Capone by Laurence Bergreen

Author:Laurence Bergreen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Published: 2017-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Secret Agents

THE SUMMER OF 1930 HAD BEEN LONG, hot, and frustrating for Frank J. Wilson, who led the IRS investigation of Al Capone. Wilson had watched the murder of Jake Lingle induce paroxysms of dread in Chicago, and he was crestfallen when the ensuing scandal failed to smoke out Capone. Rather, it made everyone realize that Capone’s tentacles reached everywhere, not only into the city’s gambling dens, brothels, nightclubs, and saloons, not only into City Hall and the Police Department and the town of Cicero, but into the city’s newsrooms. Isolated by the fear that corruption would taint his office as well, Wilson had spent the last two years studying countless ledgers and bank statements, but he had failed to uncover any concrete evidence of Capone’s income. “He had bought himself a Florida Palace on Palm Island, imported a chef from Chicago and was spending $1,000 a week on banquets. He tore around in sixteen-cylinder limousines, slept in $50 French pajamas, and ordered fifteen suits a time at $135 each,” Wilson reminded himself, “and I couldn’t show that this satrap of Chicago earned more than $5,000 a year!”

Wilson received countless leads developed from newspaper stories and informers, but in every case he came up empty-handed. “Everyone was hostile,” he found. “They were a hundred times more afraid of being killed by Capone guns than they were of having to serve a prison term for perjury.” Although Wilson’s snooping placed him squarely in harm’s way, his anonymous, peripatetic existence protected him better than conventional security. Lurking in the shadows of Capone’s empire, he looked like Everyman—gangly, balding, bespectacled, attired in a wrinkled white shirt and tie—and he lived a makeshift life of last-minute train rides, short stays in rundown rooming houses, smoking an endless stream of cigarettes as he placed calls from public phones. He was willing to track down any lead, no matter how inconsequential. At one point he was reduced to exploring a rumor that Capone controlled the miniature-golf racket, such as it was, in Chicago. “Investigation of this merely improved my putting,” he tersely noted of the result. It defied reason that one of the most powerful men in Chicago, perhaps the most powerful, left no fiscal fingerprints, yet there it was: Public Enemy Number 1 was financially invisible.

Desperate for a productive lead, Wilson turned to outside sources. He traveled to St. Louis, where he saw John T. Rogers, the reporter whom he had assisted with the exposé of Jake Lingle in the Post-Dispatch. Now Wilson wanted a favor in return. Rogers invited Wilson to lunch at the Missouri Athletic Club, where they were joined by a third man, who claimed he was in position to know something about the Capone organization’s gambling income. His name was Edward O’Hare. As a young man he had gone into business with the inventor of a patented mechanical rabbit used to start dog races. Track owners paid a small percentage of their take for the right to use the device, and over the years O’Hare, by controlling these rights, made a considerable amount of money.

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