reported in at the police station with their knees scraped up and hands bruised, their prisoners missing teeth. One bootlegger sat in a cell and sobbed into his hands. As a general rule, dry agents described mobsters strictly as dead-eyed murderers, nothing more. Eliot would do the same in his public comments, but he didn’t actually have such a black-and-white view of them. He hated arresting men at their homes, in front of their wives and children. “It was astonishing what good family men some of them were,” he would tell his wife two decades later.He added: “There would be a lot of emotion at the separation of the women and children from their men. In fact one of the hoodlums took it so hard he was sick all the way to the police station.”
Agents brought twenty-five gangsters to the Chicago Heights police station that morning, along with dozens of guns and hundreds of boxes of ammunition. Over at the distribution depot on East Fourteenth Street, men with axes split open barrels and watched beer rush into the street. They also found four hundred slot machines, which they bashed up with ball-peen hammers. At his office in downtown Chicago, George E. Q. Johnson took responsibility for the town’s takedown, declaring that Chicago Heights “had fallen into the hands of a syndicate which made millions of dollars through its monopoly of slot machines and booze.” The
Tribune
triumphantly announced that “Chicago Heights, known as the most lawless town in Cook county, has been cleaned up.”
By midday, paddy wagons ferried prisoners into the Loop, delivering them to the detectives’ bureau for questioning. Later, the police brought Picchi into the county jail so all of the Heights goons could give the suspected assassin a good long look. No one admitted knowing him.
“None of the prisoners is talking,” Jamie told the press. “Their silence smacks of the Mafia.” He insisted they planned on charging Picchi with the murder of Joe Martino.
Standing around in the Prohibition Bureau office, Eliot watched Jamie grandstand for reporters. He watched agents laughing and roughhousing. He didn’t want to join the celebration. He felt carved out, like he’d been kicked in the stomach. The exhilaration of the chase hadn’t lasted long; now a black cloud was following along behind it. This was nothing new to Eliot. He had battled depression his whole life and never understood where it came from or what it meant. Deciding not to wait for his brother-in-law, he climbed into his car and drove home.
CHAPTER 5
The Capone Fans
T he Chicago Heights operation was an unmistakable success. The newspaper headlines said so, as did the memos the local Prohibition office sent to headquarters in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, the one valuable conclusion the Chicago bureau office could draw from the demise of the Chicago Heights bootleg syndicate was that Joe Martino had been a small fish. He was mostly just a traffic cop directing booze between Chicago and the southern reaches of the state. Al Capone had owned him, just as Capone owned almost every bootlegger in northern Illinois.
This should not have been a surprise to the Prohibition Bureau. By now Alphonse Capone was the best-known man in Chicago. He had arrived in the city only nine years before, just as the Volstead Act was going into effect. At the time, he had been barely old enough to vote—not that he did—and as round and amiable as a vaudeville comic.Kids and mothers loved him. He set himself up as Al Brown, secondhand furniture dealer, with a storefront at 2220 South Wabash Avenue. His business card and dusty shop didn’t fool anyone. The distinctive scars along the left side of his face suggested that Capone wasn’t always as amiable as he appeared on first meeting. He glommed on to the notorious Johnny Torrio, becoming his right-hand man while running whores and providing muscle whenever and wherever needed. Capone had a soft spot for the prostitution game, but,
Agents brought twenty-five gangsters to the Chicago Heights police station that morning, along with dozens of guns and hundreds of boxes of ammunition. Over at the distribution depot on East Fourteenth Street, men with axes split open barrels and watched beer rush into the street. They also found four hundred slot machines, which they bashed up with ball-peen hammers. At his office in downtown Chicago, George E. Q. Johnson took responsibility for the town’s takedown, declaring that Chicago Heights “had fallen into the hands of a syndicate which made millions of dollars through its monopoly of slot machines and booze.” The
Tribune
triumphantly announced that “Chicago Heights, known as the most lawless town in Cook county, has been cleaned up.”
By midday, paddy wagons ferried prisoners into the Loop, delivering them to the detectives’ bureau for questioning. Later, the police brought Picchi into the county jail so all of the Heights goons could give the suspected assassin a good long look. No one admitted knowing him.
“None of the prisoners is talking,” Jamie told the press. “Their silence smacks of the Mafia.” He insisted they planned on charging Picchi with the murder of Joe Martino.
Standing around in the Prohibition Bureau office, Eliot watched Jamie grandstand for reporters. He watched agents laughing and roughhousing. He didn’t want to join the celebration. He felt carved out, like he’d been kicked in the stomach. The exhilaration of the chase hadn’t lasted long; now a black cloud was following along behind it. This was nothing new to Eliot. He had battled depression his whole life and never understood where it came from or what it meant. Deciding not to wait for his brother-in-law, he climbed into his car and drove home.
CHAPTER 5
The Capone Fans
T he Chicago Heights operation was an unmistakable success. The newspaper headlines said so, as did the memos the local Prohibition office sent to headquarters in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, the one valuable conclusion the Chicago bureau office could draw from the demise of the Chicago Heights bootleg syndicate was that Joe Martino had been a small fish. He was mostly just a traffic cop directing booze between Chicago and the southern reaches of the state. Al Capone had owned him, just as Capone owned almost every bootlegger in northern Illinois.
This should not have been a surprise to the Prohibition Bureau. By now Alphonse Capone was the best-known man in Chicago. He had arrived in the city only nine years before, just as the Volstead Act was going into effect. At the time, he had been barely old enough to vote—not that he did—and as round and amiable as a vaudeville comic.Kids and mothers loved him. He set himself up as Al Brown, secondhand furniture dealer, with a storefront at 2220 South Wabash Avenue. His business card and dusty shop didn’t fool anyone. The distinctive scars along the left side of his face suggested that Capone wasn’t always as amiable as he appeared on first meeting. He glommed on to the notorious Johnny Torrio, becoming his right-hand man while running whores and providing muscle whenever and wherever needed. Capone had a soft spot for the prostitution game, but,
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