Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [11]
Soon afterwards St. John asked a friend in the police department to issue warrants for the arrests of Ralph Capone and the three men who had beaten him up. “Al likes you,” said the friend, demonstrating an intimacy with Capone that surprised St. John. “He likes all newspapermen. But he likes Ralph better. So take it easy, kid!” But St. John refused to back down, and eventually the friend told him to come back to his office at nine the following morning to collect the warrants.
Al Capone arrived at the police station at the same time as St. John, and they were shown up to the same room. Capone thrust his hand towards St. John. “Glad to meet you,” he said. “We’ll get this over quick.” Disingenuously, Capone explained that he had given orders for St. John not to be touched—“I tell them, “Let the kid alone’”—but that his men had been drunk and “forgot.” “Sure I got a racket,” he told St. John. “So’s everybody. Name me a guy that ain’t got a racket. Most guys hurt people. I don’t hurt nobody. Only them that get in my way. I give away a lot of dough. Maybe I don’t support no college or build no liberries, but I give it to people that need it, direct.”
This was Al Capone’s cherished sentimental side, the side that appealed, as one criminal acquaintance put it, to people’s hopes as well as to their fears: buying bicycles for kids on the street; sending flowers to commemorate graduations, weddings or funerals; later, during the early years of the Depression, opening soup kitchens and distributing free milk to poor children. He began peeling bill after bill off a large roll of leaves, slang for hundred-dollar bills. “Now look, you lost a lotta time from your office . . . I guess you lost your hat . . . You had to get your clothes fixed up . . . I’ve taken care of the hospital bill, but there was the doctor . . .” Furious, St. John got up and left the room, slamming the door on Capone and his money.
Al Capone may not have been able to charm St. John, but he could shut down his mouthpiece. Soon afterwards he bought out the other investors in the Tribune, leaving St. John in the unhappy position of being employed—at a gallingly generous salary—by the organization he had been risking his life to condemn. With nowhere else to turn, he fled Chicago for a job in Vermont. He became a successful foreign correspondent and never returned to his hometown.
With St. John out of the way, Capone was able to return his attention to restoring peace to Chicago’s streets—but by peace what he really meant was restoring his own authority. “I told them [his rivals] we’re making a shooting gallery out of a great business and nobody’s profiting from it,” he recalled later. “There’s plenty of beer business for everybody—why kill each other over it?”
But the violence continued to escalate. In 1928 there were nearly twice as many murders in Chicago as in New York. The city’s mob warfare culminated in the notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 when in a savagely premeditated attack Capone’s men (it is thought), disguised as policemen, machine-gunned down seven rivals. No witnesses could be persuaded to testify and not one of the killers—or his bosses—was brought to trial; to this day there is debate about what actually happened.
Capone, who had stepped deliberately into the spotlight by seeking public admiration and approval, was the most prominent mobster in the United States. Even though he shared responsibility for the rise in crime with other gangsters, they had not courted publicity. People associated Capone with crime, and believed that crime rates would fall if he were removed. Despite his best efforts to convince them of his integrity, Capone’s customers—the public—had finally turned against him.
In 1931 he was tried for tax evasion—bizarrely, for not paying taxes on the profits of his illegal activities. Although he had taken the precaution of bribing the entire jury, on the first day of the trial he arrived in court to find that every member had been replaced; he was duly convicted. Al Capone spent the next eleven years in prison, first