[Sgt Mac]

I was just looking up some History on Primarys I seen this one?

Mr. Al Capone (D) came out in the open to support Big Bill Thompson (D) in 1929 in what was known as the "pineapple" primary. Opposition candidates were subject to all the little violent tricks in the Capone bag, including the tossing of this iron fruit. His men had shot and killed William McSwiggin,(R) State's Attorney for Cook County, and if they could get away with that (as they did) he felt he could get away with anything.

Before the pineapple primary he had also staged the cruelest murder in the annals of American gangster crime.

He had hired Fred (Killer) Burke of the Egan's Rats, a St. Louis gang, to perform this particular job. The Killer dressed three of his men in police uniforms, walked in on seven Moran men in the SMC Cartage Company Garage on St. Valentine's Day, 1929, and sprayed them with Thompson sub-machine guns and sawed-off shotguns until the last of the seven stopped twitching.

The Capone crowd lost the pineapple primary, in spite of terroristic tactics. Dissension, subsurface but sinister, got to work in the organization. The fat boy tried to stem it with a brutal show of power at a hotel banquet where he brained the guests of honor--two defecting brothers who thought their plotting had been secret--with a baseball bat.