Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (2 page)

FOR a man of Frank Loesch's years and stature it was a galling mission. With profound distaste, the venerable corporation counsel, a founding member of the Chicago Crime Commission and, at the age of seventy-five, its president, crossed the black-and-white tessellated lobby of the Hotel Lexington and stepped into the irongrille elevator. To compound his sense of humiliation, he was committed to the destruction of the man whose aid he sought. Among the city's "Public Enemies," a term Loesch himself had coined to dispel the romantic aura with which the yellow press had clothed gangsters, Al Capone ranked No. 1. Yet who but Capone could or would, this autumn of 1928, guarantee a free, honest election to the voters of Cook County? Not the governor of the state, an embezzler and protector of felons. Not Chicago's grotesque mayor. Not the state's attorney, who had never successfully prosecuted a single gangster. Not the police. Least of all the police of whom Capone once boasted: "I own the police."

Loesch recalled later: "It did not take me long after I had been made president of the Crime Commission to discover that Al Capone ran the city. His hand reached into every department of the city and county government. . . . I made arrangements to secretly meet Mr. Capone in his headquarters."

Capone's bountiful disbursements enabled him to act as if the Lexington belonged to him. The lobby was constantly patrolled by his janissaries, who at sight of any suspicious-looking or inquisitive stranger would leap to a house phone and alert their master. Other sentries kept vigil by the elevator landings, and to approach Capone's fourth-floor eyrie, the visitor had to pass between rows of bodyguards, who carried under their jackets a .45-caliber revolver in a holster, hanging, according to the prescribed style, from a shoulder halter to four inches below the left armpit.

The nerve center of Capone's multifarious activities was Room 430, the salon of his six-room suite. From there he directed-with the guidance of his porcine, Moscow-born financial manager, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik-a syndicate that owned or controlled breweries, distilleries, speakeasies, warehouses, fleets of boats and trucks, nightclubs, gambling houses, horse and dog racetracks, brothels, labor unions, business and industrial associations, together producing a yearly revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Cash was stacked around Room 430 in padlocked canvas bags, awaiting its transfer to a bank under fictitious names.

To enforce his will, Capone had an army of sluggers, bombers and machine gunners, 700 to 1,000 strong, some under his direct command, others available to him through allied gang chieftains. For his immunity from prosecution he relied on an intricate linkage with City Hall, involving a range of officials from ward heelers to the mayor.

Having passed inspection by the sentries, Loesch was admitted to an oval vestibule. A crest enclosing the initials A.C. had been inlaid in the oak parquet. At the left a bathroom contained an immense sunken tub with gold-plated faucets and ceramic tiles of Nile green and royal purple. An ancient Oriental rug covered the floor of the salon, and the high ceiling was embossed with an elaborate foliage design. A chandelier of amber and smoked glass shed a soft light. In an artificial fireplace a heap of artificial coal, covering light bulbs, glowed ruby red. A radio set had been built into the paneling above the mantel.

Capone was a late riser, having customarily stayed up past dawn, eating, drinking and nightclubbing, and visitors who called before noon would find him in dressing gown and silk pajamas, which, like the silk sheets he slept on, were monogrammed. He ordered the pajamas, so-called French models, from Sulka in lots of a dozen at $25 each. He preferred royal blue with gold piping. He also fancied col ored shorts of Italian glove silk, costing $12. His suits, custom-made by Marshall Field at $135 each, with the right-hand pockets reinforced to support the weight of a revolver, ran to light hues-pea green, powder blue, lemon yellow-and he affected matching ties and socks, a fedora, and pearl-gray spats. A marquise diamond sparkled in his tiepin, across his bulging abdomen stretched a platinum watch chain encrusted with diamonds, and on his middle finger he wore a flawless, 11 carat, blue-white diamond that had cost him $50,000.

At the time of Loesch's visit Capone was twenty-nine but appeared considerably older. Mountains of pasta and Niagaras of Chianti had deposited layers of fat, but the muscle beneath the fat was rock-hard, and in anger he could inflict fearful punishment. He stood 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 255 pounds. He moved with an assertive, forward thrust of his upper body, the shoulders meaty and sloping like a bull's. His big round head sat on a neck so short and thick as to be almost undifferentiated from his trunk. His face looked congested, as if too much flesh had been crammed into the available frame. His hair was dark brown, the eyes light gray under thick, shaggy eyebrows, the nose flat, the mouth wide, fat-lipped and purplish. A scar ran along his left cheek from ear to jaw, another across the jaw, and a third below the left ear, mementos of an early knife fight. He was touchy about his disfigurement. He often considered plastic surgery. No hair grew through the scar tissue and to reduce the whiteness of the furrows, the whiter by contrast to his darkish jowls, he applied heavy coats of talcum powder to the rest of his face. To news photographers he would present his right, unscarred profile. He detested the sobriquet the press had fastened on him-Scarface-and nobody used it in his presence without courting disaster. He allowed his intimates to call him Snorky-slang for elegant.

Loesch found Capone in affable humor. He sat relaxed and smiling at a long mahogany desk, his back to a bay window, a cigar between his teeth. On the desk stood a French telephone, a gold-plated inkstand, a herd of miniature ivory elephants-his good-luck pieces -a pair of field glasses through which he liked to scan the headlines of the newspapers stacked on the newsstand below, and a bronze paperweight in the shape of the Lincoln Memorial. Loesch was bemused by the three portraits adorning the dark-rose stucco wallAbraham Lincoln, George Washington and Chicago's Mayor William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson. Next to Lincoln hung a facsimile of the Gettysburg Address. The opposite wall accommodated a painting of Cleopatra, photographs of Capone's favorite movie stars, Fatty Arbuckle and Theda Bara, three stuffed deer heads, and a clock with a cuckoo that sang the hour and a quail that sang on the quarter hour.

Half a dozen henchmen milled about the room, attentive to Capone's slightest whim. When his cigar went dead, he needed neither to speak nor to gesture to have it relit. Somebody automatically sprang to his side, lighter flaring.

Loesch stated his business without preamble. He reminded Capone of the April Republican primary. In gangster parlance a bomb was a "pineapple," and the newspapers had dubbed it the Pineapple Primary. Professional terrorists on both sides, the majority of them Capone gangsters, had bombed the homes of candidates, murdered party workers, intimidated voters. The police did not intervene. Was the Pineapple Primary a foretaste of the approaching November elections?

The arrogance of Capone's reply staggered the old lawyer: "I'll give you a square deal if you don't ask too much of me."

"Now look here, Capone," said Loesch, stifling his anger, "will you help me by keeping your damned cutthroats and hoodlums from interfering with the polling booths?"

"Sure," Capone promised. "I'll give them the word because they're all dagos up there, but what about the Saltis gang of micks on the West Side? They'll have to be handled different. Do you want me to give them the works, too?"

Loesch replied that nothing could please him more.

"All right," said Capone. "I'll have the cops send over squad cars the night before the election and jug all the hoodlums and keep 'em in the cooler until the polls close."

He kept his word. He told the police of America's second-largest city what to do, and the police obeyed. On the eve of the election they spread a dragnet, rounding up and disarming many known gangsters. The following day seventy squad cars cruised the polling areas. The balloting proceeded without disorder.

"It turned out to be the squarest and the most successful election day in forty years," Loesch said later in a lecture at the Southern California Academy of Criminology. "There was not one complaint, not one election fraud and no threat of trouble all day."

It was also a display of power such as few outlaws have achieved before or since.

2.

Seldom had the three guests of honor sat down to a feast so lavish. Their dark Sicilian faces were flushed as they gorged on the rich, pungent food, washing it down with liters of red wine. At the head of the table Capone, his big white teeth flashing in an ear-to-ear smile, oozing affability, proposed toast after toast to the trio. Saluto, Scalise! Saluto, Anselmi! Saluto, Giunta!

On this night the Hawthorne Inn, which to all practical purposes Capone owned, as he owned the surrounding town of Cicero, had been closed to all outsiders, the doors locked and bolted, the window curtains drawn. The festivities were strictly intramural. Exuberant good-fellowship, singing, shouting, raucous joking, and laughter warmed the dining room.

When, long after midnight, the last morsel had been devoured and the last drop drunk, Capone pushed back his chair. A glacial silence fell over the room. His smile had faded. Nobody was smiling now except the sated, mellow guests of honor, their belts and collars loosened to accommodate their Gargantuan intake. As the silence lengthened, they, too, stopped smiling. Nervously, they glanced up and down the long table. Capone leaned toward them. The words dropped from his mouth like stones. So they thought he didn't know? They imagined they could hide the offense he never forgave-disloyalty?

Capone had observed the old tradition. Hospitality before execution. The Sicilians were defenseless, having, like the other banqueters, left their guns in the checkroom. Capone's bodyguards fell upon them, lashing them to their chairs with wire and gagging them. Capone got up, holding a baseball bat. Slowly, he walked the length of the table and halted behind the first guest of honor. With both hands he lifted the bat and slammed it down full force. Slowly, methodically he struck again and again, breaking bones in the man's shoulders, arms and chest. He moved to the next man and, when he had reduced him to mangled flesh and bone, to the third. One of the bodyguards then fetched his revolver from the checkroom and shot each man in the back of the head.