Chicago’s train stations were often grand, but not Randolph Street Station, where the Illinois Central Railroad joined commuter lines to the South Side and working-class suburbs where the Outfit provided beer, gambling, and women.
To access Randolph Street Station, you disappeared down a wide stairwell outside Chicago’s main Public Library, a splendid stone edifice with marble interiors—but the reading material chosen by commuters more likely came from the large newsstand nearby. This was where, on June 9, 1930, Tribune reporter Jake Lingle, thirty-eight, on his way to catch an early afternoon train, paused to make a selection from rival papers, racing forms, and pulp magazines.
A former street kid with an elementary school education, reporter Lingle never wrote a word for publication—that was left to rewrite men. From a childhood friendship with beat cop Bill Russell, Jake picked up an easy way with police and their subculture, which proved invaluable as he worked his way up from office boy to budding crime reporter. He would drop by station houses and trade cheap cigars for tips.
“He knew all the coppers by their first names,” Fred Pasley wrote. “He spent his spare time among them. He played penny-ante with them. He went to their wakes and funerals; their weddings and christenings.”
As his closeness with the police grew, so did an acquaintance with “that nether stratum of society, the underworld.” Lingle met these tough boys in cells and poolrooms and speaks, on good terms with many, including the bosses. They became an inside source of gangland gossip.
Once on a streetcar with his fiancée, he was jostled and knew right away his wallet was gone; but he also knew just what West Madison Street bar to go to, to retrieve it.
He retained a street kid’s charm throughout his Tribune career, his moon face wearing a persistent grin pierced by an ever-present cigar (now in the three-for-half-a-dollar range). Yet the eyes in the boyish face of this thickset man were as old and tired as time. His curly hair thinning, his complexion dark, cheeks rosy—well tailored, well manicured, well barbered—this was a newspaperman as skeptical and vaguely sinister as any Hecht and MacArthur would serve up in The Front Page.
Unlike many crime-beat reporters, he didn’t carry a gun and held the drinking to an occasional beer. But in one word—“Yeaaah?”—he could serve up a lifetime of cynicism. Still, most considered him a friendly sort, bighearted, even generous. As writer Walter Noble Burns put it, “Just a happy-go-lucky, roughneck West Side kid.”
Shortly before he picked up a racing form at the newsstand outside the train station stairs, Lingle took a late breakfast at the Hotel Sherman coffee shop, where in the hotel lobby he spoke to a police sergeant.
“I am being tailed,” Lingle told his friend.
The sergeant looked around, saw no apparent hoodlums, and shrugged it off.
As Lingle was about to head down the stairs to the train station, someone from a roadster at the curb called out, “Play Hy Schneider in the third race!”
Lingle turned and said, “I’ve got him!” and started his descent.
Had this seemingly friendly exchange been the way to confirm the reporter’s identity?
Like so many others this time of day, Jake’s destination was the Washington Park racetrack in the far south suburbs, via the 1:30 P.M. express. There he could mix business and pleasure, hobnobbing with crooks and politicos, picking up leads. In the tunnel under Michigan Avenue emptying into the station’s low-ceilinged underground chamber, Jake was already checking his racing form, oblivious to two men who’d also paused at the newsstand. The pair—a tall, boater-hatted blond and a shorter, darker guy—hustled down the stairs and closed in on Lingle.
The blond shoved a revolver behind Lingle’s head and squeezed off a round. Jake didn’t live long enough to hear the echo. The reporter who never wrote anything belly-flopped to the concrete, his latest cigar gripped between his lips, racing form like a hymnal in both hands, head spilling blood and brains.
The blond paused, flung the Colt .38 snub-nose by the body, and about-faced to a side tunnel leading up to Michigan Avenue. The short, dark man kept going straight ahead. The shot reverberated through the tunnel, hundreds hearing it, but only a few near enough to see Lingle drop and the assassin depart. Two witnesses took chase, following the blond up the stairs to the street, where they saw him dash through the bustling intersection at Randolph and Michigan, dodging traffic.
Someone yelled, “Catch him!” to a traffic cop, who joined the pursuit as the shooter cut down an alley, dropping a gray silk glove, which was all the cop caught up with.
Quickly to the scene came Outfit favorite Capt. Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert, Commissioner of Detectives John Stege, and Police Commissioner William Russell. The latter had stayed Lingle’s close friend since beat cop days; “Jake’s like a son to me,” the chief often said. Seeing his pal on the cement with the inside of his head leaking out must have shaken Russell. Some said Lingle helped Russell land his job, that the reporter’s influence with the chief had—in the words of Edward Dean Sullivan—made a lowly legman “a major power in the underworld.”
At the morgue, when the coroner searched the body, only $65 was found. Seemed a Trib reporter had taken fourteen C-notes from Jake’s pocket to get to the widow Lingle . . . but also to protect the paper’s rep from so suspiciously thick a bankroll.
“The meaning of this murder is plain,” stated a Tribune editorial, ignoring or unaware of that early danger sign. “It was committed in reprisal and in an attempt at intimidation.” The paper declared war: “There will be casualties, but that is to be expected. . . . Justice will make a fight or it will abdicate.”
The Herald and Examiner briefly forgot their rivalry with the Trib to close ranks. The day after the murder, a huge photo of Lingle ran on the Examiner’s front page under a bold headline: REPORTER KILLED BY GUNMAN: CAPONE GANGSTER ACCUSED. They considered the crime “a new high point in ruthless outlawry,” and called on Chicago to finally bring an end to the lawlessness that had blackened its name from coast to coast.
“This city is in a state of political corruption that will not cure itself,” the editorial continued. “It can only get worse unless decent Chicagoans take matters in hand, insist upon honesty and efficiency from men elected to office and in the police department, or throw the crooked incompetents out.”
The city was all but numb to gangland shootings—Lingle’s murder was the eleventh in ten days. But gangsters were expected to kill their own, not journalists. To the papers, a line had been crossed—the Fourth Estate itself was suddenly a target, and that would not do.
Both the Tribune and the Herald and Examiner offered rewards of $25,000 for information leading to the killer’s capture. The Chicago Evening Post offered an additional $5,000, and civic groups kicked in more, for a grand total of $55,750—an astronomical sum in the early days of the Depression.
Tribune publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick viewed the murder as a reprisal for his paper’s strong anticrime stance. Never mind that McCormick had no idea who Lingle was. “A Tribune man had been killed,” Fred Pasley wrote, “and [McCormick] was putting the vast resources of the Tribune into action not only to solve the murder, but to expose to public view that pyramid of crime and its hookup.”
Discreetly, McCormick followed the Secret Six’s lead and got in touch with State’s Attorney John Swanson, offering to bankroll the investigation. McCormick funded independent prosecutor Charles Rathbun and lead investigator Pat Roche. Collaboration between various reward-posting papers proved short-lived, as did withholding news about the investigation until Swanson released it, so as not to jeopardize the investigation.
The press did agree that Commissioner Russell should be removed from the police investigation. Russell resigned as chief but retained his rank of captain, becoming commissioner in charge of the Detective Bureau, replacing a transferred Stege. Though less visible to the public, Russell remained actively involved with the Lingle inquiry.
Echoing the McSwiggin case, the “martyred reporter” story fell apart fast. Lingle was shown to be “a $65-a-week legman” who somehow made $60,000 a year. He had a home on the West Side, a summer place in Indiana, and a room at the Stevens Hotel. He was driven around in a chauffeured Lincoln, bet hundreds on horse races, and shared a speculative brokerage account with former chief Russell.
More and more, Jake Lingle seemed like something out of Damon Runyon. “A prize specimen of the era,” Pasley called him, someone claiming he’d “fixed the price of beer” in Chicago, and had won the label “unofficial chief of police.” He had mingled with millionaires and high-ranking Illinois politicians, and sported a diamond-decorated belt buckle given to him by a special pal.
“A Christmas present,” Al Capone said of the ostentatious gift. “Jake was a dear friend of mine.” The relationship was no surprise—Capone biographer Pasley believed “Lingle’s multifarious activities included the post of liaison man for Capone.”
The legman had been seen attending boxing matches with Al and the boys, hanging around the Hawthorne Hotel, and as a guest at the Palm Island estate. Providing police protection to Capone’s rival gangs at a high price for low return, Lingle got on the wrong side of Moran and the North Siders.
But the friendship between Capone and Lingle had showed signs of fraying in recent years. Back when Al had been imprisoned for two days in the McSwiggin inquiry, the Big Fellow’s meals were delivered exclusively by the trusted Lingle. Then the reporter took advantage, going to Al’s personal tailor and charging four or five suits at a crack to his pal. And Jake’s failure to provide police protection for the dog tracks he’d advised Capone to invest in may have cost the gangster a cool million.
If Capone’s good feelings for Lingle had dimmed, so did the Tribune’s, whose attitude toward their fallen brother had changed noticeably by June 30.
“Alfred Lingle now takes on a different character,” an editorial said, “one in which he was unknown to the management of the Tribune when he was alive. He is dead and cannot defend himself, but many facts now revealed must be accepted as eloquent against him.”
The editorial granted Lingle’s inability to write stories, but noted his skill at gathering information from police circles, while finding him entwined in a world of politics and crimes “undreamed of” by the great newspaper.
Nonetheless, the stand of the Tribune was firm: “That he is not a soldier dead in the discharge of duty is unfortunate considering that he is dead . . . [but] of no consequence to an inquiry determined to discover why he was killed, by whom killed and with what attendant circumstances.” Not a soldier, then, but a reporter—defined by Hecht and MacArthur in The Front Page as “a cross between a bootlegger and a whore.”
Eliot Ness’s movements in the first part of 1930 remain largely obscure, yet it’s clear he was doing plenty.
When he wasn’t raiding Ralph’s Cotton Club, he kept working in the shadows—monitoring the wiretaps on the Montmartre and other Outfit hot spots, gathering evidence and biding his time. The waiting came to an end on June 12, 1930—the same day Jake Lingle was laid to rest in a gangster-worthy coffin of silver and bronze—when Ness made his first direct hit on Al Capone.
The sign out front identified the garage at 2108 South Wabash as an auto parts supplier, but Alexander Jamie suspected a major Capone brewery. Spring rain dampened the pavement as Jamie led Ness and the other special agents around back, under the clattering tracks of the L, armed with a search warrant.
When the agents tried to enter through the rear, they ran into a pair of heavy steel doors, barred shut. Half an hour later they had crowbarred and sledge-hammered their way in, which of course gave anyone inside ample time to escape. The only arrest was a probable lookout.
Inside, the special agents found one of the largest Capone breweries ever raided in Chicago—fifty thousand gallons of beer in wooden barrels waiting for speakeasy delivery. Massive fermenting vats, filled to the brim, held 150,000 gallons of foamy brew still in the process of cooking.
The feds estimated the brewery turned out a hundred barrels a day. At the going rate of $55 per, Jamie, Ness, and company had cost Capone more than $38,000 in weekly revenue, to say nothing of the seized equipment and product. George E. Q. Johnson declared it the opening salvo in his campaign of economic warfare against Capone.
But Jamie wasn’t content with simply shutting the place down—he seized ledgers and records, as well as canceled checks bearing the name of a suspected Capone henchman who now ran Colosimo’s restaurant. This evidence, Jamie told the Tribune, might seed a conspiracy case linking Capone to the brewery.
Jamie had good reason to feel confident. His men had secretly secured a wiretap on Capone’s headquarters in the Lexington Hotel, just around the block from the raided brewery.
As they listened, the special agents heard Frankie Rio, Jack McGurn, and the Guziks discussing the beer trade, referring constantly to “Snorky”—a slang term meaning “stylish” or “up-to-date” in a teasing yet affectionate way. This, they gathered, was Capone’s nickname among the Outfit’s elite, which he much preferred to the despised “Scarface.”
The same day as the Wabash raid, the tap picked up evidence of a conference between “Snorky” and four top bootleggers, perhaps to discuss the loss of their brewery. This—the only meeting of Capone’s inner circle the feds ever became privy to—gave the special agents their first concrete proof linking Capone to the beer business.
Ness would long remember the special agents’ struggle to batter their way inside that garage. The next time he raided a Capone brewery, he wouldn’t let steel doors slow him down.
That same summer, Ness got caught up in the hunt for Jake Lingle’s killer, thanks to his acquaintance with Lt. Col. Calvin Goddard. The ballistics expert, now ensconced at Northwestern, had restored the filed-off serial number on the murder weapon using the same chemical process he’d applied to a St. Valentine’s Day tommy gun.
This helped police identify the revolver as one of six sold by Peter von Frantzius, the dealer who’d supplied the Thompsons used at the massacre. The purchaser was a former North Sider who joined up with the Capones, Frank Foster (real name Ferdinand Bruna).
“This town is getting too hot for me,” Foster told his friends, shortly after the Lingle murder. “I’m going to lam.”
And he did.
Ness had crossed paths with Foster weeks before Lingle died. Cruising past the Lexington Hotel with Marty Lahart, Ness spotted Foster and another suspicious character—both wearing the pearl-gray hats of the Capone crowd—drive off, with Foster at the wheel. The special agents tailed the gangsters, who quickly made them and tried to shake them. Ness and Lahart forced the car to the side of the road, then ordered Foster to get out and stand for a frisk, finding a snub-nosed .38.
After running Foster in on a concealed-weapon charge, Ness brought the gun to the Northwestern Crime Lab, where Calvin Goddard gave him a basic lesson in ballistics. The Colonel fired Foster’s gun into a cotton-filled wastebasket, then showed Ness how he might compare the spent bullet to one found at a crime scene. Goddard filed the slug away with scores of other test bullets, should Foster’s gun ever turn up as evidence, while Ness took the weapon itself back to his Transportation Building office and locked it in a file cabinet.
Later that summer, Ness received a call from Pat Roche, former Intelligence Unit man now working as a state’s attorney investigator on publisher McCormick’s dime. Roche explained the gun Ness confiscated came from the same batch of six as the Lingle murder weapon, and asked Ness to hang on to it.
Ness checked to make sure the gun was still where he’d left it. But when he opened the drawer he saw the revolver was missing.
Searching the cabinet for the gun, unsuccessfully, he discovered carelessly arranged papers—had someone been rifling through the special agents’ files? Ness suspected the Capone Outfit, but gangsters need not have invaded the Transportation Building to make the search—someone in the office might have taken a bribe, even one of their select squad of special agents.
In any case, the gun was gone.
Ness felt a growing sense of dread—had he inadvertently provided the weapon for Lingle’s murder?
Then he remembered the test bullet fired at Northwestern—and dashed to the crime lab to ask if Goddard had held on to it. Goddard said yes, and brought the Foster slug out; he sat down at his comparison microscope, examining it alongside the one taken from Lingle’s skull.
When Goddard determined the bullets had been fired from two different weapons, the news felt to Ness like an eleventh-hour acquittal. He would long remember this moment as “one of the most graphic and emphatic examples of the newly developed ballistics science.”
In July, Foster turned up in Los Angeles, where he was arrested and extradited back to Chicago. Although he didn’t fit eyewitness descriptions of the shooter—Foster was short and dark, the killer tall and blond—he matched the likely accomplice. But he refused to say what he’d done with the guns purchased from von Frantzius, and the authorities could produce nothing else tying him to the crime. Some observers believed they weren’t trying very hard.
In June 1931, after several continuances, Foster’s case was dismissed for lack of evidence.
Meanwhile, Pat Roche and his men were at work.
They interviewed eyewitnesses and gathered good descriptions of the shooter; they tracked down the car whose passengers had hailed Lingle with a betting tip, and who turned out to be racing fans, not mobsters.
Lingle’s Capone belt buckle directed Roche to the North Side, despite rumbles of the Jake-and-Al friendship turning rocky. Of course, the Outfit might have known that Special Agent Frank Wilson was looking to interview the reporter, which kept Capone himself in the running.
But the prime suspects remained the North Siders, bolstered by an anonymous tip labor racketeer James “Red” Forsythe was involved. A dragnet was set up to find the elusive Forsythe; an anonymous informant claimed crafty Nitto had hired Forsythe to get rid of the legman and tag the North Side for it. And another tip vaguely implicated Grover Dullard, a North Side gambler associated with Bugs Moran, the Aiellos, and prostitution czar Jack Zuta.
Pudgy little Zuta was reigning vice boss and business manager of the Moran-Aiello alliance, though Bugs disliked the glorified pimp. Just the same, Zuta took over for Moran and Joe Aiello, both of whom had gone into out-of-state hiding after the Lingle shooting.
To Walter Noble Burns, Jack Zuta was “a noisome, slime-bred creature, utterly conscienceless, but suave, unctuously ingratiating and plausible . . . depraved and soulless . . . a rat, a poltroon, and a traitor who would not hesitate, if cornered, to turn on his friends and betray them to save his own life.”
But Fred Pasley, also obviously no fan, gave Zuta credit as having “a shrewder mind than the run of the mill criminals,” considered by some the “brains” of the Moran bunch.
And ruling for Moran in absentia laid the Lingle hit at his feet—of the top three in the North Side mob, only Zuta was around to take credit or blame. Fear that the glorified pimp couldn’t hold up under police grilling—that he would “spill his guts”—meant his own boys were as likely to hit him as the Capone Outfit.
Roche was eyeing Zuta, too, prompted by several recent clashes between Lingle and North Siders—the reporter had double-crossed Moran-connected gamblers, pocketing fifty grand for a bogus dog-track authorization. And the Biltmore Athletic Club—where among the exercises undertaken were shuffling cards and tossing dice—had been raided by Roche himself, despite the Unofficial Chief of Police getting paid for protection. Also, Jake had insisted on a raise of his take from 10 to 50 percent on Moran’s posh, popular Sheridan Wave Tournament Club, post–St. Valentine’s Day. When he didn’t get it, he made sure the club couldn’t reopen.
On June 30, Chicago police captured Jack Zuta in his apartment, hauling him down to police headquarters on the Near South Side.
“I’ll be killed the minute I leave this building,” he immediately insisted. “Don’t stand around looking sleepy! Do you cops want me killed? . . . My God, I’m a goner—I know it.”
Even surrounded by blue uniforms, Zuta stayed away from windows, and requested a cell facing no other building. The vice lord, his latest moll, and two cronies—Leona Bernstein, Albert Bratz, and Solly Vision—were held on a disorderly conduct charge overnight, and questioned the next day by Roche and others. When they were let out on bail at 10:25 P.M., Jack demanded passage to a “safe spot.”
Lt. George Barker, the stocky plainclothes head of the bomb squad, said he would take the Zuta party to where they could easily get transportation to their North Side turf. They all piled into Barker’s Pontiac and headed north on State.
Zuta, his two cronies, and the moll got comfortable as Barker drove into the Loop, State Street nearly a ghost town. At Quincy Street, a dark-colored sedan surged up behind them. Zuta yelled, “Here they come! It’s all over now. They’ll get us sure,” and ducked down to the floor.
The vice lord’s pal Solly, in the front seat, clambered over and down next to Jack, a rather ungentlemanly move leaving Leona and Bratz to shrink into the corners of the otherwise exposed backseat. The sedan came up on the driver’s side, three men in it, one stepping out on the running board wearing a flashy Panama hat, a flower in his lapel, a tan suit with creased trousers—and a shoulder holster, from which he drew a .45 automatic.
The snappy dresser fired seven rounds into the back of the car. A buddy in the sedan’s backseat began emptying his pistol as well, and the sedan’s driver—steering one-handed—started firing off rounds, too.
Barker yanked his emergency brake, leapt out, and began blasting away with his revolver. A single cop against three hoodlums, he stood like a Wild West gunfighter in the street and gave it back to them. The hoods had figured their surprise attack would take Zuta down with little trouble, but the detective’s unanticipated response shook them. The driver hit the pedal and the sedan roared off.
Barker got behind the wheel, laughing as he said, “I’ll bet I winged them,” but he was talking to himself: Zuta and his cronies had taken off on foot.
As the cop drove after the gunmen’s sedan, the hoods unleashed a new gadget: their car had a rigged exhaust that laid down a smokescreen. Barker kept on their tail nevertheless, but his car soon sputtered to a halt, its fuel tank punctured by a stray bullet, letting the gunmen escape.
In the melee, two bystanders caught bullets—a streetcar driver, fatally, and a night watchman on the way to work, his arm clipped.
Like his boss Moran, Zuta went into hiding, forfeiting his bond. Had the vice monger’s allies made a preemptive strike, knowing Jack would likely fold up and squeal? Or had Capone been avenging the death of his pal Jake Lingle?
Pat Roche was certain of one thing.
“If we can learn from Zuta who was shooting at him,” he said, “we may have the solution of the Lingle murder.”
In mid-July, at 1:00 A.M., St. Louis Star reporter Harry T. Brundidge—due to testify in Chicago about his exposé of crooked Chicago newspapermen—interviewed Al Capone on the sun porch at Palm Island.
Capone slipped an arm around the reporter’s shoulder.
“Listen, Harry,” Al said. “I like your face. Let me give you a hot tip. Lay off Chicago and the money-hungry reporters.”
When the reporter asked why, the ganglord explained: “I mean they’ll make a monkey out of you before you get through. No matter what dope you have to give that grand jury, the boys will prove you’re a liar and a faker.”
The reporter found Capone friendly, chatty, and something of a big, overgrown kid. He also considered Public Enemy Number One an intelligent subject with “a dark, kindly face, big sparkling eyes,” the trademark scar only adding to his bearing. If you didn’t know better, Brundidge wrote, you might think him “as harmless as a big St. Bernard dog.”
Earlier that evening, the reporter had arrived unannounced outside the big iron gates of the Capone estate, where a tough-looking guard said Capone was out, meeting with his attorneys. When would he get back? Brundidge asked. A shrug.
The reporter sat on the grass and waited. When Capone’s big black limo finally pulled up, the gangster got out and, after Brundidge introduced himself, said pleasantly, “This is a surprise. Come on in.”
Now, as they spoke on the sun porch, moonlight glimmering on Biscayne Bay, Capone asked, “What brings you here?”
“I thought I would ask you who killed Lingle.”
“Why ask me? The Chicago police know who killed him.”
“Was Jake your friend?”
“Yes, up to the very day he died.”
“Did you have a row with him?”
“Absolutely not.”
“It is said you fell out with him because he failed to split profits from handbooks.”
“Bunk. The handbook racket hasn’t been really organized in Chicago for more than two years, and anyone who says it is doesn’t know Chicago.”
The reporter asked why Capone, on his release from the Pennsylvania pen, hadn’t given his friend Lingle the inside story. Capone responded dismissively, as if he didn’t remember the incident.
Brundidge asked, “What about Jake’s diamond belt buckle?”
“I gave it to him.”
“Do you mind stating what it cost?”
“Two hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Why did you give it to him?”
“He was my friend.”
Asked about Lingle’s involvement in various rackets, Capone shrugged, but in his opinion newspapermen should be working against the rackets, not backing them. And he should know—he’d had “plenty” on his payroll.
The impromptu host escorted his uninvited guest around the house and grounds—swimming pool, bathhouse, private pier, boathouse, speedboat, luxurious cruiser. The two wandered through the well-tended grounds by a coral grotto, surrounded by many trees, flowers, and ferns.
Capone spoke of his love for the area, and how he’d refused to be chased out by “a little clique,” or harassing police. He claimed to be “out of all rackets,” intending to make Miami his home, going to Chicago only now and then.
The tour extended to the seventeen-room house, “tastefully appointed” under Capone’s personal direction—no mention of Mae’s role. Capone walked the reporter out, past the gates to a sedan the host had provided for the ride back to the hotel.
After publication of the mostly flattering article, Capone called the more controversial revelations “deliberate lies,” including such tidbits as the Chicago police knowing who killed Lingle and Scarface’s boast of having “plenty of newspapermen on his payroll.”
Brundidge stood behind his story.
Twilight was easing into night outside the Lake View Hotel, a resort and roadhouse on Upper Nemahbin Lake near Delafield, Wisconsin, twenty-five miles from Milwaukee. Inside all was bright and cheery, as young couples danced to player piano music, courtesy of one nickel after another being dropped into the slot.
He was a pudgy, pasty-faced character with the kind of rectangular, hooded-eyed face that looks depressed even when it smiles. But he was a snappy dresser, in a brightly banded straw hat, silk shirt, four-in-hand tie, and tweeds. Despite his naturally solemn mug, Mr. Goodman—at the resort for three weeks now—seemed genial and, well, nice.
None of the several dozen dancing couples would guess Mr. Goodman was Jack Zuta, chicken-hearted prostitution czar. And Mr. Goodman did not suspect his life of crime and sin was about to catch up with him, by way of two cars pulling up outside.
Five men got out, while the drivers remained with their rides. They trooped single file into the bar carrying assorted weapons—a tommy gun, two sawed-offs, a pair of pistols. Moving into the bright world of the adjacent dance hall, they didn’t see Zuta at first, his back to them as he dropped one last nickel into its slot.
A peppy new tune started up—“Good for You, Bad for Me”—the couples swinging to the occasion. Zuta turned to beam at these fun kids and, looking across a sea of youth, saw a row of gunmen.
Zuta was a natural runner, but fear froze him, his face blister white, his eyes wild. The young dancers scattered while the party of five crowded in. The machine gun impolitely burped bullets, punctuated by the coughing of sawed-off shotguns and the blurts of revolver fire, gun barrels issuing flame and smoke and slugs.
Zuta fell on his face, dead but not dead enough for one gunman, who walked over to the splayed corpse and fired twice into its head.
The gangsters fled in an automobile with stolen Chicago plates.
In the weeks ahead, Goddard would link some of the Lake View Hotel bullets to the Capone gang. And the Roche investigation would become a comedy of errors, when their Lingle suspect, Foster—thought to be the accomplice, not the shooter—was identified as the killer by a traffic cop prone to hallucinations from a head injury.
But Roche had also raided a North Side mob business office, just two blocks north of Lingle’s Tribune Tower newsroom, and turned up a set of ledgers for Moran’s and Zuta’s operations. These and Zuta’s own files would document police and political corruption better than ever before. Still, while Roche relished the dirt he now had on dozens of bent officials, he was no closer in locating the man who pulled the trigger on Lingle.
On the night Zuta was so thoroughly killed, Al Capone returned to Chicago to play host to one hundred close friends at the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero. On the business side, he was back to assess the damage of various federal raids in June and July, courtesy of Roche, Johnson, Jamie, and Ness.
But perhaps Al also intended to underscore having done what the local law could not: avenge his friend Jake Lingle’s death.