Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (54 page)

Rathbun and Roche decided upon a campaign of relentless, daily harassment of gangland, hoping that somebody somewhere would eventually crack under the pressure and furnish a lead. Accordingly, the detectives assigned to them by the state's attorney, armed with axes, sledgehammers and crowbars, proceeded to raid and wreck every brothel, gambling dive and speakeasy they could find in Chicago and its suburbs and to arrest everybody on the premises. At the same time Rathbun and Roche strove to have old forgotten charges against the Public Enemies revived, parole violators reimprisoned, and pending cases hastened to trial. Judge Lyle did his bit by setting bail so high, whenever gangsters were brought into his Felony Court, that they preferred to await the outcome in jail. Thus, many important members of the Capone organization and its subsidiaries were immobilized, among them George "Red" Barker, boss of the Chicago Teamsters' Union, who was returned to jail to complete a sentence for robbery; his fellow labor racketeers James "Fur" Sammons, jailed again as a parole violator with an unexpired sentence for murder, and Danny Stanton, extradited to Wisconsin under a murder indictment; Three-Fingered Jack White, tried for killing a policeman in 1924, convicted, freed on appeal, and now resentenced; Claude Maddox, booked for vagrancy. . . .

Judge Lyle had also invoked a long-disused vagrancy law that defined as a vagrant one without visible means of support, regularly pursuing illicit enterprises, and provided penalties of up to six months' imprisonment or a fine of up to $200 or both. "I had within me a warm, tingling feeling," the judge recalled later, "as I reviewed the possibilities in the law in the case of, let us say, Al Capone. If Capone, arrested on a vagrancy warrant, declined to answer questions, he would automatically fail to disprove the allegations. I could find him guilty of vagrancy and fine him $200. If he tried to pay the fine he would have to explain where the money had come from. He could be sentenced to the House of Corrections to work out the fine. Were he to recite the sources of his income he would be opening the door to criminal charges. And any claim to legitimate employment would launch an investigation that could conceivably result in perjury charges."

The first warrant he issued named Capone, who appeared in Felony Court on September 16, 1930, with Nash's svelte law partner, Michael Ahern. "The People of the State of Illinois against Alphonse Capone alias Scarface Al Brown," the clerk of the court intoned. With fame and fortune the gang leader had grown increasingly sensitive about his scars and was planning to undergo plastic surgery. "Your Honor," said Ahern, "I ask that the epithet be stricken from the record."

Capone did not take lightly the disturbance to his organization. In hopes of ending it he requested, through a go-between, a confidential talk with Rathbun and Roche. They refused to meet with him themselves, but sent an emissary, identified in the records only as "Operative No. 1," to hear what he had to say.

At the morgue to which the police carried Lingle's body his billfold was found to contain fourteen $100 notes. The Tribune's John Boettiger-the first reporter on the scene of the murder-fearing that so much cash might give rise to nasty gossip, somehow persuaded the police to let him take charge of it. He turned it over to his city editor. Such discretion commended itself to McCormick, and he chose Boettiger to work with the investigative committee. From this vantage point the reporter gathered material for a book published a year later, Jake Lingle or Chicago on the Spot, which put McCormick and the Tribune in the best possible light.*
One chapter reproduced the exchange between Capone and Operative Number 1.

"Here's what I want to tell you, and I won't be long about it," said Capone. "I can't stand the gaff of these raids and pinches. If it's going to keep up, I'll have to pack up and get out of Chicago."

Operative Number I replied:

"So far as I can tell, the gaff is on for keeps. This town has been burning up since Jake Lingle was murdered."

"Well, I didn't kill Jake Lingle, did I?"

"We don't know who killed him."

"Why didn't you ask me? Maybe I can find out for you."

"I have heard that Lingle was involved in the attempts of the North Side gangsters to open a dog track in the Stadium. . . . I have been told that Lingle was asked by the Zuta crowd to see to it that the police and the state's attorney would not bother them, and that Lingle was paid $30,000. . . .

When the gang saw that they could not go they blamed Jake Lingle, and I think that's why he was pushed." [A story Rathbun and Roche had heard before, but with the difference that Capone was the supposed dupe.]

"But I don't know who they used to do the job; it must have been some fellow from out of town. I'll try to find out."

"You can do this if you want to, Capone," said Operative Number 1, "but I don't think it'll help you with Pat Roche."

If Capone himself did not order Lingle's murder, he very likely knew who fired the fatal shot. He told Jake Guzik as much during a talk at the Lexington Hotel, which the great masquerader, Special Agent Mike Malone, overheard. Malone also heard Capone tell Guzik that he had no intention of delivering the real murderer. A few days later he asked Operative No. 1 whether Rathbun and Roche would take the killer dead. Had they risen to the bait, had they called off their incessant raids and arrests, Capone might conceivably have fabricated evidence against some triggerman, had him slain, and the body left for the police to find. The response to his question was flat. "You can tell Capone," Roche instructed Operative No. 1, "that we know he has been bluffing and that he can go to hell."

The official solution, when Rathbun and Roche finally announced it in December, 1930, left a good many people unconvinced. In October, having exhausted every other means, the investigators hired a purportedly reformed bank robber, beer runner and former associate of the Gennas named John Hagan to reenter gangland as their undercover operator. Hagan shortly ingratiated himself with a garrulous old hoodlum, Pat Hogan, whom underworld gossip vaguely connected with the Lingle murder. Taken to cabarets by Hagan night after night, plied with food and drink, Hogan finally let fall a nickname-Buster. This Buster, a friend and partner in crime, he drunkenly disclosed a few nights later, was Lingle's actual slayer. Hiding out broke in Chicago, he needed to bring off a robbery or two. Would Hagan care to team up with him? Hagan agreed, and Hogan promised to arrange a meeting.

Weeks passed while Rathbun and Roche waited for Buster to show his hand. Eventually, they learned through Hogan's confidences to their prize stool pigeon that Buster was living under the alias Leo Bader, at the Lake Crest Drive Apartments. There, on December 21, Roche, Rathbun, four detectives and John Boettiger captured a tall blond man.

His real name was Leo Vincent Brothers. A labor-union terrorist, thirty-one years old, he came from St. Louis, where he was wanted for robbery, arson, bombing and murder. Of the fourteen witnesses to the flight of Lingle's murderer, seven now testified that they recognized Brothers and seven that they didn't. Arraigned before Chief Justice John P. McGoorty and asked how he pleaded, Brothers replied: "On the advice of my attorneys I stand mute."

The Tribune congratulated Rathbun, Roche and itself and later paid John Hagan the $25,000 reward. But the majority of the Chicago newspapers doubted Brothers' guilt, an attitude that Boettiger ascribed to professional jealousy. "[They] sought to obstruct the prosecution of a murderer who had been trailed and caught by an agency set up and supported by the Tribune." Some members of the opposition press insinuated that Brothers was the victim of a frameup, either an innocent victim or one who allowed himself to be framed for money.

His trial, which lasted from March 16 to April 2, 1931, almost ended in a hung jury, so evenly balanced was the evidence presented for and against him. Though seven prosecution witnesses identified him as the man they saw fleeing from the Michigan Avenue tunnel, not one testified that he saw Brothers shoot Lingle. After deliberating for twenty-seven hours, the jury delivered a compromise verdict. They found Brothers guilty, but instead of the death penalty, as first-degree homicide normally called for, they imposed the minimum sentence of fourteen years' imprisonment, commutable for good behavior in eight. "I can do that standing on my head," was Brothers' comment.

In its issue of April 11 Editor and Publisher ran a dispatch from its Chicago correspondent, Edwin Johnson, who was also a staff member of the Chicago Daily News.

The verdict . . . brought a torrent of denunciation upon Chicago courts in newspaper comments from other cities.

The very fact that Brothers received the minimum sentence has given critics a basis for charges which have persisted since the announcement of the arrest. The utter certainty of officials that Brothers was the man who killed Lingle and the fact that not one witness testified he saw Lingle slain, presents at least a groundwork for the ugly rumors that have been circulated.

... it is held unreasonable that a jury, finding a man guilty of the cold-blooded murder of Lingle, could impose the minimum sentence on the evidence presented.

It is a question in the mind of the police at large as to the guilt of Brothers.

The Tribune has, from the first, maintained that Brothers is the man. This persistence, in the face of an unwillingness on the part of either the newspaper or officials to strip the case bare, show a motive, reveal gang connections, and thus prove to the world that Brothers had a reason for killing Lingle and did so, has engendered a belief among newspapermen that Brothers is the man who killed Lingle, but it cannot be legitimately proved without entailing a scandal which would prove so devastating as to render the game not worth the candle.

. .. Those dissatisfied with the verdict are of the opinion that from a point of general good, Brothers belongs in jail but they hold that there is still the question left unanswered, "who killed 'Jake' Lingle, and why?"

A furious protest from McCormick moved the editor of the magazine, Marlen Pew, to print a retraction and an apology. But many a Chicago newspaperman continued to share Johnson's view.

At eleven o'clock on the night of April 29, four months after Brothers entered the penitentiary, the old whoremaster Mike de Pike Heisler telephoned the woman with whom he had been living for two decades and asked her to look up a number in his address book. When she picked up the receiver again, a strange voice said: "What the hell do you want?" and disconnected.

Late that night, on a country road eight miles west of the Chicago city limits, an automobile was set on fire. The heat discharged a pistol in a side pocket, bringing a farmer to the spot. He ran for the police. The car had been stripped of its license plates. They were spotted next day in the shallows of the Des Plaines River at River Grove, on the outskirts of the city. The next day, too, in the smoldering wreckage of a house in Barrington, twelve miles to the northwest, two boys found the charred remains of a human torso. Car, license plates and torso were all identified as Heitler's.

In his advanced age the pander had been reduced to a relatively humble position in the Capone syndicate. Reckless with resentment, he addressed an anonymous letter to State's Attorney Swanson, disclosing everything he knew about Capone's bordello operations. Not long after, Capone summoned him to the Lexington. On his desk lay the letter, how obtained Heitler never discovered. "Only you could have done this," said Capone. "You're through."

Heisler wrote a second letter, repeating and enlarging upon the first. This letter he entrusted to his daughter with instructions, should he die an unnatural death, to deliver it to Pat Roche. Upon the identification of his remains she did so. Though the posthumous testimony of such as Heisler furnished grounds too shaky for legal action, it strengthened one widely held theory about Lingle's death. First, the letter named eight gangsters as conspirators in the Lingle murder, all of them Caponeites. Then the letter described a meeting at which Capone called Lingle a double crosser and promised: "Jake is going to get his."