Free Eliot Ness by Douglas Perry Page A

dancer at the club, was impressed with the man’s duds and manners—and flattered when he began hitting on her. But later, in the dressing room, one of the other dancers said, “You’re certainly in high society tonight. Machine Gun Jack McGurn.” Rand began to shake uncontrollably. She sneaked out the back door, forgetting her coat, and ran to her hotel, where she locked herself in her room.
    Capone took offense at the suggestion there might be something wrong with the way he conducted business, whatever the reputation of McGurn, his chief hit man. This was the twentieth century. Laws were passé; the country had evolved beyond them.He told the
Chicago Tribune
’s Genevieve Forbes Herrick: “They talk to me about not being on the legitimate. Why, lady,
nobody’s
on the legit. You know that and so do they.” Capone needn’t have worried so much about what delicate flowers like Sally Rand thought. Al couldn’t please everybody, but he could please enough of them. Unlike Torrio before him, the Big Fella loved to talk to the press. He loved to have his picture taken, as long as the camera got his good side. “‘Public service’ is my motto,” he declared, flashing a pleasant, boyish smile that had become a front-page staple. By 1926, he was as recognizable in Chicago as Cubs pitching ace Grover Alexander, a regular Capone customer. He had become an honest-to-goodness hero to thousands, and not just to the kids on the street corner. Industrialists and bankers admired a good bootlegger, too.
    The novelist Mary Borden, a native Chicagoan and an expatriate visiting her hometown for the first time in twelve years, was shocked to find herself one evening listening to a socialite “who spoke to me with tears in her eyes of Capone. I was already getting rather sick of the Scarface, but this suddenly made me feel quite ill; this sentimentality frightened me. I had heard, of course, of the Capone fans—he had more adorers, so I’d been told, thanany movie star—but I had not expected the friends of my childhood to be numbered among them.”
    ***
    Even two years in, George E. Q. Johnson was still trying to figure out how to do his job.
    The fifty-six-year-old Iowan’s reputation for unshakable honesty, along with a passing acquaintance with reformist U.S. senator Charles Deneen, had landed him the big office in Chicago’s U.S. district attorney’s office. His skills as a prosecutor, however, were suspect. During his thirty-year career in private practice, he had almost exclusively handled civil, not criminal, cases. For that entire time he remained little known outside his modest Swedish American community. But this inexperienced U.S. attorney did have the one characteristic that was absolutely essential for the job. When he came to Chicago from small-town Iowa as a young man, he began using the initial of his middle name so he would stand out from all the other George Johnsons in the big city. Not satisfied, he soon added a second, invented initial. You could say it was the E and the Q that would make him famous. Only a truly vain man would go after Al Capone.
    Of course, even the vainest men in the city didn’t covet the task Johnson had given himself, especially now. One month after the dry bureau’s Chicago Heights raid, Chicago police sergeant Thomas Loftus answered a call reporting gunfire on the city’s North Side. He arrived at 2122 North Clark Street at eleven in the morning and stepped inside the dank, smoke-filled industrial building. He smelled burnt gunpowder and heard a wet scraping sound. Then he spotted a man on all fours crawling toward him. He recognized the man—Frank Gusenberg, a member of Bugs Moran’s crew, one of the few remaining gangs that didn’t answer to Capone. Gusenberg’s clothing was shredded, blood streaked behind him like an airplane contrail. Only then did the policeman notice the horrors beyond—the herd of men bloodily arrayed against a brick wall, steam from their gore