Playboy's History of Organized Crime Part II: Chicago and the Prohibition Years

By 1920 Frankie Yale had grown rich, powerful and almost respectable. He owned Island and the Yale Cigar Manufacturing Company (his portrait was on every box, with the cigars selling three for 50 cents, carried in every store in Brooklyn, and Frankie Yale was the generic term for a lousy smoke), had pieces of race horses, prize fighters, night clubs and assorted other enterprises, ligitimate and illegitimate. He owned a fleet of fast boats and when Prohibition came, he turned them loose for quick trips out beyond the three-or 12-mile limit, to what became known as "rum row," to off-load good whiskey shipped from Europe and the Caribbean and run it through the Coast Guard blockades to shore. He owned trucks for shipping the whiskey to speak-easies and bootleggers anywhere and everywhere. When the Mafia moved in on the Sicilian betterment and charitable organization known as the Unione Siciliana, he became its president, giving him in creased power and stature as an ethnic leader. But what Yale prized most was his funeral parlor. "I'm an undertaker," he would often say. And, indeed, that was what he was, maintaining a crew of guns for hire to any paying customer.

A call came early in 1920 from his old friend and onetime. Harvard Inn partner, Johnny Torrio. There was a job to. be done in Chicago and the price was $10,000. Ya1e was not only willing to oblige but said would.do the job personally, for it was one that would make Torrio the king of the rackets in the nation's second city.

The 18th Amendment gave Torrio the opportunity he and others had long been waiting for. Maybe the politicians could outlaw booze, but all the laws and all the pious pronouncements were not going to stop thirsty people from finding ways to buy and drink the stuff. And Torrio was determined to be there offering them the opportunities. There were plenty of loopholes in the Volstead Act for a persevering and farsighted man to make use of. A certain amount of liquor was still going to be made legally, kept in bonded warehouses and released upon presentation of certificates; such certificates could be bought or counterfeited. Doctors would be able to prescribe liquor for medicinal purposes, and many a doctor could be bought and, millions of such liquor prescriptions accumulated. Millions more could be counterfeited. There were 18,700 miles of unguarded borders surrounding the United States across which alcohol could he smuggled with little difficulty. Every bottle of liquor, when cut and reblended, then rebottled and relabeled (with counterfeit bottles and labels indistinguishable from the real thing). could be turned into three, four or more and sold for far higher prices than before. A quart of Scotch, for instance, went for four dollars at sea, was sold by Yale and other rumrunners for $14 and was then turned into a three-quart multiple that went for $42 or more. In a speak-easy, a shot sold for 75 cents, while in pre-Prohibition days, a shot of uncut Scotch had sold for 15 cents. Millions of gallons of liquor had been stored away for a year in anticipation of Prohibition, and they were now about to come out of hiding. In the backwoods and in the back alleys of the ghettos, there were thousands of home-grown stills. Many hard-drinking Italians, Poles and Irishmen had long made their own wine, beer and liquor. Given the right price, they would be willing to increase output and turn it over for resale. And near beer was still legal, though it was first necessary to make the real stuff, then dealcoholize it.

So the liquor was there, waiting. And it was apparent to many as early as January 17, 1920, that there were plenty of customers for it, that the Noble Experiment, as Herbert Hoover would later call it, hadn't a chance of working. (Drinking in the years ahead would become a pastime even in the White House, where President Warren G. Harding. taking office a year after Prohibition, kept a secondfloor bar and maintained his own personal bootlegger, Elias Mortimer.) The law went into effect at midnight on the 16th. The first illegal drink, someone at the time noted, was sold about a minute later. And the first recorded violations of the law took place, as it happened, in Chicago before an hour had passed. Six masked gunmen drove a truck into a Chicago railroad switchyard, tied and gagged the watchman, locked six engineers in a shed and then broke open two freight cars and drove away with $100,000 worth of whiskey marked For Medicinal use only. Almost simultaneously, another Chicago gang hijacked a truck loaded with medicinal whiskey and began a trend that would last through the dry years. A third group broke into a bonded warehouse and made off with four barrels of whiskey. It was just the beginning.

But Torrio realized something more than just that beer and liquor were available and that there were plenty of customers. He saw that at last the underworld could win a measure of respectability; it could move in on something that people wanted avidly and become the sole supplier. He also realized that the law would be enforced laxly. Initially, he had not been so sure, concerned that a Federal law would be enforced strenuously by Federal agents. But political soundings soon persuaded him that he had nothing to fear. All those charged with enforcement would be political appointees and would be earning only about $1500 a year. And, in Chicago and its surroundings, there would be only 134 of them. If political hacks—underpaid and thinly spread ones, at that—were going to man the bureau, the feasibility of bribery was great.

The only obstacle to Torrio's major move into bootlegging was his mentor, Big Jim Colosimo. Bootlegging interested him hardly at all. More and more in the years before Prohibition, Colosimo had been turning the management of his empire over to Torrio while he devoted himself to other, more gracious pursuits. His café, Colosimo's, had become a favorite watering spot for Chicagoans; he had cultivated visiting celebrities, who would join him at his table; he had developed a passion for opera and was often seen with Caruso, Titta Ruffo, Lina Cavalieri and others when they were in town; he was adding to his already noted collection of diamonds and other gems, which gave him the sometime nickname "Diamond Jim." But more than anything, there was his new love, Dale Winter, a onetime choir singer whose singing and acting lessons, even concerts, he paid for, and on whom he poured treasure. In 1920, Colosimo had become so taken with Miss Winter that he divorced his wife—Torrio's cousin, Victoria Moresco—and married the singer. "It's your funeral, Jim," Torrio said when Colosimo told him the news.

It was. Colosimo would permit Torrio to handle only enough booze to stock their whorehouses and speak-easies—to satisfy the desires of the customers. Colosimo was afraid of the Feds and nothing Torrio said could persuade him that they could be bought. Blocked. Torrio made his phone call to his friend Frankie Yale in Brooklyn.

Late in the afternoon of May 11, 1920, in response to a request from Torrio, Colosimo left his bride of less than one month for a trip down to his café. There, he was to await and pay for a shipment of whiskey for the business. Yale was waiting for him and killed him with a bullet in the back of the head. (An eyewitness described Yale to the police, but must have had second thoughts on his way to New York. When confronted with Yale, he refused to identify him and was put on a train back to Chicago.)

When they broke the news to Torrio, he cried, something no one could ever remember him doing. "Big Jim and mewere like brothers," he mourned. Then the arranged a fitting final tribute for three days later. It was the prototype of the Chicago gangland funeral, and all those that followed would be measured against it. Colosimo was laid to rest in a $7500 silver-and-mahogany casket; scores of cars filled with flowers followed the hearse; so, too, did 5000 mourners, including, as honorary or active pallbearers: two Congressmen, three judges, one soon-to-be Federal judge, ten aldermen, a state representative and an army of other politicians and community leaders. Chicago mayor William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson was otherwise occupied, but he sent along personal representatives and his heartfelt condolences, for Colosimo had been a rock in the Republican Party and had brought out huge pluralities for Thompson and his G.O.P. cohorts. Torrio, one of the most demonstrably emotional of the mourners, was taken aside for personal words with most of the famous, and on the way back from the cemetery he rode in a private limousine. Pallbearer "Bathhouse" John Coughlin, a First Ward alderman, marked Colosimo's passing thusly: "Jim wasn't a bad fellow. You know what he did? He fixed up an old farmhouse for broken-down prostitutes. They rested up and got back in shape and he never charged them a cent." The only sour note in the occasion was struck by Archbishop (later Cardinal) George Mundelein. Colosimo, he ruled, could not be buried in consecrated ground—because he had divorced and remarried. In lieu of clergy, "Bathhouse" John Coughlin led the prayers.

Jim Colosimo was laid to rest. Somehow or other, his fortune evaporated between the day of his murder and the time, a week later, when a search of his estate was made. In addition to the millions he was rumored to have socked away, he had supposedly left home on that fatal day with $150,000 in cash in his pockets. But the search turned up only $67,500 in cash, $8894 in jewels and 15 barrels of whiskey. Nobody ever came up with a satisfactory explanation for what happened to the rest. Dale Winter, after a period of mourning, returned to New York City to pursue a stage career. She took over the lead in the hit musical Irene on Broadway, toured with it for some years and then, in 1924, remarried and later faded into obscurity.

So Torrio was the boss of the Colosimo empire. But his eyes were on all of Chicago. To control it, three steps had to be taken: The aid and connivance of the politicians and the police had to be assured; the source of supply of, at first, beer (for Torrio was convinced that Chicago, a workingman's town, had an insatiable thirst for beer and a lesser one for the hard stuff) and then liquor had to be gained; and unity had to be brought to the multiplicity of gangs at loose throughout the city.

Winning the police and the politicians was simple. Their cooperation had been bought in the past for prostitution, gambling and other rackets and there was no reason to suspect that more of the same could not be purchased. But now a development loomed that would have a profound effect on the future of the nation (for, almost simultaneously, parallels were occurring in New York under Arnold Rothstein and elsewhere). Until Prohibition, the gangster was generally circumscribed by the unsavoriness of his calling and limited to his own neighborhood. He was the servant of the politician, to whom he paid protection money and for whom he performed services in a variety of causes. But Prohibition cast an aura of semi-legitimacy over the organized underworld, which provided a product the public desired and could get nowhere else. So the gangster moved out into the world. He was now involved in a business that had become one of the nation's largest. grossing billions of dollars annually—a Government study would later claim that the public was putting $10,000,000 a day into the bootleggers' pockets. With all that money at his command, his power and influence increased geometrically. Though still dependent on the politicians and the police for protection, that dependency took a new turn. Now the gangster, with his wealth and status, was becoming the master, and the politician and the policeman his servants. "Sixty percent of my policemen are in the bootleg business," Chicago police chief Charles C. Fitzmorris would say later, and some would think his estimate low.

The politicians were even more dependent. Torrio and others realized that it was their money and their muscle that kept a man in office, so they acted accordingly, forcing the political bosses to come to them abjectly seeking favors. The gangster's control over the city halls and over the very life of the cities reached so far that by 1928, such an upright and impeccable public figure as Frank Loesch, president of the Chicago Crime Commission and sworn enemy of the underworld, felt it necessary to beg for an audience with Al Capone to seek his assistance to ensure an honest civic election—and Capone, with the munificence of a monarch, gave it. But toward the political hirelings, the gangster felt only contempt, paralleling, perhaps, the contempt the politician had always shown him. "There's one thing worse than a crook," Capone would say later, "and that's a crooked man in a big political job. A man who pretends he's enforcing the law and is really making dough out of somebody breaking it; a self-respecting hoodlum hasn't any use for that kind of fellow—he buys them like he'd buy any article necessary to his trade, but he hates them in his heart."

So it was no hard task to control those who governed and policed the city. And, of course, over it all in Chicago there was the figure of Mayor Thompson, whose fervent and oft-proclaimed devotion to country, city and motherhood was perhaps overshadowed only by his devotion (continued on page 170)Chicago and Prohibition(continued from page 150) to money. In four years under his rule, a $3,000,000 Chicago surplus was turned into a $4,500,000 deficit. As long as he was in city hall, Thompson proclaimed, Chicago would be wide open, for this was not only the way to prosperity, it was the way Chicagoans wanted it. That suited Torrio just fine.

It was just as simple to corner the supply of beer. With the advent of Prohibition, owners of breweries had few choices: They could close up or sell out and take their losses; they could go into the brewing of near beer, an expensive process; or they could enter into secret partnerships with the underworld, permitting them to continue to manufacture and sell real beer, illegally, and reap undreamed-of profits. For many, it was no choice at all. Within weeks of the Colosimo murder, Torrio had become a partner in nine breweries and several whiskey distilleries with the pre-Prohibition brewer, Joseph Stenson, heir to one of the richest and most respected Chicago families. Those interests would expand greatly and the profits would pour in: The beer cost five dollars a barrel to make and was sold for $45 a barrel, sometimes $50 or more—and to special customers, at the reduced price of $35. Torrio also made other connections for liquor: with Yale and the rum-row importers in the East, and with the "Purple Gang" in Detroit, which had a regular ferry run from the distilleries that were springing up across the Detroit border in Canada.

Then Torrio turned to the gang wars (that were erupting all over the city. Every section of Chicago was ruled by one gang or another. There was the O'Banion gang on the North Side. Their activities included illegal liquor, safecracking, robberies, hijackings and protecting the political interests of the highest bidder, sometimes Democrats but more often Republicans. The gang was under the rule of a young, smiling, reckless Irishman named Dion "Deany" O'Banion, never without his guns, reputed killer of at least 25, unwilling to shake hands for fear of leaving himself vulnerable, proprietor of a profitable legitimate front, a flower shop that did a thriving business whenever a gangster went to his reward. O'Banion's chief aide was Earl Wajciechowski, better known as Hymie Weiss, to whom society and the underworld will always be in debt for inventing the "ride." In 1921, Weiss personally invited a fellow Pole, one Steve Wisniewski, who had incautiously hijacked an O'Banion beer truck, to drive with him into the country. "We took Stevie for a ride," Weiss would tell friends, "a one-way ride."

The West Side of Chicago was run by the O'Donnell brothers—Myles, Bernard and William "Klondike"—all Irish and with an abiding hatred of Italians. On the South Side, in "Little Italy," reigned the "Terrible Gennas," six brothers named Sam, Vincenzo, Pete, "Bloody Angelo," "Tony the Gentleman" and "Little Mike," sometimes called "Il Diavolo." Good family men, ardent church- and operagoers, suspected members of the Mafia all, these Sicilian-born brothers controlled every racket in the ghetto—from extortion to cheese, olive oil and other delicacies, to gambling, politics and booze. During Prohibition, they specialized in turning out homemade rotgut, guaranteed to kill, blind or at least sicken the drinker; but they had no trouble peddling the stuff and the demand was so constant and grew so fast that they put hundreds to work making it in kitchens, bathtubs, anywhere. It cost the Gennas between 50 and 75 cents a gallon to turn out and they sold it to speak-easies for six dollars a gallon. The speaks, in turn, diluted it, sold it by the drink and realized about $40 a gallon.

Between the Gennas and suburban Cicero was the Valley Gang, led by Terry Druggan and Frankie Lake. On the Southwest Side was the Saltis-McErlane gang, coheaded by massive, brutal and moronic Joe Saltis and the alcoholic killer Frank McErlane,.who would introduce the Thompson submachine gun to the underworld. The Ragen Colts—racist, jingoistic, bootleggers—ran the South Side around the Stockyards. And on the Far South Side, the rulers were another O'Donnell gang, unrelated to Klondike O'Donnell, led by brothers Steve, Walter, Tommy and Ed—called Spike, and the real boss. In 1920, Spike was away in Joliet Penitentiary, having been caught walking out of a bank with $12,000. His brothers, disorganized, spent their time doing errands for Torrio at his Four Deuces saloon and brothel, waiting for brother Spike to return.

The bitterness among all the gangs was intense, and blood flowed regularly. It was Torrio's conviction that unless the internecine warfare could be halted, all his plans and hopes would come to little. So he made a proposal to all the Chicago gang leaders: There would be peace, and with it cooperation and prosperity. His proposal was the essence of simplicity and good sense: In unity, there lay strength and success; in division and hostility, only weakness and failure. The main chance, he insisted, lay in making Prohibition work for all, for it would make them all millionaires. As much as possible, he argued, the old traditional activities—robberies, safecrackings, muggings and other violent crimes—should be shunned, abandoned. This was asking a lot, he realized, and total abstinence was impossible, given the nature of the personnel; but nevertheless, this was the goal they should all strive for. They should devote themselves and their energies to those things that, while they aroused society's displeasure, aroused it only mildly—things like gambling, prostitution and, particularly, booze.

But if they were to succeed and become rich, Torrio said, then they must be willing to put an end to the old enmities. He proposed that every gang have absolute control over its own territory, over the whorehouses, gambling and speakeasies, and have the right to dictate from whom the liquor and beer sold there be bought. If a gang wanted to operate its own breweries and distilleries, fine; if not, Torrio, with his vast supplies, was prepared to sell them all the beer they needed; his price, and it was increased now, following the law of supply and demand, would be $50 a barrel; he would also supply all the liquor anyone needed at competitive prices.

If an outsider tried to muscle in anywhere, all the gangs in Chicago would cooperate in meting out appropriate chastisement. And to ensure that the plan worked, Torrio proposed an all-Chicago underworld council—the forerunner of the national Syndicate that would be created a decade and more later—with all the gangs represented and having equal voice, and with himself as chairman, ready to supervise all arrangements made among different gangs and to arbitrate all disputes.

Even to rival gang leaders who barely tolerated one another, Torrio's plan was so appealing that nobody resisted.

And so peace and good times, with Torrio as the boss, came to the Chicago underworld. They lasted for nearly three years and, as Torrio had prophesied, the riches poured in. So powerful did Torrio become that his influence reached Springfield and the governor's office. When Jake Guzik's brother, Harry, and Harry's wife, Alma, still plying their whorehouse trade in addition to the new Torrio rackets, enslaved a young farm girl, turning her into a prostitute, they were both convicted of compulsory white slavery and sentenced to the penitentiary. But before they served a day, Torrio reached to Governor Len Small, a Thompson puppet. He owed Torrio and his friends big favors; he had been indicted soon after becoming governor for embezzling $600,000 while state treasurer; bribery and intimidation had persuaded the jury to acquit him. Now Small repaid the favor. He pardoned the Guziks—and in the next three years, he would grant pardon or parole to almost 1000 convicted felons.

The first challenge to Torrio's peace, prosperity and cooperation came in the summer of 1923, when Spike O'Donnell returned from Joliet. Determined that he and his brothers would cash in on Prohibition like everyone else, he began hijacking Torrio's beer trucks and tried to muscle in on the Saltis-McErlane (continued on page 206)Chicago and Prohibition(continued page from 170) territory. The gangs followed the Torrio dictum of cooperation. Striking back, they killed at least eight of the O'Donnell troops and Spike himself barely escaped a couple of times. In a few months, he had had enough. "I've been shot at and missed so often I've a notion to hire out as a professional target," he sighed and departed Chicago.

The O'Donnells, despite the blood and the expense, had been only an annoyance. Another problem was not so easy. Thompson's term was over and Chicago was about to get a new mayor, a reform Democrat this time, named William E. Dever. He was going to see to it that the laws were obeyed and he told his new police chief, Morgan A. Collins, "I will break every police official in whose district I hear of a drop of liquor being sold."

At first, Torrio refused to believe it; he'd heard the same thing too often to be taken in. But he wanted to make sure, so he offered Collins a $100,000-a-month payoff to forget Dever's orders. Collins, instead, raided and padlocked the Four Deuces. Torrio upped the offer to $1000 a day just to overlook the movement of 250 barrels of beer a day; Collins answered by raiding breweries, speak-easies, brothels and gambling dens around the city and locking up over 100 gangsters (in the process, old Mont Tennes, ruler of the race wire and the city's handbooks, decided it was time to retire and turn the business over to younger hands).

This hurt, but not all that much, for new speaks, new brothels, new gambling houses, new breweries and distilleries sprang up as fast as the old ones were closed. But none of this made Torrio happy, for it was expensive. So he decided to look for a haven, a place from which his empire could be run with impunity, with no worry about official harassment. His eyes turned to the suburban town of Cicero, just west of the Chicago city limits. It would be the first—but not the last—American community to fall completely under the control and be at the total mercy of the underworld.

A lower-middle-class suburb of 60,000, mainly first- and second-generation Bohemians who worked in the factories of southwest Chicago, Cicero was, within its own terms, a relatively free and easy town. Its president, as the mayor was called, was an amiable lightweight named Joseph Z. Klenha; he did nothing without first checking with the Klondike O'Donnell gang, political boss Eddie Vogel and onetime prize fighter turned saloonkeeper, Eddie Tancl, who ran Cicero. The people liked to gamble on occasion, so slot machines, but only slot machines, abounded, the operators sharing the take with Vogel. The people liked to have a beer or two after the day's hard work and, Prohibition or not, they were not to be denied that pleasure. So there were plenty of illegal saloons operating out in the open. As for other vices, there were none.

In October of 1923, Torrio changed all that. Leasing a house on Roosevelt Road, he turned it into a brothel and installed a score of his girls. Cicero citizens were irate and the police quickly raided the house, closed it down and locked up the girls. Torrio said nothing, only opened a second house, with the same result. Again, Torrio did not complain and Cicero officials were certain they had turned back the invasion. It was a mistake they would regret, for they had done just what Torrio wanted. He called his friend and hireling, Cook County sheriff Peter M. Hoffman, and two days later, a squad of deputies moved in and impounded every slot machine in Cicero.

There was no misreading the message, and emissaries went to Torrio to treat for peace. If he would get the sheriff to return the slots, they would open up Cicero to him. Torrio agreed not to bring in his whores; all he wanted was the franchise to sell all the beer in Cicero except for those small areas ceded to Klondike O'Donnell, to run all the gambling—and he would bring in a plethora of games in addition to the one-armed bandits—and the right to set up his headquarters in the town.

The conquest and capitulation of Cicero had been quick and easy, with no violence or bloodshed, just as Torrio wanted it. He decided that now he could afford to take a vacation. With his mother, his wife, Anna, and more than $1,000,000 in cash and securities to deposit in foreign accounts against future need, he sailed for Italy, returned to his birthplace, where he was greeted as a conquering hero, someone the youth of the town should emulate, for he had left poor, returned rich and was even building his mother a luxurious villa for her last years.

Behind, he left his expanding empire and a man to oversee it, a man sometimes known as Al Brown but becoming even more notorious under his real name, Alphonse Capone. Born in Brooklyn in 1899, six years after his family's arrival from the slums of Naples, and one of nine children, Capone made his mark on the streets early, with fists, club and gun. He had worked as a bouncer for Yale at the Harvard Inn and there one night had earned the nickname Scarface Al: A punk named Frank Galluccio took offense at some slighting remarks Capone made about his sister, whipped out a pocketknife and slashed Capone across the face; in an uncharacteristic gesture, Capone not only forgave Galluccio but some years later took him on as a $100-a-week bodyguard. Late in 1919, seeking refuge from a possible murder indictmeat, Capone had fled to Chicago and gone to work for Torrio as a bouncer in the Four Deuces. But Capone was ambitious. He was soon chief aide to Torrio.

Capone was the antithesis of the soft-spoken Torrio. Though his business was vice and crime, Torrio did not smoke, drink, gamble or womanize—he would remain a faithful and adoring husband until his death; he rarely swore and would not tolerate the use of obscenities in his presence; he spent his nights quietly at home with Anna, except on those rare occasions when he took her to a play or a concert. And he constantly preached against the evils of indiscriminate violence. There were, he said, times when force was inescapable, but such times were rare and when they did arise, only the minimal amount of force should be used (though sometimes, the minimal amount meant a killing). Violence, Torrio constantly preached, only led to more violence and trouble for everyone; persuasion, bribes, deals and compromise when necessary meant peace and prosperity for all.

Capone, on the other hand, was a gross man with gargantuan appetites for food, liquor, gambling and women. His bets on horses, dice, roulette and other games of chance were rarely less than $1000 and sometimes as much as $100,000. And he was unlucky—he would later estimate that he had dropped more than $10,000,000 on the horses alone during his years in Chicago. (One of his bouts with a whore in his charge left him with syphilis, which went untreated, for Capone had a deathly fear of doctors and needles. He eventually died from paresis.) Capone believed in the maximum use of force and violence to gain his ends.

At first, in his initial experience as boss, Capone tried to follow the Torrio maxims. With Mayor Dever continuing to put the pressure on in Chicago, Capone moved the organization's headquarters to the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero, armor-plating it and keeping it constantly guarded. He repelled some attempted incursions by other gangs—with guns, of course, but not with undue force—and he added to the growing strength of the operation, bringing in his brothers Ralph and Frank, his cousins Charley and Rocco Fischetti, Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti and others.

And then events were set in motion that would mark the Chicago scene from that day on, would turn the city and its environs into a bloody battlefield claiming, before the Twenties were over, 1000 lives and causing even Charlie "Lucky" Luciano to exclaim after a visit, "A real goddamn crazy place. Nobody's safe in the streets."

Torrio returned from Italy in the spring of 1924, just as Cicero was about to hold a municipal election. Fearing that the citizens, resentful of the gangster invasion and influenced by the Dever reform movement in Chicago, might throw out the incumbents in favor of Democratic reformers, Vogel and Klenha went to Torrio with a new proposition. If he would ensure a victory for the Klenha slate, the town would be turned over to him. Any operation he wanted, except prostitution, would be granted absolute immunity from any interference, from the law or anyone else. What Torrio understood, and apparently the town fathers did not, was that violence would be necessary to fulfill Torrio's side of the bargain. So he turned that little job over to Capone.

And Capone accomplished it with a vengeance. Democratic candidates were beaten and threatened; Democratic voters were intimidated at the polls by gangsters holding drawn revolvers; ballots were seized and checked before the voter was permitted to drop them into the box. During Election Day's early hours, at least four persons were killed. The reformers sent out a plea for help and squads of Chicago cops poured in. All day, they engaged in running battles with Capone mobsters. At dusk, a squad car pulled up before a polling place at 22nd Street and Cicero Avenue. Standing outside with drawn guns were Al and Frank Capone and Charley Fischetti. A hail of bullets poured from both sides. Frank Capone fell to the pavement, dead. Fischetti was captured—and quickly released. Capone fled down the street, ran into another squad of Chicago cops, held them off with revolvers in both hands until darkness came and he could escape. No charges were ever filed against him. But Al could take comfort in knowing that brother Frank had not died in vain. The Klenha ticket won with an overwhelming majority and Cicero, for a time, was the capital of the underworld. So completely was it dominated that later, in daylight and with a crowd watching, Capone would kick Klenha down the city-hall steps because the town president had displeased him.

Only one lonely voice continued to speak in opposition in Cicero, that of Eddie Tancl, whose hatred of the invaders was boundless, who had refused to go along with the compact, who refused to buy his beer from Torrio or his allies, who ignored their orders to get out of town. But he did not speak for long. Myles O'Donnell walked into his saloon and shot him dead. Myles was prosecuted for the murder—without success.

The guns and the blood in Cicero were only a prelude. The underworld peace that Torrio had labored for and achieved came to an end. The O'Banions and the Gennas were snarling and shooting. The Gennas had been flooding O'Banion's North Side territory with the cheap rot-gut and underselling O'Banion. Even Torrio's remonstrances were unavailing. And then Angelo Genna lost $30,000 at a roulette table in the Ship, a casino owned by Torrio and into which O'Banion had been cut for a small interest. Genna welshed on the debt. O'Banion demanded payment. Torrio told him to forget it. Instead, the volatile O'Banion called Genna and demanded that he pay up in a week. When Hymie Weiss and others told O'Banion to cool off, that he was only asking for trouble, O'Banion replied. "To hell with them Sicilians."

So the O'Banion mob and the Gennas were on the verge of war. What was worse for the Irishman was that he had incurred Torrio's displeasure as well. The two had been partners in the Sieben Brewery for some time, and in May of 1924, O'Banion sent word to Torrio that he was going to quit the rackets and retire to a ranch in Colorado. He was, he explained, simply afraid that he had pushed the Terrible Gennas too far and they'd get him if he didn't get out. Would Torrio be willing to buy O'Banion's interest in Sieben for $250,000? Torrio agreed and paid the money. To show how appreciative he was, O'Banion said, he'd help Torrio make one final shipment from the brewery.

That shipment was to be made on May 19. Torrio, O'Banion, Weiss and several others (Capone was in hiding; he had killed a man a few days earlier and was waiting until the witnesses were persuaded to change their stories) were at Sieben watching 13 trucks being loaded under the supervision of two local-precinct cops. Suddenly, the place was a hive of other cops, under the personal leadership of Chief Collins. The chief personally ripped the badges off the precinct cops and then hauled Torrio, O'Banion, Weiss and the others not before a city judge who would quickly spring them but before a Federal commissioner. For O'Banion, this was a first arrest for bootlegging and, according to prevailing practice, he would get off with a fine. But Torrio had been picked up for bootlegging some time before and had paid a fine then. As a second offender, he could expect a jail term. Then, from a friendly cop, Torrio learned that O'Banion had tipped off Collins' office, setting up the raid and thereby not only reserving a jail cell for Torrio but clipping him for $250,000 plus what had been seized at Sieben. And the word got back to Torrio that O'Banion was telling friends, "I guess I rubbed that pimp's nose in the mud all right."

It was just too much. O'Banion had to be chastised and there was only one fitting chastisement for such a double cross. Torrio made common cause with the Gennas. All that held them back was the cautious voice of respected Mike Merlo, who headed the Chicago branch of the Unione Siciliana; he, even more than Torrio, deplored violence and its effect on his underworld friends. But Merlo was dying of cancer and his death would free Torrio and the Gennas. It would also provide the excuse for Torrio to once again call upon Frankie Yale, the Union's national president.

Merlo died on November 8, 1924 (Angelo Genna was named to succeed him). The funeral was set for the tenth. Yale arrived in town for the ceremonies. And the orders for floral tributes poured into the O'Banion shop. Torrio bought a $10,000 mixed bouquet; Capone kicked in $8000 for red roses; the Unione itself anted up for a huge wax-and-flower sculpture of Merlo to be carried in a limousine behind the hearse. The night before the funeral, Angelo Genna called to order another massive and expensive tribute and told O'Banion he would send around a couple of guys to pick it up.

At noon on November tenth, O'Banion was in the shop, waiting. In walked John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, two illegal immigrants from Sicily wanted for murder there and now working for the Gennas and Yale. "Hello, boys," O'Banion greeted them. "You want Merlo's flowers?"

"Yes," one of the men replied. Then, inexplicably, O'Banion held out his hand; it was the first time anyone could remember his offering to shake hands; it would be the last. The hand was grasped. O'Banion was pulled forward, off balance. Before he could recover, guns were drawn and he was shot six times.

The farewell to O'Banion was orgiastic. "It was one of the most nauseating things I've ever seen happen in Chicago," said Judge John H. Lyle, one of the city's few courageous and honest judges at the time. The casket, rushed from Philadelphia, was of silver and bronze and cost $10,000; 26 cars and trucks were needed to carry the floral decorations, including garish ones sent by Torrio, Capone and the Gennas; there were three bands and a police escort; more than 10,000 people marched in the funeral train and 5000 more waited at the cemetery; there were judges, aldermen and assorted other public officials. Hearing of it all, Yale would say to friends, "Boys, if they ever get me, give me a send-off that good." Three years later, they did.

But O'Banion's friend and successor as gang leader, Hymie Weiss, was determined that the fallen leader would be avenged, and he was certain the knew upon whom to wreak that vengeance—Torrio, Capone and the Gennas. Not willing to stand up as a target, Torrio took off for a vacation—unknown to him, he was trailed everywhere by Weiss gunmen, who never got the opportunity to get off a shot. In Chicago, the war was under way. An attempt was made to kill Capone as he drove through the city; it failed and Al promptly ordered an armor-plated, bulletproof car from General Motors. Other members of the gang, however, fell before Weiss's bullets.

By mid-January of 1925, Torrio was back, and he knew exactly where he could find safety. The Federal bootlegging charges, growing from the Sieben raid, were finally before the court. Torrio pleaded guilty and, almost with a grin, heard himself sentenced to nine months in jail and fined $2500. He was given, as a prominent businessman, five days to clean up his affairs.

On January 24, he went shopping with his wife. At dusk, they returned to their Clyde Avenue apartment. Ann started for the apartment-house door. Johnny hung back to remove some packages from the car. A black Cadillac stopped across the street. Inside were four men holding pistols and shotguns. Two leaped from the car (one was later identified as George "Bugs" Moran, killer and sometime down prince of the O'Banion mob). They dashed across the street and began firing at Torrio and his chauffeur. The chauffeur was hit in the leg. Torrio was hit four times—one bullet shattered his jaw, the others struck his right arm, chest and groin. Simultaneously, the two men in the car began firing across the street, lacing the Torrio limousine with bullets and shotgun pellets. One of the killers bent over to put a bullet in Torrio's head. His gun misfired and before he could fire again, a warning blast of the Cadillac's horn sent him hurrying away.

Within minutes, racked with pain, Torrio was in an ambulance on his way to the hospital. In the hospital, guarded by the best troops the shaken Capone could round up, Torrio proved to be not as seriously wounded as first thought, though he would bear scars on his jaw for the rest of his life and would never be without a scarf to hide them. He mended quickly. But when questioned about the assailants, he would say only, "Sure, I know all four men, but I'll never tell their names."

Then Torrio went to jail. He was treated with the respect his wealth and power called for. Special furniture was brought in; the warden's office was his for the asking; he could make all the phone calls he wanted and he could have all the private conferences he desired. During these months, he came to a decision. All that he had built up so carefully was now coming down in violence and death and could easily mean his own death. He summoned Capone. "It's all yours, Al." he said. He was leaving Chicago, leaving everything behind, turning it all over to Capone to do with as he wished. All Torrio wanted was the peace and quiet of a retired businessman.

So Johnny Torrio, the mastermind of the Chicago underworld, left jail and was driven in a three-car motorcade to meet a train, a train that would take him to New York, where he would meet quietly with old friends and talk about the future, then board a boat for a long trip to Italy. But he would be back, and when he returned, his arena would be the whole country, for he would play a major role in forging a nationwide criminal alliance.

Now Capone was the boss. But not, as Torrio had been, of a semipeaceful and cooperative underworld. There was war in Chicago and Capone was ruler of only one army, albeit the biggest and strongest. numbering between 750 and 1000 troops. Arrayed against him were the remnants of the O'Banion gang, led now by Weiss and joined by other Irish, Jewish and Polish gangs who proclaimed their hatred of Italians. Their number and firepower nearly matched Capone's.

But Capone's gang was tightly knit. And he had the drive and ambition that others lacked and the unscrupulous amorality to see him to victory. He was determined to be Chicago's master.

To achieve his goal, Capone knew, he would have to smash his opposition unalterably, not with the Torrio technique of persuasion, treaties and compromise but in the manner he knew best, with violence. Initially and unwittingly, Weiss was of help, for with Torrio's departure, he turned his guns on the Gennas, sometime allies of Capone but more often a threat. in a series of street-corner shoot-outs, motorcade battles and lonely ambushes during the spring and summer of 1925, Weiss's men gunned down Angelo, Mike and Tony Genna and a small army of their followers. It was the end of the Terrible Gennas. The surviving brothers fled the city, and when they returned a few years later, it was to a life of obscurity as importers of cheese and olive oil. The demise of the Gennas, and the murder in a barber's chair of their protégé Samuzzo "Samoots" Amatuna soon after, put the Unione Siciliana in Capone's pocket, for his consigliere, Tony Lombardo, succeeded to the presidency, all of which brought Capone new power and new troops.

He needed them, for the city rocked to the sound of gunfire in a seemingly endless battle between Capone and Weiss. In the summer of 1926, Weiss and one of his top gunmen, Vincent "Schemer" Drucci went to pay a call at the new Standard Oil Building on South Michigan; they were going to make a payoff to political ward boss Morris Eller and assistant state's attorney and gangland funeral director John Sbarbaro. Instead, they met a carload of Capone gunmen. The street in front of the building, filled with people, was suddenly a war zone as bullets flew from both sides. The only casualty: a clerk grazed in the thigh. Later the same day, as Weiss and Drucci drove along Michigan Avenue, their car was strafed by a passing Capone car, but again, there were no casualties.

Weiss struck back. About a month later, he set up an ambush for Capone at a restaurant Al frequented near the Capone-controlled Hawthorne Race Track. A ten-car motorcade sped by. From each car protruded gun barrels. And from those barrels came the spit of bullets into the crowded restaurant. One Capone aide was wounded, and so, too, were three innocent bystanders. One woman's injuries were severe, and generous Capone paid the entire $10,000 hospital bill. He also paid for repairs to the restaurant and adjoining stores.

It wasn't that Capone minded the shooting; after all, he did it himself and it was one of the risks of the business. What he minded was all the bad publicity. Maybe the Torrio way was best, after all, he thought. So he sent word to Weiss, asking for peace and cooperation; there was enough for everyone. Not, Weiss replied, until Capone turned over to him O'Banion's killers: Scalise and Anselmi. "I wouldn't do that to a yellow dog," Capone snapped back.

The only thing Weiss would listen to, Capone decided, was gunfire, and gunfire that would end his career. An ambush team rented a room next door to the O'Banion flower shop, which Weiss still used as headquarters. On October 11, 1926, as Weiss and four companions left a car to enter the shop, two waiting gunmen opened up with tommy guns and shotguns. Hit ten times, Weiss was dead before he fell to the pavement. A Weiss aide was also killed instantly. The two others, though wounded, recovered. Directly in the line of fire was the Holy Name Cathedral. On its cornerstone was written: A.D. 1874 At the name of Jesus Every Knee should Bow in Heaven and on Earth. The fusillade that killed Weiss nearly obliterated the text, chipping offall but: Every Knee should ... Heaven and on Earth.

So Weiss went to the cemetery, where he would soon be joined by Drucci, the victim of a policeman's bullet. And Capone said, "Hymie was a good kid. He could have gotten out long ago and taken his toll been alive today."

And then, for a time, there was a semblance of peace. On October 21, 1926, Weiss's allies, frightened now of Capone's firepower, sued for peace and Capone granted it to them. He generously permitted the other gangs to split the spoils north of Madison Street, while everything south, and all the suburbs, would be his—a territory containing more than 20,000 speak-easies, uncounted numbers of gambling dens, brothels and other rackets. "I told them," he would later say, "we're making a shooting gallery out of a great business and nobody's profiting by it."

Peace came at the right moment. For Big Bill Thompson was coming back. He campaigned on a platform of "What was good enough for George Washington is good enough for Bill Thompson.... I want to make the king of England keep his snoot out of America! America first, last and always!" and asserted that "I'm wetter than the Atlantic Ocean. When I'm elected, we'll not only reopen the places these people have closed but we'll open 10,000 new ones." He was backed by a huge war chest, including a $260,000 contribution from Capone, who also supplied plenty of bribes, terror and multiple votes. Thompson was swept back into city hall and Chicago was wide open again. Capone would later say that his payoffs to the police in the Thompson era averaged $30,000,000 a year and that half of the force was on his payroll. "Chicago is unique," said Professor Charles E. Merriam, University of Chicago political scientist and civic reformer. "It is the only completely corrupt city in America."

Thompson was good for business; the campaign investments paid off. But any hope of a lasting peace was bound to be an illusion in Chicago. No sooner had one group been conquered than another rose to take its place. As the O'Banions regrouped, under Bugs Moran, and the Gennas disappeared, Capone was faced with a new challenge, from the nine Aiello brothers and their countless cousins who had succeeded the Gennas as bosses of Little Italy and who, unlike the Neapolitan Capone, were Sicilians and so full-fledged mafiosi with lines around the country (Capone was eventually made an honorary member of the honored society but never a full member). The Aiellos chafed when Capone's choice, Tony Lombardo, became president of the Chicago branch of the Unione over their choice, elder brother Joseph. They determined that both Lombardo and Capone, and anyone supporting them, had to go. They forged an alliance with Moran and they spread the word that they'd pay $50,000 to anyone who killed Capone.

All through 1927, there were takers. But most fell victim to the weapons of Capone's chief bodyguard, James Vincenzo De Mora, who went by the name of "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn. The Aiellos even tried poison, offering to pay the chef of a favorite Capone restaurant, Diamond Joe Esposito's Bella Napoli Café, $35,000 if he would put prussic acid in Capone's minestrone. The chef told Capone.

It was just too muds, especially when Capone learned that Joe Aiello had brought in some outside gunmen to take care of both him and Lombardo from ambush. The police stumbled across the plot, finding first one stake-out, then another, and finally being led to Aiello. He was jailed. While in his cell waiting for bond to be posted, cars filled with Capone gunmen drove up and surrounded the jail. One of the gunmen was arrested and thrown into the cell adjacent to Aiello's. He whispered in Italian to the mafioso that his first step outside would be his last. The terrified Joe Aiello pleaded for police protection and got it, all the way to the railroad station and a train that carried him and several of his brothers to safety in the East. (Joe Aiello would return a few years later and at last succeed to the presidency of the Unione that he had always craved. But he would be no more fortunate in that office than his predecessors: Within a year, he would be caught in a cross fire from two machine-gun nests prepared by Capone.)

By the end of 1927, then, it seemed that Capone, from his luxurious and guarded headquarters, could look out over a city he ruled, having conquered it and achieved more by guns and violence than had Torrio by soft words and treaty. And Capone was famous. Torrio had never been more than a shadowy figure whose power and influence few realized. He had shunned publicity; the garrulous Capone wallowed in it. He loved it that every schoolboy knew his name and face. That wherever he went—in Chicago. Florida, anywhere—he was the center of attention. He gave interviews, trying to explain, but not apologize for, his actions. He had power and he was certain that to Chicago, at least, he was essential. When Thompson got virtuous—deciding when Calvin Coolidge announced he would not run that he would make a damn fine President and the way to get the Republican nomination was by showing he was honest and was cleaning up Chicago—Capone just took himself off to Miami, Florida, where he bought his Palm Island retreat. "Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best way they can," he announced. "I'm sick of the job." Once Thompson renounced his White House dreams, the heat came off and Capone returned to pick up his life as Chicago's master and benefactor.

And benefactor he was, indeed. From the huge roll of bills he always carried in his pocket, he would peel off ten-dollar tips for newsboys and bootblacks, $20 for hatcheck girls or chambermaids, $100 for waiters. There was no end to his generosity. But then, he could afford to be generous. He was earning, the Federal Government would later estimate, more than $105,000,000 a year by 1928.

Capone had expanded far beyond liquor, gambling and prostitution; he had a lock on just about every racket in the city. By the end of 1928, according to the state's attorney's office, at least 91 Chicago unions and trade associations had fallen under the rule of the racketeers. They controlled everything from retail food and fruit to city-hall clerks to plumbers to bakers to carpetlayers to kosher butchers to movies and beyond. They collected initiation fees and monthly dues; in return, they offered employers protection from unions, unions the right to organize and to all, protection—from themselves. The cost to the public was enormous. When Capone moved in on the cleaning-and-dyeing industry, in order to raise the protection money, the merchants had to raise the price of cleaning a suit by 75 cents; when he moved in on the kosher butchers, the price of corned beef went up 30 cents a pound. By the end of the decade, the Mob's control was costing consumers in Chicago $136,000,000 a year, or $45 for every man, woman and child.

It was a good racket, and others besides Capone realized it. Bugs Moran, regrouping the shattered O'Banion-Weiss forces, was back on the attack. Trucks carrying liquor for Capone from the Detroit Purple Gang were repeatedly hijacked. Though dog racing was then illegal (Florida, in 1931, would be the first state to legalize it), dog tracks, dominated by Capone, flourished. Moran went into competition and even tried to burn down a Capone track. He tried to muscle into the Capone-dominated cleaning-and-dyeing industry. He set up ambushes and tried to kill Capone favorites like McGurn. And he never lost a chance to taunt Capone in public. "If you ask me, he's on dope," Moran said. "Me, I don't even need an aspirin." Capone, Moran would say, was "the beast."

By early 1929, Capone had had enough. He took off to Florida. But he was constantly on the phone with Jake Guzik in Chicago and several of his aides made quick trips down to see him. On February 14, Capone rose early, had his customary swim and then took himself down to the office of Dade County solicitor Robert Taylor, for a chat about what he had been doing in Florida.

While Capone talked away the morning hours, it was Saint Valentine's Day in Chicago. At the S-M-C Cartage Company warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, members of the O'Banion gang were waiting for a truckload of whiskey from a hijacker in Detroit. They were waiting, too, for the arrival of their leader, Bugs Moran. They were six hoodlums—Johnny May, Frank and Pete Gusenberg, James Clark, alias James Kashellek (he was Moran's brother-in-law), Adam Heyer and Al Weinshank. With them was Reinhardt H. Schwimmer, an optometrist and friend of Moran's who, though not a gangster, enjoyed the company of gangsters. And there was a dog.

A long black Cadillac, a police gong on its running board and a gunrack behind the driver, pulled up outside. Moran, late for his appointment, was just turning the corner; he spotted the car, noticed its accouterments and, certain that a raid or a shakedown was about to take place, turned and hurried away.

According to witnesses, four men, two in police uniforms and two in civilian clothes, emerged from the car and started for the warehouse. A fifth man remained behind the Cadillac's wheel. The four disappeared inside.

One resident of Clark Street thought he heard the sudden clatter of a pneumatic drill going on and off in several short bursts, then the sound of an automobile backfiring twice. Two neighborhood women, drawn by the noise, looked out their windows and saw two men in civilian clothes leave the warehouse, their hands in the air, followed by two policemen with drawn guns. They got into the Cadillac and drove off. The women shrugged. It was just a raid.

And then the dog started to howl, a sad, mournful cry cutting through the silence. The dog would not stop. A neighbor went to investigate and fled, sick, to call the police. As best anyone could reconstruct it, the seven men in the warehouse had been disarmed and lined up against the wall, and then cut down by submachine guns; all had been riddled in the head, chest and stomach. Two, May and Kashellek, had also been blasted in the face at close range by shotguns. There was blood everywhere, on the floor and all over the brick wall against which they had stood. Only one man could have described what happened. Somehow, Frank Gusenberg had survived. He would last a few hours. But all he would say was, "Nobody shot me. I ain't no copper."

No one was ever convicted of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. But Moran knew who was behind it. "Only Capone kills like that," he said. To which Capone, brought the news at a gala party at his Palm Island mansion, replied, "The only man who kills like that is Bugs Moran."

Capone could joke, but the jokes had a gallows ring, not just for his victims but for himself. The slaughter on Clark Street had solved little, for Moran, the intended victim, had escaped. And the slaughter, at last, stirred a wave of public revulsion and disgust. And a cry for vengeance from Moran. The Aiellos had put a $50,000 price tag on Capone and, despite their flight in disarray, they had never withdrawn it. Now Moran said he would guarantee payment. And he found recruits willing to do the job. In 1928, Tony Lombardo had been gunned down in a crowd of shoppers on Madison Street, a fate that seemed destined for the Unione's Chicago leaders. (Joe Aiello, it was theorized, was behind that one.) After others who tried to hold down the job met the same fate, the new president became a Sicilian gunman named Giuseppe "Hop Toad" Giunta, and as his vice-presidents he named the O'Banion killers, Anselmi and Scalise. They decided to collect the Aiello-Moran bounty. But Capone, with spies everywhere, was quick to hear of their treachery. On May 7, at the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero, he gave them a banquet and when they had eaten and drunk to satiation, his aides suddenly surrounded them and tied them to their chairs. Then Capone personally picked up a baseball bat and with slow and cool deliberation, beat each one to death.

It might have seemed, then, that despite the constant threats and the steady guerrilla warfare of his enemies, Capone still ruled with impunity. He dealt with his foes mercilessly and had little fear of official retribution—between 1927 and 1930, there were at least 227 gangland killings in Chicago, but only two assassins were ever tried and convicted.

But the times were changing, and so was the public temper. An era was coming to an end. For years, the public had read of the exploits of Capone just as avidly and with just as little moral concern or overt outrage as it had read of the exploits of the other public heroes of these years of wild wealth and moral stupor—Babe Ruth. Charles Lindbergh, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange. But the blood that stained Chicago's streets, the innocents—and there were many—who were caught in the cross fires, the indiscriminate and unconcerned violence, the mounting revelations about official complicity and corruption were beginning to have an effect on the city's and the nation's conscience. And the sudden end to that giddy era on the black Wall Street afternoon in October of 1929 did even more. Who had time any longer to be amused at tales of Al Capone and his millions when there was no money to pay the rent or put bread on the table, or even to buy a newspaper to read about him?

When Jake Lingle, a Chicago Tribune crime reporter, was shot down on June 9, 1930, and it was soon learned that he had been something else in addition to a reporter, that he had been a paid ally and an active member of the Mob with spreading interests in the rackets, even the kind of detached amusement with which the press had viewed Capone and the mobs (as long as they were around, there were plenty of good stories that would sell papers) ended. The press began to look harder and with more concern at the doings of the underworld, to demand action. And the wrath increased, and so did the demands for a wholesale cleanup.

Less than a month later, Jack Zuta, the Moran mob's expert on whorehouses, barely escaped assassination as he rode in a police car under official protection, and then was executed by five Capone gunmen. When Zuta's papers were examined, among them were found letters from a host of politicians asking for loans, thanking Zuta for favors and asking for more. Perhaps a few years earlier, in good times, it would all have been dismissed. But with the Depression flattening the land, it was too blatant; the cries increased.

By the last years of the Twenties, even racketeers around the nation were becoming distressed by the Chicago odor; it was giving the whole underworld a bad name. And that odor, and the man responsible for it, was one of the subjects under discussion at a major national underworld conference from May 13 to May 16, 1929, at Atlantic City. There, under the protection of Atlantic City's supreme ruler, the bootlegger-gambler-racketeer-politician Enoch "Nucky" Johnson, gathered the criminal powers of the nation—Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and others from New York, Max "Boo-Boo" Hoff and cohorts from Philadelphia, representatives from Cleveland, Kansas City, Detroit, Boston, everywhere. And Torrio, back home from Italy, operating now in cooperation with New York rulers, was an omnipresent figure, a respected elder statesman of the underworld. The conference dealt with cooperation and syndication in the bootlegging business, began charting a course for the day they all knew was coming, when Prohibition would end. And there was the problem of Capone and how to stem the mounting public outcry against the violence that had marked Chicago. There was, it was agreed, only one way. Capone would have to go, at least temporarily, and he would have to go with official connivance.

Though Capone at first resisted, he at last agreed and soon realized that the arrangements might actually suit him. Where better could he be protected from the vengeful Moran and his followers than in jail for a short spell? Arrangements were made with cooperative Philadelphia police. On his way home from Atlantic City, Capone was picked up for carrying a concealed weapon. The only thing that shocked him was what he got. He expected a vacation of a couple of months. Instead, he was given a one-year sentence in Holmesburg County Prison and served ten months in luxury.

But when he left prison in March of 1930, the world had changed. Prosperity was gone and Depression had arrived, and with it a contraction of the income from the rackets. Worse, the Federal Government was now after him. If local officials would not deal with the underworld and if most Federal laws were ineffective, there was, Washington realized, one way of getting the mobsters—for violation of the income-tax laws. Under Elmer L. Irey, head of the Treasury Department's Enforcement Branch, the Government took aim first at Chicago and, initially, at those under Capone. Ralph Capone got hit with a three-year sentence and a $10,000 fine for income-tax evasion; Jake Guzik got five years and $17,500; Nitti got 18 months and $10,000.

Then it was Al Capone's turn. The pressure on Irey to get Capone had come from as high as the White House itself. President Hoover kept pressing Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon: "Have you got that fellow Capone yet? Remember, I want that man Capone in jail." And Mellon was passing the orders down to Irey and others in the IRS.

But it was no easy task. Capone never maintained a bank account, never signed a check or a receipt, never bought property in his own name. He paid for everything in cash and he kept his horde in a strongbox under his bed. So the tactic was to go after him on the basis of his net worth and net expenditures, to show that he had income, undeclared and on which no taxes had been paid. Stores were scoured to get records of purchases; hotels' and caterers' records were examined to see how much his parties had cost; the brothel operations were studied—even the towels that went to the laundry were counted in order to estimate income.

With the heat growing, Capone's lawyers went to the Government and offered to settle up on back taxes on a reasonable basis. No deal. Then Capone, against the advice of everyone, hired five gunmen to kill the tax agents on his trail. The plot was discovered and a message was sent to Capone to call the gunmen off or they would be shot down on sight. Reluctantly, he did so. Next, he tried bribery, sending a message to Irey that he would hand over $1,500,000 in cash if the case against him were dropped or rigged in his favor. Again, no deal.

In the spring of 1931, Capone was finally indicted for failing to file tax returns and for evading taxes for the years 1925 to 1929. The Government said it could estimate and prove only a fraction of his real income, but that fraction came to $1,038,655.84, on which he owed $219,260.12 in back taxes and $164,445.09 in penalties.

Capone's trial began on October sixth and lasted for ten days. The jury was out for eight hours and returned with a guilty verdict on five of the 22 counts against him. On October 24, Judge James H. Wilkerson sentenced him to 11 years in prison, fined him $50,000 and an additional $30,000 for court costs—the harshest penalties handed out up to that time for tax evasion. "You won't see me for a long time," said Capone as he was led away. He was right. First, the was jailed in Chicago, then, when his appeals had been turned down, he was transferred to Federal prison in Atlanta and finally to Alcatraz, where he remained until 1939. He was released a shattered man, his brain destroyed by the ravages of syphilis. He spent the remaining seven years of his life in guarded isolation on Palm Island. He would never return to take up his rule in Chicago. "Al," said Jake Guzik not unkindly, "is nutty as a fruitcake."

But though Capone had gone—at first to prison and then to death—his organization remained and flourished. There were successors who adapted to new times, men like Charley Fischetti, his brother Ralph, Jake Guzik, Nitti, Sam "Momo" Giancana and others. For soon after Capone departed, a new world began. Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House and the law that had made Capone and his era was about to die.

The Prohibition era in Chicago, which was to be the model upon which all the Hollywood movies of gangsters were based, had, however, been an exception, and a garish one. There had been other men, particularly in the East and New York, who had seen the gold in illegal booze and seized it. But they had done so without the flair for violence that had marked Capone and eventually brought his end. They had adapted to changing times with greater circumspection and so would last longer. And it would be they who came through the world of the Twenties to lead crime into a new world of organization.

A Directory of noted Chicago Businessmen

"it was a hell of a wide-open town"

a short chicago cab ride back to the roaring twenties

Charles W. Burns is 73 years old, looks closer to 50, lives like he were 30 and talks like Anthony Quinn. He drives a cab one or two days a week to supplement his $77 Social Security and ,$58 welfare checks, but only when the horses aren't running at Arlington Park. The horses are Charley Burns's first love. His others are poker, craps, driving around Chicago and talking to people. Any willing passenger gets the benefit of his long experience at living the good life without ever holding a job. As Playboy Associate Editor William J. Helmer discovered recently, this includes a lively narrative of Chicago in the good old days, which, for Charley Burns, began when the Volstead Act took effect and ended with its repeal.

I never worked for a living. Never had to. I was born in Frisco in 1900, and even when I was a kid—I didn't have no schooling—I learned to make my money gambling. Cards and craps, from Seattle to L.A. I came to Chicago about the time they outlawed booze and it didn't take much to figure out the angles. If there's anything people like as much as gambling, it's drinking. That's why I opened up speak-easies.

What I'd do is rent myself three or four apartments on the North Side, somewhere around Broadway. I'd open up one of them and keep the others in reserve. If there was a pinch, I was open the next day at another address. I did that for years and made a hell of a bundle, because I always ran a good place. Hell, we had girls, gambling and booze—anything you wanted. Some guys would come into town and drop maybe $1000 or $1500 in 24 hours. That was big money in those days and everybody had fun. Even the coppers.

One time I remember, these two state coppers brought me in a load of alcohol and stayed around to play. One of the coppers went down on this broad and bit her cunt. I just got him to hell out of there before he got in trouble, because you had to stay friends with the cops. There was a police station right across the street, and they were always coming over. They didn't give you no trouble. They wanted a place to go like anybody else, and they even got a few bucks out of it. More than a few. Hell, I supported some of those guys. 'Course, I got pinched now and then. There's always some nigger in the woodpile doing his goddamn duty, but the next day I'd beat the rap and he'd be out in the goddamn woods. Bill Thompson—he was mayor then—he didn't want us closed down. Nobody did. Close the speaks and nobody would have come to Chicago. It was a hell of a wide-open town.

I was never part of the Mob, but I didn't argue with them, either. It worked like this: You got a few bucks together and opened a joint on your own, and sooner or later, when you were going good. some guys would come around and ask where you got your booze. They didn't care, you understand. It was just a polite way of telling you that your next shipment would come from them. And, by God, you smiled and you bought the stuff.

I never had any bad run-ins with the Mob except once, and that was a misunderstanding. I was out of my regular neighborhood, the North Side, and two guys with guns figured me for a finger man setting up to heist the crap game they were protecting. They took me out in the alley and kept asking me where my men were, and I kept telling them not to shoot me before they called some people and checked me out. They told me that the guys running the game were friends of theirs and I shouldn't take their money, and I kept saying they were making a mistake. I was scared, because they were trigger happy as hell and really wanted to give it to me. That's how guys got ahead in those days; they got a good reputation for killing people. But. one of them finally checked me out, and after about an hour they let me go. That was the closest shave I ever had. I like to shit my pants.

Now, those guys were tough. That's the way guys were back then, because that's the way they had to be or they didn't last long. It's not like now. Now all you've got is sissies.

I wasn't ever violent myself. I ran my speaks and gambled and drank and fucked. That's all. The coppers were always shaking me down and trying to catch me carrying a pistol, but they never did. That wasn't my style. I never wanted to hurt nobody and I never did. I only helped 'em. You know the stories about Al Capone opening up soup kitchens after the crash? Hell, I used to know Capone. Actually, I didn't know him. He was just one of the guys you saw in the places I hung out. Anyhow, I did the same thing. I didn't open no soup kitchens, but I looked after people and helped them out, got them jobs. Like I said, I never worked for a living, but I had contacts and back then I could get anybody a job doing something. That's the way I like it. I like to see everybody work but me.

And for me, tabbing isn't work. I only drive this cab when I've got nothing better to do and when I feel like getting back on the streets. That's the only way you can meet new people and see all the old places. I'm over 70 going on 60 and I'll last to 150, because I'm one of the few people you ever met who knows how to live. Most people, they work, they get old and they die, because they never learned how to live. I'm at the track four, five days a week; at night I hit the bars where I know people; and I still gamble like hell. The reason I'm still alive is because I never worked and never settled down and I spent my life doing what I enjoyed. You know, that's what I'm doing right now. Chicago's not as easy as it used to be in the Twenties, but a man can still get by.

This is the second in a series of articles on organized crime in the United States.