Moving in to Cicero
There are difficulties here for the British reader attempting to do a mental transposition and imagining a borough council election in, say, Windsor or Wolverhampton or Wisbech, with smoking pistols around the polling booths, battles of bullets between police and carloads of plug-uglies, voters pummelled, intimidated and press-ganged. But this is exactly what happened in April, 1924, to a respectable lower-middle- class American suburb, where 68 per cent. of citizens owned their own homes, with its Rotary Club, its Chamber of Commerce and its min- isters' association—Cicero. The Illinois Crime Survey recorded: 'Automobiles filled with gun- men paraded the streets slugging and kidnapping election workers. Polling places were raided by armed thugs and ballots taken at the point of the gun from the hands of voters waiting to drop them in the box. Voters and workers were kid- napped, taken to Chicago and held prisoners until the polls closed.'
The previous night Torrio, just back from his overseas holiday tour, had summoned his lieutenants to plan their campaign. Al Capone and his brother Frank were appointed to direct the electioneering. At dawn the Torrio army moved into the town, took up their positions and turned on the heat. Each voter was asked by men in slouch hats and with guns stuck in their belts how he was casting his vote. If it was unsuitable he was advised to change his mind and stood over While he placed his cross on the correst line. Those who argued or refused were roughed up and thrown out, or shoved in cars and driven off. By early afternoon, Cicero was in a stage of mixed rage and panic.
The Democratic committee—backed by out- raged Republican voters—appealed to Chicago for help. County Judge Edmund K. Jarecki swore in seventy policemen as deputy sheriffs and they were rushed out to Cicero by car. They opened fire on Torrio cars, and the gangsters shot back.
A police squad swung round a corner at Cicero Avenue and Twenty-second Street, and saw Al and Frank Capone, Dave Hedlin and Charley Fischetti standing at the door of a polling station With drawn pistols in their hands, ushering voters inside. As the police jumped out and ran across the road, Frank Capone shot at Patrolman McGlynn and missed. McGlynn fired back and mortally wounded Frank. Hedlin fell wounded. Fischetti was pursued into a field and captured unhurt. Al fled down Cicero Avenue and almost into the arms of another band of policemen. He fought them off, a gun flaming in each hand, and escaped into the darkness. During the day a man was killed in Eddie Tancl's saloon, two Others shot dead in Twenty-second Street. an- other man's throat cut, and a policeman black- jacked. Four dead and forty wounded; Klenha and his clique, the Torrio nominees, were re- elected with immense majorities.
There was, of course, the customary inquest. County Judge Jarecki was appointed to conduct 'an investigation of bloodshed and riots in the election,' and the State's Attorney's office de- Voted much time into inquiring how Capone and his troops had acquired pistol permits. Most, it transpired, had been issued by suburban justices of the peace. Capone was never arrested for his Part in this sinister fantasy. He was, in any case, occupied with grief. In commemoration of the late departed Frank Capone every, saloon and gambling resort in Cicero was requested to close and draw down its blinds for two hours. Capone appeared at his brother's inquest, but stated that he had no information of value to impart. Frank Was given a splendid funeral, his body cradled H0. a silk-lined, silver-plated casket and heaped With 20,000 dollars' worth of flowers.
• The keening faded and the chiming of the cash registers swelled again in the Cicero streets. The election had left an aftermath of scores for settlenaent. Capone, with a civic administration committed to his welfare, was the dragon emperor of Cicero. The conciliatory smile vanished from his face and he blew fire through his nostrils. Tancl, owner of the Hawthorne Inn, Who had been a power 'in the old liaison, was the first to feel the lash of the new tyranny. He was an ex-boxer with cauliflower ears and a spread-eagled nose, a man of notorious brutality and evil temper. From the start he had refused to knuckle under to the insurgents or to buy their beer. He was told either to co-operate or depart, and his answer was that he wasn't going In co-operate, he was going to stay, and if he left he would leave in a coffin. He did. Two of Capone's gunmen, Myles O'Donnell and James J. Doherty, picked a quarrel with him over a meal bill, then opened fire on him in front of the Hawthorne Inn, while shopping housewives and local tradesmen threw themselves behind cars and into doorways in the horizontal position that was becoming an identifiable posture of Cicero citizens. Tancl stood square where he was, snatched a gun from his armpit holster and exchanged shot for shot. He slumped down riddled, but flung his emptied gun in O'Donnell's face and yelled at Leo Klimas, one of his waiters who was at his side: `Kill the rat. He got me.' Klimas, already wounded, leaped at O'Donnell but Doherty put a bullet in his back.
O'Donnell and Doherty were arrested, indicted —and acquitted.
Capone, hating to see a good business stand idle, took ovcr Tancl's Hawthorne Inn and made it his local garrison and headquarters. He had the entire upper floor equipped as suite and office for himself, with bullet-proof steel shutters fitted at the windows and doors. It became the favourite discreet rendezvous of Chicago and Cook County politicians, where they were enter- tained—and instructed—by Capone. The character of Cicero underwent swift change. It came to be said that if you wanted to know when you had crossed the parish boundary from Chicago into Cicero all you had to do was raise your nose into the wind and sniff. 'If you smell gunpowder, you're " there.' The erstwhile pleasantly placid suburb became Gangsters' Town.
'The one-time peaceful streets of down-town Cicero,' wrote Asbury, 'were filled with arrogant, roistering, swaggering gangsters, and crowded with saloons and gambling-houses.' The centre was transformed into a neon-flashing inland Barbary Coast. Immediately next to the elevated railway terminal station, convenient for sports running out from Chicago for an evening's whoopee, was The Ship, run by Toots Mondi on behalf of the Torrio-Capone combine; a dance- ball with cabaret performing from midnight until dawn, and upstairs gambling parlours offering craps, poker, stush and faro. Nearby was Lauterback's, with a big saloon in front and roulette wheels upstairs, which was the casino with the biggest turnover in the country, as much as 100,000 dollars on the table for one spin of the wheel. The 160 wide-open night-and-day bars were now and then subjected to a formalis- tic raid by the Federal Prohibition Department. But, after a day's token closing, they were open again. A saloon-keeper explained: 'When the cops and the Prohibition agents come here after hours all the time to get drunk, why, of course, they go along with us. They always tip us off to the raids. An injunction means nothing. When the owner of a place is caught by one he opens up somewhere else under another name.'
Whisky was sold in Cicero for seventy-five cents a shot, beer for thirty-five cents a stein, wine for thirty cents a small glass. Installed in every establishment not wholly owned by the Capone-Torrio combine was one of their agents, whose wages had to be paid by the pro- prietor and whose duties were to see that the place was 'protected' and that the combine got its cut of the gross receipts, which varied from 25 to 50 per cent. Capone and Torrio were taking 100,000 dollars a week •each out of Cicero. Capone, enjoying his first taste of total power, ruled the town through his gunmen despotically. Mayor Klenha and his circle dis- piritedly endured what they had brought upon themselves. Now, it was Capone's voice that was listened to : his orders transcended law.
Police, city officials and local businessmen took instructions diret from the Hawthorne Inn. Once when Klenha had failed to carry out a command, Capone paid him a 'personal call, knocked him down the steps of the City Hall and kicked him repeatedly as he scrambled up. A policeman stood watching the assault, twirled his night-stick and strolled off. Again, when the town council rebelliously tried to put through a measure which Capone had vetoed, his strong- arm men shouldered into the chamber, broke up the meeting, dragged one of the trustees into the street and blackjacked him. Robert St. John, editor of the Cicero Tribune, who bravely con- tinued to print anti-Capone editorials, and who interfered when a policeman was being dealt out a disciplinary beating, was coshed, kicked and had his face smashed in, by a squad led by Ralph Capone. His brother, Archer St. John, editor of the neighbouring Berwyn Tribune, who wrote leaders protesting against the invasion of Torrio's prostitutes and gangsters during the election, was shot from a car, kidnapped and held prisoner for forty-eight hours until the polls closed.
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