Joe Aiello

October 23, 1930

Fifty-nine bullets

Fifty-nine—that’s the number of bullets they plugged into Joe Aiello in 1930. That definitely seems like overkill, but Aiello brought it all on himself. He just seemed to have a one-track mind and no matter what anyone else was talking about at the time, he would inevitably steer the conversation back to his pet subject—whacking Al Capone.

It’s not as if Aiello didn’t have enough to do without starting trouble with Capone. By 1925 he controlled the remnants of the Genna brothers’ old gang, which brought in lots of dollars from the home-made stills of Chicago’s Little Sicily; and in 1929 he finally realized his dream of becoming president of the Unione Siciliana. And that is the crux of the matter. Apparently Capone had backed Aiello’s ex-friend Tony Lombardo in the bid for presidency of the Unione. After that move, Aiello seemed compelled to start yet another war in Chicago.

Aiello had comparatively little trouble when it came to taking out Lombardo. Capone, though, was a different matter. Here’s a run-down of just a few of his attempts:

Early 1927: Aiello pays the chef at one of Capone’s favourite eateries to put prussic acid into the big guy’s soup. The chef tips off Capone, and the whole Borgia-like escapade falls apart.

Later in 1927: an Aiello machine-gun nest is discovered directly across the street from Capone’s favourite cigar store.

May 25 to September 24, 1927: a total of eight Aiello men or hirelings are butchered in the war. In desperation Aiello offers $50,000 for the head of Capone, but all that does is pile up more bodies on his own side.

April 1929: Aiello tries to use Capone gunmen Albert Anselmi and John Scalise to kill their boss. Capone’s spies reveal the plot and the Murder Twins are killed instead.

Mika Bizarro, Joe Aiello, Joe Bubine, Nick Manzello and Joe Russio, standing in front of a wall in a jail, Chicago, Illinois, 1927.

Propaganda tactic

In 1927, when Capone found out that Aiello was being held at the South Clark Street police station on a weapons charge, he made a grand show of power, intended to put Aiello in his place; he sent down a goon platoon of twenty-five strong to make its presence felt at the courthouse and generally spread intimidation around in a broken-nosed kind of way. The press had a field day in expectation of a bloody shootout. Flashing their guns around, a couple of the gangsters were disarmed by the police, then hustled into the courthouse where they proceeded to put the fear of Al into Aiello.

The whole thing was getting very bloody—and costly. Just how many more men could Aiello afford to lose?

Finally, on October 23, 1930, Aiello decided to skip town for a little while, and was holed up in the house of the astonishingly named Pasquale “Patsy Presto” Prestogiacomo when the boom was finally lowered. With his bags packed, and supposedly on his way to Mexico City, Aiello was shot as he headed for a waiting cab. Staggering around the corner of the house, he encountered another machine gun nest with an unobstructed view of the quarry. That was it, of course, the fifty-nine bullets. When the barrage of slugs finally stopped, Aiello’s black trench coat was like a sieve, and the wall of Prestogiacomo’s house was a crumbling mess. Aiello had finally been outgunned and outgooned.