Читать книгу The Rise of the Mafia - Martin Short - Страница 26

Immigrant Italian families across America supplemented their meagre income throughout Prohibition by making wine and selling it to bootleggers. The business could become nasty. Vincent Piersante, who later became a legendary anti-Mafia fighter in Detroit, had a frightening experience as a child.

‘I was raised on a dairy farm just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One evening when I was about 6 years old I was sitting on the porch swing and I saw our barn, that housed sixteen dairy cows, was ablaze. I ran into the house and told my father but the whole thing was a loss. All the cows were destroyed. It was years later before I discovered that the barn had been burned down by some people who had attempted to get my father involved in the liquor business … they wanted to use his milk wagons – pulled by horses – to deliver moonshine whiskey. He resisted and this was a means of telling him they didn’t appreciate his resistance.’

On Detroit’s East Side, as in Little Italys all over America, alky-cooking was big business. Piersante was open-mouthed. ‘There were bootleggers on almost every block. They made it in their own homes and garages and even built underground conduits under the street from one barn (as we called garages in those days) to another across the street. The trucks and wagons would regularly come to pick up the whiskey in 5-gallon cans. Occasionally there would be a police raid. They would go into the barns and throw the cans of moonshine out into the alley and break them open and let it spill on the ground. Then everybody in the neighbourhood would come running around with cups and pans and pick some of the moonshine up and run back home.’

In such communities the top bootlegger was a man of power who commanded respect, especially if he belonged to the Mafia. On Detroit’s East Side the position was held by the notorious Santo Perrone: ‘He was … our most prominent neighbour, the neighbour that everybody had most respect for, and awe and fear. He was also the neighbour who was best with the kids…. Occasionally he would use us to help him open the garage door so that the whiskey trucks could drive out quickly. Then we would close the doors and go back to his house and get our reward which was only appreciation, a pat on the head and something like, “That’s a good boy!”

‘You knew one thing when that happened to you: you had been touched by power. You were only 10, 11 or 12 years old but the reason you knew is because you noticed how your adults, your own father, mother, uncles, reacted to this individual when they saw him on the street. They would practically come to attention, bow slightly, and address him by his surname. It was always very formal. At the same time our parents would tell us to stay away from that end of the block: “Don’t hang around there, those people are not the kind of people we want you to associate with,” but you couldn’t help it. They were there, just a block away.

‘Years later, after I became a police officer, I found out that this same individual was a power in organized crime, in what we call the Mafia.’

All the ethnic communities contained such bootleggers; they were not all in the Mafia. Indeed, most of them were not even Italian. (The term itself was already 300 years old. America’s first bootleggers were English colonists in the 1630s who smuggled bottles of spirits to Red Indians in the legs of their high boots.) Nevertheless, the one man who will forever epitomize both bootlegging and Prohibition was a twentieth-century Italian-American: Al Capone.

‘All I’ve ever done is to supply a public demand. Laugh this off: when the United States went more or less dry there were 7000 saloons in Chicago, and the town and its suburbs spent something like $70 million a year for beer and liquor. And it votes wet 5 to 7. Well, you can’t cure a thirst by law.’

Al Capone became a legend because he exploited an extraordinary series of coincidences. He was at the height of his physical and mental powers when America backed Prohibition, a law which many of his fellow-citizens found laughable, offensive and without moral foundation. Prohibition created an underground economy which Capone above all others was able to organize. He was the most ruthless of a horde of immigrant or second-generation American criminals whose race-memory of oppression in their homelands elevated law-breaking to a duty. Capone was lucky to move to Chicago, America’s most corrupt city. He also seized power in the decade when three inventions revolutionized crime in America: the motor-car, the telephone and the Thompson sub-machine-gun.

In Chicago I talked with some of Al Capone’s close relatives and friends old enough to recall his early days. He was not the gangster portrayed in the movies. He spoke without a trace of an Italian accent. He was born in Brooklyn in 1899, the fourth child of Gabriel and Teresa Caponi, immigrants who had come over from Naples six years before. As a teenager Alphonse fell under the influence of John Torrio, then a leader of the murderous Five Points street gang.1 It was with the Five Pointers that Al gained his basic training, not with the Mafia or any other secret society. As a Neapolitan he could not then have joined the Mafia which was still wholly Sicilian, not did he belong to the Neapolitan Camorra. Indeed Capone never belonged to any secret criminal organization.

Capone hated Sicilians. He first encountered them when his father, a barber, was the victim of Black Hand extortion. Al found out the Black Handers were two Sicilians and shot them dead. Summoned to Chicago in 1919, Al was well able to staff Torrio’s move into bootlegging. He soon called his brother Ralph and his cousins, the Fischetti brothers, to follow him from New York and increase the strength of Torrio’s army. The relatively gentle era of gambler-gangsters was over. The Prohibition wars would be fought by violent men for whom committing murder was part of the job and being murdered was an occupational hazard.

As soon as America went ‘dry’ gangs sprang up all over Chicago and every other city to meet a bottomless demand for liquor. At first there was so much business that the gangs concentrated on the market rather than each other. Chicago drinkers were soon being supplied by a dozen big gangs, each with its own territory. Only two were Italian. Most were Irish and one was made up of all-American hoodlums. In time racial distinctions became unimportant as criminals with matching skills united and business sense dictated the merger of small independent operations.

From the start John Torrio was Chicago’s most powerful bootlegger for he already led the strongest organized-crime syndicate in the city, the fruit of years working for Colosimo in the Levee. Torrio soon joined forces with the Irish Druggan–Lake gang who controlled part of the inner West Side but his smartest move was to go into partnership with Joseph Stenson, the black sheep of Chicago’s leading brewing family. The Stensons were rich and respected. As Prohibition began Stenson outwardly converted his breweries to producing near beer; in fact they were brewing real beer for John Torrio. In 1924 the Chicago Tribune claimed Torrio and Stenson had piled up profits of $50 million in just four years. The Daily News branded them: ‘joint rulers of the underworld, the two kings of crime’.

On Chicago’s North Side the strongest operator was Dion O’Banion, known as Dean, the son of an Irish immigrant plasterer. He had started work as a newsboy, a job which bred some of America’s leading gangsters. Around 1900 William Randolph Hearst resolved to establish newspapers in cities where competition was already stiff. Elmer Gertz, a Chicago criminal defence lawyer, remembers how hoodlums would kill each other to keep rival papers off the news-stands. ‘There were pitched battles, newspapers destroyed, and newsboys hurt. The very same men who were active in the newspaper wars, people like Dean O’Banion, were the ideal recruits for the bootleg era. They had the training.’ O’Banion had a brief career as a safe cracker, teaming up with two Polish Catholics deceptively named Hymie Weiss and George ‘Bugs’ Moran. All three proved more capable as bootleggers specializing in importing whiskey from Canada.

O’Banion combined his love of religion and flowers in a florist’s shop opposite the Holy Name Cathedral on North State Street. Business merged with pleasure whenever floral tributes were required for a gangland funeral. He had been an altar boy at the cathedral, as had Jack McPhaul who later became a reporter for Hearst’s Herald Examiner. ‘The newsboy–Horatio Alger type and the good boy who faithfully goes to church are part of the American success story, the man who rises to wealth in business and industry. Dean had that start in life but he took a different path. You might call him the second most successful bootlegger in Chicago and that was a multi-million-dollar industry, so in terms of dollars this ex-altar boy and newsboy was an American success story.’

On Chicago’s Sicilian West Side bootlegging was dominated by ‘the terrible Gennas’, six brothers from Marsala where wine has been made since Roman times. They brought the tradition to the New World in 1920 when they acquired a licence to sell industrial alcohol. Most of this went into making whiskey and other spirits. Demand was so great that they paid their impoverished countrymen to cook ‘alky’ in their homes. For $15 a day a denizen of Little Italy just had to keep a fire burning under a still and gently stir and skim. From time to time a still would explode, killing the operator or his family, but running that risk was better than working as a labourer or starving from no work at all.

In Sicilian neighbourhoods the law of the Gennas was enforced by John Scalise and Albert Anselmi. Also from Marsala this ferocious pair put the ‘fluence’ on victims by greasing their bullets with garlic. Anyone not killed outright was supposed to expire from garlic-induced gangrene. Few of their targets lived long enough to disprove the theory. In 1925 they shot two policemen dead at point-blank range. Tried for murder they seemed certain to hang but were cleared when the jury accepted that they were only defending themselves against unwarranted police aggression.

Like all other gang bosses the Gennas ruled their patch by owning politicians and police. A lawyer once argued their innocence on the grounds that they had been able to operate only with the connivance of local officials. ‘For six years the Genna brothers maintained a barter house for moonshine alcohol, as openly and notoriously, as public as the greatest department store on State Street. And not a drop could have been sold unless it was done on the open permission of the law-enforcing agencies of Chicago. The Gennas became mighty men and influential. Three hundred policemen crossed the threshold of their Taylor Street shop every month…. They were not afraid of policemen. Why should they be?’

The Gennas sold spirits made of home-cooked mash blended with flavours and colouring, achieving instantly what took years in genuine whiskey. In went creosote, coal-tar dyes, fusel oil and wood alcohol which could kill the drinker in less than an hour. Herman Bundesen, Chicago’s commissioner of health in the early 1920s, branded the Gennas and their rivals, ‘Distillers and Distributors of Death Unlimited’.

In 1923, with Chicago’s liquor market overflowing, the Prohibition war started in earnest. From the South Side the Irish O’Donnell gang hijacked Torrio’s beer trucks and smashed up six of his speakeasies. Torrio and his allies, the Saltis–McErlane gang, struck back by killing several O’Donnell drivers. In 1924 the war spread to the North Side where Dean O’Banion upset Torrio and Capone’s empire by undercutting their prices. He also took on the Gennas by hijacking their trucks. ‘To hell with them Sicilians,’ he proclaimed to reporters.

He spoke too soon — he had made too many enemies. On 10 November 1924 three men came into his shop as he was clipping chrysanthemums. O’Banion thought they had come to order flowers for a prominent Italian’s funeral. As he put out his arm to shake their hands they shot him dead. No one was ever charged with his murder, a routine procedure that has been upheld for a thousand Chicago gang killings since.

His obsequies befitted so pious and floral a gangster. In an Italian funeral parlour his cadaver was described in the press as ‘lying in state’. The embalmer had worked wonders on the bullet holes in his throat and cheeks. After three days on view he was placed in a $10,000 casket brought all the way from Pennsylvania. Another $10,000 was spent on flowers, including one basket from Al Capone. Thousands of mourners lined the streets as the cortège travelled to Mount Carmel cemetery. The cardinal archbishop banned the dead man from consecrated ground but within five months Mrs O’Banion had him reinterred in holy ground.

One newspaper summed it up as the day when ‘The elite of the gun world gave O’Banion a magnificent funeral, a testimony of the leadership he had attained in the realm where gunplay makes millionaires.’ Hymie Weiss was said to have ‘cried as a woman might’. O’Banion’s most violent lieutenant, Weiss was already plotting revenge. He invented the method of death in which the victim sits in the front passenger seat of a car with his assassin directly behind him. He is then shot in the back of the head. After such a murder Weiss chuckled that his victim had been ‘taken for a ride’, coining a catch-phrase for generations of crime reporters and screenwriters.

Weiss knew Capone had ordered O’Banion’s murder. On 12 January 1925 he tried to machine-gun him to death. (Capone’s allies, Joe Saltis and Frank McErlane had introduced the Thompson sub-machine-gun to Chicago in 1923.) Al survived but twelve days later John Torrio was wounded in an attack by O’Banion’s other henchman, Bugs Moran. A boy saw the shooting and identified Moran. Torrio also recognized his attacker but refused to name him. Moran was held for three days but never tried. The ‘fix’ had gone in. The incorruptible police captain, John Stege, lamented, ‘You can figure out gangdom’s murders with a pencil and paper but never with a judge and jury.’

Torrio recovered from his wounds but was jailed for operating an illegal brewery. On his release in October 1925 he announced that he was quitting Chicago because it was too violent. At 48 he had lost his nerve. He went to Italy for a while but returned to New York, surviving until 1957. He died in a Brooklyn barber’s shop where he was hit not by the customary bullets but by a coronary.

The demise of the terrible Gennas also occurred in 1925. Three of the brothers were murdered in separate battles with Bugs Moran, the police and with other Sicilian hoodlums. The surviving Gennas left town. Capone, who had played no obvious part in their downfall, took over their territory. He now had no serious challengers as Chicago’s leading Italian gangster.

His rise coincided with a savage increase in Chicago’s gangland murders. In the 1910s underworld slayings numbered some twenty a year, mostly Black Hand killings. The number rose to thirty-seven in 1922, fifty-two in 1923 and to an all-time peak of seventy-five in 1926. It stayed above forty until 1933, the year Prohibition ended. While it had lasted there had been more than 705 mob killings. Perpetrators were tried and convicted for only seven of these murders – less than 1 per cent. By 1926 such ruthless culling had reduced Chicago’s once numerous gangs into two main armies. On one side were the remnants of O’Banion’s mob, led by Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran, allied with German, Polish and Jewish gangs. They dominated the North Side. On the other side was Capone who now controlled most of the Italian and Sicilian factions. His domain was even greater: the South Side and the western suburbs.

On 11 October 1926 Weiss was machine-gunned to death on the steps of Holy Name Cathedral. Only Moran was left to fight Capone. Al now felt invulnerable as Chicago’s crime overlord so he decided to act the statesman. On 21 October he dominated a meeting of the city’s gang bosses which agreed on the peaceful division of territory. Henceforth there would be no more slaughter. For two months gang murders almost ceased. There were some fraternal disputes – Capone could not stop Sicilians killing each other – but he showed he could impose a Pax Caponiana.

His power was based partly on his own surgical use of violence and partly on the machine he inherited from John Torrio. A master manipulator of politicians Torrio had kept up Colosimo’s connection with the First Ward Democratic aldermen, Kenna and Coughlin. At the same time he also supported Big Bill Thompson, Chicago’s Republican mayor from 1915 to 1923. Thompson derided Prohibition by proclaiming he was as ‘wet as the Atlantic Ocean’. His big favour for the gangsters was to fulfil his promise of a wide-open town. He abolished the Morals Squad of the Chicago police and, in effect, licensed vice. This led to his defeat in 1923 by a reform Democrat, William Dever, who targeted Torrio and Capone. Torrio, anticipating such adversity well in advance, had taken over self-governing townships just outside Chicago like Burnham, a mile square, south of the city. Its ‘boy mayor’, John Patton, had been elected at the age of 19 when he had already run a saloon for five years. He gave Burnham to Torrio who set up dozens of brothels and gambling houses catering mainly for local steel workers.

Another Torrio village was Posen. Its claim to fame was the Roamer Inn, a brothel run by the brothers Harry and Alma Guzik. In 1921 they were convicted of selling a country girl into white slavery. She had been lured there with the offer of work as a hotel maid. In 1923 they were pardoned by Illinois govenor Len Small. In three years Small pardoned or paroled 1000 criminals, making him the most corrupt public official in the history of American organized crime. The Chicago Tribune estimated that 40 per cent of the freed men went to work for Torrio. By 1922 Torrio controlled six suburban townships. When Dever became mayor Torrio and Capone simply moved their most lucrative business out of his reach to the south-western suburb of Cicero.

Cicero looks small on the map next to Chicago, but in 1923 it was the fifth largest city in Illinois with 70,000 inhabitants, mostly immigrants from Bohemia. It had long been corrupt but in 1924, while Torrio was touring Europe, Capone transformed it into the vice capital of greater Chicago: 161 wide-open saloons mostly supplied by Torrio’s breweries, dozens of gambling houses and a craven political hierarchy. Election day in Cicero in 1924 fell on 1 April. Capone made a deal with the incumbent town president and imported 200 thugs to beat up his Democratic opponents. Skulls were broken, throats slashed and one man was killed. More than 100 Chicago policemen were brought in to quell the riots. At dusk Al Capone, his brother Frank and cousin Charlie Fischetti had a gunfight with the law. Al escaped, Charlie was arrested but Frank was shot dead.

Frank Capone was given a statesman’s funeral, attended by many of Chicago’s most notable bootleggers. Al mourned his loss but at least his man had retained Cicero with an enormous victory. One month later Capone and Torrio launched a grand gambling house, the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, and in November Eddie Tancl, their only opponent in Cicero, was slain. Cicero now belonged to Capone.

State’s Attorney Robert Crowe now vowed to crush vice in Cook County, which contained Chicago and all the townships controlled by Torrio and Capone: ‘Cook County is going to be dry and moral for the next four years…. it is the end for liquor, beer and vice.” But his vow fell flat when his chief assistant, William McSwiggin, was killed in a gangland shoot-out. Only 26 years old, McSwiggin had won the reputation of a hanging prosecutor, sending seven murderers to the gallows. None of them were gangsters. They always escaped his noose, notably Scalise and Anselmi, the hit men he had prosecuted for murdering two policemen. McSwiggin spent a lot of time with gangsters on the hoary excuse that he was gathering information. Even so it was strange that on 27 April 1926 he went out for a night’s drinking in Cicero with two men he had just tried for Tancl’s murder and had sworn to hang.

One was Myles O’Donnell, of the notorious West Side O’Donnell brothers. Once allies of Capone, they were now shipping beer into his Cicero territory and boasting about it. That night Capone’s followers ambushed Myles, his brother Klondike and two other men as they staggered out of a speakeasy with McSwiggin. The brothers survived but their two cronies and McSwiggin were killed.

Public outrage led to five grand jury investigations, each inconclusive. Capone was a suspect but when interviewed by a newspaperman he upset the judicial applecart by talking about ‘my friend, Bill McSwiggin…. Of course I didn’t kill him. I liked the kid. Only the day before he was up to my place and I gave him a bottle of Scotch for his old man…. I paid McSwiggin. I paid him plenty and I got what I was paying for.’

By 1926 Al Capone was both feared and hailed as Chicago’s gangland boss. His turnover was put at $100 million a year, $30 million of which went on graft to police, judges and politicians. He was the most powerful man in the city. In Capone the American gangster had come of age. As reporter Jack McPhaul says: ‘Many of the gangsters started the Prohibition era as bullies for politicians but they made such tremendous sums of money that they were far richer than politicians and so became the bosses of men they once served as footpads.’

Capone now wanted to enjoy his wealth outside Chicago, especially with the uproar over McSwiggin’s death and rumours that his own life was in more than usual danger. He soon found he was not particularly welcome elsewhere. In December 1927 he was thrown out of Los Angeles. He turned up in Miami where he bought a luxurious home on Palm Island. Straight citizens tried to oust him but he survived the controversy to become a regular visitor.

Back in Chicago he devoted some efforts to long-overdue good works. One of his friends was a rising young lawyer named Roland Libonati. Born in America, Libonati served as an army officer in the First World War. During Prohibition he became a defence lawyer. He was later elected US congressman for an area including the First Ward and served in Washington for sixteen years. He sternly denies the frequent accusation that he was a front man for organized crime.

Libonati found a compassionate side to Al Capone. In 1929 he saw him give $10,000 to Pennsylvania’s striking miners. In 1930 Capone made his own contribution to fighting the Depression by opening seven soup kitchens in Chicago for down-and-outs. His personal donation was almost $2 million. One newsreel showed hundreds of derelicts enjoying Al’s charity. Among those who spoke of their gratitude were two sharply dressed young men whose efforts to look needy were unconvincing. With the benefit of fifty years’ hindsight they look more like members of Capone’s youth guard destined for a great career in the Chicago mob.

Libonati recalls a donation by Capone of $7500 to repair a church roof, damaged by fire. He also claims that Capone even had a streak of morality when it came to vice. ‘In his first job in Chicago he was assigned to 2222 South Dearborn Street. The Four Deuces it was called; it was a house of assignation. There was a complaint made by the pimps who had girls in this place that they were running away. Mr Capone, they said, was putting $100 bills under their plates, either at breakfast, lunch or dinner, and they were running away. He was very much against prostitution. He had married Mae, a wonderful person, and loved her and was a one-man person with womanhood was noted for that.’ According to Libonati Capone’s greatest service for the Italian people of Chicago was to end extortion by Black Handers. He told them that they weren’t going to shake people down any more and he got his way. Capone sent for them and he laid down the law that they were all through, that they would have to go to work. One person said to him, “You have your racket, I have mine.”

‘Capone said, “Is that the way you feel about it?”

‘He said “Yes.”

‘Nobody knows what happened to this fellow. Some claim he went to Utica, New York. Some claim he left for Italy. Nobody knew. But everybody knows that Capone’s statements were always treated with great respect.’

In the 1920s Libonati was told how Capone had risen above every other gangster in Chicago. ‘I asked one of his right-hand men how they happened to pick Capone as a leader and he said to me, “He doesn’t love money; a man who doesn’t love money you can trust.” And he was right…. Any violence in the underworld only happens when you cheat somebody out of what is his, and then you have trouble.’

Capone ploughed most of the money back into the business, says Libonati. ‘The cost of operation was tremendous. Just think of all the payoffs necessary to stay in an illegitimate business run in the open. Money to him was purely a method of staying in business, not a method of accumulating wealth.’

What of Capone’s reputation as a murderer? I asked Libonati.

‘Well, murder. Murder of who? Murder of those that transgressed in the bootleggers’ policy of “You take this area, I take that area. You come over here and try to take my area and I have to prevent you from doing it.” All of those murders were competitive murders between themselves. Not respectability. Not persons who were involved in legal pursuits. It was the bootleggers’ competitive business arrangements which caused the murders.’

But what about bootlegging itself? Surely Capone was criminally involved?

‘Most Americans did not consider a bootlegger as violating the law because he served the public what it desired … the average person even to this day doesn’t consider violations of the Prohibition law violations at all…. Now Capone never robbed anybody on the streets, he never took advantage of anybody by selling them liquor that wasn’t the real McCoy. He handled the best. He bought all his whiskies from England and Canada. People would go into the emporiums and ask for Al Capone’s whiskey because no one dare refill those bottles. He had testers going round to see if anybody had refilled them. He said that if a man buys a drink, you ought to give him the right kind of a drink or get out of the business.’

Libonati’s friendship with Capone brought him a lot of criticism. In 1931 at a Chicago baseball game Al Capone was photographed shaking hands with the Cubs’ catcher, Gabby Harnett. That alone made the picture front-page news but also prominent in the shot, sitting with Al, was state congressman Roland Libonati.

Libonati claims: ‘Capone called me down to talk to his son who wanted to become a lawyer. I went down there and he was surrounded by his friends; some were political.’ When a photographer came up, ‘All of his political friends left! I stayed there. It was the best thing I ever did for him and later on in life, when I ran out to him all the time, he had a great respect for me. And he had a lot of power too which he didn’t use against me.’

The photographer was Tony Berardi. He saw Capone as far from benign. ‘I felt that he and his mob hurt 500,000 Italian people who lived in the Chicago area. They were hard-working, honest people but folk with other ancestry thought we were all a bunch of gangsters. If I went somewhere and said, “My name is Tony Berardi,” people thought I was a member of the Capone mob. I felt very bad about that and I still do.

‘Quite a few people idolized the bum and I used to get so mad and say, “How could you idolize a bum like that? He hurt his father, he hurt you, he hurt your mother, he hurt every Italian that lived in Chicago and throughout the country. He was national. Hell! he corrupted congressmen, he corrupted every politician he could possibly corrupt.”

‘Later he became a sort of Robin Hood. Many kids loved him. I enjoyed photographing the guy. I enjoyed meeting him. But I didn’t like him. I hated his guts.’

Capone was a kind of Italian-American success story. He may have shamed law-abiding Italians but his crimes were condoned, partly because he and his kind were major employers in an otherwise job-starved immigrant community. In Italian areas alky-cooking became a major source of employment and stimulated many offshoot industries. When there was a move to repeal Prohibition, Italians in Chicago protested with the slogan, ‘No Vice, No Work’.

Bud Freeman, the jazz saxophonist, used to go round Chicago with Joe Marsala, another tenor player, who grew up in an Italian neighbourhood. ‘In the Black Hand district poor Italian families competed with one another in the wine business. We used to go out and buy a jug of half a gallon of wine for 25c. That was their living and competition became very, very big. Of course when Capone took power he organized all that and out of a small impecunious business came big business.’

John Landesco, the pioneer sociologist who researched organized crime in Chicago during Prohibition, asked,

Why should bootleggers be outcasts in the opinion of the ignorant, humble, needy, hard-working people around them? They are the successes of the neighbourhood. The struggling, foreign-born peasant woman sees them in their expensive cars and their fur-trimmed overcoats. She hears that they are sending their children to private schools. She hears them called ‘beer barons’ and ‘booze kings’. The word ‘booze’ has no criminal significance to her but the words ‘king’ and ‘baron’ have a most lofty significance. About all she knows is that these richly dressed young men are making or selling something that the Americans want to buy.

Incidentally she hears in gossip with another toil-worn neighbour that Johnny Torrio, ‘king’ of them all, gave his old mother back home in Italia a villa, with fifteen servants to run it.

Because gangsters always spread a lot of charity around the community, to churches, hospitals and children’s homes, they can always count on popular support. ‘Thus the whole issue between good and bad government, and good and bad men, is befuddled.’2

If Italian immigrants embraced bootlegging with enthusiasm, native Americans were not far behind them, as is clear from the relationship between Italian lawbreakers and the non-Italian ranks of Chicago’s police force. Bootleggers were not the only corrupters. Gambling and vice rackets continued as openly as in earlier years. In June 1930 a North Side whoremonger named Jack Zuta was shot to death. Among his papers was a letter from William Freeman, police chief of the suburb of Evanston.

Dear Jack,

I am temporarily in need of four ‘C’s [$400] 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.

When this letter was published in Chicago’s newspapers Freeman resigned but suffered no other penalty.

Abner Bender joined the Chicago Police Department on 26 October 1922. After thirty days’ training he soon saw how the system worked. ‘I was first sent to a Polish neighbourhood and the saloon keepers would always welcome you. You couldn’t pay for anything. The bottle was there and you were supposed to drink. I didn’t drink so I’d take a hatful of cigars, not that I smoked either.’

Officer Bender soon found out he was not meant to shut down the saloons. ‘We were just ordinary policemen and if you did anything in the way of enforcement they’d put you on a post where there was nothing but weeds. It was a conspiracy and the higher ups were being taken care of.

‘In late 1923 I was put into the Italian neighbourhood of Maxwell Street and Taylor Street, around the stockyard. Every so often they’d clean up the local station and put in a new bunch of policemen. There were so many bootleggers down there. Every other house was a distillery.

‘Almost my first night out in that district I was assigned to 12th Street and Halsted. I was going up and down and I backed into a doorway to observe what was going on. A fella dashed up to me and said. “This is for you.” He handed me an envelope, I took it and he was gone. I opened it up and there were $75 in it. In those days that was a lot of money so that was probably a payoff intended for somebody else. I never found out who it was for.

‘From then on it was nothing but moonshine. If you had a humid or a foggy day you’d just drive up and down the alleys and sniff around and you could smell the stills cooking. There were a few abandoned factories in the neighbourhood and they would put up stills that were two and three storeys high. The detectives would go in and chop them down, but they’d very seldom get any of the operators because as the agents knocked on the front door everybody would go out the back door. So it never stopped.

‘In the police nobody took Saturday off because on Saturday, especially if you were assigned to the flivver, the old Ford patrol cars we had with high rubber tyres, you’d just pull up and somebody would come out and throw an envelope on the seat and you’d drive off. That’s the way it went in those days.

‘The payoff was such a common thing. Believe me, I never went out seeking it. It just came as a matter of course. I tried to do my job. We went out on several raids, made arrests and got convictions but the whole thing was rampant. It was laughable. We even had coloured preachers operating stills. They’d come and go. I guess the Italians got rid of them quick.’

After two years in the Maxwell Street district Bender was assigned to Chicago’s mounted police. ‘Being on a horse we had nothing to do with bootleggers. The only thing we had to do was if a truck drove up with a load of beer we could tell the guy on the beat. We ran into the high-class bootleggers who floated their whiskey over from Canada, or so they said. They even put watermarks on with Lake Michigan water to make it look really good. They’d ask me for my car keys and when I got in my car to go home there was a case of whiskey almost any time I wanted it. I had the biggest closet full of whiskey you ever saw.

‘Sure, I felt I shouldn’t be doing this but why be different? If you were different you ended up on some straight post at night. So you just went along with it and took the line of least resistance.’

Humble cops like Bender were, unknowingly and in a roundabout way, employed by Al Capone. Right at the top of Chicago public life Mayor Thompson was on the take. Capone gave him $260,000 when he ran again for mayor in 1927. He was re-elected and became rich far beyond his declared income. When he died a fortune in unaccounted cash was found among his property. There is little doubt who most of the money came from.

Al Capone was Chicago’s real police chief in the late 1920s. This was acknowledged in 1928 by Frank Loesch, chairman of that impeccable group of concerned citizens, the Chicago Crime Commission. Loesch was alarmed that the murder and vote theft which had marred Chicago’s recent elections should not besmirch the Cook County vote in November. He knew that the only person who could guarantee peace was Capone. He requested an audience which Capone granted at his headquarters in the Lexington Hotel. Loesch later recalled, ‘I told Capone I wanted him to keep his damned hands off the election. He said he would not interfere. He kept his word. There was not one act of violence. It was the most orderly election Chicago had had in years.’

Coming from Loesch this was some tribute for he was the first man to brand Capone a ‘Public Enemy’. This memorable phrase was invented by a Chicago judge, John Lyle, who realized that the old English common-law offence of vagrancy could be used against notorious gangsters. Lyle reasoned that if corruption in Chicago meant that these men could rarely be convicted of individual crimes, they could at least be held as vagrants who had no lawful explanation for their obvious wealth. In April 1930 the Crime Commission published its original list of public enemies. Public Enemy Number One was Alphonse Capone.

Public Enemy though he was, many people still saw him as a public servant and indeed public benefactor. For years he beguiled Chicago with his flair for publicity, his soup kitchens and acts of kindness. Behind this affable façade, however, Al Capone was the leader not just of a pack of hoodlum bootleggers but of a huge crime combination, the ‘Outfit’ as it is still known in Chicago.

Under Capone the Outfit took three evolutionary leaps to become the most sophisticated criminal organization in America. Through violence and corruption he achieved the first by eliminating all his major competitors, not just in liquor but in all criminal endeavours. In New York no single gang could establish complete control, so even today the city’s rackets are divided among five, often conflicting, Mafia families. In America’s second city the mob is monolithic.

The Outfit’s second evolutionary leap was into ‘legitimate’ business. In 1928 Cook County investigators found that ninety-one business associations and labour unions were controlled by racketeers, most of them in the Capone syndicate. They included the Food and Fruit Dealers, the Junk Dealers and Peddlers, the Candy Jobbers, the Newspaper Wagon Drivers, the Building Trade Council, the City Hall Clerks, the Glaziers, the Bakers, the Window Shade Manufacturers, the Barbers, the Soda Pop Peddlers, the Ice Cream Dealers, the Garbage Haulers, the Street Sweepers, the Banquet Organizers, the Clothing Workers, the Musicians, the Safe Movers, the Florists, the Motion Picture Operators, the Undertakers and the Jewish Chicken Dealers!

Perhaps the best contemporary definition of a racketeer appeared in the Chicago Journal of Commerce in 1927:

A racketeer may be the boss of a supposedly legitimate business association; he may be a labor union organizer; he may pretend to be one or the other or both; or he may be just a journeyman thug.

Whether he is a gunman who has imposed himself upon some union as its leader or whether he is a business association organizer, his methods are the same; by throwing a few bricks into a few windows, an incidental and perhaps accidental murder, he succeeds in organizing a group of small businessmen into what he calls a protective association. He then proceeds to collect what fees and dues he likes, to impose what fines suit him, regulates prices and hours of work, and in various ways undertakes to boss the outfit to his own profit.

Any merchant who doesn’t come in or who comes in and doesn’t stay in and continue to pay tribute is bombed, slugged or otherwise intimidated.

The Employers’ Association estimated that such extortion cost the city $136 million a year or $45 for each Chicagoan. Capone’s syndicate extorted a clear profit of at least $10 million through such rackets in 1928, less than a tenth of its gross revenues but enough to weather the Depression and make the years after the repeal of Prohibition a good deal easier to survive.

Capone’s third great contribution to organized crime was to make the mob multi-ethnic. Jews, Irishmen, Germans, Poles: he did not discriminate. In many respects he was an equal opportunity employer, although neither women nor blacks have ever figured on Chicago’s ‘board of directors’. Much of the Outfit’s strength today is based on the strategic use of non-Italians.

Capone even suppressed his own hatred of Sicilians, recognizing that they were worth exploiting for their manpower alone. He made sure he had a say in Chicago’s Unione Siciliana. The Unione was formed in New York in the late nineteenth century as a legitimate fraternal society of expatriate Sicilians. Soon it fell into the hands of mobsters such as Ignazio ‘Lupo the Wolf’ Saietta and Frankie Yale, who turned it into a Mafia front. In Chicago the Unione flourished. By the 1920s it had thirty-eight lodges and some 40,000 members. As a Neapolitan Capone himself could not be a member.

Presidency of the Unione was a much-prized office. With it went much of the profits from Little Italy’s alky business. In the early 1920s the presidency was controlled by the Genna brothers but in 1925 two presidents (Angelo Genna and Samoots Amatuna) were murdered. Capone had ordered neither death but he was now free to take control through his nominee Tony Lombardo. In 1928 Lombardo was murdered as was his successor Pasquale Lolardo in 1929. Both were felled by Joey Aiello, an enemy of Capone’s. His turn came in 1930, the sixth Unione president to be murdered in nine years. Al Capone replaced Aiello with Phil d’Andrea, a man who must have been surprised to die of natural causes.

Tony Berardi believes Capone ‘sold himself to the Sicilians. Like a good salesman he said, “Hey, look we’re Italians. Whether you’re Sicilian and I’m a Neapolitan, we’re all in the business so let’s cooperate.”’ If Capone used and exploited Sicilians, they also used and exploited him. The genius of a brilliant individual gangster would in time be overtaken by the less spectacular corporate skills of organization men. The Chicago Outfit would evolve in the same way as America’s greatest business corporations. That is no coincidence.