Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (30 page)

La Guardia returned to the theme of two-tier justice (not only concerning Prohibition enforcement) again and again. “May I remind the gentleman from Georgia,” he replied to a congressman who had urged him to respect the constitutional sanctity of the law, including its Prohibition provisions, “that there is also a 14th amendment to the Constitution? The 14th Amendment deals with human rights and liberties and it is as dead as a doornail in certain sections of the country.”

After a decade of Prohibition, he commented with some bitterness, “... politicians are ducking, candidates are hedging, the Anti-Saloon League prospering. People are being poisoned, bootleggers are being enriched, and government officials are being corrupted.”

Will Rogers, the famous American humorist, may have joked that “Prohibition is better than no liquor at all,” but to La Guardia, it was no laughing matter, for all its tragicomic undertones: as an Italian-American, he had a special reason to seek the end of Prohibition. He knew that the longer it lasted, the more the Italian-American image would be tarnished in the eyes of public opinion.

In fact, in New York at least, the underworld was by no means exclusively Italian-American. Frank Costello — one of its masterminds, and a brilliant businessman in his own right — took an Irish name, but he was born Francesco Castiglia, although he did his best to conceal the fact. However, his front man, “Big Bill” Dwyer; Tammany Hall op
erative Alfred J. Hines; and Larry Fay, owner of a taxi company that operated a mobile bootlegging operation,
were
Irish-Americans. Arnold Rothstein, one of the biggest owners of speakeasies, clip joints, and New York nightclubs (and the man who fixed the 1919 World Series), was Jewish. So were “Dutch” Schultz (Arthur Flegenheimer); Meyer Lansky, probably the most astute entrepreneur of all; and Benjamin (“Bugsy”) Siegel. Nor did the Italian-American gangsters operate in a vacuum. Albert Anastasia had an official, police-approved bodyguard who was not an Italian-American. “Lucky” Luciano trusted his Jewish underworld partners more than his fellow Sicilians. A leading Mafia hit man suspected of killing the anti-fascist refugee Carlo Tresca had a direct line to the (largely Irish-American) New York police department.

Chicago was where Italian-Americans came to dominate gangland during the Prohibition years — but the problem was not simply that Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, and the infamous Genna brothers were Italian-Americans and active in the
Unione Siciliana
. In Chicago, Prohibition resulted in so blatant a collusion between underworld figures and those supposed to be fighting them that during the three terms of Chicago Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson, Capone and Torrio between them “ran and directed the political, police and federal enforcement agencies of Chicago and Cook County.”
⁹

T
he Untouchables
, that hugely popular TV series starring Robert Stack as Eliot Ness, with Walter Winchell’s gravelly voice-over narration, gave viewers all over the world a pretty good idea of American gangland activities during Prohibition — or so they thought. In fact, the series bore as much relation to reality as a Stalinist film of the 1950s glorifying the Soviet regime. Made with the close cooperation of the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover’s supervision (he monitored the series and the FBI had censorship rights),
The Untouchables was
a complete travesty — a blatant propaganda exercise eulogizing Hoover and the FBI, bending the facts to suit him.

First shown in the early 1960s,
The Untouchables
celebrated the triumph of the forces of righteousness over absolute evil. The FBI’s war on gangsters took place in a vacuum, with not the slightest hint that the underworld bosses were so aggressive because they knew they were aided and abetted by so many respectable individuals, including members of the judiciary and the police. Nor were there any references to politicians and elected officials on the take, to district attorneys and judges in collusion and even in business partnership with bootleggers, or to bribed, bent, or terrorized juries.

In fact, it can be argued that some of America’s biggest villains
during the Prohibition era were not the Al Capones, Johnny Torrios, Gus Morans, Dutch Schultzes, or Frank Costellos but the political bosses in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere who used the underworld to their considerable advantage, and the many venal, conniving police and law enforcement officials who supplemented their incomes with mobster money.

New York’s mayor and Tammany boss James Walker — until defeated by Fiorello La Guardia in 1929 — enjoyed a cozy relationship with New York’s gangland. But nowhere was the collusion between politics and organized crime more spectacularly evident than in Chicago, where Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson’s three-term reign led to a virtual breakdown in law and order, and a situation in which — on a par with “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Port au Prince, Medellin (Colombia) in the 1980s, and Moscow today — gangs virtually ran the city. “Thompson,” wrote Fletcher Dobyns, “made Chicago the most corrupt and lawless city in the world.”
¹

It had been a wide-open town long before Prohibition became an issue. The old-time First Ward (district) Democratic bosses, “Bathhouse John” Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna,
²
both sons of Irish immigrants, owed their clout, and their considerable wealth, to handouts from the brothel owners they routinely protected. “I always entertained state legislators free in the Everlight Club,” Minna Everleigh, owner of Chicago’s most famous and expensive brothel, told a Chicago judge after her retirement. That was the least of her favors.

“Hinky Dink” Kenna was a dour saloon owner whose generous “schooner” measures made it the most popular drinking place in town. He was also, for several decades, a hugely influential inner city Democratic party figure, who had devised a foolproof way of ensuring his partner Coughlin’s reelection.

It was called chain voting: genuine ballots were spirited away and marked for “Bathhouse John.” They were then distributed to floating voters, who were driven to the polling booths, where they voted, using the already marked ballots and picking up fresh ones, which they surrendered to “Hinky Dink’s” henchmen, collecting a small fee in return. These were then recycled, and used with another batch of voters, ensuring that “every vote paid for was really cast for Coughlin.”
³

Long before 1920, the Chicago gangs had established a tacit but effective
modus vivendi
, sharing out their most lucrative activities — gambling, prostitution, “protection,” and strike breaking — throughout the various inner city wards. Paradoxically, the fact that local politicians (including Coughlin and Kenna) were so intimately involved in the management and protection of Chicago’s many brothels meant that violent crime was relatively rare. The politicians’ vested interests gave Chicago’s red light districts an aura of respectability — all those involved knew that bloodshed and gangland violence drove the customers away.

Prohibition brought this era to a close. The reason Chicago became synonymous with gang warfare — from 1920 to 1933, nearly eight hundred gangsters were killed in shoot-outs with other gangsters — was the irresistible profit motive. With no legitimate source of liquor left, clubs, speakeasies, and private dealers were compelled to turn to the bootleggers, and these, increasingly under the thumb of underworld bosses, became a ready prey.

From 1920 onward, a new breed of gangsters emerged to take advantage of the new situation. Underworld leaders — the term is inappropriate because they made little attempt to conceal their activities — used their links with politicians and politically appointed city officials, including the police and even the judiciary, to eliminate their rivals with virtual impunity. Given the cozy, mutually rewarding relationship that existed in Chicago between politicians and mobsters even before Prohibition, the gangland saga that followed was eminently predictable, even though the gangsters’ political allegiances had always been notoriously fickle.

From 1910 onward, “Big Jim” Colosimo, the slot machine and brothel king (and owner of Chicago’s celebrated saloon Diamond Jim’s), had worked closely with “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse John” Coughlin — though he would campaign for Republican “Big Bill” Thompson for mayor in 1919. His demise, in 1920, shortly after Prohibition came into being
⁴
(Johnny Torrio, his bodyguard, almost certainly had him killed after “business differences” arose between them), marked the passing of an era. His was the first of the hugely expensive, ostentatious funerals that would later become a ritual. Congressmen; aldermen; members of the Chicago Opera Company; countless public officials, including district attorneys; and over a thou
sand First Ward Democratic party stalwarts solemnly paraded through the city behind his coffin.

In pre-Prohibition days, many brewers and distillers had behaved like loan sharks, buying up saloons and then squeezing the saloon keepers for ever-increasing profits. From 1920 on, the new, younger, greedier gangs behaved far more ruthlessly, using terror as a weapon. It was, as Remus’s aide, George Conners, noted, a seller’s market: with good liquor constantly in short supply, saloon keepers and nightclub and brothel owners were now compelled to buy set quantities of liquor at set prices in return for “protection.” The purchasers knew that if they protested too much, the penalties could be fatal.

The police rarely intervened in such disputes, and underworld members, including those of non-Italian origin, respected a form of
omerta:
even on their deathbeds after fatal shootouts, they seldom cooperated with the police. Nor did the police intervene when rival gangs began hijacking each other’s liquor. As long as no law enforcement officers got hurt, it was a private war that did not concern them. As in Cincinnati in George Remus’s heyday, suitably remunerated uniformed police in Chicago even routinely escorted delivery vans belonging to specially favored bootlegging gangs.

In all fairness to Chicago, New York was not far behind. “Lucky” Luciano claimed he controlled every New York police precinct, and had a bagman deliver up to $20,000 a month to New York Police Commissioner Grover Whalen in used notes. He also maintained that after the 1929 stock market crash, he loaned Whalen $35,000 to cover his margin.
⁵

Hijackings occurred with increasing frequency. The rationale was not only to acquire liquor stocks for free but to eliminate business rivals for good. “Crime,” John Huston has a character say in
The Asphalt Jungle
, “is just a left-handed form of human endeavor,” and in many ways there was a parallel between gangland history during the Prohibition era and that of the new industrial empires, also coming of age from 1920 onward. Gangs, like respectable conglomerates, competed for an ever larger share of the market because it was soon clear to both that they had to keep on growing or go under, gobbled up by more powerful rivals.

Chicago was unique because it became, in the early 1920s, not just
a microcosm of corrupt,
affairiste
Washington under the Harding Administration but at times a virtually lawless city. “Big Bill” Thompson, its mayor, was no Daugherty. The latter was careful to maintain a respectable front while in office, using bagmen such as Jess Smith to do his dirty work.

“Big Bill” Thompson’s front men tended to control
him
, for this testy, foul-mouthed tub-thumper with a child’s attention span and only moderate intelligence lacked Daugherty’s shrewdness, discretion, and political experience. Thompson’s weapons were blustering invective, crude intimidation, and an entirely spurious, hail-fellow-well-met charm. “Big Bill” and Prohibition were certainly made for each other, and Prohibition’s impact on Chicago cannot be fully explained without a closer look at one of the oddest political phenomena in American history.

In terms of damage done to Chicago’s image, there was not much to choose between “Big Bill” Thompson and Al Capone. Capone was certainly by far the more sophisticated operator. He had an innate public relations sense — whether paying the hospital expenses of a middle-aged woman bystander who had been severely wounded in the eye in a shoot-out aimed at killing him in Cicero or opening soup kitchens for the destitute after the 1929 crash, even as he was about to go to jail for tax evasion. A superb media manipulator, he even convinced some respectable newsmen that he was merely a somewhat unscrupulous businessman who deplored violence and was invariably singled out as a convenient suspect even when he was totally innocent — and could prove it.

“Big Bill” ‘s cowboy image, popular at first, rapidly degenerated into caricatural, swaggering megalomania. Unaware of his failings, and surrounded by venal flatterers, Chicago’s mayor saw himself as a pioneer, “the big builder.” Although he was indeed responsible for some of Chicago’s new city infrastructure, he had no real vision — he was no Robert Moses — and his anti-British, anti-Washington, anti-intellectual obsessions eventually degenerated into near-lunacy. Like Daugherty, he was an authoritarian who believed in conspiracies and favored strong-arm methods almost rivaling Capone’s. Only in the Prohibition era could such a figure have dominated America’s second city for so long. Without him, it’s unlikely that Chicago, or Capone, would have acquired their mythic status.

William Hale Thompson’s father, the scion of a wealthy Bostonian family, settled in Chicago to take advantage of the real estate boom, becoming a millionaire. “Big Bill” ‘s own aversion to school was such that he never graduated from high school, let alone Yale, where his overindulgent father had hoped he would follow him. From childhood, young William became obsessed with the Wild West: his single-minded passion was such that he even dressed as a cowboy, riding horses through Chicago streets. His father, in 1881, reluctantly allowed his fourteen-year-old son to “go West” and live out his fantasies at first hand instead of merely reading about them — at first as a brakeman on the Union Pacific at the height of the Gold Rush, then as a greenhorn cowboy in Cheyenne, Wyoming. At least he would no longer have to bail out his son for rowdy behavior in Chicago.