Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  • • •

  Like his brother Ralph, Al also became familiar with the local prostitutes, and he probably contracted syphilis from them at this time. Throughout his life, Al refused to admit precisely how or when he caught the disease that would shape his future. In his later years, when he was undergoing treatment for syphilis in Baltimore, Maryland, he did reveal to his physicians that he was infected early in his life, very early, in fact, which suggests that he contracted the disease not long after he became sexually active. That Al acquired syphilis at such a young age was not evidence of promiscuity, however, since there is a 75-percent chance that engaging in sexual intercourse with an infected partner will lead to transmission of the disease. In other words, just one visit to a contaminated prostitute, the result of a dare or a spur-of-the-moment decision, would have sufficed to give him the disease. At the time, syphilis ran unchecked through the population, but not until the draft of the Great War would public health officials realize how widespread it was; blood tests revealed that approximately 10 percent of the draftees suffered from venereal disease. Estimates of syphilis in the general population of the United States varied greatly, but usually ran from 6 to 10 percent. Millions of Americans suffered from the disease at the time Al contracted it, and tens of thousands were dying of it each year.

  Despite its devastating effects, venereal disease remained a secret plague, rarely spoken of, yet it had been devastating populations at least since the fifteenth century. Its origins are traced, interestingly enough, to the city the Capones fled: Naples. It went by several names, depending on who did the naming. The Italians called it the French disease, morbus Gallicus, and the French reciprocated by naming it the mal Napolitain, the Neapolitan disease. In this way the ancient scourge followed the Capone family all the way from Naples to Brooklyn. The malady acquired the name by which we know it in 1530, when an Italian poet, Girolamo Fracastoro, wrote a poem in Latin in which his hero, a shepherd named Syphilis, insults the god Apollo, who in turn afflicts his genitals with the disease; thus was the name of this fictitious character immortalized in a way his creator could never have imagined.

  Because of its varied and exotic presentations, syphilis had long fascinated physicians, though they were powerless to cure it. A great mimic of other physical and mental ailments, it was considered the prince of clinical diseases. “Know syphilis in all its manifestations and relations and all other things clinical will be added unto you,” declared Sir William Osier, an eminent physician and teacher. What was known about syphilis was that it is caused by a spirochete, a screwlike organism, usually transmitted by genital contact. In its first, most obvious, and least harmful stage, a boil or open sore, teeming with spirochetes, appears on the genitalia; if left untreated, it usually disappears within one to three weeks. The secondary stage is often more difficult to detect because the symptoms mimic the flu: a sore throat, a rash, enlarged lymph nodes. That, too, heals by itself, so it is entirely possible for the sufferer to think he has had a bad cold rather than a sexually transmitted disease. Syphilis then enters a latent stage, free of symptoms, and the final, or tertiary stage does not begin for another two to twenty years. It is rarely fatal in the first or even the second stage; only if it returns for the dreaded third (or tertiary) stage can the disease kill, and then in only 20 percent of the cases.

  Although he had no way of knowing it, Al belonged to that unlucky 20 percent of syphilis victims. Once his sore and his fever disappeared, he believed he had recovered from his illness, as most people did. As he later told his physicians in Baltimore, the disease simply vanished, and he assumed he had been cured somehow. He had no way of knowing that it had actually gone underground, gradually becoming a form of dementia, similar to Alzheimer’s disease; slowly but surely the victim loses his mind. In his case, the disease typically attacks the frontal lobes of the brain, the seat of the personality, and within a short time it begins to alter the victim’s behavior. The changes are so subtle as to be undetectable at first. The new, altered personality is closely modeled on the old; it is an exaggeration of it. Dr. Bernhard Dattner, an outstanding syphilologist, described the transformation this way: “Frequently the initial personality changes are so insidious that even close friends of the patient remain unaware of them. How much more difficult it is for the physician to detect these minimal signs of psychic aberration if he has never before seen the patient.” The array of symptoms Dr. Dattner observed included “irritability, nervousness, lack of initiative, insomnia, and memory impairment.” So it was with Al Capone. Those closest to him and most familiar with his behavior were the least likely to recognize the incremental changes wrought by the disease. Generally affable, he could, on rare occasions, lash out at those who threatened him. As the neurosyphilis slowly took over his brain, however, his mood swings, which had previously been within normal limits, became more extreme. He would act moody and remote, then exuberant. More genial, then more enraged. More passive and withdrawn, then more hostile.

  If Capone’s syphilis had healed itself, as most cases did, it is unlikely he would have developed into the high-profile, feared gangster he became. It is entirely possible he would have drifted into the rackets under Johnny Torrio’s guidance. But of course his syphilis never did vanish, and the special swagger and vehemence associated with Al Capone—the sudden outbursts of violence, as well as his reckless gambling—were the result of his incurable disease. Indeed, tertiary syphilis is usually associated with megalomania; the young Al, quiet and withdrawn, showed little of those tendencies, but the mature Al, with his hallucinations of grandeur and his penchant for brutality, certainly did. The Capone we remember was the creation of a disease that had magnified his personality. Syphilis made Al Capone larger than life.

  An early instance of Capone’s rage suddenly spewing forth occurred one night when, as he attended a local political rally, a pool-playing pal of his informed him that a “slicker had stopped in . . . and had cleaned out the best of the talent for about eight hundred dollars.” According to Capone’s friend Edward Dean Sullivan, “Al hurried over to the pool room and at half past ten he had the eight hundred dollars back and a hundred and fifty of the stranger’s money. . . . Without a word the stranger reached in his pockets, opened a long bladed knife, and told Al that he’d play another game, or else—!” Capone hit his adversary just once, but the blow was so powerful that it knocked the man out. Capone returned home, always mindful of the 10:30 curfew, but later that evening he heard the man in the poolroom was dead—and that he had killed him. As Al later learned, the report was wrong, and the man survived, but the single blow had done sufficient harm to send him to the hospital for months.

  Sullivan’s story gave rise to one of the first legends surrounding Capone, that the poolroom confrontation sparked his flight from Brooklyn to Chicago to avoid a murder charge. In fact, when the time finally did arrive for Capone to leave Brooklyn, he would be a young married businessman looking for better career prospects, not a teenage gangster fleeing a murder rap. But the persistent legend demonstrated that an aura of violence—whether deserved or not—clung to Capone from an early age. Try as he did to avoid it, brutality, like syphilis, was fated to follow him through all his days.

  • • •

  Al Capone’s first encounter with violence as a tool of business came through his mentor, Johnny Torrio, who, though a peace-loving man himself, knew intimately the uses of force, bribery, and fear. He introduced young Al to influential friends on Coney Island, where the flesh and the flash were to be found. The resort and amusement area was a considerable distance from Capone’s home and the headquarters of the Torrio Association, all the way at the other end of Brooklyn. There Al met and came to work for Brooklyn’s own Prince of Darkness, Frankie Yale.

  Alternately killer and benefactor, he elicited wild and contradictory passions in Brooklyn, but on one point, at least, there was universal agreement: nobody defied Frankie Yale. He was only six years older than Capone, still in his m
idtwenties, but already famous and feared. He drew stares wherever he went, for everyone recognized the shock of black hair, the pug nose, and the burning black eyes. He was handsome in a menacing sort of way, compact and muscular. The stories about him were impressive; to hear people talk, Yale had killed eight, ten, maybe a dozen men—or more.

  Yale was not his real name, of course; that was an affectation. Nor did he originally spell it “Uale,” as is often claimed and as it appears on his tombstone. His original name was Francesco Ioele. Nor did he belong to the Mafia, which was an almost exclusively Sicilian preserve. He was born in Calabria, one of the poorest of all Southern Italian provinces, in 1893, and he came to the United States as a child, the first of the influential Calabrians with whom Capone associated. Because of campanilismo, it was unusual for Neapolitans like Capone to form alliances with rural Calabrians, who tended to be more suspicious and pragmatic than their urban counterparts. In the years to come, however, Capone would surround himself with Calabrians, who proved dutiful and respectful once he was able to win their trust.

  Yale spent his adolescent years in the Five Point Juniors, constantly getting into scrapes. At seventeen, he teamed up with a wrestler by the name of “Booby” Nelson to wreak havoc in a poolroom on Surf Avenue; his victims discovered what a horrendous weapon a cue could be. The melee led to his first jail sentence, and shortly after his release, he was sent to jail again, this time for toting a pistol. More arrests ensued, including a charge of theft of sheep- and goatskins worth $300. Marriage finally accomplished what the courts had been unable to do; it took him off the street and transformed him from a thug into a businessman. He lived the life of a local big shot, ensconced in a large and gloomy brick home at 6605 14th Avenue, owned by his in-laws. The address doubled as his place of business; the legitimate career he pursued was dreadfully appropriate, for Frankie Yale became an undertaker.

  He also developed many sidelines. There was the ice route, for one. Ice was a necessity in the days before refrigeration, and icemen, usually from an Italian background, operated strictly as freelancers. The competition among them kept prices and profits low. Once Frankie Yale moved in and organized them, the icemen served assigned districts, for which they paid him a handsome tribute. Prices went up, and so did the profits. Essentially Yale imposed a series of local monopolies, strictly enforced. If you were an Italian iceman, and you bought your supply of ice from Frankie Yale’s company and paid him his cut, you had no problem. His collectors’ cars announced themselves with horns trilling a distinctive note, and the icemen trotted out to hand over the money, discreetly contained in an envelope. If you bought your ice somewhere else, you received a warning or a broken window in the night, or your child came home from school describing an encounter with a threatening stranger. Frankie understood that it was human nature to make a mistake now and then. If you persisted, however, Frankie shut you down. No one went to the cops, because Frankie had paid them off.

  Then there was the laundry business, another profitable sideline in which he displayed his golden touch. To prevent unions from attempting to infiltrate their business, the owners of laundry establishments paid Yale $150 a week to scare off organizers. He exploited the situation by establishing his own union, and he forced workers to contribute a dollar a week out of their modest salaries toward it or face immediate firing, a beating, or worse. Yale’s union did nothing to protect or advance the workers’ cause, as a legitimate union did; it was a means of exacting tribute from laundry workers. Even cigars became a racket for Yale. He launched a brand featuring his portrait on the box, and the cigars sold for twenty cents, or three for fifty. As with the ice, tobacco shops had better stock them, or harm could come their way. Windows could be broken; necks, too. Brooklyn merchants found that in the long run it was better for business to stock the stinking Frankie Yales, as the cigars were known.

  Frankie fancied himself an entrepreneur, and his most ambitious venture—the one that lured Capone into his orbit—was a Coney Island bar and dance hall situated close to the Atlantic Ocean. Established in 1916 with the proceeds of the ice racket, it was modeled on the thriving College Inn, and Yale decided to have a little fun by naming his pleasure dome after a university; thus Yale came to be the proprietor of the Harvard Inn. The Ivy League aura immediately went to his head; he began to part his hair in the center, after the fashion of students. The center part soon led to bigger changes, a flashier wardrobe, brightly colored fabrics, all in the height of gangster fashion, accented with eye-popping jewelry, especially his famous diamond-studded belt buckle. When people asked what the buckle represented, Yale replied with a laugh that it stood for the Championship of the Underworld. His new position meant that he spent many late nights away from his wife, Maria, and their two girls; inevitably, he sought out female friends around Coney Island, choosing from a large transient population of willing and desperate girls. Yale knew how hotheaded their boyfriends could be, and displaying the same cool judgment he brought to his business ventures, he always brought a bodyguard to stand watch during his brief assignations. When the girls became pregnant, Frankie had a solution for that, as well; he found nice young men for them to marry—men who happened to work for him and would not complain if their new brides happened to be pregnant or who assumed that they themselves had fathered the child. Whatever the problem was, the resourceful Frankie Yale had a solution.

  Despite its grand name, the Harvard Inn occupied a modest one-story building located on a popular thoroughfare, Seaside Walk. The most imposing feature was the bar, which ran twenty feet, almost the entire length of one wall. There was also room for an orchestra and a small dance floor. Yale loved running the tawdry little place. Every night he sat at his table, whose location was carefully chosen, a little off to the side, near the exit, in case he needed to make a speedy egress. His constant companion was “Little Augie” Carfano, another tough from the Gowanus area. There Yale nursed his tumbler of whiskey and transacted business. Searching for a young man who could double as a bouncer and bartender, capable of combining a winning manner with the threat of force, Yale turned to Torrio for a recommendation, and Torrio sent him Al Capone, who was now eighteen.

  Capone and Yale struck up a rapport, and the young man became a fixture there, doing everything from washing dishes to waiting on tables under the proprietor’s eye. He made himself a popular figure; the customers paid their respects to Frankie and shied away from “Little Augie,” but they liked Al, the jolly way he served up the foamy beer at the bar and occasionally took a turn on the dance floor himself. It was not exalted work, but the job kept him busy and on display. There was plenty of opportunity to mingle with the customers, too.

  One night, after he had been at the Harvard Inn for a year, Capone was waiting on a table occupied by a couple about his age. Al could not take his eyes off the girl. She was Italian, and she had a gorgeous figure. He repeatedly buzzed the table, and finally, with the impulsiveness of his age, he leaned over to her and said in a loud voice, “Honey, you have a nice ass, and I mean that as a compliment.” Suddenly, the man who accompanied her leaped to his feet. His name was Frank Gallucio, he was the girl’s brother, and he was obviously drunk. Capone had just done the unforgivable: he had insulted Frank’s sister. Gallucio was nowhere near as big or bulky as Capone, but emboldened by alcohol he punched the man who had insulted his sister. As he later recalled, “A punch was not enough to stop Capone.”

  Capone’s unpredictable rage erupted. Fearing for his life, Gallucio pulled a four-inch knife from his pocket. The sight of the flashing metal sent patrons fleeing. Gallucio went straight for Capone’s neck. Undeterred, Capone moved in, and the blade cut into the flesh of his left cheek and his neck, once, twice, three times. There was blood everywhere now, blood on the knife, blood all over Capone, blood on the floor. Terrified, Gallucio grabbed his sister and ran from the Harvard Inn. Capone’s wounds looked awful, but the injuries healed cleanly, leaving three large scars: one ran four inches along h
is left cheek and another followed his left jaw for slightly more than two inches. The third was the least visible but marked the most dangerous injury he had sustained; it coursed down his neck beneath his left ear. As they healed, the scars turned from red to white, and over the years Capone would become increasingly sensitive about them, averting his head from cameras attempting to photograph his left side, refusing to answer questions about them, even resorting to powdering them in a vain attempt to make the pale grooves blend with his olive complexion. But for now, they were a badge of courage, showing that he was a street fighter, and as the years passed, the scars acquired increasing fame until they came to identify Capone in the public mind forever as “Scarface.”

  Intent on revenge, Al announced he was looking for Gallucio, and he made sure to invoke Frankie Yale’s name. Capone’s antagonist sought the assistance of a small-time hood named Albert Altierri, who in turn took the issue to a rising young racketeer in Manhattan by the name of Salvatore Lucania. Only two years older than Capone, Lucania had been born near Palermo, Sicily, and had arrived in the United States as a boy of nine, spending the remainder of his bleak youth on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he fell in with the Five Points gang. By the age of sixteen he had gotten himself arrested and jailed for running heroin. Later, when everyone called him Lucky Luciano, he would rival Capone in underworld influence and direct a vast racketeering empire, much bigger than anything Frankie Yale ever dreamed of, all run out of a luxurious suite in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he maintained a full-time residence under the alias “Charles Rose.”

  Hearing the story of the knife fight, Lucania sided with Gallucio; nobody should insult someone’s sister as Capone had. To bring the matter to an end, Lucania proposed a sit-down, a formal gathering, at the Harvard Inn to discuss the issue thoroughly. The principals waited until after hours, after the drunken patrons and chorus girls had departed, and then Lucania, Gallucio, Yale, and Capone engaged in a serious discussion of the slashing and what should be done about it. The elders in their wisdom decided that Al should apologize to Gallucio for insulting his sister, and that would be the end of the matter. Should Al attempt to take revenge, it would be his funeral. No matter how much he disliked the outcome of the parley, Capone had no choice but to obey, for Lucania was already powerful and feared, while Al was still a nobody, a waiter at a Coney Island bar; he had to show respect. And Al did. As long as he controlled his temper, Al always knew what was expected of him and behaved accordingly.