The Outfit (12 page)

Between 1910 and 1928, Morris Becker had built the ten largest cleaning and dyeing facilities in Chicago. Crowley’s dream of acquiring total control of the cleaning business necessitated Becker’s compliance. As had been the case with Kornick’s Central Cleaning, Becker’s employees were slugged and robbed, and his facilities bombed. For the coup de grace, Becker’s unionized workers were ordered to strike. Soon, the inevitable occurred when Crowley met with Becker and assured him that his troubles would end immediately after Becker joined Master Cleaners and anteed up a $5,000 “initiation fee.” “We had to go to Walter Crowley,” Becker later recalled to the local news media, “and stand on the carpet and receive our punishment for being born in America and thinking we had some rights as American citizens in a free country.” Not long after showing Crowley the door, Becker was visited by Sam Rubin, Crowley’s strong-arm.

“I’ll tell you something, Becker. You have to raise prices,” Rubin dictated. Crowley’s forces wanted Becker to force a 50 percent price rise, most of which would be siphoned off to Master Cleaners. Becker replied, “The Constitution guarantees me the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - and to set my own prices.”

“The hell with the Constitution,” said Rubin. “As far as you are concerned, I am a damned sight bigger than the Constitution.” Again, the demand for $5,000 was leveled. Again, Becker refused. Becker’s actions over the next few days displayed his naivete: He sought relief from Chicago’s corrupted legal system. Becker and his son delivered volumes of specific and corroborated evidence to the state’s attorney’s office. Soon the grand jury brought indictments against fifteen members of the Master Cleaners and Dyers Association. If Becker felt optimistic, he had no knowledge of the similarities of upperworld and underworld crime: The white collars could put in the fix with the best of them.

Master Cleaners wisely retained the services of a litigator famous for legal bombast and melodrama, Clarence Darrow. Perhaps the most famous American trial lawyer of all time, Darrow gained fame for his rhetoric-heavy defense of the downtrodden and underprivileged, as well as his staunch support of the union movement. As a social reformer, he made history in his 1925 defense of John Scopes’ right to teach evolution. But in his zeal to give voice to the voiceless, Darrow also defended murderers. In 1924, Darrow perorated against anti-Semitism while defending the undeniably guilty murderers Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb. In his lifelong support of the union movement, Darrow gained the acquittal of Big Bill Haywood, a union leader charged with murder. That Master Cleaners was a corrupt, strong-arm union did not discourage the seventy-one-year-old Darrow from leading their defense.

As Chicagoans tell it, the fix was in “from top to bottom” for the Master Cleaners’ trial. After an anemic presentation by the prosecutor, and despite a mountain of incriminating evidence, the jury took all of fifteen minutes to acquit Crowley and his colleagues. Morris Becker quickly found the nearest phone booth and asked the operator for the number of the Metropole Hotel. As Becker later recounted, “The police, the state’s attorney, the United States attorney would, or could, do nothing. So, we called a man who could protect us - Al Capone. He did it well.”

Actually, the task was delegated to Curly Humphreys and was just the opening he needed to initiate one of the Outfit’s most lucrative takeovers ever. The very day after the court’s verdict, Morris Becker and five other cleaners met at the Metropole with Capone, Humphreys, Guzik, and two of Capone’s lawyers. An arrangement was reached to form a new corporation, Sanitary Cleaning Shops, Inc. On the board of the new venture, along with five other business owners, was Al Capone. For his participation, Capone was paid $25,000 plus a large percentage of the profits, while Curly received $10,000 per year to act as “arbiter” in labor conflicts. Big Al Capone began telling people, “I’m in the cleaning business.”

INDEPENDENT CLEANERS BOAST GANGSTERS WILL PROTECT WHERE POLICE FAIL ran a local headline. The mere inclusion of Capone’s name on Sanitary’s incorporation papers was all that was needed to end Crowley’s vision of a Master Cleaners dynasty. As Morris Becker later said, “I have no need of the police, of the courts, or the law. I have no need of the Employers Association of Chicago. With Al Capone as my partner, I have the best protection in the world.” When interviewed many years after his retirement, Becker still insisted that the alliance with Capone was the right thing to do, and that Capone was an honest partner who lived up to his end of the bargain. “If I had it to do over again, I would never ask for a more honest partner in any business.”

With Master Cleaners on the run, Humphreys went for the jugular. Sam Rubin and his fellow Master Cleaners thugs began receiving late-night phone calls in which they were warned that their wives would be dipped in acid unless Master Cleaners brought in Curly Humphreys to run the shop. After a few broken arms and blown-up porches, Humphreys was invited into Master Cleaners. He had finally bagged the golden goose, along with its $300,000 treasury nest egg. The grand plan was completed when Humphreys grabbed Local 46 of the Laundry, Cleaners, and Dye House Workers International Union.

In all, some 157 businesses were bombed during the sixteen-month laundry war. It should be noted, however, that when Curly employed the bomb, he made certain that it went off at 5 or 6 A.M., to minimalize the chance of casualties. Predictably, when the ashes had settled, Capone’s Syndicate stood victorious. Although Curly and the Syndicate were now the dominant forces in local laundering, one obstacle remained to total control: Al Weinshank. As a labor racketeer, Weinshank had recently allied with Bugs Moran’s North Siders, who in turn had partnered with Ben Kornick’s Central Cleaning Company. As a criminal version of the Civil War, this contest pitted Weinshank and the North against Humphreys and the South, climaxing with Chicago’s own version of Antietam. In fact, the manner in which this final thorn was removed from Humphrey’s side may have been an overlooked component to one of the nation’s most infamous crimes.

When the bootlegging war with the North Siders reached its bloody St. Valentine’s Day climax in 1929, Curly Humphreys may have played a silent but critical role in its planning. Ostensibly, bootlegging rival Bugs Moran had been targeted by Al Capone, but the death of Weinshank had at least as much effect on the laundry wars as it did on the bootlegging wars. The real target may have been Weinshank, who was killed in the Valentine’s Day bloodbath, not Moran, who was not even present. And the planner may have been Humphreys, not Capone. “The St. Valentine’s Day massacre never really made sense,” asserted Chicago researcher Mike Graham. Graham reasoned that Capone would not have assented to such a suicidal attack, i.e., Capone’s Syndicate could never have weathered the inevitable civic backlash. Graham and others believe that the agenda for the killings is still open to speculation. For some, the Humphreys-Weinshank rivalry is at least as plausible a theory as any other, since Humphreys was the chief beneficiary of the Weinshank murder. Curiously, on Valentine’s Day, 1936, seven years after the massacre, one of its supposed triggermen, Jack McGurn, was gunned down after trying to muscle back into the Outfit. On his body was a sardonic Valentine’s greeting that smacked of Curly Humphrey’s sense of humor:

You’ve lost your job

You’ve lost your dough

Your jewels and handsome houses

But things could be worse, you know

You haven’t lost your trousers

It is not widely known, but McGurn was a scratch golfer who might have turned pro if he had lived. Once, when playing the Western Open in Illinois, the Chicago police “goon squad” was dispatched to the links to harass McGurn, who was in danger of actually winning the event. “You fuckin’ dago,” the cops yelled as McGurn (born Vincenzo Gibaldi) putted on the last four holes.
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Their tactics worked, and Jack “the Duffer” McGurn went in the tank at the end of the round.

Got Milk?

By 1931, Curly Humphreys felt confident enough about his racketeering skills to revisit the milk industry, which he had approached without success in 1922. Since his induction into the Syndicate in the midtwenties, Humphreys had been trying to convince Capone to get into the dairy business. Curly saw it as a direct way for the underworld to enter the upperworld: The boys could at last combine wealth with the respectability that accompanied legitimate, upperworld, white-collar scams.

Curly was his usual convincing self, and according to Chicago journalist and Humphreys’ friend George Murray, Capone began extolling the virtues of milk to his fellows: “Do you guys know there’s a bigger markup in fresh milk than there is in alcohol? Honest to God, we’ve been in the wrong racket all along.” During one prolonged soliloquy, he sounded like an evangelist who had just seen the light: “You gotta have a product that everybody needs every day. We don’t have it in booze. Except for the lushes, most people only buy a couple of fifths of gin or Scotch when they’re having a party. The workingman laps up a half a dozen bottles of beer on Saturday night and that’s it for the week. But with milk! Every family every day wants it on their table. The big people on Lake Shore Drive want thick cream in their coffee. The big families of the yards have to buy a couple of gallons of fresh milk every day for the kids.”

Although by 1931, Capone was facing serious court battles with the government, he also knew that convicted tax cheats only served a few months prison time, on average. He may have seen his imminent incarceration as a much needed rest, from which he would reemerge as an upperworld milk baron. Curly was given the OK to infiltrate the milk business.

Humphreys’ experience told him that the quickest way to take over an ongoing upperworld racket was to first gain control of the relevant workers’ unions. His style mandated that force be used only as a last resort: The velvet glove of the payoff was always offered before the hammer of kidnapping. His assault on Local 753 of the Milk Wagon Drivers’ Union began in the late spring of 1931. This powerful union was sitting on a treasury of almost one million dollars. At the time, Robert G. “Old Doc” Fitchie was the local’s president, and Steve Sumner was its business manager. History showed that part of Humphreys’ modus operandi was the use of a trusted partner, such as Fred Evans or Red Barker, in his operations. For the milk operation, he once again teamed with his garage-scam confrere, Red Barker, and a third conspirator, named Frankie Diamond, whose brother was married to Capone’s sister, Mafalda.

On a spring night in 1931, not long after Capone’s tax indictment, Humphreys and Diamond paid a visit to Steve Sumner. According to later testimony by Sumner, Humphreys took the floor and in his typically charming tones asked Sumner for a favor. “Since 1926,” Curly began, “Capone has been trying to diversify his investments in legitimate business while consolidating his brewing and distilling empire. He is opening a retail dairy business.”

While Curly initially stated that he was only approaching Sumner as a peace gesture, asking that Sumner refrain from giving Al’s new operation any union troubles, it wasn’t long before Curly got around to the real purpose of his visit: He wanted Local 753 to stake Al’s new business. When Sumner refused; an unhappy Humphreys lowered the boom: “Your union has a million dollars in the treasury. I will hand you a hundred thousand dollars cash. All you have to do is walk away. Leave town. I’ll take over from here.”

Sumner replied, “That’s out of the question,” and the meeting broke up. Steve Sumner was no fool. He immediately began fortifying both his office and his home in anticipation of the Humphreys bomb squad: bulletproof glass was installed on his car; his headquarters was shielded with sheet-metal plates; bodyguards were employed.

But Curly Humphreys was no fool either. In December 1931, while Sumner was circling the wagons and Capone was starting his jail term, Curly and Red Barker kidnapped the union’s president, Old Doc Fitchie. In short time the ransom note appeared, demanding $50,000 for Fitchie’s safe release. Sumner immediately caved. “I handed Murray Humphreys fifty thousand dollars cash in December,” Sumner later testified. Fitchie was released unharmed, and two months later Humphreys chartered a new corporation named Meadowmoor Dairies, with an initial capitalization of $50,000. Meadowmoor then had the effrontery to sue fifty-one other unionized dairies to prevent them from forcing Meadowmoor into becoming a union shop. This would allow Meadowmoor a “vendor’s license,” allowing Curly et al. to pay lower wages and hire underage delivery boys, much as newspapers are allowed to employ newsboys. Once Meadowmoor was established, with one C. W. Schaub fronting as president, secretary, and corporate director, the business prospered.

And though his recent travails were with Humphreys and the underworld, Steve Sumner would later inform an investigating tribunal something it would probably rather not have heard about its own culpability. He testified about the true essence of organized crime in Chicago, and by extension the entire United States: the upperworld. “The racketeering started here in Chicago years ago,” Sumner advised. “It was first brought in by big business. The men whom we generally look to as being above the average were the very men who were the lowest. They brought them [the underworld gangsters] in.” Or, as one veteran Chicago investigator concluded, “The Irish, the Germans, the Poles - they got here first and had already made the move up to judicial corruption and white-collar crime. The Italians were just the last ones here, so they’ll be the last ones out.”

Much as Capone’s soup kitchens created goodwill among the city’s less fortunate, so too did Meadowmoor have a lasting positive impact on the way milk was bought and sold in the Windy City. Through the Outfit’s representatives in the city council, new rules were adopted that for the first time established a definition of Grade A milk, forbidding lesser grades to be sold within the city limits. Further, the Outfit’s pols gained passage of the city’s first dated-milk ordinance, which established the first guidelines that allowed mothers to protect their children’s health by screening the milk they ingested. Throughout the parliamentary debate over these bills, the upperworld politicians fought hard against the measures, which they feared would cripple the established dairies. But the Outfit fought harder and prevailed. Meadowmoor prospered for decades and still exists under the banner of the Richard Martin Milk Company, the name having been changed in 1961, and the present owners are not controlled by the underworld.