Hymie Weiss got out of jail in April 1926.1 He decided to make O’Banion’s flower shop on State Street his new headquarters. Weiss made deals with bootleggers in Cleveland, rumrunners in Miami, wholesalers in Quebec. Big slot-machine operators from Cicero, bootleggers from Chicago’s South Side—any and all enemies of Capone became Weiss’s new friends.
By July, Weiss was ready to resume his war of revenge. He planned an ambush. He began by kidnapping Capone’s driver. The man knew Capone’s daily schedule, but he wouldn’t talk. Weiss had him tortured. Burning cigarettes, branding irons, the man endured the torments of a holy martyr. Not a word. Weiss shot him in the head, then dumped him in a cistern.2 Capone was appalled. People said that he and Torrio used to torture people in the basement of the Four Deuces on Wabash. No matter. Capone was outraged: his driver was his driver.
Three months passed. In October, one of Weiss’s new allies—an over-the-hill South Sider named Joe Saltis—went on trial for murder. Weiss raised $100,000 for Saltis’s defense. The first day of the Saltis trial, after court ended, Weiss told his driver to take him to headquarters. Weiss had a list of Saltis jurors in his pocket and a list of state prosecution witnesses in his safe. He was eager to get to work. He jumped out of his Cadillac and crossed the street. He never made it to the shop’s front door.
Capone would have killed him sooner, but he’d been out of town. Not on vacation, but in hiding. All because of something that had happened the same month Weiss got out of jail. The three months Weiss spent rebuilding his connections, Capone spent working out a deal—from a safe distance—with state and federal prosecutors. Capone returned to Chicago in July. Six grand juries met, fretted—and decided nothing. Capone’s problem faded away, like a stain in a rug.
Capone’s problem started one night in late April. Capone had been having dinner at his headquarters in Cicero—a hotel called the Hawthorne Inn—when one of his watchers interrupted his meal: the O’Donnell brothers—gang leaders from the South Side—were wandering around Cicero, drunk and disorderly, as if they had nothing to fear. The O’Donnells knew they were targets; they were tempting fate. Capone decided to relieve them of their lives. He sent three men to kill them. He sat in his own car and watched.
Unfortunately, no one told Capone that the O’Donnells weren’t drinking alone. A well-known public official, an assistant state’s attorney named McSwiggin, had made the mistake of joining them. Maybe the O’Donnells thought that with McSwiggin along they were safe. Maybe McSwiggin thought that he was too well connected to die. Capone’s men attacked the O’Donnells with machine guns. The O’Donnells ducked; McSwiggin didn’t.
A prosecutor shot dead in Cicero would have been embarrassing enough, but McSwiggin was no ordinary prosecutor: his father was a veteran Chicago police detective; his mentor was Mr. Crowe himself. McSwiggin had won so many death-penalty convictions that the papers called him “the hanging attorney.” Back in October 1925, Mr. Crowe had tried—and failed—to convict Albert Anselmi and John Scalise of killing Patrolman Olson. When those two were brought back from Joliet to stand trial for killing Patrolman Walsh, Mr. Crowe chose William McSwiggin to prosecute them.
Capone’s real problem was that on McSwiggin’s way up the ladder—on his way to becoming the prosecutor—Mr. Crowe asked him to do what he couldn’t do: McSwiggin had tried, very publicly, to indict Capone himself. Not for bootlegging or pimping or election fraud, but for personally killing a man in front of witnesses in a bar back in 1924.3
The shooting made headlines. Capone’s picture appeared in the papers. William McSwiggin saddled up and went after him. William Dever had just been elected mayor. Crime and corruption would end. Justice would prevail.
Nothing came of the case. Witnesses forgot or rearranged their memories. Capone presented himself to McSwiggin and offered to explain everything: He was a businessman; he’d been out of town; he’d never met the dead man. The coroner’s jury ventured a guess: the dead man had died because he’d been shot. End of story. Except, Capone and McSwiggin met. They took a good look at each other. They were both on their way up. Capone would inherit Torrio’s world; McSwiggin would inherit Crowe’s. Why not live and let live? Maybe even do business.
McSwiggin’s body was still warm when it was found. The O’Donnells had emptied McSwiggin’s pockets, ripped the labels out of his clothes, and dumped him on a prairie road. Mr. Crowe—and all the papers in the city—decided that William McSwiggin had died a martyr’s death. The young prince had been killed while patrolling the streets of Cicero. Cicero—where not even the sun set without Capone’s permission. Why McSwiggin was there was a mystery. Why he’d been in the company of bootleggers was also puzzling. He must have been on a mission.
Mr. Crowe announced a $5,000 reward—money from his own pocket—for information leading to a conviction. He deputized three hundred detectives and set them loose.
The president of Chicago’s Union League Club spoke for many prominent people: “I have nothing against Mr. Crowe personally,” he said . . . “but, obviously, he is unfit to [investigate] the beer racket. . . . It is mixed up, all down the line, with politics and politics only. . . . Citizens cannot expect Mr. Crowe to prosecute the kind of an investigation this city requires.”4
Mr. Crowe was offended. Politics? “I am engaged in the investigation of the most brazen and dastardly murder ever committed in Chicago,” he said. His deputies broke down the doors of gambling dens, tore brothels to ribbons, flooded speakeasies with beer from their own broken barrels. Whatever ledgers and account books they found, they brought back to Mr. Crowe and laid them before him like spoils of war.
“It has been established,” said Mr. Crowe, “ . . . That Al Capone in person led the slayers of McSwiggin . . . five automobiles, carrying nearly thirty gangsters, all armed with weapons ranging from pistols to machine guns were used. . . . It has been found that Capone handled the machine gun, being compelled to this act in order to set an example for fearlessness to his less eager companions.“5
Capone left town. He thought he’d be shot on sight. In his absence, the city’s newspapers, civic leaders, law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and coroners quarreled with one another. Who was in charge? Who was to blame? McSwiggin’s death—and the investigations that followed—played out like primal scenes. Doors opened: no one wanted to see what they saw.
Three months later, when Capone returned (he’d been hiding in plain sight in Lansing, Michigan), he made a statement:
“I’m no squawker,” he said, “but I’ll tell you what I know about the case. All I ask is the chance to prove I had nothing to do with the killing of my friend, McSwiggin. Just ten days before he was killed, I talked with McSwiggin. There were friends of mine with me. If we had wanted to kill him, we could have done it then and nobody would have known. But we didn’t want to; we never wanted to6 . . . I liked the kid. Only the day before he was killed, he was up at my place, and when he went home, I gave him a bottle of scotch for his old man. . . . I paid McSwiggin and I paid him plenty—and I got what I was paying for.”7
That settled everything: Mr. Crowe’s protégé was just another cop who took money. Sleep with dogs, wake up with fleas.
Capone went back to solving the problem of Hymie Weiss.
One week after some boys found the body of Capone’s driver, Weiss met “Schemer” Drucci at Drucci’s hotel. They had breakfast and talked business. Business and politics; they had an appointment that morning with a ward boss named Morris Eller. Eller was Weiss’s connection to Mr. Crowe’s office. Drucci handed envelopes to Eller; Eller would take what he needed, then pass the envelopes to John Sbarbaro (the assistant state’s attorney whose funeral home specialized in dead crooks). Sbarbaro would take his share, then hand the envelopes to someone else. No one discussed who that someone else was.8
That morning, Drucci had an envelope with $13,200 in it.9 It was such a nice day, and Eller’s office was so close to Drucci’s hotel, Weiss suggested they walk there. Eggs and bacon in their stomachs, money in their pockets, Weiss and Drucci strolled down Michigan to the Standard Oil building.
Four men attacked them with handguns just as they reached the front door. Weiss threw himself down; Drucci took cover behind a mail box and fired back; two men charged him; Weiss ran; the men disappeared in the crowd. Drucci commandeered a car. “Take me away and make it snappy,” he told the driver. He didn’t get very far: Police appeared, blocked the sidewalks, blocked traffic. So efficient, so vigilant. They arrested Drucci and one of the men who’d rushed him. Neither Drucci nor the other man gave their real names. No matter. The police knew Drucci by sight. They knew the other man worked for Capone. They presented him to Drucci for identification. “Never saw him before,” said Drucci. “It was a stick up,” he said. “They wanted my roll.”10 Thirty rounds had been fired; the front of the Standard Oil building had bullet holes in it. No one was dead; the only person wounded—slightly—was a pedestrian. The attack was a piece of theater. If Capone had wanted to kill Weiss and Drucci in as public a place as Ninth and Michigan, he would have.
Weiss didn’t take the hint.
On September 20, while Capone was having lunch at the Hawthorne, everyone around him stopped talking. They listened: machine gun fire, distant, steady, then closer and closer. Capone’s bodyguard pulled him down. Everyone in the restaurant hit the floor. The gunfire passed in front of the hotel, then faded away in the distance. Capone pulled himself up and headed outside to inspect the damage. His bodyguard preceded him. No broken windows, no bullet holes. Capone’s bodyguard understood before he did. Blanks. A trick to draw people outside. The real show was about to start. Capone’s bodyguard knocked him down, then covered him with his own body.
Six cars11—big ones—Cadillacs and Lincolns—drove slowly past the hotel, firing broadsides, like ships of the line. Hundreds and hundreds of machinegun slugs tore chunks out of the Hawthorne’s facade, ripped apart its lobby, blew holes through the front walls, windows, and insides of shops on either side of the place. Two more cars appeared. They turned and parked in front of the hotel. Screams, falling glass, masonry dust. A man in overalls and a work shirt—probably Moran—climbed out of the first car, carrying a Thompson. He knelt as if he were on a firing range, braced his weapon, and began. He went through two, two-hundred-round magazines. Deliberately. Methodically. He made long, parallel rows of holes, chest high, along the Hawthorne’s inside walls. Then he stood up, turned his back, and walked to his car. The driver blew his horn three times; the two cars drove to the head of the line, paused, then led the convoy away. East. Back to Chicago.12
Capone had had enough.
He put two plans in motion. One was visible: he proposed a truce. One was hidden: he sent agents to rent rooms, next to and behind Weiss’s head-quarters. If Weiss agreed to a truce, the rooms would be blinds for watchers; if Weiss refused, the rooms would be sniper posts.
Capone didn’t give Weiss the satisfaction of proposing anything to him personally. Instead, Capone ordered the president of Unione Siciliane to meet with Weiss and make him an offer. Samoots Amatuna had tried for the presidency of the Unione, but Capone wanted the Unione to obey him and no one else. In November 1925, soon after Mike Genna died in the shoot-out with police, Capone had Amatuna killed and Tony Lombardo made president.13 Lombardo did as Capone wanted: He contacted Weiss and arranged a meeting.
He and Weiss met in a hotel room on October 4. Lombardo began by reminding Weiss of something that every police commander and every gang leader in Chicago knew: If the war continued, no one would be alive to enjoy the peace. There was plenty of money to be made. Plenty of money for everyone. Capone was prepared to be generous: he would give Weiss the exclusive right to sell beer to every speakeasy north of Madison Street in Chicago. Capone’s offer was equivalent to Uncle Sam offering Weiss the Philadelphia mint. Weiss refused.14
Weiss didn’t want territory; he didn’t want money. Then what? asked Lombardo. Anselmi and Scalise, said Weiss. Yes? said Lombardo. What do they have to do with Mr. Capone’s offer? Tell Mr. Capone, said Weiss, if he wants things to stop, he needs to give me Anselmi and Scalise.
Lombardo left the room to call Capone. Capone shouted into the phone, “I wouldn’t do that to a yellow dog.”15 Lombardo told Weiss. Weiss left. No truce. No peace.
A week after the attack on the Hawthorne, a young man—blonde, German speaking—asked to rent a room in the boardinghouse next door to O’Banion’s old shop. The young man said his name was Oscar Lundin.16 The landlady showed him a back room; it faced a wall. Not so nice, but all she had. The young man said he’d been hoping for something with more light. The landlady said there might be a better one—nice view, looked out on Holy Name—there might be a nice room opening up, soon. Mr. Lundin said he understood. He gave her three weeks rent in advance. He hoped she’d keep him in mind. Sure enough, a week later, the young lady across the hall gave notice. Mr. Lundin moved right in. He worked nights, slept days. The people who owned the building sold it to someone else. No one—except the landlady’s son, Steve—even remembered what Mr. Lundin looked like. Mr. Lundin did have friends, though. Steve remembered an older man, small, dark. Jewish, maybe. Or Italian. The man visited once or twice.
The same week that Mr. Lundin moved in, a pretty young woman—Mrs. Thomas Schultz was her name, came to the city all the way from Mitchell, South Dakota—rented a third-floor apartment on West Superior Street.17 The apartment didn’t have as nice a view as some people might have liked. Especially a person from South Dakota, used to all that sky. If you looked one way, all you saw was the intersection of State and Superior. Nothing but cars. If you looked the other, there was just an alley. Behind a flower shop. Mrs. Schultz said she was glad to find anything she could afford. Beggars can’t be choosers, she said. She paid her first month’s rent in advance. She even paid her second month, right then and there. After that, hardly anyone saw her. She must have had relatives, though. Probably lent them her keys, the way they came and went.
While Capone’s agents were renting rooms, jury selection began for the Saltis murder trial.18 Weiss wanted to prove that he could bend the law as easily as Capone. The lawyer Weiss hired—W. W. O’Brien—was less polished than Thomas Nash or Michael Ahern, but O’Brien was experienced and he guaranteed results. (Mr. O’Brien had been one of Beulah Annan’s attorneys.) Morris Eller, the ward boss who’d been sitting, waiting for Drucci’s envelope, supplied Weiss with other men who could help: an enforcer named Ben Jacobs became O’Brien’s “investigator”; a drifter with a criminal record named Sam Pellar became Weiss’s driver. Both men carried weapons; both men stayed close to Weiss and O’Brien when the Saltis trial began.
Jury selection ended on October 11. The Criminal Courts building was only a quarter of a mile from O’Banion’s shop. Weiss and O’Brien could have walked there. Jacobs, Pellar, and another bodyguard named Murray would have screened them. Instead, they decided to drive. Better to be cautious. They parked next to Holy Name, then crossed the street together. Straight into the ambush set for Weiss.
Murray died where he fell. Weiss had enough holes in him—machinegun and shotgun rounds—to have died there, too. A fire rescue truck took him to a hospital. He died on the examining table. O’Brien was hit in the arm, the side, and the stomach. He staggered into a nearby doctor’s office and lived. Pellar was hit in the abdomen. When the shooting started, he thought Weiss had set him up.19 He pulled his gun and fired a round. It hit Jacobs in the foot. Pellar lurched away; Jacobs hobbled after him. Machinegun fire chased them around the corner onto Superior. Pellar threw his revolver down a basement stairwell. One of them spotted a doctor’s office; they tumbled through the door and were saved.
Crowds gathered around Murray’s body. Police found more than $2,000 in his pockets. Police searched Weiss’s clothes: in one pocket, a rosary; in the other, a wallet with $5,000 in it. In his jacket, two envelopes: one had an unsigned check for $6,000 in it; the other had a list of jurors. Separate from all this: a shoulder holster with a.45 in it.
Almost as soon as the shooting stopped, two well-dressed men came bursting out a ground-floor window, behind the boardinghouse next to the flower shop. One man carried a machine gun; the other carried a revolver, muzzle up, in each hand. Neither of the men looked like Oscar Lundin. When they reached Huron, the man carrying the machine gun lofted it, two-handed, over a back fence. It landed on the roof of a doghouse. No one saw those two again.
Police searched the room where they’d been: days and days of cigarette butts;20 shell casings from a machine gun and an automatic shotgun. The shotgun was still in the room. So was a nice, new, gray fedora from a shop in Cicero.21
A week later, a lady who lived below Mrs. Schultz’s apartment on West Superior complained that Mrs. Schultz’s radiator was leaking water through her ceiling. A janitor went to fix the leak; he discovered Mrs. Schultz had moved out. She left a golf bag with an automatic shotgun in it.
Chief Collins announced delivery of 215 new police cars. He planned to arm them with rifles and shotguns “to combat the winter crime wave.” “These roaming fortresses,” he said, “will cruise the streets, ready to pump lead into every bandit caught committing a crime.”22 Reporters asked the chief about the killing of Weiss and Murray, and the wounding of O’Brien, Pellar, and Jacobs. “I don’t want to encourage this business,” said the chief, “but if somebody has to be killed, it’s a good thing the gangsters are murdering themselves off. It saves trouble for the police.”23
Reporters asked the chief whether the killings would delay the Saltis trial. “No,” he said, “nothing will delay Saltis’s swift prosecution.” Attorney O’Brien spoke from his hospital bed; his wounds would not affect the trial. His law partner, Frank O’Donnell, was more than ready to proceed with the defense.
Three days later, a Saltis juror began talking to himself. A bailiff reported to the judge: “During the night, the man began to shout, rave, and whistle from an open window. . . . I asked him what the idea was, and he said he wanted to hear the echo. He also spoke of being in a coal mine. . . . Then he gathered up the cuspidors and tried to put them in a dresser drawer.”24 The judge questioned the man’s wife. She said her husband had been in and out of mental hospitals for the past four years. The judge asked a court psychiatrist to examine the man. “Circular insanity,” said the psychiatrist.
The judge declared a mistrial.
The coroner convened an inquest. Steve Juranovich, the landlady’s son, described Oscar Lundin. Two Salvation Army workers and two artists who shared a studio on Cass Street described Pellar and Jacobs staggering away from the shooting. A woman said she thought she saw Pellar turn back and fire at Weiss. A man named McKibben testified that he’d seen Pellar and Jacobs draw their weapons and fire them, point blank, at Weiss.
Pellar was brought to the hearing on a stretcher. He refused to say anything. Jacobs hobbled in on crutches. He refused to say anything. Finally, Hymie Weiss’s brother Fred was called to testify. Fred didn’t want to be there. “I saw him only once in twenty years,” said Fred. “That was when he shot me three years ago.”
John Sbarbaro patched up Weiss’s body just as he had O’Banion’s. O’Banion’s widow, Viola, came to the service. She sat next to Weiss’s mother and patted her hand. Eight cars of flowers followed Weiss’s hearse. Morris Eller, John Sbarbaro, and a man running for county judge pinned political placards to Weiss’s hearse to advertise their candidacies.