Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [6]
Einstein reckoned that in most cities it took just half an hour to get a drink—although in Pittsburgh it took only eleven minutes and in New Orleans a matter of seconds. He and Smith had more trouble in Chicago. When they arrived they were recognized immediately and closely followed throughout their stay. Al Capone was taking no chances.
The Capone family had landed in New York from Naples in 1894, five years before Alphonse was born, the fourth of nine children. His father Gabriel worked as a barber and his mother Teresa was a seamstress. Like most immigrants from the more deprived parts of Europe, neither Gabriel nor Teresa could speak English or read and write. The Promised Land, increasingly wary of new arrivals flooding its shores, offered less succor and opportunity than they must have hoped. On average, an Italian-born laborer in New York in 1910 earned about $10 a week—roughly a third less than his “native-born” American counterpart. Existing home-country ties of family and community assumed even greater importance in this hostile environment.
Al Capone arrived in Chicago from Brooklyn in 1921, aged twenty-two, at the invitation of the racketeer Johnny Torrio. Already marked by vicious scars on the left side of his face, Capone was a rising talent in the underworld. He had been running errands for Torrio and his gangster associates, Frankie Yale and Lucky Luciano, in Brooklyn since his early teens, finding in the gang mentality of New York a sense of identity and belonging that was painfully absent in the lives of most Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Capone was intelligent and ambitious, but legitimate outlets for his energies and talents did not exist: crime offered him the chance to make it big.
At the hub of a burgeoning railroad network and ideally placed to distribute timber, ice and grain around the country, Chicago in the early 1920s was a town on the make—a Capone of a city—fueled by brutal, frontier vitality, the scent of freshly made money in the air. Shining new-built skyscrapers soared perhaps twenty stories heavenwards, steel indicators of the city’s lofty ambitions; grimy suburbs, filled with immigrants of all races and colors—Southern blacks, Russian Jews, Italians like Capone himself—sprawled out round the center, providing the labor on which the city’s wealth was built and the markets it would service.
Long before Capone’s arrival, Chicago had been home to a flourishing criminal population. Racketeering, gambling and political corruption were commonplace, but vice was Chicago’s particular specialty. White slaves—young girls forced into prostitution—were “broken in,” or repeatedly raped, before being sold on to brothels. From 1900 to 1911 the Everleigh Club, run by a pair of stately sisters, Ada and Minna, was the most opulent and expensive bordello in the country. The Levee was so notoriously unruly a district, populated by street walkers, that police officers did not dare try to enforce the law on its streets until it was closed down in 1912. Pimps and madams each had their own union-like associations (respectively the Cadets’ Protective Association and the Friendly Friends) which raised slush funds with which to pay off the police force. The reign of Big Bill Thompson, the city’s crooked mayor since 1915, had only reinforced these traditions. It was appropriate, therefore, that although Al Capone’s business card read “Second-Hand Furniture Dealer” his first job in Chicago was managing the Four Deuces, Johnny Torrio’s headquarters, a whorehouse, saloon and gambling den. In 1924 police seized the Four Deuces’ ledgers which revealed Capone’s methodical business records—detailed lists of big-spending clients and police and Prohibition agents