Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation

Prologue

1 The patient admitted to Saint Mary of Nazareth Hospital Center, Chicago, on May 14, 1992, was an eighty-six-year-old retired businessman, grayhaired , feeble, and dying from congestive heart failure and acute respiratory failure. There was little the doctors could do to save him, and his family sorrowfully agreed that he should be removed from life support. He quietly passed away on the evening of May 27. After he died his corpse was taken to the hospital mortuary and then picked up by the MontclareLucania Funeral Home, where the body was prepared and placed in a casket . A Catholic priest led a brief prayer service, after which the body was driven in a hearse to the Queen of Heaven Cemetery for burial.1 It’s probable that among the nurses, physicians, orderlies, and undertakers who ministered to him at the time of his death one or more might have spotted an unlikely, faded relic on the weathered and wrinkled skin of the man’s right hand. It was a tattoo of a bluebird, with wings outstretched . When the man was alive, moving his thumb and trigger finger gave the bird the appearance of flapping its wings in flight. Perhaps the caregivers who saw that tattoo wondered how this old man came by this young man’s adornment and reflected on the passage from lively, frivolous youth to the somber end of life. The old man’s baptismal name was Antonino Leonardo Accardo, but he picked up other names as he made his way through life: Joe Batty, Joe $ p r o l o g u e The Bluebird Tattoo 2 Prologue Batters, Big Tuna, and just plain Tony. His business was crime. He started his criminal career while still a teenager, running errands for the Chicago gang known as the “Outfit,” which came to be headed by Al Capone. Accardo early on demonstrated the ability to use violence and got the nickname “Batters” for his aggressive beating of people who ran afoul of the gang. He moved up the ladder to become one of Capone’s trusted bodyguards. His rise continued after Capone went to prison, and by the mid 1970s Accardo was the leader of the Outfit. Accardo acquired his bluebird tattoo in Atlantic City in May 1929, shortly after his twenty-third birthday. He was providing protection for Capone at a conference of mob leaders. Maybe the spring weather and the pleasant breeze from the Atlantic Ocean inspired him to get a tattoo incised on his hand. Capone, thinking it a bad idea for the young man to give himself that identifying mark, is supposed to have said,“Kid, that will cost you as much money and trouble as it would to wear a badge with the word ‘thief’ on it.”2 As Accardo grew older and became a respected mob capo, he came to dislike the tattoo as too undignified, and he covered it with his left hand when appearing in public.3 That bluebird tattoo might serve as a symbol of a different time in organized crime: the prosperous era of Prohibition, when young, ambitious criminals were on the make. Accardo was one of the last survivors of that era, and his tattoo offered him a constant reminder of that long ago time. The Prohibition Generation Cultural observers often speak of generations that shared common experiences . Consider, for example, the Lost Generation that came of age in World War I, their Greatest Generation offspring who went on to win the Second World War, and their self-centered children who comprise the Baby Boom generation. More recently, pop culture analysts have identi- fied Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, and the Millennial Generation. Traditionally, a generation is reckoned as a twenty-five-year span; anybody born in those The Bluebird Tattoo 3 years is considered a member of that generation. One of the finest analyses of the place of generations in American history was applied by historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick in a celebrated 1961 article,“The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution,” which sees the authors of the U.S. Constitution as members of a younger generation who viewed the world differently from their elders.4 This book applies a generational perspective to the gangsters of the Prohibition era, men born in the quarter-century span roughly from 1880 to 1905, men who came to power...