Suddenly Capone was up and bustling, and Rose was clearing the table. He outfitted Vasco with Rio's mackinaw, which he was leaving behind for his city clothes, and Ralph's vest, which swam on him even with the coat underneath. That, too, was loose, especially under the left arm where the flannel lining had been cut out to make room for his pistol. Ralph's bucket hat would have settled on his shoulders, so he put on his own black snapbrim. Capone, whose tongue was loosening, remarked that he looked like an undertaker who specialized in burying lumberjacks.
"Don't let the father fall overboard," said Mae in parting.
He followed Capone down a path worn between tall wet grass to the lake, where Brownie had stowed tackle, a Thermos, and a picnic basket filled with sandwiches aboard a twelve-foot rowboat with a motor that looked like a chafing-dish mounted on a propeller shaft. His employer was surer on his feet here than on Palm Island. When Vasco was seated in the bow, he pushed off, splashed through water, adding a fresh coat of algae to his high-topped shoes, and clambered aboard like a man half his age and thirty pounds lighter. He used an oar to push them clear of the reeds, then tipped the propeller into the water, grasped the starter rope by its wooden toggle handle, pulled, got a sputter and a gasp the first time, then pulled again. The motor started with a roar. He sat down and steered them away from shore with his hand on the rudder. Vasco turned up his collar against the rush of cold air on the back of his neck.
A little over halfway across, Capone cut the motor. The sudden silence was a relief.
"Drop anchor, Padre. That bucket there; toss 'er over the side."
The rusty paint bucket at Vasco's feet was filled with cement, with an iron ring sunk in it tied with a coil of cotton clothesline to an iron staple attached to the side of the boat. It was heavier than it looked and he used both hands. The bucket splashed when it entered the water and the rope zinged against wood until the weight settled on the bottom. It sent a fresh set of concentric rings overlapping the ripples the boat had made, chasing them toward shore, where the reeds grew straight until they stooped under their own weight like old Jesuits and the pines threw Christmas-cookie reflections onto the lake. A loon started up. A bullfrog gulped. Everything else was the hollow scrape and thump of their feet on the deck when they shifted positions and now and then an inverse splat when something broke the surface from below to sip at the air. Their breath curled in the cold.
Vasco shivered. It was only his first day and he could hardly picture Miami already crawling in heat just an hour ahead of them.
He made himself useful, lifting the battered green metal tackle box from the deck, resting it on the two-by-eight seat that separated them, and unlatching it. Capone stopped him.
"Keep your shirt on, Padre. We got a freezerful of fish on the back porch. I don't even like fish."
Vasco sat back. Capone patted his vest, took a cigar from a deep flap pocket designed for something else, a lure or an olive bottle filled with grubs for bait, bit off the end, and spat it over the side; something struck at it from below, but it was gone before it could be identified. Capone struck a match from a book from another pocket with billy's bar block-printed on the cover. He sent a brownish-gray plume out over the calm water.
"It ain't Lake Michigan," he said. "That's one of the things I like about it. Too many stiffs cluttering up the bottom there, they make your flesh crawl. They say that sheeny cocksucker Dutch Schultz invented cement overshoes when he dunked Bo Weinberg in New York Harbor, but he got it from Johnny. Of course, that was before the stiffs started falling too fast and too many to stop and clean up after." Vasco had started to yawn, affected by sleepiness and chill. He broke it off and listened.
THE CONFESSIONS OF AL CAPONE
1920-1925
Compiled from Transcripts by Special Agent P. Vasco
Division 5 FBI File #44/763
TWENTY-FOUR
TIME DON'T COME OFF THE RACK. IT'S MADE TO ORDER FOR EACH OF US. A geezer there in Mercer sits puffing on a corncob pipe all day in front of the hardware store says he's a hundred and three, and last month a five-year-old kid fell into the flowage and drowned. I don't know if the geezer put his time to any better use than getting that pipe going, but it's a sure bet that kid never got the chance to do anything with his.
In November 1920, my old man's heart went flooey watching somebody else shoot pool in the joint next door to the apartment where I grew up in Brooklyn. He was fifty-five. That seemed plenty old to me then, though I could've stood having him around a little longer. Now I'm just ten years short of that and they tell me I'm a long shot to make it. But fifty-five was just past halfway for Old Corncob, and eleven times more than the kid that took the water nap. See what I mean?
Anyway we went back for the funeral, Mae, little Sonny, and me. I let my beard grow for the occasion as was tradition. Deanie O'Banion shipped a blanket of flowers I'd picked out, at cost, which was damn decent of him, and Johnny sent a great big spray of yellow roses, which was Gabriel's favorite color and mine. Father Garofalo prayed him across and sprinkled dirt on him in Calvary Cemetery in Queens. Later I had him exhumed and reburied in Mount Olivet in Chicago under a swell marble monument with his portrait in the base. But before that I shipped in Mama, four of my brothers, and my sister, Mafalda. Ralph was already with me, doing the heavy lifting, and Jimmy was out West, riding cows and punching horses, though we didn't know that then. I put the rest up in the house I built on South Prairie Avenue, with plumbing fixtures imported from Germany and walls of poured concrete; I had an idea even then, when the North and South Sides was shaking hands and slapping each other on the back and swapping cigars, that the shooting wouldn't stop with Diamond Jim. I fixed an escape route from the basement to an alley where I kept a car and driver posted around the clock. I'm just never wrong when it comes to predicting trouble.
The place was big enough for all of us, but not to do business in. Mama didn't have any English, so there was small danger of her ears getting bruised, but Mafalda was studying for the convent—not that you'd guess that now, the mouth she's got on her—so I was sound in my early instincts to hold on to the suite at the Metropole Hotel, which became my answer to Henry Ford's plant in Detroit, where the raw ore came in one end and Model T's out the other. I set up shop in the hotel, and just in time.
Nobody gave Spike O'Donnell a Chinaman's chance at a pardon, except his brothers, who put their faith in Big Bill Thompson and his pull with the governor, who scribbled his moniker on a sheet absolving Spike of the crime of bank robbery with Bill guiding his hand. Big Bill, I should point out, was a dope who was always surprising folks with the weight he slung around, which was considerable. He was the duckbill platypus of American politics, with the body of a hippopotamus and the head of a horse grafted on by Boris Karloff or one of them other mad scientists you see at the picture show. Bill made a lot about having been a cowboy out West, like Jimmy, but like Jimmy it was as real as an injun trinket you pick up at the five-and-dime. He got into the mayor's office back in 1916 with a gang of blow and steam about making Chicago a wide-open town, and it didn't matter to him who he wallowed with so long as the town stayed wide open. It was the thing we all loved about him, even if his main order of business was to keep King George the Third out of Illinois. That was one promise any politician could keep, because old George had been feeding the worms for a hundred years. He had a hard-on against anything that might put England back in control of the Loop. So to keep that from happening he returned Spike O'Donnell to the general population, which put Spike back in business, and his business as he saw it was to make Johnny Torrio pay for leaving him out of the arrangement that brought peace to the rackets. I'm not selling this as the McCoy. If you try to understand how Big Bill thought, you might wind up thinking like him, which is a one-way ticket to the booby hatch. We was all making it up as we went along, as I said, and Bill didn't have anything but rotten scrap to begin with.
Well, if you saw a movie in the past ten years you know how Spike ope
rated: cold-eyed punk swaggers into a South Side speakeasy pledged to Torrio, roughs up some poor bartender, got nothing on his mind but wiping up wet rings and twisting out the towel over a pitcher of beer; opens all the taps so the money spills out ankle deep, flowing out like jizzum going to waste, as the priests say, only in Latin so's it sounds like it came straight from Rome; signs the barkeep up for ten barrels of needle beer you wouldn't sell to a yellow dog, then goes on down to the next speak on the list in the notebook in the pocket of his hundred-dollar suit, and starts in all over again; I tell you, that Mick Jimmy Cagney had it all down cold. I'd like to meet him someday, buy him a bottle of Johnny's best. A couple of dozen stops on this punk's rounds, it starts to cut into the bottom line.
What death does to you, unless of course it's your own, it makes you take stock of the time you got, and I didn't plan to waste any waiting for Johnny to come around to what had to be done about the O'Donnells. I kept needling him. It wasn't as if we didn't have any talent: Willie White could blow out the candles on a birthday cake with his .38, and Jimmy Belcastro, Bomber we called him, could mix baking powder with vinegar and a handful of nails and clean out a roomful of crazy Micks before they finished drinking breakfast. But he didn't have to go to the pantry, on account of dynamite was cheap and easy to get. Then there was Frankie McErlane.
"Frankie?" Johnny says. "Frankie's a thug."
"What's Spike O'Donnell? Fight fire with fire."
"But where's it all end?"
"With Spike's head on a pike." See, I'd sucked up all that culture he force-fed me through his fairy professors, they'd lost their tenure diddling the teaching assistants. I read all about Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth and the Tower of London. When it came to bumping each other off, those limeys didn't even stop at family.
"I'm not so sure. Maybe we should have a sit-down."
"There's no sitting down with the Irish. You taught me that."
"Do what you have to do. I don't want to know anything about it till it's done." Which is what Pontius Pilate said, washing his hands. I had my first small doubts about Johnny in charge. "Leave it to me," I said. It was the second time I'd said that, and it had turned out all right, Diamond Jim underground and piles of jack for the survivors.
Frankie worked fast. This was 1923, and the troubles were just beginning, but none of us could know that. We were putting out a brush fire before we had to call in the ladder trucks.
The operators of all the South Side speaks were put on notice to call Frankie the minute any O'Donnells showed up. One night the call came, and he and three torpedoes trailed them through the broken glass and busted heads till they stopped to wet their whistles in Klepka's on South Lincoln. Three of the brothers skedaddled when the shooting started, but Jerry was slow. Frankie trotted him outside and blew off his head with a sawed-off. That was the shot heard 'round Chicago, the beginning of the beer wars.
Right from the start we were winning. Four or five of the Micks' strong-arms wound up in ditches that year, minus their heads also. Walter O'Donnell went down in Cicero early in '24 after giving a good account of himself in a gunfight; them cabbage-eaters got guts as strong as their livers. On September 25, 1925, a red-letter day in our history, Frankie fired the first tommy gun in town at Spike himself on the corner of Sixty-Third and Western, only he was new to it and Spike ran out from under the spray. I remember the cops scratched their heads over all the bullet holes. They thought they came from a busload of gunmen or else a shotgun with elephant rounds.
That Thompson was the berries, dropping a thousand Micks to the minute. It came out too late to use in France, so the company tried selling it to police departments, only the cops weren't having any, they were stuck on their hip guns and billies. The customers turned out to have names like Murray the Camel and Polack Joe. In Chicago it got so you hung your head if you weren't shot at with one at least once. Jack McGurn took his to bed with him, they said; maybe that's malarkey, but if it wasn't, his girls never complained. Jack and dames, he'd've been called "Machine Gun" even if he never picked one up. It all broke the heart of the inventor, General Thompson his handle was. He sold out his interest and retired to write his memoirs. "On the side of law and order" was the advertising pitch, no shit.
All this time, of course, the O'Donnells are trying to slug it out, but it's tough to lead a charge when you're carrying around a bull's-eye on your back, and they kept losing guys to our side. We already had them bug-ass Gennas, who had Johnny Scalise and Al Anselmi, they rubbed their bullets with garlic and puss so if the lead didn't kill you the blood poisoning would. I can't say it worked, because most of the guys they punctured didn't last more than a day, but the rumor about them bullets was enough to make you piss your pants just hearing their names. But I ducked a couple of slugs from an O'Donnell flivver down the street from the Metropole, and Johnny started keeping irregular hours and never took the same way home twice in a row.
About a month after Frankie whiffed Spike, he got the hang of his weapon and broadsided Spike's car just a block from the same spot. This time he wounded brother Tommy in the passenger's seat.
Spike took the hint then. I was beginning to think he never would. When the reporters came buzzing he said, "Life with me is just one bullet after another. I been shot at and missed so many times I've got a notion to hire out as a professional target." He took the next train east and didn't come back for two years. You don't have to shoot more than three out of four Irish to make your point.
This fight was overlapping other things. Life isn't a Saturday serial, with one chapter followed by the next. It's a jumble of what-you-call unrelated events. When we weren't potting at O'Donnells in the arcade we were building up our truck fleet, acquiring new routes, opening up more joints to handle the inventory. Jake Lingle wrote there were twenty thousand speaks in Chicago proper, counting walk-up flats and potato cellars where they cooked the stuff up on the premises, and Jake would know; he probably went to every one and drank a toast to the Anti-Saloon League. I took the train to Detroit to work out delivery details with the Purple Gang, who were trucking Old Log Cabin over the bridge from Canada. Them Jews was tough, and they didn't enjoy doing business with Italians.
Abe Bernstein told me to stay home next time and send a kike go-between or he'd ship me back in a box. I don't get sore. That hogwash you hear about me busting up furniture and screaming in mugs' faces over some little thing—sure, I made a show now and then, just to keep the crew in line, but that's all it was, good business practice, like any captain of industry puts on so they don't think he's getting soft like Diamond Jim. I even heard where I patted a couple of boys once with a baseball bat, which is newspaper hokum. In the yard in Atlanta I couldn't hit a fat pitch with a tennis racket. What I did in Detroit, I stayed around town a couple of days, making arrangements with some swell designers at General Motors for my armor-plated bus, then bought a round for the house at the bar in the Book-Cadillac Hotel, and sauntered on down to Michigan Central and bought a first-class ticket home. I don't run from Jews or Apache Indians.
The big order of business, so far as I was concerned, was setting up breweries. Beer was bigger money than whiskey, when you figure in all them thirsty day-laborers, slaughterhouse workers, longshoremen, and factory stiffs, and it justified the larger investment. A broke-down whore with a one-room apartment on East Seventy-First could cook up alky on her hot plate, but a brewery needs skilled labor, Germans mostly, a warehouse to hold a vat the size of Comiskey Park, a gangload of barrels, and a hefty layout for protection. You couldn't hide it—we were using army trucks, with green canvas sheets and chain drives, you could hear them flapping and rattling for blocks, and you could smell them long before you heard them, all that bubbling ferment, the brewery too. Somebody tried standing barrels of mothballs around the bay doors to soak up the stink, but it just smelled like a keg party in a closet. There wasn't anything for it but to pay off the harness bull on the beat. Fortunately they came cheap, at least in the begi
nning. You pay a guardian of the law a salary lower than the Jap you hire to cut your grass, you get what you pay for. I spent more time supervising a brewery setup than I did anything else. Mae made me strip in the laundry room and hang my clothes on the back porch to air out.
I got in a dumb scrape just when we were getting started that could have cocked up our entire operation. I bring that up so you don't get the impression I'm selling myself as a boy genius, never makes a wrong step. It got me my first notice in the press. I was drunk, not that that's any excuse, driving Johnny's brand-new green Locomobile. I ran it into a taxi double-parked on Randolph. I didn't know but that it was a trap set up by the O'Donnells, so I pulled a gun on the cabbie, flashing my honorary sheriff's badge, which Cook County gave out with Cracker Jacks. I got arrested. It didn't come to nothing, I paid a fine, using the Al Brown dodge, but the newspapers dug and still got it wrong. I was "Alfred Caponi" on page three. Johnny gave me blue hell over it: "I told you the first day to get some gorilla to carry your gun for you." He went on about what would have happened if I'd killed a square citizen, what that would do to all the plans we'd made. I earned that chewing out, but the worst thing that came of that dustup was I lost Maggie.
I loved that girl. Not the way I love Mae, mother of my child, the woman who held things together all the time I was in stir, the plot next to mine in Mount Olivet. A man can love two women different ways. Maggie was a pretty blonde, like Mae, and a tough Irish nut, like Mae, but she didn't smile much. She worked the cigar counter in the Metropole lobby. One day I stopped there when I was all set for cigars and asked her out.
"You're married, aren't you?" she asks.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Does your wife know what you're doing?"
The Confessions of Al Capone Page 35