and a $3,000 diamond ring. Scalise promptly sent his ring to his sweetheart in Sicily. Anselmi, less romantic, haggled $4,000 out of a jeweler, at the point of a gun, for the $3,000 ring.
The tales of their killings became the talk of the underworld. When one victim begged mercy with his hands held in prayer, the boys jokingly shot off his hands before shooting him in the head. They gunned down their victims on crowded streets, with absolutely no regard for innocent bystanders.
Anselmi and Scalise finally broke with the Gennas when they were given a contract to hit Al Capone, realizing that even if they succeeded, Capone's followers would sooner or later get them. Instead, they revealed the murder order to Capone and went to work for him—while letting the Gennas think they were still in their employ. That way they were eventually able to set up one Genna brother for assassination and personally dispatch another.
Once the pair became open members of the Capone forces, they were quickly regarded as the gang's most efficient killers, outdoing even Machine Gun McGurn and Golf Bag Hunt. They took part in the most important Chicago murder of the 1920s, that of O'Banion. Later when a peace pact was almost worked out between the Capones and the O'Banions (then under the leadership of Hymie Weiss), the agreement foundered on the Weiss demand that Anselmi and Scalise be turned over to them for execution. Capone who prided himself on loyalty to his men, refused saying, ''I wouldn't do that to a yellow dog."
Anselmi and Scalise went about their murdering business. They were arrested any number of times but never convicted; somehow witnesses against them suddenly remembered they did not recognize them. The pair even beat a rap of murdering two police detectives. After three trials, a typical Chicago verdict found that they were just innocent gangsters resisting unwarranted police aggression.
Anselmi and Scalise were finally to die at Al Capone's hands in 1929, shortly after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, for which they were arrested but did not live long enough to be tried. Capone had learned that Anselmi and Scalise with Joseph "Hop Toad" Giunta, whom he had installed as head of the fraternal Unione Siciliane, were conspiring with another Mafia crime family boss named Joe Aiello to kill him. At first Capone could not believe this of Anselmi and Scalise whom he had refused to sacrifice to Hymie Weiss, but another aide, Frankie Rio, convinced him of the pair's disloyalty with a contrived test. At a dinner Capone and Rio faked an argument and Rio slapped Capone and stormed out. The next day Anselmi and Scalise approached Rio full of sympathy and offered to bring him in on a plan to kill Capone. Rio dickered with the gangsters for three days and then reported back to Capone.
On May 7, 1929, Capone hosted a party to honor Giunta, Anselmi and Scalise. At the height of the banquet, Capone accused them of betraying him and, producing an Indian club, beat Giunta and Scalise with blow after blow until they slumped to the floor, near death. Then Capone turned to the quaking Anselmi, who looked awestruck at his murder partner and for the first time in his life turned on him. "Not me, Al," he begged. "Honest to God. Johnnie. It was his idea. His and Joe's. Believe me, Al, I wouldn't—." Capone cut him off with a barrage of blows. Then Capone was handed a gun and he shot all three, finishing the gory job. Anselmi and Scalise died as they had always worked—together.
Anslinger, Harry J. (1892–1975): U.S. narcotics commissioner One of our most controversial lawmen in this century, Harry J. Anslinger was an implacable foe of the Mafia and consequently a major enemy of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, who for more than 30 years maintained the Mafia did not exist. For those same 30 years, Anslinger's men had been gathering names and identities of top gangsters in the United States. Eventually they compiled a list of 800 big names in national and international crime and a black book which was labeled Mafia. This can fairly be called the first federal study of the American Mafia and was done at a time when Hoover's "there-is-no-Mafia" line was generally accepted in law enforcement circles.
The rivalry between Hoover and Anslinger, in his prime a squat, bull-necked, bald, energetic man, was particularly intense. Each considered the other as both incompetent and a threat. But Hoover's disregard of and disrespect for Anslinger was not shared by Hoover's agents. In the early 1950s, Anslinger had provided them with a five-page list, four columns to a page, of the names and cities of over 300 crime family members. There were those who said the specter of organized crime was one that Hoover could not see because it had become visible to Anslinger first.
FBI agents surreptitiously circulated the "List of Mafia Members Obtained From Narcotics Bureau." It had to be done surreptitiously since any agent caught with the list would undoubtedly have been subjected to transfer and, more likely, to dismissal from the service. In his Inside Hoover's FBI Special Agent Neal J. Welch describes FBI men "burning' shiny grayish reproductions on primitive office copiers and passing the list secretly from agent to agent like some heretical religious creed—which it was." Welch relates that when he
