National Affairs: I’m Awfully Hot

The empire that Gangster Al Capone had built with the help of the Tommy gun and the dum-dum bullet in the back had a strange air of flaccid respectability in 1950. Marty the Ox died in bed without a single bullet hole in his hide. And in the rare places where the shakedown still prevailed, it was costing a merchant as little as $1 a week to insure his plate-glass windows against a well-heaved brick. The ugly libel was afloat that Chicago had turned sissy and petty larcenous.

But to anyone who knew what went on behind the grey post-Capone fagade, it was all a base canard. Surviving kinsmen and colleagues of Al had expanded all their mentor’s old rackets—the bookie room, the call houses, the gambling joints, the numbers games and the dope runs. Striving for real class—the quiet stuff—they had moved into riches and power that Al never dreamed of. The trick was done by plowing their illicit earnings into legitimate channels. One man who knew plenty about “The Outfit” of 1950 was William J. Drury, a handsome Irish ex-pug who joined the police force 26 years ago, at 22.

A Copper’s Pay. Bill Drury was a plainclothesman but his clothes made a mockery of the title—his suits were” about as plain as a Capone mobster’s funeral, and almost as expensive. He became a lieutenant and acting captain, and quickly fell into the pattern which Chicagoans expect of their police captains—a rich man’s life on a copper’s pay. He made a fetish of wearing a hat and, as his hair began to disappear in later years, he even kept one on while eating in the classiest restaurants. “I’d rather be caught dead than without a hat,” Drury often explained.

But Drury was also a tough cop, handy with his fists and afraid of nobody. He habitually put the pinch on, or otherwise harassed, such hearties as Murray (“The Camel”) Humphries, the late Frank (“The Enforcer”) Nitti, Louis (“Little New York”) Campagna, Paul (“The Waiter”) Ricca, Ralph (“Bottles”) Capone, Big Al’s biggest brother. Once he even tried to pin a murder rap on fish-eyed, elegantly tailored Charlie (“The Gentleman”) Fischetti, one of Al Capone’s top three heirs. And he hauled in Jack (“Greasy Thumb”) Guzik, Al Capone’s business brains, whenever he felt displeased with the look on Greasy Thumb’s fat face—which was often.

Then, in 1947, Bill Drury got too energetic in his hunt for the killers of Racing Wire Czar James Ragen. It was taken for granted that The Outfit got Drury fired because he was getting too hot on the trail of a most delicate matter: complete control of Chicago’s fabulously rich bookie business.

A Spouting Source. This year, having failed to get his job back through the courts, Bill Drury got sore and began spouting what he knew. He fed information on the Capone mob to columnists and expose writers and he offered his services when Senator Estes Kefauver’s special Senate committee began investigating organized crime. Drury arranged to meet a Kefauver investigator early this month to prepare the way for the committee’s full-dress entry into Chicago. Word got around that Drury was also getting ready to channel embarrassing information about Police Captain Daniel A. (“Tubbo”) Gilbert, the Democratic candidate for Cook County sheriff, to Tubbo’s Republican opponent. In his 18 years as chief investigator for the State’s Attorney, Gilbert had never pinned a rap on any important mobster.

Recently Bill Drury got in touch with one Marvin Bas, a small-fry lawyer who was also collecting dirt for Gilbert’s Republican opponent. One day last week, in a strangely agitated state, Drury visited his own lawyer. “I’m awfully hot,” said Drury. “I need protection.” Drury’s lawyer telephoned a Kefauver committee investigator for bodyguards.

A Hatless Corpse. That evening, sharp as ever in a dark suit, pearl-grey fedora and canary-yellow gloves, Drury drove his new black Cadillac home. At 6:45 he backed into the garage. Two men stepped out of the darkness and faced the car. With a shotgun and a .45, they punched four holes in the windshield. The first slugs knocked Drury’s hat to the seat; the rest plowed into his head and body. An hour later Bill Drury was dead—without a hat on. Upstairs on his desk was a telephone message: the Kefauver committee had called to say it would arrange to give him the necessary protection until the heat was off.

Four hours later and two miles away, Lawyer Marvin Bas was caught and shot down by two gunmen in the shadow of the Chicago El. Chicago’s Keystone cops skittered busily around town trying to run down a lead to the killers. But wherever they looked for big shots in The Outfit who might be able to answer a few polite questions, the cops found nobody home—the boys were all on abrupt vacations. Running away to hide was something that rarely happened in Big Al Capone’s day. But Al, as everyone knew, was not worried by a lot of legitimate investments to protect.