The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  They said it was the second to last car in the convoy that stopped first. I don't see why it's important, but this one had plenty of witnesses and everybody wanted to get in his licks. A character in a khaki shirt and farmer's bib overalls gets out, kneels on the sidewalk, hoists a tommy to his shoulder, and brooms the restaurant back and forth. He empties the drum and strolls back to the car, which by now is blasting its horn, let's get the fuck outta here before we wake up the cops. Later I hear it's Pete Gusenberg in the overalls, Frank's brother, and as crazy a Jew as ever came wandering in from the desert. That gang was a hodgepodge affair, all mixed up with Irish and Jews and wops and Polacks, which Weiss was one, a Polack, Bugs Moran too, despite their names. All the tribes have risen up against me, like it says in the Good Book.

  When Frankie gave the all-clear and we got up, I couldn't believe what I saw. The Argonne Woods has come to Cicero. There isn't a pane of glass left in the place, a cup in its saucer. People are slipping and sliding in food spilled on the floor. Coffee's gushing out of holes in a big urn. There's shit floating in the air, feathers and sawdust from upholstered furniture torn to pieces in the vestibule. Customers are patting themselves all over, checking for wounds. You see them cartoons, a talking rabbit—thinks he's all right after getting shot at, then takes a drink of water and it squirts out of him like a watering can, you expect that's going to happen there in the Hawthorne. I mean, what kind of animal would risk pouring lead into a hundred strangers he's got no beef with just to get one guy? You can see what I'm up against.

  But the miracle is no one was killed. Weiss's mugs poured a thousand rounds into the place without so much as nicking a major artery. Louie Barko, an old Genna pal who'd seen the light and come over to sit in hotel lobbies and at the next table to see I got to live in peace, caught a slug in the shoulder, and a dame sitting in a car by the curb got a piece of glass in her eye, but apart from those things and some haberdashery and soiled underdrawers, the visiting team batted zero. It cost me five grand to save the dame's eyesight. I'd've billed Hymie, but the collection agencies were so busy I'd've wound up suing his estate as it turned out.

  The cops came along finally, to sweep up glass and count bullet holes. They grilled hell out of Louie Barko there in Cook County General with his arm in traction. I got my time downtown, along with Weiss and Schemer Drucci and Moran and whoever else they could scoop up; they already had Scalise and Anselmi in custody for shooting those dicks from Maxwell Street on Congress, though they didn't keep them long because the dicks forgot to identify themselves as officers and the jury agreed they thought they were defending themselves against a rival mob. The law and the gangs both liked Cadillacs and you needed a score card to tell 'em apart. The cops left the file open on the Hawthorne business and went on to other things because out of a hundred witnesses nobody fingered anybody; even the squares who got a good look at Pete Gusenberg wouldn't pick him out of the lineup.

  But everybody knew who was behind it. I knew, but I'm a reasonable man. I gave Weiss one last chance. That was a big shitty mess, and anybody in his right mind knew the papers and the Chicago Crime Commission wouldn't put up with a return match.

  But Hymie wasn't in his right mind. He was what rackets guys call a twenty-niner: one keg short of a truckload. Tony Lombardo was running the Unione Siciliana then, warming the seat left vacant by Angelo Genna, and I asked him to represent me at a meeting with Weiss in the Morrison Hotel, two weeks after the Hawthorne became temporarily uninhabitable. I knew Hymie wouldn't sit down with me, but everybody knew Tony and trusted him, even Micks. It was a fancy conference suite with a view, good cigars, real Scotch and brandy off the boat. Al wants peace, Tony said. You're both not even thirty yet, you got plenty of time to make your pile and live like Rockefeller, there's cash enough to go around. A solid-gold coffin looks swell, but it's no better to lay in than a pine box; common-sense stuff, you know, same sell Johnny made back before the O'Donnells upset the apple cart. I even threw in an offer to manage all the beer concessions north of Madison Street, which cut straight through the Loop, with more speaks than Weiss had bullets and no interference from me.

  Well, he wouldn't listen to money or reason. "Scalise and Anselmi killed O'Banion," he said. "Tell Capone to put 'em on the spot. That's the price of peace."

  Well, I wouldn't do that to a yellow dog, and I told Tony to tell him so. And just between you and me and the Atlantic Ocean, once word got out I'd sold two of my own like pieces of meat, my life'd be worth even less than it was with a maniac like Weiss running around. Also he'd never honor the deal, having a hard-on against everybody who had any connection with what happened to his dear old pal Deanie.

  So Weiss had to go. I expected it and had already taken steps.

  Normally I'd've given the job to Jack McGurn, who always reminded me a little of me when I was at his stage. I started him as a bodyguard at $150 a week, but he took to a tommy like Caruso took to Pagliacci, so he was wasted sitting around reading Happy Hooligan with a rod under his arm. He practiced out in the country until they said he could put a drumload through the knothole of a tree at thirty paces without touching the sides. I heard he killed twenty-two men, but if so it wasn't for me. I never gave the order for that many. A dozen's a nice round number for anybody. He dressed spiffy and was a devil with dames. Played the ukulele.

  But right at the time Tony Lombardo was talking peace to Weiss, Hymie's hotshots Frank and Pete Gusenberg followed Jack to the cigar store of the McCormick Hotel at Chicago Avenue and Rush and opened up on him with a tommy and a pistol in a phone booth.

  It took four pints of blood to keep his heart pumping and Machine Gun Jack wouldn't be strumming the ukulele for a while, much less make Hymie the Po-lack number twenty-three.

  I gave it to Frankie Rio. What the hell, a man's got to make his bones sometime, and he proved he was cool under fire. He cased out Hymie, who as it happened had a weakness for religion. He moved around a lot, never took the same route to the crapper twice running, but the one thing you could count on was he'd show up at Holy Name Cathedral, right across from O'Banion's old flower shop on North State. Two days after the talks broke down, Frankie rented a second-story room on the same side as the shop for eight bucks a week and changed the guard often. Far as the landlady knew, it was being used for poker games, which was a cottage industry then; an old bag named Romanian Annie put a celebrated twist on it by training her cat Ginny to snatch dollar bills off the table during games. As dodges go, it was airtight. Johnny always said there's nothing like a crooked front for throwing suspicion off a more serious criminal enterprise.

  Right away Frankie showed he had a gift. He committed Scalise and Anselmi right on the courthouse steps after they were sprung on the cop-killing deal, and he hired a first-rate wheel man for the getaway, a beer truck driver who was overqualified for that position, having outrun a hijacker only a couple of weeks earlier, which considering automotive realities was something rare. It was a ten-year-old Mack against a Packard Eight with a souped-up engine, but he had a downhill run, and with a full load and an operator with maracas, that's like putting a rocket on a roller skate. The dough was good and he needed it in a hurry. Frankie posted him at the corner in a Hudson Super Six.

  They waited six days. Then on the afternoon of October 11—three weeks to the day after Weiss's army hit the Hawthorne—a Cadillac cruises to a stop across the street from the florist's.

  Well, there's nothing much in that, but nobody gets out until a Buick comes around the corner and parks behind the Caddy. That makes it Weiss, whose bodyguards had bodyguards. He was just too cheap to buy top-drawer transportation for the second team.

  There's three men in his car besides Sam Peller, his driver, but Hymie's not hard to spot. He was scared of drafts and wore a tan camel's-hair overcoat most seasons and a homburg like Daddy Warbucks', and his ears stuck out like curb feelers; he had to put on earmuffs when the wind blew off the lake or he'd sail right over the Wrigley Building. Peller lets o
ut Pat Murray, his personal security, and behind him Hymie, William O'Brien, his mouthpiece, and Benny Jacobs, who got out the vote for Weiss's man in the Twentieth Ward. Nobody the world would miss.

  Hymie was in a hurry to get to church. I guess his sins hung heavy on him. He skips up the steps ahead of the others, and Scalise and Anselmi have to scramble if they're going to get a clear shot. No sweat, though: between John's chopper and Albert's pump gun, Weiss was hit ten times. Murray's liver is shot away, he's a goner, and O'Brien and Peller picked up some slugs. Jacobs didn't get a scratch, which isn't that always the way with politicians; Cermak was the only exception to that rule. Hymie's homburg is still rolling when that Super Six tears off carrying the guys that knocked him out from under it.

  So another whiz-bang funeral procession snarls up traffic downtown. Well, that Polack liked his parades, didn't he? He was twenty-eight, a year older than me. Rheumatism's not an issue in our trade.

  I sat out the services. I heard John Sbarbaro, the Prince of Undertakers, did a nifty job plugging up the holes, as why wouldn't he, having had plenty of practice on Deanie and the Gennas and O'Donnells? But with Moran and Drucci in attendance and things being what they were, I couldn't count on any of the old truces being in effect. Hymie's ward heeler was sore enough over Benny Jacobs getting scared, and grateful enough for the work Sbarbaro did on Hymie, to run the undertaker for municipal judge. He won, too.

  The cops found Scalise's tommy in the street where he ditched it and collected some shells from the rented room and a hat from the bed with a Cicero label in it, but nobody was arrested. That didn't stop the chief of police from tagging me in the press. I threw a shindig for all the reporters in town in my suite at the Metropole—booze, shrimp cocktails, girls—and stated my innocence for the record. I offered to turn myself in for questioning, but nobody took me up on it. And what did they write? "Gangdom literally shot piety to pieces." That line had Jake Lingle all over it. I sent him a case of Scotch in appreciation. Did I get a thank-you? No, but he didn't send back the hooch.

  What I felt like saying, what's the city pay for shooting mad dogs? I didn't tell you, I don't like to remember it, I still get nightmares, but I wandered outside the Hawthorne after the dust settled and before the cops arrived, I hear screaming coming from a parked car. Frankie tried to hold me back, but I said, "It's a flivver, for chrissake," meaning a Model T, no rackets guy'd be caught dead riding in one. This is the car I told you about, with the woman inside hurt. I go up to it and the man behind the wheel's talking. Clyde Freeman's the name, this is Anna, the little woman, and that's Clyde, Junior, he's live years old and just started kindergarten. We're in from Louisiana to see the races. He's saying all this like we just met in a bus station. Making chitchat, with a finger sticking through a hole in his hat in his hand, broken glass covering his lap. Junior's in the backseat, face red as a turnip, his nose is running; a slug grazed his knee and his stockings are plastered with blood and he's pissed his knickers. Mrs. Freeman, Jesus. Leaning over on the passenger's side in front with her face in both hands, blood slipping out between her fingers all down the front of her dress. I thought her face was gone. She's got a splinter of glass in her right eye; three inches long, the surgeon said later, it penetrated the brain. Horrible. But the worst part is Clyde, Senior, making casual conversation with his world shot to hell. He's hysterical but calm. I preferred the screaming and blubbering.

  Weiss. How much do you have to hate a man to be willing to destroy a hundred people you never met just to get him? He was a dead man from that moment. That peace conference was just a stall while the arrangements were being made.

  The heat was on: joints busted up and padlocked, small fry herded into police headquarters and bounced around the basement, editorials demanding martial law. Will Rogers said Chicago wouldn't let a crook in town until he agreed to rub out another crook. It was funny, but it brought pressure from Washington and Springfield. Harness bulls we'd been paying off for years shook their heads, said it was a damn shame, and swung the axe.

  In the rackets, cooler heads prevailed. That winter a stray stiff or two turned up, nobodies killing nobodies, and most of them tidily disposed of across the state line. If they ever took a census of the fresh dead in Indiana, they'd outnumber the living. I felt safe enough to plan my first family vacation since I left Brooklyn. But I was never so glad to see a year go out.

  The Weiss affair made me a national figure. I'm in headlines and newsreels, Walter Winchell mentions me on the radio. I'm a vice lord, a criminal kingpin, the Sultan of Sin.

  Did I say national? When the economy went bust in Germany, von Hindenburg blamed me. I'm a symbol of American gangsterism run amuck, he said, and shot some anarchists. I'm world news. Fame has its advantages. I got tables in reserve at all the best restaurants every night for me and my security, just in case I show up. When the Yankees are in town, Babe Ruth comes up to my box in Comiskey Park to sign a ball for Sonny. When I get back from vacation in Hot Springs, the band at the Hawthorne track strikes up "It's a Lonesome Old Town (When You're Not Around)" on my way to my seat; every soul in the bleachers comes to his feet, clapping. Quite a reception for a guy who less than ten years ago was roping in customers to visit Frankie Yale's girls in the back room of the Harvard Inn.

  Well, that's how the world saw it. But I'm a hunted man. Much as I like my new Caddy, it's a jailhouse on wheels, I can't walk down to the corner to buy a paper. You probably saw me up on the silver screen before the feature, loping across sidewalks and up courthouse steps, shoving cameras out of the way; I can't stop to jaw with the boys from the newsroom like I used to, not out in the open where I'm a swell target. When I moved from the Metropole into larger quarters at the Lexington, I had a boilermaker put a two-inch plate in the back of my desk chair, just in case the steel shutters on the windows didn't perform up to advertised standards. I installed a secret door into the office building next door so I could run down the fire stairs away from mad Micks and crazy Polacks. There's a friendly police car parked in front of the house on Prairie Avenue day and night, bodyguards following my eight-year-old kid down the street while he plays kick-the-can. I'd trade the Canada route to be able to take a Sunday picnic with my family.

  I announced my retirement.

  Johnny was right. The dough ain't worth it if you can't pop into Marshall Field's and spend some of it on a bracelet for your wife or your girl without sending in scouts to pat down all the stock boys. The last straw was when Anton the Greek, who owned the Hawthorne restaurant, left me one night to greet some customers and showed up the next day frozen in a ditch. Troopers had to chip him out with ice picks. That was senseless. The Greek hadn't a thing to do with my business apart from getting a loan to fix up the place after the thing in September. Drucci and Moran couldn't get to me directly, so they set out to hurt me by targeting a friend. The new year's only a week old and already it looks like 1926 all over again. So I brought the press into my home and whipped 'em up a mess of spaghetti and said so long.

  "Where you going, Al?"

  "Hot Springs, Arkansas. I'm gonna take the waters." Well, that got a laugh, Al Capone mentioning himself and water in the same sentence. They didn't believe me, and I was serious as the clap. But it was too late. I should've gotten out when Weiss had the upper hand, but you can't tell that to a Five Points boy. I had to get my lick in.

  Schemer Drucci read the papers. If I thought he ever got past the funnies, I maybe would've considered before answering that last question. He followed me to Hot Springs and made a pass at me with a shotgun. I'd left Mae and Sonny unpacking at the hotel and ducked into a place with Frankie for an Orange Julius, and when we came out I heard a boom and something set the wind chimes rattling under the porch roof two feet from my head.

  Drucci scrammed, the yellow bastard, not having fixed the locals to let him plead not guilty on grounds of defending himself against wind chimes.

  So it was a short retirement, but at least I got the poisons out of
my body.

  Big Bill Thompson, that wonderful dope, was back running for mayor against Square Deal Dever, whose reformers had crowded me out into the suburbs, and Bill had history on his side. One term of honest government is as much as any electorate has patience for. Ever since they kept record, far back as the Roman Republic—I did a shitload of reading in Alcatraz, after that first month when they don't let you read or do nothing but sit in your cell, jack off, and think about the mistakes you made in life—no reform ticket ever succeeded itself. To show whose corner I'm in I contributed six hundred grand to the Thompson campaign. He shooed right in, but Schemer never got the benefit. The day before the election he barged into an opposition leader's office, roughed up his secretary, and dumped over filing cabinets and shit, spraying paper the way he liked to spray bullets. A dick named Healy cuffed him, but on the way to the station house Drucci tried to grab his gun and Healy dealt him four slugs off the bottom.