Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [10]
St. John took over the assignment himself with, one imagines, as much excitement as trepidation. Emptying his pockets of identification—for his name, as he thought, if not his face, would be well known to all Capone’s men—he entered the brothel which stood on a deserted road near the race-track. Posing as a customer, he was ushered through the small bar that served as shop-front into a bullet-razed passage closed off at each end by automatic doors. “Although the place had been open for business only about two weeks, the doors already looked like pieces of Swiss cheese and there were black stains on the floor and walls of the corridor.” From there he entered an anteroom where he paid $5 and waited his turn on a bench.
The clinical mood inside surprised St. John. It was, he said, “the antithesis of pleasure”: the girls, dressed in bras and panties, were “blasé and businesslike . . . as if they were selling ninety-eight-cent sweaters in a department-store bargain basement.” When his turn came, St. John went upstairs with a girl named Helen and persuaded her to allow him to interview her. After several hours, having extracted “enough material for a modern-day Moll Flanders,” he leapt from the window and rushed home to write his story.
When the next edition of the Cicero Tribune came out, carrying St. John’s revelations, the upright burghers of Cicero were finally impelled to protest against the rising tide of sin engulfing their town. Ministers spoke out against Capone and his men; outraged committees and delegations laid siege to City Hall. “Everywhere they were given promises of action,” wrote St. John. “Yet the weeks went by and nothing happened.” Nothing, that is, until one morning when a professional arsonist, paid $1,000 by the Cicero Citizens’ Association, burned down the rickety brothel St. John had visited. Care had been taken to ensure that the building was empty when the fire was started.
The fire trail led back to St. John, and Capone had no choice but to make an example of him. Murder was risky; St. John’s outspokenness about the Capones had made him too prominent a victim. Silence was all Capone required. A message was sent to St. John: Al and Ralph Capone were angry with him. Recklessly, St. John sent a message back. He was angry too, “angry that the whole lot of them had not yet decided to get out of Cicero.”
Two days later, as St. John walked to work, a black car screeched to a halt beside him and four men jumped out. As he dropped to the ground, curling up into a ball with his head buried in his arms, St. John recognized Ralph Capone. Using the butt end of a gun, a blackjack and a cake of soap in a woolen sock (a useful mob weapon which, when aimed at the base of the skull, caused maximum damage without leaving a mark), Capone’s men beat St. John unconscious. Two policemen stood by, watching. When they had finished—leaving St. John for dead—the four men got back into their car and drove away.
On the same day, St. John’s brother Archer, who worked for a newspaper in Berwyn, the town next to Cicero, was kidnapped, held in a remote hotel and later released into woodland. He did not publish the exposé he was planning to run on Capone’s designs on Berwyn. “BOY EDITORS BEATEN; KIDNAPPED” howled the Chicago newspapers. Both the Berwyn and the Cicero police forces issued statements that they were not going to investigate the crimes against the St. John brothers. Robert St. John spent a week in hospital recovering from his beating. When he tried to pay his bill, the cashier told him that a dark-complexioned man with a husky voice, very well dressed and with a diamond stick-pin in his tie, had paid the entire amount in cash. “He didn’t give his name. Just said he was a friend of yours.