Free Chicago to Springfield:: Crime and Politics in the 1920s (Images of America (Arcadia Publishing)) by Jim Ridings Page B

needed his own village officials in place, and he put his efforts into the 1924 municipal elections. (KCC.)
    Edward Vogel (pictured), along with “Big Ed” Kovalinka and gangster Louis LaCava, picked the men who would run for office in Cicero and Forest View. Kovalinka was precinct committeeman and a protégé of Gov. Len Small. They appointed William “Porky” Dillon, a thug pardoned by Governor Small, as Forest View’s police chief. Dillon also was a bagman in the selling of pardons by Governor Small. Together they helped deliver Cicero to Capone and his hoodlums. Vogel went on to be an important figure in the Mob’s gambling rackets. (KPL.)
    Election day 1924 saw gangsters patrolling the streets with guns and beating election workers and police. Capone’s candidates won the election, but five people were killed that day, including Frank Capone, in a shoot-out with police. (KPL.)
    Chicago’s most infamous gang murder was the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929, when Al Capone sent his gunmen to kill rival George “Bugs” Moran’s men in their garage hideout on North Clark Street. Seven people were slaughtered. Capone’s assassins, posing as Chicago police, lined Moran’s men against the wall and opened fire. Moran was on his way there when he saw the “police” arrive, so he stayed back and avoided the carnage. (KCC.)
    No one was arrested for the St. Valentine’s Day murders. Rumor linked gangsters “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Frank Nitti, and Gus Winkeler to the planning of the crime. The only man positively connected to it was Fred “Killer” Burke (pictured). When he was arrested for the murder of a Michigan policeman, a machine gun found in his home was proven to be one used on St. Valentine’s Day. When he was arrested, Burke was living with Viola Ostrowski Brennenman, a Kankakee woman. (KCC.)
    Bugs Moran was the intended target on St. Valentine’s Day. He might still have been in a prison cell, and no threat to Capone, except he was paroled in 1923 after bribing the men who ran the “pardon mill” in Governor Small’s administration. (KCC.)
    While some politicians have always worked cooperatively with mobsters, their partnership sometimes resulted in murder. In 1926, William McSwiggin, an assistant state’s attorney, was gunned down outside a Cicero speakeasy. State senator Albert Prignano (above left), who was allied with Capone in the gambling rackets, had a dispute over payoffs with Frank Nitti, who believed Prignano was trying to organize his own racket. Nitti had assassins shoot and kill Prignano in 1935 at his front door in front of his wife, mother, and eight-year-old son. A few months later, state representative John Bolton (above right) was gunned to death. Suspects in that murder were mobsters Louis “Little New York” Campagna, Angelo Lazzia, Frank Nitti, state representative James Adduci (left), and state senator Daniel Serritella. (All KPL.)

    Daniel Serritella was Capone’s man in city hall. Mayor Thompson appointed him city sealer and in charge of regulating merchants. Serritella was convicted in 1932 for taking payoffs from merchants to allow shortchanging of customers. (KPL.)
    Daniel Serritella (left), seen here with Ralph Capone, was elected state senator in 1931 and served until 1943. Jake Guzik was arrested in 1944 for election fraud in Serritella’s last campaign. (KCC.)
    Al Capone lent money and muscle to his candidates. The campaign for the April 1928 primary election in Chicago was known as the “Pineapple Primary” because gangsters tossed about 60 hand grenades in the campaign. On March 21, Republican committeeman and gangster Giuseppe “Diamond Joe” Esposito was shot dead in front of his wife and daughter. Esposito worked for Sen. Charles Deneen, and a few days later Deneen’s Chicago home was bombed. On Election Day, Octavius Granady, an African American candidate challenging the Mob’s choice for committeeman in the “Bloody 20th” Ward, was gunned