“I really am too much a cop, Frank. I respect you. You’re the best man in your world. But the Outfit does a lot of things that make me…uncomfortable.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and I couldn’t help thinking again that that was the name of that goddamn Pegler’s column, “but I got to ask you a favor.”
“Sure.”
All humor, all goodwill, left his face; like a sudden change in the weather, Nitti rained on me: “Stay out of the Outfit’s business. You turned up twice this week in my business. You almost got killed once because of it. I would’ve regretted that. I would’ve sent flowers. But dead is dead, my friend, and that is how you will be if you continue to put your nose in my affairs. Capeesh?”
“Capeesh,” I managed to say.
He leaned back; his face and his voice softened a bit. “You can’t be faulted for taking on a client who offers money. I understand that. I understand the temptation when an O’Hare, a Bioff, comes around and says I will give you money. But next time such a person comes to you, think, next time, remember: Frank Nitti offered you a job. I offered you a job years ago, in a hospital room as a matter of fact, not long after you saved my life from Cermak’s maggots and I don’t forget that, not a second do I forget that, but in truth you turned my offer down. And you turned me down just now, again. From that I take it to mean that you aren’t interested in my business. So stay the hell out of it. I mean this in a friendly way. Final warning.”
I swallowed. “I appreciate your frankness, Frank. I appreciate the warning.”
“Right. Some people wake up dead in the alley. They didn’t rate no warning. You, I figure, got that much coming.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, Frank. I apologize for-”
He waved a hand again. “No apologies. Clients hired you; that’s what you’re in business for. But that was before the law was laid down. Henceforth, stay the fuck out of my affairs.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say, except: “Yes, Frank.”
“Now, you saw some things at O’Hare’s.”
What was he talking about?
“Frank, I don’t know…”
“I want you to forget it. All of it. Anything O’Hare said to you, before he was killed. Anything you saw there, at his office. You just put that out of your mind.”
And as he said that, I put it together: the very thing he didn’t want anyone to put together. Because as he sat there looking at ledgers-fresh from a conference with O’Hare’s partner Johnny Patton-I recalled who was the accountant at Sportsman’s Park: Les Shumway, the witness who helped put Capone away. And who was O’Hare, but the federal informer who helped put Capone away? Yet O’Hare had prospered, in the wake of Capone’s fall, and even Shumway had found refuge, right under Frank Nitti’s nose. Why wasn’t Shumway dead?
Perhaps he was, now, like his boss O’Hare. Or he was out of town, or he was being well taken care of.
Because the man sitting across from me was the real man who put Capone away. It wasn’t Stege or Ness or Irey or Frank J. Wilson or Uncle Sam.
It was Frank Nitti.
I knew, with a certainty that chilled me, something that the papers for all their theorizing had not guessed, something that the feds for all their investigating had not even considered, something that few people living knew, few people but for the handful of conspirators themselves, one of whom, Edward J. O’Hare, was freshly dead.
That Frank Nitti had, through O’Hare and Shumway, set Capone up for the federal fall.
To vacate the throne for himself.
“Well,” he said, “I won’t take up any more of your time. It’s been a busy week for all concerned.”
“I would imagine,” I said, casually I hoped, “what with the big boss coming back in a few days.”
He laughed again; not the booming laugh, but loud enough. “Al’s not getting back in the business, kid.”
“Would I be out of line asking why?”
Matter-of-fact shrug. “We heard rumors, but till they let his own doctor examine him at Lewisburg the other day, we couldn’t be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
His smile stopped just short of gloating. “Kid, Al’s crazier than a bedbug. The syph’s eaten away half his brain. He just didn’t live right, you know.”
And he finished his milk.
I rose. My knees felt weak, but I could stand. I could even walk, and did, out the door.
Campagna, waiting, said, “You want a ride home? Snow’s comin’ down. I got a car.”
I could hear the muffled sound of Nitti talking to a woman, in the entryway back of the closed door behind me.
“No thanks,” I said.
After all, the day might come soon enough when Louis Campagna, or someone like him, took me for a ride at Nitti’s behest.
On November 22, the first of Pegler’s columns exposing Bioff and Browne appeared in hundreds of papers nationwide. For once, Pegler submerged his quirky, alternately folksy and pompous writing style into a flat, clear, straightforward reporter’s voice that helped make his union-busting series something that was taken seriously.
The first column specifically exposed Bioff’s unserved sentence for pandering; later Pegler bared Browne’s gangster-tinged past.
In February 1940, due to public pressure created by Pegler’s columns, Bioff was returned to Chicago and, on April 8 of that year, the clang of a cell door swinging shut at the House of Correction marked the start of his actually serving that long-forgotten six-month sentence. Word was he had a private office-like cell with a fresh tub of iced beer each day, the latter a luxury more suited to Browne than Bioff; and he was sometimes released on a good-conduct pass, and was seen out-and-about in Chicago. What the hell-I was pleased that the bust I’d made so long ago had finally resulted in a jail sentence being served at all, iced beer, private office, good-conduct passes or no.
On May 4, 1941, Pegler was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, for “articles on scandals in the ranks of organized labor.”
Twenty days later, Bioff and his co-defendant Browne were charged in a federal court in New York under the Federal Anti-Racketeering Statute on the film-industry extortion. Shortly thereafter, so was Nick (Dean) Circella. Dean and Browne each received eight years; Bioff ten. All three went to prison without uttering a word about Nitti and the Outfit.
Dean, however, was a fugitive for some months prior to his trial, until FBI agents arrested him in a roadhouse known as Shorty’s Place, in Cicero. He was hiding out with Estelle Carey, who had dyed her hair black and posed with Dean (himself posing as a workman) as his little homebody housewife; it must have been a masquerade Estelle enjoyed not in the least.
The murder of E. J. O’Hare remained (and remains) unsolved.
Me? I went about my business, watching all this from the sidelines, keeping what I knew about the Nitti-directed murder of O’Hare to myself. That week never quite faded from my memory, however, if for no other reason than it was the single most financially rewarding week I had in those early years, and for some time thereafter. Between O’Hare, Nitti, Montgomery and Bioff, I brought in enough mazuma to pay the entire yearly salary of my secretary with some left over toward one of my ops. At the same time I knew the risks I’d taken earning that dough could never be properly compensated. I could still be killed for what I’d done, and for what I knew.
Nonetheless, I thought all this movie-union crap was behind me. I had not been called to testify in the Bioff/Browne/Dean proceedings, and Pegler had in his columns played down my role as much as he could; he probably thought he was getting back at me, but I considered it a favor. I took Nitti’s advice and stayed out of his Outfit’s business-as much as I could, anyway, in a town he owned.
When I came back to Chicago in February 1943, Guadalcanal weighed more heavily on my mind than Willie Bioff and company, and I had no intention of allowing myself to get drawn back into that sordid affair. Nitti’s “final warning,” after all, to stay out of his business, still went-and, battle fatigue and amnesia not withstanding, I clearly remembered that Frank Nitti was not to be taken lightly.