Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (71 page)

Read Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Online

Authors: John Kobler

* The corporal recounted the episode in a letter to the Brooklyn Eagle. September 27, 1947.

* Schofield's sons continued to run the shop up to 1960, when it was razed to make way for a parking lot. At last reports they had a flower shop at 714 North State, half a block south of the old address. Holy Name Cathedral remains.

* Until World War II, when the United States and its allies bought almost 2,000,000. Today the tommy gun is obsolete.

* Probably nobody ever walked up to Guzik and said, "Hi, Greasy Thumb." Nor did gangsters address each other as "Schemer," "Enforcer," "Potatoes," etc., except in movies and fiction. Such nomenclature was chiefly a game played by newspapermen. Legend ascribes many of the more picturesque sobriquets to James Doherty, a Chicago Tribune crime reporter, and Clem Lane, a Chicago Daily News rewrite man, who supposedly amused themselves on slow nights by coining them.

0 To the author.

• Sports, Inc. still exists in Chicago. Although the founder died in 1968, the company's letterhead continues to list "P. von Frantzius, Pres. & Gen. Mgr."

* In deference to St. John's wishes I have disguised the names of his co-directors.

• After editorial jobs on newspapers in Vermont, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, St. John joined the Associated Press in New York as city editor. During World War II he was its Balkan correspondent. Since then he has been a radio news commentator, lecturer and author of a dozen books.

* Chicago taxi drivers still point out the cornerstone to strangers. The cathedral had largely been restored when I last visited the city, but a bullet scar was still visible.

• The secret door was discovered by the present owner of the Lexington (renamed the New Michigan) . He spotted it from the street, a door to nowhere, after the office building had been torn down. An aged porter, who had worked at the Lexington ever since Capone's day, explained its use.

• There are survivors of the era who agree, like the aged waitress in a South Side pizzeria who told me: "I think Al was a wonderful person. He took from the rich and gave to the poor, didn't he?" or the former Negro doorman, found by a local feature writer still living near the site of the Four Deuces, who remembered: "They was swell guys, all of them. These folks 'round here never knowed who paid the rent, but it was Al.... They was all fine boys and they was real good to me."

* In 1945 a couple named Werner, who knew nothing about the building's lurid history, converted the front office into an antique shop. They were soon besieged by crime buffs. "They come here from all over the world-England, France, even New Zealand," Mrs. Werner complained. "If I had known, I never would have come here." The building was torn down in 1967. I know several Chicagoans who treasure a brick from it as a souvenir.

* The St. Valentine's Day murder team, I was assured in 1969 by the Barker gangster Al Karpis, after he had served thirty-three years in federal penitentiaries, consisted of Burke, Maddox, George Ziegler, Gus Winkler and "Crane Neck" Nugent. These five, according to Karpis, who got his information from Nugent, constituted an execution squad regularly employed by the Capone syndicate and its affiliates. They were paid $2,000 a week plus an occasional bonus and travel expenses. Ziegler, said Karpis, actually planned the massacre, and a sixth hoodlum, not on the regular payroll, Byron Bolton, was one of the Clark Street lookouts.

* By the underworld, by stool pigeons, by knowledgeable old cops like John Stege and by Chicago's top crime reporters like Ray Brennan and Clem Lane.

• The others: (4) Frank Rio, alias Frank Kline, alias Frank Gline (5) Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn (6) James Belcastro (7) Rocco Fanelli (8) Lawrence "Dago Lawrence" Mangano (9) Jack Zuta (10) Jake Guzik (11) Frank Diamond (12) George "Bugs" Moran (13) Joe Aiello (14) Edward "Spike" O'Donnell (15) Joe "Polock Joe" Saltis (16) Frank McErlane (17) Vincent McErlane (18) William Niemoth (19) Danny Stanton (20) Myles O'Donnell (21) Frank Lake (22) Terry Druggan (23) William "Klondike" O'Donnell (24) George "Red" Barker (25) William "Three-Fingered Jack" White (26) Joseph "Peppy" Genero (27) Leo Mongoven (28) James "Fur" Sammons.

* Later assigned to the Tribune's Washington bureau, Boettiger married President Roosevelt's daughter, Anna, quit the Tribune, and eventually became publisher of Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer.