Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (43 page)

"Besides gambling you're a bootlegger, aren't you?"

"No, I never was a bootlegger."

"Do you know Jake Guzik?"

"Yes."

"What does he do?"

(Jokingly) : "He fights."

Elmer Lewis was not the only person to see the Cadillac stop at the warehouse and four of the men go inside, those in uniform leading the way. On the second floor of her rooming house next door, as she was ironing a shirt, the noise of the truck scraping the Cadillac drew Mrs. Max Landesman to the window. Surprised that no altercation took place, she watched until the quartet had entered the warehouse.

When Moran and Newberry saw the car, they assumed a police raid or a shakedown was taking place, and they swiftly retraced their steps back to the Parkway. A third Gusenberg brother, Henry, who also lived there, had been about to join them at the warehouse, but they warned him not to go near it. Willie Marks, approaching from south of the warehouse, reached the same conclusion. Shrinking into a doorway, he jotted down the car's license number.

"And you don't know anybody who sent you money under the name of A. Costa?"

"No."

"But you did receive it from Chicago?"

"That is correct. All of it comes from Chicago, from my gambling business."

"Are you going to buy Cat Cay?"

"I don't know. I don't think I will get it."

"How much do they want for it?"

"Half a million."

"Who is Mitchell of Oak Park, Illinois? He called your home three times on January 20th?"

"He commissions money on racetracks for me."

"Did you get any money from Charlie Fischetti while you were staying at the Ponce de Leon? Henderson said you received various sums from $1,000 to $5,000."

"What has money got to do with it?"

With that indignant question left unanswered the interview ended. For Capone it had been a welcome confrontation in at least one respect: Miss Gaskin's stenographic transcript would establish beyond the slightest doubt where he had spent the morning of February 14, 1929.

It sounded like the chatter of a pneumatic drill. Or drumbeats, furiously fast. It started a few moments after the five men entered the warehouse and lasted a minute or two. Then, two single blasts like a car backfiring. A dog began to howl. Vaguely disturbed, Mrs. Landesman moved back to the window and glanced down at the snowy, windy street. Her friend across the way, Mrs. Alphonse Morin, looked out of her third-floor window at the same time, and they both saw the men reappear. The first two came out with their hands raised. The two men behind them, wearing the uniforms, held pistols to their backs and prodded them toward the car. A police raid and an arrest, the women concluded; the fifth man must have been a plainclothes detective. The car continued south on Clark Street to Ogden Avenue and there turned right. .. .

As the dog kept up its howling, Mrs. Landesman's uneasiness grew. Finally, she asked one of her lodgers, a man named McAllister, to see what ailed the animal. He went into the warehouse. He did not stay long. He came running out, pale and sick. "They're all dead," he said.

He was mistaken. Frank Gusenberg still breathed. Though fourteen machine-gun bullets had hit him, some passing through his body, he had managed to crawl about twenty feet away from the rear wall. The others lay dead where they had fallen at the foot of the wall, Kashellek on his face, Weinshank, Heyer, May and Schwimmer on their backs. Pete Gusenberg had died kneeling, his upper body slumped against a chair. The hapless optometrist, Schwimmer, still wore his hat, and Weinshank's tan fedora rested on his chest. Where the seven had stood before the bullets flew, blood slopped down the yellowish bricks, and blood from the bodies snaked across the oily stone floor. Highball, howling and snapping, tore at his leash. The executioners had been systematic, swinging their machine guns back and forth three times, first at the level of the victims' heads, then chests, then stomachs. Some of the corpses were held together in one piece only by shreds of flesh and bone. Yet evidently life had still flickered in Kashellek and May after the machine-gun volleys, for they had also been blasted with shotguns at such close range as to all but obliterate their faces.*

Capone returned to a busy household. A big party was in preparation. With the Miami winter season at its peak and boxing enthusi asts already converging on the resort for the approaching world championship fight between Jack Sharkey and "Young" Stribling, Capone had invited more than 100 guests to Palm Island-sportswriters, gamblers, show folk, racketeers, politicians. A boxing enthusiast himself, who favored Sharkey to win the title, he frequently visited his training camp and was photographed by news cameramen standing between Sharkey and Bill Cunningham, sportscaster and former All-American center.

As Detective Sweeney bent over the still-breathing gangster, he recognized a boyhood companion. Clarence Sweeney and Frank Gusenberg had gone to the same public school not six blocks from the warehouse. "Frank," said the detective, "in God's name what happened? Who shot you?"

But Gusenberg was unconscious. He revived a little in the Alexian Brothers Hospital, and Sweeney, at his bedside, repeated the question.

"Nobody shot me," said Gusenberg.

He did not have long to live, the detective told him. His brother Pete was dead. Let him speak. The law would avenge them.

"I ain't no copper." They were his last words.

When Bugs Moran learned of the massacre that he had escaped by only minutes, he said: "Only Capone kills like that."

The guests feasted on an elaborate buffet and drank champagne served by half a dozen of Capone's bodyguards. The night was hot, and the bodyguards had been allowed to remove their jackets and pistol holsters. They were otherwise impeccably attired, young, most of them, and muscular. ("Capone hires nothing but gentlemen," attested a thug named Harry Dore, who once worked for him, bursting with professional pride in the association. "They must be welldressed at all times; they must have cultured accents; must always say, 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir' when he addresses them. He hires men with great care and takes pains that they are his own type in dress and conduct.")

Mae Capone hovered quietly in the background, seeing to everybody's wants. At Sonny's bedtime his father took him by the hand and led him from group to group to say good-night. The small boy with the hearing aid, a shy, withdrawn little figure, his big eyes opened wide in bewilderment, made a pathetic contrast in that strident gathering.

Jack Kofoed, the New York Post's sports editor, brought his wife, Marie. As the steamy night wore on, she decided to cool off in the swimming pool. Retiring to the Venetian loggia with her swimsuit, she saw, in a corner of the ladies' dressing room, what appeared to be a chest covered by a tarpaulin. She sat on it to remove her shoes and quickly got up again with a cry of pain. Lifting the tarpaulin, she uncovered a tangle of machine guns, shotguns and revolvers.

Tact restrained the guests from discussing too loudly the Chicago massacre that was reported in the evening papers and radio broadcasts. The next morning, when additional details had been published, among them Moran's comment, Jack Kofoed called again on his host. "Al, I feel silly asking you this," he said, "but my boss wants me to. Al, did you have anything to do with it?"

"Jack," Capone replied, "the only man who kills like that is Bugs Moran."

Mortified by this latest gory blot on the city's reputation, the Chicago Association of Commerce posted a reward of $50,000 for the arrest and conviction of the killers. An aroused public subscribed $10,000 more. The City Council and the state's attorney's office each added $20,000, bringing the total to $100,000, the biggest price ever put on the heads of gangsters.

No agency wanted a swift solution more eagerly than the police, for some people believed what the killers meant them to believe: that policemen had done the deed. Such was the disrepute into which the Chicago Police Department had fallen. The newspapers quoted the local Prohibition administrator, Frederick D. Silloway, as saying: "The murderers were not gangsters. They were Chicago policemen. I believe the killing was the aftermath to the hijacking of 500 cases of whiskey belonging to the Moran gang by five policemen six weeks ago on Indianapolis Boulevard. I expect to have the names of these five policemen in a short time. It is my theory that in trying to recover the liquor the Moran gang threatened to expose the policemen and the massacre was to prevent the exposure."

To which Chief of Police Russell rejoined: "If it is true that coppers did this, I'd just as soon convict coppers as anybody else," and Chief of Detectives John Egan added: "I'll arrest them myself, toss them by the throat into a cell and do my best to send them to the gallows."

The next day Silloway retracted his accusation, claiming he had been misquoted. To mollify the Police Department, his superiors in Washington transferred him to another district. But the damage was done. The suspicion lingered.

The investigation proceeded with Chief Egan, the state's attorney's staff and the Cook County coroner, Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, each grappling with different aspects of the case. Scouring the warehouse, Egan and his men recovered seventy empty .45-caliber machine-gun cartridges and fourteen spent bullets of the same caliber. Across the street, at Nos. 2119 and 2125, were rooming houses run, respectively, by Mrs. Michael Doody and Mrs. Frank Orvidson. As Assistant State's Attorney Walker Butler was canvassing the neighborhood for information, they came forward with corroborating stories. Ten days before the massacre three young men appeared, looking for rooms to rent. Mrs. Doody was able to accommodate two of them, and Mrs. Orvidson took in a third. They said they were cabdrivers, working a night shift, and they insisted on front rooms overlooking Clark Street. None of them hardly ever left his room. When either landlady went in to clean, she usually found him sitting by the window, watching. The three men vanished on the morning of the massacre. Having suspected from the start that the Purple Gang was involved, Butler showed the landladies photographs of sixteen members. They identified three of them as the mysterious lodgers. But when questioned, at Butler's request, by the Detroit police, all three produced unshakable proof that they had been nowhere near Chicago.

On February 22 chance aided the investigators. A fire broke out in the garage behind the house at 1723 North Wood Street, about three miles west of the warehouse. The firemen who extinguished it found a black Cadillac touring car which had been partly demolished by an acetylene torch, axes and hacksaws. The torch, they surmised, had accidentally started the blaze, putting the wreckers to flight. In a corner lay a Luger pistol and the charred wooden handles of two other small arms. Notified by the Fire Department, Egan examined the remains of the Cadillac. The still decipherable engine number enabled him to trace the car to a Michigan Avenue dealer, who said he had sold it in December to a man identifying himself as "James Morton of Los Angeles." From the owner of the Wood Street property, a neighborhood grocer, Egan learned that a "Frank Rogers" rented the garage on February 7. He gave 1859 West North Avenue, around the corner, as his address. That house was now deserted, but, significantly, it adjoined the Circus Cafe, headquarters of Claude Maddox, whose ties to Capone, the Purple Gang and Egan's Rats were well-known. Tony Accardo was then a member of the Circus gang and, according to a police theory developed later, helped plan the massacre. Soon after, he became a Capone bodyguard and was sometimes seen in the lobby of the Hotel Lexington with a tommy gun across his knees.

The police could uncover no trace of either "James Morton" or "Frank Rogers," and they had no legal grounds on which to detain Maddox. As for Bugs Moran, he refused to disclose anything about the hijacker who had phoned him on the eve of the massacre except that he had long known and trusted him. ("Moran raves when he talks about him," one detective reported. "He threatens all the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition.") But on the basis of the clues gathered thus far, combined with their knowledge of intergang relationships, the investigators reconstructed the events of February 14 as follows:

The plot that Capone conceived to exterminate the North Siders called for two men who could persuade the victims to surrender their arms without a fight. Hence, the police disguise. The masqueraders, of course, had to be total strangers to the victim. Probably, Maddox imported them for Capone from either Detroit or his native St. Louis, kept them under cover until needed, and provided them with the spurious police car.

The function of the three Clark Street lodgers was to watch for Moran-echoes of past Caponian ambushes!-informing the killers by phone the moment he entered the warehouse. What saved Moran's life was his resemblance to Weinshank. The business racketeer chanced to arrive first, and the watchers phoned too soon.

The collision on Clark Street suggested the route the killers took -north along Wood Street for a mile to Webster Avenue, then east for two miles on Webster to Clark, a fifteen-minute drive at most. The three men wearing civilian clothes probably waited in the warehouse office while their uniformed accomplices relieved each victim of his weapons. They then emerged with their tommy guns adjusted to rapid fire and ordered the seven North Siders to face the wall. Though the killers must have realized by then that Moran was not present, they dared not let the others live. It was to confuse any witnesses to their getaway that they staged the final scene, reappearing on the street posing as policemen after a raid with their prisoners.

On February 27 the police obtained a warrant for the arrest of Jack McGurn. It was based on the testimony of a youth named George Brichet. He was passing the warehouse on the morning of the fourteenth, he said, when five men entered it. He heard one of them say, "Come on, Mac," and he identified McGurn from a rogues' gallery photograph as the man so addressed.

The arresting officer found McGurn living at the Hotel Stevens with a young blonde named Louise Rolfe. Following his indictment for seven murders, bail was set at $50,000. He raised the amount by putting up as surety a hotel he owned valued at more than $1,000,000.