Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (6 page)

It was the style among the young bucks of Capone's milieu to start a cellar club. This usually consisted of a rented storefront where, behind drawn blinds, the members gambled, drank and entertained girls. In 1918, during a party in a Carroll Street cellar club, Capone met a tall, slim girl named Mae Coughlin. She was twenty-one, two years older than Capone, and worked as a sales clerk in a neighborhood department store. Her parents, Michael Coughlin, a construction laborer, and Bridget Gorman Coughlin of 117 Third Place, were respected in the Irish community for their industry, rectitude, and religious devotion.

Despite the antagonisms that persisted between the Irish and the Italians, many Irish girls showed a distinct preference for Italian boys because the latter did not shrink from early marriage, whereas the Irish boys tended to wait until they felt settled and secure in their occupation. Johnny Torrio married an Irish girl from Kentucky, Ann McCarthy. Capone was so eager to marry Mae Coughlin that he obtained a special dispensation from the church, eliminating the necessity to publish banns. Presumably the difference in ages embarrassed the bride; on the certificate of marriage registration she lowered her age by one year and Capone raised his by one. The ceremony was performed on December 18, 1918, by the Reverend James J. Delaney, pastor of St. Mary Star of the Sea Church, where the Coughlins worshiped. The bride's sister Anna and a friend of Capone's, James De Vico, acted as witnesses. The following year Mae Capone bore her first and only child, Albert Francis, nicknamed Sonny. Torrio was the godfather, and on each of Sonny's birthdays he bought him a $5,000 bond. "I'd go the limit for Johnny," Capone said in later years.

Torrio had been spending more and more time in Chicago ever since 1909, when his uncle, James "Big Jim" Colosimo, first fetched him there, and though he continued to pursue various joint ventures in New York with Paul Kelly, Frank Yale and others, Chicago was now his base. Capone's fortunes, meanwhile, had not progressed. The money he craved to pamper his wife and son eluded him. Already suspected of two murders, he faced indictment for a third, if a man he had sent to the hospital after a barroom brawl should die. The man lived, but this Capone did not wait around to learn. A message came from Torrio, summoning him to Chicago. He needed no urging. With his wife and son he fled New York.

THE capstone of his career was Colosimo's Cafe. Opened in 1910 at 2126 South Wabash Avenue and remodeled four years later, it had become the ne plus ultra of Chicago night life. No other pleasure palace in the city could compete with the talent of its star entertainers, the beauty of its chorus girls or the virtuosity of its orchestra, which alternated "jass," or "jaz" (as they spelled it then) , with operatic medleys. Nor could any Chicago restaurant boast a more accomplished chef than Colosimo's Antonio Caesarino or a wider choice of vintage wines. Ben Hecht, at the time a columnist on the Chicago Daily News, marveled at the quantity and diversity of Big Jim's collection of imported cheeses.

For the bon ton from the North Side "Gold Coast" who patronized the cabaret its location added piquancy to the trip downtown. They had to venture deep into the wicked Levee. Bounded north and south by Twenty-second and Eighteenth streets and east and west by Clark and Wabash, the Levee had one of the world's heaviest concentrations of crime and vice. Colosimo's place was all gaudy opulence from its gilded portals to its immense mahogany and glass bar. Green velvet covered the walls. Gold and crystal chandeliers hung from a skyblue ceiling where rosy, dimpled seraphim gamboled on cottoncandy clouds. Wherever the eye fell, it was dazzled by gold-framed mirrors, murals depicting tropical vistas, tapestries. At the flick of a switch hydraulic lifts raised or lowered the dance floor on which bobbed-haired women with calf-length skirts and their tuxedoed escorts performed whatever gyrations the current fad dictated-onestep, two-step, Boston, turkey trot, fox trot, grizzly bear, bunny hug, Castle walk-to the beat of "Tiger Rag," "Ja-da," "Pretty Baby," "Dardanella," "Ohl How She Could Yacki, Hacki, Wicki, Wacki, Woo." The festivities, which seldom got up full steam before midnight, sometimes went on past dawn. In a suite of rooms on the second floor gamblers could find any game they fancied from faro to chuck-a-luck at any stakes they cared to hazard.

Colosimo's Cafe enjoyed national renown, and the nightly throng was a miscellany of sporting figures, big businessmen, collegians, gangsters, journalists, politicians, the rich, the chic, the famous and infamous, the tourists. At Big Jim's insistence the tables were wedged close together to promote an atmosphere of warmth and intimacy. Thus, a Potter Palmer or a Marshall Field might find himself rubbing elbows with such underworld celebrities as Mike Merlo, the Sicilian boss, head of the local Unione Siciliane; Mont Tennes, the racetrack gambling czar, whose complete life history, if known, would (according to the Illinois Crime Survey) "disclose practically all there is to know about syndicated gambling as a phase of organized crime in Chicago in the last quarter century"; the gambler Julius "Lovin' Putty" Annixter; "Mike de Pike" Heisler, merchant of vice, who looked like a Surinam toad, and his wizened confederate, "Monkey Face" Charlie Genker; Dennis "the Duke" Cooney, suave whoremaster whose notorious Rex Hotel was a favorite playground of gangdom; Joey D'Andrea, president of the Sewer Diggers and Tunnel Miners' Union, who was believed to have introduced to Chicago labor racketeering the peonage system of exploiting immigrant Italian workers; the labor thug "Izzy the Rat" Buchalsky; the Black Hander Vincenzo "Sunny Jim" Cosmano; Dion O'Banion, jack-ofall-crimes and chieftain of Chicago's most redoubtable strong-arm gang. . . . There were the political sachems, notably the two First Ward Democratic aldermen to whose protection Big Jim owed his rise, Michael Kenna, nicknamed Hinky Dink because of his puny size, and John Joseph "Bathhouse John" Coughlin, a chesty six-footer with a handlebar mustache, who once worked as a rubber in a Turkish bath. Between them they ruled the Levee, exacting a percentage of the profits from every illegal enterprise that flourished there. . . . Few headliners who played Chicago failed to put in an appearance at Colosimo's Cafe after the show. The celebrities in the late-supper crowd might include Al Jolson, George M. Cohan, John Barrymore, Sophie Tucker, whose "coon-shouter" song with gestures, "Angle Worm Wriggle," had caused the normally permissive Chicago police to arrest her. . . . Big Jim loved opera, and no matter how packed the place was, he would always find a table for the resident or guest artists of the Chicago Civic Opera Company-Mary Garden, Luisa Tetrazzini, Amelita Galli-Curci, Titta Ruffo, John McCormack, the conductor, Maestro Cleofonte Campanini. He counted Caruso among his personal friends.

Not the least distinctive feature of Colosimo's Cafe was Colosimo himself. He had a verve, a bluff, zesty Southern Italian humor. A big, fleshy man, he would move with ursine tread from table to table, gesticulating grandly, charming the women and amusing the men, ordering champagne and cigars on the house. He was the glass of Levee fashion. His pomaded black brush of a mustache and luxuriant black hair gleamed like onyx. His winter wardrobe ran to twobutton sack suits with flaring lapels, white shirts embroidered with blue elephants or horses and striped knit neckties. His season of fullest sartorial flower was summer, when he appeared swan white in immaculate linens. He had a diamond fetish. By comparison the personal ornamentation of other gangsters was lackluster. Not only did Big Jim festoon his bulky person with the precious stones, wearing them on several fingers, on his belt, suspender and garter buckles, his tiepin, watch fob, shirt bosom, cuffs and vest, to which he fastened a sunburst the size and shape of a horseshoe, but he also carried about with him chamois bags full of unset diamonds. In idle moments he would empty the bags onto a square of black felt, count his treasures, toy with them, rake them up into little heaps.

Profitable though Colosimo's Cafe was, it produced but a fraction of the fortune that enabled Big Jim to maintain two limousines, each driven by its own uniformed chauffeur, a sumptuous house for his father and another for himself, crammed with chinoiserie, bronze and marble statuary, deep rugs, yard upon yard of unopened books bound in full morocco, rare coins, a wife and a mistress. Gamblers sometimes called him Bank because he would advance losers a fresh stake from a billfold bulging with $1,000-dollar notes. The chief sources of his annual income, which averaged about $600,000, were white slavery and a chain of brothels.

On the lowest stratum of Levee life, at the corner of Nineteenth Street and Armour Avenue, sprawled Bed Bug Row, a malodorous cluster of twenty-five-cent cribs inhabited by Negro whores. It faced the Bucket of Blood, a combination saloon and whorehouse. Only slightly higher up the scale, on Dearborn Street, stood the California, run by "Blubber Bob" Gray, who weighed 300 pounds, and his wife, Therese. The tariff here was $1, and the inmates, wearing transparent shifts, flaunted their charms at the windows. The customers made their choices sitting on wooden benches in the otherwise barren reception room while the girls sashayed up and down before them and Madame Therese screamed at them: "Pick a baby, boys! Don't get stuck to your seats." Black May's, between Dearborn and Armour avenues, also offered Negro women, but only to white clients, and it staged "circuses" renowned for their depravity. Opposite Black May's was a Japanese and a Chinese bagnio and a few doors south, the House of All Nations which, like the famous Paris lupanar of the same name, claimed it could provide girls from every country in the world. The stretch between Twenty-first and Twenty-second streets enclosed some of the better-class brothels: French Emma's, featuring mirrored bedrooms, Georgie Spencer's, Ed Weiss', the Casino, the Utopia, the Sappho, and the most luxurious, stylish, profitable and celebrated bawdy house in the country, if not the worldthe Everleigh Club.

Few successes in the annals of whoredom compare with the achievement of the two handsome, queenly sisters from Kentucky, Ada and Minna Everleigh. With no previous experience in the field, their private lives having been above reproach, they opened their first bordello in Omaha when Ada was twenty-two and Minna twenty. A lawyer's daughters, they had been genteelly reared and educated at a private Southern school, had married brothers who maltreated them, and had run away with a barnstorming theatrical troupe which brought them to Omaha shortly before the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition. Having inherited $35,000, they decided to invest it in an enterprise likely to attract the males who visited the exposition, and close by they opened their first brothel. With their substantial profits they then moved to Chicago, where they bought and redecorated the late Lizzie Allen's bordello at 2131-3 South Dearborn, a three-story mansion of fifty rooms.

From the day the Everleigh Club admitted its first customers, Feb ruary 1, 1900, to its closing eleven years later, it was the wonder of the Levee. In addition to the purchase price of $50,000, the sisters spent almost $200,000 on new furnishings. Twin entrances opened into hallways massed with exotic shrubbery and marble Greek deities. Greeted by Minna or Ada, gowned and jeweled like empresses, one mounted mahogany stairs to a maze of public rooms with parquets of rare woods, brocaded draperies, damask-upholstered divans, pianos, one of which, fashioned of solid gold, cost $15,000. Food prepared by a cordon bleu chef and wine at $12 a bottle were served, according to the client's whim, in the walnut-paneled dining room whose mahogany refectory table could seat fifty, in a private parlor or in a bedroom. The cutlery was gold and silver, the dishes goldrimmed china, the glassware crystal, the tablecloths and napkins of handwoven linen. Each private parlor embodied a different decorative theme. There was the Copper Room, its walls paneled in beaten copper, the Moorish and Turkish rooms, where one reclined against hassocks and silken bolsters, the Chinese, Egyptian, and Japanese rooms, heady with incense. . . . Each of the parlors had a gold spittoon and a fountain that sprayed perfume.

No lineup of wriggling seminaked girls marred the refinement of the Everleigh Club. Handpicked by the sisters (without the intermediate agency of any pimps, whom they scorned) for their beauty, good health, freedom from addiction to drugs or alcohol, taste in clothes, ladylike manners and sexual artistry, the Everleigh Paphians sauntered casually through the parlors with the aplomb of a guest at a Gold Coast soiree. When a gentleman expressed his preference, one of the sisters would introduce him, observing all the amenities prescribed by etiquette.