Sunday, July 24, 1927: Chicago
Dinner With Snorky
Earlier today the Yankees announced that “Tony Lazzeri Day” will be held on September 6th. Mayor Walker proclaimed it will be a half-day holiday for all Italian New Yorkers, which should give them plenty of time to ride the subway up to the Stadium for our game that Tuesday against the Red Sox. Hizzoner also proclaimed every restaurant on that day is to serve “Spaghetti a la Lazzeri,” which should make for some interesting lunches down in Chinatown.
Lazzeri’s popularity is something to behold. All season it’s seemed like every Italian in every city in the American League has been coming out to cheer for “The W*p.” Of course, even if Lazzeri were to hit 100 home runs this year, he would still only be the second most famous Italian in America. Number one is Al Capone.
Which is why it was probably inevitable that the two Italian Americans would meet on one of our trips out west to Chicago.
Wednesday Night
On our train ride into Chicago from St. Paul, the topic of conversation among the ballplayers and the writers in the smoking room of our Pullman car turns to Al Capone. Nothing surprising about that, as every train heading towards Union Station these days is full of gab about Capone, who now looms like a permanent cloud over the City of Broad Shoulders.
Capone openly controls much of Chicago: bootlegging, gambling, racketeering, prostitution, politicians, police, prosecutors and a few judges — everything but the newspapers and the baseball teams.
Puffing on a cigar in the smoker, Paul Gallico, my gin rummy pal from the Daily News, tells us, “Capone’s men actually walk around town with business cards that they hand out to any cop who isn’t familiar with them. The print on the card reads: ‘To the Police Department — you will extend the courtesies of this department to the bearer of this card.’” Gallico blows a smoke ring for punctuation. “Rare is the Chicago copper who after reading that card is discourteous in any way to its owner.”
Ford Frick, who ghost writes Babe Ruth’s columns while also covering us for the Evening Journal, says the mayor of Chicago, “Big Bill” Thompson, is a well known crony of Capone’s. Ford tells us how last year Thompson ran for re-election on a Capone-friendly platform that promised the public that the mayor would muzzle the police and keep the booze flowing, despite the 18th Amendment. “Then on election day, Capone’s men kept order at the polls, while the good citizens of Chicago followed Capone’s admonition that they should ‘Vote early, and often.’” Not surprisingly, Big Bill won in a landslide.
As our train rumbles through the Illinois night, Mark Koenig tosses a spent cigarette out the window. “I don’t understand,” he says while fumbling to get another smoke out of his pack, the same way he’s been fumbling to get ground balls out of his glove at shortstop lately. “Why is Capone allowed to operate so openly in the second biggest city in the country?”
Everyone around him just laughs.
“Mark, my young lad,” sighs Schoolboy Hoyt, dripping pity while putting his arm around Mark’s shoulder. “Despite what Herr Doctor Freud may say, the answer to most of life’s questions about human behavior is…?”
Koenig stares blankly at Schoolboy, who answers his own question with, “Money.”
Schoolboy smoothly shuffles Koenig a cigarette from his own pack and even lights it for him, all in one elegant motion, like a magician.
“And, in the city of Chicago, Mark,” says Schoolboy, tilting his head closer to Koenig’s, “Mr. Capone’s smiling face might as well be on the dollar bill.”
Gallico, whose sources are the crime reporters on the Chicago Tribune, adds to Hoyt’s analysis. “Capone’s outfit takes in over $150 million a year. $150 million! And $30 million of that gets generously distributed to City Hall and law enforcement.
“Mr. Capone is a businessman who clearly understands one has to spend money to make money — and, as a result, it’s the rare policeman or person with any power in Chicago who isn’t supplementing his income with some of Capone’s cash.”
Gallico sketches a map in the air with his cigar of Chicago, Michigan and Canada, and then details how the outfit’s whiskey is smuggled down from the Bronfmans in Canada by the Purple Gang’s “Jewish Navy” anchored in Detroit. Then he adds, “Of course, that’s the Canadian whiskey. Capone also runs several illegal beer breweries in Chicago. One of them has so many cops walking in and out of it that it’s been nicknamed ‘The Police Station.’”
“What’s most remarkable,” continues Gallico, blowing another smoke ring, “is how Capone’s associates operate thousands of stills in apartments and corner groceries throughout the city.” Then, with more than a touch of admiration for the simple genius of it all, Galico explains:
“Just imagine you’re some poor slob in a tenement building or a shopkeep wondering how you’re going to pay your rent this week, when suddenly — bang! bang! — there’s a loud knock on your door. You open it up to find yourself staring at a couple of hoods in flashy suits, like the ones Lazzeri wears, with well-oiled hair and unusually large bulges in their jackets. And these fine gentlemen have come to ask if you’d like to make $15 a day, simply by letting them set up a still in your bathroom.
“Now faced with such a personalized sales pitch, more than a few of Chicago’s poor have decided it’s in their best interest to take the money, put a still in their bathroom, and start showering over at their neighbor’s apartment. That’s how an innocent in Chicago gets put on the payroll. And that’s why there aren’t a lot of innocents left in Chicago.”
“Of course,” Frick sympathetically says, “not everyone in Chicago appreciates the frequent sound of Tommy Guns, let alone all the bullets, bodies and blood they leave behind. But no one can stop it.”
Gallico is now puffing his smoke rings at a closed window, where they’re bouncing off the glass and then vanishing into the Pullman car’s ceiling. Through the window, we can see the lights of Chicago as our train approaches Union Station.
“Mark, you inquisitive lad,” laments Gallico, “the sheriff who finally rides into town to try and clean up this mess, he’ll first have to convince all those good citizens riding Capone’s merry-go-round of vice — from the tenement slob with his $15 a day bathroom still, to the cop getting an extra $100 to escort a shipment of booze — that the presence of legitimate law and order won’t end up actually damaging Chicago’s economy and their own wallets and pocketbooks — not to mention their supply of hooch.
“And, frankly,” he says finishing off his cigar and tossing it out the window towards the windy city, “for all those folks waking up every morning in Capone’s Chicago — the ones with Capone’s face on the dollar bills in their pockets — that will be one tough sell.”
Thursday Afternoon
In our first game of a four game series, we play the White Sox over at Comiskey Park. For most of the game our bats are dead, as Sarge Connally of the ChiSox has a one hitter against us going into the eighth. That’s when “Five O’Clock Lightning” strikes again. Lazzeri leads off with a triple that cues a four run rally. We win the game, 4–1. Our sixth win in a row.
Capone, we would learn, had listened to the game on his office radio. Like many Italian Americans, he was rooting for Lazzeri more than he was rooting for his home team.
Thursday Night
Hoyt, Koenig, Lazzeri and I go out to the Green Mill Lounge for dinner and a show, featuring a young comic named Joe E. Lewis.
Capone’s fingers are everywhere around Chicago, so none of us are surprised when a man in a dinner jacket, who isn’t a waiter — in a joint where only waiters and gangsters ever wear dinner jackets — approaches our table and overly politely says:
“I respectfully trust that you’ll pardon my interruption, but I could not help but overhear your speculations as to the nature of Mr. Capone’s relationship to this and other establishments within the vicinity of our current location.
“And to that subject,” he continues, “with respect to the topic of your conversation, I have been asked to extend an invitation to Mr. Lazzeri and his Yankee companions present this evening, to join Mr. Capone tomorrow night for dinner at the edifice of the Metropole Hotel, at a time that is most convenient for you, Mr. Lazzeri.”
The non-waiter in the dinner jacket now focuses his smile on Tony, and informs him that Tony’s most convenient time will be, “Ten o’clock.”
“Thank you,” says Mr. Lazzeri.
We ballplayers encounter our share of hoodlums. Hoods are always around ballparks and in the speakeasies and jazz clubs we frequent. I’ve always found the men under Capone’s employ — as opposed to the hoods in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, St. Louis, and definitely Detroit — to be not only well dressed but also exceptionally well mannered. Many of them fancy themselves businessmen, as well as gangsters. They are also known for their attempts to speak the King’s English. The results of their efforts, however, are rarely royal.
Almost always, Chicago hoods combine fractured elements of grammar and diction in a manner that, true to their vocational training, strangles the English language. The result is a style of speech that Gallico calls, “Gangster Aspirational.” And most Chicago lads who graduate into hoodlums maintain this oral affectation from the day they join their chosen profession until the day they are, as Gallico says with a smile, “permanently dead.”
Friday Afternoon
During batting practice, Earle Combs — who’s been playing a flawless centerfield for us all year, batting .344 and getting on base almost every other at bat — came close to being sent to the Cook County morgue after being struck by a ball thrown from deep in the outfield. Earle was knocked out cold, and for a short time he appeared to be permanently dead.
Earle is a deeply religious man who reads his bible every night and had never had even one sip of alcohol until Friday afternoon. “Doc” Woods, our trainer, while having great respect for Earle and his beliefs, felt the best thing for his soul at that dire moment, however, was a shot of whiskey, which Doc just happens to keep in a flask in his bag — for medicinal purposes only, of course. The act may have damned Earle for eternity — and Doc, too — but it certainly brought Earle back to life. Earle then spent the rest of the afternoon lying on a table in the clubhouse with his head on a pillow of ice, with Doc by his side talking constantly to him, to make sure Earle didn’t drift off to sleep and possibly a coma.
The next collision occurred in the second inning, when Little Julie Wera — once again filling in at third for Joe Dugan, whose knee is still troubling him something awful — tried to score after tagging up from third. Julie slammed into ChiSox catcher Ray Schalk, breaking Schalk’s nose and dislocating his shoulder. But that didn’t stop Schalk from tagging Little Julie out, and sending him to the locker room to join Earle and Doc, and a few more bags of ice.
Meanwhile, Ted Lyons, on the mound for Chicago, had our number, and we were down 5–1 in the bottom of the seventh when Huggins brought me in to relieve Herb Pennock, who had struggled all day.
Even down four runs in the bottom of the seventh, I know if I can just keep the ChiSox from doing any more damage we’ll have a chance for “Five O’Clock Lightning” to strike.
My first pitch to right fielder Bill Barrett is a forkball away. Just not far enough away. He hits it hard on the ground to short. Koenig already has two errors today — and this play should have been scored his third. Mark gets to the ball with enough time but, once again, he fumbles it in his glove. Then he decides he doesn’t want to risk a hurried throw to first and quite probably his third error of the day.
“Sorry, Tommy!” he mutters as he tosses the ball back into me.
“Sorry, Tommy!” Jesus Christ.
“Sorry, Tommy!” is what he should have yelled when the next batter, Bibb Falk, the White Sox left fielder pokes a two-run homer just over the right field wall.
“Sorry, Tommy! There probably goes your chance to escape mop-up duty for the rest of the year!”
Friday Night
Hoyt, Lazzeri, Koenig and I meet in the lobby of our hotel, the Cooper-Carlton, at 9:30 p.m., ready to head out to Capone’s headquarters at the Metropole Hotel. Lazzeri is dressed in another of his demure evening outfits: a purple suit, a yellow shirt with a purple tie, his favorite white fedora with a purple flower in it, and purple spats over white shoes.
I tell the boy at the door to get us a cab, and he replies, “Mr. Capone done sent that car over there for you, sir.”
He points to a large, green, Cadillac sedan, sitting across the street, idling with its motor running. In the front are two large men dressed in dinner jackets.
They drive us down to Motor Row, where the Metropole stands — two streets filled with spacious, storefront automobile sales rooms for Ford, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Buick and Cadillac. Folks come to this street from all over the country to buy their cars. Capone, though, got his auto directly from General Motors in Detroit, as he wanted a few extra features that don’t come standard, like seven tons of steel armor-plated doors and body work.
There’s no moon tonight, and most of the streets in this area are dark. But the lights in the showrooms are kept on all night, and as we pass them the cars inside glow with promises.
After a fifteen minute ride with no conversation, we arrive at the awning of the Metropole. There we’re met at the door by two more dinner jackets being worn by two very large gentlemen. They escort us through the hotel. The lobby is full of an interesting crowd — a mix of hoods and businessmen, and young women looking to transact.
As we wait for the elevator, one of the two dinner jackets says, “Mr. Capone suggested we give youse Yankees a tour.”
The jackets take us up to the tenth floor. Before we get there, however, the elevator is stopped between the first and second floors. One of the jackets says, “Excuse me gentlemen.” The four of us are all frisked, just to make sure no one associated with Murderers’ Row is planning to do harm to Mr. Capone.
Capone is said to be renting fifty rooms in the hotel, some of which he and his associates sublet with amenities by the hour. The most interesting room we see on our tour is actually two rooms currently being made into one. It’s a gym that Capone has built for his men. Inside one room are weights and boxing equipment — heavy bags, speed bags, jump ropes — and in the other room is a newly installed row of stationary bicycles. Capone insists that his men work out and be as fit as possible. This evening two of them with lit cigarettes dripping from their mouths are riding the bikes hard, while workmen with sledge hammers are knocking down the wall between the two rooms.
Gallico on the train told us stories about the whores’ rooms in Capone’s brothels in Cicero. Each of those rooms has a large framed portrait on the wall, with a sliding section of wood behind the eyes, through which Capone’s men in the adjoining room can watch the action inside, like they’re in a nickelodeon peep show. On our tour, so far, I don’t see any portraits at the Metropole.
Finally, the dinner jackets take us down to the fourth floor. We walk a long hallway with plush red and gold carpeting, framed by green velvet curtains on both sides. The suite at the end of the floor has an unmarked door with two more dinner jackets waiting for us. They each shake our hands and tell us what big fans they are of Tony. Then they frisk us. After making sure for a second time that Lazzeri, Hoyt, Koenig and I only play for the Yankees and aren’t moonlighting as hit men, the dinner jackets open the door.
Sitting at the other end of a large room, behind a business desk in an office that could belong to our team president, Ed Barrow, is the CEO of Chicago’s underworld: Al Capone. Behind him on the wall are three framed portraits of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Big Bill Thompson. I doubt any of their eyes move. The office is unusually dark. Gallico told me the lights would be dim, because it makes Capone’s scars less visible.
“Gentlemen,” says Mr. Capone. “It’s an honor to host you this evenin’. Let us go next door to my dinin’ room.”
Walking with Capone into the dining room, seeing the jump in his step, I can feel his youth. Capone rose to power at just 25 years old, just a little over a year ago. He appears much older in the newspapers, but he’s a young man, entering his prime. His ruthlessness, efficiency and enjoyment of talking with the press have all combined to make him great copy for reporters, and they in turn have helped make Scarface a legend in his own time, and even a hero to some.
We pass through a side door in his office into a smaller, mirrored room that’s lit entirely by candle light, including dozens of candles stuck in an enormous chandelier high above us. Under the chandelier is a circular dining table that can seat twelve people or more.
In this light the scars are clearly visible. Two scars. From one knife. Both on his left cheek. Both about three inches long. Both caked under heavy makeup.
His bodyguards never leave him, but in this room, some of the men wearing dinner jackets are actually waiters. There are waitresses, too. Four very attractive and well painted ladies, one for each of us. They make sure our water and whiskey glasses are always full, and their hands on our thighs ensure that we’re always at attention. In the corner are a pianist, a violinist and a cellist, playing Italian chamber music.
The menu is simple: steak and spaghetti a la Capone.
Capone is a big sports fan. Gallico says he sits ringside with his bodyguards at all the big prize fights in New York, Philadelphia, and in Chicago at the new Soldier Field. Sometimes he brings his son, along with his bodyguards, to watch the White Sox at the newly renovated Comiskey Park, or to see the Cubs and Bears play at the just renamed Wrigley Field.
Right now the Cubs are tied with the Pirates for first place in the National League. But Capone says he’s been too busy to see many of their games this season, although he’s clearly familiar with both National League teams. “Pittsburgh’s a more balanced ball club. I love both ‘dem Waner Brothers: Big Poison and Little Poison. I love ‘dem names. And ‘dare bats.
“The Cubs are more exciting, though,” Scarface says, chewing on his steak. “And dat’ Hack Wilson is a crazy kid who’s gonna kill himself one day, but until then, he’s gonna be killin’ baseballs. He might even be the next Ruth.”
“There’s never going to be another Ruth,” Hoyt says flatly. “But if there were, then Gehrig’s the next Babe Ruth. Not Hack Wilson.” Hoyt says it like you would say, “The sun is never going to rise in the West. Nor will it ever set in the East.”
It’s a stunning moment. Not many people contradict Al Capone like that and live to talk about it.
I can’t tell who is more stunned, Capone or Hoyt.
For a split second, Hoyt looks like a man rounding first base who’s suddenly stumbling and is about to fall and get tagged out to end the game. But Schoolboy’s deep well of self-confidence allows him to get his emotional balance and recover quickly, all while staring into the the face of a cold-blooded killer.
“You’re a Brooklyn kid,” Capone laughs.
“Takes one to know one, Mr. Capone,” says Hoyt, feeling he’s back on firm ground.
“You ever come out to the Harvard Inn, in Coney Island when I was working there?”
“No,” Hoyt replies. “My mom always tucked me into bed before ten o’clock.”
“You’re a funny guy. Your dad was a funny guy too. I saw him a couple of times at the Orpheum in Flatbush.”
Then the kicker.
“Call me Snorky.”
“I’ll try that sometime. Call me Schoolboy.”
“You and I are the same age, kid. I saw you pitch for Erasmus High in the Spring of ’16. A no-hitter. Why didn’t you just throw fastballs at ‘em? They couldn’t touch your fastball.”
“Yeah, they couldn’t. But, geez, Snorky, where’s the fun in just throwing fastballs?”
Hoyt says he pitched three games for Erasmus that spring, when he was 16 years old. All of them wins, two of them no-hitters within a few days of each other. And Schoolboy points out that this was after the Giants had signed him at age 15, though he hadn’t played a game for them, yet.
“Ahhh,” says Capone sounding like an old soul. “To be a young, tough kid in Brooklyn, once again — someone who knows in his heart that he’s goin’ big places in America, and he’s goin’ there just on guts and guile.
“Like you, Mr. Lazzeri,” Capone says as he swivels to his other side, “You are making a lot of Italians proud.”
I can see Tony wondering if he should respond, “You, too, Mr. Capone.”
Hell, who knows, Capone actually might think that’s the case, that he’s making his people proud, that he’s the Tony Lazzeri of gangsters.
Playing it safe, Tony simply replies, “Thank you, Mr. Capone.”
“Call me Snorky, please.
“It’s always such a pleasure to be able to watch you boys play, even just to hear you on the radio. I’m glad I persuaded Mr. Comiskey to put ‘dem White Sox on the radio this year.”
This is news to me.
“Excuse me, Mr. Capone,” I say, “but how did that come about?”
“Just the Cubs was on the radio the last two years. No White Sox. It bugged me. ‘Dem White Sox kept saying that puttin’ games on the radio would be giving ’em away for free — that people would stop comin’ out to the ballpark. But the Cubs was provin’ ’em wrong, right? Even more people was becoming fans of the Cubbies and comin’ out to the games.
“So, I got fed up. Last year durin’ the season, I wrote Mr. Comiskey a letter. I told him that I would guarantee ’em $100,000 worth of advertizin’ for the last 50 games of the season if he would put his games on the radio.”
“Excuse me, Snorky,” says Hoyt. “But which of your businesses were you thinking of advertising on the radio.”
“Ah, Brooklyn,” Capone says laughing at Hoyt’s nerve.
“The beauty of my enterprises is they don’t need no advertizin’. They’re based on urges. I’m just giving people what they want. And once they get what they want, since they all want what everybody else wants — and they want to do it with everybody else, their drinking and what-not, once they get my product, and they like the product — ’cause I give them great product, the best product, the purest product — then they tell their friends. So I ain’t got no need for advertizin’. My customers do my advertizin’.
“In fact, I got less than no need for advertizin’. I got a need not to let people know about my businesses — which I think is what you’re bein’ a little smart about, Brooklyn.”
Hoyt smiles.
“But I know a lot of businesses in Chicago that normally might not think of advertizin’ — like dry cleaners and grocery stores — and I was sure some of my associates could be very persuasive in their abilities to convince those businesses to advertise on ‘dem White Sox radio games.”
Capone now tells us his 1927 master plan for selling radio ads, in great detail. Spectacularly, it’s modeled on the plan that put all those stills in the tenement apartment bathrooms.
Jesus Christ! Just imagine you’re some poor slob owner of a dry cleaning store, and every day you’re standing behind your counter wondering how you’re going to pay your rent bills, pay your employees salaries and pay your protection money to those pesky mob racketeers who already drop by every other week to collect their dough in the form of “union dues”…
And then out of the blue, one day Snorky’s radio advertising sales boys stop by — men in flashy suits with well-oiled hair and unusually large bulges in their jackets — and they tell you how it would be a healthy thing for your business if you took out some “advertizin’” on the White Sox radio broadcasts.
And they also tell you what an unhealthy thing it would be for your business if you didn’t buy an ad.
Can you imagine?
I don’t know much about either the radio or the advertising business, but I doubt Capone’s strong-arm advertising plan is the standard method for doing business in either world.
I do know that this season for the first time ever, the White Sox are broadcasting their games on not one but two radio stations. Maybe Capone’s letter helped persuade Charles Comiskey. Or maybe it was just the fact that Comiskey saw the Cubs, in their first two years on radio, double their attendance since 1925.
I know what Snorky thinks.
“Gentlemen, I need to go back to work, but you’re welcome to stay and finish your meals.”
Capone says this but there’s no food left on the table. Everything’s been cleared, except for four unopened bottles of champagne, eight crystal glasses, four Metropole room keys, and the four waitresses.
The four Yankees thank our host for dinner.
And for dessert.
I’m really hoping there isn’t a portrait in the room Snorky gave me.
- AL Capone
- Paul Galico
- WAITE Hoyt
- TONY Lazzeri
- Joe E. Lewis
- Ray Schalk
- William “Big Bill” Thompson
- Lloyd Waner
- Paul Waner
- Hack Wilson
- 1927 Yankees
- July 21, 1927: “Awed Until Eighth, Yanks Top Chicago.” New York Times article and Box Score.
- July 22, 1927: “Yanks’ Rally Fails, White Win, 7–5.” New York Times article and Box Score.
