Operating from his headquarters at the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero with its bulletproof shutters on every window , Capone dispatched his enforcers. On April 27, , a five-car motorcade carrying Capone's trigger men swept by members of a rival bootlegging gang as they left a bar and opened fire with machine guns. One of the men killed, it turned out, was not a known bootlegger but rather Bill McSwiggin, an assistant state's attorney.
Chicagoans were used to reports of gang members killing other gang members, but the murder of a top law enforcement officer was something new--and the public looked for a response to the growing violence in their city. Authorities charged Capone with the McSwiggin murder, but the fix was in and, six grand juries and no indictments later, charges were dropped. By , while still maintaining offices in Cicero, Capone had moved his headquarters to fifty rooms of Chicago's Hotel Metropole.
With the city's new mayor, Big Bill Thompson, in his pocket, Capone carried out his illegal bootlegging, racketeering, and gambling businesses with virtual impunity. His enforcers carried officially stamped cards issued by the city that read: "To the Police Department--you will extend the courtesies of this department to the bearer.
When Chicago's winters were to much to bear, Capone headed south to his luxurious Miami estate , surrounded by a ten-foot concrete wall, where he could direct operations poolside or from his thirty-two foot cabin cruiser. Capone liked to think of himself not as a ruthless criminal, but as "a public benefactor. Capone chose to view the killing of rival gang members as a necessary evil: "killing a man in defense of your business" is like "the law of self-defense, On May 7, , Capone held a banquet to which he invited three former associates, men he knew had joined in a plot to assassinate him, but men who still thought they were on good terms with Capone.
Drunk and full, the three men suddenly found themselves surrounded by Capone's men who tied each to a chair. Capone pulled out a baseball bat and with shocking deliberation beat each man to death. The best known of the Capone-ordered killings came on Valentine's Day While seven member of George "Bugs" Moran's bootlegging gang waited in a Chicago warehouse, expecting the arrival of a truckload of whiskey, a Cadillac carrying six of Capone's men, four dressed in police uniforms, pulled up in front of the warehouse.
The members of the Moran gang fell amidst a hail of bullets from machine guns, bodies strewn against a yellow brick wall.
Few doubted who the killers were. Two years earlier, in United States v. Sullivan , the Supreme Court had ruled that the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination did not protect Manley Sullivan, a bootlegger convicted of failing to file a return showing the profits from his illegal businesses. For the day-to-day job of gathering incriminating evidence for Capone's tax evasion case, Irey turned to Frank Wilson, his most aggressive and relentless investigator.
Frank Wilson and his team of five other Treasury investigators set up offices in the Chicago Post Office Building and set about the job of building a case against Capone. Capone made their task difficult by not maintaining a bank account and never signing any checks or receipts. They uncovered purchases of high-end furniture, custom-made shirts, diamond-studded belt buckles , gold-plated dinner service , hotel suites, and a Lincoln limousine.
While such unusual extravagance does not in itself prove taxable income, a juror could easily draw such an inference. While successful in tracking down evidence of expenses, investigators encountered considerable difficulty in finding direct evidence of income.
Wilson described most as either "hostile to government and ready to give perjured testimony" or "so full of fear of the Capone organization To convict Capone would require help from inside Capone's illicit operation, but--for reasons all too obvious--few on the inside wanted to step forward to help the government make its case. One who did was Eddie O'Hare, owner of the patent for the mechanical rabbit used in greyhound racing. O'Hare ran dog racing tracks for the Capone syndicate in the Chicago area, as well as in Florida and Massachusetts.
Years later, just days before Capone's release from prison, O'Hare would pay the ultimate price for the leads he provided the government over the course of their two-year investigation.
While driving on a Chicago street, he was gunned down by two men in a passing car. In , Chicago's new international airport was named in Edward's memory. The first big break in the investigation came in the summer of when Wilson stumbled across three bound ledgers seized in a raid of one of Capone's establishments.
The ledger was divided into columns with labels such as "Craps," "21," and "Roulette. Building on the ledger evidence, Wilson collected sworn testimony from persons whose participation in a citizen's raid on a Cicero gambling hall had left them convinced beyond any doubt that Capone was the proprietor of the place.
An even more significant potential witness was located by comparing the handwriting in the ledger with that on deposit slips from local banks. Investigators identified the likely author of the ledger as Leslie Shumway, the same man who signed deposit slips that turned up at a small Cicero bank. Agents tracked Shumway to Florida, where they interrupted a breakfast at his home to offer him a ride down to the Miami Federal Building to talk to agents.
Threatened with a not-so-secret subpoena and well aware of what Capone might do to someone about to disclose embarrassing facts to the government, Shumway agreed to talk. In his affidavit, Shumway described the nature of the gambling businesses and stated that "I took orders relating to the business [from] Mr.
Alphonse Capone. In April , Capone's tax attorney, Lawrence Mattingly, contacted Treasury and expressed the desire to have his client meet with agents to settle his indebtedness with the government. In response to the question, "How long, Mr. Capone, have you enjoyed a large income? As he prepared to leave the room after the interview, he inquired, "How's your wife, Wilson?
On 17 October , he was found guilty on five charges of tax evasion and later sentenced to 11 years in prison. He was sent to Atlanta penitentiary in , then transferred to the newly opened Alcatraz amid rumours he had been receiving special treatment. His health deteriorated in prison, the result of late-stage syphilis. Though paroled in , he never returned to gangland politics and retired to his mansion in Palm Island a different man — according to his physician, he had the mental capacity of a year-old.
He died of a heart attack in He even managed to broker an amnesty between rival gangsters, and for two months the killing and violence ceased. But Chicago was firmly in the grip of gangsters and Capone appeared beyond the reach of the law. Soon infighting between rival gangsters escalated into street violence and frequent hijackings of Capone's whiskey transports became a big problem.
One major thorn in the side for Capone was Yale. Once a powerful associate, he was now seen as the main instigator of disruptions to Capone's whiskey business. One Sunday afternoon, Yale met his end with the first use of a "Tommy gun" against him.
Capone also had to deal with rival gangster Bugs Moran and his North Siders gang, who had been a threat for years. Moran had even once tried to kill Capone's colleague and friend Jack McGurn.
The decision by Capone and McGurn to avail themselves of Moran was to lead to one of the most infamous gangland massacres in history — the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. On Thursday, February 14, , at in the morning, Moran and his gang were lured by a bootlegger into a garage to buy whiskey.
McGurn's men would be waiting for them, dressed in stolen police uniforms; the idea being that they would stage a fake raid. McGurn, like Capone, made sure he was far away and checked into a hotel with his girlfriend.
When McGurn's men thought they saw Moran, they got into their police uniforms and drove over to the garage in a stolen police car.
The bootleggers, caught in the act, lined up against the wall. McGurn's men took the bootleggers' guns and opened fire with two machine guns. All the men except Frank Gusenberg were killed outright in cold blood. The plan appeared to go brilliantly except for one major detail: Moran was not among the dead. Moran had seen the police car and took off, not wanting to be caught up in the raid.
Even though Capone was conveniently in Florida, the police and the newspapers knew who had staged the massacre. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre became a national media event immortalizing Capone as the most ruthless, feared, smartest and elegant of gangland bosses. Even while powerful forces were amassing against him, Capone indulged in one last bloody act of revenge — the killing of two Sicilian colleagues whom he believed had betrayed him.
Capone invited his victims to a sumptuous banquet where he brutally pulverized them with a baseball bat. Capone had observed the old tradition of wining and dining traitors before executing them. Somewhat ironically, it was the pen pushers from the tax office who posed the greatest threat to the gangsters' bootlegging empires.
In May , the Supreme Court ruled that a bootlegger had to pay income tax on his illegal bootlegging business. Capone left for Miami with his wife and son and bought Palm Island estate, a property that he immediately started to renovate expensively. This gave Elmer Irey his chance to document Capone's income and spending.
But Capone was clever. Every transaction he made was on a cash basis. The only exception was the tangible assets of the Palm Island estate, which was evidence of a major source of income. I want that man in jail. Mellon set out to get the necessary evidence both to prove income tax evasion and to amass enough evidence to prosecute Capone successfully for Prohibition violations. Eliot Ness , a dynamic young agent with the U. Prohibition Bureau, was charged with gathering the evidence of Prohibition violations.
He assembled a team of daring young men and made extensive use of wiretapping technology. While there was doubt that Capone could be successfully prosecuted for Prohibition violations in Chicago, the government was certain it could get Capone on tax evasion.
In May , Capone went to a "gangster" conference in Atlantic City. Afterward, he saw a movie in Philadelphia. When leaving the cinema, he was arrested and imprisoned for carrying a concealed weapon. Capone was soon incarcerated in the Eastern Penitentiary, where he stayed until March 16, He was later released from jail for good behavior but was put on America's "Most Wanted" list, which publicly humiliated a mobster who so desperately wanted to be regarded as a worthy man of the people.
Elmer Irey undertook a cunning plan to use undercover agents posing as hoods to infiltrate Capone's organization.
The operation took nerves of steel. Despite an informer ending up with a bullet in his head before he could testify, Elmer managed to amass enough evidence through his detectives, posing as gangsters, to try Capone in front of a jury.
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