Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [63]
That day, Al Capone went to a Chicago hardware store and ordered three.
Capone first used his tommy guns on April 27, 1926, in an attack that would soon become a staple of the gangster-film genre. He and associates set out to kill a bootlegger named James Doherty. Lumbering along in a black, armored Cadillac limousine, Capone caught up with Doherty as he and two other men stepped from a Lincoln and made their way toward one of the many illegal saloons then operating in Chicago. Capone and his gunmen opened fire, killing all three men. They didn’t realize it until later, but they had killed an unintended victim. It was a mistake that would, five years later, prove an important contributor to Capone’s conviction for tax evasion.
One of the dead men proved to be a twenty-six-year-old Illinois state prosecutor named William McSwiggin, known as the “hanging prosecutor” for his aggressive pursuit of gangsters. In response, police raided Capone’s headquarters, seizing the ledgers that Internal Revenue agent Frank Wilson would later discover at the back of a file cabinet and that would provide the first solid evidence of Capone’s income.
The attack triggered an arms race. Capone’s enemy, Hymie Weiss, whose gang controlled the North Side of Chicago, acquired Thompsons and, on September 20, 1926, launched a retaliatory attack against Capone, the most spectacular—if ineffective—attack of the Prohibition era, dubbed the “Siege of Cicero.”
Capone’s headquarters were situated in the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois, some two blocks from the Chicago line. Shortly after one P.M. on September 20, 1926, Capone and his associates were seated in the Hawthorne’s first-floor restaurant, which was packed with other diners. They heard the telltale chatter of a machine gun somewhere down the street, but none of the screams and sounds of shattering glass that tended to accompany that kind of attack. Intrigued, they went to the windows of the restaurant—exactly what Hymie Weiss’s men had intended. That first machine gun was a lure; it was loaded with blanks.
A Capone bodyguard quickly recognized the trap and forced Capone down. As everyone in the restaurant hit the floor, a convoy of ten limousines and touring cars slowly made its way up the street, machine guns and shotguns firing from every window, pumping some one thousand rounds into the room.
No one in the room was hit. Outside, two members of a Louisiana family—the mother and her five-year-old son—were slightly wounded. A minor member of Capone’s gang who had been standing outside the restaurant was nicked by a bullet.
The Thompson submachine gun quickly migrated from Chicago. It turned up next during a gang war in southern Illinois, which even featured dynamite dropped from a biplane. (The bombs never went off.) Philadelphia experienced its first tommy-gun attack on February 25, 1927, New York on July 28, 1928.
The violence became more grotesque, less the “innocent” battlings of bad guys against bad guys.
On February 14, 1929, a Cadillac with a siren and gong pulled up in front of the S.M.C. Cartage Company in Chicago. Two men in police uniforms and two in civilian clothes—one wearing a chinchilla coat—stepped from the car. The officers entered the building and announced a raid, ordering the seven men inside to put their hands up and face the wall. Six of the men had ties to a gang led by George “Bugs” Moran; the seventh was a young optician named Reinhart H. Schwimmer, who had become enthralled with the mob and had stopped by that day for coffee.
The two civilians, each carrying a Thompson, entered next and