Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Read Online Free PDF Page A

they'd throw rocks and knock the boards off, so they could hit us. They would usually come around raiding about three times a week. We had beebee guns and a 22-rifle, in which we shot blanks to scare them, but we might have shot something else if we'd had it."
    The supreme thrill-and an activity important to the cohesion of the gang-was fighting. The captains would stake out a block or two as their gang's domain and declare war on any other gang that attempted to set foot inside the boundaries. Or they would mount a raid against a rival gang's territory.
"Jimmie, the leader of the gang, is a bad actor. He would kill a policeman, if necessary, to get away. Most of the bunch are getting rounded up now, on account of their robbing expeditions. The greatest spirit of the gang is fighting and Jimmie would lead the boys to battle on the least pretext.
"One fourth of July the bunch had a big fight with Danny O'Hara's gang. We had about two hundred on our side, and there were about as many there for Danny. Danny got hard with Jimmie and told him that he was trying to start a fight or something. First Jimmy busted Danny in the nose and then the whole gang started fighting. We had the traffic blocked on the boulevard for a long time, and finally the patrol wagon came, but they did not get any of the gang.
"We had wars with lots of other gangs. We fought the Deadshots and there were about a hundred in the fight. Jimmie got bounced on, and when he saw our enemies were too big for us, he beat it.
"We fought the Jews from Twelfth Street, but they had too many for us. They're pretty good fighters. We knew they had more than we did, so we went down with clubs and everything.
"Another time we went to Garfield Park to lick the Thistles. We had only about seventy-five guys. They had said they could lick Jimmie and the rest of the gang and right away he wanted to go down there and fight them, but he got beat up as usual. There were too many of them for us, and half of them were about twenty years old.
"We also had a war, starting over a baseball game at the park, with the Coons from Lake Street."
    Not all gangs were as belligerent as the Bimbooms. Not all were criminal. Some developed into social or athletic clubs, approved and aided by the adults of the community. For many boy gangs, however, it was a short step from random mischief to professional criminality. Practically every racketeer, Capone included, spent his formative years on the prowl with a gang.
    Nearly always the delinquent gang enjoyed the protection of some ward boss, for its members need not have reached voting age to render valuable services during elections, to intimidate, slug, kidnap, steal ballots, recruit repeaters. The bosses spared no effort to secure such allies. They would lease a clubhouse for them, buy them sporting equipment and uniforms, give them beefsteak dinners, picnics, tickets to prizefights and ball games. If arrested, a gang member could count on the ward boss to furnish bail and a lawyer; if convicted, to get his sentence reduced or quashed.
    The gang Capone joined during his mid-teens, as did Lucky Luciano, was the Five Pointers, into which Torrio may have introduced them both. It was based on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Its name derived from an intersection at the heart of the "Bloody Ould Sixth Ward" between Broadway and the Bowery, a warren of decaying tenements, gin mills and dance halls built on swampy land that emitted foul gases. Though the section had undergone some physical improvements, it was almost as noisome, its moral climate as debased, as when Charles Dickens, in his American Notes, three-quarters of a century earlier, described "these narrow ways . . . reeking everywhere with dirt and filth . . . hideous tenements which take their names from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed. . . ."
    For nearly a century the Five Points spawned the most feral gangs ever to terrorize the city. Following the Forty Thieves,