Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  Basile leaned over to Ness.

  “The silk-shirted Italian,” he whispered, “has just asked ‘Johnny’ whether or not he should let you have the knife in the back.”

  Basile’s tone convinced Ness the threat was real. He sat frozen, blood pumping, fear washing over him.

  “I felt young and alone at that minute,” he recalled of a rare time when he ever truly feared for his life on the job, with no choice but to sit tight and wait for the blade.

  Basile was coiled to throw himself at the killer if he made any move, while Nabers eyed the gangster grimly, fingering a pistol in his pocket, all but daring the man to try something.

  Giannoni watched in alarm as the standoff developed. He had every reason to distrust these feds, but a bloodbath was the last thing he wanted. Finally he raised a hand and called off the killer. The group agreed on a one-time payoff of $100 per still.

  The special agents accepted with thanks, then—Nabers keeping the gangsters covered—headed quickly out to their Cadillac. They sped out of the Heights, shudders of relief broken by dark laughter.

  To a man like Basile—already living on borrowed time—the little band had come much too close to meeting the kind of end these Heights gangsters would not hesitate to provide. Basile warned Ness and Nabers to wrap up their case and get out while they could. But the agents knew it wasn’t that simple.

  They still had work to do.

  The front gate.

  (Authors’ Collection.)

  Bathhouse of Capone’s Palm Island mansion, Miami Beach, Florida.

  (Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection.)

  Nine

  Winter 1927–Summer 1928

  “In December of 1927,” wrote Chicago journalist Fred Pasley, “a looker-on at the Chicago scene would have concluded that Al Capone was pretty comfortably ensconced, pretty well content with himself and the world . . . master of all he surveyed.”

  Less than three years after taking over the Outfit, Capone had made Torrio’s vision of a cooperative, corporate-style underworld a reality. A government estimate found the Capone organization took in $105 million a year. Most of that money—some $60 million—came from bootlegging, the rest from gambling, vice, and various other rackets.

  “No accurate estimate is possible as to the amount Capone was pocketing,” Pasley wrote in 1930, “but those in his confidence have put it at $30,000,000.”

  Capone spent as if his financial resources were endless, gambling compulsively, throwing away small fortunes on races and crap games. Although he should have had the benefit of insider information, he lost consistently, and when he did win, he would either gamble the money away or spend it on a good time.

  In 1927, the ganglord said he’d lost a million and more on the horses in the past two years. And, he said, “if someone handed me another million, I’d put it right on the nose of some horse that looked good to me.”

  Within a couple years, he would tell reporter Alfred “Jake” Lingle of the Tribune he’d blown about $7.5 million since arriving in Chicago. Another estimate put Capone’s gambling losses at around $10 million. But Capone never stayed depressed about such figures for long.

  “The winnings did not interest Capone,” Pasley wrote. “It was the excitement. He was a gambling addict.”

  Plenty of other Americans chased the same compulsion at the tail end of the Roaring Twenties, as the frenzy of speculation on Wall Street pushed the country to the peak of prosperity, on paper. But Capone refused to play that game: he considered the stock market “a racket.”

  He had plenty of other ways to blow his money. Sometimes Capone and his entourage would take over a speakeasy, paying off the manager to lock up the joint before declaring, “This is our night.” Over the course of the evening, Al and his pals might run up a tab of as much as $5,000.

  “Every nightclub you went to,” recalled a former dancer with the Ziegfeld Follies, “you saw Al with about two other men and three women at the table.”

  Capone always appeared impeccably dressed and “very much of a gentleman,” taking childish delight in being the center of attention. A more skeptical observer described him as “really a bigger boob than any small towner who comes in from the sticks to do Chicago in one night.”

  Often he would hold court as politicians came to pay their respects like vassals to their feudal lord, the gangster considering himself “big business” as he ordered more champagne. “Capone likes that sort of thing,” wrote one Chicago journalist.

  Capone loved music, too, particularly opera, with a passion for Giuseppe Verdi, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and especially Aida. Attending the theater on opening night became a ritual, requiring as many as eight seats for his bodyguard retinue, whose eyes were everywhere but on stage.

  One theatergoer complained about sitting right behind Capone “in the direct line of fire.” The manager could only sympathize—he didn’t like having the gangsters around, but they bought the best seats.

  Capone also drank in jazz, lavishly tipping musicians, who regarded him as a source of fun, excitement, and cash.

  His speakeasies catered almost exclusively to whites, but he opened the stages to premier jazz talent, showcasing Chicago’s best black musicians. These illicit bars—particularly brother Ralph’s Cotton Club in Cicero—featured the likes of trumpet legend Louis Armstrong, who remembered Al as a “nice little cute fat boy.”

  But Capone’s belief that anyone could be bought led him to treat black performers as something akin to property. When he assigned two bodyguards for famed pianist Earl Hines, the implication was the African-American musician “belonged” to the Outfit.

  Another time, Capone asked black clarinetist Johnny Dodds to play a particular tune. When Dodds admitted he didn’t know it, the Big Fellow tore a $100 bill in two and stuck one half in the musician’s pocket.

  “Nigger,” he said, “you better learn it for next time.”

  One January night, four hoodlums kidnapped pianist Fats Waller, sticking a gun in his stomach and hustling him into an automobile. They brought the terrified musician to a party, showed him a piano, and told him to start playing. Waller did so, soon realizing this was a birthday revel for Capone—the gangster was a fan, and the boys had delivered Fats as a present.

  Waller “swung it so hard, Capone kept him there several days, shoving hundred-dollar bills into his pocket per every request played, and keeping his glass filled with vintage champagne.”

  In late 1927, singer-comedian Joe E. Lewis left his gig at the Green Mill nightclub for a more lucrative engagement. Capone enforcer Jack McGurn, who owned a sizable stake in the Mill, threatened “to take [Lewis] for a ride” if he didn’t change his mind. But the comic brushed him off.

  Soon, Lewis was beaten in his hotel room by three armed invaders, his skull cracked by a pistol butt. His assailants sliced his jaw up to the ear, and carved bloody gashes in his neck and scalp, leaving Lewis unable to speak, brain damage robbing him of the ability to read or write.

  Eventually Lewis recovered and resumed performing, thanks to Capone. The gangster kept Lewis afloat with a gift of $10,000, even offering to help the comedian open his own cabaret.

  “Why the hell didn’t you come to me when you had your trouble?” Capone asked Lewis. “I’d have straightened things out.”

  Future actor-director Orson Welles, who hung around Chicago’s theaters as a student in the late 1920s, said Capone and other gangsters made a special effort to ingratiate themselves with stage performers.

  “Capone used to take four rows at the opening night of every play in Chicago and come backstage and see everybody,” Welles said. “They were horrible people—I never thought they were glamorous or interesting or anything—but there they were, part of the scene, and so one got to know them.”

  Famed vaudevillian Harry Richman recalled being so terrified having Capone in the front row, he almost didn’t go on. Afterward, Capone came backstage and embraced the performer, saying, “Richman,
you’re the greatest!”

  The entertainer joined Capone at a party, and—after considerable champagne—Richman found himself enthralled: “It was hard for me to believe that this man had been responsible for all the horrible things I’d heard about him.”

  Many people who encountered Capone in a nightclub or a speakeasy felt the same. They met a man so unlike the demon in the papers they couldn’t help but be disarmed. Fred Pasley described the social Capone as “a fervent handshaker, with an agreeable, well-nigh ingratiating smile, baring a gleaming expanse of dental ivory; a facile conversationalist; fluent as to topics of the turf, the ring, the stage, the gridiron, and the baseball field . . . generous—lavishly so, if the heart that beat beneath the automatic harnessed athwart the left armpit were touched.”

  Stories abounded of Capone’s generosity, like the Christmas baskets handed out to girls who went to school with his sister, Mafalda. A damp and disheveled newsboy once approached Capone on a rainy night and got twenty bucks for his remaining papers. People told tales of going to Capone after robberies, only to have their property returned intact.

  To Capone’s defenders—a growing legion of admirers Pasley and others christened “Capone fans”—such stories proved the gangster’s inherent decency.

  A socialite spoke of Capone “with tears in her eyes,” novelist Mary Borden wrote. Borden fully expected “the hungry and ragged” recipients of Capone’s generosity to, “with a catch of the throat, mumble the maudlin words, ‘Good-hearted Al,’ ” but seeing “the petted and pampered daughters of Chicago’s old families . . . moved to tears by the . . . bootlegger’s big heart” left her deeply unsettled.

  Capone could afford to throw money around. Comedian Milton Berle told of shaking Al’s hand after a performance, only to come away with a palm full of hundred-dollar bills. Berle demurred, claiming he didn’t need the money.

  “I don’t need it either,” Capone replied.

  “Everybody was making money,” recalled a musician who played in his clubs. “And it was because of Al Capone. . . . Plenty work, plenty money, plenty girls, plenty this and plenty of that. And everybody was happy.”

  Away from his wife and Prairie Avenue, Capone continued to chase other women, including prostitutes, some in their teens. Taking pains not to be seen or photographed with them was Al’s idea of protecting Mae’s feelings.

  But after he took up with a platinum-blonde lover, Mae responded by dyeing her hair the same shade. Capone first saw her new look on an infrequent visit home for Sunday dinner. Mrs. Capone meant to silently humiliate him before the rest of the family, but he only complimented her. She continued to bleach her hair until old age.

  “Those who have known Capone for years grant him qualities—a few—that would be acceptable in anyone,” Chicago journalist Edward Dean Sullivan wrote. “He has concentration and executive ability which many possessors of better trained minds might envy. He is not petty. He is generous, foolishly so. He is intensely loyal. He has a good memory and is appreciative. He talks little, but when he has uttered a few sounds you have heard something.

  “The rest of him,” Sullivan said, “is yours for a nickel.”

  In the mid-1920s, Al and Ralph Capone purchased a secluded property near a lake in northern Wisconsin. They sank over a quarter of a million in the place, converting an old house into a well-fortified compound where Al could swim under the watchful eye of a guard tower. But in winter months, Capone looked south.

  At considerable expense, he rented a house in Miami Beach for his family and bodyguards. The vacationing owners had no idea “Al Brown” was Capone until a shipboard radio news dispatch revealed it. The couple spent their winter worried about what would be left of their lovely home, picturing broken furniture, shattered china, ruined objets d’art, and bullet-riddled walls.

  The couple returned to find their home its usual beautiful self, contents undamaged. In the cabinets, however, dozens of new sterling sets and chinaware awaited. The only annoyance was a $500 phone bill. A few days later a slim, attractive blonde, dressed rather simply, arrived in an expensive motorcar, to drop off a thousand-dollar bill to take care of the phone charge, telling them to keep the change.

  Capone also rented a high-priced office suite in downtown Miami atop the Hotel Ponce De Leon, getting to know its manager, Parker Henderson Jr., twenty-four, son of a former mayor. Capone impressed the young man as the rare celebrity who wasn’t full of himself.

  Soon, the young hotel manager was gambling and drinking alongside his famous tenant, and running his errands, including picking up (and cashing) money orders from Chicago for “Albert Costa.” Parker now sported a diamond-studded belt buckle, a gift the gangster gave his closest pals.

  Miami, with its dog tracks and barely concealed casinos, was much to Al’s liking—his wife and child enjoying the outdoors, the climate almost Mediterranean. With those who sought to kill him far away, he could at last sit back and enjoy the fruits of his hard work, like any respectable man of business.

  Florida might also provide the solution to a long-brewing concern. On Prairie Avenue, Al’s mother, Theresa, played matriarch, doing all the cooking and taking charge of housework while Mae tended to Sonny. Because of the boy’s ailments—and security issues—he was schooled at home till the seventh grade. The friction between Mae and Theresa became unbearable, with Capone’s spoiled sister Mafalda adding to the stress. Mae and Sonny needed their own place, and Miami seemed the answer.

  But the City Council and local newspaper were troubled by the idea of Al Capone becoming a Miamian. Only the mayor, a real estate agent, could see the advantage of pumping Chicago money into a city suffering the aftermath of a destructive hurricane and a land boom gone bust.

  In January 1928, Capone paid a visit to the police chief, arriving quietly without his usual bodyguards.

  “Let’s lay the cards on the table,” he said. “You know who I am and where I come from. Do I stay or must I get out?”

  The chief said, “You can stay as long as you behave yourself.”

  “I’ll stay,” Capone replied, “as long as I’m treated as a human being.”

  After this meeting, Al held an off-the-cuff press conference: “I’ve been hounded and pushed around for days. . . . All I have to say is that I’m orderly. Talk about Chicago gang stuff is just bunk.”

  Miami, Capone said, was “the garden of America, the sunny Italy of the new world, where life is good and abundant, where happiness is to be had even by the poorest. I am going to build or buy a home here and I believe many of my friends will also join me. . . . If I am invited, I will join the Rotary Club.”

  With the help of Parker Henderson and the real-estate-agent mayor, Capone went house hunting. They led him to man-made Palm Island and one of many boom-era mansions—93 Palm Avenue, built by Clarence Busch of St. Louis’s Anheuser-Busch.

  Through Henderson, in Mae’s name, Capone met the $40,000 asking price. Secluded, secure, the mansion had fourteen rooms and a wide enclosed porch on a 300-by-100-foot plot in the shade of a dozen royal palms. The stucco Spanish-style compound included a gatehouse bridging the driveway.

  The public howled—not only was Capone moving in, the mayor had been his realtor! Al reached for his wallet, contributing to local causes and political campaigns. That helped settle the rumbling.

  But when representatives from the local Community Chest refused his thousand-dollar donation, due to “very general and wide-spread opposition,” the newly minted Miamian was dismayed.

  “I wanted a home,” Capone said. “I bought one. And what happens? They tell me I’m not wanted. Yet they take my money. The merchants take it. The grocer takes it. The builders take it.”

  Meanwhile, police kept the Palm Island place under surveillance, recording license plate numbers.

  “They threaten to arrest every member of my family that they can find,” Capone complained. “What do they want me to do? Get an airplane and live up in the clouds?”

 
; The mansion, or “Palm Island,” became a shared project for Al and Mae. Capone spent more than $100,000 adding a swimming pool—largest in the state—outbuildings, and security features, including a concrete fence. Mae lavishly furnished the house with gilded replicas of Louis XIV furniture and expensive trinkets. An oil portrait of Al and Sonny in the living room testified to Capone’s love for his boy, as did the cabin cruiser, Sonny and Ralphie, docked at the house, taking its name from the sons of Capone and his brother Ralph.

  Still, Miami offered its own enticements. At the races, Capone found another mistress, whose black hair soon became platinum blonde. He plied her with gifts and money, made sure never to be photographed with her; but Mae almost certainly knew.

  That seems to have been all right with Mrs. Capone, who had chosen to end any sexual relationship with her husband, her syphilis seemingly subsiding. They still shared a bed on those rare occasions when they slept under the same roof, which was as far as their physical intimacy went.

  The purchase of the Palm Island property represented a shift in the couple’s relationship. Mae and Sonny would stay in Florida year-round, while Al divided his time among Chicago, Miami, and various hideouts. She would always love her husband, but Mae’s disappointment with him was clear.

  “Your father broke my heart,” she would say to their son. “Don’t you break my heart, too. Don’t do anything like what he did.”

  Back in Chicago, a rising tide of violence announced the approaching election of April 10, 1928. The city had seen plenty of campaign bloodshed before, but the brazenness of these attacks—and the repeated use of small round bombs, nicknamed “pineapples”—now captured international attention, branding this the “Pineapple Primary.”

  Though neither man was running for reelection, Mayor Thompson’s slate faced a primary challenge from Republican reformer Charles S. Deneen’s candidates, backed by racketeer-restaurateur Diamond Joe Esposito, who saw Deneen’s anti-Capone crusade as a means to seize the Outfit throne. Al of course lined up on Thompson’s side, which had taken the first blows when the homes of the city controller and commissioner of public service were hit with explosive “pineapples.”