Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [23]
But before concluding this chapter, I also want to speak of another aspect of Chicago life for which, rightly or wrongly, the city has become famous (or infamous) – organized crime, and the G-men and police who oppose it.
Just as Chicago has become big in everything else, it has (if you haven’t heard) also been big in crime. Big Jim Colosimo, Johnny Torrio, Al Capone – all were ruthless, powerful syndicate rulers, and all operated in Chicago. They had a supporting cast of hundreds, featuring such “names” as “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, and Louie “Little New York” Campagna. Their gunmen plotted hundreds of killings – two hundred in one four-year period – including such “spectaculars” as plugging hoodlum Dion O’Banion in his florist shop as he arranged flowers for another criminal’s funeral, and machine-gunning his successor, Hymie Weiss, in front of the Near North Side’s Holy Name Cathedral (you can still see bullet scars on the building). Early in the thirties there even was one battle at high noon near the “world’s busiest corner,” State and Madison.
Times have changed since the days of open gang warfare, which culminated in the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, when seven members of Bugs Moran’s gang were slain in a garage at 2122 North Clark. Hoodlums continue in their insidious rackets and vice, as in almost every other large city. But now underworld disagreements are handled more discreetly. (You’ve heard of the syndicate’s new five-passenger compact car? Rides two in the front seat, two in the rear, and one in the trunk.)
Al Capone, the former New Yorker who once headquartered in fifty rooms of Chicago’s Metropole Hotel, is dead. His brother “Bottles” is busy with a $210,000 back-tax case. His widow Mae and son Albert, now Miami residents, spend most of their time in filing lawsuits connected with movies and TV shows about Scarface Al. As one wag put it: “They want residuals.” And pending an appeal to higher courts, for a time Tony Accardo, Capone’s syndicate heir, was under Federal sentence for income-tax evasion.
Capone gloried in violence, but Accardo remains the man in the gray flannel suit. While Al loved publicity, and made conspicuous appearances at night clubs and speak-easies with his entourage, Tony shies from it. Except for going deep-sea fishing in Florida, Tony has lived quietly with his family of four in a $6oo,ooo-home at 915 Franklin in River Forest (complete with high fence, indoor pool, two bowling alleys, a billiard room, and a one-piece onyx bathtub with gold-plated faucets). His only lavish entertaining is the huge lawn picnics every Fourth of July for “business associates” and their friends, and special affairs such as the marriage last year of his daughter Linda. On that occasion most of the underworld elite turned out, but they scarcely enjoyed it – reporters, photographers, and FBI men in the crowd outnumbered the rice-throwers.
Despite the hoods’ having gone “respectable,” however, they’re no less intolerable a cancer on society than before. (It is no worse in Chicago, I hasten to add, than in any other large city. Senator Kefauver, after all, didn’t stop with Chicago in his crime committee hearings.) The annual cost of crime to Our Town, according to ex-FBI man Virgil Peterson, head of the watchdog Chicago Crime Commission, is $750,000,000 a year – more than $200 for every