Lethal Passage (20 page)

Eliot Ness urged his supervisors to let him establish a special unit of young agents not yet “bent” by mob money and influence, and in September of 1929 he founded a squad the newspapers would soon begin calling The Untouchables, for their apparent resistance to corruption.
Far from shooting it out with bootleggers and walking up mean streets cradling a tommy gun, Ness and his squad used painstaking investigative techniques to pursue the Chicago gangsters, chief among them Alphonse Capone, also known as Scarface. One of their coups was to place a wiretap in a nightclub operated by Al Capone’s brother Raffalo, more commonly known as Ralph.

Like the Wild West heroes who came before him, Ness was largely responsible for his own legend. In a 1957 book called
The Untouchables
, which became the basis for the TV series starring Robert Stack, Ness played up the dangers of pursuing Al Capone, even though in fact Capone and other gangsters had an overwhelming respect for the damage they would do to their own interests if they ever killed a federal agent.
Indeed, Schoenberg writes, Capone explicitly warned his men not to shoot it out with Treasury agents—just to get away, if possible.

The real hero in the pursuit of Al Capone, according to Schoenberg, was an “investigative accountant” named Frank Wilson, an Internal Revenue agent who would later become head of the U.S. Secret Service, another branch of the Treasury Department. Wilson and colleagues doggedly hunted for evidence that Al Capone had failed to pay his income tax. The first step was to prove he even had an income, something Capone had consistently and effectively denied ever receiving. The agents examined some one million checks looking for any hint of money destined for Capone. A breakthrough came when Wilson discovered a ledger confiscated early on in a raid on Capone’s headquarters that had been left to gather dust at the back of a file cabinet at his office.

Prohibition greatly heightened America’s official distaste for guns. Gangsters rubbed each other out on street corners, in front of restaurants, from armored limousines.
By the fall of 1925, as mobs in Chicago fought each other for control, the homicide rate in Cook County, Illinois, rose to more than one murder per day, a decidedly modern rate of mutual disposal. For as long as the killing remained in the family, the public was enthralled. Chicago’s gangsters were
glamorous celebrities thumbing their noses at a censorious government intent on denying the public its pleasures.

The history of gun violence, however, teaches two important maxims, whose predictive power was demonstrated yet again during the Prohibition wars.

First, violence will always spread beyond boundaries initially found by the public at large to be “acceptable.” That is, gang warfare—or, as today, inner-city feuds between drug dealers—will inevitably expand beyond those boundaries to include bystanders.

Second, guns will always migrate from the hands of their originally intended users to those who value their use in crime. Just as the Ingram, designed for military use, became instead the drug-gang weapon of choice and a ghetto icon, so too
the Thompson submachine gun, designed to be a “trench broom” for use in World War I, became instead the favored tool of gangsters throughout the country and an icon of the 1920s.
In 1969, long before S.W. Daniel began peddling its Cobray as “the gun that made the eighties roar,” William J. Helmer titled his biography of the Thompson gun
The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar
. The gangsters’ use of the gun was largely responsible for the passage of the nation’s first-ever federal gun controls in 1934, and thus for expanding the Treasury Department’s law-enforcement responsibilities to include firearms.

The Thompson submachine gun, invented by Gen. John T. Thompson, was built in New York by Auto-Ordnance Corp., founded by Thompson in 1916 with the express purpose of putting the design into production. Like the Ingram, the Thompson submachine gun was initially a failure. The Army did not yet appreciate its value. The gun was too big to be a sidearm, too small for a field rifle, or so went the conventional wisdom of the time. General Thompson, like Gordon Ingram, sought to expand the market for the gun by offering it to consumers, an effort that resulted in some unusual advertising.
In a 1922 magazine ad, Auto-Ordnance merged frontier myth with modern firepower, depicting a cowboy in furry chaps and
kerchief earnestly firing his tommy gun from the front porch of his ranch house at a group of seven bandits. The text below called the gun “the ideal weapon for the protection of large estates, ranches, plantations, etc.”
An article in
Army & Navy Journal
reported the gun “can be kept in the home as a protection against burglars.”

Critics, however, described the gun in terms strikingly similar to those used by Col. Leonard Supenski in his critique of S.W. Daniel’s Cobray pistol.
In 1923, a British firearms expert described the tommy gun as “an arm that is useless for sport, cumbrous for self-defense, and could not serve any honest purpose, but which in the hands of political fanatics might provoke disaster.”

The gun did not initially win many military contracts, but it captured the imagination of the Chicago gangs.
The first recorded use of a tommy gun in crime occurred in Chicago on September 25, 1925, when Frank McErlane, a Chicago bootlegger, set out to assassinate a competitor named Spike O’Donnell. Police were stymied by the volume and the orderly arrangement of bullet holes left in a storefront by the attack. McErlane used the gun again just over a week later when he blasted the headquarters of another bootlegger. Here too no one was killed. A few months later, on February 9, 1926, McErlane used the gun again; this time the weapon made front-page headlines. The banner headline in the next morning’s
Chicago Tribune
read, “Machine Gun Gang Shoots 2.”

That day, Al Capone went to a Chicago hardware store and ordered three.

Capone first used his tommy guns on April 27, 1926, in an attack that would soon become a staple of the gangster-film genre. He and associates set out to kill a bootlegger named James Doherty. Lumbering along in a black, armored Cadillac limousine, Capone caught up with Doherty as he and two other men stepped from a Lincoln and made their way toward one of the many illegal saloons then operating in Chicago. Capone and his gunmen opened fire, killing all three men. They didn’t realize it until later, but they had killed
an unintended victim. It was a mistake that would, five years later, prove an important contributor to Capone’s conviction for tax evasion.

One of the dead men proved to be a twenty-six-year-old Illinois state prosecutor named William McSwiggin, known as the “hanging prosecutor” for his aggressive pursuit of gangsters. In response, police raided Capone’s headquarters, seizing the ledgers that Internal Revenue agent Frank Wilson would later discover at the back of a file cabinet and that would provide the first solid evidence of Capone’s income.

The attack triggered an arms race. Capone’s enemy, Hymie Weiss, whose gang controlled the North Side of Chicago, acquired Thompsons and, on September 20, 1926, launched a retaliatory attack against Capone, the most spectacular—if ineffective—attack of the Prohibition era, dubbed the “Siege of Cicero.”

Capone’s headquarters were situated in the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois, some two blocks from the Chicago line. Shortly after one
P.M
. on September 20, 1926, Capone and his associates were seated in the Hawthorne’s first-floor restaurant, which was packed with other diners. They heard the telltale chatter of a machine gun somewhere down the street, but none of the screams and sounds of shattering glass that tended to accompany that kind of attack. Intrigued, they went to the windows of the restaurant—exactly what Hymie Weiss’s men had intended. That first machine gun was a lure; it was loaded with blanks.

A Capone bodyguard quickly recognized the trap and forced Capone down. As everyone in the restaurant hit the floor, a convoy of ten limousines and touring cars slowly made its way up the street, machine guns and shotguns firing from every window, pumping some one thousand rounds into the room.

No one in the room was hit. Outside, two members of a Louisiana family—the mother and her five-year-old son—were slightly wounded. A minor member of Capone’s gang who had been standing outside the restaurant was nicked by a bullet.

The Thompson submachine gun quickly migrated from Chicago. It turned up next during a gang war in southern Illinois, which even featured dynamite dropped from a biplane. (The bombs never went off.) Philadelphia experienced its first tommy-gun attack
on February 25, 1927, New York on July 28, 1928.

The violence became more grotesque, less the “innocent” battlings of bad guys against bad guys.

On February 14, 1929, a Cadillac with a siren and gong pulled up in front of the S.M.C. Cartage Company in Chicago. Two men in police uniforms and two in civilian clothes—one wearing a chinchilla coat—stepped from the car. The officers entered the building and announced a raid, ordering the seven men inside to put their hands up and face the wall. Six of the men had ties to a gang led by George “Bugs” Moran; the seventh was a young optician named Reinhart H. Schwimmer, who had become enthralled with the mob and had stopped by that day for coffee.

The two civilians, each carrying a Thompson, entered next and began firing, instantly cutting down the seven men. For good measure, one of the gunmen then fired from ground level into the tops of their heads. The two gunmen then put their own hands up and were marched back to the car by the two men dressed as policemen.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre marked a change in the public’s willingness to accept gang violence. The brutality of the crime, the fact the men were shot in the back, somehow seemed a violation of criminal etiquette.

As other massacres followed, the revulsion grew. On July 28, 1931, gangster Vincent Coll tried to kill one of Dutch Schultz’s men as he sat in front of a social club on E. 107th Street in New York. The target escaped unharmed, but the attack, quickly dubbed the Baby Massacre, left five children wounded. One, a baby in a baby carriage, later died. Coll may or may not have used a tommy gun, but the gun took the blame anyway.

Within a month, two other New York gun battles killed two girls, one eighteen, the other only five. In the latter, gunfire also killed two
policemen and three of the assailants and wounded twelve other people.

Crime seemed poised to overwhelm the country. In 1932, the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and murdered. (Capone offered $10,000 for information on who did it.) Killers of all kinds—John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine-Gun Kelly (who contrary to myth never fired a gun in the course of a crime), Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Baby Face Nelson, and “Ma” Barker—rampaged over the countryside. Bonnie Parker, once again demonstrating that penchant of our heroes of violence for promoting their own legends, wrote poetry about her exploits with Clyde. One, titled “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde” and released to newspapers by Bonnie’s mother, linked the pair to the mythic outlaws of the Wild West:

You’ve read the story of Jesse James
—
Of how he lived and died
,
  
If you’re still in need
  
Of something to read
Here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde
.

Soon after the poem was published, police at last caught up with Bonnie and Clyde and killed them both.

One result of all this mayhem was a host of gangster movies, beginning with the 1930 hit
Little Caesar
. In 1931 alone, Hollywood made fifty gangster films. And once again myth and reality converged.
On October 14, 1931, Edward G. Robinson, who starred in
Little Caesar
, sat in on Al Capone’s tax evasion trial, which would end three days later and result ultimately in his being sent to a brand-new prison built on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

A more significant result, however, was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which regulated the sale and manufacture of machine guns and other “gangster-type” weapons, such as silencers and sawed-off shotguns, and gave responsibility for enforcement to the Alcohol Tax Unit of the Internal Revenue Service. You could still buy
a machine gun, but now you had to register the gun and pay a $200 tax. At the time, this was real money, more than the retail price of a Thompson, which Auto-Ordnance had reduced to $175 in its continuing quest for orders from the U.S. military. The tax remains $200 today, no longer quite the disincentive the law’s crafters meant it to be.

In 1938, Congress passed the next round of federal controls with the Federal Firearms Act, which required the licensing of gun dealers and set the cost of a license at a whopping one dollar. (The National Rifle Association had argued even this was too high and should have been something nominal, say fifteen cents or a quarter.)

The next great spasm of domestic violence took place in the 1960s, with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Charles Whitman’s shooting spree from the top of the University of Texas tower, which killed fourteen people; and the overall unrest that tore the nation’s cities apart in the late 1960s. This time the result was a more comprehensive set of firearms laws, called the Gun Control Act of 1968.
It boosted dealer fees to $10 and required that they keep detailed records of incoming and outgoing guns. It also forbade the sale of rifles, shotguns, and handguns to felons and others deemed unfit to own guns. And taking its cue from Lee Harvey Oswald’s mail-order purchase of the rifle he used to kill the president, the law banned mail-order sales of guns directly to individuals. Congress assigned enforcement of the act to the Alcohol & Tobacco Tax Division of the IRS, which became the Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms Division.

Law-enforcement agents within the ATFD welcomed their new responsibilities. They were accomplished lawmen with a lot of nitty-gritty, dangerous experience in battling the moonshiners of the South. But officially they were employees of the Internal Revenue Service, the nation’s tax collector. The images clashed. “
When our law-enforcement officers were asked who they were, they would say Treasury agents,” said Rex D. Davis, a former director of ATF who at the time was an assistant regional commissioner of the ATFD. In outlying
field offices, the agents placed signs on their doors that said Treasury Department. “Our guys didn’t want to be Internal Revenue agents.”