Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [7]
Two years after Capone’s arrival in Chicago, Big Bill Thompson had to withdraw from the upcoming mayoral election in the wake of revelations of his corruption. He was replaced by William Dever who campaigned on a pledge of enforcing Prohibition. Torrio and Capone, who had had a good working relationship with Thompson, knew that under Dever they would have to be more circumspect about their activities. They looked to the sleepy suburb of Cicero, which had its own mayor and a police force separate from Chicago’s, as their new command center.
Cicero was one of Chicago’s western suburbs, dominated by the Western Electric Company which employed a fifth of its 40,000 inhabitants in making, so the company boasted, most of the world’s telephones. It was a quiet, prosperous place, its character determined by the hard-working, old-fashioned and, crucially, beer-loving Czech Bohemians who had settled there. Beer is an easy drink to produce but the most difficult to distribute unobtrusively because breweries and beer-trucks are large and conspicuous; more than any other kind of alcohol, it necessitated large-scale criminal activity.
Johnny Torrio set up Cicero’s first brothel in October 1923. At about the same time the Cotton Club, run by Al’s brother Ralph, was opened there; police files referred to it as a “whoopee spot.” Ralph also managed the nearby Stockade which was a sixty-girl brothel as well as a gambling den, weapons dump and hideout. He had received permission for his establishment after rousing the local police chief from his bed in the middle of the night, taking him to the town hall and kicking and beating him over the head with gun butts. Another brother, Frank, was given responsibility for dealing with Cicero’s administration, promising Capone support in return for non-interference in their affairs.
It was in this atmosphere, in the autumn of 1923, that an idealistic 21-year-old journalist named Robert St. John decided Cicero needed a newspaper that would stand up to the encroaching power of the Capone-Torrio organization. His weekly Cicero Tribune, regularly publishing exposés of criminal activity and attacking the alliance between the Capone family and the local political elite, soon had a circulation of ten thousand.
Al Capone responded quickly. He began targeting Tribune supporters: an advertiser might find the taxman on his doorstep, requesting old accounts; his usual parking place might be replaced by a fire hydrant; pernickety health inspectors might insist on stringent improvements to his workplace. As if by magic, though, all these restrictions and demands would melt away as soon as local businessmen began subscribing to the Capone-controlled Cicero Life instead of the Tribune. Not content with directing the town’s illegal activities, Torrio and the Capones set their sights on local government, paying and sponsoring Republican candidates for the primary elections in April 1924, speaking out about their desires to improve Cicero and “make it a real town.” St. John hung on, continuing to defy mob authority while watching his bribed and threatened reporters quit and his advertisers defect to the Cicero Life.
On election day Democrat activists and voters were intimidated or beaten by Capone’s men; ballot boxes were stolen, one election official was killed and others were kidnapped.
Although Chicago had no jurisdiction in Cicero, the recently installed Mayor Dever was persuaded to send a troop of plainclothes policemen in nine unmarked sedan cars to protect the suburb. St. John was watching from his office window when the procession of long black cars—identical to the ones used by gangsters—entered Cicero’s boundaries. At the same moment as the line of cars stopped abruptly and the plainclothes men spilled out of them, a neatly dressed man walked out of a house on to the street. St. John recognized him as Frank Capone. Turning, Capone reached for the pistol in his rear pocket as the