Al Capone and the Secret City
The year 1920 marked the start of a decade of great change for the city of Chicago. It saw the introduction of the prohibition laws, renewed economic prosperity, and the emergence of a businessman named Al Capone. He would become the most notorious gangster in America, and he would transform Chicago into his own private fiefdom. Capone and his henchmen are long dead, But our investigators are returning to Chicago to peer beneath the contemporary city, in order to reveal the turbulent world which the gangsters rule. Talk about an amazing burst of growth in the 1920s. They’ll explore what remains of the many illegal bars, brothels, and gambling joints, all connected by a network of secret tunnels. They’ll recreate the scene of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. One of the most infamous crimes in American history occurred on this site. They’ll uncover the modest lifestyle lurking behind Capone’s glamorous public facade. This is Al Capone’s bedroom. They’ll search for clues and examine new evidence. And using computer animation, our investigators will reveal the lost world of Al Capone. Our investigators are in Chicago. History professor Vula Saradakis wants to know what the city she now lives in was like when it was ruled by al Capone. It was like he was announcing to everyone, here I am and what are you going to do about it? Josh Dortzbach is a structural engineer. I can see the bones of the building, the steel frame which supports the structure. He wants to use his knowledge to understand how Chicago was transformed during Capone’s time. In 1920, prohibition law was enacted, and America changed overnight. The moment it became illegal to buy or sell alcohol, ordinary people became criminals, gangsters became heroes, and men like Al Capone were gifted an easy way to get rich fast. 1920 was the year when Capone, a New Yorker, arrived in Chicago. He was a professional criminal with a simple idea. At the time, the city’s illegal liquor trade was run by amateurs. Capone intended to take it in hand. Our investigators want to find out why Chicago was the ideal place to set up a criminal organization. Tim Samuelson, an historian, believes the city was ripe for exploitation. Tim, can you tell me what it was about Chicago’s geographical location that helped it grow as a vice capital? Well, Chicago was the perfect place for Vice to flourish, and kind of a center of commerce in a way for illicit activity for the same reason Chicago grew, to begin with. It was in the center of everything. You had perfect transportation. You had the lake. You had the river. You had the railroads. For people- passing through, Chicago had something to offer for everybody. Perhaps it might be your last time to have a really good time in a long time. The city already had a flourishing red light district, the levee. Capone targeted this area immediately. In the early days of Chicago, all of the illicit activity was located in one place. They called it the levee on the south side of Chicago. The authorities looked the other way. In fact, they kind of realized that a growing city just kind of had to have these things. Most of the levee was bulldozed for redevelopment in the 70s, but Vula Saridakis is searching for traces of buildings that Capone would have known. Using maps, photos, and documents of the time, she wants to pinpoint key locations. I’m looking for Colossimo’s Restaurant, which, according to this map of the Southside levee, is located on this block. 2118-2120 and the address is 2122. And so it would have been right here where this car park is right now. Now in empty space, Colossimo’s was the place where Capone made his first deals. He began by supplying bootleg liquor and running protection rackets. Having control over the alcohol supply gave him control of the bars. Then he moved into other areas, notably gambling and prostitution. This vehicle parts shop used to be a brothel. It’s one of the few structures from the period that remains. Documents show that in the 20s, it was the Culleton Hotel. A stone’s throw from Colossimos, the Culleton housed Capone’s ruthlessly efficient money-making operation. You look down here on the floor… You see these beams, these partitions down here, as well as up in the ceiling. And so these would have been separate rooms in this hotel. The rooms are rather small, and this probably would have been an establishment which you paid by the hour. Capone’s name was not on the Calliton’s deeds, but he certainly controlled the hotel prostitutes. It would have been. Absolutely seedy hotel back then. And it really runs counter to the stories that we hear about the glamorous life which these underground individuals used to live. In. The contrast between the glamorous image of Al Capone, Chicago and it’s sordid reality is marked. This becomes clear when we study the floor plan of a hotel these cheap seedy rooms were as small as prison cells. It’s very eerie to imagine all the people who would have been coming through here. Capone distanced himself from this side of the operation. He spent his time in an elegant establishment with a well-heeled clientele. In northern Chicago, we find the Green Mill Bar. The syndicate took control of it in the 1920s. It served alcohol only to people with class and cash. It was a real fancy joint back then. Women had to wear gloves and a hat, and men had to be dressed with a suit on just to get in. The booze sold here was either smuggled by Capone or produced in one of his breweries. And if the owner didn’t sell enough of it, he endured a visit from the boys. Capone’s bully boy tactics inevitably made him many enemies. Wherever he went, he had to be constantly on his guard. Where was Al Capone’s booth? Ah, that’s the booth right here. He would sit in that booth because you could see both doors. And any gangster knows that you never sit with your back to the door, because you want to see who’s coming in or going out. The bar has changed little since Capone’s day, and for a paranoid gangster, it had an extra benefit. A hidden escape route. There’s these rooms down there, and from what I’m told by these old guys, there used to be the parties down there, And if you got raided and you want to get out of here, there’s the tunnels that you could go through. To walk out on the street. Like you were never in here anyway. Vula decides to explore the tunnels in order to determine whether or not the tales are true. This system of freight and drainage passageways made Chicago unique in that it literally had its own underworld. But if there was a raid, how effective would they have been as a means of escape? First thing that I notice is just how extensive the tunnels are. They go in all different directions. And the one, for instance, behind me, possibly leads underneath the street and into other establishments. Vula decides the stories are credible. Certainly, there’s evidence to support the idea of the of the mist surrounding Al Capone and the use of these tunnels. Potentially for smuggling, for getting out onto the street, possibly for escaping. The tunnel complex is extensive. It once connected cellars all over the district. Today, the tunnels are blocked off. Not so in Capone’s time. His men could easily have used them to transport booze between cellars and as a means of escape if a raid took place. His network securely in place, It took Capone just a couple of years to turn a haphazard criminal activity run by amateurs into a big business, run like a corporation. And money bought influence. He was able to bribe elected officials with ease. The mayor, Bill Thompson, seemed more than happy to turn a blind eye to Chicago’s burgeoning speakeasies and brothels. However, in 1923, the situation changed when Thompson was voted out of office and replaced by William Dever, a man with a mission to enforce the law. Capone and his associates had to put their cash and the tools of their trade out of sight, fast. But they had no intention of surrendering their empire. Next, we’ll visit the quiet suburb that Capone would transform into a center of the vice trade, And investigate the private life he set up for his family, far away from the ganglands of Chicago. It’s amazing to me that this room has not changed since Al lived here. Our investigators are in Chicago, building a picture of the city at the time of Al Capone. They’ve discovered that. In 1923, after three years of turning a blind eye, city officials began to crack down on the illegal sale of alcohol. Capone knew that the situation was going to turn ugly, and he decided to move his family out of the ganglands. He bought a modest house in south Chicago for $5,500. He purchased it in his wife’s name and moved the whole extended family into it. Vula has come to explore this house with Capone’s great niece, Deidre, who’s agreed to talk about growing up here with our uncle Al. For the very first time. Oh dear Four generations of Capones lived in this house for over 30 years. Deidre and her immediate family occupied the first floor. Al Capone and his lived on the second. This was very private living quarters. We would only come up here to get the things that we needed. What was in this room? This was where Al would have his meetings with the boys. And anything interesting ever go on in the room? Well, yeah, you knew when he was in here and the door was closed that there were things that were going to be happening soon after that. Even the storeroom had secrets. So tell us about this room. This room was always kept locked. And when my grandmother would bring me up here and unlock it, there’d be cheeses and sausages hanging all over the place. And stacks of hundred dollar bills, and where would that money be? On a shelf, just out in open, out in the open. Yes, Capone was a rich man, but by recreating the floor plans of this small five-room flat, we can see how unassuming his home life was. Meetings with the boys took place in the tiny blue room. Capone’s bedroom wasn’t much bigger. This is Al Capone’s bedroom, small room, isn’t it? For a big man. So what are your memories of Al? Oh, I’ve got lots of memories. He taught me to sing. He taught me to play the mandolin. Bouncing on his knee. He was my family. This was all my family. I felt safe here. Uncle Al was a good family man. To Deidre, Uncle Al was a man devoted to his family. But we also know about his salacious side. Ruler has found that, in addition to the house in the south of the city, Capone also purchased an apartment on the other side of Chicago. This was his house of fun. It’s the only building that still stands. Today in Cicero, that’s associated with Al Capone, and we’re going to go inside and take a look. Capone was an inveterate womanizer. Syphilis would eventually kill him. His private parties were fueled by alcohol and cocaine, and they took place here. Well, this was the bedroom then, as it is a bedroom now, and I see mirrors. In the corners and on the door there, rather suggestive. The furnishings of this room are the same as they were when Al Capone relaxed here. When I look around this apartment, it becomes very evident that this was his personal sanctuary in Cicero, where he would have parties, drugs. He would bring his mistresses. But in 1923, Capone’s world of vice and luxury was turned upside down. The election of William Devere as mayor meant the prohibition was rigorously enforced in the city of Chicago driving Capone and his criminal businesses into the suburbs. He chose to go to the place where he kept his private apartment, Cicero, five miles from the city center. Volu is following in his footsteps now in Cicero, It’s an amazing difference with downtown Chicago and quite far removed. And it makes one wonder why Al Capone would, in fact, come here to set up his base of operations. Perhaps the reason for this is because he could easily exert his influence over an area like this. Before Capone came here, Cicero was, much as it is now, an ordinary residential suburb. But it would soon be transformed into the biggest gambling hotspot west of Atlantic City. According to John Rusick, Capone chose Cicero because he knew that local officials could be bribed. The Capone organization is able to manipulate this town into the kind of operation that it’s looking to create here relatively quickly, partly because there is a weak political organization and it is largely corrupt, and it’s open to the opportunities that this new gang presence offers them. So there’s a marriage of convenience, so to speak. Capone wasn’t interested in hiding from the law. He wanted to be above the law. He turned Cicero into a place where disputes were settled by the gun. When local elections were held in 1924, Capone’s thugs perfected their own campaign style. During the course of the election, Capone’s organization is out in force, intimidating voters with beatings, with threats. There are reports of people within the Capone organization being inside the polling booths with guns drawn, guns exposed on the streets, in front of polling stations. Capone’s methods worked well. The town of Cicero and its inhabitants became his puppets. Well, Capone’s success in Cicero was monumental. They were able to control the politics of the town. They were able to run their operations in Chicago, and they were able to expand their operations greatly here in Cicero and the surrounding area. This rare footage shows Capone enjoying himself in typical style at the race course he opened here. He’s clearly defiant, proud of what he has become, and able to go about his nefarious business in full public view. On the south side of the street was the centerpiece of Al Capone’s operations here in Cicero. It was a place called the Hawthorne Hotel. The Hawthorne Hotel was situated on Cicero’s main thoroughfare. It was the nerve center of a network of illegal businesses that grew at a remarkable rate. Having no fear of the law or its officers, Capone’s only concern was that rival gangs would try to muscle in on his territory. Even at his headquarters at the Hawthorne, constantly surrounded by armed bodyguards, he wasn’t entirely secure. In 1926, he narrowly survived an assassination attempt just outside the building. The hotel no longer stands, but we can recreate it. As it was in its heyday. The unremarkable exterior concealed a bar, a brothel, and a gambling den. From here, Capone controlled 250 other premises. The rackets he ran from the Hawthorne made the gangster a fortune. But the rest of the city was booming, too. In the center of Chicago, the skyscrapers that would create the modern skyline soared up in every direction. Legitimate business was making even more money than Capone’s crime rings. He wanted some of the action. The gang boss decided he’d had enough of hiding away in the suburbs. Capone was coming back. Our investigators are in Chicago. They’ve discovered how Al Capone transformed the placid suburb of Cicero into a gangland of vice and crime. Now they’re visiting the city center to find out what Capone did with the wealth he amassed in Cicero. He intended to move back into the heat of the action. Chicago in the 1920s was awash with money. Big businesses were eager to be in the flourishing heart of the city. Space was at a premium. Chicago had a very small downtown area. It was hemmed in by the lake, the river, so the only place to go was up. And so the real estate people got the architects and the engineers to kind of raid the toolbox of the industrial revolution and help create the modern skyscraper. Prosperity provided the opportunity to radically transform the skylight. Skyscrapers were the symbols of economic success. The higher the city rose, the more Al Capone wanted to take his place in downtown Chicago. Engineer Josh Dortzbach has come to explore one of these Capone-era skyscrapers. The Blackstone hotel is currently undergoing restoration, giving Josh a chance to see the engineering behind the 1920s building boom. He can see the problems the developers faced. For many, many years, Chicago engineers have had to deal with this. This mucky, marshy material, which is so difficult to build on. Chicago stands on marshy clay, loosened by water from Lake Michigan. A way had to be found to reach firmer ground beneath the marsh. The engineers employed a method called caissons. Caissons are basically long cylinders which extend down to bedrock, consisting of… Straight, concrete. This was a way to transfer the weight of the building down to the underlying suitable material, which is the bedrock limestone. Casons were crucial to the construction of this building, as they were to every other skyscraper built in the city since the 1920s. The engineers had to dig to a depth of 100 feet to find solid ground. Shafts were then filled with concrete to ensure the foundations were firmly secured to the bedrock. 33 caissons were sunk to ensure maximum stability for the construction. Josh then discovers another pioneering technique that enabled the builders to reach new and dizzy heights. I’ve come up here to the sixth floor of this building to see how this building is held up. And I can see the bones of the building, the steel frame which supports the structure, and the tremendous weight which must, and is, be coming down through this. It’s actually quite magnificent if you look at it. You see these riveted connections. Withhold it all together. A steel frame allowed the buildings of the 1920s to become taller without becoming excessively heavy. Prior to the development of the skyscraper in Chicago, many of the buildings were masonry or brick-and-mortar load-bearing walls, so they became very thick at the bottom. But at a time they decided to develop the steel frame, It allowed us to remove the brick and mortar and have just a skeleton frame of the building exposed. But there was a downside to these lighter, taller structures. They were vulnerable to strong winds. We had to deal with the problem that there is… More wind force on the building. So the wind connection developed. And the wind connection was comprised of the main steel beam, which also supports the wall above, and then it was stiffened in a triangular fashion like this, both above and below the beam. This allowed the building and its connection to stabilize against wind force. In the center of Chicago, Dotzbach visits the most celebrated building to be constructed utilizing these techniques. It’s the Chicago Board of Trade. When Capone came into the city, this is what he saw, a building intended to be the tallest skyscraper west of New York. The Board of Trade was the symbol of Chicago’s new commercial success, the pride of the businessmen who flaunted their wealth by constructing monumental buildings. In contrast, Capone and his fellow gangsters were forced, by the illegal nature of their operations, to be more discreet. Josh wants to know more about the Board of Trade’s construction. Using what he’s learned about the Blackstone Hotel, and with access to the original engineering drawings of the Board of Trade itself, Josh has been able to work out how the skyscraper was constructed over 75 years ago. I found a copy of the original structural and architectural drawings, and you can see very clearly how it sets back with each tier of the building. Firstly, the Caissons secured the foundations to the bedrock. Then the steel frame was constructed. Clad with limestone, this 43-story structure rose to the giddy height of 609 feet. At the topmost point of the edifice is a statue of the Roman goddess Ceres. The casual way it was embellished reflects the confidence of the men who created it. The statue at the top of the Board of Trade has no face, And it’s said that. The reason for that is because at the time it was the tallest building in Chicago, and nobody would ever see the face from the ground. Completed in 1929, the Board of Trade still stands in the heart of Chicago. It was the city’s tallest building until 1965, when the faceless goddess was first looked down upon by the occupants of the building’s newer and taller neighbors. As the Board of Trade was soaring upwards, Capone planned his return to the center of Chicago. In 1928, he paid $250,000 to ensure a sympathetic mayor was elected. He would move back to the city from Cicero to operate in plain sight, and in some style. Some distance south of the center is the site of the Metropole Hotel. Here, Capone set up his headquarters in 50 of the hotel’s suites. If you look around, you can’t really get a sense of what this used to look like. And perhaps we’re walking into what once used to be the lobby of this hotel. But if you look across the street, you can see some of the buildings that would have been here in the 1920s. This six-story building was the crux of Capone’s operation. The lobby was always full of people waiting to do business with him. Booze flowed like water. Prostitutes came and went openly. There was round-the-clock gambling. This is what the Metropole Hotel looked like when Capone controlled it in the 1920s. By 1928, Capone was renting almost every room. He held court on the fourth floor in two adjoining suites. By positioning himself so near the center of Chicago, Capone had made the decision not to hide from public view. It really was a very highly visible location. Everyone knew he was here. And it really was a gutsy move on his part because it was like he was announcing to everyone, here I am. And what are you going to do about it? The city authorities appeared to tolerate Capone for as long as his criminal activities were clandestine. But eventually, gang violence spread through the city. It became intolerable. Now, our investigators will revisit the scene of one of the most heinous crimes ever committed. They will examine the single invention that did most to shape Capone’s Chicago. The Tommy Gun. This vacant plot was the location of one of the most notorious crimes ever committed in America, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Investigator Vula Saradakis is attempting to reconstruct the scene of the crime. She’s being shown around by local historian Richard Lindbergh. One of the most infamous crimes in American history occurred on this site. At the same time, Josh Dortzbach is going to examine one of the key technological developments that made Chicago so extremely violent, the Tommy Gun. By early 1929, Al Capone had re-established himself in central Chicago, supplying illegal liquor across the city. But tension mounted when his control over the liquor trade was threatened by a rival gang, Bugs Moran’s Northsiders. They were challenging Capone’s syndicate, which controlled the south Side. Their struggle for supremacy gave rise to one of the bloodiest moments in the history of organized crime. It became the stuff of legends, and has been glamorized in many books and films. Richard takes Vula to a salient vantage point. So where are we? We’re standing inside the bay window of 2121 North Clark Street, looking out at the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Opposite was the Clark Street Garage, a northside gang meeting place and booze depot. From these buildings, Capone’s hitmen watched the northside hoods come and go. Rooms were rented in several of these buildings, offering perfect views. You can look out this bay window and you can look upon where the garage stood and observe every single person that was going in there. When Capone’s men had completed their surveillance, they planned a ruthless and brutal attack. On a very cold Valentine’s Day morning in 1929, this garage here, this liquor depot belonging to the Bugs Moran gang, seven men were chatting, playing cards. The hit squad comprised four killers. Two of them would gain access, disguised as police officers, pretending to be raiding the premises. Two men entered through the rear, and the other two shooters came in from the front door on Clark Street. The shooting would only start when Moran’s men had surrendered their weapons to the bogus policemen. The garage has been razed to the ground. There’s no concrete evidence today of the building as it once stood. So what clues are there left? Now to tell us that there was this structure here. You can see the faint traces, the ghostly kind of reminders that there was once a building here. By looking at the residue of tar up on the brick facade facing here. This was the roof line of the building and it extended all the way over here. The original garage floor plans allow us to recreate the scene of the crime. The massacre shocked Chicago to its core. It would become the emblem of the vicious habit that organized crime wrought upon the city. The atrocity was committed with Capone’s signature weapon, the Thompson submachine gun. First produced in 1920, it became so common a sight on the streets that it was nicknamed the Chicago typewriter. To find out more about the Tommy gun, engineer Josh Dortzbach has come to meet Lieutenant Keith Hafer. He believes that he’s in possession of the actual Tommy guns used in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Well, these two weapons were recovered by the Berrien County Sheriff’s Department following the murder of a police officer. And as part of that investigation, the sheriff at that time conducted a raid and they recovered a steamer trunk full of firearms. They were subsequently tested and matched to projectiles and cartridge cases used at the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. This gun bears all the hallmarks of a criminal past. In the 1920s, the serial number was often filed off in order to make the weapon untraceable. The Tommy Gun is one of the pieces of precision engineering that shaped Capone’s Chicago. It’s a recoil-operated, fully automatic weapon. When I load and cock this weapon, I would be pulling the bolt to the rear, compressing this recoil spring. When I pull the trigger to fire the weapon, the bolt is allowed to fly forward or slide forward. So if I grab a cartridge. One of these rounds is stripped out of the magazine. It’s placed here, and the bolt comes through, strikes the round. Pushes it into the chamber. The firing pin would strike the primer, firing the cartridge correct. And then the bolt would move to the rear. Meanwhile, this recoil Spring is set, receives the bolt, and continues to move back and forth. That is correct. So as long as my hand or my finger is still on the trigger, and this is flush, the bolt continues to move back and forth. It would continue to fire until you run out of bullets or release the trigger. Fully loaded, the Tommy gun weighs 20 pounds. It’s capable of firing at a rate of 800 rounds per minute. It gave a gunman overwhelming firepower. This was one of the earliest submachine guns. What this combined was a tremendous amount of firepower, a lot of ammunition, and a reasonably portable weapon. Capone’s willingness to use this lethal piece of equipment created an underworld where disputes were resolved with efficient finality. We’re standing right along the site of the North Wall, in nearly the proximate location where the shooting started. The men were ordered to get up from their chairs. They were lined up, ordered to put their hands on the wall, and were assassinated, execution style. All mayhem and chaos broke loose. Lieutenant Hafer wants to recreate what happened that day with the actual guns used at the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. The two police officers have fired 90 rounds, the same number of bullets thought to have been expended during the massacre. It’s easy to imagine what huge damage those shots would have inflicted on a human body. Unbelievable. Those guns created so much damage. Think of those seven men standing in front of that wall at such close range. How terrible. Alleged to have masterminded the crime, al Capone became public enemy number one. The federal authorities knew they could not secure a conviction, so they tried another attack and prosecuted him not for murder, but for tax evasion. In October 1931, he was convicted and sentenced to 11 years in a federal penitentiary. He appealed against the sentence and was taken to the Cook County Jail to await the decision on his fate. The prison remains one of the largest maximum security facilities in the United States. This is where Al Capone spent his last days in Chicago. Our investigators have been given access to the wing of the Cook County Jail, which was home to Al Capone 75 years ago. It continues to house prisoners today. So here I am at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse and Jail, constructed in 1929. At the time, it was the largest jail in the free world. And yet, even today, still one of the largest in the country. And you see this heavy structure, heavy limestone walls. The old guard tower that’s been bricked in. You can see that narrow slit window. Quite amazing. The jail was originally intended to hold 3,200 inmates. Today, it holds nearly 9,000. At the time, it was the most modern prison of its kind. The governor has arranged for this wing to be vacated so that Vula and John Rusick can see exactly where Capone was incarcerated. This wing became his world. The first thing as I look around that I notice is just how closed it was and narrow. And he would have lost his freedom and his privacy. Capone found himself under the constant surveillance of guards who patrolled the corridors on both sides of his tiny cell. Not much has changed since then. The materials that were used, which were metal walls and steel bars and concrete floors, And all of that not only fulfilled the needs of the jail, but has kept this building intact for all these years. This is an interesting piece, this metal mirror that’s been polished so that there aren’t… The potential for any weapon making going on. Each cell measures a mere five by eight feet and contains two beds. Long-term inmates were denied luxuries of any kind. But Capone wasn’t treated like a regular inmate for very long. He was soon able to use his power and influence on the outside to obtain preferential treatment on the inside. He is able to change his living conditions here. He’s able to get a block of cells, have much more room, special guests, and he’s largely able to continue to run his operations out of the Cook County Jail. Capone was convinced that his time in jail would be short. He fully expected to be released. Capone seemed somewhat oblivious to the idea that this was actually the end of his career in the rackets. And I think that there were a fair number of political and civic leaders who felt the same way. People figured he was going to get out of this jam he was in. Maybe he was going to spend a few months in prison, but he wouldn’t be off the scene for very long. But after spending six months at Cook County Jail, Capone served seven years in a series of different penitentiaries. So I walk through this jail, past these small cells, and through this narrow passageway. I’m struck by the fact that this was Al Capone’s last… Place where he stayed before leaving Chicago. And by the time he left, he was just another inmate, just another number. Capone had once ruled Chicago, and this is what his criminal empire had shrunk to. Even though this is a maximum security facility, we’ve secured special permission to reveal the building’s layout. Each floor of each wing consists of 39 cells, with corridors running along both sides. There are eight wings and five floors in total. Topone left here in 1932 and boarded a train out of Chicago. His malign power over the city had come to an end. The following year, prohibition was repealed, delivering a death blow to the gangs whose core business was trafficking in liquor. The next time Al Capone would return to Chicago, it would be in a coffin. He was released from Alcatraz in 1939. His mental and physical health had visibly declined, and he died in Florida eight years later. The cause of death was a heart attack, probably brought on by syphilis. He was 48 years old. Capone only lived in Chicago for 12 years, but that brief time saw great change. While he brought bootleg, liquor, vice, and violence to the city, legitimate business brought wider prosperity and construction on a massive scale, which would produce a city full of skyscrapers. This is the skyline of Capone’s era, and although it’s now dwarfed by the skyscrapers that have since been built, it was the innovative building techniques developed in the 1920s. It created the soaring city of today, a city where we can still detect the traces of Al Capone’s lost world, in forgotten tunnels, derelict plots, cramped hotel rooms, and the vast prison where his reign of blood and bullets finally came to an infamous end. The story of Al Capone has been told for 75 years, with the same ending. The government got Capone on tax eviction. The men who brought him down were U.S. Treasury agents, Elliot Ness and the Untouchables. That’s not how it really happened. The real story, the real plan to get Capone is his involvement as a covert CIA operation. There were undercover agents. Briefings to the President. And a group of businessmen with secret identities. Together, they laid a calculated plan to outmaneuver the most brutal pillar of the 1920s. The man they labeled public enemy number One. As powerful and ruthless as he was, Capone was going down. Al Capone sat in the courtroom, thumbing his fingers on the defense tip. It was October 1931. At the age of 32, he was already one of the most calculating and cold killers of all time. He was responsible for 300 murders. It seemed he had his hand in every illegal business in Chicago. And he was in court for not paying taxes. It had taken three years to get him here. Three years of death threats, undercover work, and planning. The men responsible have remained, for the most part, unnamed for the past 70 years. That’s the way they wanted it. It all began here, in Chicago in 1924, in a city that seemed willing to live with this. In exchange for the luxury of getting a drink, prohibition had been in effect for nine years. The federal ban on the sale and drinking of alcohol had divided friends and acquaintances, and even entire towns, into two camps, dry or wet. The people who lived outside the city limits of Chicago were dry, while Chicago was one of the wettest of the wet. Standing at the top of Chicago’s bootlegging empire was Al Capone. He was young, just 24 when he started, but he was smart. He had a knack for illegal business. He was the embodiment of organized crime. Before he was 30, he earned more than $25 million, $75 million by today’s standards. And when his business savvy failed him, he had one fail-safe way of ensuring his success. He got rid of the competition. His gang rule was in the headlines routinely. Under his command, Chicago had become a city terrorized by the violence of bootlegging wars. Police and judges, even the city’s mayor, were on Capone’s payroll. Few murders were investigated, and those that were often ended without conviction. But one day, in 1929, Capone made a mistake. It was 10.30 in the morning of February 14th, when Capone’s men entered a warehouse on Chicago’s north side. Six members of the Bugs Moran gang were inside, along with an optometrist who liked to hang around them. Moran was supposed to be there too, but he was late. They’d been taken in by a fake phone call, promising a truckload of hijacked whiskey at a bargain price. Capone had orchestrated what would happen next. The way he saw it, he owned bootlegging in Chicago. No one muscled in on his business. With Capone safely tucked away at his Miami home, his plan was carried out. Two of his men, dressed like policemen, entered the warehouse first, and lined the Moran gang up against the wall. The men griped about it, gave a little lip, but didn’t resist. They knew the drill of what looked like a routine bust. Once they were facing the wall, two more of them, Capone’s men, came in. It was one of the most brutal mass murders in Chicago history. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre was captured in a photo and made international headlines. When something that extreme happens, it really forces people to sit up and take notice. It’s not just the usual sort of run-of-the-mill gangland killing here, gangland killing there, like in a lot of other places. What’s interesting is that it took seven men to be killed in Chicago before there was a really gigantic outcry or public outcry. After the massacre, a group of Chicago businessmen paid a visit to the new president, Herbert Hoover. The city’s reputation had been ruined. Their businesses were at risk. They’d had enough of Capone. Dennis Hoffman is professor of Criminology at the University of Nebraska. In his book, Scarface Owl and the Crime Crusaders, he uncovers what those Chicago businessmen were willing to do to get rid of Capone. And the crucial role, often ignored by history, that they played in his downfall. Today, in the year 2004, it seems odd to think of private agencies taking the lead in a battle against crime. But back in Chicago in the 1920s, the thinking of business people was that if there was an important problem, it should not be left up to politicians, but rather… Businessmen themselves needed to form private agencies to address problems. And that, in effect, is what happened in the case of Al Capone. Six names stood out. Frank Lesch, of the Chicago Bar Association. Samuel Insull, owner of Commonwealth Edison. Julius Rosenwald, Chairman of Sears Roebuck. Robert Isham Randolph, President of the Association of Commerce. Edward Gore, one of the founders of the Chicago Crime Commission. And George Patek. A stockbroker. Before the massacre, they had been businessmen, and now they were about to become vigilantes. A newspaper article would later nickname them The Secret Six. Many of the people in The Secret Six were staunch Republicans, so they obviously were tied to President Hoover. Armed with the fortunes they’d made and their political connections, the six men met clandestinely, bold but cautious. For the safety of their families, they would continue to meet in secret. For the moment, Capone had other concerns. He’d heard two friends, John Scalise and Albert Anselme, were plotting to get rid of him and take over his bootlegging empire. Capone decided to host a dinner to show his gang what happened to traitors. He laughed and drank with the two men. And then, when dinner was over… He took a bat and circled the table. We’re a team, he said, like the New York Yankees. But there’s only one manager, and that’s me. When he reached the two men, he raised the bat and clubbed them to death. He was an effective communicator. In the Oval Office, President Hoover called Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Melanin for their daily ritual of morning exercise and conversation, And asked the same question he asked every day. Have you got that fella Capone yet? The stock market crash that would start the Great Depression was months away. Hoover was no fool. He might have been new to the office, but he knew if he was going to be successful, he had to keep the industrial leaders of the nation happy. Besides, Prohibition was his baby, one of the platforms that had gotten him elected to office. He wanted Capone in jail almost as much as his Chicago constituents did. Secretary Mellon had a two-pronged plan of attack. He’d send two groups of Treasury agents to Chicago. Both groups would make contact with the Secret Six when they arrived in town. By then, the Six had $1 million at its crime rate. Fighting fund that it would make available to the agents, whatever they needed. Elliot Ness and his untouchables would go after Capone on prohibition violations. While Ness made headlines, the other group of agents would work more covertly to infiltrate the Capone gang and try to uncover information from Capone’s own people about how he conducted his business. Special agent Frank Wilson would coordinate intelligence. And evidence. Agent Mike Malone would put his life on the line and try to infiltrate the Capone gang. His cover being invented back at headquarters was that of a small-time Philadelphia hood. The other four agents would hit the streets, looking for informants, checking bank records. Capone knew everything that went on in Chicago in 1929. He heard about the Secret Six and the intelligence agents, but he didn’t think much about them. My guess is that maybe Capone got to believing some of the newspaper stories in Chicago about him. Maybe he believed that he was omnipotent. Maybe he believed that the Feds could not touch him. Maybe he believed that he was beyond the law. When the Untouchables started making raids on his distilleries, he’d get upset. But these other agents, they’d never get anything on him. He’d make sure of that. It would be easy to say that Al Capone was nothing more than a menace to society. A ruthless killer who unleashed a crime wave in Chicago that has never been duplicated. And gave the city a reputation it still hasn’t completely shaken off. But that wouldn’t explain why movies and television shows continue to romance his image. Or why there are people who still think of him as a folk hero. He came to Chicago from Brooklyn in 1924, following a mentor, and became one of the youngest crime bosses in history. He already had a scar on his left cheek from a knife fight that would label him scarface the rest of his life. As he climbed the criminal ranks, he found he had a knack for running businesses. He seemed to be made of the same stuff as other corporate chairmen, except for one thing. His way of firing traitors or dealing with competitors came from a dark part of his soul that only murderers know. Loyalty earned people safety from Capone. Those who risked being his enemy never had a chance. His killings were cold and ruthless. In his seven years as Chicago’s mob boss… He was responsible for more than 300 Gangland murders. But Capone didn’t see himself as a criminal. He thought he was smart and charismatic enough to be popular. People treated him like a celebrity. He didn’t act like a murderer. If it weren’t for the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, Things might have gone on that way in Chicago for a long time. But once it had become clear that Capone was behind the brutal mass murder, the city he thought was his turned on him. By the end of 1924, The Secret Six, the Chicago businessmen turned civic vigilantes, were making progress in their plan to get rid of Al Capone. The members each had their reasons for wanting Capone out of Chicago. Frank Lesch, a devout Christian and survivor of the Great Chicago Fire, saw it as a public service. George Paddock, who had become a U.S. congressman, worried about the effect on the poor. Robert Isham Randolph had commanded troops in World War I and saw this as a different kind of war. Collectively, their motives were simple. They didn’t think the city was safe for decent citizens, with Capone and his gang around. Once they decided to take action, things had quickly fallen into place. They secretly began a campaign to get other businessmen to contribute to their fund. They were meeting regularly with the government agents the president had sent to Chicago. Out in the open, Elliot Ness and his untouchables were building a prohibition violation case, while the intelligence agents worked undercover, risking their lives for evidence of something that, at face value, seemed almost comical, income tax evasion. Some people may think it’s comical. Al Capone was brought down on tax evasion. But it just shows you how difficult it was to get Al Capone out of the crimes. Witnesses typically ended up dead. And there was another problem. The people of Chicago liked their liquor. Capone was their supplier. They weren’t eager to see him put away. If the Feds go after Capone on prohibition charges, this case is going to be tried in two places. It’s going to be tried in federal court. But it’s also going to be tried in the Court of public opinion. Income tax was a good way to go, on the other hand, because the average taxpayer could relate to the wrongness of a citizen dodging responsibility to contribute to the general good of society. The six internal revenue intelligence agents assigned to the Capone case met in a small room in the old Chicago Post Office building. They were no ordinary men. They have to be the kind of person that has the courage to go through a door, knowing that there may be people armed on the other side, and yet have the ability to trace the smallest bits of evidence. Not everyone could do books and records. Not everyone could go through a door. Special agents to be effective of IRS intelligence or criminal investigation, have to be able to do both. The agents worked the streets. Slowly, the road to Capone opened up. One agent found a prostitute working at a Capone brothel, who agreed to be his informant. Frank Wilson, the head of the investigation, had another. A man who owned a racetrack with Capone. His name was Eddie O’Hare. Risking his own life, O’Hare played both sides of the fence. Eddie O’Hare had been working in Chicago with the Capone mob for years, and then, for reasons of his own, partly, I think, to cleanse his reputation, and partly because he had this idea that he wanted his son to go to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and they certainly weren’t going to let an associate of organized crime send his son there. He contacted the IRS and started cooperating with them as a confidential informant. During the incapacity evasion case, providing them with, uh, various types of information, some of which seems to have been, uh, you know, somewhat crucial. Agent Mike Malone took the riskiest job, sure, death, if he was caught. He checked into the Lexington hotel, home of Capone’s headquarters, and, with money from The Secret, six started making friends with the Capone gang. One night, the gang invited Malone to one of Al’s parties. Malone was worried he’d heard what Capone had done to traitors at one of his so-called parties. What if he’d found out who Malone was? He decided to hide an extra gun on his belt, just in case. When dinner was served, Malone took a bite of steak. He’d never had spiced steak. before. It didn’t go down easy. And his gun supposedly popped out of his belt, where he had a holster. Luckily, no one saw it. It ended up in his lap, and he was able to put it back in time before anyone spotted that he had a gun. Days later, when Capone walked out of a theater and ran into two policemen, he had a lot on his mind. The New York mob was unhappy with him. He drawn attention to the mob with his love of publicity. His killing sprees had gotten out of hand. They’d given him a warning. Shaken, Capone had arranged to have himself arrested for carrying a concealed weapon to get off the streets. In March 1930, while he was in jail, the Internal Revenue intelligence agents made their first crack into the Capone empire. Capone’s lieutenant, Frank Nitti, was found guilty of income tax evasion and sent to prison for a year and a half. A month later, another crack. Capone’s other lieutenant, Jake Guzik, was convicted of income tax evasion and sent away for five years. A month after that, it was Al’s brother, Ralph. He’d be gone three years. Capone’s base was beginning to crumble, but the boss was going to be more difficult to bring down. He had a fail-safe way to protect himself. His real name was never used in payments or ledgers. He didn’t have a bank account. There was no source to tie him to an income. Capone’s public face was confident. I think he would have been blind if he wouldn’t have seen that. This is what they’re doing. This is how they do this. And they are getting convictions. This is not something that is just going to pass away. Where they’re going to take this case to court and the jury is going to turn its back on it and return a verdict of not guilty. He may have looked confident, but Capone had to be feeling the pressure. He’d underestimated the internal revenue agents. Now, his most trusted allies and his brother were gone. They were closing in. In March 1930, The Secret Six made its next move to turn up the heat on Capone. One of the members of The Secret Six was Frank Lesch. He was involved in The Secret Six, and he was also the head of the Chicago Crime Commission. The Chicago Crime Commission, a private watchdog group, published a public enemy list with the names of the 28 worst criminals in Chicago. Capone would earn the spot of public enemy number one several times over the next year. A gangster who craved legitimacy had now been publicly named the most dangerous person in Chicago. It’s kind of a complex thing to be a gangster, I think, in terms of personality. On the one hand, you’re involved in these illegal activities. You’re breaking the law left and right. You’re involved in violence, etc., etc., etc. On the other hand, for their own self-esteem, they probably would like people to like them. Would like to be respected in some sense, you know? Nobody would like their children to think of them or know them as a. As a gangster, they would probably like to be thought of as, uh, as something else. Someone who actually did good in some fashion or other. The Secret Six was becoming famous for its crime fighting. It opened a speakeasy to buy leads from small-time hoods, hired its own investigators and continued to finance the work being done by the untouchables and the internal revenue Agents. Their fame was spreading across the country. Groups of businessmen in St. Louis and Kansas City were starting their own crime-fighting organizations, modeled after the Six. Everyone wanted to know who the Secret Six were. Capone read the newspapers, and they were beginning to make him uneasy. He asked for a meeting with the head of the Secret Six, Robert Isham Randolph. In his memoirs, Randolph wrote that Capone offered him a deal. If the Secret Six would stop gunning for him, he’d police Chicago for them. Randolph refused. It was a bad time for Capone all around. The world of the rackets was changing for him. There was a new mayor in Chicago, with a new law enforcement department that couldn’t be paid off. His violent way of doing business was becoming obsolete, even for gangsters. And now he was threatened with doing some real prison time. Capone was running out of options. He called his lawyer and arranged another meeting, this time with the head of the Internal Revenue Intelligence Unit, Frank Wills. Capone was looking for a deal. He was willing to pay the government, the Internal Revenue Service, about a million and a half dollars. If they would just walk away and not prosecute him criminally. But Wilson wasn’t interested. On his way out of the office, Capone stopped and whispered into the agent’s ear. How’s your wife, Wilson? You take care of yourself. Wilson took the threat to heart. He knew what Capone was capable of. But the way he saw it, the internal revenue agents didn’t need to make a deal with Capone. There was a smoking gun called the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, and they were about to discover it. Mike Malone would hear about it first, one night while he was having drinks with one of the Capone guys. Those income tax dicks aren’t so bright, the gangster said. He told Malone about an accounting ledger the police had taken in a raid on a Capone gambling house called the Hawthorne Smoke Shop. It’s there somewhere, the gangster said, right under their noses. It’s all the evidence they’d ever need to get Capone. Frank Wilson would be the one to find the hard evidence. He was just finishing an 18-hour day, looking through ledgers from police raids, hoping to find one with Capone’s name in it. He’d decided to call it a night, and then he found something he had not seen before. It was a ledger for a gambling house that operated under the cover of the Hawthorne Smoke Shop. On one of the pages, he found the name Al. And across from it, the amount $17,500. The Hawthorne ledger was crucial to the case because here we had direct evidence. That Al Capone was receiving money. Jurors understand when they see sheets of paper and someone explains it, that here’s a bottom line number, and this person got the number. And it’s not on any tax return. Now Wilson had to connect Capone to the AL in the ledger. He had a couple of ideas. He’d had his intelligence agents collect handwriting samples from police records and voter registrations. Of more than 1,000 of Chicago’s gangsters. Now he compared them to the handwriting on the ledger and found a match. The cashier’s name was Leslie Shumway. He called his informant, Eddie O’Hare, to see if O’Hare knew where Shumway was. Eddie, you know, that’s Shumway. If they could find the cashier, they had Capone. They tracked Shumway down to a racetrack in Florida. And found another Capone cashier, Fred Riss. Now they had two witnesses who could testify against Capone. But there was a problem. There was no federal witness protection program. How would they keep them alive? So the Secret Six sort of said, well, you know, we’re going to do what we have to do here. And they bankrolled that activity. And that was, in a sense, their own private little army, fighting the racketeers in the way that the racketeers themselves fought. As the intelligence agents were building their case against Capone, a letter came into Wilson’s office from Capone’s tax lawyer, Lawrence Mattingly. It laid out a statement of Capone’s estimated earnings for the previous five years. Capone, who is worth more than $25 million, was ready to own up to making $226,000 over four years. Why would Capone’s own lawyer send the investigators incriminating evidence against his client? The purpose and the intent of that letter was that Mattingly and Capone were trying to settle the tax problems of Capone out of court. They were trying to reach a civil settlement, you know, and many taxpayers today reach civil settlements every day with the IRS. The intelligence unit, the intelligence division after that, and the criminal investigation division now doesn’t accept money in lieu of prosecution. Otherwise, everyone who would get caught would just simply say, okay, I’ll pay now what I was supposed to pay in the first place. The case against Al Capone was mounting. Desperate, his lawyer made another call, this time to the U.S. attorney. Capone was ready to cut a deal. And, in fact, they did cut a deal. And the deal was Capone would plead guilty. He would do two and a half years in prison. So it would be a much lighter sentence. A plea bargain was a way. Of demonstrating to the public that Capone was not invincible and that Capone was going to be imprisoned. There was just one problem. The people who’d put the plan to get Capone together three years earlier, the government, the Secret six, the agents, had gone to a lot of trouble to get him. Were they really going to let him off with a sentence of two and a half to five years? When Capone’s lawyer stood before the judge to get a ruling on the plea bargain, the judge did something unusual. Judge James Wilkerson looked at that proposed plea bargain and rejected it. He nixed the plea bargain. In open court, Wilkerson said to Capone, you cannot bargain with the federal court. The letter to the IRS hadn’t worked. The plea bargain hadn’t worked. Capone was in trouble. I suspect at that point, Capone was fairly shaken that things had changed. And now he was looking at, however many years in jail if he got convicted. As opposed to, if you get sentenced to three years with good behavior, you do a third, you’re out in a year, etc. He could be back in Chicago in no time. A few days later, Frank Wilson got a call from Mike Malone. He’d heard the Capone guys talking. Capone had ordered a hit on Wilson. Wilson’s reaction was surprising. He swore out a warrant for Capone’s arrest, got a detail of detectives, and went out looking for the men Capone had sent to kill him. When Capone heard about the warrant, he called the hit off. He was already in enough trouble. On June 5, 1931, Al… Capone was indicted on two separate charges, income tax evasion and prohibition violation. Three months later, he opened a soup kitchen for the people of Chicago, unemployed because of the Great Depression. Coincidentally, that was right before his income tax evasion trial, and it was closed not long after the income tax evasion trial ended. So that looks like it was nothing more than a publicity ploy. To get a little bit of good publicity splashed all over the newspapers for Capone with the public around the time. That the case is going to go to trial and that it’s being heard at trial. Capone spent the summer before the trial at his hideout in Lansing, Michigan. Before he left, he gave his gang a job to do. He had one more rabbit up his sleeve. If it works, there was no way he’d ever be found guilty. Intelligence agent Frank Wilson arrived at the Cook County Courthouse in Chicago early in the morning of October 6, 1931. No one stopped him. No one knew who he was. Elliot Ness would be in the courtroom, too, but only as an observer. Both teams of government agents had done their jobs. Ness and his untouchables had submitted 5,000 indictments against Capone for prohibition violation. Frank Wilson and the internal revenue intelligence agents had subpoenaed 75 witnesses for their case. By the time they were done, they had evidence that Capone made at least $1 million in his seven years as Chicago’s mob boss. After weighing both cases, the judge had decided the income tax case was stronger. The day would belong to Wilson. His internal revenue, agents, and The Secret six. If he was found guilty of income tax evasion, Capone faced up to 34 years in prison and a fine of $90,000. Ironically, out on the streets, Capone’s gang was fighting what would be the last of the gang wars over bootlegging in Chicago. When this one was over, Capone would be the only warlord still standing. The newspapers would report that Capone looked confident when he entered the courtroom. Frank Wilson, sitting at the defense table, knew why. They had somehow obtained the names of the jurors, which is the first step to then going and trying to bribe jurors, intimidate jurors, etc., Agent Mike Ballone, still working undercover, had gotten word to Wilson, and Wilson had notified the judge. When Judge Wilkerson found out about it, what he did was switch jury panels, switch the list from his courtroom with another judge, and they came in with a completely new group of potential jurors, which then would have been a surprise to Capone. His men, who were working on trying to suborn the jury. The Capone trial got underway with a new jury, one the newspapers had their fun with. It seemed poetic justice that slick al Capone was to face a jury of rural gentlemen of careless dress. There were three key pieces of evidence. The letter from Capone’s lawyer, estimating Capone’s income at $50,000 a year for four years, and the testimony of the star witnesses. Capone Cashiers, Reese and Shumway. Capone’s attorneys seemed to be caught off guard by the income tax charges. They got some bookies to testify to how much Capone lost gambling, but it was virtually irrelevant. Through it all, Capone maintained his composure, looking almost disinterested at times. It’s not clear that Capone showed any really visible reactions in the court itself during the trial. I mean, again, this is what happens when you’re a gangster. This is part of what goes on. They come after you. In that business, especially, you try and keep your nerve up. And not show that they’re getting cute. The outcome of the trial is recorded in history. Al Capone was found guilty of income tax evasion for the years 1925, 26, and 27, and for failing to file returns in 1928 and 29. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison and fined $80,000. It was the most severe sentence ever given in an income tax evasion case. Income tax evasion might have seemed a flimsy ending for one of the most brutal gangsters of all time. But it got the job done. Or did it? University of Nebraska professor Dennis Hoffman has uncovered information that he believes puts yet another twist to the Al Capone case. Professor Hoffman believes even though the income tax evasion case was strong enough to convict Capone, the government had a second safeguard in place, just in case. The case against Capone might not have been about prohibition, But, according to Professor Hoffman, the local government had stacked the jury with a group of men who were violently opposed to alcohol. They were part of a system put in place in Chicago to make sure bootleggers like Capone went to jail. No matter what the charge, the Al Capone jury may have looked like rural folk to newspaper reporters, But it was something much more dangerous to a bootlegger like Capone, a group of moralist prohibitionists. If you’re a big-time gangster and you’re going on trial, don’t expect that you’re going to be afforded all. The rights guaranteed to you under the Constitution. Who knew about the prohibitionist jury system in place for the Capone trial? And who didn’t? Did the judge, who dismissed Ness’s prohibition charges in favor of the income tax case, know? The prosecutor? How high up did it go? That’s a question still to be answered. On October 24th, 1931, Al Capone’s reign over Chicago came to an end. The man, who had held the city in his grip for almost a decade, was finally going to prison. The Chicago newspapers applauded the end of the Capone era. When interviewed about the trial, Capone gave one last salute. Not to the U.S. Treasury agents history would name as his argenemy, Elliot Ness and the Untouchables, but to the businessmen of Chicago, he respected. The secret sinks. Well, I think the major contribution of Elliot Ness and the Untouchables was to hit Capone’s stream of income to the extent possible. They didn’t dry up Chicago. They didn’t totally… Eliminate Capone’s ability to produce alcohol or to make money, but they put a crimp in his activities. They were a hindrance. On the grand scale of things, though, that was very, very secondary compared to what resulted in the income tax evasion conviction. The Secret Six, maintaining its desire to keep its members’ identities secrets, had stayed away from the courtroom, but they’d kept close tabs on what was happening. In a newspaper interview after the trial, Robert Isham Randolph, the leader of the group, said he felt the six’s contribution was letting the underworld know it was a good idea. Had a new, non-political foe to contend with. The case was over. The bad guy had been put away. But had the government given Capone a fair trial? Or had it done what it thought it had to do and concluded that the end justified the dealings? This trial was really about restoring the legitimacy of the federal government. At the time… The federal government was failing to seriously address the problem of depression. The Hoover administration was failing to deal with problems of unemployed people. It was also failing in its attempts to enforce prohibition. And so the trial of Al Capone presented Hoover with an opportunity, an opportunity to restore the credibility of the federal government. The government, even today, zeroes in on certain people. I don’t have much feeling that the intelligence unit, or because of the president of the United States, zeroed in on someone like Al Capone. I mean, he was a murderer. After the conviction in 1931, Al Capone was sent to the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta, then to Alcatraz to serve out his 11-year sentence. One day in 1939, he started to get confused. He couldn’t speak. He was diagnosed with neurosyphilis. He’d contracted it when he was a young man. In 1939, even the federal government recognized that he’s not a threat to anyone anymore. They actually give him early release, recognizing that he’s not going to go back to Chicago and take over at the helm of what was now the Chicago Outfit, led by Frank Nitti. Nitti got what Capone had built and consolidated that after Prohibition. So Capone was not a danger to anyone in the public, by and large. His wife and only child, Sunny, took him to his Florida mansion, where he died of a heart attack on January 25, 1947. He was 48. After the Capone conviction, many U.S. Citizens contacted the internal Revenue, eager to pay their delinquent taxes. The amount collected was in excess of $1 million. In 1968, the Federal Jury System Selection and Service Act mandated that jurors be chosen from lists of registered voters to abolish the prohibitionist jury system. People in organized crime went to school on the Capone trial. The lesson to them was, keep a low profile, go underground. If you’re going to engage in criminality and skullduggery, do not broadcast it to the world. For The Secret Six, what started out as a black and white issue began to turn gray. The secret Six got caught tapping the telephones of state’s attorney, Swanson. When those claims were subjected to scrutiny of a grand jury, nothing happened. Their vigilante days were over. Wilson’s mob informant, Eddie O’Hare, became a respectable businessman. But eight days before Capone was released from prison, O’Hare was gunned down. Frank Wilson fulfilled his promise to him. He made sure O’Hare’s son, Butch O’Hare, got into Annapolis. Well, his son graduated from Annapolis, became a naval aviator, and, in fact, was an ace during World War II. Shot down on five Japanese planes on one mission, eventually lost his life in the Pacific. Eventually, they named the new airport in Chicago O’Hare Field after Butch O’Hare, who was Eddie O’Hare’s son. Frank Wilson, of the IRS intelligence Unit, went on to head the U.S. Secret service and was charged with the security of U.S. Knowledge of the atom bomb. When the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, Charles Lindbergh asked for his help. And the intelligence unit went on to investigate other racketeers in New York, winning 250 convictions. As the years passed, the names of the people who brought Al Capone down faded from history. The story of a vicious yet charismatic gangster and the handsome Treasury agent who was his arch enemy evolved instead. I think we just smile at it. We never took that personal that Elliot Ness gets to credit. We really never did. The idea that a group of wealthy businessmen and a handful of internal revenue agents could be under their three-piece suits, all superheroes. Well, that just wouldn’t make for a good story. The mob is not a business. It’s a way of life. You come into that life, they tell you straight out, you either leave in a box or you don’t leave at all. I saw more guys leave at an early age than died of old age. We know that if we make the mistake, the guy next to us who’s been our best friend for 20 years… Can be called upon to take us out. Do you get numb to it? No. You never get numb. At least I did. No one can tell you more about the American mafia than Michael Francise. Because he truly lived it. From the streets, to a mansion, to a prison cell, He knows how it works, and why it worked so well for so long. Michael was probably the biggest moneymaker ever. I think his entire career is amazing. In this definitive guide to the mob, Michael Francis explains how to get in, how to get made, and how to make big money. I said, Junior, I’m going to show you more money than you ever saw in your life. I’m bringing him $2 million a week. He’s the only made man to ever publicly quit America’s most notorious criminal organization. And he had somehow lived to tell about it. The truth is, if you leave the mob, there is a very high likelihood you will not survive. I’m shocked. That Michael Franchese still walks the streets. Michael learned everything there is to know about the mob. Plus, one thing that so many gangsters never learn. How to stay alive. Who am I? My name is Michael Francis. And when it comes to this life, la cosa nostra Mafia, in this country, I know as much or more about this life than anybody that ever lived it. Why? Because I lived it. I was a made member of the Colombo family. I made as much or more money for that life than anybody since Al Capone. And I can tell you about every facet of that life that you need to know, and I’m not telling you from behind a curtain. Fellas, let’s go. I don’t have any axe to grind. I’m telling you because I lived it. And this was my life. Michael’s introduction to the mob began with his father, Sonny Francis, a feared gangster and underboss for the Colombo crime family. My dad was my idol. I loved him. Great father, great husband to my mom. Sonny is a legend in his own time. Okay? Everybody looked up to him. But I did see the other side of him a couple of times. I’ve seen people shudder at the name of Sonny Franzese. They want to mess with him. For instance, I’d be playing baseball, and he would walk on the field. Everybody’s looking at him. And, you know, once or twice, I noticed I’m up there, and, you know, pitch come over the plate, should have been strike three, but the umpire wouldn’t call it. Never called Strike three on me when he seen that. He was the man, and we all respected him for that. I thought I had a normal childhood. I had FBI agents outside my door 24-7, seeing people come and go, who went to jail, who got killed. That’s the world I grew up in. Michael’s entry into this violent world became official when he witnessed one of the most famous hits in mob history. It’s June 28, 1971. The second annual Italian-American Unity Day rally in New York City. Joe Palumbo, head of one of New York’s five mafia families, and Michael’s father’s boss, is about to make a speech. We probably had well over 50,000 people. We had a big stage set up. He motioned to me. He said, Mike, I want you to head towards Lincoln Center, and I want you to hand these brochures out to everybody. And I said, okay, Joey, no problem. And I was exhilarated. It was a great day. And I turn away to walk away from him, and I get maybe 10 steps, and I hear, boom. Boom, boom, shots. People start to scream. I turn around and somebody yells, Now, Joey’s been hit. Joey’s been hit. When he got shot, I was right there. I was the last person he spoke to. I was 21. This moment had a lasting effect on Michael and was the beginning of his life in the mob. To understand Michael’s role in the mob, you must first understand its roots, which go back to Sicily, a small island off the coast of Italy. There’s no mafia in the United States. Mafia exists in Italy, it doesn’t exist here. In America, it’s called la cosa Nostra. It means this thing of ours. For hundreds of years, Sicily was occupied or controlled by foreign intruders, foreign invaders. And what this led to was, in effect, patriotic groups that sprang up, families, sometimes, were banded together to oppose these oppressors. So these origins of the mafia were well-intentioned. But these patriots eventually turned to crime. When a wave of Italian immigrants sailed to America in the 1800s, many of these criminals joined them. When many of the Italian immigrants came over here, the mafia was able to gain a foothold. They called it back then the Black Hand. Black hand, essentially extorted Italian businessmen. That was their business back in Italy. That’s what they did over here. For the first two decades in the 20th century, Italian or Sicilian gangsters in America were operating on their own. They were just street thugs, robbers, thieves, extortionists. There was no real organization. Organization came to these street gangsters thanks to a law passed by the United States Congress in 1919. Now, all this changed when prohibition became the law in America. Overnight. A lot of these Sicilian and Italian gangsters. So what an opportunity. This could be a gold mine. They now got into bootlegging. And overnight, they became millionaires. They learned early on that the only way to get power is through money. It ruled America, then. It rules America today. So whatever was out there, whatever made a big buck, they were into. And they had no competition. During this period. The American mafia thrived, but rivalries were soon formed, turning New York City into a violent gangland. From 1930 to 1931, 40 to 50 casualties occurred. When you see these movies in the 1930s about these cars coming around, shooting up streets, it’s true. That’s what they were doing in New York. This wave of violence ended when a young gangster named Charles Lucky Luciano rose to power and realized that war was bad for business. Luciano and four other mob leaders became heads of the original five families and created a commission where the groups could peacefully coexist. It was Luciano’s idea of creating a commission, and violence had to be used. It had to be clear through the commission. So the whole idea was, when you think about it, ingenious. The commission basically brought organization to organize Christ. Luciano’s organization grew in the decades to come and dominated much of Brooklyn, where the story of Michael Francis continues. Well, see, the thing is, you can do anything in this town that you wanted to do. It was a safe haven. Nobody would ever give you up, ever. I mean, you can shoot a guy in the street, you can have a brawl, you can blow up a car. Nobody knew anything. Now, this really feels at home. This was our neighborhood. Well, I tell you, though, it brings back a lot of memories. A lot of these things, tattoos, come on, never had a tattoo place around here. We weren’t supposed to get tattoos because you don’t want any identifying marks if you were to do anything, you know. Now, what’s this? Chinese or something? Forget it, we never had any Chinese here. No Chinese places, no tattoo places. My grandfather, him over here in 1910, 1911. This was it. Now, you see, this was our building right here. You see this? That’s where it all started. And this is where my father started. You know, again, he was one of four brothers. And they were all tough guys. You know, my uncle Nufrio, in the basement of one of these houses here, Guy owed him money, didn’t want to pay. My uncle actually hung him up and had a blowtorch to his feet. And there was a blowtorch in the guy’s feet until he paid. That was my uncle. Everybody was afraid of him. Even though he… Threw up with organized crime, Michael was never pushed toward a career in it. Surprisingly, his father had always tried to steer him away. Yeah, my dad didn’t want me involved in a life. He had hopes for me to get an education. He wanted me to be a doctor. I mean, that’s what I heard all my life. Go to school, be a doctor. Michael’s plans changed dramatically when his father was convicted in a bank robbery case and sentenced to 50 years in prison. At 19, Michael became the new head of the household. It turned to Joe Colombo and the mob as a means to support his family. Even witnessing his new mentor being gunned down on that fateful day in June of 1971 didn’t sway Michael from entering the family business. For some strange reason, it had the opposite effect on me. From that point on, I started to get more interested and more involved. And so I went to see dad in prison and I said, dead. I’m not going to school anymore. I got to help you out somewhere. You’re going to die in here. He was upset with me. So we kind of went at it. And after a while, he knew my mind was made up. And he said to me, son, I got to ask you one question. He says, And I need an answer, honest answer. And I said, what? He says, If you had to kill somebody, could you do it? And I thought a minute, you know, and I said, well, if the circumstances were right, I think I can do it. Yeah. He said. That’s the right answer. Go home. I’m going to send word downtown. Somebody will be in touch with you. Do whatever you’re told. That was it. Michael Franci’s made millions as a made man in the American mafia. He says the secret to the organization’s success is a simple one. Run your gang like a company. The mob is structured. Very similar to corporate structure in America. And I know that’s one of the reasons that we survived and prospered, because of the structure and the discipline. How do you compare it? In our life, you have a boss, and the boss would be comparable to the CEO of any major corporation. You have an underboss, which would be his executive vice president. You have a consigliere, who is his advisor. Boss needs to know something. He turns to his advisor and find this out for me. Then you have the capo regimes that I would consider to be the vice presidents. And they’re in charge of the various departments. And those departments are run by the soldiers. They’re the workers. They’re the guys that are out on the street and really making the whole deal function. The essence of the mob is that the people who actually carry out the criminal assignments and collect the money, they get to keep some. The rest, it gets kicked upstairs. The boss gets a cut of everything. If the capo regime is honest. And he better be, otherwise he’s in trouble, then it goes up the chain. The underboss will get a piece, the concierge is supposed to get a piece, and the boss gets the piece. The loyalty is supposed to operate both ways. If the boss insists on too large a cut, then you start to get discipline problems in the ranks. A boss who is shrewd understands that you want to get your share of everything, but you want to make sure everybody else eats along the way. These titles are reserved only for made members of La Cosa Nostra. And to be made, you must be of Italian descent. But the mob needed plenty of other personnel for its operations. Those guys were called associates. For every made man in the mob, there might be ten associates. You could work for the mob. You could profit, but if you were non-Italian, you could never become an inducted, sworn, made member. This family hierarchy, along with the commission structure, kept bloodshed to a minimum and led to the mob’s extraordinary success. None of this would have been possible without a mob mediation tool known as the sit-down. Remember, the cardinal rule of the mob is don’t interfere with making money. One thing you never really hear about, which is such a significant part of our life, is the sit-down. A sit-down is a meeting, and it’s a way of resolving a dispute without actually getting violent, And it’s part of the legacy of Luciano. You have a sit-down because one side knows that this side could get very violent with that side. What we really want to do is come to this table, sit down, and let’s end this thing amicably. That’s the way you make money. That’s the way things go smooth. More money was lost or made at a sit-down than you can imagine. I’m talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Everything was resolved and decided in a sit-down. And if they can resolve it, it’ll be resolved at that level. If necessary, it’ll be taken up to a higher level. They’re going to make a decision so that this thing doesn’t have to be in the streets. And 99% of the time, it does work smooth. Michael Francis learned the power of the sit-down when he was a rising star in the mob and found himself toe-to-toe with it. Another up-and-comer named John Gotti. John and I are both soldiers at the time, and two of my associates come to me and they say, Mike, we got this flea market. We got a guy in a flea market who’s got trouble with his partner. His partner’s dealing drugs. They said, if you can help him out, and you’ll take a percentage of the market. We find a drug dealer, we chase him out. End of story. A week, 10 days later, I get a call from John Gotti. He says, Mike, this guy in a flea market, he’s with me. I said, too late, John. I threw him out. Him and I are going at it, back and forth. We can’t resolve anything there. So we had to, boom, have a sit-down. My dad was my captain at the time. And I said, Dad, I can’t resolve this alone. You got to come. I said, I know you’re on parole, but we got to work it out somehow. So we meet in a sit-down in somebody’s house. And I said, Dad, look, I already understand, John. This guy can’t lose. I’m going to tell John, I’m buying you out. He’s going to say, you don’t buy me out, I buy you out. At the end of the day, that’s what I really want. So we go in there and I said, Hey John, I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna buy you out. I give you 250 grand, you’re out. You don’t buy me out, I buy you out. He said, I’ll buy you out of the market and that’s how we’re gonna resolve it. I said, I’ll tell you what, John, you got it, no problem. Because I knew we couldn’t work together, it was no way. And that’s the strategy that my dad and I used. So he bought us out, 250 grand. That was a typical sit down. Understanding the art of being a successful, wise guy takes years of study. It all starts with becoming a recruit, which means finding a way to get on the mob’s radar. Nobody’s doing any recruiting. Nobody’s dragging anybody into anything. Nobody says, you come in. It’s nothing like that. You have to go after that. Once a guy shows some promise, he can become an official recruit. Only through the recommendation of a made member. Guy under my dad, he picked me up and he took me to see, at that time, the acting boss. He said, I got a message from your father. He said, you want to become a member of this life. Here’s the deal. From now on, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you’re on call to serve this family. He said, from this point on, I’m putting you with a cap regime, a captain, Andrew Russo. He’s your guy. Anything Andrew tells you, you do without question. Can you do that? Yes. That’s it. You’re in. However, it’s still a long road from new recruit to made man. Yeah, when I was a recruit, this was my office. Every day I had to be here. We had a social club right up the street. Wear a suit and be here, and that was it. When you’re a recruit, you just shut up and listen. You speak when you’re spoken to, and you observe, and you learn the life. You’re smart. That’s what you do. And you become a very, very good listener. I learned a lot during that recruiting period. But there were times when Michael had to learn the hard way. You can’t make mistakes. So one day, I had to be at the social club up the street. So I’m driving in from Long Island. I’m on the Bell Parkway. There’s a ton of traffic. So I get there. I’m late. Forget about it. My cop regime tells me, How could you be late? Don’t you ever do this again? You’re not worthy to be a member. I mean, he ran a riot act on me. He said, tomorrow, you be at Monty’s at 1 o’clock. We got an appointment. I said, all right, all right. So I get to Monty’s the next day. I’m there at 12 o’clock. One o’clock, 1.30, 2 o’clock, 2.30. Finally, it was about 4.30, quarter to five. I see my captain, Andrew, pull up. He’s okay. You get the message? I said, I got it, Chief. He said, go home. That was it. I was never late again. It’s not enough just to know the rules. A recruit needs to prove how he’ll be of value to the organization. You kind of distinguish yourself in that life as to what kind of role you’re going to play. Every guy in their life is always looking for the next score. But some guys were a little bit more talented than others in finding that score and developing it and making money at it. Other guys, they were a little more talented in doing what we called the work. The muscle, I guess you can call it. And you kind of distinguish yourself as either or. Rarely are you both. Early on in my recruiting period, I kind of distinguished myself as an earner. I’ll tell you this. There was a lot more workers than there were earners. Quite honestly, the guys that published the violence. They didn’t make any money. They were doing the work because they couldn’t do anything. An example of one such worker was a tough enforcer named Nicholas Grancio, known on the street as Nicky Black. Nicky Black was, he was a soldier in our family for a while. He had a bar. I had to go see him one day and he’s in the back room and he says, Mike, come on back here. And he’s got some guy back there who’s a gambler. Gambler owes him money, and the guy wasn’t paying him. So. He puts the guy’s hand on the bar. He takes a hammer. Well, breaks the guy’s knuckles, right? Right there. The guy’s screaming. He says, Imagine this guy, Mike. He says, You don’t want to pay me. I gave him one chance, two chances. Boom. Got to teach him a lesson. That’s Nicky Black. But on January 7th, 1992, Nicky Black’s career came to an abrupt end. For Michael, this was another important lesson in mob life. This life is like a wheel. Things turn around. If you’re quick to pull the trigger, when it comes your turn, and it will someday, people are going to be quick to do the same with you. Michael worked the streets of Brooklyn for almost two years, waiting patiently to become a made member of the Colombo family. The call finally came on Halloween 1975. I get a call to meet at the social club, wear a suit. I kind of assumed something was up that night. Ten o’clock at night, we start driving, we end up at a catering hall. I don’t ask any questions. Get out of the car, go into the hall. I see a bunch of other guys there and figure, hey, not a surprise party. This must be it. Yeah, we go inside. We’re all in this back room. They start calling us in one at a time. Mike, come here. Mike, come here. I go in. I see a place where there’s a little flicker of light. I see all the captains lined up. We had about 15 in the family at that time. So I get to the head of this horseshoe configuration, where the boss is standing. Underboss is next to him. He grabs my hand, takes a knife, cuts my finger. He squeezes in some blood drops on the floor. Told me to cut my hands. They took a picture of a saint, the Catholic altar card, lit it, aflame, put it in my hands. Everybody thinks it was a symbol of toughness. It’s not. It just burns quickly. It was just symbolic. Tom Dibello was the acting boss at the time. He said to me, are you ready to take the oath? I said, yeah. Tonight, Michael Francis, you’re being born again into a new life. Into la cosa Nostra. You violate this oath, you’re going to burn in hell, like the saint is burning in your hands. He said, Do you accept? And I said, yes, I do. That’s how it started for me. Five-minute ceremony, you’re in, but it’s very intense. I want you to know the seriousness of what you’re getting involved in. The important thing to remember about that is it was six of us that night that took the oath. I’m the only one alive today. Not one of them died of natural causes. There’s no other way out. They had a whole ceremony designed to impress on people who were admitted to the inner sanctum of the family. That this is really a step from which you cannot retreat. Once you’ve accepted the rule, you get the benefits, but there’s no way out. I understand the life intimately well, and I’ve done something that… But to this day, I don’t believe anybody else has ever done or ever been able to do. And that is that I’ve walked away from that life publicly, not entered a witness protection program. And here’s some 20 years later, lived to tell about. When Michael Francise pledged his life to the American mafia in 1975, he was asked to carry on the mob’s most honored tradition, earning money. You know, when it comes to making money, the mob has a billion different ways. Start with one of the original money-making things for the mob, the numbers business. How? How did it work? You would pick three numbers, put down 50 cents to have three numbers hit. If you hit for 50 cents, you get back 600. It was a big racket in the neighborhoods, especially in New York. It looked like it was Penny, ante. You’d bet a nickel, a dime, very few people even bet a dollar. But it could get as much as a thousand to one chance. Now, where did the number come from? Every day in the newspaper, they would list the attendants at the racetracks. And the last three numbers of the attendants would be the numbers. That’s it. You hit that number, you got it. But you’d have several hundred bookmakers throughout the city that were taking these numbers and bringing in massive amounts of money each day. This particular house right here, my dad’s sister, Red Rose, her husband, Johnny, they called him Murphy. He was a little bit of an alcoholic. He was a character. But he was the main, one of the main numbers runners here in the town. And it was very lucrative. You involved everybody in the neighborhood, little old women, you know, kids, guys, and they all got to know the numbers, guy. We’d send the runners out to all different parts of the neighborhood and they would be stationed in different places and they would take the numbers. and, hey, you put down 50 cents, you get 600. That was big money, especially back then. Very few people ever won. Wasn’t it a good thing for the neighborhood? It was a little hope. It was like, you know, wise guys didn’t go around saying, you never know, but that’s what it was. It was you never know, you might win. It was a pipe dream for them, but it was a multi-million dollar bundle for the mob. And if it was so horrible, could the government have taken it over? Bookmake, taking bets. Bookmakers bet on just about anything. So they went into everything, baseball, horse racing, basketball, whatever sport there was. It’s illegal, obviously, because you’re not paying taxes to the government. That’s what makes it illegal. Raynon Gamblers has been a mob moneymaker for decades. Colombo family bookies took bets at watering holes like this one in Brooklyn. They pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars every week. Now, the great thing about it, you didn’t have to put cash down. It took credit. You want 5,000 on such and such a horse in the eighth race, boom. Okay, you write his name on a paper and that’s it. Yeah, the bookmakers in the neighborhood, you know, they give you credit. You know, five grand, ten grand, yeah, whatever you want, no problem. But if a guy don’t pay, somebody needs to collect. We were pretty good at collecting debts. This was multi-millions. And it became, for many people in the mafia, their bread and butter. Always had 12 or 13 bookmakers answering to me. I’d get a cut of the action. They would operate wherever they wanted to. Anybody bothered them, hey, I’m with Michael. Hands off. This wasn’t just about gamblers laying down bets. Often, it involved the athletes themselves. You know, when the athletes used to come to us, because for some reason, they’re the worst gamblers in the world. They may play the sport well, they don’t have to gamble on it. For instance, a lot of the athletes from some of the local colleges, they used to hang out in some of the clubs in Manhattan. We were always there. So we would see one of these guys and we would start to cultivate him. Hey, come on, you know, have a drink, come by the bar and we’d bring girls around him. You know, it’s always a good attraction. So after a couple of weeks, I bring him to the table. Hey, sit down. I said, you know, you’re a senior, right? Yeah, you’re a pretty good player. Yeah, you know, you’re six foot two. You know, you’re not going to the pros. Yeah, I know. Let me ask you this. How much money you got in your pocket? Oh, I’m broke. That’s what you hear all the time. So you’re broke. Why are you broke? Every time you play, they fill that arena up, 16,000 people. I said, let me educate you a little bit. I’m going to do something real smart. You got 15 games left, okay? Tomorrow night, you’re favored to win by 10. Don’t win by 10. Don’t lose the game. We got some morals about us. We love your team. We want you to win. But don’t cover the spread. Win by 7, win by 8, win by 5. You do that. Here, pull 10 grand out of my pocket, put it on a table, slide it over there. Very hard to refuse. He sees that 10, his eyes open up. And that’s the number. Not 5 to 10,000. That’s what does it. He’ll take it. But here’s what happens every time. It gets to them. They’ll do it maybe two times, maybe three. Inevitably, they come back. Hey, Mike, I can’t do this anymore. The pressure’s getting to me. I got 30 grand. It’s more than I ever had. Good, what do you mean? Oh, we made a deal, you got 10 games to go, bro. Unless you want to go, speak to your coach, tell him how good you’ve been playing. I’ll go talk to your girlfriend, mom and dad, they’ll be proud of you. How about we go to the newspaper, you know, plaster this all over the place, want to go to the cops? I don’t care, they’re gonna lock me up one day anyway. You’re done what I tell you, you’re done. They make one mistake one time, they’re done. If you had gambling, you had loan sharks. Who had to lend money to the bookmakers because the bookmakers would get themselves in trouble because they were essentially gamblers themselves. The mob’s banking system was often run out of its social clubs. They referred to money lending as shylocking. And Michael learned this art at the Carroll Street establishment run by his captain, Andy Russo. Some rough things happened in this social club. There was more high-level business done in this place than you can imagine. Shylocking, major, major part of my business. What is Shylocking? We lend out money at usurious rates. The loan shark would essentially give, say, $5,000 to the bookmaker. That $5,000 became $5,500 in one week. By the second week, that $5,000 became $6,000. By the loan Shark, extending the loans to bookmakers. They essentially own that bookmaker. Because you can’t pay that interest. You’re paying 50% a year on your money, 100% a year on your money. There’s no way. And you can’t miss a payment. This is every week. You’ve got to be there. And it’s cash. Now, in addition to doing it with gambling, many people in legitimate businesses couldn’t get loans. Who would they go to? They’d have to go to loan sharks run by the mafia. Quite often, a guy would come to me. He needed 100 grand, 150 grand. He had a business. I knew he couldn’t pay, but it was really the business that I wanted. So when he couldn’t pay, I took it over. Well, you know, mob guys had one basic philosophy. They believed that everybody’s money really belonged to them. They just had to figure out how to get it, right? So nightclubs were a real mark. I’ll give you an example. A club out in Long Island called Jupiter’s got it on the place. It was a guy by the name of Danny Colombo. I went in to see him one night and said, listen, your place is becoming known. I says, I don’t know if you know how things work over here, but pretty soon you’re going to have every wise guy in New York knocking on the door. I said, they’re going to take a piece of whatever you got here. Oh, Michael, I don’t know if I know you have to give it to them. I said, if you don’t, they’re going to close the place down. What do you need that headache for? I want you to make money. I’m not going to bother you, but I’m going to protect you from everybody. Anybody walks in that door, you tell them I’m with Michael Franzese. Nobody’s going to bother you, but that’s going to cost you, Danny. You know, so you give me 20% of whatever you got over here. Christmas time, you make it a little better. I said, you’re going to have the best place on Long Island. Not only will I do that, but I’ll make sure all my guys come here every Friday, Saturday night. We’re going to spend money here. You got it made. Now, some guys take to that nicely. The guys that don’t take it nicely, well, maybe we come back next week and we make them understand that you’re going to have to do this. Rackets like bookmaking and extortion were solid moneymakers from the mob’s early days. But when La Cosa Nostra found a way to infiltrate America’s workforce… They became virtually untouchable. From loan sharking to sports gaming, the American mafia had a thousand ways to illegally make money. But when they took ownership of the unions, they became almost invincible. One of the most effective power sources for the mob were the unions. I don’t know if people realize, but unions were born out of mob labor. We supported them early on. We really created the union power in this country. As far back as the 1930s, the mob established close ties with labor unions, giving them a solid foothold in legitimate industries. A lot of Italians took jobs on the dock. You know, they were construction workers. They were truck drivers. And big corporations were taking advantage of the workers. I mean, these guys were thugs, too. They’d hire their goons to go out and beat people up, break the strikes. Well, Italians, we didn’t take that. And what’d they do? They came to guys like us, street guys, because we fought back. And this was an era when unions were beginning to really emerge in the 1930s and become powerful forces themselves. And eventually, you know, mob guys realized that, hey, this was something that we should be involved in. And then from that point, we rose to the top and we became the leaders. And we control the unions. And by taking over the unions, they can rob the unions from their welfare funds, their membership funds, and they can also shake down the employers. You want labor peace? You got to deal with us. Through a union, you could control an entire industry. Let me give you an example. By controlling the concrete unions, you could determine when concrete was poured and when it wasn’t poured. So that if you, the mob, controlled the union, and that union didn’t kick back to you, you could basically shut down an entire site. By the 1970s, the major mob families controlled all the labor unions in New York City. But instead of fighting over territory, a cooperative was formed. And each member received a cut. Rather than competing among each other, what they decided to do was bring them all together in what they call the club. And the club was a mechanism through which all the concrete companies would get work allocated by the mobsters. The family that controlled that company would get 2%, and they would create another 2% tax, which they would divide up among the family. So basically, every major building built in New York during this period of time paid a 4% tax to the American mafia. Another perk of controlling the unions was the ability to hand out cushy, high-paying jobs. Michael saw these rewards himself when he worked on what was then the biggest construction project in the world. Right back there, which was the site of the World Trade Center, was kind of the place where this began for me. Because my dad got me a union job. I could tell you some stories there, boy, because that was mobbed up. My cousin Tootie was a shop steward there. I was up on the 80-some-odd floor. They made me a bell ringer on the hoist. Anytime anybody else worked, I worked along with them, so I got a ton of overtime. So as a young kid, going to high school, I was making myself $1,200, $1,300, $1,400 a week. In the 70s and 80s, what you see is the mob permeates the activities of almost any major economic activity in the city of New York. So, for example, if you’re importing fruit, you’ve got to move it through the docks, or it rots. And if all of a sudden the longshoremen start to really slow up on the loading, you can lose an entire shipment. So the ability to calibrate the flow of work, the speed of work, gave the mafia a real opportunity to dominate legitimate business. In this town, here, from every piece of fish that came in, to every piece of cement, and every window that went into. Every one of those buildings, the mob had a piece of. We had a piece of everything in this town. We owned this town. The Italian mob made little effort to hide their connection to the unions. But when it came to drugs, things were much more complicated. I tell you this, in a Colombo family, we were told straight out, you get involved with drugs, you die. Hands off, that was the policy. The mob’s policy on drugs was they were supposed to stay out of it. You were not to be involved in drug trafficking. They did that with a wink and a nod. Don’t believe a myth that the mob was opposed to narcotics. They prospered and loved it. What happened was simply this. The Sicilian mafia in the 1950s would set up heroin stills all over Europe. They needed a big market. And Joe Bonanno, who was then the head of the Bonanno family in New York, went to Sicily, had a meeting with the bosses of the mafia in Palermo. He said, you have the product. We have the market. We will show you where to distribute it. We will now bring it into the inner cities, New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia. All over America, if anyone’s responsible for the drug upsurge in America, it’s the mafia. And if there’s any spot in hell that’s reserved for people who did that to us, they deserve to be there. The mob’s stated policy on drugs was, We do not get involved in drug dealing. It was not based on a moral principle being against drugs. It was based on the view that the drug sentences were very, very tough. And there was a concern that if you were caught drug dealing, you’d face such a harsh sentence that you might wind up turning on the mob and becoming a witness for their government. Ultimately, the Colombo family avoided the drug trade for a very simple reason. Bottom line, it was bad for business. Brings a lot of heat, a lot of violence around drugs. We believe that there was a lot of rats in the drug business. It was bad for business. You had to stay away from it. Almost anything else was fair game. With that directive, Michael found himself the score of a lifetime. I fell into something that was 100 times better than drugs. It was the best thing since prohibition. By the 1980s, La Cosa Nostra, this thing of ours, had created an unprecedented criminal empire. But they were always hungry for more. Colombo soldier Michael Francis knew the drug trade was forbidden in his family. The young earner needed a new scam to bring the boss’s money. Suddenly, he found a big one. As active as I was, I got a deal a day, and I fell into something that was a hundred times better than drugs. And that’s the gasoline tax business, we’ll call it. So I fall into this deal that’s unbelievable, amazing. And it started by this guy, Larry Irizo. He comes to me, an Italian guy. And he says, Mike, I got a bunch of gas stations, but I figured out how to take the tax money from the government on every gallon of gasoline. Tax from the government, sounds great. What do we do? Hey, he’s Italian, from the neighborhood. I’ll give him a shot. So we go into business and I put this guy with him that I trusted. He was actually a butcher, Vinnie the Butcher, big, imposing guy, scar across his head. Figured he’ll watch this guy. And this is how we started. One Saturday, Vinnie, he comes to my house, knocks on the door, I open the door. He’s got a box, big box like this. So I figured it’s meat. He said, Hey chief, it ain’t meat. I said, what is it? He said, It’s the first week’s take in our new operation, the gas business. I open it up. $380,000 in cash. Got my attention, right? These gas stations, we service the budget. And basically, here’s how the scheme worked. At that time, the tax on every gallon of gasoline was about $0.35 a gallon. The gas station owner was responsible to collect that tax and to pay the government on a quarterly basis. Well, let’s say after the first quarter, you don’t send it in. They write you a letter. Every day, the register’s ringing. That 30 cents keeps adding up. Six months, seven months. Finally, after a year, they get fed up. They come down to the gas station. We already know they’re coming down. We shut that door. The gas station’s closed. The government is out of a year’s worth of taxes that was due to them. I wait two weeks, and I bring another guy in, and we start the process all over again. I had all the gas stations along Grand Central Parkway. I don’t know. They’re all mine. He was selling to probably 400 to 500 stations here throughout the city. But now the government got smart. Okay, we’re going to stop all of this. Instead of collecting taxes from all the gas stations, the government went directly to the wholesalers and required each one to have a license. We’re going to make the wholesaler responsible, and we’re going to make them license it so we know exactly who they are. They have to get a license, and we’re going to know that they’re responsible people, because if you’ve got to be licensed, you’ve got to be responsible, right? So they thought. Well, they thought they were going to shut us down. Well, you know, mob guys, we got connections. I had a connection in Albany, where I was able to get licenses. It was basically the same scheme, okay? Except now we’re licensed companies instead of gas station operators. They basically would set up phony corporations, and they would sell the gas from one corporation to the next corporation. Ultimately, the last corporation would go bankrupt and the tax would never be collected. Ironically, the government’s efforts only made the scam more lucrative. They actually made it better for us because we were able to buy directly from the major oil companies in greater volume. Which was really funny because we were selling it back to their own gas stations. Yes, we would go into the owner and ask him, How many loads are you buying from Obelisk? Well, we’d buy eight. Oh. And I said, well, buy six from Mobile, buy two from us. They were thrilled. So they’d buy, you know, two loads from us a week, and before you know it, they’re asking to buy another one, another one. And I said, hey, don’t get crazy now, because mobile’s going to come down. You’ve still got to buy gas from them. The scam grew rapidly as Michael found aggressive new partners. When he teamed up with a crew of Russian gangsters, the Gas operation became one of the wealthiest scams in the history of organized crime. And at the end of the day, between the Russian crew that I had in Brighton Beach and the crew that I had from Long Island. And up and down the East Coast, we were selling a half a billion gallons of gas a month, and the government never was able to touch it. The success of this business did present one large challenge to the Francise crew. How to deal with piles and piles of money that reeked of gasoline. I’m bringing in… 30 to 40 million dollars a month in cash. It was all small bills. Come in a gas station, you don’t buy with hundreds, right? Dollars, fives, tens, and it all smelled like gas. The guy who’s pumping the gas is the one who handles the money person. So from there on in, it’s got the smell of gas on it. And it just stays with you. Couldn’t go to a normal bank because everything stunk of gas. You were happy just if someone could just give you some clean money, you know, so that you can… You can go out that night without your money stinking, you know? But ever the innovator, Michael came up with a plan to literally launder his money. I said, you know, buy a couple of refrigerators and get baking soda, and put baking soda in the refrigerator, And we’ll put the cash in there first, and we’ll take the smell out of it, and then you can do whatever you want with it. Michael realized his gas scam was a game changer, and would affect every mob family in New York. We set up a meeting with the head of the Colombo Crime family. I said, Junior, I’m going to show you more money than you ever saw in your life. I said, it’s gas. He said, gas. I said, yes, gas. I think the first week I brought him $400,000, $450,000, $600,000. It turns out I’m bringing him $2 million a week. Michael had now distinguished himself as a major player. Soon he would receive that rare honor in the ranks of La Cosa Nostra, a promotion. Now, hey, Mike, you’re doing a great job. You’re a cop of the regime. He appoints me a cop of the regime. So now I’m a cop, all right? The operations started to grow. The money started to pour in. I’m starting to get popular with a lot of guys. Michael’s gas scam became so lucrative that other bosses began contacting him. He soon heard from one of the biggest names in organized crime. Fat Tony Salerno, boss of the Genovese. Here’s what’s happening, right? You know, I had a big cigar. I used to sit there. Tony was a character. He said, oh, this gas thing, what are you doing? I said, I got gas stations, Tony, and I’m selling gas. He said, I hear you’re doing pretty good. I said, yeah, I’m doing good. I got these guys around me. They ain’t got two nickels to rub together. He said, you put them to work, you do me a favor. I said, Tony, no problem. I’ll give them a gas station. And he said, well, how much could they earn? I said, well, they’ll earn $1,500 a week. Would that make you happy? He says, 1,500. He says, give them $500, give me $1,000. I said, Tony, you got it. Whatever you want. You’re the boss, right? You make a lot of friends like that. So that spread. I was bringing money to bosses of other families. So you get kind of popular when everybody’s earning. Michael was on top and had every intention of enjoying his wealth. We bought a helicopter. Nice Learjet 25A we had. I always had two or three boats at one time. I had an 8,000 square foot house. Bought a house in Florida. I had two boats down there. But the success in that life is actually a double-edged sword. Because, yeah, you’re doing well and you’re prospering, and you’re getting attention. But people at the top start to get nervous. This guy’s getting too powerful. I got a bullseye on my back. I felt the heat starting to build in a certain way. A gasoline tax scam made Michael Francis a rich and powerful mafioso. But this overwhelming success came with a price and made Michael a marked man. I’ve seen guys get killed because they were becoming too strong, too powerful. You know, that’s that double-edged sword. When you start to become powerful in that life, the guys at top are more eager to jump on you because you’re a threat now. In that life, when you rise to leadership, you don’t do it by a vote. You take the boss out. Michael was now a captain in the Colombo Crime family and he knew well that to stay on top, violence was a necessity. Violence is a part of the life. Murder is a part of the life. And there’s no way to sugarcoat it. It is what it is. And if you’re called upon to do that, you have to do it. And in a weird kind of way, we looked at it as something noble. Why? Because we take an oath. We realize if we violate that oath, we’re going to pay with our lives. We accept that. When I had to do what I had to do, I did it. But it always troubled me. I never wanted to be involved in that. You do it anyway because you got to, or you pay for it with your life. The main reasons a maid member will get whacked would be fear of disloyalty, fear that the person is going to go to authorities. Someone could get whacked if they were stealing money. If you had a case where someone slept with another maid member’s wife, that could result in being whacked. And then you could get whacked if you were considered to be generally a danger to the mob. They don’t necessarily have to know that you’re a threat. If they think you’re a threat to the organization, they’ll hit you. You find out later on that, you know, guys get killed for the wrong reason. And it’s not always about respect. A lot of politics involved. It’s normally over money. When there are rivalries, they decide to find reasons to kill you. If you’re in trouble, if you’re going to get taken out. It’s going to come from your own family. It’s always within the family. You’ve got to watch out for your own. Michael learned this back in 1971, here in New York’s Columbus Circle. He was just a few feet from Joe Colombo, the boss of the mob family he grew up in, when an assassin fired three shots into Joe’s head. Shots started to fire out. Mass hysteria on top of the stage. Everybody’s screaming. One guy yelled out, Joey’s been hit. Joey’s been hit. And I turned around and it was almost a complete blur because people were running everywhere. Where? Columbo was shot by a lone gunman named Jerome Johnson, who was posing as a press photographer. Unfortunately for Johnson, whoever had plans for Joe Columbo also had plans for him. This guy doesn’t realize it. He’s going to his death. He makes the move. He hits Joey within 10 seconds. He’s dead. Everybody around him was carrying a piece. They pop a few into him. Everybody drops their guns. They’re all over the street. I remember that. I’m running around. There’s guns everywhere. No one was charged in either shooting. The mob boss was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where he went into a coma. Joe Colombo remained in a vegetative state for seven years before dying. But that day ended his reign over the family that still bears his name. So how could this happen? How could a boss of a major crime family get killed on his big day in front of all of these people? Well, that was the problem. In this life, you’re supposed to fly under the radar, especially if you’re a boss. You don’t want to bring heat on the life. Colombo made himself a target by creating the Italian-American Civil Rights League and claimed to be fighting the persecution of Italian-Americans by law enforcement. His efforts did not sit well with other mob leaders. You know, Colombo brought way too much press onto the La Cosa Nostra. By him creating the Italian-American Civil Rights League, he basically highlighted the role of the mafia. He was told to knock it off. And it wasn’t because he created the problem that he got hit. It was because he refused to stop all this publicity and he had to be eliminated. The prevalent theory, and most detectives and investigators were pretty sure that it was a deed originated by Joey Gallo. Crazy Joe Gallo was a Colombo soldier and a famous name in the mob. It was believed he was the gunman who executed wise guy Albert Anastasia as he was getting a chain. Gallo was also a longtime rival of Joe Colombo. Gallo had been a maverick going back for years in the family. He was a loose cannon. He wanted to kill Joe Colombo in a move where he would then take over Joe Colombo’s family. This was a well-designed mob hit. Joe Gallo knew what he was doing. But unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story. The Colombo family was positive that it was Joey Gallo who was behind Joe Colombo’s murder. And that he exhibited the kind of audacity that he often pulled. He thought by killing Colombo, he could take over the family. It didn’t work out quite that way. So here we are, on the corner of Mulberry Street and Hester. This was the site of the old Humberto’s Clam House. Ten months after Colombo gets hit. At Columbus Circle, Joe Gallo is sitting in this restaurant with his family, celebrating his birthday. There happened to be a Colombo guy at the bar who noticed Joey sitting there with his family. He makes a phone call. Within 15 to 20 minutes, two shooters from the Colombo gang come in, see Joey at the table, and open fire. Joe Gallo, pretty strong guy. He gets up off the table. He runs outside, right at there, right out the front door. And he collapses on the pavement, and that’s it. He’s dead. And that’s how things happen in this life. You don’t make a move on a boss that goes unretaliated. This was an unauthorized hit. Joe Gallo figures he had a shot, he did it on his own, and it ended badly for him right here. Joe Gallo is unsuccessful in promoting himself by taking out the boss, But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen, especially when it involves a ruthless gangster named John Gotti. Carlo Gambino was a mob legend and a close friend of Lucky Luciano. He became a boss in 1959 and stayed there for over 25 years. The man he picked to carry on his legacy was Paul Castellano. Paul Castellano was the brother-in-law of Carlo Gambino. Carlo let it be known that he threw his support behind Paul. Carlo dies, Paul takes over, he’s installed as boss. Gambino’s selection of Castellano was a surprise to many in the family. Because it was seen as a slight to his longtime underboss, Anil Delicroce. Delicroce was very different from Castellano. Delicroce was a more old-school mob guy. Castellano was on the kind of legitimate side of the spectrum of mobsters, meaning he believed in making a lot of your money using legitimate activities. Under Castellano, the Gambino family continued to thrive, but Delicroce loyalist John Gotti never forgot the slight to his mentor. Anil liked it. John very much and kind of protected him. Essentially, the family was divided between these two leaders. And when Delacroix died, that created a vat. On the scene comes John Gotti. Gotti had a resentment for Paul Castellano. Didn’t regard him at all. Talked bad about him many, many times. Neil was his protector. Neil Delacroce dies. Now gotti’s out there, having talked bad and having resentment about a boss. Well, you don’t get away with that. Castellano disliked Gotti, and Gotti was pretty sure Castellano would kill him. So he decided to launch a preemptive strike. So here we are, December 1985, close to Christmas. Paul Castellano has a meeting over here at Spark Steakhouse. He pulls up in his car, he’s got his driver with him, Tommy Bellotti. They get out of the car, figuring they’re going to have a sit-down and a nice steak. As they exit the car and start to walk into the steakhouse, two shooters come up the street. Shots, one, two, three, four. Both Bellotti and Castellano. They fall to the pavement and Gotti had made his move first. At the time, John Gotti, unbeknownst to everybody, sitting across the street in a car, watching this, taking it all in. Very unusual. It’s the only time that I ever heard that anybody was brazen enough to order a hit and sit there and watch it at the same time. But that was Gotti. And this is how it works. When you become boss in this life, you don’t get elected. You eliminate the boss above you. And Gotti made the move, and within two days, he ascended to the throne of boss of the Gambino family. Gotti’s audacious behavior continued when he became boss, But he was about to be tripped up by an organization that was slow to take on the mob, but caught up in a hurry. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was America’s top crime fighter for over 40 years, but not when it came to La cosa Nostra. We didn’t want anything to do with it. I was told that J. Edgar was afraid of us like a lot of other people were. Hoover wanted no part of combating the mafia. In fact, for decades, he insisted it didn’t exist, despite all the information he had, all the intelligence material that he had. He was into communism. That was an easy deal. You know, you go after movie actors. You don’t go after tough guys on the street. For the FBI, everything changed when new tools were given to law enforcement. In the 1960s, they passed a law that allowed legal wiretapping. Not just wiretapping over telephones, but eavesdropping by putting bugs in buildings or in rooms. These tools, for the first time, opened the possibility of not just attacking the low-level criminals who were out there actually collecting their loan shark money or committing the acts of extortion, but the captains and the bosses who were behind it all. By the 1980s, the FBI had become expert at gathering the evidence they needed to put major mobsters behind bars. John Gotti became a major target, as did a glamorous figure the New York Press had dubbed the Yuppie Don, Michael Francise. After hitting it big with his illegal gas operation, Michael Francise was forced to deal with the other side of Mob’s success. Scrutiny from law enforcement and suspicion from his cohorts. In la cosa Nostra, that suspicion can be fatal. People get whacked because you broke the rules. You get called in, you go in. And if you did something wrong, you know what you’re going in for. When you gotta go, you gotta go. Michael Francis was now very much in the sights of law enforcement. This led to attention from the media, who nicknamed him the Yuppie Don. Michael knew that this was trouble. I felt it starting to come around me. I felt the heat starting to build. I knew that this was going to elevate in a way. But I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and I always knew that I had that much. There was nothing to hide. The heat kept building until one day he got a call from his father, Colombo veteran Sonny Francis. My dad called me up, and he says, Boss wants to see us tonight. I said, okay. I said, what time do you want me to pick you up? He said, well, they want to do this differently. He said, they want me to come in first, and they want you to come in second. So right away, the antenna’s up, right? I’m thinking. And I said, no, don’t tell me that, Dad. We’re going together. No, we’re given an order. We got to go separate. We argued. I said, I hope you’re not wrong. Because if you’re wrong, we’re in trouble. I was told I had to meet another captain, Jimmy Angelina. I knew Jimmy all my life, right? I get in his car and I noticed I got somebody sitting behind me. Now, Jimmy, don’t really introduce me. That’s not good. We’re going someplace. Jimmy’s going to tell me what this is all about, right? He don’t say anything. And so I’m trying to get a little bit of information. He’s not. Bending at all. So I’m getting nervous. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like the setup. You got a guy in the front seat, a guy in the back seat. They put one in the back of your head, you’re done. Late at night, I get out of the car. I start to walk towards the room. Jimmy falls in behind me. The other guy’s behind him. I’m getting nervous. No, nervous isn’t a word. No, I’m getting scared. This was either the longest or the shortest walk of my life. My knees are getting weak. My heart is beating through my chest. But all I’m focusing on is the room. What’s going to happen when I get there? Is it going to be empty? Is it going to be dark? Is somebody going to be standing there? If nobody’s in there, am I going to get two shots in the back of the head? Are they going to push me in there? And all these thoughts are running through my head. And it was all about that room. And I’m praying. I wasn’t a religious person, but I’m praying to God. God, if you’re up to help me, I mean it. I’m praying. I’m saying, please, don’t let that room be empty. That room is empty. I’m done. I finally get to the room, and it’s not empty. And I look, and I see all the breasts of the family there. And I’ll be honest with you, I had to just collect myself. Because now I got to be ready for the battle. Because now I got to deal with the boss, Carmine Persico. And let me tell you about Persico. They didn’t call him the snake for nothing. This was one tough, treacherous guy. A force really to be reckoned with, and I got to deal with him now. Not easy. Hey, Michael, how are you? Sit down. It wasn’t a warm greeting and all that kind of stuff. But I’m trying to calm myself down without letting them know that I’m scared. But they wanted me to be scared, no doubt about it. And they start to grill me about the gas business. Now I’m still looking over my shoulder because that guy that was in the back of the car, if this guy was a new recruit and he had to make his way into the life, I might have been his ticket. You’re in a secure place. Nobody’s going to find anything there. That’s a perfect place to do something like this. And so everything was lined up for me to go out. And as we’re talking, I’m starting to get angry. I’m saying, hey, I don’t understand. You know, I’m giving you guys more money than you ever saw in your life. I’m taking all the heat. And then I said, wait a second. Don’t let me give these guys any excuses. So I catch myself and I just go along and I answer the questions. And it was intense. They’re mainly questioning me about the amount of money. I knew what to say. Believe me. But I had to say it the right way, you know, without being disrespectful. I said, come on, what are we doing here? I mean, I’m getting more confident as I’m talking because, you know, I realized that there was nothing there that they had. These sit-downs don’t waste time, okay? If they had something, they would have hit me with it right away. There was nothing. So now the drilling is over. I guess they’re satisfied. Everything seems to be okay. They get up, they hug me, kiss me, like nothing happened. Have a drink, sit down. I just wanted to get out of there. I wanted out of the place. Michael’s father had already had his sit down and knew what his son was walking into. On the ride home, Michael received a critical piece of information about this meeting. We’re on the ride home, and Jimmy turns to me at one point and says, I got to tell you something, and it’s really significant. And he lays this devastating information on me, about my father. He said, Listen to me, your father, he didn’t help you one bit in there tonight. Not one bit. My father didn’t help me. What are you talking about? I find out later, he didn’t go out of his way to hurt me, but he didn’t help me one bit. He threw me under the bus. Hey, if my son is stealing, I don’t know. My son handles everything. I don’t do anything. If he did anything wrong, I don’t know about it. He just kind of left me on my own to handle it that night, and it could have been serious. What I said to myself that night, This life can separate father and son. What are we doing? I said, what do I have here? I’m basically on my own. Suddenly, Michael Francis was dealing with the darker side of mob life. His family was turning against him, and the FBI was watching his every move. Then things would only get worse. He was about to go head to head with the ultimate gangbuster, the Rico Act. The mob bosses never really committed any acts themselves. It was all done by andalites. A law was passed in 1970, known as the Rico law, Racketeer Influence Corrupt Organizations Act, which, for the first time, created a legal mechanism in which you could indict and charge. Not just individuals who directly committed crimes, but those who actually ordered the crimes, managed the crimes, and benefited from the crimes. So you could do a whole organization. And their first targets were the commission members, the titans of organized crime. And they did it. In a legal landmark known as the Mafia Commission Trial, prosecutors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Chertoff used Rico to convict top bosses of every crime their underlings committed. And as the convictions started to pile up, more tough guys started to talk. It’s one thing to keep quiet when you’re facing five years in prison. It’s another thing to keep quiet when you’re facing 50 years in prison. I mean, years ago, the police used to have to beat you to get any information out of you. Now they got to smack you around to shut you up. The 1980s and 1990s saw an unprecedented crackdown against organized crime throughout the country. The Rico law was very effective. The commission case had proved that you could get… The top people. The Mafia Commission case ultimately put the top bosses and underbosses of all five families behind bars and drove a dagger into the heart of the mob’s infrastructure. They had the Mafia Commission case on at that time. They’re all going to trial and they’re coming back. Who’s getting 50 years, 100 years, 150 years? I said, what the heck? I’m the youngest guy. They’re going to give me 300 years on this case. Rico was probably the nuclear weapon. That decimated the mob. With that said, I think the mob was brought down internally as well. You’d have to look at this as a series of waves. The first wave was the family cases and the commission case, which wiped out the entire existing structure of Boston. There was then a next generation. The next generation was not as skillful or discreet as the earlier generation, and that made it easier to take them. One of that new breed was John Gotti. The brash gangster who took over the Gambino family and ultimately shared more mob secrets than anyone. If the FBI had wanted to destroy organized crime, the mob, their best candidate would have been John Gotti. By the 1980s, the American mafia was beginning to crumble due to the FBI and crusading prosecutors. But the biggest factor in their downfall may have been one mobster’s ego. The mafia’s history is filled with godfathers who were done in by hubris, who thought they were invincible, that they could do whatever they wanted, And that usually led to disasters. The best candidate for that in the modern American mafia would have been John Gotti. John Gotti? Was totally incompetent as a boss. Let’s be honest about it. Gotti had no clue how to run a legitimate business. He was the muscle guy. They extorted businesses to get their money. That’s all they did. He had been a thug. He didn’t know much about white collar crime. He had no idea about how to handle this gigantic family. In addition to that, he was a megalomaniac. He demanded that at least once a week, everybody in the family had to come and show him court at the Ravenite. And yet, at the same time, he was so vindictive, anybody who crossed him was murdered. His ego got the best of him. He actually started believing his own headlines so that every day he had to be in the paper. And then the final stroke that he did was that he blabbed. Wiretafs, particularly from this apartment above Gotti’s Ravenite social Club, provided a treasure trove of incriminating information. They had 2,000… Hours of tapes on John Gotti and his crew. They talked nothing but mob business for 2,000 hours. So everything about that life that the Feds needed to know, it came through those surveillance tapes and through the bugging devices on Gotti’s places of business. In the winter, rather than do a walk and talk, go out in the cold streets, he would sit in an apartment, not thinking he was bugged, and openly discussing everything. John Gotti told the Feds everything there was to know about that life. Everything. I mean, there wasn’t a stone unturned. So Gotti, by his own actions, not only destroyed himself, but he virtually destroyed the Gambino thing. Maybe so, but don’t tell that to a loyal mob guy. I’m going to say this. If you want to put this on the air, you can. I have so much respect for John Gotti that I don’t want to talk about him, okay? I don’t want to talk about him because there’s a guy who did it from the day he was born until the day he died. He did it the way it’s supposed to be done. Gotti died in a federal prison in 2002, but he earned the respect of his peers because he stuck to a culture. Oh, that mob guys hold sacred. Never talk to the feds. And if busted, do your time. I hate this place. This is the federal courthouse for the Eastern district of New York. And this is where all the main stuff took place for us. This was the last stop before he went to prison. It’s part of life. This is what happens. You know, one day you’re in a Learjet. Next day, you’re in Leavenworth. You do what you have to do. You shut your mouth. You go do your time. And that’s the end of it. Mobsters understood that they assumed the risk of going to jail. And they accepted that may very well happen. Prison’s the cost of doing business for these guys. That’s the way they look at it. The general rule is you stand up, you know, try to get out of it. Was I scared of it? No. I knew that prison was part of the life. I knew at some point in time I’d probably do some time. The more serious the prisons were, like Leavenworth, that was the easiest time to do. Because there was no, guys got killed. You could walk down the chow line and there could be a body laying there. Okay? So when you’re in that environment, everybody kind of respects one another. As long as you’re not bothering anybody, you’re fine. My dad taught me something that served me very well. He said, Mike, when you go to prison, remember to say please, to say thank you, and to say excuse me. You be courteous in there. It goes a long way. For Michael Franci, prison was becoming more of a reality. He was acquitted on four previous charges, but a relentless prosecutor named Rudolph Giuliani was determined to bring him down. Rudy Giuliani, he indicts me on a big racketeering case. I go to trial. Boom, I beat the case. Several months later, they indict me on this whole gas charge. And I told my lawyer, I said, listen, I’m going to take a plea. I beat this government so many times. They’re going to want to get some time on me. I said, let’s try to negotiate. Michael had another reason to make a deal. He had recently married, and for the first time ever, he began to question the values of mob life. This young girl, who’s now my wife, she was a very strong woman of faith. My wife started to work on me. And seeing the way she conducted her life, that started to give me cause to think, hey, maybe I was a pretty bad guy. I didn’t even realize it. So that started to come into play, but not at that point. At that point, it was kind of survival. How am I going to have a life? Because am I going to be behind bars the rest of my life? Well, I might get killed. I’m going to take my chances that way because I got experience there. Michael decided to take the government’s deal and use his prison time to figure out his future. I’d take the plea to racketeering, two counts of racketeering. We negotiated down to 10 years and a $15 million restitution. So I figured, maybe I’ll do four or five and I go off to do my time. One thing Michael knew he couldn’t do was testify against any made members of the mafia. But the Feds tested his loyalty many times. I went through the roughest times in prison, meaning that later on, when the Feds were trying to get me to cooperate in a big way, they put me on diesel therapy. What does that mean? They don’t let you stay in any one prison. They throw you in a hole until they transport you someplace else. They take you out in the middle of the night. The family don’t know where you are. It was horrible. When I was in a hole, I spent a total of 29 months and seven days, 24-7, six by eight cell. That was it. You’re in a hole, you could go crazy. The worst part of prison for me was being separated from my family. I had just gotten married. I don’t want to lose my wife. I don’t want to lose that relationship. My wife was really the catalyst for this. Meeting her, getting this indictment, being in jail, that kind of sailed it for me. I said, I’m going to make the break. There is no definitive guide for leaving the American mafia. For Michael Francise, a made man, the step he was about to take? Was unprecedented. You know, I’m thinking, I don’t know anybody that walked away from that life. Either leaving a coffin, or you join a government and enter a witness protection program. Neither one of those was an option that I was interested in. Combined, Michael served nearly eight years in federal prison. When he was released in 1995, he was determined to start a new life. Really marked the end of my life in the mob. That was it for me. But Michael needed to make an honest living for the first time in his life. When he was offered a lucrative book deal to tell his story, he accepted. I sit down with this writer and we write the book. Now, I was inexperienced at that time. I didn’t know the title was going to be quitting the Mob. That really said it to everybody and that I was really out of the life. And it kind of made it no turning back for me, too. I mean, that was big. Then came an opportunity where Michael could use his mob experience as a source for good. He was asked to speak to professional and college athletes about the epic problem of gambling in sports. I said, I can’t do that. Big, tough mob guy. You can’t speak to a couple athletes? I said, all right, set it up. I’ll be there, right? That started me on another career. Since 1998, I have visited just about 400 universities throughout the country and spoke to all the student athletes. And I carry this message to all of them. You get involved in gambling, okay, you’re leaving yourself open. You are a target. You are a money-making machine for somebody out there that wants to take advantage of you. Whether they’re mob guys, bookmakers, or anybody that wants to gamble and make money with you. And they cringe. They get scared. You know, I’ve tried to right this wrong in many ways by making myself available. And it’s been a very successful program. Michael had started a new chapter. But he had broken the vow of silence he took when he joined the mob in 1975. Now, his life was in jeopardy, and he needed a plan. So what am I going to do? Honestly, there’s no blueprint for walking away from that life and living. So it was kind of like, create this as you go along. When my girlfriend ZZ quits the mob, I say to myself, you just don’t quit like this. There’s only one way out of the mob. Feet first. It’s not even believable, and yet… We lived and saw it happen. The American mafia went from a ragtag group of street thugs to a sprawling criminal empire that affected commerce across the nation. Michael Francise was born into this world and rose to become one of its most prominent made members. Then he literally risked his life to do something he swore he’d never do, walk away. The truth is, if you leave the mob and you’re not in the witness protection program, there is a very high likelihood you will not survive. When Michael publicly quit the mob, he knew his biggest threat came from one person, his former boss in the Colombo family, Carmine Persico. When I decided to make the move to walk away, I knew I was in trouble. Feds told me, hey, we got word that Persico’s putting a hit out on you and your father’s going along with it. I figured, what was my father going to do? He turned on me once. And what I said to myself, okay, this time around, they’re not walking me to a room. They’re going to have to come and get me. Of course, he was the strength at that point in time. He took it very personal when I walked away. An FBI agent told me that they had his cell bugged and he got a copy of my book. And when he got it, he threw it against the wall and started ripping the pages out after he read it. He was so incensed over me. If he had the opportunity today, I’d be dead. The question remains, why is Michael Francis alive? At the end of the day, there wasn’t anything I planned. You know, I’m a person of faith, and I believe my purpose wasn’t to die in a hail of bullets in that life. That’s the spiritual reason. The practical reason is that I knew the life as well as anybody. I knew the modus operandi. I knew what the guys would do, and I knew what they wouldn’t do. I said, you know what? It’s one thing to walk a guy into a room. It’s another thing to send a hit squad across the country to kill somebody that’s aware and get away with it. So at least I can use my wits and use my experience and knowledge to try to make this happen. And I knew they were never going to walk me in a room again. Michael knew that if he wanted to stay alive, he would have to make certain changes to his lifestyle. I don’t create a pattern in my life. I don’t walk my dog seven o’clock in the morning, every morning. I don’t go to clubs. Guy spots me, makes a call back to New York, wherever I am, LA, Miami. He wants to make a name for himself. I walk out into the parking lot. Boom, I’m gone. I don’t go to the same restaurant, sit in the same seat every Tuesday night. I can’t move back into the neighborhood and say, Hey guys, I’m coming back. I probably wouldn’t last 48 hours. Over the last 20 years, Michael Francis has essentially won a war of attrition. Biggest reason for his victory is likely the 139-year prison sentence being served by Carmine Persico. Persico, he’s gone. The guys that really had an infamy, they’re gone. So the bottom line is I outlasted everybody. I think things just fell into place. In fairness, he never really put any gangsters away. One could say, well, you know, he really never hurt the organization. He was really never a threat, but he did acknowledge that the organization existed. I would not testify against any made guy, and I wouldn’t go beyond that. It’s like a brother who does something to embarrass you. Do you hate him forever for it? When you love a person like he’s your brother, you love him. You know what I mean? And the bottom line is, although he did things that made a lot of people unhappy, he actually didn’t put anyone in jets. And what about the towering figure who introduced Michael to mob life, his father, Sonny Francis? After it became public, my dad writes me off. Ten years later, he sends me a message. Mike, I want to see you. I’ll never forget. I open the door, and he’s standing there, about 10 feet away from me. And he looks at me and he says, If you’d have listened to me, you’d have been the boss of the Colombo family. I didn’t know what to say, right? And he looked at me and he says, You’re really serious about this walking away? I said, yeah, I am. He said, All right, let’s talk. And that kind of broke the ice. And I got to say now that, you know, my dad and I are closer than ever. I’m glad. I’m really glad because, you know, I told him one day, I said, Dad, the difference between you and I, you don’t get it. You’ve sacrificed your entire family. The difference with you and I is I’m not doing that to my family. At some point, I came to understand that the life is, it’s an evil life. I don’t know one family of any member of that life that hasn’t been totally devastated. I don’t mean hurt. I mean, devastated. And my family alone, my dad did, over 30 years in prison. During that time, my mom was a single mom, essentially, had to raise these kids. My sister died of an overdose of drugs while my dad was in prison. My brother, drug addict for over 25 years. My younger sister, another one, died. When I look back, I realize that it was this life that caused all of that. And that makes it an evil life. At the end of 2008, Sonny Francis was released from what looked to be his final incarceration. But just over two years later, he was headed back to prison for his role in extorting strip clubs in a pizzeria. My dad, the oldest living mob guy in America, he gets involved in another racketeering case. Goes back to prison at the age of 94. You know, I see him now, he’s in a wheelchair, but we still talk and reminisce mob stuff. It’s still so much a part of him, you know. But the mob’s sunny friend sees New is gone. La Cosa Nostra was basically destroyed by the combination of the RICo statutes and its own internal decline. The mob was brought down in two ways, I think. I think law enforcement had a very distinct impact on bringing the mob down. Two, I think what happened within the mob was that many of the values that the old timers brought to the mob were basically dissipating. It seems that countless movies and TV shows about mob life have created a romantic image of the mafia that doesn’t fit the full story. You know what kills me with these young kids today I speak to? They’ll see a movie like Goodfellas, and they are so infatuated with the life. Oh my gosh, you guys had the money, the power, the women, the cars, everything. I said, yeah, that’s true. But you see the other side of the movie, the second half? Who got killed? Who went to jail? They don’t see that part. But it’s a whole different generation. They’re not going to stand up. Like the guys that I saw, the guys that I lived with, that I was honestly fortunate to see. Because that was the real life. It’s not the same. It’s not the same as it was. You know what I mean? By the end of the 20th century, the mob was nearly decimated. But on a sunny September day in 2001, it suddenly became less of a priority for law enforcement. the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by terrorists, actually gave a reprieve to organized crime. There was a huge cutback in the number of prosecutors and FBI agents who are now assigned to… Mafia, organized crime cases. Everything’s focused on terrorism. Resources have been devoted primarily to stopping the next terrorist attack. And I might point out, many of the techniques developed in investigating organized crime have now been transferred over to the investigation of terrorism. When I became Secretary of Homeland Security, one of the benefits of my experience doing organized crime cases was having learned how to take… Huge amounts of data and information and making sense out of it. That’s what you do in counterterrorism work. The consequence, however, we’ve got limited resources devoted to the investigation of organized crime. During my day, they had 1,200 agents on 750 guys in a mob. Today, from my understanding, that number has dwindled down to 150 or 200. What’s going to happen? These guys are going to build up again. There’ll always be organized crime in America. Capitalism germinates organized crime. As long as there’s a need for illegal goods and services, we will have organized crime. Will la cosa nostra be what it was 20 or 30 years ago? Probably not. I think what’s been interesting in the last 10 years is that they’ve moved into the field of electronics. We’re now dealing with cybercrime. That’s where the money is. That’s what the mob as they follow. The money in terms of deciding where they’re going to devote their efforts. Michael Fran sees the guy who could have written the definitive guide to the mob. Understands our fascination with the mafia and knows they’ll always be an attraction to the mysterious man of La Cosa Nostra. The best quality that mob guys have is how to get around somebody, how to make them feel comfortable, how to make them feel protected and strong, and then get them to go and do their work. Yeah, people are very attracted to mob guys. But you’re going to get into business with this guy. You’re going to do things with him. Don’t get on the wrong side of it. Trust me on that. February 14th, 1929. St. Valentine’s Day in the gang-fueled anarchy of Prohibition, Chicago. There are gratuitous episodes of extreme violence on a regular basis. The man, crime boss Al Capone, is out to eliminate his longtime nemesis. Capone was a monster created by Prohibition. In a moment of unparalleled violence, seven men are about to taste Capone’s vengeance. With Capone, you know, there’s just only so much he’ll take. Enough is enough. Engineered for massive carnage, the machine is the Thompson submachine gun. Gangland couldn’t have asked for any better weapon of mass destruction. But fate throws a kink in Capone’s perfect plan. Which one of you bums is Moret? Hi, I’m Hunter Ellis. When Al Capone unleashes this brutal attack against his rivals, it’s the climax of his career, sealing his rise from street thug to the most prominent gangster in prohibition, Chicago. Capone’s gunmen use a weapon that has unprecedented firepower and becomes a symbol of gangster bloodshed, the Thompson submachine Gun. In a single moment, Capone and the Tommy Gun will transform gangland tensions into full-on street warfare. On the morning of February 14th, 1929, Chicago police raid an illegal liquor depot on the city’s north side. Actually, these cops are imposters, sent to carry out a ruthless act of gangland retribution by one of the most- powerful men in town. All right, you guys. Al Capone’s name was emblazoned in history by the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. If it had never occurred, he would have been known as just another thug in Chicago. Which one of you bums is Moret? Al Capone and the many wants to kill derive their power from laws enacted to improve society. January 17th, 1920. At 12.01 a.m., Prohibition begins. It takes only 58 minutes for the first violation to occur. When a shipment of whiskey is hijacked in Chicago. There are huge profits to be made in illegal alcohol, and gangsters waste no time getting down to business. Prohibition turned out to be a golden opportunity for criminals because it suddenly gave them, handed them, a business which before then had been completely legitimate. So it suddenly put them in the mainstream. Almost overnight, Chicago becomes a hotbed of bootleg liquor and beer. The city had already put their stamp of approval on not funding anything in relation to the Prohibition Act. They would not enforce it at all. So that meant it gave the gangsters a free hand to do whatever they wanted in the city. Police are paid to turn a blind eye to the bootlegging business. Citywide, government corruption runs deep. It was well known that a lot of the police officers were riding shotgun with liquor shipments coming in and out of Chicago. Chicago was very lawless land, even before Prohibition. I mean, lots of corruption with police and officials. So you could pretty much do what you want, get what you want in Chicago. There are two main outfits in the Chicago bootlegging business. The north side is controlled by a brash 28-year-old Irishman named Dino Banyan. The south side is the stronghold of Gangland’s senior statesman, Johnny Torrio. Most of the gangsters could rarely look beyond the next day or the next week, largely because the average age of the Chicago gangster. When he died was 26 years old. Torrio was in his 40s when prohibition began, comparatively old for a Chicago gangster. So he had more foresight than any of them did at the time. Second in commandatorio is 21-year-old Al Capone. Capone was a very tall guy, you know, large size. For that era, especially about 5’11”, and probably even as a young man, close to 200 pounds or a little bit more, And would have been very, very good with his fists. Smaller gangs operate the west side and other neighborhoods. But Johnny Torrio imposes peace and cooperation among all the gangland factions. Johnny Torrio saw that the only way for prohibition… To be of maximum profit to all the parties concerned was to unite. United, you profited. Divided, nobody won. But there is tension and unrest, especially on the north side of town. Dino Banyan is angry with Torrio for failing to rein in rival incursions onto Banyan’s turf. That’s it. Dino Banyan, like a lot of the gang leaders in Chicago, was a fairly volatile individual. The sort of guy where there was no backing up. If you stepped on his toe, he would punch you in the face. If you punched him in the face, he would shoot you. May 19th, 1924. O’Banion decides to teach Torrio a lesson by selling him his interest in a profitable brewery and then arranging for it to be raided by the police. All right, heavy and slow. Come on, slow. During the raid, police find over 100,000 gallons of illegal beer. As a first-time offender, O’Banion gets off. He knew he would. But Torrio has a prior prohibition violation, which means jail time for him. It doesn’t take long for Torrio to realize he’s been betrayed by O’Banion. Once O’Banion sets Torrio up for this arrest and conviction, there’s no going back at that point. I think Torrio recognizes that, look, you just cannot deal with a guy like this. John Torrio was no… With No angel. He was very sort of diplomatic and forward-looking, but, you know, there just comes a point when you can’t deal with people anymore. Torrio decides to remove the North Side leader, and he turns to his top lieutenant, Al Capone, to get the job done. I need you to take care of him now. Consider it done, boss. O’Banion will be easy to find at the flower shop he runs on the north side. I’d like some roses. Nice, big, beautiful. Capone placed an order. For an $8,000 rose sculpture to be picked up at the flower shop the next day, thus ensuring that O’Banion would likely be on the premises, finishing up the order and having it ready for when it was picked up. November 10th, 1924. Capone’s hired guns rub out Dean O’Banion with six gunshots. The flower Shop murder will shake O’Banion’s inner circle to the core, especially his devoted henchmen, Jaime Weiss and George Bugs Moran. 26-year-old Jaime Weiss becomes the new leader on the North Side. He’s got plenty of enemies, and so do I. I’ve got to watch my back, too. Jaime weiss was a hot-tempered Pole. He was the only North Sider that Al Capone truly feared, because he was very un… Predictable, he’d fly off at the handle at any slightest provocation. That 23 year old Bugs Moran is second in command. Bugs Moran, who was an ally of Dino Banyan. Um, was more like a thug. He was a very handsome, devilish thug. But he was more of a gunman, uh, who was carrying out orders. And he had no head for strategy. Particularly Ice and Moran vowed to avenge their boss’s murder when Obanian was murdered. Weiss and Moran not only lost a leader, they also lost a best friend. They viewed it as a personal loss, and therefore their reaction was not only violent, not only bloody, but extremely vindictive and relentless. The O’Banion killing marks a bloody war of retaliation between the north and south side gangs that will last for the next six years. For Weiss and Moran, killing Johnny Torrio and… And Al Capone becomes their primary mission. And they won’t delegate that task to any underling. They’ll see to it personally. January 24th, 1925. Johnny Torrio is returning home from an afternoon of shopping with his wife. They have no idea that Weiss and Moran are waiting to pounce. Johnny Torrio, the most powerful gang boss in Chicago, is about to die by the hand of Northside rival Bugs Moran. Bugs Moran is reputed to have stood over him with a pistol to his head and ready to put the last round to him and click. You know, he was out of bullets. Moran and Weiss leave Torrio barely alive with as many as five bullet wounds. Torrio knew after he survived that attack on him, that he had no stomach for the violence that was coming. He knew what was happening. He knew that it was time to step aside and hand the leadership over to Al Capone, who did have the stomach. Who did have the ruthlessness to fight the Northsiders on their own terms. I’m quitting this. I’m giving you the business. I’m done. Good luck. When Torrio retires, 26-year-old Al Capone is suddenly sitting on top of a multi-million dollar conglomerate of breweries, speakeasies, brothels, and gambling joints. He’ll have to fight to keep his empire from being torn apart by rival gangs. But he has the smarts and the skills to handle it. They were honed on the streets of New York. Alphonse Capone is born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 17, 1899, to Italian immigrant parents. He’s the fourth of seven children. The family lives near the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Which provide a busy market for the vice trade in the area. That meant he grew up next to a lot of brothels that the sailors used. So that was his first exposure to vice. For Capone, it was probably second nature. It was just part of life. He really didn’t think too much about it. In the early 1900s, a mild-mannered gangster named Johnny Torrio sets up one of the first organized vice businesses in the neighborhood. He’s got brothels and gambling joints, and Capone and other boys run errands for him. Those kids didn’t realize that they were actually being introduced to a life of crime and to behavior that could only get them in trouble as they got older. But young Capone seems destined for trouble. He drops out of school at age 14 and prowls the streets with gangs of kids. He works odd jobs to help support his family. He’s a pin setter at a bowling alley. He works at a book bindery. He also works at a paper box factory. But he finds that the lure of making fast money in crime is a better way to go. In 1917, at age 18, Capone gets a job at a Coney Island bar run by a local gangster. Capone is very brash. He doesn’t care about anybody. He makes his own rules and makes his own way, and says what he feels when he feels like it. One day at the bar… He makes an obscene comment to an attractive customer named Lena Galluccio, who’s there with her brother Frank. Hey honey, nice to boost. Frank Galluccio loses it, demands that Al Capone apologizes to his sister. It was a compliment. It was a compliment. Capone’s wounds will later give rise to his nickname, Scarface. Soon after the attack, senior mobsters order a truce. Years later… Capone will hire Galluccio as a bodyguard on a trip back to New York. On December 4th, 1918, Capone’s Irish girlfriend, May Coughlin, gives birth to a boy, whom they name Albert Francis Sonny Capone. A few weeks later, 19-year-old Capone marries May. She might have been somewhat of a fast girl in some sense, because she certainly would have known. Who this guy was, that he was no Rhodes Scholar, and that he wasn’t on a track to a life of legitimate, honest, hard work. Shut up. Wow. In 1919, within a year of his marriage, Capone gets in… Serious trouble in a bar brawl when he beats a man with his bare fists and leaves him for dead. He needs to get out of New York and turns to Johnny Torrio for help. By this time, Torrio has moved his business to Chicago, where he arranges a job for Capone at a brothel. Al Capone started as a doorman, slash, roper, slash, pimp, slash bouncer. Everything rolled into one. Torrio takes a special interest in Capone. He sees in him both a skill for organizing and a brutality that he himself does not possess. I need somebody who’s tough. Torrio had no stomach for violence. He needed somebody at his side who was capable of carrying out the dirty work that he didn’t want to personally see to himself. By 1924, Capone is second in command of Torrio’s south side Gang. Together, they expand operations to the neighboring suburb of Cicero. When John Torrio retires the next year and leaves his protege in charge, Capone becomes one of the most powerful gangsters in Chicago. But a new force is about to emerge on the scene, a weapon that will elevate the gang wars to unprecedented heights of violence. In September 1925, Chicago police respond to what they think is a routine gangland shooting. But at the scene, they’re stunned by how much ammunition has been fired in the short attack. 50 rounds of .45. Caliber pistol cartridges. They thought that it was caused by a squad of riflemen. They had no idea that such a weapon existed that could create that much damage. As more attacks break out, the Tommy gun makes headlines in Chicago. Al Capone is impressed. Hey, hey, it’s loaded. I know. Get out of here. Take things to the boys. Here was a weapon that was incredibly portable, delivering a large volume of fire at a target. And he realized very quickly that if he didn’t have similar arms to protect his interests… He’d be quickly exterminated. The Tommy gun soon becomes the gangster’s weapon of choice. It’s easy to buy, and there are no laws to regulate its use. It was illegal to carry a revolver in your pocket in Chicago, but it was perfectly legal to walk down the street with a Thompson submachine gun in your arms. It wasn’t against the law. After the Tommy Gun is introduced in September of 1925, gang slain spike in Chicago. With more than one killing a week. It’s a rate that’s unsurpassed for gang-related murder there, even to this day. It ratchets up the violence. It has the effect of producing this wild, lawless environment, where there are gratuitous episodes of extreme violence on a regular basis. When the Tommy gun appears on the scene, gangsters throughout Chicago begin using it. The weapon becomes linked to Al Capone, though, more than any other gangster, because of one murder in particular. When an important public figure is caught in his crosshairs, it elevates Capone’s status from little-known mob boss to notorious killer. April 27th, 1926. Capone’s headquarters at the Hawthorne Hotel. Capone is having trouble with a rival gang run by Klondike O’Donnell. O’Donnell is pushing his beer into Capone’s territory. I don’t know. I can’t believe this. O’Donnell’s just down the street. When O’Donnell’s car is spotted near his headquarters, Capone decides to take the Thompson on an outing. Some witnesses said they saw Capone pull a Thompson submachine gun from the wall panel in the restaurant at the Hawthorne. Members of O’Donnell’s gang are out drinking with a childhood friend. Billy, how you doing? I’m good, Jimmy. How are you? Good to see ya. Who’s a rising star in the criminal courts. You’ve been out of trouble, huh? Hey, Jimmy, how are you? It’s to you. The men have no idea that Capone is about to personally unleash his wrath. April 27th, 1926. Al Capone is about to destroy a rival gangster who’s been invading his turf. He believes his target, bootlegger Klondike O’Donnell, is drinking at a nearby saloon. Actually, it’s Klondike’s brother, Miles, with four companions. And it’s… It’s going to be a good day with opponents, you know. One pistol shot is something that is survivable. You might be able to survive it, depending on where it hits you. If you wanted a weapon that would guarantee that you were going to kill the person you wanted to kill, the Thompson was the weapon for you. I will serve the Ares. I will not let you down. I will not let you down. Soon, the Borg will be your target. Miles takes cover and is unhurt in the attack, but three of his companions are mortally wounded. Including 26-year-old assistant state’s attorney William McSwiggan. Up until this point, the public has turned a blind eye to gangster killings. But now that a civilian has been murdered and a high-profile prosecutor at that, it looks like Capone has gone too far. You’ve got three men killed at once with a Thompson submachine gun now, and you’ve got a, um… Assistant state’s attorney killed, and that immediately causes outrage, because the immediate suspicion is, was he the intended target? McSwiggan’s boss, the state’s Attorney, accuses Capone of personally pulling the trigger. Capone goes into hiding. The McSwiggan killing was the first time that most people in Chicago took notice at the Gangland killings and initially had an outcry of wanting to have these killings stopped. There’s no hard evidence against Capone, and no witnesses willing to testify. The cases eventually drop, but the incident cements the image of Capone and the Tommy Gun as a public menace. In 1926, the Thompson submachine gun is one of the most powerful weapons ever to hit the streets. It’s named after Brigadier General John T. Thompson, who pioneered its invention in 1918. John Thompson very astutely recognized that American soldiers needed greater firepower. He recognized this even before World War I, but then, once World War I started, he realized that. Now is the time that we’re going to have to develop a weapon that fits these terms. This is the fully automatic, water-cooled Browning M1917 heavy machine gun, Standard U.S. Army issue in World War I. It’s heavy. It weighs about 93 pounds with tripod and gear, so it takes a crew of three to transport and operate it. It’s almost impossible for an infantryman with a rifle to advance against a defensive weapon like this. But Thompson wants to change things. He wants to put this kind of full-auto firepower into the hands of the individual soldier as an offensive weapon. To Thompson’s dismay, the army is unwilling to put resources into developing new weaponry. Soon after the start of World War I, he leaves the military to design on his own the powerful firearm that he envisions. Thompson writes, Our boys in the infantry, now in the trenches, need a one-man handheld machine gun, a trench broom. In 1916, he forms the Auto Ordnance Company, and work begins in earnest on a rapid-fire, lightweight, automatic machine gun. They decide to use the easily available Army Standard .45. Caliber automatic colt pistol cartridge for the new weapon. Now, its chief obstacle is to work out a dependable breech lock mechanism. A breech lock is what keeps the chamber of a firearm closed while the cartridge is fired. Without it, the cartridge can eject prematurely, violently exploding. None of the locking systems of the day are small or light enough for the gun that Thompson envisions. He needed something new that could keep the weapon locked during firing, that could unlock the weapon during the recoil phase, and still keep the weapon lightweight. Thompson finds what he’s looking for in a simple bronze lug called a blish Lock. It works by metallic adhesion, a kind of super friction that delays the rearward thrust of the bolt and the ejection of the spent cartridge. Until the chamber pressure is at a safe level. The fraction of a second delay is enough. To protect from dangerous flyaway cartridges. The blisch lock was a major step in safety for the gun. Thompson calls his new weapon a submachine gun because it uses pistol caliber rather than rifle caliber ammunition. It’s an all-new weapons classification. The Thompson was a completely new design, started from scratch to become, in essence, a stand-alone generation of firearm. The first production model comes off the line in 1920. Model 1921A is made of forged and machined carbon steel and is 32 inches long. It has a stock of American black walnut, and the weapon weighs nearly 20 pounds, fully loaded. The powerful gun fires .45. Caliber automatic colt pistol cartridges from either a 20-round box magazine or 50 and 100-round drums. It’s a revolutionary weapon insofar as it produces an incredible volume of fire. One person can stand and spray an area with 145 caliber bullets in the span of just four seconds. And there really aren’t any other weapons in the world at all that can compare to that kind of functionality. But Thompson’s machine is too late for World War I. It was designed to fill a military role, and then the military didn’t need it. So Thompson decides to go after civilian customers. In 1922, he stages a public demonstration in New Jersey, but his gun fails to find a market. There’s this strange reception. Everyone that saw the weapon demonstrated would remark, it’s an incredible technical innovation. It’s the greatest firepower that there is available to an individual today. But then nobody was buying it. What saves the Tommy Gun from obscurity are the mobsters of Prohibition, Chicago. The era of the drive-by shooting was born thanks to the Thompson submachine gun. So what do you have here, Marty? All right, Hunter, here is your M1921 Thompson submachine gun. Very nice. Now, not too heavy. It’s about like 9 pounds, 10 pounds. You’re approaching 10 pounds of the weapon. It’s not exactly lightweight, but not too terrible. Until I give you a 100-round C-drum magazine, right, with the submachine gun and 100 rounds of .45. ACP and a C-drum magazine. You’re looking at approaching 20 pounds of weight. But it’s nice and compact, so I can see why. Gangsters want to choose this as the ultimate weapon. It seems like it’d be easy to wield inside of a vehicle. Absolutely. Gangsters love this. This was the ideal drive-by shooting weapon because, especially equipped with a 100-round magazine, the weapon can pour out a very high volume of fire. And because it’s somewhat of a heavy weapon, it tends to hold its recoil down. There’s very little in the way of felt recoil on the weapon. And so that gives you the ability to keep your point of aim on a target while you just pour out volume of fire on it. My challenge is to simulate a gangster drive-by shooting. Driving around 15 miles per hour, I’ve got just four seconds, about the time it takes to empty a 100-round drum magazine, to see what kind of damage I can do to these paint cans. Now that I’m in here, it’s a little more difficult than I thought it would be. Yeah, it’s tight. It’s not an easy thing. Drive-by shooting is a very challenging thing to accomplish. Ready? Fire! Hold your fire. Click it on safety. All right. Let’s see how you did. That was four seconds. I’ll tell you, that is challenging. How did it feel? It felt good, though. It’s easy with this much firepower to really walk it onto the target and just collectively put a lot of ammunition in one space. Well, this is a pretty graphic representation of what you can do with that much firepower. So how’d I do? You did good. I mean, look, this is four seconds. Of, I’m on target with an M1921 Thompson submachine gun, And I think it’s safe to say that you neutralized the target and that you are an effective drive-by shooting gangster now. The drive-by shooting becomes the centerpiece of gangster recrimination. Its lethal power helps make al Capone the biggest crime boss in Chicago. By 1926, he controls the majority of Chicago’s vice trade on the south and west side of town, as well as the suburb of Cicero. But the gangland war escalates when Capone’s archenemy, northsider Jaime Weiss, makes a bold strike at Capone on his own turf. Jaime Weiss was referred to as the only gangster Al Capone ever really feared. Capone was heard to say once that if he had known what he was getting into when he left New York, he’d have never set foot in Chicago. September 20th, 1926. Capone is dining in his Cicero headquarters at the Hawthorne hotel when he hears a burst of tommy gunfire on the street. When Capone thinks the attack is over, he goes to the window to see what’s happening. And that’s exactly what Weiss is waiting for. Jaime Weiss and Bugs Moran lead a motorcade of up to 10 cars that systematically strafe the hotel with shotgun and tommy gun fire. I think it would be fair to say that in the drive-by shooting at the Hawthorne Hotel, they shot the hell out of it. It must have been pretty frightening if you had 8 or 10 cars of guys armed to the teeth with shotguns, much less Thompson submachine guns. The gunmen fire approximately 1,000 rounds. Miraculously, Capone emerges unscathed. When Capone is fired on like that in broad daylight, in an attack that demolishes that whole block, Capone’s ultimate reaction is, this guy will stop at nothing to get me. This act of aggression is a critical link in the chain of events that leads to Capone’s ultimate revenge. It not only seals the fate of the Northside gang and their leader, Jaime Weiss, but it also triggers an escalation of violence that even Capone himself is hoping to avoid. Capone had always wanted peace. During the struggle with Jaime Weiss, Capone’s actions were largely defensive. He was protecting himself from Weiss, not so much as trying to put Weiss away. Jaime Weiss is a fierce opponent, intelligent, fearless and brutal. He will not rest until Capone is dead. The attack at the Hawthorne hotel confirmed that. The only way to stop the bloodshed and bring back some semblance of cooperation and prosperity like the former years, would be to have to put Jaime Weiss out of the way. I need you to take care of Jaime Weiss. This has gone on long enough. Take care of the boss. We’ll handle the boss. October 11th, 1926. As Jaime Weiss arrives at his Northside headquarters, Capone gunmen lie in wait. The Northside gang has lost another leader, and Capone’s longtime rival is gone. With Weiss out of the way, Capone decides it’s time to end the bloodshed. He calls for a general truce among all the Chicago gangs. I think it’s fair to say Capone was diplomatic. As gangsters go. Look, there’s enough here for everybody. All we need to do is just stay in our separate corners, if you will, and get along. Why ruin a good thing by trying to kill each other? Capone also embarks on a public relations campaign meant to improve his image. He takes his son to baseball games. And later opens a soup kitchen for the unemployed. He skillfully cultivated his Robin hood persona, that he was actually stealing from the rich or from somebody to give to the poor. He liked to portray himself as the ally of the working man. But Capone’s problems with the Northside gang are far from over. With Weiss gone, Bugs, Moran assumes leadership, and his hatred for Capone remains unabated. No truce will stop Moran on his quest for revenge. Capone was responsible for most of the major losses that occurred for Moran, personally and professionally. There was no way that there could ever be… A personal peace between the two of them. That’s it. Over the next two years, Moran launches a series of attacks meant to kill Capone and his closest people. I suspect with Capone, you know, there’s only so much he’ll take. Enough is enough. If these guys, you know, can’t cooperate with me, then, well, then we’ll try something different. Got a couple of guys down in St. Louis. Can make the call. And Capone had realized that the only way to combat the problem was to remove it entirely. I want Moran. In December of 1928, Capone retreats to Florida, leaving his best men in Chicago to oversee his plan. In February of 1929, Capone’s spies discover that Moran is planning to meet with his top lieutenants. At a low-profile garage at 2122 North Clark Street. February 14th, St. Valentine’s Day. Capone Lookouts watched the garage for Moran’s arrival. The last to enter is a stocky gangster wearing a dark overcoat and tan fedora, Moran’s winter uniform. The lookout makes a critical misjudgment and calls the waiting gunman. Moran’s in. You’re on, go. With Moran believed to be in the garage, Capone’s men move in. But their perfect plan is already unraveling. How about you, you in? I’m in. All right. The plan is fairly simple. You’ve got to get at these guys who are going to have lookouts. And who are obviously, by their nature, very, very suspicious. So the basics of the plan are you make it look like a police raid. All right, you guys. It looks like a routine bootlegger bust, but these so-called cops are imposters brought in by the Capone gang. What the gunmen don’t realize, though, is that Bugs Moran is not with his men in the garage. The wheels are in motion for a bloodbath, and nothing can stop it now. Capone’s hitmen make their entrance. Which one of you bums is Moret? Within 10 seconds, all but one of Moran’s men are lifeless on the floor. The killers exit in a dramatic ploy meant to confuse witnesses. The fake officers march the plainclothes men out to the car, as if making an arrest. The entire attack takes less than 15 minutes. This was a very professional job. The speed of execution and the daring ruse of addressing the gunmen as cops was breathtaking. It raised the art of assassination in Chicago to a new level. Bugs Moran arrives just in time to see the killers getting into their police car. Moran was 10 to 15 minutes late arriving at the garage. Because he stopped at the hotel where he resided, went into the barber shop, and had a haircut. When the real police arrive, they find seven bodies lying in pools of blood. The victims would have been absolutely bullet-riddled, and an enormous amount of… Overkill was used against these crime victims, and the result had to have been a scene of complete and total gore. But one of Moran’s men, Frank Gusenberg, is still moving. Who did this to you? Who shot you? Nobody shot me. Job The lone survivor, obeying the gangster code of silence to the very end, never cooperates with the police. Gusenberg dies. A few hours later. The job went down, boss. Alright! But I gotta tell ya, Moran wasn’t even in the building. What? Capone was supposedly upset that somebody had screwed up and, um, said that Moran was there when he wasn’t. And therefore, they missed the intended target. The killings make headlines across the nation and turn Al Capone into a household name. They also spark a movement against gangland violence. The public outcry over the violence of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre for the first time got the federal government involved. On October 18, 1931, almost two years after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Capone is convicted of the only crime authorities can pin on him, tax evasion. He’s sentenced to 11 years and $80,000 in fines and sent to the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta. The rivalry and bloodshed between the North side and South side gangs comes at a heavy cost. Nobody really won. Moran lost his key lieutenants in the Clark Street garage. And the aftermath resulted in Capone ultimately losing his freedom. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre turns public opinion against Prohibition, confirming what most people believe, that outlawing alcohol has caused more problems than it’s solved. Four years later, on December 5, 1933, prohibition is repealed. In 1934, three years into his sentence, authorities stage a public relations coup by transferring Capone to a newly opened maximum security federal prison called Alcatraz. That same year, the National Firearms Act makes it illegal for civilians to own a Thompson submachine gun without a strict registration process. Its use and the use of other automatic weapons was addressed by the first major piece of national firearms legislation, and that law is still in force today. In 1939. Nearly 20 years after its introduction, the Thompson submachine gun is finally enlisted for the job it was intended, on the battlefields of World War II. There were still so many Thompsons that had been produced. That the weapon is around and is a part of every battle and every theater where American forces fought. Because of failing health, Capone serves only eight years of his sentence and is released from prison in 1939. The once feared mob boss retires to Miami, Florida. On January 25, 1947, 48-year-old Al Capone dies quietly in his bed of complications from syphilis. The gang that he built into a powerhouse in the 1920s still operates on a smaller scale in Chicago today. Although Capone didn’t wield the machine gun himself in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, Because of the violence in the prohibition era, for which he was largely responsible, he became associated with it for the rest of time. When Al Capone extracts his vengeance with a Thompson submachine gun, it’s a bloody moment of gangland recrimination that has etched forever in American history. It’s also an example of the M3 factor, the convergence of a powerful man with a powerful machine that creates a force for righteousness, or, in this case, evil. We’ll continue to follow this force throughout history, on Man, Moment, Machine.
Al Capone ruled Chicago’s underworld with ruthless efficiency, controlling bootlegging, gambling, and extortion. His rise and fall epitomized Mafia power, from brutal turf wars to secret alliances. Though imprisoned for tax evasion, his legacy shaped organized crime forever.
Director: Jason Fenwick
00:00 Secret City
43:31 Taking Out Al Capone
01:26:59 The Definitive Guide to the Mafia
02:50:52 The Machine Gun Massacre
6 Comments
Two different bots with the same thirst trap pfp
nothing worse than stupid limeys trying to explain American mafia.
GTFOH 👉
Excellent documentary. I absolutely love anything about the history of the era. Depression era, prohibition, organized crime , etc…Al Capone's life was interesting. Thank-you for this history lesson. I'm almost 70, and learning is a lifelong experience. Young people in their 20's have no idea who figures in history were. Really sad. Schools, i don't know what they teach anymore?!!!😮😢
wow
I don't know if I'd be happy to have him as my uncle or if I'd be shit-scared !
May our Creator, Great Spirit continue to guide you. To your wife ? You saved this guy. Nothing more needs to be said. I hope it's all Peace in the Valley.