Mr. Capone by Robert Schoenberg

Author:Robert Schoenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1992-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Capone left almost immediately for the summit at the President Hotel in Atlantic City. Nearly every important crime figure from the East and Midwest attended, with a glorious American disregard for creed or national origin: Costello, Meyer Lansky, Charles Luciano and Dutch Schultz from New York; Charles Solomon from Boston; Abner Zwillman, overlord of New Jersey; Abe Bernstein from Detroit’s Purple Gang; Max Hoff, kingpin of Philadelphia; and others from Florida and New Orleans. All factions—except Moran—were represented from Chicago, the hot spot whose killings were giving bootlegging, gambling and prostitution a bad name, threatening a national cleanup. Capone brought with him Jack Guzik, Frank Nitti and the inevitable Frank Rio.

“I told them,” Capone remembered later, “there was business enough to make us all rich and it was time to stop all the killings and look on our business as other men look on theirs, as something to work at and forget when we go home at night. It wasn’t an easy matter for men who had been fighting for years to agree on a peaceful business program. But we finally decided to forget the past and begin all over again and we drew up a written agreement and each man signed on the dotted line.”

Johnny Torrio, an important presence at the meeting, must have been proud of his disciple. The agreements followed the pattern that Torrio had negotiated in Chicago before 1923 and that Capone had tried to enforce ever since: rational pooling of corruption efforts; fixed territories; a united front against outsiders, the incorruptible and reform; and arbitration by an umbrella commission, chaired by Torrio. Above all, they agreed to end the public violence that had quickened public opinion against them.

Moran, still in hiding, might present a problem. Some Chicago Sicilians might resent the deaths of Scalise, Anselmi and Guinta. Whether it was the newfound commission’s idea, Torrio’s or his own, Capone decided to remove himself for a season as target of revenge and focus of public outcry. He set up his own arrest in Philadelphia.

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