Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation

Chapter 1. The Big Fellow in the Windy City

9 $ “Honey, you have a nice ass, and I mean that as a compliment.” The year was 1917, the place was the Harvard Inn, a bar and restaurant in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, and the speaker of these unwelcome comments was a young waiter, Alphonse Capone, who had been eyeing the girl that evening. Her name was Lena Gallucio, and she was sitting on her much-admired posterior at a table with her brother Frank Gallucio. When Capone made his insulting remark Frank leaped to his feet, and the two men began a fierce struggle, in the course of which Frank pulled a knife and cut deep slashes in Capone’s face and neck. Frank and his sister fled the establishment, presumably without leaving a tip.1 If Gallucio’s knife had severed the waiter’s jugular vein, the world would never have heard of Al Capone. As it was, Capone survived the fight, but bore deep, embarrassing scars on his face for the rest of his life. At the urging of local underworld figures, Capone later made his peace with Gallucio and hired the man as a part-time bodyguard when the Chicago mob boss visited New York. This early episode in the life of the best-known crime lord of the Prohibition era demonstrates his impulsive nature and brawler instincts. It also demonstrates his gift for smoothing things over with words. Although he was just a waiter at the time he was already known in the New York underworld. A sixth-grade dropout, he had run errands for a noted mobster, John Torrio of Brooklyn, who in turn recommended c h a p t e r 1 The Big Fellow in the Windy City 10 The Rise Capone to the owner of the inn, Frankie Uale. (Frankie must have had a thing about the Ivy League because he changed his last name to Yale and chose Harvard as the name of his establishment.) After the Gallucio incident, Capone moved on with his life. He married an Irish girl, Mae Coughlin, and they had a baby boy. World War I was raging in Europe, and having a family enabled Capone to avoid the draft. For a time he worked in Baltimore, where he did legitimate bookkeeping at a construction company. But at some point in 1920–1921 he left behind that occupation to move to Chicago, the fast-growing metropolis of the Midwest, where John Torrio had a job for him in the world of crime. He purchased a home at 7244 South Prairie Avenue, where he was joined by his wife, son, mother, and siblings who moved to the Windy City from Brooklyn. A Chicago Tribune reporter, writing a decade later, described the newly arrived Capone as a loud dresser,“stout muscled, hard-knuckled; a vulgar person; a tough baby from Five Points, New York City.”2 Capone’s patron, John Torrio, was very different. Seventeen years older than Capone, Torrio was described by another Chicago newspaperman as a “short, dumpy, sallow ” figure, with a potbelly, chubby cheeks, and the demeanor of a “mild, benevolent little man.”3 He was soft-spoken and conservative, understated in the clothes he wore and the life he lived. Despite his immersion in the world of prostitutes, he remained faithful to his wife. Capone, however, had no such compunctions. Similarly, Torrio was not personally violent like so many other gang leaders and claimed later in life that he never fired a gun, a claim that certainly never fit Capone.4 But Torrio knew how to hire men who could commit the violence he sought. Torrio had left New York in 1909 to go to Chicago, where he handled business for Big Jim Colosimo, a flashy Chicago figure from an older generation whose specialty was running brothels. Colosimo had become rich in the prostitution business and was reluctant to branch out to bootlegging . Torrio, however, saw Prohibition as a way to make vast amounts of money. Colosimo was assassinated on May 11, 1920, and Torrio took over The Big Fellow in the Windy City 11 by expanding into bootlegging and bringing Capone to Chicago to assist him in the expansion of Big Jim’s empire. There is speculation that Torrio arranged for the Colosimo murder, and no culprit was ever found. Under Torrio, Capone began by managing the whorehouses that Colosimo had established. Chicago was notorious for its prostitution...