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Many of the old Capone friends and enemies would be absent when "The Big Fellow" returned to town. He might have seen them had he been released from jail a week earlier, for they were on hand (by special permission of the police) for gangland's latest, grandest funeral, that of John ("Dingbat") Oberta. Joe Saltis, retired beer chief, came down from his place at Saltisville, Wis.., to brag of the $100,000 he had invested there in a nine-hole golf course, a clubhouse "that sleeps 26 people." George ("Bugs") Moran, who lost seven of his north side hirelings in the St. Valentine's Massacre (TIME, Feb. 25, 1929) informed Chief Stege that he was now "out of the booze racket," that he was running a $125,000 dry cleaning plant. Newsmen, familiar with "blind activities" of gunsters, smiled wisely at these claims.
It was not Capone who started the murderous Chicago rackets which put the Underworld in Rolls-Royces and furnished their coffins with $15,000 orchid spreads. But he had had a large hand in racketeering's perfection. Born in Brooklyn of an Italian family, he was a "good boy" until he was 17. Then, in a Greenpoint pool room, he knocked down a stranger, thought he had killed him. A cousin in Brooklyn's "Five Points" gang hid him away from the police. When the stranger recovered, young Al was already at work on small "jobs." In a Coney Island fight he was slashed across the left cheek, though later he like to insist that the scar came from War service with the Lost Battalion.
In 1921, Capone went to Chicago as bodyguard for Johnny Torrio, hired by Jim Colosimo, big restaurant and brothel man. Prohibition started to create a public demand for liquor. Gangs were formed to supply the demand, to beat off rivals. Capone began as a brothel keeper, which started his police record with a $50 fine. In 1923 Colosimo was murdered. Torrio took command of the liquor and vice gang, Capone becoming his No. 1 assistant. Fierce was the hostility between the South Side gang under Torrio and the North Side gang under Dion O'Banion. In 1924 O'Banion was shot down in his florist shop. A few months later Torrio was mangled with slugs, fled to Europe. It was then that Capone took charge, pushed his program of expansion; and then that "Bugs" Moran, supposed successor to O'Banion, became his bitterest gangland enemy.
With expansion, as in any well-run business, came prosperity. Capone took over the cross-roads village of Cicero, outside the city limits, made it a special gambling and vice resort. He started dog-racing. He developed his liquor trade in every direction. When men got in his way, his hirelings shot them down. A famed Capone saying: "It's bootleg when it's on the trucks but when your host hands it to you on 'a silver tray, it's hospitality."
Capone became a marked man. When he want to the theatre he would buy out almost a whole row and string blue-jowled body guards out on each side of him. He made millions, spent millions, thought nothing of losing $100,000 in an evening's crap game. His income became a subject of U. S. scrutiny. Last week he faced charges of evading his Federal tax on enormous profits.