to its earlier indictment against Capone it added another with twenty-two counts covering the years 1925-1929. That fraction of his income for those years which Internal Revenue had been able to compute totaled $1,038,655.84. The tax assessment came to $219,- 260.12, and the penalties to $164,445.09.

A week later the grand jury returned yet a third indictment. Based on the evidence assembled by Eliot Ness and his raiders, it charged Capone and sixty-eight members of his gang with conspiring to violate the Volstead Act. Five thousand separate offenses were cited, 4,000 of them consisting of beer truck deliveries, 32 barrels to the truck. They went all the way back to 1922, when Capone bought a used truck for Torrio. The income-tax case, however, took precedence.

A SPIRIT of rebellion was stirring inside the Mafia. (Or the Syndicate, the Outfit, the Mob, Cosa Nostra. The terms are interchangeable, "almost a matter of semantics," as Attorney General Robert Kennedy once put it, each used in its time by the press or the police-if hardly ever by the members themselves-to designate the same loose-knit national confederacy of Italian and Sicilian gangster "families.") A conflict threatened between an old-world gang tradition and a businesslike, Americanized approach to organized crime, between the "Mustache Petes" and the "Young Turks."

For decades the American Mafia families had been ruled by stiffcollared Sicilian despots with handlebar mustaches, who styled themselves Boss and aspired to the national title of Boss of Bosses. Parochial and bellicose, they organized their families along military lines with underbosses and soldiers. They shunned alliances with nonSicilian gangs and would admit no mainland Italians to their ranks. Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria, who headed the predominant New York family during the twenties and carried considerable weight among Sicilian gangs all over the country, typified the Mustache Petes. "An outfit runs on its own," he insisted, "and knocks off anybody in its way." He acknowledged Peter "the Clutching Hand" Morello as Boss of Bosses. Masseria allowed exceptions to the ban against non-Sicilians in the cases of Vito Genovese, a Neapolitan, and Frank Costello, a Calabrian, and one or two others, who rose high in his family, and he had a friendly understanding with Dutch Schultz, a Jew converted to Catholicism. Otherwise Joe the Boss observed strict orthodoxy.

The Young Turks wanted no Boss of Bosses. They preferred the American system of delegating authority, of rule by committee instead of dictum. They were prepared to welcome Italians as fellow Mafiosi whatever their native province (though none of these radicals ventured so far as to propose non-Italians for membership) and to ally themselves with other gangs regardless of ethnic differences. They rejected warfare, making allowance only for the liquidation of individuals who imperiled the common purpose. In sum, they stood for the kind of ecumenism Torrio had always urged and Capone had practiced when possible. Out of their insurgency evolved organized crime as it flourishes in America today, still dominated by Italians, but with a board of directors to determine national policy and numerous non-Italian associates participating.

By the late twenties nearly every Mafia family harbored its Young Turks. In the Masseria family they included Genovese, Costello and the Sicilian Lucky Luciano, whom Joe the Boss looked on as a son. Capone had maintained liaison with them ever since the Atlantic City conference.

Masseria and many members of his family were natives of Sciacca, a town on the west coast of Sicily. New York's second most important Mafia family came mainly from the region bordering the Gulf of Castellammare, on the northwestern coast. It was headed by Salvatore Maranzano, who conducted his business, principally bootlegging, behind an office door marked REAL ESTATE high up on the ninth floor of the Grand Central Building, overlooking Park Avenue. In February, 1930, Masseria moved to take over the Castellammarese by arranging the murder of one of their top men, Tom Reina, and foisting upon them a lieutenant from his own ranks, Joseph Pinzola. In reprisal both Pinzola and the Masseria-supported Boss of Bosses, Peter Morello, were killed. The feud, which lasted more than a year, is known to Mafiologists as the Castellammarese War. Frantic with fear and hatred, Masseria decreed the execution of every Castellammarese in the country. The casualties in both camps totaled about sixty, many of them occurring in Massachusetts, Ohio and Illinois, as well as in New York and New Jersey.