The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  I got sore and charged him, but Charley stuck out a hand and I ran into it. "Easy, Al;" he says. "Johnny didn't get to be Johnny buying no pig in a poke." Johnny blew on his knuckles. "Okay, Charley. He doesn't fold. I don't need a boy just now, but tell your friend the big fellow to give Frankie Yale my name. That Harvard Inn of his goes through bouncers like a dose of clap."

  Which if I were a superstitious person I'd wish I paid more attention. "Thank you, Mr. Torrio," I said. "I hope I can return the favor."

  Nothing could take that smile off his face, not even shotguns, as it turned out. "I look forward to it," he said.

  Out in the hall, Charley threw me up against a wall. No one else I ever knew had the guts to do that. "What're you doing?" he said. "Man does you a favor, you threaten to knock his block off?"

  I said, "He sucker-punched me."

  "You know who gets sucker-punched?"

  "Suckers." What else could I say, backed into a corner?

  "You had your guard up, you'd be working for Johnny instead of that puzzo Yale."

  But Frankie Yale never played me false all the time I worked for him. That came later. I don't know what Charley's beef with him was. He was another old Five Pointer I'd heard plenty about. They said he had a dozen notches on his belt by the time he was twenty. Some said eight, some ten. When everyone agrees it's more than five, you can bet it's more than one. That was a few years before I caught up with him, and I hadn't heard where he'd slowed down in the widow-making racket. Later he got fat, but in those days he looked like the Arrow Collar man. Georgie Raft reminded me of him a little, and Georgie went into the movies.

  Frankie had a finger in everything: milk, ice, the laundry business, if you picked up and delivered, he took his cut. He ran protection for the Black Hand, gambling and liquor in the Harvard Inn (Yale, Harvard, get it? Humor was different then, not wise-ass like now), and had a string of girls in back, which was how I met Constanzia. For a while he sold cigars with his picture on the box, but he gave it up when he overheard a guy on the El tell another guy you don't smoke a Frankie Yale, you flush it. I think he really thought he had a good product till that moment. He didn't smoke himself, and he could make a tumbler of whiskey last all night.

  Frankie was the quietest man I ever knew, even quieter than Johnny, and a lot more dangerous. He had this low way of speaking that made everybody lean in to hear what he was saying. You saw him sitting at a table, people crowded around him close, you thought he must've been talking about something important, when he might've just been saying it looked like rain. Anyway I heard it got him close enough to one chiseler to cut his throat.

  That job was a low point in my life. The place was lousy with bouncers, so Frankie put me to work out front. He dressed me up like a carnival barker, swear to god, in a striped coat and straw boater. I'd spot a fellow passing by looked like he had dough, I'd walk alongside him and say quiet, like it was a secret, "They got some nice-looking girls inside, buddy, whaddaya say?" I was a pimp was what I was. It still shames me to say it. But I needed the job. I was getting married.

  I met Mae in a cellar club on Carroll Street; another basement. You ought to have seen her then. Skin like skim milk and she had the longest legs I ever saw on a girl. She was a salesgirl in a department store, lived with her parents in a class Irish neighborhood. Good Catholics.

  Her real name's Mary, but she looked like Mae West, who was playing at the Shubert Theater then, so everybody called her Mae. What she saw in me God knows. I was eighteen, good with my dukes or a pool cue, but put a teacup in my hand and you can guess the rest. I couldn't turn around or fart in that teensy parlor in her parents' house on Third Place without knocking something over. I had pimples, for chrissake. And I had these scars.

  There's more lies told about me than Mata Hari, and most of them are about where the scars came from. I spread a few of them myself. I told Jake Lingle I got them fighting in France, but the closest I ever got to there was a truckload of champagne bottled in Montreal. I even read where a barber cut me with his razor when I asked for a haircut only a member of the Mafia was allowed to have. Back then I never heard the word Mafia. We just called it the Black Hand. Most of those boys cut their own hair, and it showed.

  A lot of people think I'm vain of my good looks and that's why I turn that side of my face away from cameras. I know I'm no Jack Barrymore. In my old neighborhood, you turned rat, they cut you so everybody knew. Well, I never turned rat on anybody, but I'm not proud of how I got these.

  Drink's to blame. When Frankie was shorthanded inside, I got to change out of my pimp clothes and fill in at the bar or at the door. One of those nights in comes this scrawny little guinea, Frank Galluccio, drunk, with a beautiful girl on his arm. She looked like Louise Brooks, I'm not exaggerating. Fantastic figure. So naturally 1 kept finding reasons to pass their table while I'm serving drinks and clearing away glasses. I wasn't as bombed as Galluch, as we called him, but one reason I never made bartending my profession is I always liked what I was pouring as much as my customers. So I had a little bit of a bag on or I wouldn't have said what I said. I leaned over the table. I thought I was being quiet, but they told me it was loud enough to carry to the next party over. You always think you're goddamn Vernon Castle when you're looped. "Honey," I said, "you got a nice ass, and I mean that as a compliment."

  Turns out the dame is Lena, Galluch's sister, which as you know is a very big deal with Italians. Everybody's sister is the Virgin Mary. He's on his feet in a flash, yelling at me to apologize. Others heard what I'd said, so he's got to play it big. But others heard what he said, so I'm better off keeping it small. So I'm saying take it easy, pal, I didn't mean nothing; smiling, you know. "This is no fucking joke, mister," he says, and now I'm in it. Bar full of people sees me back down from a runt, I won't get a job bouncing baby showers. So I make my move.

  Here's a free lesson, Padre, you ever decide to ditch that collar and work in a saloon. You only throw punches as a last resort. That's a good way to get glass hands, break one every time you knock on a door, because jaws are harder than fists. Ask Samson. What you do, you get him in a bear hug, and if he's smaller than you squeeze till he stops wiggling and if he's your size or bigger, hang on till help comes from the bar or the door with a pool cue or a blackjack. That's what I had in mind for Galluch, the old squeeze. Snap a rib or two.

  But little guys are fast, and for a drunk he had good reflexes. He must've practiced the move in front of a mirror, which is a sound idea if you've got a sister pretty as Lena.

  The knife seems to open up by itself as it's coming out of his pocket. Swish! He opens up my cheek like slicing the casing on a sausage. Swish-swish! On the jaw and on the neck; two inches higher and I'd be short one ear. Hurt? Not at first. It was like when you nick yourself shaving and you watch in the mirror to see if you broke the skin and then the blood comes. It came plenty. I'm bleeding like a stuck pig, sure my throat's cut, and Galluch, who's a drunk but no fool, gathers up his sister and takes it on the ankles. I think he left his hat.

  Thirty-two stitches they took in my face over at Coney Island Hospital, where they had plenty of experience patching up knife wounds but no sense of aesthetics. They didn't close them tight enough and they healed over white. When I go out I still dust my face with Johnson & Johnson's, which I suppose makes me look like a clown but it's better they think that than ask how I got slashed up. For a long time I was madder at the doctors than I was at Galluch.

  Not that I didn't want him in the ground. My face was burning on one side, covered with gauze, I had pills for the pain, but they weren't nearly as good as the morphine they pumped into me at the hospital. My face throbbed and I was dopey from the pills and sore at the world, but mostly at myself. Well, you can't fight the world—I couldn't even fight the U.S.—and I wasn't about to commit suicide over a bonehead mistake, but I spread word around Brooklyn I was looking for Frank Galluccio.

  Next thing I know I'm talking with Frankie Yale and Charley L
uciano at the Harvard Inn, their invitation, and who walks in but the man I'm looking for. I jump up, dumping over my chair, but just like that Frankie's got my arms pinned from behind and Charley's looking at me that same way he did when he had me up against the wall outside Johnny Torrio's office. "This is a sit-down," he said, "so sit."

  Frankie let go and I sat. You don't argue with them two when they got their backs up.

  "You, too," Charley tells Galluch, who is also not a man to saw off his legs when he might need them to run on later. He sits, too, and he's so pale you can see right through him. He had no more idea I was going to be there than I did him.

  Frankie uncorked a jug of chianti in a basket and we drank and listened to Charley. This vendetta shit is for the Old World, bad for business here in the land of opportunity. The decision has come down that I am to apologize for insulting Galluch's sister and he is to apologize for overreacting to an unintended slight. This, Charley said, is direct from Joe Masseria, who in those days ran all the rackets in New York clear up to Albany, where the governor asked the president to hang on while he took a call from Masseria—"Joe the Boss," he was called. Now that I see how the cow ate the cabbage I got up and stuck my hand out to Galluch in friendship. He took it, the blood coming back into his cheeks as he did, partly I think out of relief that his pretty sister Lena wouldn't be attending his funeral anytime soon and partly out of shame for having disfigured me so badly when all he wanted to do was kill me.

  Charley hugged me, hugged Galluch; so did Frankie. Peace was restored that day, and I have never broken it between me and the man who made me Scarface. Every time business took me back to New York after I relocated to Chicago, I looked up Frank Galluccio and paid him a C-note a week to serve as my bodyguard. Who better to protect me than the only man who ever got close enough to carve me up and lived to tell about it?

  Mae didn't see the scars when she looked at me. She still doesn't, and I thank God every day I went to that cellar place on Carroll that night instead of going to shoot pool, which was what Little Augie Carfano wanted me to do. He was Frankie's bodyguard, mean little shit: shot rats in the spine and laughed when they crawled along on their front legs. A man's nothing without a woman who can't see his scars. I sure traded up from Little Augie.

  We took our vows at St. Mary Star of the Sea, spitting distance from the docks, December 30, 1919, Father James J. Delaney presiding; I remember he had gin blossoms on his nose. Mae's whole family was there, though I can't say they all approved of the union: I was a greaseball booze-slinger, the scars on my face still bloodred, and like I said they was lace-curtain Irish; the master of the house took a walk around the block when he had to pass wind. (My old man the barber leaned over on one cheek at Christmas dinner and let fly.) But you know Mae. Getting her to do a thing's a simple matter of telling her not to. She ran that house same way she runs this one. There's no appeal from a blond head, blue eyes, and a blowtop. If she ran the North Side, Chicago'd be a different place.

  She gave me Sonny. If she never gave me anything else, that would be plenty. He's the hope of the family. He's got my smarts and Mae's sense of what's right and wrong, and there's no stopping a man with those qualities. I dealt him a rotten hand, whoring around before Mae came along and passing down the bug, but he's playing it and I've never heard a word of complaint.

  After the wedding, things changed for me. Johnny Torrio was getting ready to leave for Chicago, where his uncle, Diamond Jim Colosimo, needed a young man with ideas to manage the rackets, and he was throwing himself a going-away party in the restaurant below his office. I was never so surprised to get an invitation in my life. I was a settled man now, with family responsibilities, a kid on the way, and word that I'd played ball with Charley and Frankie over the Galluch business had gotten back to Johnny. He knew now I wasn't the same hothead who tried to tag him for clipping me on the chin all those months before.

  You never saw such a party. Beer and champagne in tubs of ice, quarter cigars, girls, a shine band playing that monkey music they brought up from New Orleans. I never cared for it myself. King Terranova dropped in for a few minutes, and Frankie was there, and Charley and his friend Frank Costello and their Jewish friends Benny Siegel and Meyer Lansky and Lepke. Joe the Boss and Arnie Rothstein, the man who crooked the World Series, couldn't make it, but Joe sent a big floral horseshoe with a sash that said "Good Luck, Johnny," and Rothstein sent a basket of meats and cheeses and fifty-year-old brandy that must've set him back a couple of C's. There were Five Pointers all over the place. Even Dinny Heehan paid his respects. He ran the Irish mob in Brooklyn, what called itself the White Hand, which was a thumb to the nose of the Black Hand, but what the hell, there was a truce in force. He didn't look happy to be there, and he wasn't drinking. When a Mick don't have a glass in his hand at a party, you know he's expecting trouble.

  I don't think I truly appreciated how big Johnny had become till this leprechaun shows up in a derby and chinchilla coat and I recognize Jimmy Hines from Tammany Hall, whose picture was in the paper. Jimmy the Gent didn't go to just any party. He was too busy electing the mayor and governor. So that explains Dinny Meehan. He couldn't afford to stay away with Hines there.

  Right then I knew something big was in the wind. That was New York reaching out to shake hands with Chicago. The rackets weren't just local affairs anymore. They were branching out across the country, and Johnny had been appointed ambassador.

  When he saw me he hugged me, right there in front of everybody. He'd had good reports about my work from Frankie, and like I said he knew I'd learned how to sit down and talk peace for the good of the Outfit. He made a lot of trips back home after that, organizing connections, and he always came by to visit Mae and me at home. He stood godfather to Sonny and sent him a five-hundred- dollar bond every birthday till Johnny threw in with that sheeny prick Dutch Schultz and I tore them all up. But that was years later. Johnny was as much my godfather as Sonny's and my guardian angel.

  He liked my ideas, like setting up a legitimate front to keep the reform crowd from asking embarrassing questions, some easy thing to maintain, like a secondhand furniture store. This was the beginning of Al Brown, Antique Dealer. It wouldn't fool a baby, but it wasn't busting the law in their face, so there wasn't any public show of disrespect, which when you come down to it is the only thing they really care about, the church committees and politicians. Johnny said I had too good a head on my shoulders to make thirty-five bucks a week slugging drunks.

  Sometimes, I have to admit, I lost that head. In the fall of 19191 was drinking in a harbor saloon when this character Artie Finnegan comes in. I didn't know him. Short, squat, face like a cheese. He sees me and starts cussing me out, greasy nigger wop this, greasy nigger wop that, stinking up the place. I'm thinking, what's your problem, Paddy, you got piles or what? Stranger minding his own business, you want to start something over nothing? That's kid stuff. After Five Points I never in my life went looking for a fight. In Chicago I never hit back but that they hit me first. Well, he keeps on, and now he's dragging my family into it, my mother, my father, my wife if I've got one, bastards and whores, all of them. He's dotting i s, crossing t's. He didn't come here to lift a pint and sing "Danny Boy."

  I beat the Irish clean out of him. My hands still ache when I think about it. They had to drag me off him. Now he's on the floor leaking blood from everywhere, even his ears. I think, well, there you are, you cocksucker, you wanted to dance, now you're dead. I really thought he was.

  I wasn't worried about the cops. I'd been pulled in before over a couple of scraps and questioning, roughed around, turned loose with the charges dropped, and when the doctors said they figured they could put Artie Finnegan back together after all, minus a few pieces, I knew the cops wouldn't waste their time looking for an eyewitness that wouldn't say Finnegan slipped on a puddle of beer and fell down a couple dozen times. It was the White Handers I was concerned about. Finnegan was one, and Dinny Meehan didn't like his boys being abused any
more than Frankie Yale did his. Dinny sicced Wild Bill Lovett on me.

  Lovett put the fear of God on the waterfront. He wasn't any bigger than little Frank Galluccio, and he had these big cow eyes and teensy ears that poked out like an elf's. But he'd kill you as soon as shake your hand. He'd fought abroad with the 77th Regiment and been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for valor under fire. He carried his old service .45 everywhere and never packed a bodyguard, not even after Frankie put Meehan on the spot months later and Wild Bill took over the White Hand. He walked alone.

  A lot can change in a short time. A year earlier I'd have waited for him, or more likely gone out looking for him myself with the rod I used to pop bottles in the basement of the Adonis Social Club. But I had a family now. If anything was to happen to me, Mae and Sonny would be on their own. I went to Frankie for advice. He shook his head. Even Joe the Boss couldn't get me out of this jam. There's no sitting down with the Irish. What he did, he called Johnny in Chicago. Johnny said he could use an extra man who wasn't a mug and sent first-class tickets for me, Mae, and Sonny. Lovett could go on turning over every rock in Brooklyn looking for the scar-faced punk who beat up Artie Finnegan. What's a White Hander's time worth, anyway?

  So we got on the train at Grand Central Station, and on January 17, 1920, I celebrated my twenty-first birthday with Johnny at Colosimo's Cafe in Chicago. That same day, the Volstead Act kicked in and the whole country went on the wagon. Who says God doesn't appreciate a joke?

  1944

  CORNED BEEF AND CRIBBAGE

  THIRTEEN

  There was a little silence while Sonny finished sealing the film reels in their cans before Vasco realized Capone was asleep. His wing collar was sprung, the tie hanging loose on either side like two black socks, and the overhead light poured shadows into the lines of fatigue on his face, Frank Galluccio's handiwork on the side he hid from the world. He'd always looked older than he was—people who thought they knew his story were shocked when told he was barely thirty at the time of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre—and now at forty-five with the vital spark dormant he could pass for a man ten years older. Illness and mortal sin had taken its toll.