Following the treaty negotiated at the Hotel Sherman, the Outfit’s trucks could haul beer openly through the city without risking arrest or a hijacking. Al Capone whittled his retinue of bodyguards down to one, and seemed delighted with his newfound freedom.
It’s “just like the old days,” he told a reporter from the Herald and Examiner. “They stay on the North Side, and I stay in Cicero and if we meet on the street we say ‘hello’ and shake hands. Better, ain’t it?”
Capone emphasized how peace had benefited the lives of his wife and son. “The reason I wanted to stop all that [violence] was because I couldn’t stand hearing my little kid asking why I didn’t stay home,” he said. “I had been living at the Hawthorne Inn for fourteen months. He was with his mother way out on the South Side.”
Capone went on, “He’s been sick for three years—mastoid infection and operations one right after another—and I’ve got to stay here to take care of him and his mother. If it wasn’t for him, I’d have said: ‘To hell with you fellows. We’ll shoot it out!’ ”
A rumor went around that Capone planned to quit and leave for Europe. On January 23, a reporter found Capone dressed for housework and holding a pot of spaghetti at the front door of his South Prairie Avenue house.
“I positively have retired,” the gangster said, before going back inside. “I am out of the booze racket and I wish the papers would let me alone.”
But after an official with the Cook County highway police took credit for kicking Capone out of Cicero, the ganglord went to the Herald and Examiner and said nobody had driven him out. “I have merely transferred my headquarters. . . . I’m not leaving Chicago. I’m a business man and I’ve got plenty to keep me here.”
Al explained that he’d left Cicero’s Hawthorne Hotel because, “I found that my business took in a bigger area than it used to, and I needed a central headquarters.”
Quietly Capone set up operations in Chicago at the Hotel Metropole at Twenty-Third and Michigan, near the now-padlocked Four Deuces. Al took a corner suite with a view on his South Side kingdom. Portraits of George Washington, Big Bill Thompson, and Abraham Lincoln supervised from a nearby wall.
Capone soon occupied most of the seven-story hotel, which provided lodging (for gunmen and their molls), a gymnasium, and administrative offices. The Metropole lobby brimmed with young men in loud suits swollen with shoulder holsters. For many Capone hoods, the criminal life was rarely exciting; mostly it was one long wait for their next assignment.
But orders were slow to come. Even at the height of the Beer Wars, gunmen were mostly defensive, a hoodlum purgatory on the lobby floor protecting the heavenly corporate offices above; other thugs lingered outside breweries and on trucks, discouraging hijackers. Such gunmen were paid big for little; the gym was available to keep them in shape and alert.
Chicago’s mayor since 1923, William Dever had brought strong management to the city and reduced the many debts accumulated under the prior administration’s mismanagement, though his efforts to contain deficit spending were often overruled by the City Council. Yet he had managed to build considerable infrastructure and had laid the foundation for the planned World’s Fair.
Nonetheless Dever faced a serious challenge in 1927 from a buffoon who shouted “America First” as he ranted against the King of England. Many Chicagoans considered Big Bill Thompson an embarrassment—on a recent campaign appearance, the eccentric once-and-future mayor had brought along a birdcage with two rats named for an opponent and a ward boss. But voters knew he represented a wide-open town—any “frivolous” concerns about Thompson’s competence were left to the eggheads who wrote books and read the news.
Thompson knew just how to capitalize on this populist sentiment. He appeared at campaign rallies carefully choreographed to present him as the “friend of the plain people,” and told voters to beware a host of enemies—from the universities to the newspapers to the elite outsiders angling to run the city.
“Yes, they lie about Bill Thompson . . . ,” he would say, “but they rob you . . . everybody robs you! . . . They call you low-brows and hoodlums . . . they call me that, too. . . . We low-brows got to stick together. . . . Look who’s against us!”
Thompson’s posturing as a common man was insultingly ironic; he came from a wealthy family while his opponent had worked his way up from slaving in a tannery. Yet that mattered little to the voters, in part because Dever’s failed campaign against crime helped turn the city against him. Closures of speakeasies and gambling joints, and overzealous police raids on homes where alcohol was cooked, only added to Dever’s unpopularity. The mayor’s old slogan—“Dever and decency”—now got him more laughs than support.
“Away with decency,” the voters would reply, “give us our beer!”
Dever also suffered from an inability to raise the kind of campaign funds Thompson could easily get from bootleggers, speakeasy proprietors, and gamblers.
“The Dever administration,” Thompson declared, “has made one of the greatest records in Chicago’s history for closing up business.”
By “business,” Thompson meant the illicit variety; Mayor Dever hadn’t shut down any legal establishments.
“When I’m elected,” Thompson went on, “we will not only reopen places these people have closed, but we’ll open ten thousand new ones.”
Thompson’s promise of ten thousand new speakeasies reached its intended audience—Al Capone, who threw his support (at least $100,000 worth) behind Big Bill.
On April 5, 1927, Thompson beat Dever by more than eighty-three thousand votes. For a Chicago election, things were relatively quiet—a couple of bombings, two election judges kidnapped, a dozen voters harassed. The only fatality happened the day before—Vincent “Schemer” Drucci, killed when he resisted cops who picked him up on a roust, a Capone enemy gone without Outfit involvement. On the negative side, Bugs Moran, nicknamed “the Devil” by the Capone crowd, rose to chief of the North Side mob.
Thompson took office on April 11, promising to “give the old town the greatest ride for prosperity she ever had!” The ride began when Thompson rehired the corrupt police chief Dever had fired, with an order to throw the crooks “out in ninety days!” In fact, Thompson chose one of those crooks—Capone crony Daniel Serritella—as Chicago’s new city sealer. Ostensibly in charge of protecting consumers by checking scales, Serritella was really a fixer with an office in City Hall easily accessible to aldermen and others. He’d performed much the same role during the campaign, ferrying money from Capone to Big Bill.
The rest of the country viewed Thompson’s reelection as a new low for Chicago. The city had chosen as its mayor a “political blunderbuss,” in the words of one journalist—“indolent, ignorant of public issues, inefficient as an administrator, incapable of making a respectable argument, reckless in his campaign methods and electioneering oratory, inclined to think evil of those who are not in agreement or sympathy with him, and congenitally demagogical.”
Many saw Thompson as a product of the special cocktail of corruption and bluster that animated local life.
“They was trying to beat Bill with the better-element vote,” observed the humorist Will Rogers. “The trouble with Chicago is that there ain’t much better element.”
But others recognized Big Bill as the symptom of a deeper rot permeating the country—“a striking example,” wrote the Indianapolis Star, “of the potency of demagoguery and appeals to prejudice in American elections.”
For one sociologist, writing in Century Magazine, Thompson’s victory proved that democracy itself had failed—not just in Chicago, but in any major metropolis.
“The people were not fooled,” he wrote. “They knew that a vote for Thompson was a vote for Thompson and the ‘boys.’ ”
The old, open form of government—“the kind of democracy visioned by Thomas Jefferson”—had given way to cabals of crooks, grafters, and party bosses who cut their deals behind closed doors.
“That is essentially what has come to power with Thompson,” this sociologist wrote. “His election is the triumph of the gang.”
By that standard, Capone should have had little to worry about. The peace agreement had mostly held, and with Thompson now in the mayor’s office, enough money was rolling in to keep the gangs happy and decrease the violence.
Still, for some—like Joseph Aiello, heading up another Sicilian clan in the old Genna territory—there was no such thing as “enough money.” Capone’s control of the Unione Siciliana had prevented Aiello from taking over the Genna alcohol racket in its entirety. So Aiello—who resembled Eddie Cantor minus the comedy—offered $35,000 to the chef at Capone’s favorite restaurant, “Diamond Joe” Esposito’s Bella Napoli Café, to poison their famous customer’s soup.
The chef—figuring there was scant likelihood of both serving that dish and living to enjoy Aiello’s tip—warned Capone.
Next Aiello put a $50,000 price tag on Capone’s head, intended to attract out-of-town torpedoes. But Al had contacts and informants far and wide. Led by Gus Winkeler, former members of the Egan’s Rats gang out of St. Louis would prove to be effective Capone allies in the Aiello attacks.
Lanky Winkeler, a graduate of teen street gangs, had been an ambulance driver in the Great War, racing through flying bullets and falling shells. In peacetime, he found work in St. Louis as a top-notch getaway driver. Winkeler and two other ex-Rats, fellow veterans Robert Carey and Raymond Nugent, were among the best at the ransom racket in the Midwest. Snatching a bootlegger, gangster, or gambler was a popular hustle during Prohibition. Kidnapping—not yet a federal crime, the targets unlikely to go to the law—could bring in several thousand dollars.
Winkeler first floated into Capone’s orbit after his crew kidnapped Detroit gambler Henry Wertheimer. They drove their captive to Chicago and hid him away in a North Side apartment, then sat back and waited for a payoff call from Wertheimer’s associates. But the call they got was from Al Capone himself, who ordered the kidnappers to the Hawthorne Hotel. Winkeler figured fleeing would be fatal, and persuaded his accomplices to go along with Capone’s summons—their only option.
“Al Capone is a swell fellow,” Gus later reported to his wife. “He talked to us like a Dutch uncle trying to show us we were in the wrong racket and couldn’t last long at it. He told us snatching was a rotten business and begged us to quit. Then he set up the drinks and took us to a swell feed.”
Winkeler’s two cronies got drunk. Capone might have had them killed, but instead filled their pockets with cash, while a quite sober Winkeler passed. Capone drew Gus to one side, encouraging him to give up the “bum” snatch game and come see him for real work. The ganglord had a genuine dislike of kidnapping, built on fears for his family and coworkers. But Egan’s Rats were known for their toughness, and Capone—in the face of Aiello and other challenges—could use guys like that. Wertheimer was let go and Winkeler went on staff with the Outfit.
Gus liked that Capone was a guy who kept his nose clean. Maybe he could do the same. After all, among the gamblers and bookies, Al was known as “a square shooter,” a man who always paid his debts, however exorbitant.
“If he gives you his word,” the racetrack crowd said of Capone, “you can believe him.”
And if you did right by Al, it was understood, he would go to the wall for you; but if you crossed him, well, that’s why he needed men like Gus Winkeler on call.
In late May 1927, Antonio Torchio came by train from New York City to Chicago, drawn to town for a try at the Aiello gang’s open contract on Al Capone. Heading on foot from Union Station to Little Italy, taking in these impressive new surroundings, the Sicilian heard a click behind him followed by thunder as Capone enforcer Jack McGurn’s bullet traveled through his brain. Four more followed, but Antonio heard and felt nothing.
A few days later, a big black sedan pulled up in front of 473 West Division—the Aiello family bakery. Working inside that evening were Joe Aiello’s brothers Dominick and Tony and three employees. When a tommy gun noisily chewed at the building, two drums’ worth of bullets flying, everybody hit the deck. Cakes were decorated with bullets, furniture went to pieces, and a player piano gave out not music but the crunch of splintering wood.
Tony and a baker suffered serious wounds, surviving what was apparently intended as a warning. But Joe Aiello only stepped up his drive to kill Capone, this time enlisting a crony, Lawrence LaPresta, who on the first of June took two sawed-off shotgun barrels in the back courtesy of McGurn. Had Capone dispatched McGurn to preemptively take out any Aiello gunmen, or had the torpedo taken it upon himself to make a brutal point? Either way, in a month and a half, McGurn gunned down another seven. Brought in on one murder, McGurn walked away—insufficient evidence.
With the press making noise about a new mob war, Capone gave McGurn a rest and brought his bought-and-paid-for cops in off the bench. A raid on the Rex Hotel on North Ashland nabbed five gunmen with rifles and ammunition who, after backroom interrogation, gave up their boss. Joe Aiello was arrested, but he remained unworried—his contacts would bail him out.
With Aiello snug in his cell, several taxis rolled up outside the Detective Bureau. A dozen husky Capone gunmen piled out like combat soldiers from military vehicles. Nine armed thugs circled the block while Louis Campagna and two others stood out front, one hood transferring an automatic pistol from a shoulder holster to his side overcoat pocket. This caught police attention, and before any siege could be laid on by the gangsters, Campagna and the two hoods were rounded up, the rest scurrying off into the night.
Short, heavyset, oval faced, with thinning hair and thick dark eyebrows, Campagna was another ex-Brooklynite who might have known Al in early young-gang years. “Little New York,” as Louis was known, was an ex–bank robber, ex-con, and successful Outfit enforcer, much valued by Capone.
The trio of hoods was taken to the cellblock where Aiello watched in horror. Campagna whispered to Joe in Sicilian (a language distinct from Italian), “You’re dead, friend, you’re dead. You won’t get up to the end of the street still walking.”
Aiello whimpered, “Give me fourteen days and I’ll sell my stores, house, and everything and quit Chicago for good. Can’t we settle this? Think of my wife and my baby.”
“You started this,” Campagna snarled back. “We’ll end it. You’re as good as dead.”
Aiello pleaded for police protection, but on release got escorted only as far as a cab. Within hours he had gathered his family and taken the train to New Jersey.
Capone claimed he was happy to let Aiello settle his affairs and go, always glad to avoid bloodshed.
“But I’m going to protect myself,” he said. “When someone strikes at me, I will strike back.”
After ducking assassination attempts for six months, Al Capone was now viewed as a liability by Big Bill Thompson, of all people. The most corrupt mayor in Chicago’s history—an astonishing accomplishment in itself—was running for president.
And even a buffoon like Thompson knew Capone, the top criminal in a city now world famous for crime, was attracting the wrong kind of national attention. The Aiello clashes only ramped that up. Now anybody affiliated with the Outfit faced police harassment and arrest, with Al himself constantly tailed by the law.
Capone’s growing notoriety weighed heavily on his wife and son.
“Can’t something be done to protect this innocent and inoffensive child?” Mae pleaded to the Herald and Examiner in mid-December. “Every day [Sonny] comes home crying. His schoolmates tease him and abuse him, all because of what has been said and printed about his father.”
Soon Al was holding court from his bulletproofed desk chair, needing a shave but decked out in hunting togs—as worn by wealthy types who shopped at Marshall Field’s, not the average hunter in Wisconsin’s north woods.
“I’m leaving for St. Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow,” he told reporters. “Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I’m sick of the job—it’s a thankless one and full of grief. I don’t know when I’ll get back, if ever. But it won’t be until after the holidays, anyway.”
He’d given the best years of his life to the public, providing pleasures and showing them a good time.
“And all I get is abuse,” he said, “the existence of a hunted man. I’m called a killer.”
Then his tone grew sarcastic. “Well, tell the folks I’m going away now. I guess murder will stop. There won’t be any more booze. You won’t be able to find a crap game, even, let alone a roulette wheel or a faro game.”
He claimed that 99 percent of Chicago’s adults drank and gambled. “I’ve tried to serve them decent liquor and square games. But I’m not appreciated.”
Then he brightened. “Say, the coppers won’t have to lay all the gang murders on me now. Maybe they’ll find a new hero for the headlines. It would be a shame, wouldn’t it, if while I was away they would forget about me and find a new gangland chief?”
While Capone’s complaints were as sincere as they were hypocritical, he was also doing Mayor Thompson a favor and the police, too, who could brag about driving Capone out of Chicago. Of course, with Frank Nitto running things, bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution would experience no shortage of customers.
The trip to St. Petersburg—where Johnny Torrio had a place—never happened. Instead, Al, his family, and two bodyguards journeyed to Los Angeles. On their two-day stay, the Capones never left the Biltmore Hotel grounds, before getting cast out by the L.A. police and put on the train back to Chicago. Los Angeles was mounting its own tough-on-crime campaign.
Capone whined to the Los Angeles Times, “Why should everybody in this town pick on me? I wasn’t going to do anything here. . . . We are tourists and I thought that you folks liked tourists.”
Back in Chicago, the police were talking tough again.
“Despite the cold wave,” the chief told the Herald and Examiner, “my men are prepared to make Chicago too hot for Capone.”
Even the Metropole, Capone’s headquarters, claimed his rooms had all been rented out.
“It’s pretty tough,” Al told a reporter, “when a citizen with an unblemished record must be hounded from his home by the very policemen whose salaries are paid, at least in part, from the victim’s pocket. You might say that every policeman in Chicago gets some of his bread and butter from the taxes I pay. And yet they want to throw me in jail—for nothing.”
This had to sting Capone, with so many police on his payroll, although with the Thompson crowd unfriendly now, Outfit graft was said to be down. Why pay to be harassed?
Then Capone announced: “I’m going back to Chicago. Nobody can stop me. I have a right to be there. I have property there. I have a family there. They can’t keep me out of Chicago unless they shoot me through the head.”
His mood turned combative. “I’ve never done anything wrong,” he said. “Nobody can prove that I ever did anything wrong. They arrest me, they search me, they lock me up, they charge me with all the crimes there are, and when they get me into court I find that the only charge they dare to book against me is disorderly conduct.”
Nonetheless, Capone had arranged for his brother Ralph to collect him in Joliet to bypass any problems at the Chicago station.
But when Ralph arrived an hour early, with four men carrying pistols and shotguns, police placed all five under arrest; and their presence immediately told local authorities Ralph’s brother would soon arrive.
When Al got off the train in Joliet, he walked right “into the arms of the entire police force of that city,” the Herald and Examiner reported. The local police chief and a captain stood waiting to greet him.
“You’re Al Capone,” the captain said.
“Pleased to meet you,” Capone replied.
The chief personally frisked Capone, finding nearly $3,000 in cash on his person as well as two guns.
“You may want some ammunition, too,” Capone said, as he handed over a few excess magazines.
Police confiscated seven other guns and more hefty bankrolls from Capone’s bodyguards, then locked the gangsters up at the local jail. Capone took offense at having to share his cell with two strangers. According to the Tribune, they “made too much noise and were too long unshaven to suit the fastidious taste of Capone.”
Al paid both of his cellmates’ fines—for a grand total of $23—so he could enjoy some privacy.
While he waited for his lawyers to post bail, Capone remained magnanimous.
“When I come back for my trial,” he told the Tribune, “I am going to make a good big donation to the worthy charities of Joliet. I’m not mad at anybody.”
But his resolve remained firm. As he prepared to leave Joliet, a reporter asked him for a forwarding address.
“I am going to my home in Chicago,” Capone declared.
When he finally arrived at South Prairie Avenue, after a celebratory stopover in Chicago Heights, harassment at the hands of police continued. The police chief stationed twelve detectives around the house, with orders to nab Capone if he walked out, or any other gangsters should they walk in.
“I wouldn’t invade his mother’s home to arrest him,” said the chief of detectives. “Anyway, we haven’t any specific charge against him. But—if he is seen on the street, my men have instructions to pick him up and take him to jail.”
And so Al Capone hunkered down to spend Christmas on Prairie Avenue, surrounded by police. Business interests, he told the press, would keep him in the city for the foreseeable future.
“Besides,” he added, “I like Chicago. It’s my home and I pay taxes here. I’m not a gangster, I’m a real estate broker.”
Meanwhile, Big Bill Thompson’s cross-country travels had gone almost as poorly as Capone’s. As with Al, Big Bill found few outside his city to be on his side, his “America First” message bombing as badly as his birdcage humor. He slunk back to Chicago, his presidential candidacy a bust.
On December 22, 1927, Capone went back to Joliet and pleaded guilty for carrying a concealed weapon. He paid in cash the fines and court costs for himself and his men, casually peeling a thousand-dollar bill and six hundreds off his ever-present roll. The clerk offered him $10.20 in change, but Capone refused it.
“Please take that down to the Salvation Army Santa Claus on the corner,” he said. “Tell him it’s a Christmas present from Al Capone.”