CHICAGO’S FIRST “ONE-WAY RIDE”

The Forgotten Bate Murder Case

Although the gangland “one-way ride” didn’t become a slang term for an underworld execution method until the Prohibition era, the first such ride in Chicago actually pre-dated the Volstead Act by more than a decade and a half. The usual plan is for the victim, who is lured or forced into a car, to be driven to a remote location where they are killed and their body dumped.

The term for this type of execution was reportedly first used by North Side gang member Hymie Weiss, who was the last person to be seen in the company of Steve Wisniewski, a local criminal who had recently hijacked a North Side beer shipment in July 1921. When he returned, Weiss explained the man’s disappearance by saying that he “…took Stevie for a one-way ride.”

This method was used countless times in gangland executions of the era and bodies of rival mobsters were often found in remote locations throughout the Chicago area during the 1920s and 1930s. However, the very first “one-way ride” actually took place on November 18, 1904 when a dashing ladies man named John William “Billy” Bate was last seen in a car traveling south on Michigan Avenue with his killer at his side.

Around 9:15 p.m. that evening, Billy Bate was seen in a mint-green Pope-Toledo touring car that was traveling south on Michigan Avenue near Congress. Wearing a chauffer’s cap, goggles and driving gloves, he was chatting with his passenger, a man who had introduced himself as “Mr. Dove”. The man’s name had been heard by Edward Slavin, a telephone operator at the Auditorium Hotel, and Chicago police detectives carefully noted his name.

The touring car that Billy Bate was last seen driving on Michigan Avenue on November 18, 1904.

On the morning of November 19, a farmer named Peter Freehauf found the touring car parked along an abandoned road near his home in south suburban Lemont. Billy Bate was slumped over the steering wheel and he had been shot twice in the back of the head with a .22-caliber pistol.

Who had killed the young man – and why?

As the police began to investigate the crime, they discovered the mysterious figure of “Mr. Dove”, as well as Bate’s string of jilted girlfriends, which ultimately led to his death.

On the previous evening, Mr. Dove had approached the registration desk of the Auditorium Hotel and had asked the switchboard operator to telephone the Wabash Avenue garage for a car and driver. He needed a vehicle that would accommodate two passengers, he said, and after some bargaining, agreed to pay the driver $5 an hour. The operator placed a call to Dan Canary’s garage, where Billy Bate was passing the time with some other drivers in a game of coin toss.

Bate agreed to take the call and asked the night manager if Dove was “all right”. Edwin Archer, who had taken the call but later remembered nothing more about it than that the customer argued about the price, told Bate, “I don’t know, and I don’t care. Get your money and pick him up.”

Witnesses later described Mr. Dove as a wealthy-looking man who was attired in evening clothes and a derby hat. A bystander claimed that he heard Dove exchange some heated words with Bate as the car pulled away from the curb but aside from that, no evidence about the man existed.

The Freehauf farm near Lemont

The police learned that another witness, a farmhand on his way home from a date, had seen the touring car later that night around midnight. It was parked on Archer Avenue, about three miles outside of Lemont. The farmhand said that he saw three people in the automobile and one of them was a woman. Peter Freehauf, the man who reported Bate’s body the next morning, said that he and his wife heard someone pounding on their door during the early morning hours, followed by two gunshots in rapid succession. The couple huddled in terror, refusing to open the door. At dawn, they ventured outside and found Bate behind the wheel of his car. He had been shot in the back of the head on the muddy, deserted road.

A young boy stands on rural Archer Avenue, where the touring car was found on November 19.

Detectives were able to trace some of Dove’s movements. He continued to Joliet by train, wagon, or some other method, pausing at a boarding house to purchase a bottle of benzine (a harsh cleaning solution) to get some of the blood out of his clothes. A kitchen helped at the house described Dove as a nervous chain-smoker who smelled of women’s perfume. They noted that his teeth were very small and white and than he had a soft voice “like a woman.” He apparently confessed to having a girlfriend in Pittsburgh, which the police found interesting since Bate claimed to have a fiancée there. They entertained the idea that the chauffer had been murdered by a woman posing as a man but then eventually concluded that Dove was a man, albeit an effeminate one. 

Mr. Dove boarded a train in Joliet the next day and was never seen again.

The police pulled five love letters from the dead man’s vest pocket and the next day, the Chicago American printed allegations that Bate was keeping company with a wealthy society matron and had left a trail of broken hearts and spurned lovers that extended from New York to Chicago. One of the more poignant letters was from a woman named “Rose” who wrote:

I understand you have won the love of Bertha, and I presume that you have no further use for me. I hope that your future love will be successful. Of course it is pretty hard on me, but I will let the matter drop and say no more. With love, Rose

Investigators scoured the countryside looking for clues as to the identity of the woman who was seen in Bate’s car. They even searched for a body, in case she had been murdered too. A theory held that Mr. Dove had forced him to pick up the woman outside of Chicago, murdered the woman and then turned the weapon on Bate. The nearby canal and the roadside ditches were searched, but no trace of her was ever found. If a woman had been murdered in the midst of this drama, the killer had caused her to vanish without a trace.

Billy Bate's belongings were searching but police found no clues as to the identity of his killer.

The Bate murder mystery, although mostly forgotten today, was the subject of newspaper stories and gossip for many weeks to come. A female detective (which was very rare in those days) was brought into the case to look over the facts and draw her own conclusions, but there was little for her to examine. The investigation foundered and then went cold. It was suggested by some that the murder was the desperate acted of a scorned lover or part of a conspiracy that had been hatched by the elusive Mr. Dove. Or perhaps Bate was nothing more than a small-time hood that fell in with the wrong people and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We will never know for sure but Billy Bate earned a place in the history of Chicago crime as the original victim of the city’s first “one-way ride”.

O'Banion's Right Hand

O’BANION’S RIGHT HAND

Earl “Hymie” Weiss

This post is sort of a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the attempted assassination of John Torrio by elements of the Dean O’Banion mob during Chicago’s bloodiest years. This date, January, 25, 1898, was the birthday of O’Banion’s closest friend and most bloodthirsty avenger, Earl “Hymie” Weiss.

Earl “Hymie” Weiss

During his brief period of power on Chicago’s North Side, Dean O’Banion gained a reputation as a reckless, dangerous and eccentric gangster – and a man not to cross. But O’Banion surrounded himself with men who were just as eccentric as he was. Perhaps one of the most colorful was Earl Wojciechowski, the son of a Polish immigrant who was better known as Earl “Hymie” Weiss. Hymie coined a term that would become one of gangland Chicago’s best-known traditions when he murdered a fellow gangster named Stephen Wisniewski in 1921 – the “one-way ride.” After Wisniewski hijacked some of O’Banion booze, Weiss was tasked with teaching him a lesson. He took the gangster for a ride along Lake Michigan and somewhere along the way, Wisniewski was murdered and his body dumped on the roadside. Afterwards, Weiss was said to have bragged, “We took Stevie for a ride, a one-way ride!”

Weiss was born on January 25, 1898, the son of Walenty and Mary Wojciechowski, who Americanized their names to William and Mary Weiss. He had two brothers, Bruno and Frederick and a sister named Violet. Two other siblings died as children and Weiss’ parents separated while he was still young. Weiss began his criminal career as an “auto pirate,” stealing cars and cutting them up for their parts. In May 1919, after two stolen cars were found at 128 North Cicero, police captured Weiss, along with James Fleming and Alfred Marlowe, as they drove up in a third stolen car. They had been chopping up the cars at 317 North Avers, where they kept tools to dismantle car chassis, strip them for parts and then sell the stolen license plates. Weiss later became friends with O’Banion and the two of them went into the burglary and safecracking business.

Like O’Banion, Weiss attended Holy Name Cathedral and always wore a crucifix around his neck and kept a rosary in his pocket. Thin and wiry with coarse, dark hair, hot black eyes and a notoriously short temper, he was easily the smartest member of the gang and the most arrogant. Many people told stories of his kindness but those who disliked him shuddered in fear at his very presence (Rumor had it that he was one of the only men whom Al Capone feared). Weiss’ frequent mood swings may have been caused by the fact that he suffered from severe migraines. A sofa was installed for him in an upstairs office at Schofield’s flower shop (the North Side gang’s headquarters) and he would sometimes lay there for hours, wracked with pain and completely immobilized in the darkness.

When feeling well, Weiss was described as “generous to a fault.” Like O’Banion, he often helped out poor people in the neighborhood, contributing food and money to those who fell short on their grocery bills. He not only paid all of his parents’ food bills and expenses, but he took care of their friends and neighbors, as well. Once while staying overnight with the family of a fellow gangster, he heard a noise in the kitchen and went in to find his friend’s son trying to get into a cookie jar on the kitchen counter. Weiss laughed and lifted the boy up so that he could snag a snack, a welcome favor that the child would remember many years later as an adult. Weiss made many friends growing up and a number of his classmates from St. Malachy’s School, which he attended as a child, were honorary pallbearers at his funeral. He shared an apartment with a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl named Josephine Libby, who called him “one of the finest men in the world.”

But Weiss, like so many other gangsters of his era, had a dark side. On election days, he worked hard for whatever political party he had been hired to support, clubbing his way from polling place to polling place with a revolver. He seemed to relish beating up election officials while his thugs stole the ballot boxes. One example of his fiery temper occurred in June 1921 when he shot his brother. Fred had just returned from France after completing his military service and made an unwise comment to his brother about the fact that he had failed to serve his country. Earl whipped out a gun and shot him. The Weiss family tried to cover up the incident and Fred pleaded with his doctor at Washington Boulevard Hospital not to tell the police. Everyone claimed it was an accident. The truth of what really happened did not come out until after Earl’s death, when Fred finally admitted that his brother shot him.

After the assassination of Dean O’Banion, Hymie Weiss became a man motivated by revenge. After O’Banion’s death, he became the head of the North Side gang that O’Banion had founded. However, Weiss seemed less interested in making money and more concerned with wrecking the operations of Capone and his allies – and wiping them out. Weiss and his men had wounded John Torrio and caused him to flee Chicago. They had attacked Capone twice, killed Angelo Genna, and wounded and murdered dozens of enemy gunmen.

But Capone retaliated next. He marked Weiss and fellow gang member Vincent Drucci for death and assigned gunman Louis Barko to carry out the murders on August 10, 1926. The event became known as the “Battle of Michigan Avenue.”

Drucci had a suite at the Congress Hotel, four blocks north of the Standard Oil Building at Ninth Street and Michigan Avenue. On the morning of August 10, following a late breakfast in Drucci’s eighth floor suite, Weiss and Drucci walked toward the Standard Oil Building, where they were supposed to meet with Morris Eller, a Sanitary District Trustee, and John Sbarbaro, owner of gangland’s favorite funeral home. Eller was the mobbed-up boss of the Twentieth Ward and a cheap racketeer who offered a presentable face as a politician. Drucci was carrying $13,500 in cash in his pockets, which was allegedly a down payment on a piece of real estate, but was more likely bribe money for the North Side gang’s Twentieth Ward sponsors.

As Drucci and Weiss were about to pass through doors of the building, Louis Barko and three other men jumped out of a car on the east side of Michigan Avenue and opened fire on them. Windows shattered and bullets chipped the stone walls as Drucci scrambled for cover behind parked cars. Weiss managed to get into the lobby of the building, shaken but unhurt.

Drucci pulled out his own gun and returned fire before jumping onto the running board of an automobile driven by C.C. Bassett, a startled motorist who had been trapped in the crossfire. Drucci’s escape was interrupted by the arrival of the police, who dragged him off the car. The attackers ran back to their car and when one of them fell behind, the others drove off without him. The affair turned out to be bloodless and it was over in less than two minutes. The police officers on the scene recognized Barko as one of Capone’s gunmen and assumed this was an attempted mob hit. However, Drucci denied it. When questioned by the police at the South Clark Street station, he claimed that he didn’t know Barko and dismissed the whole thing as an attempted robbery. “It was a stick-up, that’s all,” he told the cops. “They were after my roll.” Hymie Weiss’ mother posted the necessary bond and freed her son’s friend from behind bars.

Their luck continued five days later. On August 15, Drucci and Weiss were driving south on Michigan Avenue and as they passed the Standard Oil Building, a car that had been trailing close behind them suddenly raced ahead, swerved to the right and rammed them. The men in the other car opened fire and bullets smashed all of their windows. Drucci and Weiss ducked down and scrambled out of the passenger side of the sedan. As they ran for the shelter of the closest building, they fired back over their shoulders with their own handguns. Miraculously, once again, no innocent bystanders were killed in the attack. As bullets slammed into the attacker’s car, they roared away down Michigan Avenue.

It was incidents like this that caused Charles “Lucky” Luciano, after visiting Chicago, to remark, “It’s a real goddamn crazy place! Nobody’s safe in the streets.”

Soon after, Weiss and George Moran led a hasty assault on the Four Deuces at 2222 South Wabash. Capone somehow escaped unhurt but his driver, Tony Ross, died behind the wheel.

A week later, on September 20, 1926, Weiss pulled one of his craziest stunts yet. He sent a caravan of automobiles, each carrying a trio of machine gunners, to Capone’s Cicero headquarters, the Hawthorne Inn. Hundreds of bullets shattered the front of the hotel, but no one was killed.

On October 4, Capone made a curious move. It was one that would have pleased his old mentor John Torrio, but was uncharacteristic of the more hot-headed Capone: he proposed a peace talk. Weiss agreed to a meeting at the Morrison Hotel, but Capone himself did not attend. He sent Tony Lombardo in his place and, to placate his enemy, he authorized Lombardo to offer Weiss exclusive sales rights to all of the beer territory in Chicago north of Madison Street, an outrageously handsome concession.

But Weiss wouldn’t have it. His thirst for revenge overrode his business interests. The only price that he would accept for peace was the deaths of the men responsible for O’Banion’s murder. Lombardo telephoned Capone for instructions. When he gave Capone’s answer – “I wouldn’t do that to a yellow dog” --- Weiss stormed out of the hotel in a fury.

Capone realized that there was no negotiating with Weiss. With this realization, the man’s days were numbered. Weiss had been a thorn in his side for too long.

October 11, 1926 was a day like any other in downtown Chicago. Workday crowds and shoppers shuffled up and down the pavement and automobiles moved back and forth on the busy streets. Across State Street from Holy Name Cathedral, at 738 North State Street, was the old flower shop that had been run by Dion O’Banion, and now operated solely by John Schofield. Hymie Weiss continued to maintain an office on the second floor.

One of the buildings used by Weiss’ assassins -- the window of the apartment where the shooters waited is marked with a white “X” in the photograph.

Next door, at 740 North State Street, was a three-story rooming house that was kept by Mrs. Anna Rotariu. Early in October, a young man who called himself Oscar Lundin, or Langdon, rented rooms from Mrs. Rotariu. He wanted a room on the second floor, facing State Street, but all of the front rooms were occupied so he agreed to take one in the rear until something in front opened up, as one did on October 8. It was a small, rather dismal room furnished only with two straight-backed wooden chairs, an old oak dresser, a brass bed, a tin food locker, a gas ring and a shelf that held a few mismatched cups, cracked plates and tarnished cutlery. In spite of this, Lundin appeared to be delighted with the room.

On the same day that Lundin moved into his new quarters, a pretty blond woman, who gave her name as Mrs. Theodore Schultz of Mitchell, South Dakota, rented a front room on the third floor of an apartment building at 1 Superior Street, which ran at a right angle to State Street, south of the flower shop. Lundin’s windows offered an unobstructed view of the east side of State Street from Holy Name Cathedral to the corner, while Mrs. Schulz’s windows overlooked both the front and rear entrances of the flower shop. Anyone approaching or leaving the immediate area in any direction had to pass within range of one or the other ‘s windows.

Lundin occupied his new room for only one day. After paying a week’s rent in advance, he vanished. Two men, who had visited him during his short stay, moved into the room. Mrs. Rotariu described them as an older man who wore a gray overcoat and fedora, and a younger man who wore a dark suit and light cap. Mrs. Schultz of Mitchell, South Dakota, also vanished after paying a weeks’ rent. Two men also moved into her room. The landlord later said that they looked like Italians.

In Early October, Hymie Weiss was attending the murder trial of Joe Saltis and Lefty Koncil, two former Capone allies that had defected to Weiss and the O’Banion gang.

In Early October, Hymie Weiss was attending the murder trial of Joe Saltis and Lefty Koncil, two former Capone allies that had defected to Weiss and the O’Banion gang.

During that week in early October, Hymie Weiss spent most of his time at the Criminal Courts Building, four blocks from his headquarters above the flower shop. He was watching the jury selection in the trial of Joe Saltis and Lefty Koncil for the murder of Mitters Foley. The trial held special interest for Weiss, as evidenced by the list of officials and witnesses that was later found in his office safe. These documents would give substance to the rumor that he had paid out more than $100,000 to guarantee an acquittal in the case.

When court recessed for the day on October 11, Weiss left the building with four friends – his driver Sam Peller, a bodyguard and part-time beer runner, Patrick “Paddy” Murray, a Twentieth Ward politician and private investigator named Benny Jacobs, and William O’Brien, one of Chicago’s top criminal attorneys, who was leading the Saltis-Koncil defense team.

At about 4:00 p.m., Peller parked Weiss’ Cadillac coupe in front of Holy Name Cathedral, across from the flower shop, and the five men started across State Street. The two men in Mrs. Rotariu’s rooming house had been waiting for two days with their chairs drawn up to the windows, guns in hand. Dozens of cigarette butts littered the floor. The two men in the side-street apartment had also been keeping watch since October 9, smoking and drinking wine, but now saw they were no longer needed. As they hurried out of the apartment, they left behind a shotgun and two bottles of wine.

As the five men reached the center of the street, the deafening sound of rattling Tommy guns pierced the air. Pedestrians scattered as bullets poured out of the windows of the rooming house. Weiss died instantly but Patrick Murray was hit ten times and survived long enough to be pronounced dead at Henrotin Hospital without regaining consciousness. Peller, hit fifteen times, fell dead in the street.

Patrick “Paddy” Murray in repose

Sam Peller’s Body is taken away by the police

O’Brien, with bullets in his arm, thigh and abdomen, dragged himself to the curb. The first policeman on the scene found him begging people in the growing crowd to take him to a doctor. Jacobs was hit once in the leg, and managed to drag himself to safety. The bullets that killed Hymie Weiss tore away portions of the inscription on the church's cornerstone and left bullet holes as a graphic reminder of the event. The church tried to have them removed years later but the chips and marks remain. They can still be seen on the corner of the cathedral today.

Meanwhile, the assassins fled their third-floor lair, ran down a back staircase, exited the building through a ground-floor window into an alley and disappeared into the crowd. A discarded Tommy gun was found atop a dog kennel in an alley off Dearborn Street but it couldn't be traced back to the killers. On a bed in the rented room the police found a fedora with a label a label from a store in Cicero near the Hawthorne Inn. No record of the owner was ever found.

Although one has to wonder how hard the police actually looked for it. Chief Morgan Collins issued a gruff statement: "I don't want to encourage the business, but if somebody has to be killed, it's a good thing the gangsters are murdering themselves off. It saves trouble for the police.”

A gruesome photograph of Hymie Weiss in the Morgue.

While Weiss was being prepared for burial at the Sbarbaro Funeral Home, Capone was holding a press conference at the Hawthorne Inn. “That was butchery,” he lamented over the course of several interviews as he handed out drinks and cigars to the reporters. “Hymie was a good kid. He could have got out long ago, taken his and been alive today. When we were in business together in the old days, I got to know him well and used to go often to his room for a friendly visit. Torrio and me made Weiss and O’Banion. When they broke away and went into business for themselves, that was all right with us… But then they began to get nasty. We sent ‘em word to stay in their own backyard. But they had the swelled heads and thought they were bigger than we were. Then O’Banion got killed. Right after Torrio was shot – and Torrio knew who shot him – I had a talk with Weiss. ‘What do you want to do, get yourself killed before you’re thirty?’ I said to him. ‘You better get yourself some sense while there are a few of us left alive.’ He could still have got along with me. But he wouldn’t listen to me. Forty times I tried to arrange things so we’d have peace and life would be worth living. Who wants to be tagged around night and day by guards? I don’t, for one. There was, and there is, plenty of business for us all and competition needn’t be a matter of murder, anyway. But Weiss couldn’t be told anything. I suppose you couldn’t have told him a week ago that he’d be dead today. There are some reasonable fellows in his outfit, and if they want peace I’m for it now, as I have always been.”

One of the reporters asked if Al had any idea who might have killed Hymie Weiss. He shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry Hymie was killed, but I didn’t have anything to do with it. I phoned the detective bureau that I’d come in if they wanted me, but they told me they didn’t want me. I knew I’d be blamed for it. There’s enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street. I don’t want to end up in a gutter punctured by machine gun slugs, so why should I kill Weiss?”

The question brought a grunt of disgust from Chief of Detectives Shoemaker when he read the interview in the newspaper. He had his own statement for reporters, one much more succinct than Capone’s. “He knows why,” Shoemaker said, “and so does everyone else. He had them killed.”

Chief Collins agreed. When he was asked why Capone was not arrested for the crime, he replied: “It’s a waste of time to arrest him. He’s been in before on other murder charges. He always has his alibi.”

Hymie Weiss’ funeral was a sad affair, not only for his friends, but in comparison to other gangster funerals. A group of his boyhood classmates from St. Malachy’s School served as his pallbearers and with the last rites of the church denied to him, he was buried in unconsecrated ground at Mt. Carmel Cemetery, not far from the resting place of his friend, Dion O’Banion. The floral tributes fell far below the usual gangland standards and the only underworld figures in attendance were Vincent Drucci and George Moran, who now ran what would be the doomed gang together.

Want to know more about the North Side mob and the history of the Chicago’s Beer Wars? See my book BLOOD, GUNS & VALENTINES, available here in an autographed print edition or as a Kindle book from Amazon.com 

Vengeance for O'Banion!

VENGEANCE FOR O’BANION

The Near-Miss Assassination Attempt on John Torrio

On this date, January 24, 1925, an attempted Chicago mob assassination changed the face of Chicago forever. On that evening, North Side gangster attempted to kill John Torrio, the undisputed leader of Chicago gangland. Torrio was a mentor and boss of Al Capone and the man directly responsible for dividing Chicago up into territories for individual gangs at the start of Prohibition. He was a man who believed in settling trouble through words and negotiations, rather than by bullets. But he was willing to order violence when it was needed – and it was often needed during the tumultuous years of the early 1920s.  

Chicago mob boss John Torrio

Unfortunately for Torrio, he made two big mistakes in 1924. First, he allowed the assassination of Dean O’Banion, the leader of the North Side mob, who had been causing problems for other gangs by hijacking liquor shipments and selling whiskey in other gangs’ territories. The North Siders were an eccentric and reckless bunch and their leader was no exception. O’Banion then made the mistake of setting up Torrio himself on liquor charges, which would eventually lead to the mobster spending time in jail. At that point, Torrio lost all patience with O’Banion and allowed Capone to arrange for his murder.

This led to Torrio’s second mistake – he underestimated the pathological need for revenge that would grip the remaining members of the North Side mob. O’Banion had not just need the boss, he was their friend and loyalty was important above everything else to the North Siders. They would do just about anything to avenge the death of Dean O’Banion and their actions began the famous Chicago “Beer Wars.”

On January 24, Torrio’s mistakes came home to roost when he was attacked by North Siders. The severe wounds that he suffered led to not only his abrupt departure from Chicago after his prison sentence, but led directly to the ascendancy of Al Capone.

The assassination of Dean O’Banion in November 1924 turned out to be John Torrio’s last great achievement in Chicago. He left the city soon after the funeral and embarked, with his wife, Ann, on an extensive tour of vacation spots in the South and the Caribbean. They visited Hot Springs, Arkansas (a favorite gangland recreation spot of the era), New Orleans, Havana, the Bahamas, Palm Beach and St. Petersburg – never realizing that they were staying just one step ahead of gunmen that had been dispatched by O’Banion’s right-hand man Hymie Weiss, who were trying to kill Torrio whenever they got the chance. To Weiss’ regret, they never caught up with him, always arriving a day or two late, or perhaps missing them only by a few hours.

Al Capone was Torrio’s second in command and was gravely concerned about the murder attempts by the North Side mob – both for himself and his friend. 

But the North Siders weren’t just after Torrio.On January 12, Capone and two bodyguards were driven by his chauffeur, Sylvester Barton, to a restaurant at State and Fifty-Fifth streets. When they reached the restaurant, Capone got out of the car, leaving the two bodyguards behind. The door had just closed behind him when a long black car cruised slowly by. Inside were North Siders Hymie Weiss, Vincent Drucci and George Moran, all clutching shotguns and automatics. As they rolled up next to Capone’s car, they opened fire, raking it from front to back with their weapons. A policeman later said, “They let it have everything but the kitchen stove.” The bodyguards managed to come out of the hail of bullets unscathed but Sylvester Barton, the driver, was hit once in the back.

The close call prompted Capone to place a special order with General Motors – a $30,000 custom-built limousine that weighed over seven tons. It had a steel, armor-plated body, a steel-hooded gas tank, bulletproof windows, a gun compartment behind the rear seat and a removable back window that allowed occupants to open fire unimpeded on pursuing vehicles. Capone began using the car regularly, even when traveling short distances. He knew that he was an easy target walking down the sidewalk. When he had to cross a street – or even a hotel lobby – a cluster of bodyguards surrounded him, walking two and three deep on every side. In the nightclubs that he patronized, no strangers were allowed to sit at adjacent tables. At the opera, bodyguards took the seats on every side. In his office, as a precaution against an assassin who might somehow slip past his guards, he used a swivel chair with a high, armor-plated back. He rarely kept an appointment at the agreed upon time and place, always sending a messenger ahead to make a last-minute change. Ironically, despite all these precautions, no life insurance company would sell him a policy, as he found out when he applied for one in 1925.

While Barton the chauffeur was recovering from his wound, Capone used Tommy Cuiringione, alias Rossi, as his driver. He proved to be a chauffeur and bodyguard of exceptional loyalty. Not long after he started driving the boss, some of Weiss’ men kidnapped him and tried to force him to tell them where they might ambush Capone. One morning, a month later, two boys were walking a horse through some woods southwest of Chicago and stopped at a cistern to water the animal. The horse backed away and refused to drink. That afternoon, the boys mentioned the odd incident to a police officer they knew. He instructed the boys to take him to the cistern. He looked inside and hauled out what remained of Tommy Cuiringione. He had been beaten and burned with cigarettes and then shot five times in the head. His killers had tried to hide the body by wiring his wrists and ankles to a concrete block and dropping him in the cistern. Capone never forgot the fact that Tommy didn’t talk.

Hymie Weiss was Dean O’Banion’s second in command and took over running the North Side mob after his friend was killed. He was intent on avenging the death of O’Banion. 

Torrio and his wife returned to Chicago in the mid-January. After being free for seven months on bail, Torrio and 11 co-defendants now had to stand trial in the Sieben Brewery case, which O’Banion had set Torrio up in. He was almost happy to be inside a courtroom because he knew that it was a safe place to hide from Weiss’ gunmen. Torrio was shaken by the latest attempt to kill Capone and he was looking for a place to find refuge. Where would be the safest? In federal prison, he realized. On January 23, Torrio appeared before Federal Judge Adam Cliffe and entered a guilty plea in his case. He would be safely behind bars and by the time he got out, Capone would have dealt with Hymie Weiss.

Before passing sentence, Cliffe offered Torrio five days during which time he could settle his affairs. He took his wife shopping on Michigan Avenue on January 24. His car was in the shop for repairs, so he borrowed a Lincoln sedan from Jake Guzik, along with his driver, Robert Barton, Sylvester’s brother. It was almost dusk when the automobile, packed with shopping bags and parcels, turned onto Clyde Avenue on Chicago’s South Side. It stopped in front of 7011, where the Torrios occupied a third-floor apartment. Neither Barton nor the Torrios noticed the black Cadillac with no license plates that was parked at the corner of Clyde and Seventieth streets.

    

Barton opened the rear door of the sedan and helped the Torrios gather up their bags. Ann Torrio went ahead along the short sidewalk that led to the front door in the center of the apartment building. The Cadillac slowly moved forward. As she pushed the door open, backing inside since her hands were full, the Cadillac stopped across the street, directly alongside the sedan. Ann could see what appeared to be four men inside the car – and all of them were holding guns! She started to scream as Torrio stepped out of the car and onto the sidewalk. It was too late. She could only watch helplessly as two men, later determined to be George Moran and Hymie Weiss, jumped from the car with automatics drawn and ran toward her husband. The first man (Moran) fired two shots and Torrio fell to the ground, his jaw broken by one bullet and the other in his chest. As he twisted on the sidewalk, Weiss shot him in the right arm and the groin. At the same time, the two men who were still in the Cadillac, Vincent Drucci and Frank Gusenberg, opened fire with shotguns at the sedan, shattering windows and tearing open holes in the metal. A bullet hit Barton in the right leg below the knee.

George Moran came very close to killing Torrio. If the clip on his automatic had not been empty, he would have had his revenge against the mob leader. 

Moran bent over Torrio and held his automatic to the fallen man’s temple, planning to deliver the final shot, but the clip was empty. Before he could reload, Drucci began honking the horn of the Cadillac, signaling frantically that they needed to leave. Moran and Weiss ran to the car and they sped away.

Somehow, Torrio managed to crawl toward the apartment building and his wife, who was still screaming, dragged him inside. A neighbor, Mrs. James Putnam, witnessed the shooting and called the nearby Woodlawn police station. An ambulance arrived and Torrio was raced to Jackson Park Hospital.

Barton, ignoring his leg wound, got into the sedan and sped off toward Seventy-First Street. He passed a car driven by retired detective sergeant, Thomas Conley, who, spotting the sedan filled with bullet holes, gave chase. He confronted Barton in a drugstore as he was limping out of a telephone booth. The bleeding man refused to tell Conley what was going on. He pushed past him, got back into the car and drove off again. After traveling halfway across the city, he was finally forced to pull over by a patrol car, taken to a local station house, and then the hospital. The person that Barton had telephoned, the police believed, was Al Capone.

Torrio’s automobile after the attack.. it was filled with bullet holes. 

Newspaper reporters managed to get to Torrio at the hospital and began badgering the badly wounded, but still conscious, mobster with questions. He spoke with difficulty because of his shattered jaw but managed to say, “Sure, I know all four men, but I’ll never tell their names.” And he never did.

The police found a neighbor who was willing to talk, though. The 17-year-old son of the apartment building’s janitor, Peter Veesaert, had been standing in the doorway of the building at the time of the attack. He was shown some photographs that were taken by the police during Dion O’Banion’s funeral and he pointed out George Moran as the first man who shot Torrio. Bravely, he insisted that his identification was correct when he was brought face-to-face with Moran after he was arrested. “You’re the man,” Peter said. The police wanted to hold Moran until they could establish some evidence in support of the boy’s identification but Judge William Lindsay released him under $5,000 bail. He was never indicted for the crime.

Capone made it to Jackson Park Hospital soon after the ambulance arrived. He was in tears when he learned that his friend’s condition was critical. He not only refused to leave Torrio’s bedside but he insisted that Torrio be given an inner room on the top floor. Two policemen stood on guard outside of Torrio’s door but Capone also placed four of his own bodyguards in the corridor. It turned out that these precautions were necessary. During the night, hospital staff reported three carloads of armed men circling the building. The police were notified and eventually the cars drove off.

Despite the seriousness of his wounds, Torrio recovered quickly. In less than three weeks, he was discharged from the hospital. He left by way of a hidden fire escape, surrounded by bodyguards. That same day, February 9, with his jaw and face bandaged and hidden behind a scarf, he appeared again before Judge Cliffe. He was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and sentenced to spend nine months at the Lake County Jail in Waukegan, Illinois.

Torrio showed up for court with a scarf around his neck to hide the still-healing bullet wounds from the assassination attempt. 

Aware of the danger that Torrio was in, the warden of the jail fitted the windows of Torrio’s cell with bulletproof, mesh-steel blinds and assigned two deputy wardens to patrol the corridor outside. Other additions to the cell had nothing to do with Torrio’s safety. The little chamber was cozily outfitted with throw rugs, an easy chair, framed pictures and a down mattress for the bunk. This was not unheard-of treatment for rich, well-connected prisoners – especially in Chicago.

The warden also allowed Torrio to hold business conferences at the jail and in March, a month after his incarceration; he met with Capone and his attorneys. The treaties between the gangs that Torrio had created and worked so hard to enforce were now wrecked beyond recovery. There was no hope of peace in the Chicago underworld and Torrio had no stomach for war. So, he announced to Capone and his lawyers that he planned to retire from Chicago and divest himself of all of his interests in the city. With no demands, payments or conditions, he turned everything over to Capone: the brothels, the breweries, the speakeasies and the gambling houses, which together produced annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars.

Capone was literally the crowned the king of the Chicago underworld and he became the most powerful man in the city – at only 25 years old. But his new empire did not come cheap. With the syndicate crumbling, it was all in danger of coming apart. To secure it again, and continue producing wealth, Capone had to win back, overthrow or destroy every major gang in Chicago.

Read the full story of Capone’s rise to power, the gangster wars of Chicago and even the ghostly tale that haunted Capone to the grave in my book, BLOOD, GUNS & VALENTINES. Available as an autographed print edition or as a Kindle edition from Amazon.com