Chicago was strident, corrupt, lavish, fat from war contracts in 1919 when a young hoodlum from Brooklyn slipped into Diamond Jim Colosimo's South Side underworld and muttered his name. The hoodlum, branded on one swart cheek by the razor memento of the Neapolitan Camorra, was Al Capone.
Prohibition, an experiment noble in purpose, was about to begin. Midnight on Jan. 16, 1920, it went into effect. Five months later, guns barked and drilled plump Diamond Jim Colosimo dead as a herring in his own restaurant. The murder was a clue to the sudden bustle in the underworld. Colosimo, owner of brothels, had tried to bite off too much of the new business in illicit booze. That killing set the pattern for many more.
To get and hold the easy pickings of bootlegging, the U. S. underworld went to war. It was an internecine affair of ambush and the double cross. Along Jersey highways from the shore, where rum runners landed their cargoes, runners and highjackers fought it out in the night. In New York City, men were shot discreetly in basement saloons. In Detroit and St. Louis, guns banged on street corners, men died at high noon.
In Chicago, Colosimo's murder moved Capone up. Now he was cheek by jowl with Diamond Jim's lieutenant, Johnny Torrio. The two worked well together. In four years Capone & Torrio ruled Cicero, the Chicago suburb whose name has been notorious ever since. Only disputant of their power was Dion O'Banion, on Chicago's North Side, who ran a flower shop as a sideline, specialized in floral pieces for gangster funerals, a highly lucrative trade. O'Banion said he hated Wops. One November noonday three men came to his shop, riddled him with bullets and left him sprawling on a pile of ferns. Among the tributes around O'Banion's $10,000 casket was a basket of roses tagged: "From Al."
The O'Banion mob was wild. In a cavalcade of seven cars, led by Hymie Weiss they went openly to Cicero's Hawthorne Hotel, Capone's headquarters, sprayed the windows with Thompson submachine guns. Capone crouched out of harm.
All the brash ones died. Colosimo and O'Banion had been too brash. So was Hymie Weiss. Weiss was shot down several months later in front of the Holy Name Cathedral on Superior Street. Others died in doorways, in telephone booths, in alleys, in bed, at the wheels of their expensive cars. In the decade there were 4,242 homicides on the blotter of the Chicago police alone, most of them unsolved. But nobody shot Capone.
The Brooklyn boy was not brash. He was smart, and a coward. It was a healthy combination. Johnny Torrio was shot up and fled. The last of the opposition, remnants of the O'Banion gang, were ambushed in a Clark Street garage on St. Valentine's Day in 1929, machine-gunned.
Capone, secure behind his bulletproof vest, his gunmen, his cordon of attorneys, his wall of alibis, was beyond the law. He was said to have $15,000,000 set aside just to grease his way out of trouble. He was arrested and questioned about the killing of Johnny Duffy, and released; arrested and questioned in the killing of Joe Howard, released again. He was indicted for violation of the Prohibition law in 1926; the indictment was quashed for lack of evidence. No one ever testified that the elegantly porcine hoodlum ever committed a murder.