Scarface and the Untouchable Read online

  Eliot didn’t stay with the faith very long, but he never quite shook Eddy’s ideas about disease. Sickness was something he powered through and tried to ignore, as if he could just will it away.

  But such stoicism was of little use when young Eliot came down with rheumatic fever, a terrifying infection resulting from untreated strep throat or scarlet fever. His joints became painfully inflamed, with lumps developing under his skin. If the infection had passed to his brain, his hands, feet, and face would have begun to jerk and twitch. Almost certainly, he experienced chest pains and shortness of breath as the disease attacked his heart.

  Ness survived, but at great cost. The disease scarred the valves of his heart, forcing it to pump harder to keep him alive. The damage would not be detected for many years, but this added stress shortened Ness’s life just as surely as syphilis did Capone’s.

  * * *

  By 1910, Peter’s business had grown into an impressive operation, employing twenty-four bakers, ten wagon drivers (each with his own team of horses), and nine shop clerks. Besides the original Kensington bakery, Peter now operated two storefronts on Michigan Avenue and contracted with a third independent operator to sell his goods exclusively.

  “Every morning and afternoon,” said the Calumet Index, “there is a fresh output of bread, biscuit[s], buns and rolls delivered to all the stores,” one of which sat in the shadow of the Peoples Store, the South Side’s answer to Marshall Field’s. This was prime real estate—Chicago’s largest, most bustling business district outside the Loop, known locally as “the Avenue,” and Peter must have done a tremendous walk-in business.

  Peter prided himself on running a clean, modern shop using only the finest ingredients and hiring only the best people, right down to the “hustling young salesladies” behind the counter. At their height, the Ness bakeries took in about $150,000 in gross annual sales.

  This remarkable American success story, however, did not last. The rapid growth of the business left Eliot’s father vulnerable to overextension—losing just one of his outlets could bring the whole chain crashing down. And this appears to be exactly what happened in 1917. The expansion of the Peoples Store and a bakers’ strike are likely culprits. In any event, Peter lost control of his business. And because the family still lived above the Kensington bakery, they might have briefly lost their home.

  Peter was in his late sixties; after more than thirty years of hard work, almost everything he’d built was swept away. But life had taught him early on how cruel fate can be, and he took the loss in stride—he had Eliot, fourteen, and Charles, twenty-six, to rely on. With their help, Peter soon established a new bakery. Eliot had spent a previous summer working a gas oven in a radiator plant, and he used what he’d learned to build his father’s new oven.

  Still, the family’s finances remained tight. When the Nesses moved to a new house, they took in boarders, fellow Norwegians. Eliot now had to pay all his own expenses, and he fell into a succession of odd jobs—timekeeping for Pullman, checking gas meters, painting autos, whatever it took. The backbreaking work of dipping radiators gave him upper-body strength, packing a surprising amount of power into his slim frame.

  When America entered the Great War in April 1917, Ness took time out from high school to work at a munitions factory in West Pullman. He didn’t stay out of the classroom long, his parents having drilled in him the importance of a good education. Always an individualist, Ness hated the compulsory military training at Christian Fenger High School, yet he proved proficient, and managed to keep his grades up at the same time.

  Alexander Jamie, meanwhile, left Peter’s employ shortly before the business collapsed, returning to the Pullman Company, this time as an investigator—or an undercover man, as he put it. Memories of the 1894 strike remained fresh, and the company sought to keep tabs on its workforce in order to prevent another revolt. Jamie spent eight months traveling, “securing data as to the honesty of employees,” keeping his ears open for any information helpful to the company.

  He also joined the American Protective League, a vigilante group formed in Chicago. Its members carried “Secret Service” badges and raided anyone they suspected of pro-German sympathies—draft dodgers, socialists, and immigrants. Their mission went hand-in-hand with Jamie’s work for Pullman.

  The job kept Jamie on the road—some fifty thousand miles in under a year—which soon put a strain on his marriage. Clara prevailed on her husband to find work closer to home, which he soon did. His investigative experience, and especially his membership with the American Protective League, made him an attractive candidate for a young federal agency seeking new men: the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice, later known as the FBI.

  The Bureau, when Jamie joined, employed only about three hundred agents in fifty-four offices across the country, but it grew rapidly after the war amid a wave of anticommunist paranoia. In 1919, bombings and riots rocked the country; the newly formed Soviet Union’s loud calls for global revolution made Bolshevism seem an imminent threat. Under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the Bureau cracked down on any suspected anarchist or communist, rounding up thousands of innocents in the notorious Palmer Raids. Directing the drive was Palmer’s young assistant, twenty-four-year-old John Edgar Hoover.

  Except for one notable case of election fraud, Jamie’s time with the Bureau was hardly glamorous—he pursued leftist agitators, white-collar criminals, and interstate pimps. Yet to teenage Eliot Ness, Jamie’s new career was an inspiration.

  In between school and work, Ness had discovered Sherlock Holmes. Those stories, still pouring at the time from the pen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were a veritable textbook of modern crime solving, introducing Ness and millions of other readers to fingerprinting, ballistics, toxicology, and other forensic sciences well before they became standard in the American detective’s toolkit. In whatever idle moments he could spare, Ness dreamed of following his brother-in-law into the profession and becoming a real-life Holmes. But those remained little more than fantasies while his family struggled its way back to prosperity.

  In June 1920, Ness graduated from Fenger High with excellent grades. He had grown into a handsome young man with a serious cast, approaching six feet. Fellow students, when asked what stood out about Eliot, remarked on his sense of calm. Behind that placid mask was an engaging personality few got the chance to see. “Although he has a store of wit,” Ness’s senior yearbook observed, “he’s very shy in using it.”

  Peter and Emma dreamed of having their son go off to college, but instead Eliot decided to enter the workforce. His father was seventy, his mother a few years shy of sixty. Their seventeen-year-old son, unwilling to be a burden on them, had every reason to want to strike out on his own. And besides, with only a grammar school education, his brother-in-law had managed to become a federal agent. Soon Ness secured a painting job at a company where Jamie had once worked.

  Peter was appalled, and made sure Eliot knew it.

  “He said he hadn’t worked day and night so that his youngest son would be a failure,” Ness recalled, “and have to work just as hard [as he did].”

  The father had crossed an ocean to find opportunity for himself and his children, and feared Eliot wouldn’t amount to anything. First a man needed an education, and only then could he “set his own course.”

  Ness listened respectfully but kept his painting job. Yet his father’s words ate away at him through the fall and winter of 1920.

  “One day,” Emma later told a reporter, “Eliot came home from work with a new suit and a suitcase. He announced he had already enrolled in the University of Chicago because he ‘didn’t want to get into a rut without a higher education.’ ” Signing up on his own, without telling anyone, was entirely typical of headstrong young Eliot.

  By then, the Nesses lived at 10811 South Prairie Avenue, a narrow brick building made up of two stacked apartments—one of innumerable such “two-flats” lining the leafy streets of Roseland. Far to the no
rth, between Sixteenth Street and Twenty-Second Street, Prairie was known as “the richest half-dozen block[s] in Chicago,” where tycoons like George Pullman and Marshall Field built their mansions. This far south, Prairie was a humbler street, “a refuge to which the tired business man may repair,” according to Chicago reporter Fred Pasley.

  But in 1923—while Ness still lived with his parents on Prairie, commuting every day to the University of Chicago—a different kind of tycoon moved into a modest but comfortable red brick two-flat at 7244 South Prairie, five miles up the road from the Nesses.

  Indeed, little distinguished it from the Ness house: the two were mirror images. But in a few years, 7244 South Prairie would be world famous, a hub of activity, with police and reporters camped out around the clock.

  Al Capone had moved in on the Ness family’s street.

  7244 South Prairie Avenue.

  (Authors’ Collection)

  Three

  1920–1925

  Al Capone’s new two-flat at 7244 South Prairie Avenue was a large building of the era, each floor a separate apartment with three bedrooms, built on a double lot. Far more spacious than anything they’d known in Brooklyn, the new house initially housed Al’s mother, his wife, his son, and two of his siblings. Most had a room to themselves or shared with one loved one, a major improvement from Brooklyn days, and an arrangement perfect for a large extended family reflecting the close Italian famiglia ideal.

  Al and his brothers did not operate openly in their new neighborhood, Park Manor, not with cops living on the same block. That legal presence was not considered security by the family, whose house was already protected by basement windows with iron bars. Capone commuted to work at Johnny Torrio’s Four Deuces in the Levee district, taking another step up from the lower-class dives of the crowded ethnic neighborhoods he’d known in Brooklyn.

  Chicago’s Levee—just south of downtown, running along State and Dearborn Streets near several train stations—made a perfect location for a red-light district, for visitors and residents alike. A few blocks east, nearer the lake and its parks, were the mansions of the Prairie Avenue District. Many of the rich were no strangers to the Levee. The Four Deuces and Colosimo’s on Wabash bordered the better Near North Side sections and its swank hotels and classy restaurants. Al Capone was well schooled in the hypocritical sexual tastes of the middle and upper classes while working for Torrio at the Four Deuces, where prostitutes often served the captains of industry.

  While he began as a Four Deuces pitchman, enticing men to gamble or philander, Capone’s duties and income swiftly grew. This reflected the personable young man’s powers in business management, but also Torrio’s rapidly expanding bootlegging. More than a million citizens in greater Chicago had lost easy access to liquor, and while homemade wine and beer were an option for some, hordes of thirsty customers remained.

  Torrio envisioned a citywide coalition of alky cookers, brewers, and suppliers—graft on a countywide scale, with set markets for gangs and organized distribution of capital and supplies, linked with local gambling and prostitution.

  He began with his own organization, which would come to be known as the Chicago Outfit. The infrastructure supporting Colosimo’s brothels around the county now became the spine of an illegal booze distribution system. Long-trusted Levee veterans were recruited, like veteran pimp Jack Guzik, now Johnny’s bookkeeper and payoff man.

  The other dependable source was relatives—Al’s brother Ralph left passable pay in New York for better money in Chicago, and soon was joined by brother Frank, and their cousins, Charles, Rocco, and Joseph Fischetti. Al could assign his brothers critical tasks, the three siblings often living together, and—with the Fischettis—their slice of the Outfit began to feel like a family business.

  Ralph started in distribution, where he picked up the nickname “Bottles” for his ability to encourage tavernkeepers to buy Capone product. He eventually organized a legitimate enterprise for the Chicago Outfit—the sale and distribution of near beer and soft drinks used as mixers. He also was proficient at managing nightspots, brothels, and gambling dens.

  Tall, with dark curly hair, fastidious Frank—who had no truck with “broads”—drew dangerous whispers regarding his sexual orientation. A skilled, charming front man, out in the community making contacts and sales, Frank was nonetheless a behind-the-scenes player who would rather negotiate than strong-arm, displaying a political sensibility at first eluding Al.

  Cicero journalist Robert St. John wrote that the more famous Capone “had a strong hero worship for his older brother. [Al] would have liked to have the poise, the air of a gentleman, the appearance of good breeding which Frank had.”

  Al spoke, some time later, of the new family venture.

  “We had to make a living,” he said. “I was younger then than I am now, and I thought I needed more. I didn’t believe in prohibiting people from getting the things they wanted. I thought Prohibition an unjust law and I still do. Somehow I just naturally drifted into the racket. And I guess I’m here to stay until the law is repealed.”

  Management challenges accompanied the Outfit’s burgeoning new business. Teenage ghetto gangs fed fresh talent into the organization, while other new recruits were honest laborers put out of work by Prohibition. Brewmasters and others involved in the liquor industry had two options: learn a new trade or go into bootlegging.

  The Outfit mingled investments from criminal gangs and upper-class private partners, its operation staffed heavily by thugs and hardened criminals. Torrio had the unique ability to manage an enterprise of that scale while maintaining authority and respect.

  Facilitating all this was Chicago’s mayor, William Hale Thompson, a crook with the common touch. He called himself “Big Bill the Builder,” because he loved taking credit for massive construction projects.

  “Winning the election feeds his ego,” noted one observer. “He takes a boyish delight in playing with crowds and getting his picture taken. But more fundamental than that, he has a mania for building lasting monuments to William Hale Thompson.”

  Big Bill connected well to society’s lowest classes, courting African-Americans and interacting with the underworld. To curry favor among the large number of German voters, his campaign had even attacked the British. Thompson preached reform and promised newly enfranchised women he’d place “a mother” on the Board of Education. Colorful and amiable, Big Bill promised every special interest the moon, made an issue of his opponent’s Catholicism, and won one of the largest pluralities in Chicago history.

  Of course, his campaign pledges were for the most part forgotten. Nonetheless, in 1919, a scandal-ridden Thompson was narrowly reelected, thanks in part to the African-American vote. And with the recent passage of Prohibition, Thompson’s reelection guaranteed a wide-open town—the Torrio organization and the Levee supported the mayor vigorously, knowing reelection meant a free ride (well, not free) for the Outfit’s bootlegging and vice empire.

  Now important enough to need a front, Capone set up an antiques shop within the Four Deuces building. His “Alphonse Capone” business cards announced no hours, and the storefront window displayed a bookshelf bearing a prominent Bible.

  Good Book or not, in January 1921 Capone had his first documented face-off with Chicago law, who brought him in for operating a brothel and handling slot machines. A guilty plea got him a fine of $150 and $110 in court costs; Capone covered up for Torrio and showed his loyalty and commitment to the organization.

  Al’s low profile was next disrupted in the early morning hours of August 30, 1922, when his car collided with a taxi, leaving the driver in need of an ambulance. An inebriated Al leapt out, brandishing a deputy sheriff’s badge and a revolver, threatening to shoot an accusing witness.

  Booked at Central Station as Alfred Caponi, “alleged owner of the ‘Four Deuces,’ ” he faced charges in Harrison Street Court for carrying a concealed weapon, driving under the influence, and assault with an automobile. Capone to
ld the arresting officer he’d get him fired and did his best to intimidate the prosecutors with claims of “pull.”

  “I’ll fix this thing so easy you won’t know how it’s done,” he crowed. He was escorted for a brief stay in the lockup before being bailed out.

  The charges were dropped while Capone sobered up—this was the First Ward and Torrio’s territory. But the incident indicates street thug Al Capone had not yet matured into a business executive, despite the calming influence of brother Frank and mentor Torrio.

  Meanwhile, Torrio added to his staff another ex-Brooklynite: the Capones’ old neighbor, Frank Nitto. At just over five feet, dapper and well groomed, Nitto did not have to work his way up—the unlicensed barber, who floated shop to shop, already had a reputation as a reliable fence. Stolen jewelry fit naturally with Nitto’s barbering, enabling him to develop neighborhood relationships, including one with Alex Greenberg, a bootlegger–loan shark crony of Torrio’s.

  Nitto started out keeping track of receipts, intimidating wayward barkeeps, and adding new customers. In Chicago’s slums, goons and killers were a dime a dozen, but crooks with business acumen like Torrio, Jack Guzik, and the three Capone brothers were uncommon. Nitto easily entered their ranks.

  Johnny Torrio’s operation continued to grow. The unlikely little godfather’s vision was a synchronized system, each bootlegger with an explicit territory and a means of taking care of payoffs. The system worked fine for a while, but some in the bootlegging game had their own ideas.

  Like many Prohibition-era crooks, Charles Dean O’Banion saw the dry law as his shortcut to respectability. He started off as a burglar and safecracker before graduating into hijacking illicit-booze shipments. Although he never quite shook his appetite for hands-on crime, he—like Torrio—realized the federal government’s folly had opened the door to bigger and better things.