Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  “No good,” a policeman said to D’Andrea. “That’s expired. You can’t carry a gun on that and certainly not in a courtroom.” The bodyguard remained in custody.

  Ahern and Fink tried to locate the judge and lodge a complaint, but Wilkerson had already departed, bound for a football game, rain or shine. As D’Andrea was led away, Capone glumly left the building, weaving his way “through the usual lane of policemen and gangster-worshipers.” He climbed heavily into cab, which sped off in the pouring rain.

  At four in the afternoon, Wilkerson returned to court and ordered D’Andrea to appear before him without any lawyers present. “It is not necessary to have counsel here today,” Wilkerson told him. “I do not intend to dispose of this case now. There is a rule of the federal court of long standing, in the disposition of cases of this kind. In the case of Sharon vs. Hill it is stated that any man or counsel or witness who comes into court armed should be punished. This also applies to the lawyers who allowed it.” With that, D’Andrea was locked up in the county jail until Monday morning, when he would face a charge of carrying a concealed weapon into the courtroom. Nothing could have been more calculated to alienate and infuriate Wilkerson than the presence of an armed associate of the defendant. As a result of the incident, Capone seemed less a celebrity and more a Chicago hoodlum reflexively resorting to violence.

  The unmasking of D’Andrea received considerable attention in the press, partly because he seemed to be a new face in the Capone crowd. Actually, he was a longtime Capone confidant and insider, a quieter version of “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn but no less dangerous when provoked. D’Andrea lived in a splendid estate in Benton Harbor, Michigan, not far from the lake. He had long cherished his anonymity and was furious about losing it; in fact, nothing irritated him more than the journalists who would proceed to brand him as a gunman, and especially the photographers who jostled to take his picture as he moved through the corridors of the Federal Building. As D’Andrea discovered, one of the photographers, Tony Berardi, the amateur boxer, proved as tough as any gangster; the only difference was that the weapon he wielded happened to be a camera, which in its own way could be as deadly as a gun. Once the photograph was published in the paper with an appropriate caption, it could do irreparable harm to the subject’s reputation. “I was the first guy ever to take a picture of D’Andrea,” Tony Berardi later boasted. “I took the only clear picture ever made of the guy, and he threatened me, the little shit.” Nobody threatened the feisty little Berardi, not even Capone himself, and certainly not an unknown bodyguard. “I picked him up and put him right against the wall and said, ‘You little son of a bitch, I’ll kill you first!’ ” This was normal Chicago talk, phrased in terms D’Andrea could understand. He backed off, the photographer got his picture, and came away unharmed.

  • • •

  Columbus Day is normally a holiday of particular pride to Italian-Americans, but as if to emphasize his lack of sympathy for that group, Judge Wilkerson insisted court would be in session on that date: Monday, October 12. Capone looked rested after the weekend, and he arrived wearing a luxurious tan overcoat. He took his seat and listened to the prosecution resume its tally of his personal expenditures—“Capone’s trail of gold,” the newspapers took to calling it.

  Capone’s lawyers remained mute until the prosecution introduced Capone’s phone bills as evidence. The debate began when a representative of Miami’s telephone company stated that Capone had paid $955.55 in telephone tolls in 1928, an almost unbelievable $3,141.40 in 1929, $3,061.29 in 1930, and $1,226.64 for the first five months of 1931.

  “Now what in the world have 1930 and 1931 to do with this lawsuit?” demanded Fink.

  To which Grossman replied with devastating effectiveness: “The bill payments show that money was available to pay taxes.”

  “And they used it to pay telephone bills with,” Judge Wilkerson interjected.

  “We were trying to pay the taxes,” said Fink with an acquiescent smile, “and apparently the Government wouldn’t take them and had us indicted.”

  The judge smiled right back at the counsel for the defense. “Because you did not want to pay enough.”

  After the phone bill had been dealt with, the prosecution detailed Capone’s disbursements in Chicago, and again the scale of living described by the merchants he had done business with was sufficient to startle the jury. Capone had paid $3,500 for a rug for his mother on Prairie Avenue, and another $800 for rugs in the hotels where he himself had lived. He bought a $4,500 McFarlan automobile for Mae back in 1924; even then, the dealer testified, Capone was able to pay in cash, as he did for another McFarlan in 1926 and a Lincoln in 1928. (The automobile Capone purchased for his wife was a custom-designed cabriolet, similar in style and quality to a Cadillac, manufactured by the short-lived McFarlan Motor Corporation of Indiana.) In 1928, testimony also revealed, Capone paid a jeweler on Wabash Avenue $4,000 in cash for sterling silver and glassware. Then there were the glittering diamond-studded belt buckles he bestowed on his friends and allies: trophies that by the end of the 1920s had turned into badges of corruption. Jake Lingle had been wearing one at the time of his death. The jurors heard that Capone had purchased thirty of them at $275 apiece.

  A salesman from Marshall Field testified about Capone’s clothing expenditures, symbolically stripping the defendant to his silken underwear before the court. In 1927 and 1928, he had bought himself twenty-three suits and three topcoats from this store alone, sales that totaled $2,635 the first year and $1,080 the next. The shirts, which went for $18 to $30, he bought literally by the dozen, as he did the neckties, the collars, and the handkerchiefs. Then of course there were the union suits, the undershirts and shorts, and finally the very special union suits made out of “Italian glove silk,” which sold for $12 each.

  “Italian glove silk,” Fink asked the witness. “What is that?”

  “A knitted silk, very fine, similar to ladies’ gloves, a knit glove.”

  “Is it warm?”

  “No, it is just a nice suit of underwear.”

  Capone laughed in embarrassment. Hearing merriment coming from all directions, he turned his head, and as he did so, he blushed, and the twin scars on his left cheek suddenly appeared freshly emblazoned as he tried to laugh along with the spectators. They all laughed at Al, at the man who swaddled his privates in Italian glove silk. The revelation caused Meyer Berger, for one, to regard Capone in a new and unexpected light. Sinister around the edges but soft at the center. The reporter, nobody’s fool, decided that this fearsome Capone was actually “soft,” “home-loving,” and even “naïve,” a man with “distinctly feminine traits,” as evidenced by his “passion for colored-silk underwear.” Compared to Jack “Legs” Diamond, another gangster whom Berger had also studied in court, Capone seemed as appealing and affable as a “jovial Italian opera singer.” So Berger became one of the few outsiders to recognize that Capone was not exactly a psychopath, cold blooded killer, or an evil genius. He was, in fact, highly congenial and touchingly eager for the good opinion of all those with whom he dealt, and Berger concluded, “The previous conception of Capone, as gleaned from newspaper stories of his gang’s massacre of seven rivals in one shooting, does not fit in with the smiling, good-natured Capone trying to find a place for himself and his wife in a fashionable Florida community.”

  “What is the price of those now?” Fink continued, referring to the silk union suits.

  “Ten dollars a garment.”

  “Came down $2.”

  (Said Runyon: “It looked for a moment as if he had a sale.”)

  Few citizens of Chicago could afford to pay $12 for Italian glove silk union suits in good times, and even fewer could afford $10 with the Depression at hand. It was in homely details such as these that the jury gained an appreciation of the extent of Capone’s wealth. At the same, the image of Capone spending his time at Marshall Field rather than in some seedy roadhouse or gambling den made a strong impression. “The testimony
revealed Al as rather a busy and shrewd shopper,” Runyon felt. “While he is usually pictured as a ruthless gang chieftain, he was today presented as a domesticated sort of chap going around buying furniture, and silverware, and rugs, and knickknacks of one kind and another for his household. . . . Moreover Al appears to have been somewhat conservative in his big household purchases, considering the amount of plunder he is supposed to have handled.”

  Finished at last with tales of Capone’s shirts and underwear, the prosecution summoned a clerk named Walter Housen, who had worked at both the Lexington and Metropole Hotels, Capone’s principal headquarters in Chicago. Housen proceeded to offer fresh instances of Capone’s evasiveness as well as his seemingly limitless supply of money.

  “What did his bills average a week?” asked Jacob Grossman.

  “Oh, twelve to fifteen hundred.”

  “Did he ever give any banquets?”

  “Well, there was one after the Dempsey-Tunney fight that lasted two nights.”

  “Did you get paid for it?”

  “Yes.”

  The prosecution went on to establish that Capone moved from the Metropole to the nearby Lexington Hotel on July 30, 1928. Several days after moving out, he paid his tab of over $2,000 in cash. The move involved both Capone and as many as twenty members of his gang, all of whom registered at the Lexington under the incongruous designation “George Phillips and family.” This strange state of affairs aroused the suspicions of Judge Wilkerson, who demanded of the witness, “Now, just what do you know about the relation of this defendant to that party?”

  “All I know is,” Housen meekly replied, “they came in for rooms that were engaged, and I couldn’t get anybody to register for the rooms, and I took it upon myself, because I had to have something to show for the rooms.”

  “Is it in your handwriting?” asked Jacob Grossman of the prosecution’s team.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And one of that group was the defendant Alphonse Capone?”

  “Not at that time, no sir.”

  “Well, when did he come in?”

  “Well, he might have come in that day, and he might have the next day.”

  “What room did the defendant Alphonse Capone occupy?”

  “Two thirty,” the clerk said.

  “And how does that room compare in size with the other rooms?”

  “Well, that is a suite; that is, three rooms in one group.”

  As the government lawyer badgered the witness, it became apparent that Housen was lying—not bold deceptions, but small evasions designed to save the skin of a frightened hotel clerk, who was terrified of testifying against the “Big Fellow.”

  In the afternoon session, a builder named Henry Keller, who had worked on Capone’s Palm Island dock, took the stand, but to the prosecutors’ chagrin, his testimony, rather than damning Capone, painted the racketeer in a sympathetic, if not entirely innocent light. “There was one day early in July,” Keller began. “We were sitting together having lunch at his house and we started a conversation in a casual way, and as it drifted around he said, ‘Dad, where are you from?’ I said, ‘I am from New York, born in the Tenth Ward, 1863.’ ”

  Bewildered, Ahern demanded to know where Keller’s testimony was leading.

  “What do you expect to prove?” Judge Wilkerson asked the prosecution.

  “Oh, just trying to show that the defendant started in a very humble way in New York, and didn’t have any money when he started, and comparing that with the vast amounts of money that he spent in Florida, is some indication that he must have gotten some, or earned it; he didn’t inherit it,” Jacob Grossman explained.

  “He started in a humble way like Hoover and Andrew Jackson and a number of other people who have risen to some distinction in the country,” said Fink in defense of his client.

  “Well, he didn’t start in exactly the same way,” Grossman pointed out.

  After the skirmish, Keller resumed his testimony. “The conversation then finally drifted around to what I had done when we first started in, and in the natural course of the conversation, I says, ‘What did you start at?’ He said, ‘My first job was tending bar at Coney Island.’ ”

  At that point, Grossman abruptly terminated Keller’s testimony, lest Capone seem too sympathetic, too much the self-made man. Had he been quicker on his feet, Grossman might have taken this moment to point out the speed with which Capone had acquired his uncounted wealth. At the time Keller talked with Capone, approximately 1927, only nine years had elapsed since Capone had held his first job as a bartender at the Harvard Inn on Coney Island, and only seven years separated that job from his taking over the Chicago rackets from Johnny Torrio. Such was the velocity of the 1920s.

  • • •

  All eyes were on Capone to see what color suit he would wear on October 13. He had clothed himself in a different hue for each day of the hearing. Today he wore a blue suit, with thin stripes, and to the surprise of some, no garters; instead, he wore his socks rolled down, collegiate-style, as it was called. He remained silent throughout this day as he had every other day of the trial. Rumors rushed to fill the vacuum created by his silence, and a story circulated that Johnny Torrio would take the stand today to testify against his former protégé, but the rumor turned out to be groundless and Torrio failed to appear, much to the relief of Capone and his lawyers.

  However, the prosecution planned to call five other witnesses to testify against Capone. The most important member of the roster was Fred Ries, the gambling cashier with the pathological dread of insects, whom Frank Wilson of the IRS had virtually tortured into testifying. His testimony had already helped to put Jack Guzik away for five years, and the government expected Ries to do even worse damage to Capone. Ries was a tall, stooped figure, nearly bald, his face partly obscured by thick horn-rimmed glasses. He looked exactly like the bookkeeper he was and nothing at all like a gambler or a gangster. He wore a light brown suit, and as he sat in the witness box, he constantly shuffled his feet, “as if operating an invisible sewing machine,” noted a reporter. This nervous mannerism was a manifestation of the fear the high-strung Ries felt at having to testify against Capone, a fear that was well placed. “They say, here, that the trigger men of the Chicago gang have been trying to find Ries since he testified as one of the key witnesses at the Guzik trial,” Meyer Berger remarked, sharing the widespread assumption that Ries was a marked man.

  “Mr. Ries,” Grossman began, “were you in 1927 cashier of a gambling house called the Subway in Cicero, Illinois?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who was the manager of that institution?”

  “A man by the name of Pete Penovich.”

  “Do you remember the address of the Subway?”

  “I think it was 4738 Twenty-second Street.”

  “In Cicero, Illinois?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did that gambling house have any competition there in Cicero?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Now Mr. Ries, as cashier did you have charge of all the finances of the gambling house?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I show you a cashier’s check from the Pinkert State Bank, Cicero. Tell us about that check.”

  “I bought it with cash representing profits from the house and turned it over to Bobby Barton,” he replied, referring to Capone’s chauffeur, but the connection eluded the prosecutors, and Grossman turned his attention to establishing a link between the money and Capone. “Did you say you operated at the Ship?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you operate at the Ship before or after you operated at the Subway?”

  “We operated the Ship early in ‘27 and also in September ‘27.”

  “Now, did you see the defendant, Alphonse Capone, on the premises of the Ship?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When?”

  “January 1927.”

  “Tell us about where he was on the premises at that time.”

/>   “Well, he was right at the telegraph operator’s office talking to Mr. Guzik.”

  “And was the telegraph operator’s office a part of the main establishment where the public usually congregated?”

  “The telegraph office was right next to the main office. The public didn’t congregate at the telegraph office as a rule, no, nobody is supposed to be there, no outsiders.”

  “No outsiders,” Grossman repeated for emphasis. “Is that the first time you saw the defendant Capone at that place?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you operate a place called the Radio?” asked Grossman, referring to another of Capone’s gambling parlors.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you ever see the defendant Capone at that place in 1927?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, where was he at that time when you saw him?”

  “Well, I was taking bets at the counter and he would come by, and he said, ‘Hello, Ries,’ and I said, ‘Hello, Al.’ ”

  “Yes. Where did he go?”

  “He went back to the office.”

  “Now referring to this check for $2,500, Mr. Ries, you say that J.C. Dunbar, the payee thereof, is you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And as cashier for the gambling establishment you had charge of the finances there, you say?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And if profits were made what would you do with the profits?”

  “I would turn them over to Jack Guzik in the shape of a check.”

  Grossman prompted him. “You would take the profits and buy . . .”

  “I would buy cashier’s checks and turn them over to Bobby Barton, and he would turn them over to Jack Guzik.” Barton was Capone’s chauffeur.

  “Do you know the approximate total that you turned over to Jack Guzik in 1927?”

  “I think around $150,000.”

  “Now, Mr. Ries, who was operating the place known as the Ship in early 1927?”

  “Jimmy Mondi was the manager there.”

  “Was there any change?”

  “At the Subway there was a change of manager.”