up to and including J. Edgar Hooverclaiming gambling was at most a "minor" crime, the mob's loss was hardly irretrievable.
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Stevens, Walter (18671939): Hit man
The press was to call him the Dean of Chicago Gunmen, and Al Capone used him for dozens of murders, with never a complaint. In fact, Walter Stevens probably killed more members of the Spike O'Donnell Gang for Capone than any other gunner.
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Stevens started his career as a professional killer some time around the turn of the century. He once did a killing as a favor for a mere $50, and on another occasion a "half a killing" for just $25. Stevens became an honored slugger and killer for Mossy Enright in his union-busting operations. When Enright was murdered in 1920, Stevens started renting out his guns to other mob leaders, and he soon became a favorite of Johnny Torrio and Capone.
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In all, Stevens is believed to have committed at least 60 murders. Direct evidence linked him to at least a dozen murders, but since his activities were centered in Chicago and Illinois, it went without saying most of the evidence never led to any prosecutions. In fact, Stevens only went to prison for one murder, that of a policeman in Aurora, Illinois. But the conviction didn't amount to much. Len Small, then the governor of the state, was himself indebted to Stevens for some past mayhem. Having some years earlier been charged with embezzling more than a half-million dollars while state treasurer, Small remembered Stevens's part in bribing jurors and threatening others to achieve an acquittal. Now Small pardoned Stevens.
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As mean and deadly as Stevens was in his professional life, he was a bit of a pussycat at home. Very well educated and read, he was fully conversant on the works of Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. This was very highbrow among the Capones. He neither smoked nor drank, and for 20 years took loving care of an invalid wife. Stevens adopted three children and saw that all received excellent educations. He was very prudish as a father and censored the children's reading material, ripping out pages of books he thought immoral. The children could only attend stage plays and movies that met his puritanical standards. His daughters were not to travel down the road to degradation by wearing short skirts or lipstick and rouge.
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Stevens got out of the killing business in the late 1920s when, for the first time, an attempt was made on his life. After that, members of the underworld would say of himalthough never to his facethat he was like Johnny Torrio: "He could dish it out, but he couldn't take it."
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Stevens would more realistically put it that he had beat the odds longer than most hit men, and it was time to hang up his guns.
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Stockade, The: Torrio-Capone syndicate brothel
The Maple Inn, popularly known in the Chicago area as the Stockade, was the largest brothel run by the Torrio-Capone syndicate in the 1920s. But flesh peddling was not the Stockade's claim to fame. Rather, the whorehouse was one of the very few 20th-century Mafia operations ever to be the target of vigilante action.
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It was Capone's technique to take over communities just beyond the Chicago city line and engage in excesses far beyond those carried out within the city itself. The suburban village of Forest View soon came to be referred to by Chicagoans as "Caponeville." Booze wars, murder, gambling dens, physical intimidation of public officials and above all prostitution greatly upset the decent citizens of Forest View. Law enforcement officials remained doggedly unable or unwilling to meet this gangster invasion and rape of what had previously been a quiet community.
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The symbol of the Capone blight on Forest View was the Stockade, an immense old stone-and-wood structure that housed gaming rooms and a bar, as well as a 60-girl whorehouse. However, the Stockade was more than just that. It was a hideout for wanted Capone gangsters and an arsenal with secret chambers hidden behind false walls, floors and ceilings.
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Within this labyrinth was an extra-large chamber to which the whores could retreat in case of a raid. For the gangster on the run, there was a particularly lavish room beneath the eaves soundproofed with cork lining. The fugitive in residence enjoyed a most comfortable living area with deep pile rugs, comfortable couches and easy chairs. There was also a speaking tube to place orders for food and drink which was conveyed to the hideaway by dumbwaiter. The punctured eyes of female figures painted on the ceiling gave the secreted criminal an overview of the rooms below, including the saloon and gambling hall. The secret compartment contained a number of steel-lined panels built into the walls in which were stored dynamite, grenades, shotguns, rifles, automatic pistols, machine guns and ammunition.
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The residents of Forest View felt helpless against this Capone invasion strongholduntil 1926, when State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe, taking considerable heat at the time for a scandal involving his aides cooperating with gangsters, ordered an attack on Capone's suburban empire. Among the joints hit was the Stockade, and axewielding raiders smashed slot machines, crap tables, roulette wheels, beer barrels and cases of whiskey, and
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