Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone by John Kobler

Author:John Kobler [Kobler, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-02-11T16:27:00+00:00

In March Capone took a short pleasure jaunt to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Drucci, who somehow got wind of it, followed him there, fired a shotgun at him, but missed.

As April 5-election day-drew near, Capone's Hotel Metropole suite became a covert annex to the Thompson campaign headquarters on the sixteenth floor of the Hotel Sherman. To and fro between them, carrying messages and money, scurried such middlemen as Daniel Serritella, ex-newsboy, founder of the Chicago Newsboys' Union and First Ward politician, a particular Capone friend; Morris Eller, the Twentieth Ward boss; Jack Zuta, the whoremaster, a member of the William Hale Thompson Republican Club, who contributed $50,000 to the campaign chest and bragged: "Pm for Big Bill hook, line and sinker and Bill's for me hook, line and sinker." Capone, hunched over a mahogany conference table behind a battery of nine telephones, a cigar in his mouth, issued orders to his forces scattered through the city, to triggermen, sluggers, kidnappers, bombers....

The first act of violence had not been planned by Capone, but the end result could scarcely have gratified him more. The O'Banionites, too, like most Chicago gangs, were cheering Thompson and his wideopen town policy. The day before the election a band of them, led by Schemer Drucci, broke into the offices of the Forty-second Ward's Alderman Dorsey R. Crowe, a Dever champion, bent upon mayhem. Finding no sign of Crowe, they beat up his secretary, toppled over filing cabinets, and smashed windows. The police picked up Drucci that afternoon. One of his captors, Detective Dan Healy, enraged him by laying rough hands on him. In the squad car taking him to the stationhouse, Drucci yelled: "I'll get you for this!" and tried to grab the detective's gun. Healy pulled back, freeing the gun, and holding it close to Drucci's body, killed him with four shots. "Murder?" said Chief of Detectives Schoemaker when a lawyer retained by the gangster's widow demanded an investigation. "We're having a medal struck for Healy." The police had thus rid Capone of one of his deadliest foes.

Drucci was buried in unconsecrated ground at Mount Carmel Cemetery under a blanket of 3,500 flowers. Though denied the last rites of his church, he was accorded military honors by the Harold A. Taylor Post of the American Legion, to which he belonged, having served in the World War. A squad of uniformed Legionnaires fired a salute over the flag-draped casket, and a bugler blew taps. Capone, who had sent one of the showiest floral offerings, stood unshaven at the graveside.

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