Authors: Gus Russo
Immediately upon assuming leadership, Torrio, as he had in New York, brokered a gangland agreement that resulted in a mutually beneficial crime consortium: essentially, a truce. Convening the leaders of all the Chicago crime fiefdoms, Torrio built his case on irrefutable logic: thanks to Volstead, there was no longer a need to fight over the now massive treasure or to dabble in petty crime. There was enough money to go around. At Torrio’s suggestion, the gangs carved up the city into discrete and sovereign territories.
The essentials of the arrangement held that the Torrio “Syndicate,” as it was now called, took the downtown Loop and part of the West Side; the South went to Danny Stanton’s gang; the Northwest to William “Klondike” O’Donnell’s contingent; smaller districts to the Frankie Lake-Terry Druggan gang and others. Only the South Side O’Donnells, Spike and Walter (no relation to the Northwest O’Donnells) refused to participate, a big mistake since all five brothers were quickly executed by Torrio’s gunmen. A U.S. district attorney now referred to Torrio as unsurpassed in the annals of American crime; he is probably the nearest thing to a real mastermind that this country has yet produced.
Torrio soon branched out into the suburbs. Within weeks of Big Jim’s murder, Torrio’s army of whores and roulette-wheel spinners were overrunning dozens of surrounding communities. And of course the booze flowed freely as Johnny’s bootlegging dreams became reality. Torrio’s source of strength, his ability to broker cartels and alliances, was in fact the reason his own bootlegging empire would become so formidable. Displaying brilliant foresight, Torrio had engineered a longstanding alliance with two key Chicago powerhouses: the Genna family and the Unione Siciliana.
The Genna family, who had arrived in Chicago’s Little Italy from
big
Italy in 1910, virtually owned the enclave. Known as wild men, and Black Handers, the boys established themselves as a collective to be reckoned with. After Volstead they immediately applied for one of the few exempted licenses for the production of industrial alcohol. “The Terrible Gennas” - brothers Angelo, Pete, Sam, Mike, Tony, and Jim - siphoned off most of their licensed industrial alcohol, colored it with various toxins known to cause psychosis, and called it bourbon, Scotch, rye . . . whatever. Glycerin was added to make the concoction smooth enough to be swallowed.
5
The brazen and volatile Gennas paid more than four hundred police to escort their booze-carrying truck convoys. Their distilleries operated within blocks of police stations, with workers on twenty-four-hour shifts. In fact, so many men in blue made appearances at their warehouse, locals jokingly nicknamed it The Police Station. In no time at all, the Gennas were grossing $300,000 a month, only 5 percent of which went to overhead, that is, official graft.
The Gennas paid Sicilian families $15 per day (ten times what they would have earned at hard labor) to distill fifty gallons of corn-sugar booze. The arrangement, and the compliance of the largely illiterate Sicilian families, was made possible because the Gennas, old-world, blood-oath Sicilians, had the support of “The Unione.”
The Unione Siciliana di Mutuo Soccorso negli Stati Uniti was founded in New York in the 1880s and eventually incorporated thirty-two branches across the country. As a fraternal organization, the Unione played a vital role in the lives of the new arrivals, providing jobs, housing, low-cost insurance, and burial benefits. Sicilian families paid weekly dues that quickly established a huge treasury fund, perhaps the largest of any such union. The Unione also taught English and generally helped immigrants adjust to the American way of life. When there were legal problems, the Unione functioned as a mediator between Sicilian immigrants and American authorities. The Unione had its own influential national publication with a large circulation. It settled disputes, some of which involved Black Hand extortion, between members who distrusted the American system (police were usually answered with a broken-English “Me don’t know” when asking an Italian to testify). The Chicago branch, chartered in 1895, counted twenty-five thousand Sicilian members (vs. five hundred thousand Italians in Cook County), and it wielded great power in the community.
Inevitably, all elements of Sicilian society were represented in the Unione. Perhaps because it was savvy to the ways of the New World, the gangster component, like the Gennas, often muscled its way into leadership positions in the Unione, but this in no wray reflected the wishes of the illiterate, gullible rank-and-file members. This faction was also the custodian of the darker old-world customs, “blood brotherhood” traditions, and the law of
omerta,
or silence.
Johnny Torrio, although not Sicilian, numbered among his good friends one Mike Merlo, the Unione president. Merlo gave the Torrio Syndicate his blessing, and by inference its partnership with the Gennas. With his huge gambling and vice empire, Torrio could purchase all the hooch the Gennas and their cottage industry could produce - and then some. A key part of the arrangement held that Torrio would purchase the raw “cooking” materials, with the Gennas supplying the the labor force.
The Torrio-Genna-Unione triumvirate now possessed unmatched power. Throughout the years, the Syndicate would stop at nothing to maintain its control over the Unione leadership. The Torrio-Genna compact was seemingly all-powerful.
In addition to distilleries and breweries in Chicago, Canada supplied prime brands that were smuggled across Lake Michigan. Still more flowed northward from the Caribbean. From his headquarters in the Four Deuces, Torrio oversaw an enterprise that was, thanks to Volstead, now pulling down over $10 million a year from combined booze and vice in greater Cook County.
With thousands of speakeasies, gambling joints, and brothels, Torrio needed to beef up his security operation, especially since countless independent operators had not endorsed the peace pact. Just as Colosimo had reached out to New York years before, Torrio brought his cousin, a bouncer in a Brooklyn brothel, to his aid. Torrio would eventually teach his charge the power of the payoff. “Bribe everyone” was Torrio’s mantra.
The boy from Brooklyn, who had years before worked in Torrio’s gang, was a powerful and fiercely loyal muscleman for his cousin. Soon after his arrival in the Second City, he would be implicated in the decade’s most infamous murder. A witness to Jim Colosimo’s demise, his secretary Frank Camilla, described the fleeing assailant as a heavyset man with scars on the left side of his face, a portrayal that effectively narrowed the field to one: Torrio’s newest imported muscleman. After his own notorious reign in Chicago, this enforcer’s coterie, the Outfit, would achieve a level of success that had eluded even him, Alphonse Capone.
The Capone Years and the Chicago Beer Wars
You get more with a smile and a gun than you get with just a smile.
-Al Capone
He was, like Johnny Torrio, a product of the New York to Chicago, First City to Second City, gangster pipeline. Born in 1899, Alphonse Capone was the last link in the criminal evolutionary chain that gave rise to the Outfit.
As a teenager in New York, Al joined Johnny Torrio’s James Street Gang and tended bar for Torrio criminal associate Frankie Yale at the Harvard Inn. Al Capone was big
and
driven, but with an uncontrollable temper that got him expelled from the sixth grade for punching a teacher. He also possessed the Look, taking it to the level of an art form. While he was still in his teens, a barroom brawl with another tough guy named Frank Galluccio left him with three deep knife scars on the lower left side of his face and a new nickname, Scarface.
By inducting Capone into his Five Points Gang, Yale turned Capone from just another thug into a full-fledged gangster. As such, Al graduated to the big leagues, where a player had to be able to perform the ultimate sanction without hesitation. At about the same time he committed his first murder for Yale in 1918, a nineteen-year-old Capone lost his heart to Mae Coughlin, an Irish lass two years his senior. Nine months hence, and as yet unmarried, Mae gave birth to Albert Francis “Sonny” Capone on December 4,1918. On December 30, Al married Mae. By this time Al and Johnny Torrio had grown so close that Torrio was named Sonny’s godfather.
After a brief stint in Baltimore, where he made a momentary attempt at the straight life, Capone returned to New York in 1920 to attend his father’s funeral. The homecoming was momentous, since Al fell back in with Johnny Torrio. Capone never returned to Baltimore, or the straight life. In short time, he beat an Italian-hating Irishman named Arthur Finnegan to death. Finnegan’s boss, the terrifyingly dangerous William Lovett, then made it known that Al was a dead man.
For Capone, the call from Johnny Torrio couldn’t have been more timely. Now, just as Colosimo needed Torrio, so too Torrio needed Capone, and Capone had to go on the lam to avoid being eviscerated by Lovett. In Torrio’s Chicago, Capone would go from a $15-a-week mop boy (and occasional whore-beater), to one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the world in a mere six years.
Upon arrival, Capone was given the job of “capper” at Torrio’s Four Deuces. In that capacity, Al, who now used the surname Brown, had the lowly task of standing out in the frigid Chicago night coaxing prospective clients inside. “Got some nice-looking girls inside,” the scar-faced barker would entice. Capone would flash a sense of humor when he handed out his newly struck business card, which read:
AL BROWN
Second Hand Furniture Dealer
2222 South Wabash Avenue
When asked to elaborate as to what sort of furniture he sold, Capone would quip, “Any old thing a man might want to lay on.” After Torrio waxed enthusiastically about their potential empire of booze, Al had his brothers Ralph and Frank join him from Brooklyn. His first cousins, brothers Charlie and Rocco Fischetti, also boarded the New York to Chicago underworld railroad. For a brief time, the quartet lived in the same apartment building on South Wabash Avenue.
In 1923, the newly elected mayor, William Dever, made a serious attempt at clearing the bootleggers out of downtown Chicago. When Dever’s police chief proved immune to bribery, Torrio and Capone were forced to abandon the Four Deuces and find a more hospitable locale. They chose the near west suburb of Cicero, a bleak, depressing town of fifty thousand submissive Bohemians, most of whom found work at the huge Western Electric factory. For Torrio-Capone, the choice was a stroke of genius. The Czech-born, beer-drinking Ciceronians resented prohibition almost as much as they resented people of color. Gangsters arriving was one thing, but God forbid a clean-living “Negro” family wanted in.
Setting up their headquarters at the Hawthorne Inn, the boys systematically took over a town that never stood a chance. The local Republican contingent knew a gift horse when they saw one and quickly struck a deal with their new neighbors.
The Syndicate’s challenge was to guarantee the reelection of Cicero mayor Joseph Klenha. At the time, the local Democrats were making noise about deposing Klenha as a requisite to - if one could believe it - a reform movement. Since a growing number of Cicero’s citizens appeared anxious about the recent gangster immigration, action was needed before reform caught on. Thus on election night more than one dozen touring cars, crammed with Capone’s thugs, hit the streets, ensuring that the vote went the right way. There was nothing subtle about their electioneering technique: voters had gun barrels pointed at them while instructed to pull the Democratic lever; still others were shot, knifed, mugged, and slugged into submission. One of Cicero’s finest, Officer Anton Bican, attempted to intervene and woke up in a hospital. Local officials, knowing they were outmanned and outgunned, sent out an SOS. Some seventy police were dispatched from Chicago, but while they engaged the Syndicate in street battles, the “democratic process” ran its course. During one of the police skirmishes, Al’s brother Frank was killed. It was a tough price for Capone to pay, but Klenha and the Syndicate prevailed.
Before the city had a chance to mop up the bloodstains, one hundred saloons and one hundred and fifty casinos had sprung up in Capone’s Cicero. By the next spring, however, the honorable Mr. Klenha gave an interview to a local paper in which he warned that the boat was about to be rocked. He soon regretted the interview. Klenha stated that while he was appreciative of the Syndicate’s “support” in his election, he intended to run his office independently of the gangster element.
Upon reading the report, Capone jumped into his touring car and made a beeline to the mayor’s office. This time Capone personally meted out the punishment, beating Klenha unconscious on City Hall steps while nearby cops wisely looked the other way. On another occasion, Capone sent his enforcers directly into a town council meeting, where they proceeded to drag out a councilman who had the temerity to propose legislation inimical to the Syndicate’s interests. Capone later explained that since he had bought Cicero (and Klenha) lock, stock, and barrel, disobedience could not be tolerated. Capone’s forces even dominated the Cicero police station.
Tribune
journalist Walter Trohan realized this when, arriving at the police station for a scheduled meeting with Capone, Trohan was frisked by
Capone’s
boys.
Capone was now Cicero’s de facto mayor, and he flaunted his power for all it was worth. When his former employer from Baltimore came through Cicero, Capone decreed that there would be a parade in his honor. Of course no one in Cicero had ever heard of Baltimore’s Peter Aiello, but Capone wanted a crowd, and he got one. Literally thousands lined the streets to cheer the bewildered stranger.
The Syndicate was now grossing $105 million a year, including the combined income from booze, gambling, vice, and to a diminishing degree (about $10 million) from extortion. Capone began dressing in grand style, typified by brightly colored $5,000 suits and custom-made fedoras. His pals nicknamed him Snorky, slang for “elegant.”