The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  Drucci served in the military, though I think he sat out the war in Kentucky. Still, he got the rifle salute in addition to flowers enough to carpet Flanders Field. Hell, I kicked in a nice bouquet and showed up at graveside in my stubble. I tell you, none of his schemes paid off, right to the end.

  Another quiet spell broke out after that, at least locally. In Brooklyn on the first day of July 1928, a carload of mugs chased Frankie Yale's bulletproof Lincoln down Forty-Fourth Street and unloaded a tommy through a window he left open because of the heat. It was the first machine-gun killing in New York, so naturally my name came up. It got out I had Frankie put down for hijacking our shipments from Canada because he wasn't making enough off our agreement. Sure, there was some knickknacking going on, but who am I to set the dogs on a pal when every cop and judge on the payroll is hitting me up for more and more graft? You put up with a certain amount of chiseling to avoid distraction. Consider it a business tax.

  Yale was payoff for O'Banion. The North Siders took advantage of the lull in hostilities at home to send personnel out of state and shake his hand the way he shook Deanie's. It broke my heart. He gave me my leg up. It was like losing my old man all over again.

  I expected peace then. All the original crowd was dead or satisfied, and not even the square citizens could claim I had a hand in ringing down the curtain on Drucci. We had a friend in office, who'd take any heat and turn it into a nutty debate over King George III, and the reporters got such a boot out of that they forgot all about the issue that started it. But you can figure all the angles and still overlook the human element.

  Nobody could allow for George Moran. I read somewhere where I said, "They don't call that guy Bugs for nothing." I don't remember saying it, but I'll take credit just the same. Who'd deny giving voice to a practical sentiment?

  Actually it was Bugger Moran, on account of rumors about his personal life; but you couldn't get a word like that into a family paper, so they bobbed it.

  He was screwy, though, as bad as Weiss, but smarter than Drucci, which is a dangerous combination. He came at me from the side, trying to put his man Joe Aiello in Tony Lombardo's place on top of the Unione Siciliana. I'm starting to come out of my hole, scouting winter property in Florida, when Moran's punks Frank and Pete Gusenberg pushed up behind Tony at the corner of Madison and Dearborn and put three apiece in his head from .45s, square in the middle of the Loop during the afternoon rush hour. They was dum-dums, soft-nosed slugs cut with a cross so they'll fly apart on entry and do maximum damage, messy thing in a crowd like that. The best dry cleaner in town can't sponge blood and brains out of flannel. Joey Lolordo, Tony's bodyguard, told me he picked a piece of Tony's skull off his lapel. Tony and me was like that. I cried big snotty tears next to his coffin.

  But I blew my nose and ran Joe Aiello out of town with just a show of guns and a sharp word. You don't waste grand strategy on a shit who'd bribe a waiter to put arsenic in your linguini; which he did, at the Lexington. I had the trots for a week and the waiter left in a hurry to visit his cousins in Sicily.

  With Joe out of the picture I moved fast to put in Joey Lolordo's brother Patsy for Unione president. I couldn't serve, being Neapolitan by blood, but Patsy was Sicilian on both sides and had everybody's respect as a cool customer and the voice of reason, but a man you didn't cross: molto virile. He owned a tenement on West North Street, a roach house, but his flat was all silver and silk, with Persian rugs and a marble-topped table he swore belonged to one of the Medicis. He spoke five languages, including ancient Greek and Latin. A class act, Patsy. Did all his killings close up with a knife.

  He got the votes, and he chaired a conference in Cleveland to air out grievances inside the brotherhood; Charley Luciano and Frank Costello attended, along with half the ginzos in the country. Patsy had Johnny Torrio's gift of persuasion, but his vision was bigger. This Syndicate you're always hearing about was his idea. But he only lasted four months. Aiello, the weasel, waited till I went to Florida again, then slunk back into Chicago and dropped in on him at home; to make peace, he said. He drank his wine, ate his food, smoked one of his cigars, and fed him three pills from a .38 right there in his own parlor. Patsy's wife comes running in from the kitchen in time to see Aiello slipping a velvet pillow under Patsy's head. Ipocrita.

  I threw a chair through the window of my suite in the Ponce de Leon when I got the call. I got drunk, busted up the joint, cut my hand on a mirror. Frankie Rio had to call down for towels to stop the bleeding. Patsy and I weren't that close, but I was thinking about my own situation, my wife, my little boy. You don't kill a man in his home, where he lives with his family: the Law of Vendetta is clear on that. The Irish, the Polacks, they don't care, they're animals, but Aiello knew the rules. Nobody in town would raise a squawk if I stood that pustola in front of city hall and fed him his balls with a fork.

  As it happened, though, I had to postpone the satisfaction. That was January 1929, and on St. Valentine's Day something came along that kept me busy for a year and a half.

  1944

  THE ETERNAL GANGSTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  "ARE YOU TIRED?" VASCO ASKED. CAPONE'S NARRATIVES OFTEN INCLUDED unpredictable silences while he gathered his scrambled thoughts, but this one had stretched more than a minute.

  Capone, hands in the pockets of his robe, leaned back, then lunged forward from the waist, spitting his spent wad of gum ten feet out over the bay. Nothing struck at it when it plopped down, but watching its trajectory Vasco saw a torpedo-shaped shadow gliding under the surface nearby. Instinctively he drew back from the waterline, wondering how far a shark would charge onto dry land after prey.

  It was an abstract fear, nothing more. He was absorbed in something Capone had said minutes earlier, something about Holy Name Cathedral and a Hudson Super Six, that had struck him like a blow to the heart.

  They had wandered down to the beach. Behind them, Mae, Rose, and Sonny had disappeared along with the food and refreshments; clearly, the incident with Nitti's man Verdi had postponed brunch.

  "I ain't tired," Capone said. "I'm feeling like I could swim clear to Havana and fuck a tango dancer. There's nothing like a little scrap to put lead in a man's pencil.

  "Not that that counts as a scrap. I wouldn't give the sweat off my left nut for a dozen of these punks that came up since Repeal. Either one of the Gusenbergs would've told me to go screw my sister with both eardrums blown out and a bellyful of their own teeth."

  He had to ask while Capone was still in a mood to talk about the past; there was no predicting when the clouds of the present would steal across his brain, obscuring the details. At the same time the approach had to be oblique. Ailing or not, the man at his side had spent many years deflecting questions intended to incriminate him. A mistake in timing, a revealing tone, and he would retreat into his shell, perhaps permanently. Vasco decided to start where Capone had stopped and work his way back. "You left St. Valentine's Day hanging."

  "I don't like to bore people. You can read up on it in the Sunday section every February. You'd think nothing else ever happened that month. Hell, the Maine blew up in February, but you only see it in history books. I got an alibi for that day. I wasn't in my mother's belly yet."

  "I'd like to hear your side of the massacre story."

  "Worst thing that ever happened."

  Vasco held his tongue. He hadn't expected remorse.

  "If it wasn't for that fucked-up mess, I'd have sat out my sentence in Atlanta, where they let your friends visit and you get to keep pictures of your family. Where they treat you like a jailbird, sure, but it's better than a hunk of meat. They built that rock in the ocean, they said, to hold the worst of the worst, kidnappers and murderers and rapists: animals. I forgot to pay my taxes. But they didn't lock me up for that. It was for that thing in the garage, where I never set foot."

  "Were you upset when you didn't get Bugs Moran?"

  Capone had been staring out to sea. Now he turned and fixed his gaze on Vasco.
Gray eyes reflected blue sky on a bright day, but his remained wintry. They seemed to draw from ice at the bottom of a shaft where sunlight never reached and blind things swam in black water. "I hate to disappoint you, Padre, but that one came as much of a surprise to me as to everybody else. I'm clean."

  Vasco met his eyes. Staring contests didn't intimidate him for some reason, but he lacked the talent to read an experienced liar's features. A patch of skin twitched where the long scar almost met the corner of his mouth, but that was nothing new; Vasco assigned it to nerve damage from that long-ago injury. The face itself was immobile. Al Capone and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre were connected in the public consciousness as surely as Custer and the Little Big Horn, Napoleon and Waterloo. Initial victory that it was, cutting the heart out of the O'Banion/Weiss/Moran gang at a single stroke, it had brought him down in the end as decisively as any battlefield defeat. Seven men slain in a busy commercial block in broad daylight had proven too much for even Chicago's corrupt system to digest; after nearly ten years of mobocracy, the outcry rose at last to the point where Capone had to be sacrificed on the altar of justice. To separate him from the central outrage of that spectacularly lawless era was inconceivable.

  He rejected the premise. Capone was playing cat-and-mouse; apparently for his own amusement, because he'd just confessed to a key role in multiple murders, and a man could burn only once. It was the bloodiest chapter yet in his scarlet-soaked memoirs, as well as his most candid. His condition had progressed beyond personal caution. Joe Verdi's ordeal should have prepared his listener for what would follow. He was still shaken and wondering where that confrontation would lead.

  "But if you didn't..." He left the question unfinished.

  "I studied on it for years. It became a personal hobby. See, the cops and the papers can jump to all the conclusions they want, but I never had that luxury. Hit the wrong guy and you just make more enemies on top of the one you should've hit in the first place. They said at first it was cops. Two of the shooters had on Chicago uniforms and their Caddy was fixed to look like a police car. I was inclined that way myself, remembering the dicks from the Maxwell Street station that jumped Devil Mike Genna with the purpose of hanging it on me. When that theory didn't pan out, it was the Detroit Purple Gang. That's still with us, years after it all came winding around to me: I hired 'em from Abe Bernstein because Moran's boys knew all the locals by sight and wouldn't let 'em get within a block. It makes sense, except like I said Abe and me got along about as well as Jiggs and Maggie. I'd never ask, and he'd never deliver.

  "It might have been out-of-towners in the blue. On the other hand, who really looks at the face under a policeman's cap? I'm more interested in the guys in plainclothes, who led the shooting. My people on the force told me that when the first officers came to investigate, the stink of garlic was almost as strong as the gun smoke. Everybody knew John Scalise and Albert Anselmi rubbed garlic on their bullets in case lead poisoning didn't finish the job. So that was another nail in my coffin, because they'd been with me so long, and anyway I'm the guy that goosed Mrs. O'Leary's cow."

  Capone chuckled, sounding almost jolly, turned, and began walking along the beach. He kept his head down as if he were looking for seashells. Vasco fell into step beside him. The shoreward wind was stiffening, blowing away the summer fog, and he had to strain to catch his companion's words, spoken in a low voice and directed toward the sand at his feet.

  "You can look at a thing so long, from all the angles, and get drunk on figuring, and hungover to boot. I did, and people say I had imagination. Cops don't. Reporters don't, or they'd write novels instead of fish wrap. Trouble was, everybody was coming up with suspects, then finding reasons to fit. That's backwards. Reasons come first. Who gained? Well, me, Moran's the pit in my olive, the one I keep biting down on and cracking a molar. But the job was bitched up. The pit's still there. Does that sound like me? If you go by the box scores, I'm way ahead. They miss, I don't. Also I could eliminate myself because I knew it wasn't me. That made two of us, me and the guilty party.

  "It wasn't cops," Capone went on. A week after the fireworks, a hook-and-ladder crew put out a garage fire on Wood Street and found a burned-out Cadillac rigged up like a police car. The place happened to belong to John Sbarbaro, who'd laid aside his embalming tools for a gavel; but he'd rented it out through an agency to a man who gave his name as Rogers, so the judge was cleared as an accomplice, though it was an embarrassment to the bench. The fire marshal said it looked like somebody touched off the gas tank while cutting up the car, or maybe a spark from the torch landed on some liquor that was being stored in the garage. I'm satisfied it was the car used in the slaughter job on North Clark. Do you mind switching places, Padre? I'm supposed to avoid chills."

  Jerked from his listening attitude, Vasco took Capone's place on the ocean side, becoming his windbreak.

  "Thanks. Sen-Sen?"

  He stared at the narrow flat box his host had produced from a robe pocket, shook his head. Capone shook some of the buckshot-size bits into his mouth and chewed. He stood with his back to the island, Vasco facing him with the bay behind him. Vasco wasn't fooled; a speedboat flying the Stars and Stripes was razzing fifty yards out, parallel to the beach. He was acting as a human shield in case there was a high-powered rifle aboard. Old habits died hard, but not as hard as Al Capone.

  It made his back itch. But he'd have felt even more vulnerable with his back toward Chicago.

  "Who gained?" Capone repeated. "Moran, maybe. He's in bed with the sniffles, which some said was an alibi for setting up his own crew. Wasn't he seen big as life, slurping coffee with Willie Marks, his labor guy, and Ted Newberry, who ran his book, in a drugstore up the street when the hammer fell on Valentine's Day? Nuts to that. Even if his boys were double-crossing him, he wouldn't take 'em all out at once and tell the world he was wide open; he'd do it piece by piece and line up replacements first. Anyway, who'd they double-cross him with? I was the only one left, and nobody from the North Side had come to me.

  "No. There was only one person in Chicago with the brains to set up a deal that complicated, the guts to go through with it, and a reason to do it in the first place."

  "Jack McGurn."

  He'd surprised himself as much as Capone, whose breakfront grin shattered the poker face. The name had sprung to his lips without process of thought.

  "Now, how'd you come up with him?"

  "The Gusenbergs were two of the men gunned down in the garage. You said they were the ones who ambushed McGurn in a telephone booth in the McCormick Hotel in 1926. They shot him with a pistol and a machine gun and put him in the hospital."

  Capone nodded and chewed Sen-Sen. "I think it was the tommy set him off. He figured he had the market cornered. He was shacked up with a blonde in the Stevens Hotel when the cops pulled 'em in for questioning, but they couldn't shake her story that he hadn't left her side since they checked in at the end of January. I didn't much like him hiding behind a dame, spoiling her reputation; even a slut deserves the benefit of the doubt. But I'm a last-century boy and he was a sheik. The cops let him go because they'd pegged him as a shooter, but I knew from that moment he was the little piggy that stayed home. Jack never spent four weeks with one woman in his life."

  "Did you ask him?"

  "Why? I was sure, and in my circle you don't let on you're not even when you aren't. Anyway the ketchup was spilt, and the whole town knew he was my right bower, so it reflected on me no matter how it came out. Also I think he was ashamed of what a sloppy job it was. Christ, they killed a nickel-an-hour mechanic and an optometrist; everything but the dog. There was no point rubbing it in. I got to say Jack was no slouch at mopping up after. Cops in Indiana pulled Scalise and Anselmi out of a ditch in Hammond three months later. I got the rap for them, too. They said I used a baseball bat."

  Vasco knew this for subterfuge. His father had witnessed the beating. Here in his extremity Capone seemed to have become fastidious about his legacy; hands-
on atrocities were beneath him. He must have taken particular relish in punishing them for such a costly mistake.

  "What about Joe Aiello?"

  "Joe made good. He got to be president of the Unione Siciliana."

  Capone fell silent then, grinning with flecks of black licorice caught in his teeth.

  Vasco didn't press him. In October 1930, Aiello had walked out of an apartment house owned by a business associate known as Patsy Presto, straight into the crossfire from two machine-gun nests set up on the street corners. He'd looked anything but surprised in his morgue photos, one eyelid drooping in a solemn wink where a bullet had torn through the socket.

  "He had a train ticket to Texas in his pocket when he left office," Capone said. "I was in Philly at the time, serving a year with Frankie Rio in the City of Brotherly Love for carrying concealed weapons. That put me one up on Jack McGurn, who had to marry his blonde alibi so she couldn't be forced to testify against him for Valentine's Day. I was free after ten months."

  "You engineered your own arrest." Which was the official theory, never corroborated by its subject.

  Nor was it yet. "I went straight in without filing for appeal. I had Johnny's example to thank for that. He asked for time to put his affairs in order before going in on the Volstead violation, and it was during that time Weiss and Moran jumped him with shotguns." He closed his lips, smiling tightly at a sudden memory. "Jake Lingle went berserk when he found out I'd been released and he missed the scoop for the Tribune. He threatened Ralph. My brother, Bottles, who couldn't run a bluff past Shirley Temple. It wasn't long after that Jake ran into a bullet in the pedestrian tunnel under Randolph Street. He was into his bookies for a bundle, but they liked me for that, too, and all on account of he showed up on the slab wearing one of my diamond belt buckles. I ask you, who gives a guy a gift with his initials on it in sparklers, then a slug in the skull?"