Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (27 page)

A rare insight into Mae Capone’s personality was revealed in
Capone
, an essential biography of the gangster written by John Kobler and published in 1971. Kobler relates the story of a woman who owned a bungalow in Miami that was rented out by a real estate agent to a man named “Al Brown.” The absentee owner was appalled when she learned that Al Brown was Al Capone. For weeks, the woman worried that her bungalow would suffer damage at the hands of the notorious gangster and his underlings, who were eventually joined by Mae and Sonny Capone. The woman needn’t have worried. Not only did the Capones leave the place in impeccable condition, but Mrs. Capone wrote a note asking the owner to accept as gifts the sets of fine china and silverware that they left behind, as well as numerous unopened cases of wine. The only sour note was a telephone bill for $780 in calls to Chicago. The owner needn’t have worried about that either. According to Kobler:

Soon after the [bungalow owner] received the phone bill, a Cunningham 16-cylinder Cadillac pulled into her drive, and out stepped a slender woman, quietly dressed, her blond hair falling below her shoulders, her pearly skin lightly tinted by the Florida sun. “I’m Mrs. Capone,” she said in a soft, low voice. The telephone bill had slipped her mind, she apologized, and she wanted to pay it without further delay. When [the owner] mentioned the charges, she handed her a $1,000 note. “Never mind the difference,” she said. “We may have broken a few little things, but this should cover it.”

If Mae Capone intended to bring a civilizing influence into her husband’s life, she was swimming against the tide. Scarface Al was, by most accounts, a famously brutish man who killed many people with his own hands, ordered the torture and deaths of probably hundreds, and on one notorious occasion bludgeoned to death a criminal associate with a baseball bat in the middle of a fancy, black-tie dinner. His psychosis was undoubtedly complex and far-reaching (he would eventually lose his mind and die after being diagnosed with tertiary syphilis), but one persistent source of aggravation was the feelings of hatred he harbored toward the Irish thugs he’d had to confront throughout his life of crime.

Whether Al ever vented these feelings around his Irish wife would never be known. Having been born and raised near the Brooklyn waterfront, Mae would have known about the battles between Irish and Italian dock wallopers, a brutal labor war that sent ripples of fear through the borough. If her knowledge of these ethnic hostilities was lacking, she definitely got a crash course in late December 1925, seven years into her marriage, when she and her husband returned to Brooklyn to seek medical treatment for their son.

Seven-year-old Sonny had developed a severe mastoid infection, necessitating radical surgery. Al and Mae preferred that the operation take place in New York. They consulted various doctors, all of whom said the procedure would be risky but unavoidable. “I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars if you pull him through,” Capone told one doctor. The surgery was performed the day before Christmas. Little Sonny came through okay, although he was left partially deaf and had to wear a hearing aid.

Of the events that followed, Capone later explained to a reporter: “It was Christmas Eve when my wife and I were sent home to get some sleep. We found her folks trimming the Christmas tree for her little nieces and nephews, and it broke her up.” The following night, according to Al, “a friend of mine dropped in and asked me to go around the corner to his place to have a glass of beer. My wife told me to go: It’d do me good. And we were no sooner there than the door opens, and six fellows come in and start shooting. My friend had put me on the spot. In the excitement two of them were killed and my friend got shot in the leg. And I spent the holidays in jail.”

Capone’s version of the incident left out many crucial details, starting with the probability that the killings had been planned ahead of time. It all took place at the Adonis Social Club, a no-frills speakeasy located near the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Capone himself had frequented the Adonis Social Club back in his early days as a Brooklyn dock walloper (he was known to use the club’s basement for target practice). In fact, both Capone and Johnny Torrio first made their bones in the underworld during the violent labor war between Brooklyn Italians and what the papers dubbed “the White Hand,” a gang of Irish racketeers led by the notorious William “Wild Bill” Lovett.

Lovett had been a machine gunner with the 11th Infantry in France during the war and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. After returning stateside, he became a ruthless extortionist in a section of the Brooklyn waterfront known as Irishtown, a rough-cobbled area between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Fulton Ferry, under and around the approaches to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. After assassinating Dinny Meehan to take over the Brooklyn rackets, Lovett fought to keep the Mafia off the docks. The hostilities that developed between Irish and Italian criminal interests on the Brooklyn waterfront resulted in over a hundred unsolved murders between 1915 and 1925. They were a key instigating factor in a war between the dagos and the micks that would spread throughout the country and continue to the end of the century.

Wild Bill Lovett was shot multiple times and hacked to death with a longshoreman’s hook on Halloween night, 1923, by a mysterious Sicilian assassin imported from Palermo, known only as Dui Cuteddi (Two Knives). Afterward, leadership of the so-called White Hand fell to Lovett’s brother-in-law, Richard “Peg Leg” Lonergan, who was believed to have authored a dozen professional murders. It was the red-haired, pugnacious Lonergan, along with five of his buddies, who stumbled into the Adonis Social Club on Christmas night, 1925, where Al Capone and a room full of his old Brooklyn
paisans
were waiting.

Peg Leg Lonergan was a well-known bigot. Although he had lost his leg in a trolley car accident as a youth, he was an accomplished brawler who first distinguished himself in Irishtown by killing a Sicilian drug dealer in a bike shop on Navy Street. Later, he and his fellow gangsters occasionally went on ginzo hunting expeditions in saloons and dives along the waterfront. According to witnesses at the Adonis Social Club, Lonergan and his people came into the club drunk and unruly, loudly referring to the patrons as “dagos” and “ginzos.” When three Irish girls entered the club on the arms of some Italian boys, Lonergan chased them out of the place, yelling, “Come back with white men, fer chrissake!”

At this, someone in Capone’s group gave the nod: The lights were cut off and bullets flew. In the ensuing melee, chairs and tables were overturned, glasses shattered, and customers rushed for the exit. When cops arrived on the scene, they found one of Lonergan’s men lying in the street with the back of his head shot off. The cops followed a trail of blood back into the social club, where they found Lonergan and another member of his group shot execution style in the head. A fourth member of Peg Leg’s crew was found a few blocks away, crawling in the street; he’d been shot in the thigh and leg and was rushed to the hospital.

Capone and six others were held without bail until the Lonergan man in the hospital had recovered enough to talk. The man refused to testify or even admit that he was in the Adonis Social Club on the night of the shooting; he was wounded in the street, he insisted, by a stray bullet from a passing car. Al and the others were released on bail bonds of $5,000 to $10,000. Without any witnesses willing to take the stand and testify, the case was soon dismissed.

Lonergan’s sister, Anna, who was also Wild Bill Lovett’s widow, attributed the slaughter at the Adonis Social Club to “foreigners.” “You can bet it was no Irish American like ourselves who would stage a mean murder like this on Christmas day,” she said.
⁵

The Capone family returned to Chicago. There is no known record of how Al might have tried to explain the carnage to his Brooklyn Irish wife, but it’s clear that his loathing for gangsters of the Celtic persuasion grew over the years. The extent of his loathing—not to mention his own innate narcissism—was best exemplified in a statement he made late in his life to a fellow prison inmate, Morris “Red” Rudensky. Rudensky had been gently needling him about O’Banion, O’Donnell, Moran, et al., to which Capone replied “Those silly Irish bastards. They got more guts than sense. If we ever woulda all hooked up, I coulda been President.”

Who Killed McSwiggin and Why?

As long as the gangsters only killed each other, the public didn’t get too upset. In some quarters, the Beer Wars were like a blood sport, with daily accounts in the newspapers serving as box scores. In 1925, the recently formed Chicago Crime Commission instituted the first ever use of a public enemies list. Printed semiannually in the papers, complete with mug shot photos and abbreviated rap sheets, it became a virtual player program, helping the public to keep names and territories straight. Of course, some people were horrified by the killings and growing lawlessness, but others among the cities many ethnic enclaves rooted for their side in a bloody game that sometimes seemed like a surreal microcosm of life in the big city.

Even those who viewed the city’s crime wars with frivolity and “ethnic pride,” however, were shocked by the events of April 27, 1926, a mob hit so outrageous that it would significantly reconfigure the way people looked at “those lovable bootleggers.”

William H. McSwiggin was a smart, highly touted twenty-six-year-old prosecutor in the state’s attorney’s office. He had been handpicked by the top man himself: Robert Emmett Crowe, a stern, beetle-browed Irish American who for five years had served as state’s attorney for Cook County, with an eye on higher elective office. Crowe’s tenure happened to coincide with one of the most violent periods in the county’s history. According to records compiled by the Better Government Association of Chicago and Cook County, of the 349 murders that occurred in Crowe’s first two terms in office, 215 involved gangsters killed in the Beer Wars. Yet, despite the size of the state’s attorney’s office (with seventy assistant state’s attorneys and fifty police, it was the largest in the history of the prosecutor’s office), it obtained a mere 128 convictions for murder, none involving gangsters. Bombings during the same period totaled 369 without a single conviction.

With daily broadsides in the press suggesting that Crowe was either inept or corrupt, the prickly state’s attorney placed a high level of emphasis on his rising young star, Bill McSwiggin, who in one year alone won convictions in nine straight capital cases. Little Mac, as McSwiggin was known to his friends, was the son of a decorated Chicago cop. The product of a Catholic education that included undergraduate studies and law school at DePaul University, McSwiggin was a registered Republican who had helped deliver votes for State’s Attorney Crowe, which led to his appointment at a young age. Five foot nine, with the build and bearing of an athlete, McSwiggin dressed beyond his means and was known to have a sharp wit. In an office still largely comprised of WASP holdovers from a previous generation, he was a tough, street-wise Irish American who’d grown up on the West Side alongside kids who were now among some of the city’s most notorious bootleggers. In fact, he was still friendly with various members of the West Side O’Donnell gang, who were presently engaged in a rambunctious shooting war with Al Capone for control of Cicero.

Despite McSwiggin’s occasional fraternization with known disreputable characters, his reputation as a public servant was squeaky clean. The belief that he was incorruptible was underscored by his father’s long years of service to the Chicago police department. But given the abysmal record of the state’s attorney’s office in recent years, the public lionization of the handsome, young prosecutor involved a fair amount of fanciful myth-making on the part of the citizenry and the press—all of which made it doubly shocking when McSwiggin wound up dead in the company of scoundrels.

At six o’clock
P
.
M
. on the evening of April 27, McSwiggin was eating supper at 4946 West Washington Boulevard, where he still lived with his parents and four sisters. He was visited by Tom “Red” Duffy, a boyhood chum and known member of the West Side O’Donnell gang. McSwiggin left his meal unfinished, saying he was going to play cards with some friends.

Outside the McSwiggin home, Bill and Red climbed into a car waiting at the curb. Behind the wheel sat Jim Doherty, another known gangster whom McSwiggin had only recently prosecuted (unsuccessfully) on a murder rap. Seated next to Doherty was his co-defendant from that case, Myles O’Donnell. In the back seat of the car sat Klondike O’Donnell, Myles’ brother. These four men, crammed in the car alongside Assistant State’s Attorney Bill McSwiggin, represented the entire upper echelon of the notorious West Side O’Donnell gang.

Jim Doherty had driven only a few blocks when his engine began to sputter. He pulled into a West Side garage and left the car there for repairs. The entire group got into Klondike O’Donnell’s new Lincoln sedan. A sixth man joined the party: Edward Hanley, a former police officer now working for the O’Donnells. Hanley drove. They cruised around Cicero for about two hours, drinking beer in several saloons and speakeasies. Their last stop was the Pony Inn, a two-story, white-brick saloon owned by Harry Madigan, once a member of Ragen’s Colts. At 5613 West Roosevelt Road, the Pony Inn was a mile north of the Hawthorne Inn, Al Capone’s new headquarters in Cicero.

The rivalry between the O’Donnells and Capone for control of Cicero had been heating up. Mostly it was about beer, but it also had to do with Capone’s having opened a massive brothel (managed by his brother Ralph) on the southern edge of town near the Hawthorne Race Track. Like Deanie O’Banion before them, the O’Donnells made a distinction between illegal booze and gambling on the one hand and prostitution on the other; whoring, after all, was a corruption of the flesh, a sin that was biblical in nature. It was a quaint distinction, perhaps (the illegal beer business killed more people than prostitution ever did), but it was one that held considerable sway with Cicero’s sizable Catholic population, both Irish and Italian, who viewed Capone as a degenerate vice peddler.