Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Torrio usually stood or sat in front of the building, looking for young recruits. He would pay the boys as much as $5 to run trivial errands, and the ones he found trustworthy he would assign more delicate and difficult tasks such as deliveries and payoffs. It was only a matter of time until he struck up an acquaintance with the gregarious Capone boy living right in the neighborhood. Thus Al found his first and most important mentor. Torrio became his Fagin, his link to the world beyond Brooklyn, the vast and glittering world of the rackets.

  To win Torrio’s confidence, Capone had to pass a simple test. Torrio invited him to drop by headquarters at a certain time, and when Al showed up, Torrio made a point to be absent, but he had left behind a tempting sum of money where it could be easily taken. Many of the boys whom Torrio tested in this way took the money, and that was the last they ever saw of Johnny Torrio, but not Al, who left the money where it was and in so doing won Torrio’s trust. From that time forward, the two enjoyed a partnership that lasted over two decades. In the end, it was Al who benefited most from the relationship; Torrio had many aspiring racketeers and hoodlums courting his favor, but Capone had only one Torrio in his life. If any man could be said to have invented Al Capone, to have been responsible for making him into what he eventually became, that man was Johnny Torrio. The proximity of the Capone residence to Torrio’s place of business made all the difference to Al, and it would eventually make all the difference to Torrio as well, for what Torrio, with his brilliant, analytical mind was able to conceive, Al would eventually be able to execute.

  It is not difficult to fathom Torrio’s appeal to Al; the man was everything Gabriele was not: wealthy, successful, respected. He had made it; he was connected. He had ties to Manhattan, especially the notorious Five Points gang, for decades a fixture of that borough’s underworld, an army numbering over a thousand young Italians available for hire by politicians, anti-union businesses, or anyone else willing to pay them to create mayhem. If there was a strike, the Five Pointers could break it up; if there was an election, they could enforce voting. Their leader was a small, dapper former boxer named Paolo Antonini Vacarelli. Like most other Italian prizefighters of the day, he had taken an Irish nom de guerre to overcome anti-Italian prejudice; thus he was known as Paul Kelly. His headquarters were located at the thrillingly disreputable New Brighton Dance Hall on Great Jones Street in Lower Manhattan, and his realm included the choicest blocks of southern Manhattan, including City Hall. But Kelly’s day was passing; a celebrity in turn-of-the-century New York, he later retreated to a Sicilian district in Harlem, where he was content to organize hordes of ragpickers. Torrio and other racketeers quickly filled the vacuum, learning to work together, realizing that cooperation, not gang warfare, led to real wealth and power. Torrio’s bailiwick was the Jane Street mob, a splinter of Kelly’s gang, but Torrio rarely resorted to Kelly’s strong-arm tactics. Torrio was, above all, a peacemaker; he had no bodyguard, carried no weapon, and always spoke in soft, measured tones. He considered himself a businessman, not a gang leader, and he conducted his rackets in a businesslike way.

  So Capone passed through the days of his youth in Brooklyn. Days on the street. Days of running errands for Torrio, who was invariably mild, appreciative, disciplined, and, in his way, unspoiled. A perfect role model for young Al: the pimp and gambler who rigidly segregated business from his personal life, who maintained a wholesome home and a devoted, adoring wife. Whores on the job, a Madonna at home. Working for Torrio brought young Al $5 here, a ten spot there, and he brought all of it home to his mother, who never questioned the source of the money and lavishly praised her little breadwinner. Days of doing sums in his head, of calculating the odds. Days of learning by careful observation what men would pay for, how much they would bet at poker, at craps, on various neighborhood lotteries, on the outcome of the Dodgers game that afternoon. Learning how much they would pay for a drink or a woman.

  During his apprenticeship, Capone learned to restrain his youthful bravado (“We are the boys of Navy Street, and touch us if you dare!”) and to emulate Torrio’s approach to organizing the rackets and reconciling opposing factions. From Torrio he also learned the importance of leading an outwardly respectable life, to segregate his career from his home life, as if maintaining a peaceful, conventional domestic setting somehow excused or legitimized the venality of working in the rackets. This compartmentalization was good discipline, but its emphasis on piety, on home and hearth and sentimental platitudes, also led to domestic sterility. In these circumstances, maintaining a “good home” became a crushing burden. But it was a form of hypocrisy that was second nature to Johnny Torrio and that he taught Capone to honor.

  • • •

  As he fell under the spell of Torrio, Capone also became familiar with Brooklyn’s numerous youth gangs. With its large working-class population and its multitude of immigrant groups, Brooklyn spawned a rich mixture of gangs, all of them in need of willing and bored young boys like Al. The gangs defined themselves by feuds with one another, and the most widespread rivalry existed between the Irish and the Italians. The Catholicism shared by the two groups was, if anything, a divisive factor, for there was a constant rivalry over which group made better Catholics. The Irish, from their cold climate and their repressive homeland, believed they were superior, and they considered the Italians lazy, self-indulgent, prone to all types of excess, and much too sexual. The Irish tended to regard sex with strict disapproval and so were convinced that they, as a group, were God’s favorites. From the Irish point of view, the great problem was that the Vatican, through a ghastly historical accident, happened to be located in Rome, while all the world knew the Irish were more virtuous and Ireland more deserving to be the seat of the church.

  In combat with their Italian counterparts, Irish gangs proved to be hardy, occasionally murderous, wielding bricks and stones in street combat. In addition to their Irish enemies, the Italian gangs faced constant, bloody internecine rivalry—much of it based on the Italian origins of the gang members, in other words, a continuation of campanilismo. The two main factions were the Sicilians, who were fairly visible and congregated in Manhattan, and the Neapolitans, who were more obscure, though more numerous, and resided mainly in Brooklyn.

  Among the best-known gangs of Capone’s youth were the Red Hook Rippers, the Garfield Boys, and the Gowanus Dukes. Over the years, one gang would spawn another; rival factions would battle over turf. In a world that had rejected them, immigrant children like Al Capone found a refuge in the gangs, a fleeting sense of identity, of belonging. In school, they were nothing, at home they were nuisances, but on the streets they could find other models to emulate, to act out their rage and frustration, to reflect the world’s hate back on itself. Too old to run with the Navy Street Boys, Capone now owed allegiance to the South Brooklyn Rippers, a ragtag collection of boys ranging in age from twelve to fifteen. They spent most of the time simply loitering; occasionally they resorted to petty vandalism or theft, but they were too green to be genuinely feared. Capone eventually moved on to another local gang, one consciously modeled on Kelly’s outfit, known as the Five Points Juniors. They served as an auxiliary to their adult counterparts, but its members, mainly boys playing hookey, were not necessarily apprentice gangsters, and they drifted away from the group as casually as they had joined it.

  • • •

  Despite his flirtation with juvenile gangs, his expulsion from school, and his apprenticeship to Johnny Torrio, Al Capone still aspired to a legitimate career; he gave little indication of consciously preparing himself to be a racketeer. Many boys his age, and with his lack of prospects, were already out of the house, but he continued to live at home. Life in the Capone family continued to evolve, to creep upward. Gabriele progressed from renting his barbershop at 69 Park Avenue to owning it; he had a stake in America now, however small. Teresa continued to bear children. In 1901, she gave birth to still another boy, Erminio, or Mimi, as he was known in the family; later, he would go b
y the name of John. 1906 saw the birth of another boy, Umberto, who later went by the name of Albert or “Bites.” Two years later, Amedoe, later called Matthew, or Matt, or Mattie, was born. Finally, in 1910, into this world of boys came the first female Capone to be born in America. She was named Rose. As if an angry God insisted that there should be no Capone girl, the child died before the year’s end.

  Two years later, on January 28, 1912 (ten days after Al’s thirteenth birthday), Teresa Capone finally gave birth to a daughter who survived. As a symbol of their overflowing gratitude, her parents bestowed an extravagant name on her, Mafalda, after an Italian princess. The youngest child in the family, the only girl, with no less than seven older brothers to look out for her, Mafalda grew up in an atmosphere of indulgence. In fact, compared to her brothers’ rude upbringing, she was downright spoiled, and the preferential treatment she always received affected her temperament. The Capone boys, Al included, were generally quiet and respectful toward their parents, especially their mother, but Mafalda’s tongue could sting; she lashed out at anyone who crossed her. Thin and high-strung, Mafalda was, within the family circle, the most vituperative and ferocious Capone of all.

  • • •

  By the time Mafalda was born, the eldest Capone boy, Vincenzo (James), had abandoned the family. Always strong-minded, he could no longer stand the confinement of Brooklyn, the monotony, and the lack of prospects. In 1908, at the age of sixteen, he ran away from home—not for a week or a month, but for good. A year after his disappearance, his family received a letter from James, postmarked Wichita, Kansas. He was fine, he told them; they needn’t worry about him. They read to their amazement that he was traveling around the Midwest—which the Capones of Garfield Place could only imagine as a plain populated with Indians and buffalo and no Italians whatsoever—and that he had joined a circus as a roustabout and wrestler.

  Hardy and muscular, James enjoyed living out of doors, rambling from town to town, seeing America: big cities like Omaha, little one-horse towns, whistle-stops, open spaces. He did his best to disguise his New York accent, and in time he came to sound like a midwesterner himself. Although he looked as Italian as his younger brothers, he never revealed his origins, never spoke of Brooklyn or Naples. He passed as a Mexican, or an Indian, or a combination of the two. He became fascinated with guns, which were readily available at the circus, and he spent hours shooting at beer bottles and empty cans with a .32-caliber pistol.

  Indians especially fascinated James; he admired their physical prowess and their ability to coexist with nature. He spent time on the fringes of Indian reservations, and he gambled with Indians when they came to the circus. Perhaps, as an Italian immigrant, he was drawn to them because he shared their alien status; he knew what it meant to be an outsider in the white man’s world, to be discriminated against, treated as a second-class citizen, and shunted onto a reservation. What was the Gowanus section of Brooklyn if not a reservation for Italian immigrants and other second-class citizens?

  During the years of James’s wandering, the Great War in Europe slowly engulfed the United States. In April 1917 the United States declared war, and James, still entranced with guns, enlisted in the infantry and went to France with the American Expeditionary Force. He was the only Capone to enter the armed forces. (In later years, imaginative journalists would claim that Al had seen action in France, where he received his famous scars, but there was no truth to the story.) An able soldier, James perfected his shooting ability and rose to the rank of lieutenant. In France, he received a sharp-shooting medal from the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John J. Pershing. A photograph taken of the event shows Lieutenant Capone, standing in a field of mud, saluting, taut, his chest ready to receive the medal from the general’s gloved hand. All the while, the Capone family knew nothing of his whereabouts. Nearly two decades passed before they heard from him again.

  • • •

  After James fled, the Capone family looked to the next child, Ralph, to lead the way. Taller, more reserved, and nowhere near as keen as his younger brothers (to say nothing of that spitfire, Mafalda), Ralph followed a far more conventional path, and for many years his younger brother Al followed faithfully behind him. Reliable Ralph quit school at the end of sixth grade, not in a burst of fury as Al had, but simply because it was time for him to go to work and augment the family’s income. He found a job as a messenger boy for the giant Postal Telegraph company, delivering telegrams, hustling for tips. Later, he went to work in a nearby book bindery, a position that paid better. At least he was out in the world, employed, and he had, in a modest way, surpassed his father.

  At about this time, his prison records reveal, Ralph acquired gonorrhea. This was not a surprising development, given the proximity of prostitutes in the neighborhood, but his condition healed and left no long-term effects on his health. It should be noted that Ralph’s interest in women was not confined to prostitutes. On October 20, 1915, he became the first of the Capone boys to marry. He was twenty-one, and his wife, Filomena Marie Carmelo Moscato, usually called Florence, was just seventeen years old. Like him, she had been born in Italy, in her case Salerno. They were married in Brooklyn, and two years later they had their first child, a son, whom they named Ralph Jr.

  Theirs was not a happy home. Ralph and Florence quarreled constantly, and the arrival of their child, rather than cementing their relationship, aggravated the strains that had existed before his birth. According to Ralph, Florence dishonored the name of motherhood; she neglected both him and the child; one day he came home from work to discover that she had left Ralph Jr. with the neighbors and had run off. Only in America. The estranged couple never reunited and eventually divorced. Throughout these years of domestic strife, Ralph functioned as the dutiful breadwinner. He sold life insurance for a year or two, developing an easy manner with his customers, and then he moved on to a clerical job at a street car company. More significantly, he also handled a soft drink route on the side, and everyone began calling him “Bottles.” The nickname followed him throughout life as if it were a prophecy: “Bottles” Capone.

  Al gave every appearance of trudging along in Ralph’s footsteps: responsible if unspectacular clerical jobs, early marriage, and a child. He passed approximately three years working in a Brooklyn munitions factory and another three as a paper cutter. The latter meant mind-numbing, repetitive work, and the pay was equally humiliating, only $3 a week, all of which he dutifully brought home to his mother. That Al was able to hold these jobs as long as he did and to turn the money over to his family demonstrates his tenacity and loyalty, as well as his lack of direction. He remained—and was long remembered—around his neighborhood as likable and well-behaved, not especially prone to violence or other forms of antisocial behavior. A nice boy in tough surroundings. You didn’t hear stories about Al Capone practicing with guns; you heard that he went home each night to his mother.

  There was another side to the adolescent Capone: he loved to have fun. To dress well, to get out, to enjoy himself, to show off. Al loved to dance, and he was renowned as the best pool player in the neighborhood, a local champion with the cue. These activities suggested that he was gregarious and socially adept and that he possessed a highly developed sense of fine motor coordination—not exactly the characteristics associated with youthful hoodlums. At about this time he came to the attention of another Brooklynite, Daniel Fuchs, one of the first novelists to depict Jewish immigrant life in America. Fuchs was astonished by the bloody reputation Al later acquired, for the writer, known for his unsparing portrayals of Brooklyn life, recalled Capone as a peaceful lad, well dressed and well mannered, hardly the typical neighborhood thug. Al was, in contrast, “something of a nonentity, affable, soft of speech and even mediocre in everything but dancing. Capone, always a well-dressed individual, was like many other Italians an excellent dancer. He frequented a hall called the Broadway Casino.” An early friend of Capone, a reporter named Edward Dean Sullivan, seconded this
impression of Al as a harmless young man. “Let me say that in my capacity as a newspaper man, I have known twenty men infinitely more vicious than he is,” he wrote. “He never drank and the one outstanding trait known about him, in the tough circles where his skill with a cue won him some attention, was that he must be home every night at ten-thirty.” Such disarming testimonials failed to tell the entire story, though, for Capone also frequented a far more sinister gathering place than the Broadway Casino; it was called the Adonis Social Club, and it was a magnet for violence. Gunfights had a way of erupting unpredictably at the Adonis, sending its young patrons, who were largely Italian, scrambling to the floor and out the door. In the basement, guests could take target practice if they liked, blasting beer bottles to smithereens. It was here that Capone learned how to handle a revolver.