Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (32 page)

Shortly before the 1924 elections, both to reward O’Banion for past services and to remind him where his future interests lay, the Democratic party staged a testimonial dinner for him, attended by scores of gangland figures. Also present were prominent Chicago policemen such as Chief of Detectives Michael Hughes, a former prominent DA; County Clerk Robert M. Sweitzer (the same Sweitzer who had been Chicago’s leading dry protagonist in 1915); and Colonel Albert A. Sprague, commissioner of public works in the Dever Administration and Democratic nominee for the Senate. After keynote speeches by Sprague and Sweitzer, O’Banion was presented with a platinum watch set in rubies and diamonds. All of this did not prevent him, weeks later, from throwing his weight behind the Republicans, in exchange for a more lucrative deal.

Law enforcement agencies and the judiciary were almost equally corrupt, and ineffective. Out of 136 gangland murders that took place in Chicago during the first five years of Prohibition, only six led to trials, and of these, all but one ended in acquittals (the sixth involved a gangster who had blown off the head of a rival inside a police precinct during an official inquest on the latter’s brother’s death). In a three
year period, the Board of Pardons and Paroles freed 950 felons. Illinois Governor Len Small personally intervened to pardon professional killer Walter Stevens (in return for some strong-arm work on a grand jury looking into his own questionable activities). O’Banion himself, caught red-handed robbing a labor office safe in 1921, was acquitted by a bribed and otherwise terrified jury. Al Capone proudly displayed a gun permit delivered by a Chicago magistrate in 1923.

But perhaps the most flagrant example of police collusion had to do with the infamous Sicilian Genna brothers. In the first five years of Prohibition they were Chicago’s biggest bootleggers. Although their criminal record was a long one, they had obtained a license to make large quantities of industrial alcohol, farming the job out to slum-based Sicilian families using primitive home stills, who delivered the liquor to a Genna-owned warehouse factory within four blocks of the Maxwell Street police station, one of the largest in town.

Here the raw alcohol was turned into whiskey and gin — 40,000 quarts of alcohol at about 50 cents a quart producing 120,000 quarts of bootleg “ersatz” whiskey and gin costing anything from $15 to $60 a bottle.

No attempt was made at concealment. In any case, the factory ingredients — creosote, iodine, burnt sugar, fusel oil, cane sugar, oil of juniper — gave off considerable telltale odors, which only the Maxwell Street policemen seemed unable to detect.

A former manager later told investigators the factory operated on shifts, twenty-four hours a day, with heavy trucks constantly parked outside.

The warehouse was run openly and in full view of everybody, unmolested by the State authorities other than an occasional raid. But notification of 24 hours was always given to the Gennas. Sometimes the very letters sent out by the police ordering the raid were shown to them. There would be a clean-up, then a raid, then a re-opening. . . . During all the period that I worked there the entire Genna enterprise was done with the full knowledge, consent and approval of the Chicago police.
⁷

Needless to say, the Genna brothers spent a great deal on such protection. They maintained payroll records, not just of police but of
Cook County DA representatives, checking their identities when they showed up for their money, making sure they were paying the right people. The Maxwell Street station also routinely provided uniformed police to protect truck convoys of liquor. When proof of the payoffs reached public prosecutors, all that happened was that some 187 uniformed policemen were transferred elsewhere.

The Genna brothers were prominent members of the Italian Republican Club, and in 1924 staged a banquet at the Morrison Hotel for their friends. Those attending included a prominent DA, a clerk of the Circuit Court, a county recorder, the head of the Cook County Republican party, and friends and cronies of an Illinois senator.

The Gennas’ influence did not last. One by one, they were killed off, eliminated by Capone’s gunmen as he moved in on his rivals. Although such killings invariably made front-page news, only one of the many violent deaths of 1926 became a cause célèbre. William McSwiggin, twenty-six, a police sergeant’s son and prominent Cook County DA, was shot dead from a moving car outside the Pony Inn, a well-known Cicero saloon. Two other people, Jim Doherty and Tom Duffy, both well-known underworld figures and Capone rivals, died with him. A third, Myles O’Donnell, escaped.

Although McSwiggin’s office claimed he had only been “trying to obtain information” at the time of his death, it was soon clear that the ambitious, up-and-coming DA had been far closer to the three men than he should have been. He was probably killed accidentally, simply because he happened to be in their company, but the testimony of Al Capone illustrated his contempt for all those connected with law enforcement. A leading suspect, Capone told the press: “Of course I didn’t kill him. Why should
l>
I liked the kid. Only the day before he got killed he was up at my place and when he went home I gave him a bottle of Scotch for his old man. I paid McSwiggin and I paid him plenty, and I got what I was paying for.” There was no trial, and the murder was never solved.

Even out of office, Thompson was seldom far from the public eye. His isolationist, anti-British, anti-Prohibition rhetoric invariably gained him media attention, as did his campaign against city school officials responsible for “tainted,” insufficiently patriotic school books. He also showed an imaginative flair for publicity, as when he embarked on a highly publicized expedition to the South Seas aboard his yacht
Big Bill
to bring back a mythic tree-climbing fish to a Chicago zoo — a voyage that petered out in New Orleans.

In 1927, he decided the time was ripe for a comeback. Dever tried to put Thompson on the defensive, focusing his campaign on “Big Bills” ‘s appallingly corrupt, gangster-ridden record.

Thompson presented himself as “Billy the Builder.” His campaign was based on a vague anti-Prohibitionist, “America First,” “Make Chicago Hum” program, and he answered none of Dever’s specific charges of mismanagement or corruption. He made it perfectly clear he intended to defy the Eighteenth Amendment rules. “If I catch a policeman crossing the threshold of a man’s home or place of business, I will fire that policeman right off the force” he told his supporters. “When I’m elected, we will not only reopen places these people have closed, but we’ll open up ten thousand new ones.”

Not only Capone but the fast-diminishing band of anti-Capone rivals were quick to respond, openly supporting Thompson for a third term. As Frank J. Loesch, president of the Chicago Crime Commission, noted at the time: “It did not take me long to discover that Al Capone ran the city. His hand reached into every department of city and county government.” Over Capone’s desk, Loesch noted, were three large oil portraits, of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and “Big Bill” Thompson.

A Capone campaign contribution (later estimated at $260,000) reached Thompson’s headquarters through a local Republican ward-heeler, Daniel A. Serritella, known to be on Capone’s payroll. Another gangster, Jack Zuta, who ostentatiously flaunted his William Hale Thompson Republican Club membership card, contributed $50,000. “Big Tim” Murphy; Abie Arends, the former manager of “Big Jim” Colosimo’s nightclub; and Vincent “The Schemer” Drucci (he had been one of O’Banion’s men, but had rallied Capone since his master’s death) also became Thompson campaigners. Drucci distinguished himself by raiding (and wrecking) the offices of Alderman Dorsey R. Crowe, a leading Dever supporter, a week before the election, and on polling day, Capone’s men patrolled polling booths as they had in Cicero in 1924. Thompson won, but with a diminished majority.

His third term unraveled more quickly than his second. There was an ominous presage on election night itself: the overcrowded yacht belonging to his “Fish Fans Club,” aboard which he and some 1,500
supporters were celebrating his victory, slowly sank, settling on a sandbank. There was no loss of life, but the proceedings were considerably dampened.

Thompson was no longer, as he had been for so long, the maverick, slick populist athlete-turned-politician whose turn of phrase galvanized unsophisticated crowds. Except for his own Chicago
Journal
, he was now anathema to the press, not only in Chicago but all over America. He himself had changed, physically and mentally. The once tall, trim athlete had become jowly and overweight, his public appearances now often downright embarrassing, revealing a growing confusion of mind.

His gangland supporters duly reaped their rewards: one of Thompson’s first moves, after his election, was to appoint Daniel A. Serritella city sealer, or official verifier of shopkeepers’ weights and measures. Not that Serritella did much checking: he simply haunted City Hall, unofficial ambassador to the “Mayor of Crook County,” as Capone was called, conveying his master’s requests.

Thompson’s reelection marked the apogee of Capone’s power. He began spending less time in Cicero and more in Chicago itself, renting fifty rooms, including a large conference hall, on two floors of the Hotel Metropole. Jake Guzik and Harry Mondi, Thompson’s underworld campaigners during his first campaign for mayor, also became key figures in the Capone gang, running his gambling empire.

Capone had good reason to congratulate himself on his judicious funding. Shortly after his reelection, Thompson told a crowd: “We’ll throw every damn dry (Prohibition) agent in jail.” “I will do all in my power,” he pledged, “to save Chicago citizens from any more suffering at the hands of thugs and gunmen sent here by the Federal Government.”

Against all evidence, he claimed that Chicago was no more gangster-prone than any other large American city. “Sure we have crime here,” he told reporters. “We will always have crime. Chicago is just like any other big city. You can get a man’s arm broken for so much, a leg for so much, or beaten up for so much. Just like New York, except we print our crime and they don’t.”

Despite Thompson’s now abysmal reputation as far as many Chicagoans were concerned, he was deluded enough to believe he might win the next Republican presidential nomination (Coolidge had let
it be known he would not run for a second term) and embarked on a 10,000-mile trip through the United States to gauge his chances, on the pretext of raising funds for flood control. In a series of banquets and meetings, Thompson was suitably coy. “There are a lot of reports I want to be president,” he told a San Francisco audience. “That’s not true. My one ambition is to protect the people of the Mississippi valley from the floods of the future.” But this denial was belied by the pamphlets handed out by his aides. The cover was a red-white-and-blue target whose bull’s-eye was “America First.” Inside, Thompson asked Americans to “shoot at the bull’s-eye for American prosperity” through “united action,” urging delegates to the next Republican Convention to work for the four “Thompsonian principles”: America First, farm relief, inland waterways, and national flood control.

Like an earlier attempt to sound out his chances of gaining a seat in the Senate, his presidential ambitions did not last. On his return to Chicago, he faced deep trouble. An election for state’s attorney was due in 1928 and the front-runner, John A. Swanson, a “clean government” advocate and ally of Thompson’s archenemy, Senator Charles S. Deneen, seriously threatened his power base.

The Swanson campaign was marked by a new gangland terrorist weapon, the pineapple bomb — so much so that it became known as the “pineapple primary.” There were sixty-two bomb outrages in six months, two of them wrecking Deneen’s and Swanson’s homes. Thompson blamed it all on Prohibition “agents provocateurs.” “There’ll always be bombing as long as there is Prohibition,” he told the press. Campaigning against Deneen’s man, he gave his anti-Prohibition rhetoric a new twist: if whiskey was now so costly, he told crowds, it was “all the fault of King George and his rum-running fleet.” Once more, he resurrected the campaign slogan “Whack King George on the snoot.” Thompson also repeatedly threatened to resign if his archenemy Swanson was elected. Swanson won, and Thompson changed his mind.

With many former friends leaving the bandwagon, he now faced another calamity: a much-delayed investigation into his campaign finances had revealed irregularities on a huge scale, and a judge ordered him to pay $2,245,000 back to the city. A shocked Thompson suffered a nervous breakdown and went on a prolonged vacation. His influence
further diminished as his minions got used to running the town without him. On his return, he appeared to have lost his taste for political infighting. Increasingly frail and confused, he was now little more than a figurehead.

Two sets of killings brought Chicago — and its mayor — into further disrepute. The first was the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre (February 14, 1929), which would inspire countless Hollywood movies, including the unforgettable beginning of Billy Wilder’s
Some Like It Hot
.

Although it was to become a mythic event, it is worth recalling that the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre was nothing more than the routine settling of a banal commercial dispute. “Bugs” Moran — prominent gangster, owner of speakeasies, and would-be Capone challenger — received his regular consignments of whiskey from the Detroit Purple Gang, a bootlegging organization under Capone’s control. Although the Old Log Cabin brand Moran purchased was popular with drinkers, it was expensive, and he let Capone know he would seek supplies elsewhere.

Capone did not react when Moran switched to another brand, but Moran’s customers did: they hated the stuff. Moran asked Capone to resume supplies, and was shown the door. Good whiskey was in short supply, and Capone had found more lucrative customers.