Читать книгу The Rise of the Mafia - Martin Short - Страница 20

In the big cities of nineteenth-century America both politics and organized crime were run from the saloon. Saloon owners were among the few people who could afford the high cost of politics. They had the money to get the vote out on election days and with their bouncers and barmen they also had the muscle to beat up opponents and hijack ballot boxes. Most important of all, they had the incentive. They had to have political connections to protect their income. This came not so much from the legal sale of liquor but from what went on in back rooms and up the stairs: gambling and prostitution. Most illegal casinos and high-class brothels were connected with saloons, physically and financially, so their owners had to take out insurance against the raids and shutdowns demanded by law. This was best achieved by paying off the police and curbing their zeal. The perfect arrangement was a continuing alliance with the people who chose the police chief in any city: the machine politicians.

Ideally the saloon owner became a politician himself. If he was so inclined he could then direct an entire city’s serious crime, from white slavery (coercive prostitution) to extortion, loansharking and the elimination of rival criminals. With a corrupt police force and the county sheriff in his pocket the saloon-owning politician could wipe out all opposition. If any employee or racket of his were brought to court he could get the charges thrown out by the judge, whose election he had secured or whom he had appointed in the time-honoured spoils system of American politics. If the worst happened and reformers won an election on an anti-corruption platform, the saloon syndicate usually had enough guile to outlast the reformers. After a few years the crooks would get re-elected, outwardly chastened perhaps but cannier than ever. As Richard Croker, the turn-of-the-century boss of New York’s corrupt Democratic organization said after his candidate for mayor had been defeated, ‘The people could not stand the rotten police corruption. We’ll be back after the next election. They can’t stand reform either.’

The pattern was the same in all America’s big cities but it was most blatant in the boom town of Chicago. From its incorporation in 1837 Chicago had usually been run by saloon-owning, gambler-politicians. From the 1860s a gambler-gangster named Mike McDonald led an Irish immigrant bloc which financed the Democratic party machine on the profits of illegal gambling. McDonald returned mayor after mayor committed to a ‘wide-open town’ where gambling and prostitution could flourish. If his money and his newspaper did not deliver victory, McDonald made his man mayor through forged votes and stolen ballot boxes.

The most colourful in a long line of boodling city fathers were ‘Bathhouse John’ Coughlin and ‘Hinky Dink’ Kenna who presided over Chicago for forty years. Coughlin was a big, bluff, flamboyant man who ran a bathhouse in the heart of Chicago’s business, entertainment and vice district. Most of his customers were gambling operators and sportsmen. In 1891 the city tried to shut down a racetrack. Coughlin’s gentlemen patrons stood to lose a lot of business so they sought a political front man to represent their crooked interests. As they controlled the Democratic party organization in Chicago’s First Ward their nominee for alderman was certain to be elected. The young Coughlin, a race-lover himself, was the ideal candidate and in the 1892 council elections he was victorious. The following year, however, in the race for mayor Coughlin was slow to support the man who won, the legendary Carter Harrison. Harrison showed his displeasure by ordering police raids on all First Ward gambling houses under Coughlin’s protection. Since his sole duty as alderman was to protect illegal gambling, the 32-year-old’s political career looked over before it had started.

One of his raided constituents was a glum little fellow called Michael ‘Hinky Dink’ Kenna. The Hink told the Bath that they should form an organization to protect the gambling operators and brothel-keepers in the ward from such political instability. All vice operators would pay into a fund nursed by Kenna and Coughlin. This would be used to retain some of Chicago’s most able lawyers to defend any gambling house or whorehouse owner in trouble. The fund would also be tapped for the regular payoffs and gifts needed to soften the hearts of cops and judges. So effective was this scheme that the Bath was to remain the First Ward’s alderman for forty-six years until his death in 1938 when the ancient Hink was wheeled out of retirement to replace him.

For a century Chicago’s First Ward has included the city’s downtown business district, with its banks and corporation headquarters, hotels, theatres, department stores and today some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. The First Ward also used to contain a wide-open vice district, twenty-two blocks south, known as the Levee. In the words of Kenna and Coughlin’s biographies the ward was the habitat of

… bums and thugs, thieves and gaudy prostitutes…. On these streets were the hop joints, concert saloons and brothels, from the 25 c. bagnios to the more expensive houses…. Off Dearborn Street in the heart of the city was Gamblers’ Alley and nearby on Randolph was the infamous Hairtrigger Block lined with gambling houses of every description…. Throughout the ward were endless stretches of lesser saloons and dice and faro houses from which by night issued the pimps, piffers and pickpockets to prey upon citizens and visitors.1

The Levee was like a Wild West frontier boom town where there was no recognizable law and order.

By 1895 all this was the bailiwick of the Hink and the Bath. Kenna soon joined Coughlin at City Hall as the First Ward’s second alderman. Coughlin had expanded from his bathhouse to his own saloon, the Silver Dollar, patronized by whores and gamblers alike. The pair had so mastered Chicago’s corrupt politics that Carter Harrison Jun., the son of their one-time adversary, relied on them to get him re-elected as mayor four times. He was to call them his ‘two Rocks of Gibraltar’. When he came back in 1911 to win his fifth election he was, however, forced to move against the men who once more had ensured his victory.

What was to sever Harrison from his ‘two Rocks’ was prostitution. His predecessor had appointed a commission to decide on whether there should be segregated vice districts and, if so, how they should be run. The Vice Commission was headed by churchmen, lawyers, academics and philanthropists and was staffed by tenacious investigators. Its report, published only two months after Harrison’s re-election, did not condemn vice itself but it gave Chicago a basting. In a calm but horrified tone it talked of hundreds of seven-day-a-week gambling houses, 7000 licensed saloons and 5000 full-time prostitutes.

The report stated. ‘Chicago’s vice annually destroys the souls of 5000 young women’, but asked, ‘Is it any wonder that a tempted girl, who receives only $6 a week working with her hands, sells her body for $25 per week when she learns there is demand for it and men are willing to pay the price?’ It claimed that the existing system of segregating vice away from residential areas under police supervision had failed. There was now more prostitution outside the red-light district than inside it. The police were either negligent or corrupt or both. The medical examination of prostitutes had failed. They plied their trade still infected, with the connivance of the supervising doctors.

The report named neither Kenna nor Coughlin but they were implicated throughout and condemned in a ferocious attack on their holiest institution. In 1896 they had hit upon the idea of a grand ball to raise money for the First Ward Democratic organization. It was first held at the Seventh Regiment Armory and patronized by high and low, especially the Levee’s most decorous prostitutes, madams and pimps. The star was Coughlin himself, brilliantly attired in a green tail coat, lavender trousers, pink kid gloves and bright yellow shoes. Drunkenness and fornication broke out in front of the top politicians and policemen who were attending in obeisance to the aldermen. The romp outraged the clerics but it made the Hink and the Bath $25,000.

The First Ward ball became an outrageous tradition. In 1907 the Chicago Tribune asserted that, ‘If a great disaster had befallen the Coliseum last night there would not have been a second-story worker, a dip or Plug Ugly, porch climber, dope fiend or scarlet woman remaining in Chicago.’ Twenty thousand guests drank 10,000 quarts of champagne and 30,000 quarts of beer. Another $20,000 flowed into the aldermen’s coffers. The 1908 ball went ahead despite a campaign to ban it. It was another drunken riot, notable for a large number of men dressed up as women, and greatly distressed an Episcopalian dean who infiltrated for the reformers. In 1909 the mayor refused a liquor licence. Only 3000 people came and the aldermen lost money. They never held another ball.

Harrison finally fell out with Coughlin and Kenna over a notorious brothel. In 1900 Minna and Ada Lester came to Chicago from Omaha where they had learned the brothel trade. The sisters took the surname Everleigh and opened a sumptuous resort in a fifty-room mansion at 2131–3 South Dearborn Street. The Everleigh Club became world renowned as the most splendid whorehouse on earth, with exotic fittings like its $15,000 gold piano, oriental rugs, oil paintings, golden silk curtains and gold-plated spittoons each costing $650. For rich patrons (only newspapermen received discounted favours) there were twelve soundproof parlours. To enter cost a staggering $10 and dinner was $50. A lady cost at least $50 but she would be a professional harlot of the highest class. By 1907 the Everleighs had piled up $250,000 in three Chicago banks alone as well as stockpiling millions elsewhere.

In 1911 they published a brochure illustrating the club’s charms, including: ‘steam heat throughout, with electric fans in summer: one never feels the winter’s chill or summer’s heat in this luxurious resort. Fortunate indeed, with all the comforts of life surrounding them, are the members of the Everleigh Club.’ Harrison only learned the sisters had burst into print at a banquet in another city where his ogling host showed him the brochure. The mayor was outraged that the city he represented was best known elsewhere as the home of the Everleigh Club. Back in town he instantly ordered the police to shut it down. The sisters laid on a gala farewell and in the early hours of 25 October 1911 they were formally raided and shut down. They left on a six-month trip to Europe, reassured by Coughlin that everything would be sorted out by their return when it would be business as usual.

On the contrary, the clean-up gathered force. The mayor fired the police chief for failing to shut down brothels and replaced him with someone who would. The anti-vice crusade roared on, reaching a tragic climax in a battle in the Levee between two squads of police. A Morals Squad officer was accidentally killed by another detective but the aldermen were blamed because they had licensed the rampant vice which the cops were trying to shut down.

On their return the Everleighs decided to close down for good. They were not vindictive but felt twelve years of payoffs had been a waste of money. In 1911 they wrote a statement about First Ward corruption and entrusted it to a judge. In 1914 he released the statement, revealing that the sisters had paid Kenna and Coughlin over $100,000 to avoid raids, to get all charges dropped against their girls, to ensure rival whorehouses were shut down and to block new laws against vice. They said they had bribed detectives for years. They estimated that in little more than a decade the Levee had paid the Coughlin–Kenna syndicate $15 million in graft.

With this bombshell the anti-vice crusaders resolved to black out the red-light district. The Hink and the Bath looked beaten but they were master politicians. In 1915 Harrison ran again for mayor but the aldermen switched their support and ensured his slaughter. The new mayor was a Republican, William Hale Thompson. A charismatic former football star, he made the kind of promises the Hink and the Bath liked: a wide-open town and a flourishing Levee. He fulfilled those promises but no longer would Kenna and Coughlin rule the city’s vice. Thompson delivered Chicago from saloon-owning politicians but he handed it over to the kind of mobsters who soon made the aldermen look benign.

The syndicate of vice-lords and crooks led by Kenna and Coughlin was organized crime. It is difficult to imagine any gang more damaging to society. Yet such a gang now emerged. Until the 1910s the Irish were the only large immigrant group with an identity distinct and separate from America’s dominant Protestant culture. Now millions of Poles, Jews, Greeks and Italians flooded into the cities, all demanding their piece of the American pie. Most of that pie was legitimate but a large slice was criminal. Soon Chicago’s first Italian crime boss emerged, the man from whom the city’s organized-crime family of today is clearly descended.

‘Big Jim’ Colosimo was made a Democratic party precinct captain around 1900 by John Coughlin who saw him as the ideal man to whip in the Italian vote. The Irishman sponsored his rise from street sweeper to poolroom operator to saloon owner. Big Jim married a madam named Victoria Moresco who ran one of the First Ward’s most successful brothels. Together they set up a chain of whorehouses and then moved into the restaurant business. Colosimo’s Café at 2126 South Wabash became nationally famous for its food and its connections. Its host wore the wages of sin in diamond rings, tiepins and other jewellery. He also welded his Italian compatriots into a formidable political force with its own gang of enforcers. These were pressed into service whenever Coughlin and Kenna needed them but their violence soon became too much for the First Ward veterans. Now nearing 60, they had had enough of politics. Anyway Big Jim did not need them any more.

Their decline was hastened by Prohibition which, unlike the laws against vice and gambling, had to be outwardly enforced. Coughlin had shut down his Silver Dollar years before but now Kenna closed his fine old establishments too. In contrast Prohibition brought only riches to Colosimo. His Italian followers were soon producing home-brewed alcohol in their tenement homes and his young hoodlums were just developing the art of bootlegging. But Colosimo was not keeping his mind on business. He sought a companion to match his new wealth and left his wife Victoria to marry Dale Winter, a beautiful young singer. Just after returning from their honeymoon, on 11 May 1920, Big Jim went to his café to await the four o’clock delivery of two truckloads of whiskey. The delivery was never made. Instead he was shot dead in the café lobby.

Colosimo’s wake and funeral were notable for the large numbers of aldermen, judges and congressmen who attended. Kenna was an honorary pallbearer. Coughlin knelt weeping at his casket. So many public figures turned out that Chicago was more or less telling the world that it was run by organized crime. If a pimp turned bootlegger could get this kind of send-off, the implications were not lost on rising Italian gangsters in Colosimo’s cortége, especially his protégé, if failed protector, Johnny Torrio.

Torrio was Victoria Moresco’s cousin. Visiting her in 1908, he was soon brought into her husband’s business. Big Jim then had a problem. He was being ‘shaken down’ by some Black Handers. Torrio, though small and reserved, had ‘made his bones’ as a killer in New York’s notorious Five Points gang. He soon wiped out the Black Handers and then proceeded to mastermind Big Jim’s rise, developing new gambling operations within Colosimo’s pimping empire.

Torrio in turn recruited ferocious young gunmen as protectors and collectors. The toughest and most ambitious was Alphonse Caponi, alias Al Brown, ‘Scarface’, Al Capone. In 1919 Torrio brought Al to Chicago from New York. Capone became Colosimo’s bodyguard for a while and was detained as a suspect when Big Jim was killed. With Colosimo gone Torrio became the biggest power in Chicago crime. He deputed Capone to oversee his gambling operations.

But Fate had bigger things in mind for Capone. It was his good luck that a law had just been passed in Washington creating a new’ criminal business which would ensure his immortality. The business was bootlegging. The law was Prohibition. The folly was America’s.