Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  En route to Illinois, Al brooded over the implications of being placed under house arrest in Chicago and the dishonor he had brought to his family. At this time, a journalist whom he knew boarded the train: Alfred “Jake” Lingle of the Chicago Herald and Examiner. Lingle was no ordinary journalist. These were the days of reporters and rewrite men; the reporters spent their time doing legwork, then phoned in their often scattered findings to their editorial office, where a rewrite man shaped them into a coherent article. As a reporter, Lingle rarely visited the offices of his paper, preferring to spend his time in the company of Capone or one of Capone’s henchmen, and he wore the same diamond-studded buckle Al bestowed on his friends. Indeed, Lingle was more of a racketeer than a journalist, as anyone who saw his luxury automobile or visited his lavish suite at the Stevens Hotel realized. (Lingle also maintained his wife and child in a comfortable home.) Working as a reporter gave Lingle excellent cover for his real occupation and unparalleled access to Capone, who unburdened himself during the final phase of the train ride. “It’s pretty tough when a citizen with an unblemished record must be hounded from his home by the very policemen whose salaries are paid, at least in part, from the victim’s pocket,” he told Lingle. “You might say that every policeman in Chicago gets some of his bread and butter from the taxes I pay. And yet they want to throw me in jail for nothing when I seek to visit my wife and my little son.” Capone paused to sigh dramatically. “I am feeling very bad—very bad. I don’t know what all this fuss is about. How would you feel if the police, paid to protect you, acted towards you like they toward me?” Another pause as Capone’s attention wandered to the dreary winter landscape sliding past his window. “I’m going back to Chicago. Nobody can stop me. I’ve got a right to be there. I have property there. I have a family there. They can’t keep me out of Chicago unless they shoot me through the head. I’ve never done anything wrong. Nobody can prove that I ever did anything wrong. They arrest me, they search me, they lock me up, they charge me with all the crimes there are, and when they get me into court I find that the only charge they dare to book against me is disorderly conduct—and the judge dismisses even that because there isn’t any evidence to support it. The police know they haven’t got one black mark against my name, and yet they publicly announce that they won’t let me live in my own home. What kind of justice is that? Well, I’ve been the goat for a long time. It’s got to stop some time and it might as well be now. I’ve got my back to the wall. I’m going to fight. It’ll be a good fight, too.”

  Lingle phoned his story in to his paper. Once again, the publicity worked to Capone’s disadvantage, for the police were waiting for him on the morning of Friday, December 16, as his train arrived in Joliet, Illinois (which happened to be home to the state penitentiary). As Capone stepped off the train, he pulled his fedora over his brow and turned up his collar to ward off the chill. He looked up to see six policemen fixing him in the sights of their shotguns. “Pleased to meet you,” Al said to their leader, Police Chief Corcoran. The guns were still trained on him. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “You’d think I was Jesse James and the Youngers, all in one. What’s the artillery for?” Without being asked, he yielded a .45-caliber revolver he was carrying, adding as an afterthought a smaller weapon, and, as a goodwill gesture, the ammunition. The police responded by arresting him for carrying concealed weapons and took him down to the jail. Only days before he had been lolling about his lavish suite at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, hoping to meet movie stars, but now he found himself confined to a chilly cell in Joliet with several derelicts.

  In Chicago, his lawyers, Thomas Nash and Michael Ahern, sprang into action. They arranged to post bail, and after eight hours’ detention Capone was free once more. “I am not mad at anybody,” he declared on his release. “I am going to make a good big donation to the worthy charities of Joliet.” Then he jumped into a car, and a group of the boys drove him to the safety of Chicago Heights, the one city where he could be certain the police would not harass him. By the time he returned to his family on South Prairie Avenue, the police had called off their scheme to place every gangster in the city under house arrest. “Well,” said Chief Detective O’Connor of Capone’s return, “if he’s back, he’s back. That’s all there is to it.” However, O’Connor continued his cat-and-mouse game by placing a round-the-clock police guard in front of the Capone homestead. No one troubled to bring hot coffee or stronger fortification to the cops as they sat shivering in their flivver during the late December storms.

  Although he had successfully defied the police, Capone realized that his trip had turned into a fiasco. Everywhere he had gone, he played into the hands of local police chiefs eager to win publicity at his expense. Even worse, he had generated a flurry of unfavorable press coverage across the country. For the first time in his career as a racketeer, he had to endure the uncomfortable sensation that people were laughing at him, and the ridicule followed him all the way back to Chicago, where the dailies continued to heap scorn on him. To present his side of the story, Al Capone held a press conference at the Metropole Hotel and publicly admitted that he was what everyone knew he was: a bootlegger. He did so not because he had decided the time had come to confess and repent, but merely to point out the hypocrisy of those who criticized him. “They call Al Capone a bootlegger,” he began. “Yes, it’s bootleg while it’s on the trucks, but when your host at the club, in the locker rooms or on the Gold Coast hands it to you on a silver salver, it’s hospitality. All I’ve ever done is supply a public demand. You can’t cure a thirst by law. They say I violate the prohibition law. Who doesn’t?” This was an unanswerable argument, as far as it went, but it conveniently ignored his other, more sinister activities: the gambling, the pimping, the murdering. By admitting to the lesser evil of bootlegging, Capone hoped to obscure his other endeavors, though they all contributed to his preeminence as a bootlegger.

  The next morning, December 22, he returned briefly to Joliet for a secret hearing to answer the charge of carrying concealed weapons. On the advice of his lawyers, he pleaded guilty and paid $2,601 in fines and court costs. Unfazed by the size of the fine, the racketeer dug into his pocket, produced a large wad of cash, and peeled off the amount in $100 bills. When the clerk tried to give him change, Al declined, advising the man to give the money to a Salvation Army Santa Claus—“and tell him it is a Christmas present from Al Capone.”

  • • •

  Capone spent a subdued holiday season with his family in Chicago, where his foul mood was matched by the weather. Shortly after the New Year, Capone, his wife, and child boarded a train, and they actually did go to Florida. They arrived in Miami on January 4, 1928, only to confront approximately the same reception they had been given in Los Angeles. By now the story of his cross-country wanderings had become well known, and everywhere he went the police followed him and the press delighted in harassing him. The arrival of the homeless gangster-in-exile, as he was inaccurately portrayed, inspired Miami’s civic leaders—the churches, the women’s clubs, the boosters—to raise their voices in a chorus of righteous protest.

  This time, Capone was determined not to be run out of town. As the clamor continued, he praised Miami as “the garden of America, the sunny Italy of the New World, where life is good and abundant, where happiness can be enjoyed even by the poorest.” And he explained his intention to become a pillar of the Miami Establishment: “I am going to build or buy a home here and I hope many of my friends will join me. Furthermore, if I am permitted, I will open the finest restaurant anywhere in the state and if I am invited I will even join your Rotary Club.” Despite these grandiose ambitions, he remained, in his words, “only another sucker.” As it happened, Miami was suffering from one of its periodic busts in the real estate market. A hurricane the previous year had devastated the area, destroyed millions of dollars worth of property, and left 50,000 people homeless. For once Capone’s timing favored him. Suckers were most welcome in Miami, and from the
moment he uttered the magical words “real estate,” he acquired standing in the community. A sale was a sale, even when the buyer happened to be Al Capone, and salesmen descended in droves, eager to reap a fat commission in an otherwise depressed market. “CAPONE HUNTED IN MIAMI,” read the headline in the Chicago Tribune, “BUT BY REALTY MEN.”

  As the business community rushed to fleece the newest sucker to blow into town, the city’s elected officials, fearful of Capone’s turning their fair city into another Chicago, or at least giving that impression and scaring away tourists, issued impressive-sounding statements condemning the racketeer and asking him to leave immediately. Capone countered by arranging a meeting at which he told the city fathers: “Let’s lay the cards on the table. You all know who I am and where I come from . . . I have no intention of operating a gambling house or any other illicit business.” After the meeting, Miami’s mayor, J. Newton Lummus, sounded peculiarly respectful toward Capone, whom he termed “one of the fairest men I have ever been in conference with.” Capone sidestepped the obloquy by moving to Miami Beach, a smaller community that was virtually a part of Miami but technically a separate city. It was a shrewd move, giving the politicians their breathing room while allowing Al to stay close to the action.

  Now that he had introduced himself properly, Capone found that he fit into the Miami scene rather well, largely because the city and its money were even newer than Chicago’s. And Florida had yet to be tainted by development. Early visitors from the north described the region as drunk on warmth and light. “Sea gulls floated in it, white shadows,” said Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, an early conservationist. “Bay or sky, it was all dazzling, diamond-edged.” When she wrote those words, in 1915, Miami Beach was better known as a failed coconut plantation than as a haven for millionaires, would-be millionaires, and gamblers. Then the Lummus family (to which the mayor belonged) began to develop the area as a resort. Although their Ocean Beach Realty Company got off to a fast start, World War I slowed its progress; not until 1920 did the pace of development recover real momentum. It was still a fragile society, one that could not yet afford to be choosy about its members, and desperate for the support of men with deep pockets—men like Al Capone. In Miami itself, one mammoth building after another went up, many of them in a distinctive style reminiscent of Moorish-Spanish architecture, but on a scale that was wholly and outlandishly American. Helped along by the stock market boom, the city became a playground for the wealthy, many of whom arrived in private railroad cars. Eventually a millionaire named Carl Fisher, who hailed from Indianapolis, led the drive to develop Miami Beach, which, with its imported birds, polo grounds, tennis courts, and golf courses, resembled an oceanside theme park, effectively banishing reality. Thus it proved a receptive environment for a racketeer like Capone who wanted to make it in society, for in Miami, “society” was whatever people said it was.

  Capone quickly installed himself in a penthouse suite at the city’s premier residence, the Moorish-style Ponce de León Hotel. In addition, he leased a waterfront home for $3,000 for the season. Mae and Sonny moved into the house, and Al shuttled between his family and the hotel. Now that he had paid his dues to Miami, criticism of him suddenly died away. Miami’s chief of police, H. Leslie Quigg, went so far as to say of Capone, “If he’s here for a good time and behaves himself, he can stay as long as he likes.” With those words, Capone appeared to enjoy the complicity of the Miami police in his new ventures, but the extent of cooperation he received from the city’s power structure went far beyond that conciliatory statement. It so happened that J. Newton Lummus, the mayor of Miami who considered Al so fair-minded, was also a real estate agent, and a clever one at that. He knew that Capone wanted to purchase a house without starting a new public outcry, and the mayor thought he had a solution to the problem. Even as he publicly denounced Capone, J. Newton Lummus quietly went to work for him.

  Lummus located a large, luxurious home he thought would be an appropriate domicile for an upwardly mobile racketeer. It was located at 93 Palm Island, in the midst of a small artificial island built beside a long, low causeway extending across Biscayne Bay from Miami to Miami Beach. This area was worlds apart from Al’s other homes in working-class Cicero and Chicago’s Prairie Avenue. A chic address, Palm Island was as heavily guarded and as carefully tended as a country club. Most of its homes belonged to prominent figures in Miami’s social scene. The home Lummus had set his sights on had been built in 1922 by Clarence Busch, who belonged to the St. Louis brewing dynasty, and it featured fourteen rooms, a small gatehouse, a spacious backyard, 300 feet of frontage on the bay, and a dock. It was the closest to paradise a boy from Brooklyn could hope to get. From the beige tones of its exterior to its graceful Spanish-style arches and sheltering palm trees, everything about the villa said “millionaire.” Even better from Capone’s point of view, it was secluded, and a high wall enclosed the property, making it difficult for intruders to trespass. Although Clarence Busch had subsequently sold it to one James Popham, the home’s association with the Busches was enormously flattering to Capone, for they represented everything to which he aspired: wealth, respectability, and power. Like him, they had built their fortune on booze, but where Prohibition had made Capone’s rise possible, it had left the Busches financially hard-pressed.

  As Lummus and Capone were keenly aware, if the racketeer were to purchase the Palm Island villa in his own name the transaction would unleash a storm of unfavorable publicity. An intermediary was required, and Capone soon recruited one. His name was Parker Henderson Jr., son of Miami’s former mayor, and he made an ideal patsy. At twenty-four, young Henderson was a plump young man-about-town with a fondness for the high life. By day, he managed the Ponce de León, where Capone maintained a suite, and he rapidly succumbed to Capone’s formidable charm and hospitality, which included an introduction to Miami’s leading brothel keeper, Duke Cooney. Within days of Al’s arrival, Henderson was proudly wearing one of the racketeer’s diamond-studded belt buckles as a token of their new friendship. In fact, Henderson liked everything about the gangster life—the guns, the glamour, and especially the girls—and he was delighted to help when Al asked for his assistance in buying the Palm Island villa. Capone then referred him to Lummus, who said, “If anyone sells property to Capone, you and I should do it,” implying that Henderson would receive a commission, although it was hardly necessary by this time to persuade him. The naïve Henderson had already begun to run risky financial errands for Capone. On no less than eighteen occasions between mid-January and April 2, Henderson received money orders sent to Miami from Chicago. They were addressed not to Capone but to a fictitious “A. Costa.” Accompanied by a Capone gunman, Nick Circella, who made certain there would be no monkey business, Henderson forged a signature to suit this alias and promptly turned the money over to Al. When the transactions were concluded, Capone had stockpiled $31,000 under his alias, sufficient for a generous down payment on the house of his dreams. In March, Lummus closed the deal on behalf of Capone. Thanks largely to the mayor’s skillful maneuvering, Capone finally had a respectable base outside Chicago, should it be necessary to seek refuge. What’s more, it was right on Biscayne Bay.

  • • •

  Although it appeared that the racketeer and the mayor had accomplished their goal to keep the real estate transaction out of the public eye, Capone’s acquisition of the Palm Island villa actually gave the federal government its first important lead in its effort to prosecute him for income tax evasion. In Washington, D.C., Elmer Irey’s Intelligence Unit of the IRS had been attempting with little success to investigate Capone’s tax situation. The plan was to demonstrate that he had not complied with the 1927 Supreme Court ruling which specified that even illegal income was subject to taxation. As expected, Capone had not paid his taxes. “No record of the filing of any return for any year was found,” an internal Treasury Department memorandum concluded. Irey’s Intelligence Unit subsequently began an investigation to determine how much mone
y Capone was spending as a way to estimate how much taxable income he was earning.

  To lead this part of the investigation, Irey selected Frank J. Wilson, who had successfully uncovered the financial chicanery of lesser bootleggers. Wilson looked every bit as much a civil servant as Irey; he was about forty but he looked a decade older, with his bald head and his eyes framed by severe wire-rimmed glasses. Of greater importance, he was an obsessive investigator. Despite the danger of the assignment, Wilson and his wife, Judith, moved to the Sheridan Plaza Hotel in Chicago, where he passed himself off as a tourist. He did not tell his wife the precise nature of his investigation; all she knew was that her husband was looking into the affairs of someone named “Curly Brown.” It was 1928, and Wilson would spend the next three years digging for the elusive information that could be used to send Capone to prison. “The task,” in his words, “was to find gross income in excess of $5,000 (the standard exemption at the time) accruing to Capone for any one year in which he had filed no tax return at all and/or income exceeding the insignificant amounts he did report for other years.” Given Capone’s vast income and lavish spending habits, this sounded easy enough to accomplish; in fact, it proved nearly impossible. As Wilson discovered, Capone was “completely anonymous when it came to income. He did all his business through front men or third parties. To discourage meddlers, his production department was turning out fifty corpses a year.”