Episode #223 - What's True About Al Capone? (Part II)

Audival's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you.

When it comes to what kind of romance you're into, you don't have to choose just one.

Fancy a dallions with a duke, or maybe a steamy billionaire.

You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field.

And if nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm.

Discover modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Maas and Rebecca Yaros, plus regency favorites like like Bridgerton and Outlander.

And of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wondery.

That's audible.com slash wondery.

In the early 1930s, Hollywood fell in love with gangsters.

Tales of crime and violent street life had provided inspiration for films since the silent era, but at the dawn of the 30s, a rash of new movies hit American screens that solidified the image of the cigar chomping, machine gun toting, pop culture hoodlum.

1931 saw the release of City Streets starring Gary Cooper, Little Caesar, starring Edward G.

Robinson, and Public Enemy, starring the ultimate gangster actor James Cagney.

All of these movies traced the rise and fall of ambitious criminals caught up in the dangerous world of Prohibition-era racketeering.

And each film did its part to move the needle in terms of how much violence could be shown on the American screen.

In the case of Public Enemy, the director William Wellman apparently promised studio head Jack Warner that, quote, I'll bring you the toughest, most violent picture you ever did see, end quote.

Many critics agreed that he did just that.

James Cagney's unhinged and abusive crook would become the baseline for every bad gangster impression for the next century.

I didn't ask you for any lip.

I asked you if you had a drink.

I know, Tom, but, oh dear, I wish that.

Hey, you go down wishing stuff again.

I wish you was a wishing well.

That I could tie a bucket to you and sink you.

Ah, you gotta love it.

But in 1932, all of those films were outdone by a movie the magazine Harrison's Reports called, quote, the most demoralizing gangster picture ever produced, end quote.

The New York Times agreed, saying that the new film, quote, made all the other gangster pictures appear almost effeminate, end quote.

The movie that garnered these shocked reviews was Scarface, a picture produced by the eccentric American millionaire Howard Hughes.

The director of the film was Howard Hawkes, a soon-to-be Hollywood legend in his own right, who critic Roger Ebert would later salute as, quote, one of the greatest American directors of pure movies, end quote.

These men set out to top what had come before in gangster cinema, and according to many critics, they did just that.

But despite the fact that the film still managed to shock many viewers in 1932, The final cut was a watered-down and heavily censored version of the filmmaker's original vision.

Many of the most popular crime films up to that point had been set in gangland Chicago.

Both Little Caesar and Public Enemy used the still smoldering gang wars in that city to shape their plots.

But where those earlier films had only winked at the real-life gangsters that served as their inspiration, Scarface claimed to be torn directly from the headlines.

The film's protagonist, Tony Camanti, was a Brooklyn-born Italian-American with some distinctive facial scars who was ready to use whatever means necessary to rise to the top of the Chicago crime pyramid.

If it wasn't obvious enough who the character was supposed to be based on, the film's title removed any doubt.

Scarface was Al Capone.

Well,

kinda.

The screenplay was based on the 1930 novel Scarface, itself a pulpy, heavily fictionalized take on the life of Capone.

But the original draft of the screenplay was judged to be too bland.

So a new screenwriter, Ben Hecht, was brought in by the filmmakers.

Hecht had reported on crime in Chicago and had allegedly rubbed elbows with some guys connected to Al Capone's outfit.

Hecht also had a certain flair for for the sensational.

This Chicago import and Howard Hawkes apparently got along famously and banged out a new script for Scarface in 11 booze-fueled days.

Hawkes would later comment that, quote, Ben's work was brilliant.

Of course, he knew a lot about Chicago, so he didn't do any research, end quote.

Truly, Scarface is the kind of movie that feels like it was written by someone who had heard every rumor, but hadn't bothered to check on any of them.

Not only was the original script violent, Hecht promised 25 on-screen deaths, but many critics claimed that there were probably as many as 50, it also served as an indictment of corrupt American politicians who had been bought by the bootleggers.

The original script included scenes where the Illinois Attorney General parties with gangsters, accepts handsome bribes, and then publicly denounces them for show.

But most controversial of all was the script's depiction of Tony Scarface Comanti.

Comanti is violent, greedy, and ambitious, but he's also presented as possessing a certain charm and a crazed bravery.

In the original script, the movie climaxes with Tony being pinned down by police in his fortified apartment while he fires back at the cops with his trusted Tommy gun.

Only after his building is bombarded with tear gas and then set on fire does Tony try to escape.

When he comes out the front door with his gun blazing, he is only felled once he runs out of ammunition.

The original script even added the detail that as Tony fell to the ground in a hail of police bullets, the audience would be able to hear the click, click, click of his machine gun attempting to fire.

This ending is almost Shakespearean, with Tony playing the role of Macbeth dying with his sword in his hand.

Or, as Hollywood historian Gregory Black puts it, quote, in the original, Tony dies, if not in a blaze of glory, at at least fighting by his own standards.

End quote.

But at the time, this was simply too much for a newly empowered group of American censors.

In 1930, William H.

Hayes, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, or the MPPDA, adopted the first version of a new production code meant to impose new moral standards on the American film industry.

In 1934, these standards would harden into what was known as the Hayes Code, a conservative set of restrictions meant to keep depictions of sexuality, violence, and anything deemed improper out of Hollywood films.

The code was also deeply concerned with depictions of criminality.

Criminals could not be shown as glamorous, admirable, or even morally gray.

Law and order always needed to triumph, and the criminal always needed to face justice.

Under Hayes, no one could get away with a crime in an American movie.

In 1932, the code was still taking shape, but the Hayes office decided that Scarface was a picture that required extra attention.

In fact, the office's experience with Scarface would contribute to the final 1934 version of the production code.

Right off the bat, the original script was considered completely inappropriate for American audiences.

Not only was an incestuous relationship hinted at between Tony and his sister, the protagonist, Tony Camante, was just too damn magnetic.

After reviewing the script, the Hayes office told producer Howard Hughes, quote, under no circumstances is this film to be made.

If you are foolhardy enough to make Scarface, this office will make certain it will never be released, end quote.

Now, at first, Howard Hughes felt like he could snub his nose at the censors.

What could they really do?

So he told the director to forge ahead, William Hayes be damned.

But it soon became clear that the Hayes office had teeth, and if changes weren't made to the script, the movie would never be seen, and Hughes would take a huge financial loss.

So Scarface was tweaked.

First, the name of the film was changed to Scarface, Shame of the Nation, to really hammer home that gangsters were bad.

Then there were new title cards added to the start of the film, which read, quote, this picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty.

Every incident in this picture is the reproduction of an actual occurrence, and the purpose of this picture is to demand of the government, what are you going to do about it?

The government is your government.

What are you going to do about it?

End quote.

That final you was both capitalized and underlined.

And just in case audiences forgot that message halfway through the film, right in the middle, a scene was inserted to reiterate it.

The venial bought-off Illinois politicians from the first draft were removed and replaced with zealous campaigners against organized crime who appear for one scene and one scene only to pontificate about deporting Italians and declaring martial law before disappearing from the film never to return.

But the biggest change was with the ending.

In the new draft, instead of Tony going out with his hand on his gun, he shoots at the cops for a little while before being smoked out of his apartment by a single tear gas bomb.

When confronted by the police while trying to escape, he drops his gun, begs for his life, and says he'll rat on absolutely anyone the authorities want.

When he then tries to make a final cowardly run for it, he is shot down completely unarmed.

But even that ending was too much for the censors, who demanded that yet another ending be shot where Tony is taken alive, has a trial, and is dressed down by a judge before he's finally hung.

Even after all those revisions, many state censorship boards still refused to show the film.

But ironically, or perhaps predictably, The fight over censorship helped drum up publicity for a movie they don't want you to see.

Eventually, William Hayes himself weighed in, declaring that at least one cut of the film was acceptable for exhibition.

Eventually, all the state censors allowed Scarface to play.

The big issue was that even in the final watered-down version, Tony Camonte still seemed just a little too cool.

In one of the scenes inserted to help appease the censors, a newspaper man tries to talk the audience out of liking a character that we've been following right up to that point.

When one cub journalist points out that Scarface is a colorful character, the old square-jawed newsman spits back, quote,

colorful?

What color is a crawling louse?

Listen, that's the attitude of too many morons in this country.

They think these big hoodlums are some sort of demigods.

What do they do about a guy like Camante?

They sentimentalize, romanticize, and make jokes about him.

They had some excuse for glorifying our old Western badmen.

They met in the middle of the street at high noon and waited for each other to draw.

But these things sneak up, shoot a guy in the back, and then run away.

When I think of what goes on in the minds of these lice, I want to vomit.

End quote.

Now,

when when I was watching 1932's Scarface, that little moral homily kind of hit me because it points directly at a key part of the Al Capone myth.

And that's that people think that he's cool.

The movie itself can't help but give its Capone stand-in some wonderfully badass moments.

In one of the first scenes, Scarface is confronted by a group of police officers in a barber shop.

And just to show how unfussed he is by all of this, he lights a match for a cigarette off of one of the cops' badges.

Real nonchalant.

It's fearless, provocative, and honestly very cool.

It makes him the kind of villain you want to root for.

It's no wonder the censors were like, you should probably give some nameless characters a monologue in the middle of this to remind people that he's bad.

But I will say, those attempts come off as the teacher lecturing the class about everyone's favorite problem child.

I think that the tension at the heart of the Scarface censorship battle, in many ways, mirrors the tension that appears in biographies of the real-life Al Capone.

Every Capone biographer struggles with the question of how we're supposed to feel about this guy.

No one denies the violence that was unleashed during Capone's rise to the top of Chicago's criminal underworld.

But was that just business?

If you have to embrace a form of capitalism that's free of morality, Isn't Capone's empire the most honest version of that?

How should we feel about a death when the person who's been killed was a violent gangster?

If Chicago's gangs were at war, then should we understand the dead mobsters as soldiers and Capone as something like a general?

If not, then why not?

Is there a part of us that admires the ruthless ambition it takes to make it in that world?

New Yorker contributor Maria Kunakova once wrote, quote, we grant mobsters dignity because we enjoy contemplating the general principles by which they're supposed to have lived.

Omerta, standing up to unfair authority, protecting your own, end quote.

But perhaps those principles are just a myth.

Perhaps the supposed dignity of the gangster is the result of one of the best PR campaigns in American history.

A PR campaign that was helped by a movie like Scarface, despite the meddling censors.

How do we find our moral bearings when examining a figure like Al Capone?

Let's see what we can do today on our fake history.

Episode number 223, What's True About Al Capone, Part 2.

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

Before we get started this week, I just want to remind everyone listening that an ad-free version of this podcast is available through Patreon.

Just go to patreon.com/slash our fake history and check out all the cool stuff we have over there.

If you support at $5

or more every month, you not only get access to an ad-free feed, you also get hours and hours of extra patrons only our fake history goodness.

This includes my talk, Frauds, Imposters, and Humbug Artists, and patrons-only episodes on Eldorado, Nikola Tesla, Merlin, Vlad the Impaler, and my upcoming patrons-only show.

This monthly support is the best way to make sure that this podcast keeps coming.

So if you are digging our fake history and you want more of it, then head over to patreon.com slash ourfakehistory and find a level of support that works for you.

This week, we are returning to Gangland, Chicago in the 1920s to continue our look at the life and legend of Al Capone.

This is part two in what is going to be a three-part series on Capone.

So if you've not heard part one, then I would strongly suggest that you go back and give that a listen now.

In the first part, we looked at Al Capone's early life in Brooklyn, New York, and I did my best to bust some of the myths concerning Al Capone's childhood and adolescence.

I threw some cold water on the story that Capone's family immigrated to the United States illegally.

Far from being generational criminals, Capone's parents were respected law-abiding proprietors of a Brooklyn barber shop.

We also saw that while Al Capone had an undoubtedly scrappy childhood on the streets of turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, many of the stories about his youthful criminality are likely myths.

Even the oft-repeated story that he punched punched out his grade 6 teacher is heavily disputed.

From there, we explored Al's introduction into the world of organized crime, running numbers for the illegal gambling operations of fellow Brooklynite John Torreo.

This gave us an opportunity to speak about Torreo's place in the world of early 20th century organized crime.

and the begrudging respect he seems to command from historians of that period.

Then we spent some time time delving into the contradictory accounts surrounding the origin of Capone's facial scars, which inspired the nickname Scarface.

Capone himself gave a phony account of how he got the scars while serving in the First World War as part of America's storied lost battalion.

In reality, Capone had never come anywhere near military service.

But we also saw that the widely believed story that Capone was cut up by a low-level gangster named Frank Galluccio in a barfight at the Harvard Inn on Coney Island also may not be true.

As you heard, many details from Galluccio's story were contradicted by a 1918 news report that placed the attack at a very different time and place.

After tracing Al's early days as part of the John Torreo gang, we looked at what inspired Torreo and Capone's move from New York to Chicago.

To do this, we spent some time unpacking prohibition and its effects on American organized crime.

I did my best to explain exactly why Chicago became such a prized territory for America's gangsters.

America's second largest city had a population who drank three times more than the national average and were overwhelmingly opposed to prohibition.

The city was the world's largest producer of pure alcohol, and it sat in close proximity to the Canadian border.

On top of that, local politicians and local police were happy to accept bribes from the bootleggers to leave the unpopular prohibition laws virtually unenforced.

We left off with the assassination of the Chicago crime boss Big Jim Colosimo and John Torreo's move to quickly take over his operations in the windy city.

The death of Big Jim is sometimes added to Al Capone's wrapsheet of potential crimes, but all the evidence seems to suggest that the gunman in that case was not Capone, but instead his immediate superior in New York, Frankie Yale.

What's clear is that by 1921, the Capone family had firmly settled in Chicago.

This not only included Capone's wife May and their child Albert Sonny Capone, but also Al's mother Teresa and his youngest sister Mafalda.

This multi-generational household was settled in a comfortable, but modest, home on a quiet residential street on Chicago's south side.

He was also joined in Chicago by two of his older brothers, Ralph Bottles Capone and Frank Capone, who would be two of Al's closest confidants and most trusted partners as he rose in the Torio organization?

So let's head back to Chicago and start tracking the rise of the Brooklyn native in his adopted hometown.

You're juggling a lot.

Full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family?

And now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

At American Public University, we respect the hustle and we're built for it.

Our flexible online master's programs are made for real life because big dreams deserve a real path.

Learn more about APU's 40-plus career-relevant master's degrees and certificates at apu.apus.edu.

APU, built for the hustle.

You want your master's degree.

You know you can earn it, but life gets busy.

The packed schedule, the late nights, and then there's the unexpected.

American Public University was built for all of it.

With monthly starts and no set login times, APU's 40-plus flexible online master's programs are designed to move at the speed of life.

Start your master's journey today at apu.apus.edu.

You want it?

Come get it at APU.

When Al Capone first arrived in Chicago, he was a low-level street enforcer of little consequence.

As I mentioned, not long before Capone's arrival, John Torreo had taken over the southside operations of the late Big Jim Colosimo.

Big Jim had been a glorified sex trafficker who operated a network of brothels in the city.

Torreo was more interested in dominating the newly illegal trade in booze, but it was these former Colossimo brothels that formed the backbone of that burgeoning criminal empire.

Brothels easily doubled as bars that could serve Torreo's bootleg product.

By the same token, saloons and roadhouses could easily double as brothels.

In the early days, Capone was put to work making the rounds to these establishments, getting payments from the workers, and shaking down anyone he thought was skimping.

He was effective enough in that role that within a year he was promoted to being the head bartender and bouncer at a near Southside joint called the Four Deuces.

And honestly, you could not invent a better name for a gangster bar, the Four Deuces.

The Four Deuces was a four-floor establishment that contained a saloon and cafe on the first floor, illegal gambling dens on the second and third floors, and, of course, a brothel on the fourth.

It perhaps goes without saying that the Four Deuces was a dangerous place to hang out.

During Capone's time in Chicago, at least 12 people were killed in or around the establishment.

But, given the nature of the place, all the murders remained unsolved.

Capone was considered a capable enough bar manager that he was eventually cut in as a quarter owner of the place.

And this is when Al Capone first really started making some serious money.

Capone biographer Luciano Iorizzo has estimated that the four deuces brought in something like $100,000 a year, which is roughly equivalent to over $1 million a year today.

Capone would have been entitled to a quarter cut of that.

It was around that time that Al decided that he needed to set up his first front businesses.

To that end, he rented out two small commercial spaces across the street from the Deuces and created a second-hand furniture shop and a bogus pharmacy, both of which never opened.

They were there specifically so Al Capone could say that he had a legitimate business if anyone ever asked.

Where was all this money coming from?

He was just a very prosperous second-hand furniture salesman.

Or when he was feeling feeling a little more bold, he would claim that he was a pharmacist, and he would hand the Inquisitive Party a business card that identified him as Al Brown, M.D.

As part owner of the Four Deuces, Capone started becoming the face of the Torio outfit.

As I mentioned in the last episode, John Torreo was all about keeping his hands as clean as possible when it came to the operations of his business.

He may have controlled a network of illegal breweries, stills, and smuggling operations, but he was only known to drink on special occasions, and even then only moderately.

He barely gambled and generally was not one for nightlife.

He liked to be home in time for dinner and spent most of his nights quietly at home with his wife, to whom he was quite devoted.

This meant that over time, Capone became something like the outfit night manager.

When John Torreo was at home sleeping, Capone was the guy up late at the four deuces,

which meant that he managed what you might call the day-to-day.

But given that so much of the business was nocturnal, you might call it the night-to-night.

But right there beside Al were his two brothers, Frank and Ralph.

who in this early period were just as comfortably placed in the organization as their younger brother.

In fact, it was Frank Capone, who many biographers believe was initially being groomed by Torreo for a leadership position.

Although, Frank would not live long enough for those ambitions to become a reality, but more on that in a little bit.

Now, to understand the truly unprecedented wave of gang violence that engulfed Chicago for most of the 1920s, you need to understand John Torreo's ambitious vision for the alcohol trade in the city and the ultimate failure of that vision.

When Torreo assumed control of Big Jim's crime ring, he was far from the only criminal concern in Chicago.

The city was filled with gangs, big and small, each with their own jealously guarded territory, speakeasies, clubs, and gambling joints.

Now, Torreo wasn't interested in fighting each of these gangs.

Instead, he wanted to organize them into something like a cartel.

Torio had a network of stills, illegal breweries, and a growing illegal import business from Canada and beyond.

In other words, he had a steady supply of reasonably good product.

The other gangs could partake in this quality product if they agreed to stick to their territory, keep the peace, and of course, pay their supplier.

At first, this seemed like a good deal to most of the Southside gangs, and in this way, many of them remained independent but became Torio affiliates.

The biggest Northside gang was controlled by a notorious gangster named Dean O'Banion.

The mostly Irish-American Northsiders had their own network of illegal breweries and their own smuggling operations.

This meant that they were less beholden to Torreo when it came to access taboos.

However, in the early 20s, O'Banion agreed to Torreo's system of peaceful coexistence.

In this arrangement, Northside territory was to be respected and not violated by any of the Southside gangs who were slinging Torreo's product.

Now, Torreo's cartel system seems to have worked for a few years.

From 1920 to 1923, gang violence in Chicago was kept at a low simmer.

Now, this is not to say that things were completely peaceful.

There was certainly violence, but most of it was directed at upstart gangs, or independents, as historian John Binder calls them.

These were folks operating outside of Torreo's cartel who were trying to break into the business.

But violence between the large established gangs, while not unheard of, was kept at a minimum.

But the situation was tenuous and became even more so as Torreo started to expand into Chicago's southern and southwestern suburbs.

There were a number of small towns just outside of Chicago that would would eventually become noted hotbeds of illegal drinking, gambling, and prostitution controlled by the Torreyo gang.

But the most significant was Cicero, Illinois.

The push into this Chicago suburb originally occurred because of a change in city politics.

In 1923, a Democrat named William E.

Deaver was elected mayor of Chicago and came in promising to crack down on organized crime in the city.

Significantly, Deaver's allies were not taking the bribes that usually greased the wheels of Chicago politics.

This meant that the illegal speakeasies and gambling joints that had operated quite flagrantly for the first few years of the 20s were now being closed.

The saloons that survived this crackdown now needed to be kept at a much lower profile.

So to make up for this loss of revenue, Torreo looked to the suburbs.

If the gangsters could no longer control Chicago City Hall, perhaps they could overawe the municipal government of a small town.

Cicero, which was a short 20-minute drive from Chicago's downtown, seemed like the perfect target.

After a little push-and-pull with the town's existing gangsters, a group known as the O'Donnell gang, an agreement was reached and Torreo moved in, taking over many of the town's bars and establishing a few new ones.

The job of setting up these new operations in Cicero was largely handed over to the Capone brothers.

It was at this time that Al Capone first started to get the attention of the media.

You see, John Torreo was rarely seen in the town of Cicero.

It was Al, Frank, and Ralph Capone who were the new faces in town, running a brisk trade in illegal alcohol and setting up new gambling operations.

In early 1924, Torio actually left the country, traveling to Italy, where he set up his mother in an expansive villa in the village where she grew up just outside of Naples.

In his absence, the Capone brothers were the guys in charge.

It was in April of that year that the gang attempted a truly audacious government takeover.

Municipal elections were being held in Cicero, and Torreo and the Capone brothers had put together an entire slate of candidates that were firmly in their pocket.

If this slate was elected, then Cicero could become what they called a wide open town.

That's a place where prohibition simply was not enforced.

Now, at this particular moment in Chicago history, the incorruptible reformers were from the Democratic Party, and the bought tools of the gangsters were Republicans.

But in truth, both major parties took their turn being greased by the gangsters.

As one Capone bodyguard later told an interviewer, his boss was, quote, a Republican when it fitted his clothes, I guess, and a Democrat otherwise.

He played both sides of the street.

End quote.

But it was in the run-up to the Cicero election of 1924 that the media war that has complicated Al Capone's historical reputation ever since really kicked off.

When the Torreo gang moved into Cicero, A young newspaper editor named Robert St.

John decided that he was going to use his fledgling local paper, the Cicero Tribune, to expose the invading criminal element in his town.

Capone biographer Lawrence Bregreen describes St.

John as a 20-something who, quote, burned with the reckless optimism of youth, end quote.

This meant that he was one of the few people in Cicero bold enough to take on the gangsters.

It was St.

John who first started putting Al Capone's name in the paper with some regularity.

These unflattering but ultimately truthful stories started turning the tide of public opinion against the Capones in Cicero.

You see, Cicero was a town mostly populated by German, Czech, and Slovak immigrants, for whom beer was an important part of their culture.

As such, the people of the town were largely unhappy with prohibition and tolerated illegal bars, but they were less comfortable with gambling and were deeply opposed to prostitution.

The Capone brothers, and specifically Al, were presented in the pages of the Cicero Tribune as dangerous pimps.

St.

John underscored the fact that these were Southside brothel keepers who should not be welcome in Cicero.

Now, this was technically correct, but Al Capone had always been sensitive about his association with the sex trade.

All of his biographers point out that he was known to fly into rages anytime a reporter or anyone else accused him of trafficking women.

He liked to present himself as a morally upstanding citizen.

And as such, he made the argument in the press that drinking alcohol was not an immoral act.

Sex work, on the other hand, hand, came with a more intense social stigma, especially in the 1920s.

Biographer Deirdre Baer has argued that Al hypocritically believed that prostitution was morally indefensible, despite the fact that he profited off of sex work and was an eager customer of sex workers.

Now, to combat this growing negative image in the press that threatened to upend the desired result in the Cicero election, the Capone's started their first public relations campaign.

Frank Capone was tasked with getting the outfit involved in as many public works projects as possible.

Money was spent so that contracts to repave the streets, build new municipal buildings, and improve public spaces came to outfit aligned contractors.

The Capones also spent some money to get a rival local paper called The Cicero Life to report on all the wonderful things that these engaged citizens were doing for their town.

So, this is really the start of Al Capone's Jekyll and Hyde media image.

Depending on which paper you read, Al Capone was either a dangerous flesh peddler intent on subverting the town's local democracy, or he was a jovial philanthropist, a businessman who was investing in Cicero, literally paving the town's streets.

This PR campaign went hand in hand with some old-fashioned gangster intimidation.

Journalists from the critical Cicero Tribune were routinely roughed up, which led to a revolving door of writers, many of them intimidated into quitting.

After the election, St.

John himself would be hospitalized after he was beaten by some of Capone's goons.

Nevertheless, the stories printed in the Cicero Tribune eventually got noticed by the larger Chicago Tribune.

The more widely circulated Chicago paper turned the spotlight on Cicero and warned that the upcoming election was likely going to be undermined by the local gangsters.

The bad press meant that on election day, the result was far from guaranteed.

So, the Capone brothers didn't take any chances.

Here's how Capone expert Deirdre Baer describes the scene.

On Election Day, quote,

Democratic precinct workers were beaten up and some even kidnapped so they could not do their jobs.

The Capone henchmen stood by the ballot boxes to inspect ballots before they were deposited.

And if the voter had not voted for the Capone slate, he was threatened with a beating until he changed his ballot or else left without casting a vote.

Women who were eager to use their newly won franchise were either turned away if they went quietly or shoved aside and threatened if they did not.

⁇ End quote.

This was not a subtle subversion of democracy.

This was a violent and bald-faced power grab.

But the story of the Cicero election doesn't end there.

You see, as this was all going on, a group of shocked and terrified Cicero citizens reached out to a county judge named Edmund Jurecki in hopes that he might be able to restore some order.

Judge Jarecki tried to do just that, but ended up fumbling the ball terribly.

He personally deputized 70 men as Chicago police officers for the day.

He then sent these armed men in black sedans wearing plain clothes to get the gangsters out of the polling stations.

But when Judge Jarecki's deputy squad arrived, they looked just like a rival gang showing up to a rumble.

They also didn't do much to secure the polling stations.

Instead, they went directly for the Capone brothers.

The first one they caught up with was Frank Capone.

According to newspaper reports, nine black sedans pulled up on Frank as he was crossing a Cicero street.

A group of men hopped out and gunned him down right there.

The shooters would later claim that Frank Capone had pulled a gun, so they were forced to fire.

Now, that is entirely possible, but it's equally possible that they lied about it.

Now, there's a story that Al Capone was there when Frank was killed.

Herbert Asbury, an early chronicler of Chicago crime, wrote that after Frank was shot, Al, who was by his side, pulled two pistols and got away by blasting through a group of policemen, running, quote, with guns blazing in each hand until darkness came to his aid and he escaped.

So, did Al Capone really really shoot his way through Jareki's deputies that day?

Well,

this is likely another myth.

This dramatic scene cannot be found in any of the surviving news reports.

This story only appears in Asbury's writing.

No other biographer finds it credible enough to vouch for.

In the end, Judge Jarecki's attempt to restore order changed nothing about the Cicero election and arguably only served to further undermine public trust in the authorities.

To the average citizen of Cicero, Jarecki's vigilantes were indistinguishable from Capone's enforcers.

All they'd managed to do was pull off a gangland-style assassination of a ranking outfit man.

Despite the violence, all of Capone's candidates were still elected.

His campaign of Election Day terror had worked.

For the rest of the 1920s, Cicero's government would remain in the pay of the Torreo Capone gang, and as such, the town became wide open.

Through the years, the booze business in the big city would shift and change depending on the temperament of City Hall, but Cicero would remain reliably profitable.

The Cicero municipal election of 1924 was an important turning point for a number of reasons.

First, it marked a new level of conspicuousness on the part of Chicago's bootleggers.

Violence was being done out in the open with little regard for the supposed authorities.

When the city government couldn't be bought, a more vulnerable town was violently conquered.

The opening of Cicero also changed the power dynamic in Torreo's cartel.

The uneasy peace among the gangs was now being tested as the Torreo Capone outfit was pushing out of their traditional territory and opening new markets.

It would not take long before Torreo's cartel system would collapse entirely, and the tenuous peace would give way to what Chicago newspapers would call the beer war.

For Al Capone, the death of his brother Frank was a personal turning point.

By all accounts, he was devastated by the loss.

With Frank gone, he was now the unambiguous head of the Capone family.

His brother Ralph was technically older than him, but he had never seemed cut out for leadership.

After Frank's death, Al now looked like the obvious successor to John Torreo.

This fact was underscored at Frank's lavish funeral, which was attended by virtually every notable Chicago gangster at the time.

This show of respect was just as much about paying homage to the rising Al Capone as it was about honoring the memory of Frank.

The death of Frank Capone is sometimes noted as the start of the Chicago Beer War.

But in many ways, it was just a precursor.

Frank had been gunned down by hastily deputized lawmen, not fellow bootleggers.

It was when the gangs turned on one another that the real violence began.

So let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll explore how Torreo's peace dissolved and Chicago became a war zone.

If there's one huge misconception about the Chicago Beer War, it's that it was started by Al Capone.

This was certainly the impression given by the 1932 film Scarface.

In Scarface, all the violence in Chicago can be traced back to the Al Capone stand-in, Tony Camonte.

This fictional version of events has it that Al Capone ignored his boss, John Torreo, who wanted a more orderly and less violent illegal trade in alcohol.

It was Capone who aggressively expanded the business into the territory of rival gangs and triggered a violent response.

Finally, when Torreo tried to check Capone's ambition, Scarface executed his old boss and took the reins of the outfit for himself.

But absolutely, none of this is true.

Now, luckily, most people had the good sense to understand that Scarface was not a documentary, but it certainly left the lingering impression that the worst excesses of Chicago's violent gang wars had something to do with the ambition of Al Capone.

At least part of this misconception comes from the fact that Al Capone is the most famous name associated with Prohibition-era Chicago.

If you want to sell a book about this time and place, the market dictates that putting the name Al Capone on the cover will help you move more paper.

Take, for example, one of my key sources for this series.

Historian John Binder's meticulously researched Al Capone's Beer Wars.

Now, the title of that book could suggest that Al Capone deserves the lion's share of responsibility for Chicago's gang violence.

But ironically, that is is not at all what Binder argues within the pages of that book, which makes me think that the title was something insisted on by a market-savvy publisher.

But, you know, that's just a hunch.

In the book, Binder points out that the Beer War was actually a series of messy conflicts that involved several different gangs with constantly shifting alliances.

Making sense of it is kind of like getting into the weeds of a multifactional civil war.

For fans of East Asian history, think of this as Chicago's warring states period.

Pitting the blame on any one person misunderstands the nature of this conflict.

But John Binder does say this, quote,

Chicago's underworld would have been a much different place during Prohibition, as well as possibly for decades after, if Dean O'Banion had been able to control himself, or if he had at least been able to refrain from clashing with the Torreo Capone gang.

End quote.

Interesting.

Binder lays more responsibility at the feet of Dean O'Banion.

So, who was this guy?

O'Banion was an Irish-American gangster who had controlled Chicago's north side since at least 1920.

From the arrival of John Torreo in Chicago to about 1924, O'Banion had managed to coexist with Torreo's growing Southside operation.

O'Banion and Torreo shared some of the illegal booze production, and Torreo even cut O'Banion in on a piece of what was going on in Cicero, Illinois.

But when O'Bannon soured on Torio, that was when things got dicey.

Now, just to complicate the story, I need to point out that gang violence associated with the beer wars actually got started when two smaller Southside gangs started hijacking each other's beer trucks and killing each other's enforcers in what became known as the Back of the Yards War in 1922.

From one perspective, this could be seen as the real start of bootlegging-related gang violence in Chicago.

But it didn't really involve the major gangs.

Neither the Torreos nor Obanians' Northsiders had much to do with it.

The bigger conflict erupted in 1924, due in part to a little Italy-based gang run by the Sicilian Jena brothers.

As I mentioned earlier, John Torreo's attempt to turn illegal booze distribution into something like a cartel was a complicated and delicate thing that only ever half worked.

It involved getting the cooperation of countless smaller gangs.

The Jennas were one of those gangs.

They were cut in on Torreo-produced booze, which made them allies of a sort, but the Jennas were otherwise independent, meaning that they didn't take orders from John Torreo.

In early 1924, the Jennas made the mistake of trying to sell their booze in Northsider territory.

Specifically, there were Italian communities on Chicago's North Side where the Jennas had contacts and felt like they could move a little more product.

This was a blatant violation of Torreo's cartel system, where everyone was supposed to respect the boundaries of each gang's traditional turf.

The Jennas had undoubtedly pushed into Northsider territory.

The actions of the Jennas tested Torreo's entire system.

It raised the question, what do you do when a cartel member breaks the rules?

In less criminal cartels like the old American Railroad Cartel, a disobedient member would be fined.

In more violent cartels, a member violating the deal will be attacked by all the other members of the cartel.

But this is not what happened in 1924.

Instead, Torreo did nothing, which enraged the easily offended Dean O'Bannon.

What good was this cartel if no one was going to enforce the rules?

As might be expected, the Northsiders started their own campaign to punish the Jennas, which involved a series of hijackings and killings in early 1924.

The Northsider attacks on the Jennas were answered in kind, and before long, both sides were claiming casualties.

But significantly, Dean O'Banion did not stop there.

The big escalation came in May of 1924, about a month after the Cicero elections.

O'Bannon had been the owner of the old Siebens Brewery, a large facility that produced a significant amount of the Northsiders' illegal beer.

Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking, how did these guys hide the operation of a full-on beer factory?

The answer is that they didn't.

They just greased the palms of police, politicians, or anyone else who might make a fuss.

But Chicago's new reform-minded mayor was no longer tolerating flagrantly illegal operations like this one.

So it was that O'Banion got a tip that the Siebens brewery was going to be raided and permanently shuttered by police police on May 19th, 1924.

This presented an interesting opportunity for O'Banion to stick it to John Torreo, who O'Banion saw as complicit in the whole Jenna situation.

So, in the lead-up to the 19th, Obanion made a big show of claiming that all the trouble with the Jenna's had convinced him to retire from the bootlegging game.

He wasn't going to need the Siebens brewery anymore, so he approached John Torreo to see if he wanted to buy the facility from him.

Torreo agreed and paid Dean O'Banion half a million dollars, not knowing that the brewery was about to be closed for good.

To add insult to injury, O'Banion suggested that he and Torreo meet at the brewery on May 19th to finalize the deal.

That night, while Torreo was there picking up the keys, 20 of Chicago's finest rolled in, arrested everyone on the premises, confiscated all the brewing gear, and permanently bolted the doors.

Everyone was bailed out of jail fairly quickly, but this had been a huge betrayal.

Not only was Torreo ripped off in the Siebens deal, but the bust also resulted in Torreo's second bootlegging charge, which came with mandatory prison time.

Now, Obanion was also arrested and charged that night, but this was obviously just a convenient cover.

He would later claim that he didn't know that the place was going to be raided.

His arrest proved that.

So why should he give back Torio's $500,000?

Torio smelt a rat, and from that point onward, any deal that had existed between Torio and the Northsiders effectively ceased to exist.

The wave of violence that followed can be neatly traced to the Siebens bust.

But it should be noted that the Chicago papers had been using the phrase beer war for many months before that point.

For instance, on May 9th, just 10 days before the Siebens raid, the Chicago Herald Examiner ran a headline declaring, quote, gang leader Caponi kills Foe.

Saloon shooting reopens Southside Beer War, end quote.

The article detailed the barroom slaying of a man named Joe Ragtime Howard.

Eyewitnesses quoted in the article claimed that the man had been shot in the head at point-blank range by a man they called Tony Scarface Caponi.

It was assumed by the paper that this display of of violence had to be linked to the recent spat of killings that had come out of the battle between the Jennas and the Northsiders.

So,

what was going on here?

Did Al Capone reopen the Southside beer war?

Well, the murder of Joe Howard technically remains unsolved, but no one has any doubt that Al Capone shot this man six times in a crowded bar.

While some witnesses felt bold enough to give anonymous statements to crime reporters, none of them seemed to remember anything when they were questioned by the police.

This phenomenon of witnesses forgetting everything they saw would eventually be nicknamed Chicago amnesia.

Still, all of Capone's biographers agree that he pulled the trigger.

The bigger question is: why did Al Capone kill Joe Howard?

Did this have anything to do with the beer wars?

The answer seems to be no.

Joe Howard was a low-level burglar and stick-up boy who had no clear gang affiliation.

Research suggests that he had run afoul of Al Capone after he held up one of Capone's associates and robbed him of $1,500.

This was obviously provocative, but the bigger issue may have been that Howard called Al Capone a dirty pimp when his victim asked if he knew who he was stealing from.

All of this made its way back to Capone, who, if we believe biographers like Luciano Iorizzo, was especially angered by being called a pimp, given his sensitivity around his role in the sex trade.

So he decided to handle this one personally.

Iorizzo also guesses that Al Capone may have lashed out because he was still emotionally raw after the death of his brother Frank.

Now, it should be said that that is pure conjecture, and no other biographer seems comfortable making that claim.

But it seems clear that the murder of ragtime Howard was personal and had little to do with any larger conflict between Chicago's gangs.

This did not reopen the Beer Wars.

But when you're doing your own moral calculus on whether or not Al Capone was a good guy, you should not ignore the fact that he shot a person in the face six times in cold blood.

It's unclear exactly how many people Al Capone killed personally, but there's no ambiguity when it comes to ragtime Joe Howard.

Al Capone was a murderer.

Now, despite what you might expect, the Siebens bust did not immediately result in a wave of revenge killings.

The Northsider-Jenna gang conflict certainly kept roiling, but for his part, John Torreo bided his time.

That was until November of 1924, when Torreo made his move against Dean O'Banion.

You see, O'Banion was technically a florist by trade, who ran a successful flower shop on Chicago's north side.

Now, unlike Capone's phony furniture shop, O'Banion's flower shop was a functional business.

Part of this was because O'Banion was the unofficial florist for all of Chicago's gangland funerals.

If you were an aspiring Chicago gangster, one of the ways that you paid your respects to O'Banion was to buy flowers from his shop anytime there was a funeral.

And there were a lot of funerals.

Every time a man went down, O'Banion's flower shop made a killing, creating elaborate flower arrangements and wreaths favored by the gangsters.

O'Banion rarely let his guard down, but in the lead-up to a big funeral, there was often an informal truce between warring factions, while everyone bought their flowers.

In November of 1924, a well connected Italian American social club president, with many gangland connections, passed away from cancer.

The demand for flowers for this funeral was enormous, which meant that O'Banion was needed at the shop.

It also meant that there were lots of unfamiliar Italians coming up to the north side to pick up their flowers.

On November 10th, O'Banion didn't think twice about opening the door to two men he thought were customers.

One of them was Frankie Yale, Torreo's most trusted assassin.

O'Banion was gunned down right there in the flower shop.

The beer war was now in full swing.

Knowing that Chicago wouldn't be safe for him, Torreo once again left town, heading this time for Hot Springs, Arkansas.

This left Al Capone as the on-the-ground commander in his absence.

It wasn't long before the Northsiders made their move against him.

A few months after the death of O'Banion, on January 12, 1925, Al Capone was heading into a Chicago restaurant when a group of black cars pulled up and the men inside pulled out a Thompson sub-machine gun.

In 1925, this weapon was new to the streets of Chicago, but it would become one of the most enduring emblems of the era.

The shooters riddled the restaurant with bullets, but amazingly, Capone, who hit the deck as soon as he saw the cars, emerged unscathed.

After this unsuccessful hit on Capone, Torreo decided that he would risk returning to Chicago.

He assumed that the heat was off of him and was on Capone's back.

This proved to be a miscalculation.

Torreo had barely been back for a week when he was ambushed in front of his house by Jaime Weiss and Bugs Moran, O'Banion's successors and the new leaders of the Northside gang.

Weiss and Moran succeeded in killing Torreo's driver and putting a few bullets in Torreo himself, but the killers were unable to finish the job.

Apparently, they either ran out of ammo or the gun jammed right at the key moment.

Incredibly, Torreo survived the shooting, but the experience clearly shook him.

His convalescence happened to coincide with him having to serve a short prison sentence as a result of the bootlegging bootlegging conviction that came after the Siebens bust.

At that point, he effectively retired.

And I think this is another reason why so many historians of this era appreciate John Torreo.

He knew when to cash in his chips.

He relinquished his power and turned all operations over to Al Capone.

But Torio managed to keep just enough stock in the company, as it were, to to ensure a comfortable retirement.

John Torreo left Chicago and enjoyed a peaceful existence until he was ultimately claimed by a heart attack at the age of 76.

Few prohibition gangsters managed such a soft landing.

But now, Al Capone was the big boss.

He may not have started the beer war, but he was going to end it.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will conclude our look at Al Capone.

Before we go this week, as always, I need to give some shout-outs: big ups to Billy Witt, to Frank,

to Cole Heasley, to Beth Kaye, to Antonio Matos,

to Nicholas Wingren,

to Emily, to Lonzie, to Michaela Iveson, to Brian Mack,

to Megan O'Donnell, to Patrick Frank Robinson, to Tyler Cravens, and to Andy Delauder.

All of these folks have decided to pledge at $5

or more every month on Patreon.

So you know what that means.

They are beautiful human beings.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for your support.

It means absolutely everything.

The patrons are the lifeblood of this show.

I absolutely love you.

If you want to be a patron too, go to patreon.com slash our fake history.

Check all the cool stuff we got for you there.

Also, if you're into the artwork we do for these episodes, it's all done by my man Frank Fiorentino.

You can buy t-shirts, tote bags, stickers, mugs, all sorts of cool stuff with that art on it at tpublic.com.

Go to tpublic.com slash store slash our dash fake dash history or just go to ourfakehistory.com and follow the link to the store.

I love hearing from you.

Send me an email.

I want you to send me emails.

I love hearing from my people.

Hit me up at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

You can still find me on Facebook, facebook.com at our fake history.

I'm on blue sky these days, so just search our fake history on blue sky.

You can find me on TikTok at our fake history.

You can find me on Instagram at our fake history.

You can go to YouTube and like and subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the videos I'm making over there.

As always, the theme music for the show comes to us from Dirty Church.

Check out more from dirtychurch at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major.

And remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, four.

There's nothing better than a one-place life.