Gangsters in Chicago - 5 October 1984

It used to be liquor, bootleg liquor, that made vast illegal fortunes for underworld characters in Chicago.

They’d once made handsome incomes from robberies, various sorts of petty crime, most of all, from organised prostitution rings. But when Congress wrote in an amendment to the Constitution making the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic liquors illegal everywhere in the United States, the eyes of Al Capone, his buddies and his rivals, bulged at the thought of the money that might be made from supplying the whole continent with the forbidden fruit of the grain and the grape. Mostly the grain.

At first they hired crews from the waterfronts of the eastern ports, they leased ships and imported the genuine article, and ran the cargos on to lonely beaches on dark nights. But this was slow and tricky and dangerous work and was foiled, often enough, by the coastguard or by crews willing to be bribed by the port authorities. Then the obvious grand plan struck them. Why not make the stuff right there in Chicago, and then in the suburbs, and eventually illegal stills throughout the country. All you needed to make gin, for instance, was distilled water, juniper drops, and crude alcohol.

Well, as we all know, throughout the 1920s and right into 1933, until the dreadful 18th amendment was repealed, the country was awash with alcohol precisely because it was forbidden. When the colossal mistake of prohibition was rectified and liquor was legal, America drank less and the gangsters went broke. Crime, a whole series of movie shorts reminded us, crime does not pay.

I suppose the social document that perfectly expressed the popular legend was the movie, The Roaring Twenties, in which Jimmy Cagney was an honourable veteran of the First World War, came home to breadlines and no job, got involved with the gangs, started trucking alcohol, moved up to run one gang against another, grew rich and flashy till the end of prohibition was in sight, and he sank back into poverty. He was on the run, he shot his big-time rival and was himself fatally shot and fell sprawling to his death on the steps of the church he was staggering into to repent him of his abominable sins.

This film was among the last, if not the last, of the Warner Brothers profitable cycle of gangster films. It was made in 1939 and by then liquor had been legal for six years, there were other headlines on our minds and we thought of Al Capone, if at all, as a melodious little fat man, well and truly behind bars, who was, as an old colleague who visited him said, nutty as a fruit cake and well on his way to a syphilitic's death.

For all we knew the gangs had dissolved, the rivals had long ago stopped shooting each other and then giving each other expensive ironic funerals, so they were not news. In fact, they had, as the division commanders say, regrouped for other exercises. Now this, as I recall, never really came out. I happen to stumble on it one bright, dry day at West Texas at a cattle auction in 1943. I’d been taken there by a friend, a district attorney, who’s preoccupation in those days was the first trickle of illegal Mexicans who waded across the Rio Grande by night, the so-called, wetbacks.

I was waiting for the auction to begin, along with the DA and one or two cattle men and goat ranchers, and I noticed on the fringe of the small crowd some men in strangely smart clothes. Cowboy hats and string ties, and rather well-pressed trousers and fancy shirts. These could not be cattle men, surely, they looked like what Americans then called drug-store cowboys. If they had been transported by a time machine into the 1970s, they might have passed for a rock band in transit. I suggested to my friend that they were a little too genuine to be genuine. And he said, through the ghost of a smile, they’re cattle men all right, from Chicago. They’ll buy up the whole herd. And so they evidently did.

I followed up this story and found that these men, who are much less ostentatious in their bidding than their clothes would have led you to believe, saw that the cattle got to a railroad siding, were put aboard a train once they had been stamped by the agents of the United States bureau of agriculture. The Chicago somehow saved the federals the trouble, I don’t know how, but they had their own food stamps, so to speak, which authorised the flesh as healthy and fit for shipping up to the feed lots of Iowa and Missouri and other lush pastures, where it's fattened for you and me, via the Chicago stockyards.

They used to say that a cow came into Chicago as a cow, and went out as a steak or a tennis racket. Steaks were what the fancy cattle men or their Chicago bosses had in mind, steaks for the tables of the rich, the bad the beautiful and the sleazy who could afford to flaunt the war-time rationing laws and pay outrageous prices for prime cuts and steaks that were supposed not to be available. It came out, after the war, that Americans during the war years of strict rationing, were eating more beef than ever. For exactly the same reason that during prohibition they had drunk more than ever – the stuff was scarce and, in any quantity, forbidden.

So what we are talking about is the black market in beef. A year after the Texas cattle auction I was going through Chicago on another story, and with the help of an old politician, I had a date with an ageing relic of one of the old gangs. He had a handsome office with all the high-toned fixings of a corporation president, panelled walls, gleaming files, trim secretary, and several young assistants as suave and well pressed as junior law partners. They were family, and a son, cousin, all related, the second generation of the old gangsters.

The boss man, on the understanding that I would never reveal his identity or write a story told then – on pain, I was given to understand, of being cut dead, an idiom that took on a very lively meaning at that moment – he told me about the system, the auctions, the entraining, the control, or the acquisition, of the feed lots, the connections in the stock yards and so forth and so on. I wondered idly at one point, how the revenues from the black market in beef compared with the good or the bad old, bootlegging days. "Sonny," he said – this was 40 years ago – "Remember, sonny, prohibition was a rehearsal."

Well, since then the ordinary American has paid little attention to the gangs, because they don’t shoot each other in public, their whole social aim is not to be in the news. From time to time we read big scary pieces about the Mafia and its links with parent Mafia in Sicily. We are aware that at various times there have been a rather well-publicised arrests for organised prostitution and intimidation of longshore men and tricking the speedometers on rented cars, and more and more we have been hearing about complicated links between drug producers in Colombia and mobsters in Miami with uncertain links to Italy.

There was, in the '50s, a very conspicuous televised Senate committee hearing on organised crime. And there was, it must be, quarter of a century ago now, a well, er, sensational raid on a lavish hideout in upstate New York, in which something like 90 members of the reigning mob families were seized. I think we assumed, then, that the Mafia had been broken. Of course it hadn’t.

Over 50 years the riches of the bootleggers could be used to have children who could go to college and emerge into the life of respectable businesses looking nice and dressy. There had been rumours and lurid pieces in magazines and even books claiming to document, as a fact, that today the Mafia is a stronger, immensely more powerful institution than ever, and that there is practically no profitable business, from amusement arcades and video games to motel chains, and banking, in which the Mafia does not have a firm, but invisible hand.

Well as I said it used to be liquor, now it's heroin. Last weekend, Italian police went out with over 300 arrest warrants and took in 60 Mafia suspects and, in a well coordinated move, officials of the US department of justice ordered the arrest of 28 Americans and Italians whom the Italian officials have asked to have extradited under a new treaty. The chief US attorney here in New York described them as top figures in organised crime, who are involved in an international heroin ring, which earns not millions, but billions of dollars. These particular 28 are wanted in Italy on charges of murder, drug trafficking and racketeering.

Well, this sounds like a routine newspaper report, except it takes in more than the usual suspects and according to the department of justice, has revealed an international conspiracy, on a grander scale than anyone had imagined. It all emerged from the second thoughts, the accumulated bitterness, of one man, one Tommaso Buscetta – as one headline put it, "Godfather turns stool pigeon". He was not, to be exact, a godfather. A much smaller figure, but the father of a criminal family. He is 56, born in Sicily moved, in his teens, into cigarette bootlegging. It was a time, believe it or not when the Mafia’s main interest was buying up huge quantities of cigarettes and bootlegging them at cut prices, probably the most innocent operation of its long history.

Buscetta came out of jail, came to the United States, journeyed to Brazil and got into the drug business by way of starting here in New York the useful cover of a chain of pizza parlours. He was arrested here 12 years ago, jumped bail and settled in Brazil, extradited to Italy, jailed there and enjoyed the unexplained luxury of jails for Mafia men, out again he was back in Brazil. Extradited again last July and they gave the signal that he was ready to talk about the heroin ring, an enormous crime in the honour code of the Mafia. He had broken the code of silence.

He must be, after a few presidents and sheiks, the most closely-guarded man on earth. We can, at present, only speculate on why he broke down but there was a crackling gang war in Sicily last year, and the year before Mr Buscetta’s family lost seven of its members, including two of his sons. It was too much for him. He broke the code, as one outraged family man put it – there’s no honour left any more, anywhere.

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