1932
On Halloween night, Louise is once again arrested for speeding and evading an officer, who clocks her at fifty miles per hour on a residential street in Oak Park. She is pursued into neighboring River Forest by officer Russel Guy. Guy hauls her back to Oak Park and books her. She is then released on bail.1 Of course she was drinking, and one of McGurn’s lawyers gets her freed, no doubt cautioning her that she is only a week away from pleading for her very soul in front of the US Supreme Court.
Louise is more than a little stressed herself, as she and her Jack face their final chance in front of another bunch of conservative elderly men. They must be terribly worried that the fix is in and that the power of Cook County will find its logical extension in the highest court in the land. Now that Capone is in prison, with the efficacy of his support dubious at best, it must seem like the odds are heavily stacked against them. Even the judges who were paid by Capone for all those years no longer have any allegiance or memory of having been accommodating. The two are essentially on their own, completely dependent upon their attorneys.
Jack and Louise take the Baltimore & Ohio to Washington, D.C. It is certainly not lost on them that their troubles began with a train trip. In Washington, their case arrives in the docket as number 97: “Jack Gebardi, alias Jack McGurn, alias Jim Vincent D’Oro, and Louise Rolfe, Petitioners. vs. United States of America, Respondent.”
Jack and Louise will now do battle with the United States, which is certainly the most intimidating of adversaries. Representing the government are Thomas D. Thatcher, the solicitor general; Nugent Dodds, an assistant attorney general; and James A. Wharton, the special assistant to the attorney general. They file a twenty-page brief in June, enumerating the three charges of conspiracy, the history of the case, and their arguments as well as citing the supposedly supportive rulings of the past.2 However, there is one significant difference. They are good lawyers themselves, and they realize that the second count of conspiracy is particularly ludicrous now that Jack and Louise are married: “In conclusion the government contends that the judgments of the District Court and the Circuit Court of Appeals as to counts one and three should be affirmed, and reversed as to count two.”
When they read this in Chicago, the law is extremely unhappy. The pressure from the judiciary in Cook County becomes a full-court press as Dwight Green, the US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, attempts to “help the government’s case,” obviously alarmed that they’ve already given away a third of it. Assistant attorney general Seth Richardson notifies Green on September 24 that their case will be submitted to the US Supreme Court on October 10. Green sends a letter to Richardson in which he painstakingly goes over the three counts. To address the fact that Jack and Louise have married, he makes an attempt to convince Richardson that they still violated the Mann Act because they had never actually lived together:
I might state briefly that the evidence shows that the defendant Gebardi and his real wife lived together with their child at the McCormick Hotel in 1928 … in September 1928, defendant Gebardi rented a room at the Lexington Hotel for Louise Rolfe, which room was rented under the name of G. McManus. The evidence shows conclusively that the defendant Gebardi did not occupy this room with her…. It was the theory of the prosecution that the conspiracy was entered into in order that they might have sexual intercourse without the knowledge of the real Mrs. Gebardi.3
On September 29, the attorney general writes Green back, asking for information that is missing regarding whether McGurn purchased the famous train tickets for the love trip to Florida. Green answers the attorney general on October 1. Amazingly, he is rather honest about the Chicagoan’s shaky Mann Act gambit in his explanation of why the evidence is not available:
This can partly be accounted for by the fact that when the case originally came to this office, it was brought to the attention of my assistant Mr. Anderson by an Assistant State’s Attorney of Cook County, who advised my assistant that he did not anticipate that there would be a prosecution for violation of the Mann Act but that he desired that the two be held under bond until they could complete their investigation, when they would indict the defendant for murder in what was then known as the Valentine Massacre, at which time seven hoodlums were assassinated in a garage in the near north side of Chicago.4
Dwight Green is nervous; the case against McGurn is proving to be less and less viable to the government lawyers. He enlists the aid of his boss, US attorney George E. Q. Johnson, the man who helped bring Al Capone down. Johnson sends an unsolicited letter to Assistant Attorney General Dodds, who is slated to present most of the government’s argument. Again there is a reminder that Jack and Louise didn’t live together previous to their escapade and alleged Mann Act violation: “An examination of the record will disclose that the defendants did not live together as man and wife, nor did they live in a state of adultery prior to December 22, 1928, which is the date they left Chicago for Miami, Florida. The circumstantial evidence and the records tend to prove that they had no immoral relations previous to that date.”5
In Washington, the big moment finally arrives. The august triumvirate begins to present their case while Louise, lovely in a cloche hat, glowers at the lone Chicago Daily News photographer who has followed them to Washington. Jack sits behind her in a beautifully tailored suit, his hair smooth and shining, his hands clasped in front of him as if he is making a concerted effort to keep them where everybody can see them.
An intense Louise and Jack at the Supreme Court, 1932. CHICAGO DAILY NEWS NEGATIVE COLLECTION, DN-0088601
The Daily News photographer manages to snap a telling photo of Louise exhibiting her hard side by giving him “a look that could kill.” After a couple of years of living the roller-coaster nightmare of fighting these charges and the possibility of prison, she appears to be girded for battle in the helmet of her cloche hat. She knows she has the best defense attorneys money can buy. She seems determined, angry, and, to the elder gentlemen of the Supreme Court, the paragon of “alternative lifestyles”—a prototypical gun moll and unabashed sexual libertine. And she is a stand-up gal for her Jack, no doubt about that. Moreover, since the Chicago attorneys have first brought the Mann Act charges, things have changed; Louise is now an indignant, protective American wife.
To the chagrin of the stalwart state’s attorneys in Chicago, Jack and Louise McGurn’s Mann Act conviction is overturned by the US Supreme Court on November 7, 1932. Justice Harlan Fiske Stone explains that, except in highly unusual cases, a woman cannot violate the Mann Act, especially if she is a willing participant. With Louise eliminated from the case, there is no one with whom Vincent Gebardi could have conspired.6 With the aid of Capone’s excellent lawyers, Machine Gun Jack McGurn has now triumphed in the US Supreme Court. The reversal ruling will stand as a warning to any future prosecutors who might try to use the Mann Act for spurious purposes.
By Thanksgiving, the press declares the Chicago gangs “decimated.” Capone’s money man Jack Guzik and bootleggers Frankie Lake and Terry Druggan are languishing in Leavenworth. Everyone else seems to be holding their breath and biding their time, trying to make a living. Frank Nitti, now being referred to as “The Enforcer,” is making money from the dog tracks and other gambling sources. The papers have Vincent Gebardi, “Machine Gun Jack McGurn,” living with Louise on a quiet suburban street in Oak Park and making a small living as a “muscle man,” according to Oak Park police, who seem to be closely watching their infamous citizens.7
In the spring of 1933, McGurn undergoes an epiphany and contemplates a career change, curtailing his mob activities in order to reinvent himself and play tournament golf. In retrospect, one of the most interesting facets of McGurn is his golf game. Perhaps one of the reasons the important gang killings in Chicago occur in the late fall and winter is because McGurn is preoccupied with golf in the spring and summer. At this point, golf has begun to occupy the greater part of his existence, which leads the public and the press to think of him as semiretired.
He has the ability to consistently shoot in the low seventies for eighteen holes. He has been playing much more since Capone went to jail, seriously working on his game at the Evergreen Park Golf Course and Maywood Country Club. He knows how to focus his concentration on training, just as when he was a ring fighter in his youth. It has now become his dream to become a professional golfer. Golf has grown to be much more than just recreation and sport; it has become an indispensable source of sustenance.
To McGurn, it must seem like everything has transformed in Chicago, certainly not for the better. The empire the Capone Outfit has built together is on the cusp of evolutionary change. It is shrinking in one way, expanding in another. When Capone takes the train to prison, Nitti, Ricca, Humphreys, and Guzik focus their eyes on gambling and union racketeering. Enforcing their attempt to dominate various national unions, McGurn, who is far from being “retired,” leads his group of tough guys. These include Tony Accardo; Charlie Gioe, another McGurn protégé; Sam “Moony” Giancana, who will rise to become the Big Fella in the 1940s; and Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt.
The newly elected mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, inherits the deep financial woes of the Depression, with seven hundred thousand Chicagoans out of work already. He pledges to wipe out what remains of the old Outfit and initiates a citywide anticrime drive by culling out the corrupt police officers and waging a two-fisted war against vice and gambling. There are also police raids on various political headquarters to clean out the gangster influence from the wards. Cermak is an eager beaver, taking total control of patronage and progress.
Frank Nitti is no slouch either. He has assumed the role of the Big Fella, which puts him at the pinnacle of the prosecutor’s flow charts and squarely in Cermak’s sights; he becomes the priority in the anticrime battles. Perhaps Cermak is a bit too eager, because rather than continuing the traditional, frustrating methodology of the old days of the twenties, he allegedly gives a signal to his now trusted police to eliminate Frank Nitti. Unlike Al Capone, Nitti makes an almost fatal error by foregoing hardened bodyguards like Jack McGurn.
Nitti installs one of his dummy businesses, the Quality Flour Company, on the fifth floor of the LaSalle-Wacker Building, a new high-rise sprouted in the heart of the Loop’s financial district. On December 19, two Chicago detectives plan a raid on the office, allegedly on a tip from Mayor Cermak.8 They are detective sergeants Harry Miller and Harry Lang, who are Prohibition veterans and as tough—and perhaps as underhanded—as most gangsters. Harry Miller is the brother of Jewish gangster Hershey Miller. Before going in, they call for support, which is provided by officers Christopher Callahan and his partner, Mike Shannon. What Callahan, Shannon, and even Miller don’t know is that Lang has his own special plan for Frank Nitti.
The four cops enter the office of the flour company and round up everyone inside, including Nitti, who immediately stuffs an incriminating piece of paper into his mouth. Callahan tells him to spit it out, but Nitti keeps chewing. Callahan grabs Nitti’s wrists to handcuff him. To his—and Nitti’s—shock, Lang fires his .38 police special into Nitti’s neck at almost point-blank range. Callahan jumps away, stunned. The wounded Nitti turns toward his attacker, and, with extreme deliberation, Lang then fires two more bullets into Nitti’s torso, puncturing his shoulder, lung, and kidney. As Nitti falls into a chair, Lang fires another round at his own left arm, grazing the flesh to make it appear as if Nitti shot at him first.
Nitti is grievously wounded but survives. While the Enforcer is hospitalized, Louis Campagna, Paul Ricca, and Frankie Rio are left at the helm of the Outfit. They realize that all bets are off in terms of Mayor Cermak’s campaign against them. That the fix is no longer in at City Hall will radically change the way they conduct business. Perhaps it is for the best that Nitti didn’t keep McGurn close, because there certainly would have been a few dead cops instead of a wounded Nitti. Consequently, Anton Cermak has placed his foot in an Outfit bear trap. The coming New Year will bring many abrupt changes to Chicago on both sides of the law.
As soon as he is inaugurated in January 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asks Congress to modify the Volstead Act to increase its permissible alcoholic content up to 3.2 percent. Not only do the politicians act with dispatch, they welcome a two-step plan to relegalize whole beer in the spring and, a few months later, wine and hard liquor.9
With the death knell sounded for bootlegging, it is a shaky time for the gangsters. There seems to be a redistribution of power going on as Humphreys, Ricca, Campagna, and even Accardo begin sitting at the table with Frank Nitti. They rule by committee, although the still-recovering Nitti remains the figure on the masthead to the press and the public. Chief of detectives William Shoemaker, with his indomitable hard line, publishes the new thirty-nine-name “Public Enemies” list during the second week of the year, exposing Curly Humphreys as one of the new heads of the old Capone Outfit. William “Three-Finger Jack” White is second, William “Klondike” O’Donnell is third, and Jack McGurn has moved up to fourth place. The weakened Nitti occupies the fifth spot.10
Even though it has now been more than three years, in the mind of the collective public, McGurn is still the favorite suspect for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Moreover, the fact that he is still operating in Chicago and is fourth on the list of lurking villains gives him an illusion of impunity that drives the honest cops and state’s attorneys absolutely mad. His freedom is a constant reminder of their failure to get their man.
McGurn’s record of revolving-door antics in the courts is now legendary. Of course, what Chicagoans must take for cleverness is really a combination of highly paid attorneys and Jack Guzik’s payoff structure, which enhanced the livings of scores of judges, hundreds of officials, and thousands of cops. In actuality, a sizable part of authority in Chicago has unconsciously been keeping McGurn free.
The shift from bootlegging to union racketeering and gambling is already progressing steadily, although Nitti and the boys are still running breweries and booze. Even though the Depression has tremendously curtailed expenditures on many things, gambling seems to be something that only increases along with people’s dreams. Hope springs eternal at the tables and racetracks, a reliable trait of human nature on which the Outfit counts. The year 1933 seems to be more centered on the gambling, but a growing income is derived from the subjugation of the labor unions and the working person, the ongoing vision of Curly Humphreys, who counts on another, more admirable human trait—a strong work ethic—to provide future revenues.
Jack McGurn hasn’t been near a courtroom since the US Supreme Court reversal in November. He and Louise prefer to escape February in Chicago to be in Florida playing golf. Even as the post-Capone organization goes through the growth pains of transforming into a new Outfit, McGurn is apparently still necessary. The enormous Chicago World’s Fair is a few months from opening, and Outfit interests are battling to grab a piece of as many concessions as possible, for money will be flowing into Chicago. Moreover, Nitti, still recovering from the police’s assassination attempt, seems embroiled in what is now a personal battle with Mayor Cermak. Despite McGurn’s notoriety, Nitti needs every button man he can gather, particularly because the rival Touhy gang of the Northwest suburbs is attempting to invade Outfit territories.
Perhaps to nobody’s surprise in the Outfit, on February 15, Anton Cermak is shot in Miami by a Sicilian immigrant named Giuseppe Zangara, who is allegedly aiming at president-elect Franklin Roosevelt. Zangara is either the divine, serendipitous instrument of Nitti’s revenge by sheer happenstance or part of a brilliant conspiracy that shines for its amazing luck. Cermak dies on March 5 after suffering from peritonitis and gangrene in his lungs.
Cermak had been approaching Roosevelt for more aid in fighting the gangsters, trying to enlist the federal government to pour more manpower into Chicago and no doubt to run interference for the inevitable retribution. His is the most propitious death Frank Nitti could ever imagine. Compounding this edginess to the situation, the justice system in Florida acts like a lynch mob, proving far more effective than the medical care administered to Cermak. It only takes authorities two weeks to charge Zangara, examine him with psychiatrists, try him, and sentence him to death. On March 20, fourteen days after Cermak passes away in the hospital, Zangara is the fortieth inmate to die in Florida’s electric chair.
Several writers have made interesting cases for the Outfit’s role in the shooting of Anton Cermak, suggesting that, rather than an attempt to assassinate Roosevelt, it is an Outfit hit on the Chicago mayor. In what are reminiscent of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theories, the circumstances of the crime beg for further scrutiny, mostly because Cermak’s death is so advantageous to Nitti and the Outfit. What is extremely peculiar is the fact that the shooter, Zangara, crazy or not, is silenced forever within a single month.
Oddly, McGurn is considered to have some complicity, because he is stopped on his way to Florida on the day before the assassination. On Valentine’s Day, as if it were an anniversary reminder, police detectives are tipped off that there are Outfit men loitering around the Illinois Central Park Row train station. Two squads arrive to find McGurn and Capone button Harry Hochstein, who is now the Twentieth Ward committeeman, in the waiting room. Also with them are Outfit gunners “Three-Finger Jack” White and Charlie Feinberg. They admit they are ticketed for the next Florida-bound Zephyr; Hochstein claims “he is only there to see them off.”
Later, at the detective bureau, as reporters crowd around McGurn in their familiar attempt to get a statement, he provides a bit of droll, comic relief as he announces, “I never get a chance to see the sun anymore.”11 All four of the men act outraged and victimized, but Charlie Feinberg gets the big laughs and the headline when he demands the detectives return his confiscated lunch bag, which contains six doughnuts. They are all released without charges, but the fact that they are headed to Miami twenty-four hours before the Cermak shooting begins to raise questions.
A contemporary theory suggests that McGurn and his team are on their way to deliver money or aid to Zangara, or possibly to kill the deranged immigrant after he shoots Cermak. In The Outfit, Gus Russo writes that municipal court judge John Lyle stated, “Zangara was a Mafia Killer, sent from Sicily to do a job and sworn to silence.”12
When Cermak’s stooge Lang fails to kill Nitti, he crosses the line of no return for politicians, especially from Chicago, where Outfit guns have silenced a prominent state’s attorney, a well-known journalist, and a couple of judges. A corrupt mayor who attempts the heavy-handed tactics of the Outfit is certainly not immune. In addition, suspicions surface that Zangara owes a lot of money to the New York mob for gambling debts. Zangara allegedly confesses this to columnist Walter Winchell before he is executed. If indeed McGurn and his team are on their way to Miami to silence the little Sicilian after his crime, the state of Florida saves them the trouble and ends all the questions, as well as the answers.