By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
CASSOPOLIS – No American era captivates the public imagination more than gangsters such as Al Capone, who controlled Chicago in the 1920s.
"If you talk to tourists who come from Europe or Asia," Bob Myers told a capacity crowd of the county Historical Society Tuesday night at Cass District Library, "the two things they're really interested in are the Old West – cowboys and Indians – and gangsters. I don't know what that says about America."
Capone confederates established resort homes in southwest Michigan to escape stifling city heat for lake recreation and an eight-degree dip in temperatures just four hours away.
"Gangsters are like anyone else," Myers said. "You get tired of whacking someone and you want to get away from it all. Come on over to Berrien or Cass County and relax with all the other resorters."
Boxer Muhammad Ali's gated estate on the St. Joseph River in Berrien Springs belonged to Capone's bodyguard.
A Benton Harbor landmark, the Vincent Hotel, was famous in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as a gathering place for Chicago mobsters, whose big, black cars surrounded it.
The Berrien County sheriff turned a blind eye to their presence since they stayed inside gambling.
"By and large, the mobsters pretty much behaved themselves over here," Myers said, relating a story about Capone using his clout to return a stolen purse with its cash still intact to a woman who befriended him after a train broke down.
"They had no interest in getting into petty squabbles with the law."
Myers, curator of the History Center at Courthouse Square in Berrien Springs, holds a bachelor's degree in history from Alma College and a master's degree in history from Western Michigan University.
The author and his wife are restoring their 1892 Queen Anne home in St. Joseph.
The American Revolution re-enactor with the Fort St. Joseph Militia serves on the nominations and awards committee for the Historical Society of Michigan.
The next two weekends Myers will be appearing in Twin City Players' dramedy, "Enchanted April."
Myers showed a picture of a 1931 Italian Renaissance home built near the St. Joseph hospital by Capone's "right-hand man in Chicago. It had extensive grounds overlooking the St. Joseph River across from Berrien Hills Country Club. He purchased a farm there and the farmhouse burned to the ground about October 1930. This house reportedly cost $40,000 in 1931, the depths of the Depression. If you were making $2,500 to $3,000 a year, you were doing pretty well. This was a summer vacation home with marble interior.
"In the movie 'The Untouchables' with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery, which bears very little resemblance to historical fact, but it's a fun movie anyway, there's a scene at the end where the really bad guy in the white suit is caught bringing a gun into court at Al Capone's trial. That was Phil. Costner as (Treasury agent) Eliot Ness kills him."
Mobsters such as the Italian Capone or the Irishman Bugs Moran, whose gang was Thompson submachine-gunned in the famous St. Valentine's Day Massacre at a garage on Clark Street on Feb. 14, 1929. No one was ever charged, let alone convicted.
Gangsters may loom large in American mythology, but the lore is not all true, Myers pointed out.
"Italian immigrants have really gotten a bad rap," he said. "Gangs really span the spectrum of American society. They tended to be based around ethnic cultural groups, but not only Italians. The Purple Gang in Detroit was a Jewish gang. Percentagewise, Italian immigrants had a lower incarceration and crime rate than most of the other immigrant groups."
Gangs also did not originate in Chicago or with Prohibition, but spread west from the East Coast, not only as depicted in the movie "The Gangs of New York," but in Baltimore as far back as the 1820s.
Myers said the Dead Rabbits took their name from a slang term for a "tough, a thug. They took a dead rabbit on a pole when they went into battle in the streets. These gangs simply moved west with the rest of America.
" I always imagined Al Capone at the peak of his powers as a middle-aged fellow," but the self-professed used furniture dealer born in New York City in 1899 was only in his late 20s and early 30s when "Scarface" occupied a couple of floors in the Lexington Hotel in downtown Chicago. "Capone's castle" was demolished in 1995.
"About half of the Chicago police force was on Capone's payroll. As were a good portion of the judiciary and even a lot of the news media. Capone was very powerful indeed. His mentor was Johnny Torrio," Myers said.
The older man, by about 17 years, began influencing Capone even as a boy of 10 or 11. His uncle, "Big Jim" Colosimo, had moved to Illinois from New York and began summoning Torrio to help with Chicago-based operations.
"It did not come about with Prohibition," Myers clarified. "Prohibition made what was an already incredibly lucrative business fabulously wealthy. Gangs were involved in prostitution, racketeering, extortion, some bootlegging, a little of everything. Colosimo was running one of the pretty profitable gangs in Chicago. Torrio finally moved there permanently and brought Capone in around 1920 to help him. Colosimo ran a top-flight business. He had brothels. Torrio was a natural businessman. Colosimo was not. He fell in love with a 19-year-old dancer and began neglecting the business. Torrio had no compunctions about killing people, but he didn't like violence. He felt it was unprofitable and bad for business. Gang members killing each other wasted a lot of human resources."
Two weeks after Colosimo married the teen-ager he was shot dead.
"Nobody was ever arrested for the crime," Myers said, but it was widely believed the work of a hit man working for his nephew, who took over his business.
Gang warfare reminiscent of today's drug warfare, with bombings and shootings catching up innocent bystanders, prompted Torrio to "essentially form NATO," Myers explained. "He goes to the other gangs and says, 'Look, all of this killing is doing none of us any good.' He proposed an agreement by which every gang had its own territory. They could make all the beer they wanted, but would buy beer from his operation. Gang members agreed not to kill each other in this sort of 'mutual defense pact.' No undercutting each other. No hijacking shipments. What John Torrio proposed worked. Violence virtually stopped and all of the gangs were making phenomenal amounts of money. For three or four years, everything went along very well indeed. The truce held until members of one of the gangs got out of prison and refused to hold to the treaty. Gang warfare breaks out again and goes all out in the mid-'20s."
"Torrio is a fascinating character and would have been a great corporate CEO," Myers said. "He did not fall victim to the vices he peddled. He didn't drink. He didn't smoke. He was absolutely faithful to his wife, who said he was a model husband. He came within a hair of losing his life" when gang violence reignited. "He bailed out and moved back to Italy, where he lived to a ripe old age, leaving the business to Al Capone."
"Almost beyond question (because of a witness description of a man missing a front tooth), one of the killers (in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre) was actually Thomas Camp, who went by the alias Fred Burke. He was not part of Capone's gang and he was not a hit man. He was more often involved in bank robberies," Myers said.
Burke would turn up in Stevensville. On Dec. 14, 1929, as holiday shoppers got ready for Christmas, a police officer was gunned down after a fender-bender by Peoples State Bank at the corner of Ship and State streets while directing traffic.
After a chase, Burke accosted a driver from the House of David and ordered him to drive. Witnesses said Burke appeared intoxicated and when he became sick, his hostage fled.
Police combed the wrecked car, found receipts and traced them to the house on Red Arrow Highway which today is a Coldwell Banker Real Estate office. Raiding the house, police found $320,000 in loot and an arsenal of weapons and ammunition.
Police, in one of the first uses of ballistics, matched two Thompson submachine guns to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Burke apparently holed up with a Coloma family for a while.
Police eventually tracked him to a house in Missouri. He surrendered without a fight and was extradited to Michigan, where he was convicted for killing the cop. He died of a heart attack in prison in Marquette in the 1940s while serving a life sentence.
"Chicago wanted him, but Michigan wouldn't extradite him," Myers said. "Capone fell afoul of the IRS. How appropriate on Tax Day. America had an income tax and Capone was charged with tax evasion. Nobody could prove he had any income, but a new Supreme Court ruling had come out" that it was enough to show he had expenses.
Capone was convicted of tax evasion and spent most of the 1930s in Alcatraz in San Francisco. He was only 48 when he died on Jan. 25, 1947.