Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Joseph Z. Klenha, the president of Cicero’s town council, complained that he was sick and tired of the Chicago Police Department’s habit of raiding his peaceful little city and creating bad publicity. “Why not blame the Boer War on Cicero?” he asked. “The constant patrolling of our streets by Chicago squads is making a burlesque of the whole thing.” Klenha’s protest fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, a grand jury in Chicago was investigating Klenha’s alliance with Capone; in fact, they were about to return an indictment against the two, along with a score of other racketeers and town employees, for violating the National Prohibition Act. The grand jury cited the presence of enormous amounts of bootleg alcohol in Cicero: “10,000 gallons of uncolored spirits, and 50,000 gallons of cereal beverage, fit for use for beverage purposes.” Capone himself was charged with selling alcohol at the Ship. The indictment listed “2,000 pints of cereal beverage, 205 gallons of alcohol, and 4 barrels of cereal beverage” at that gambling establishment. Although Capone’s network of bribery ensured that he would never be convicted of these charges, the existence of the indictment gave the police an excuse to continue their raids.

  The next wave of assaults turned up interesting evidence in a brothel known as the Barracks. This was a typical Capone operation, a gambling, drinking, and whoring establishment located in Burnham, a suburb the syndicate controlled in cooperation with Johnny Patton, known as “the boy mayor of Burnham” because he had operated a saloon ever since he was a lad of fourteen. For the week of September 6, 1925, the ledger revealed, the slot machines took in $906, the piano player received $55.25 in tips, the bar took in $2,677.10, gambling earned another $1,800, and finally prostitution, by far the biggest contributor to the establishment’s earnings, accounted for $5,891. These figures made for a gross income of $11,329.35, out of which 10 percent automatically went to payoffs. There were also sizable expenses, $8,540 worth, leaving a profit for the week of $1,746.35. The Stockade earned several times as much, and assuming this was a representative week, the entire group of Capone-controlled brothels in the Cicero area took in $4 million annually. The ledgers afforded police their first clear picture of how much business the brothels actually did, and the information prompted a federal grand jury to indict Al Capone, Ralph Capone, the O’Donnell brothers, and several others for violating the Volstead Act. Once again, the charge came to nothing, and worse, it was a symptom of how seriously the case, if any, against Capone for the murder of McSwiggin had become sidetracked. If only the police could actually find Capone and question him, then the murder of McSwiggin might be solved.

  • • •

  Throughout the crisis-ridden days of early May, Capone successfully avoided the press and police by taking refuge in the home of one of his lieutenants, Dominic Roberto, who was married to Rio Burke. A singer with a singularly sweet disposition, and not inclined to look too deeply into her husband’s business dealings, Rio remembered Capone for his drunken behavior at a picnic four years earlier. She found it difficult to believe that the young boor she recalled now led Chicago’s most powerful racketeering organization. His transformation within the span of a few short years was remarkable, for he was now a sober, even grave presence in her home, always well dressed, clean, and polite.

  At the time Rio and Dominic lived in Chicago Heights, an area which, with its large Italian population, was to become increasingly important in Capone’s organization. During these days, the wife of another Capone lieutenant, Jimmy Emery, stayed with them, treating the illustrious fugitive from justice to her delicious cooking. “She was the best cook in the country,” Rio Burke recalled, “and he ate whatever was set before him. In fact, all I ever saw of Al Capone while he was hiding out in our house was a perfect gentleman. Most of his suits were silk; he was impeccably dressed, always well groomed. I would say he was a rather handsome man, but I never thought of him as sexy, and I don’t believe women hounded him. He didn’t seem to be a womanizer, but I’m sure he had mistresses. I never looked upon him that way because he was all business. He didn’t smile much, he didn’t laugh much. He was always all business.”

  Despite Capone’s calm demeanor, Burke was alert to signs of danger, especially the guns stored in their otherwise proper house. “One day my maid called me and said, ‘Mrs. Burke, come down here. I’m cleaning out the front room.’ We pulled a gunny sack into the light, and it was filled with all kinds of revolvers. And I asked Dominic, ‘What in the world are all those guns doing in the closet?’ But all he said was, ‘Some of the boys are going hunting.’ I didn’t dare ask what that meant, but I do recall that Dominic never went to bed without a gun under his pillow. And one time, when I went to put clean handkerchiefs in his drawer, I found one of those fountain pen guns. It was round and black and looked like a fountain pen, but it was really a gun.” Her entire life was like that little device: it seemed ordinary enough on the surface, but a closer inspection revealed it to be filled with danger.

  To relieve the monotony of these eventless, anxious days, Capone and Dominic Roberto took long drives in the country, often tracing the shore of Lake Michigan to Milwaukee and back in a single day, letting the time pass, trying to escape the monotony, the two of them just driving, hardly talking, watching out for cop cars. And as the sun slipped from the sky and shadows lengthened, they drove on, into the midwestern night. The police wanted him, but they could not find him; he was a lost man, in search of himself. Under pressure from all sides—the police, the press, and rival gangs—Al feared for his life as he never had before. The cops had shot his brother Frank on the streets of Cicero, and he was convinced they would come after him during one of their fact-finding raids. And if they missed their mark, it would be only a matter of time until the O’Donnells retaliated. Even though he had managed to sidestep an indictment for McSwiggin’s murder, he knew that the public and law enforcement authorities held him responsible for the atrocity. And when the next policeman or prosecutor was killed, the murder would be laid at his feet, even if he had never heard of the victim’s name.

  In fact, he was fleeing not just the murder of McSwiggin but the entire series of murders beginning with the death of his brother Frank on April 1, 1924, his killing Joe Howard, his complicity in the murder of Dion O’Banion, and so on through two harrowing years, with McSwiggin’s death coming as the culmination of a rising tide of police and gangland violence. Capone was sick of living with the fear of imminent death, the presence of guns, the taste of terror constantly on his tongue. For over two years he had not been able to spend more than a few days at a time in one place, whether it was the Hawthorne Inn, his home on Prairie Avenue, or the Metropole Hotel. He was exhausted from the relentless tension and anxiety, and he was desperate to escape the gathering sense of doom, the conviction that he would meet the same end as his brother Frank. The women, the cocaine, and the food in which he indulged made the fear go away, but for only a little while, until the next dead body turned up, and the headlines started to scream again.

  For all these reasons, emotional as well as practical, Capone decided to remain in hiding—not for days or weeks, but for three months. During that period none of the three hundred detectives assigned to the McSwiggin case had any idea what had become of him; they combed New York, hiked through the woods of Michigan, and descended on the hamlet of Couderay, Wisconsin, where Ralph had acquired a hunting lodge, all to no avail. Rumors circulated that Al Capone had fled to Indiana, to Canada, to Italy. A rather large gap always appears at this point in the chronology of Capone’s life, and it is often assumed that nothing of significance occurred during this period. The assumption is wrong; the summer of 1926 was an absolutely critical period in his life. As they stretched on, these three “lost months” formed a crucible from which he emerged a far different man.

  The truth is that Capone, after spending eight days with Dominic Roberto in Chicago Heights, journeyed west to Lansing, Michigan, where he was sheltered by friends and moved in circles about which the newspapers and the police knew nothi
ng. As the months passed, his clandestine travels throughout the Midwest became a journey into himself, a time of introspection and soul-searching from which he emerged with a new, yet strangely familiar vision of what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

  CHAPTER 4

  Round Lake Refuge

  TO REACH LANSING from Chicago in those days meant a leisurely drive of slightly more than 200 miles through green, rolling countryside. The further from Chicago Al Capone went, the fresher the air, the cleaner the towns, the less likelihood that he would be recognized. He proceeded east along the southern rim of Lake Michigan, past Gary, Indiana, past Michigan City, and then drove along the shore, bustling and pleasant at this time of year, to Benton Harbor, Michigan, a resort town where several of his partners in crime were buying land and building substantial, secluded vacation houses. Just beyond Benton Harbor, the highway left the lake and pointed east to Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, then angled north into Lansing. From the bootlegger’s perspective, the city occupied a highly strategic location, since it is located approximately eighty-five miles from Detroit, at the confluence of the Grand and Red Cedar Rivers. Thus situated, it served as a checkpoint and clearinghouse for much of the Capone organization’s imported, high-class alcohol as it came into the country across a narrow stretch of water from Windsor, Canada, opposite Detroit. The trucks carrying Capone’s booze paused briefly in Lansing, then proceeded to Chicago, New York, and points south and west.

  For all its geographical advantages, Lansing did pose certain problems for Capone and his small army of bootleggers. It is, for one thing, the state capital, teeming with the sort of government and legal officials that racketeers normally avoid. Lansing is also a company town, the company in this case being Oldsmobile, the nation’s first major car manufacturer, founded by Ransom E. Olds. Lansing’s Oldsmobile plant was immense and employed thousands of workers. The concentration of manufacturing and government jobs introduced a measure of sophistication and wealth to Lansing. However, Capone and his men avoided the city, its factories, and its money, preferring the Michigan countryside, with its rolling hills, large lakes, innumerable hiding places, and its sizable Italian community, which consisted of immigrant families that had fled the crowding and confusion of Chicago’s Little Italy and the dreariness of Chicago Heights. It was here, in the heartland, that Italian immigrants became Americans in a way that was not possible in Chicago Heights, where a combination of prejudice from without and campanilismo from within stalled the process of assimilation. Compared to the Heights, Lansing was a promised land, and when Italians managed to reach Lansing they felt they had made it. The lucky ones owned their own businesses, especially produce markets and stores, and they lived the good life, the American dream to which they all aspired.

  Among the Italians who had abandoned the danger of Chicago Heights for the opportunities of Lansing was Capone’s good friend Angelo Mastropietro.1 He was a young husband and father who had once worked for the Capone organization in various minor capacities connected with the liquor trade, supplying clubs and overseeing local distribution. Then Angelo, like so many young men in Chicago Heights, became involved in a deadly altercation. The event proved a turning point in Angelo’s life, for soon after the murder he fled Chicago Heights for Lansing, where he started his life anew. “Life was very hard for the Italians in Chicago Heights,” Angelo’s daughter, Grazia,1 recalls. “It was a dead, ugly town. You can go out to the cemetery there and see a mother’s grave, surrounded by five or six sons, all dead in their twenties. Murdered by gangsters. That’s why the Italians came to Lansing. My father, Angelo, ran a fruit and vegetable market at 120 South Washington Avenue in Lansing, and it was legitimate. It was in a fine location downtown, and there were always trucks coming and going full of fruit, and my father made a lot of money selling to all the big restaurants, Greek coffee shops, and cafés.”

  Angelo’s decision to leave the rackets was perhaps the only course more dangerous than entering la mala vita in the first place, for spurned gang members threatened to track down and kill the renegade before he could betray his former colleagues. But Angelo was one of the lucky ones whose life was spared, in part because he left Chicago, and in part because he continued to perform favors for the Capone organization. He occasionally allowed Capone to use the Washington Avenue market as a front for his bootlegging operations. “The men who worked there had these trucks, and they used to go down to Florida and pick up fruit, and they also delivered booze here, running it from Canada,” his daughter notes. But Angelo never made reference to the rackets or to the unpleasantness back in the Heights, though everyone around him, including his family, knew why he had left home. He had succeeded in building a new life for himself in Lansing, running a thriving produce market, and becoming, at least in the eyes of his paisan, a wealthy man. Even better, he now earned his living legitimately, through hard work and vigilance and good judgment, and it became clear that perhaps the best decision he had ever made was to quit Chicago Heights and all it represented.

  Then Angelo was asked to perform the biggest favor of all, to shelter Al Capone during the summer of 1926, when the most notorious racketeer in Chicago was wanted for questioning about the murder of McSwiggin.

  When his former employer, Al Capone, came to Lansing, Angelo Mastropietro identified and understood. He, too, knew what it was like to live with the fear and tension; he understood how it corrupted a man’s life, and he offered to protect Capone for as long as necessary. With Angelo’s help, Capone became a fixture in Lansing during the summer of 1926 and for four subsequent summers. The city became his summer home away from home, and with Angelo’s sponsorship he made many new friends in the local Italian community. However, Capone did not attempt to control or alter Lansing’s political landscape as he had changed Cicero’s. He wanted nothing from Lansing beyond the one thing he could never find in Chicago: peace of mind.

  The Al Capone the Italians of Lansing came to know was nothing like the “Scarface” whose evil deeds regularly made headlines in the Chicago dailies. When the people of Lansing considered Capone, they did not think of beer wars, drive-by machine-gun shootings, and a rat’s nest of urban corruption. They did not shudder at the thought of a powerful racketeering organization dealing in vice and death. The Al Capone they knew in Lansing was a soft-spoken, impeccably groomed man burdened by concerns about which he rarely spoke and given to intoxicating bursts of charity. To them, he was neither a pimp, gambler, murderer, or racketeer. He was a friend, a benefactor, and in some cases a savior. It was one thing to be outside the rackets looking in, but to be on the inside, to feel Capone’s warmth, to be the recipient of his superhuman generosity, was as close to being at home as the Italians of Lansing had ever felt in the strange, wealthy, bigoted land in which they lived. Capone, in turn, reveled in their approbation. In Lansing he could walk the streets without fearing for his life; here, if nowhere else, men were not out to kill him, and the knowledge that one such refuge existed made him feel human and offered a measure of redemption from the corruption and violence he had sown in Chicago.

  The Mastropietro family was among the first to appreciate and to profit from Capone’s attempt to rehabilitate himself. Beginning in 1926 he virtually became a member of their family, and he stood as compare, or godfather, to Angelo’s two daughters, Grazia and Catherine,2 on whom he lavished presents such as jewelry and especially a cherished lavaliere. With such gifts he purchased their love and goodwill. “Al Capone and his family were all good people,” Grazia insists. “They were respected in the community. And they weren’t ignoramuses, like in the movies. He spoke very well. He’d walk into a room and you wouldn’t even know he was there until suddenly everyone else had stopped talking, and you’d turn around and see that Al had come in. And when he spoke you could hear a pin drop because he spoke so softly, nobody could make any noise while he was talking, very softly, but with such authority. He was a very refined man. Years later, when that movie in which Rod Steiger pl
ayed him with a loud, roaring voice showed up on television, I remember my aunts and uncles, who all knew Al, laughing, and my mother and grandmother, who had adored him, were outraged because he had been so quiet, and they resented showing him involved with killing, violence, and revenge. Oh, they hated it. Capone was not loud, flashy, and coarse. Capone had class. More than that, he had grace.”

  Although Capone did not resort to violence in Lansing, he nonetheless took care to import his two principal bodyguards, “Machine-Gun” Jack McGurn and Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, who took up residence with him outside Lansing in a secluded area known as Round Lake. This is a small, peaceful region. The lake is modest, hardly more than a large pond ringed with weather-beaten cottages connected by a network of dirt paths leading to a narrow beach. From his small cottage, Capone enjoyed a view of rolling hills, farmhouses, and barns.

  Here, beside Round Lake, Al lived the simple life. He spent his days lolling on the beach, alternately swimming and resting. Occasionally he played with the children who came to frolic at the water’s edge. “We were all thrilled when Al Capone rented those cottages at Round Lake,” says Grazia’s cousin Giovanna Antonucci* of those bygone summer days. “We kids had our own cottage with the ladies, and the men had another cottage, and the bodyguards had another cottage. So there were three cottages in all: men, women, and bodyguards. When we were all there Al loved to swim. You can’t believe the way that old man would swim. He was a wonderful swimmer. He’d take his friends, who all wore those straw hats they had at the time, way out, and they’d say, ‘The wind blew my hat,’ and he’d swim to it, like a game they were playing. He would swim underwater, and when he came to the surface he made a noise like a sea lion.” Besides swimming, she remembers, Al and his companions “mostly talked, played records, drank, and read a lot. They had books, you can’t imagine all the books they had. I sneaked into Al’s cabin once, and I looked through all the books, and I found this one book, The Mark of Zorro, and it interested me because in the picture on the cover he was wearing a cape and a black hat.”