“It sounds wacky to me,” Al said.
“You don’t understand,” Kearns insisted, on his feet with excitement. “You’ll get reformed, see. Everybody has heard about you and all the evil things you’ve done. . . .”
“Now justa minute, God dammit,” Capone shouted as he shot to his feet, ready to punch out Kearns.
“I ain’t knockin’ you, Al. I’m your friend,” Kearns told him. “If they stick you in the big house you’d have lots of time to study up on the Bible.” Al sat and poured himself another drink as Kearns continued to explain his scheme. “I’d take you on tour and you’d be a national hero.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Capone protested, “I’m national now. Maybe not a hero, but they know Capone everywhere—you can get a bundle on that.”
Kearns took another drink. “We’d make a million bucks when I took you on tour.”
Now it was Al’s turn to take another drink. Under the influence of the alcohol, he warmed to the scheme. Publicity was always a pleasing prospect for Capone, and he remained eager for the public to think well of him. “You know, ‘Doc,’ ” he said, “maybe you got somethin’ there, at that. I could always talk real good, even without some of my boys alongside me to keep my audience listening real close.” To demonstrate his evangelical speaking style, Capone puffed out his chest and began declaiming: “Crime don’t pay and I’m the guy who can tell you good people about it, and you damned well better listen! You got to lead a good Christian life and don’t never knock nobody off, like the one time . . .” Al paused, muttered that he had better skip over that incident, and resumed his tirade. “The devil gets inside of you when you don’t take care of yourself in a good Christian manner, and run around and drink that God-dammned booze.” Again he caught himself and muttered, “No use knockin’ booze until I know it’s legal.” He helped himself to another drink, and told his friend, “They’d listen to Al Capone, or, by God, they’d wish they had.”
Kearns drunkenly agreed, but then remarked that evangelists, “although I ain’t no authority on ’em,” probably refrained from taking the Lord’s name in vain during their sermons. The mild criticism provoked a further outburst from Capone. “Now if I’m gonna manage this God damned tour,” Kearns lectured him, “you’re gonna have to listen to some suggestions without getting hot under the collar every time I turn around.” Capone relented, and his would-be manager brought up the financial aspects of their partnership. “This deal is fifty-fifty,” he announced. Capone, he recalled, “looked like I’d stabbed him.”
“Nobody gets 50 percent of any of my deals,” Al said, before dissolving into alcoholic laughter. Finally he agreed to the terms, declaring, “It’s worth it to be a national hero and preaching religion.”
Kearns left the Cook County Jail that day with a drunken glow and the prospect of an important new client, but as the weeks and months passed, it became apparent that Capone would never obtain the freedom necessary to allow him to pursue a career as a crusading evangelist. Although Kearns’s wild scheme came to nothing, the promoter had planted the seeds of an idea in Capone’s mind, the idea being public rehabilitation. Brooding on his situation during the long days in jail, he soon devised another way to make himself into a national hero.
At the beginning of March 1932, Capone, along with the rest of the nation, reacted with horror and fascination to the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. Since his solo transatlantic flight five years before, the “Lone Eagle” had been among the most famous and fortunate of Americans, his prowess and daring celebrated both at home and abroad. He had seemed touched with grace, invulnerable, but his life entered a darker chapter when his infant son was kidnapped from the Lindbergh estate in Hopewell, New Jersey, on March 1. The event triggered national hysteria as well as a massive hunt to find the missing child and his abductor. It quickly became symbolic of a larger evil abroad in the land, a truly malevolent force. Capone seized on the tragedy as an example of unmitigated evil, compared to which his bootlegging and tax dodging were relatively benign, victimless crimes. He knew he was not wholly innocent—there was too much blood on his hands—but he thought of himself as pragmatic and resourceful, a necessary evil. He instinctively identified with Lindbergh as a victim of fame and could easily imagine a similar tragedy befalling thirteen-year-old Sonny, whose photograph adorned his father’s cell. Kidnapping had always struck Al as the most despicable of all crimes. It was one thing to kill a man—sometimes the harsh reality of the rackets left no other choice—but to harm a child was monstrous, inexcusable. Eventually Al’s compassion gave way to his megalomania and his cunning. He hatched a plot of his own, one that cast him as a hero and would, he hoped, to spring him from jail at last. It began with a request to see Mr. Arthur Brisbane, the most influential editor in the Hearst newspaper empire.
On the morning of March 10, Brisbane—tall, thin-lipped, balding, with horn-rimmed glasses—entered the Cook County Jail. Escorted to Capone’s jumbo-sized cell in the hospital ward, he found the most celebrated gangster of the day sitting alone at a table, engrossed in a game of solitaire. Once Brisbane took a seat, Capone asked for the latest news of the Lindbergh kidnapping and proceeded to divulge his plan: if the authorities would let him out of jail, he would use all his powers to find the Lindbergh baby. “I will give any bond they require if they are interested in the child,” Capone explained. “I will spend every hour of the night and day with Thomas Callaghan, head of the United States Secret Service. The Government knows that it can trust him, I think, and I will send my young brother to stay here in the jail until I come back. You don’t suppose anybody would suggest that I would double-cross my own brother and leave him here, if I could get away from Callaghan?” Capone did not invoke the name of Thomas Callaghan lightly. In fact, the IRS learned that Callaghan had recently visited Capone in jail three or four times, and Capone probably thought he had Callaghan’s blessing. But when it came to specifics concerning his attempt to recover the Lindbergh baby, Capone became vague and confused, talking of the “angles” he would pursue on the outside and promising to do his best.
Like nearly every journalist who interviewed Al Capone, Brisbane became fond of the man and listened attentively as the prisoner turned the subject to his own plight. “I handle beer,” he said, “and beer never did anybody any harm. Everybody is a bootlegger nowadays, either selling it or buying it. The man that buys it violates the law as much as the man that sells it.” As he spoke, Al wove elaborate fantasies tinged with paranoia, and his deteriorating mental condition became increasingly apparent: “I am only 33 years old, and they tie me up with things that happened 25 years ago, talking about mobs I never heard of. When I came to Chicago 11 years ago, I only had $40 in my pocket. I went into a business that was open and didn’t do anybody any harm. They talk about the unemployed. I have given work to the unemployed. At least 300 young men, thanks to me, are getting from $150 to $200 a week, and are making it in the harmless beer racket, which is better than their jobs before. I have given work that has taken many a man out of the hold-up and bank robbery business.” Of course, the hundreds killed in Chicago since the inception of Prohibition demonstrated that the beer racket was anything but “harmless,” but Capone was appealing to the emotions, not logic. He concluded on a political note: “I have always been a Republican, and my young men are 100 percent Republicans. But we don’t ask for any profit out of politics. That isn’t our racket. I don’t see why they should crucify me.”
Brisbane was hardly the first to hear the offer; in fact, Capone had been trying out the ploy on journalists for weeks with little success. The New York Times had run a brief account several days earlier, but it was buried deep in the paper and went unnoticed. And when Will Rogers came a-calling at the Cook County Jail in search of material to flesh out his newspaper column, Capone spent two hours discussing his offer with the humorist, who against his better judgment wound up in Capone’s thrall. “There was absolutely no way I could write it and no
t make a hero out of him,” Rogers wrote in his diary of Capone’s offer. “What’s the matter with an age when our biggest gangster is our greatest national interest?”
Brisbane had no such scruples. The journalist knew he had a scoop of major proportions. It was not his place to find fault with Capone’s self-serving and irrational remarks. In the morning, Hearst papers around the nation repeated and amplified Capone’s offer in banner headlines. Joining two of the most famous Americans of the day, the aviator and the gangster, the story offered just the sort of sensationalism on which the Hearst press thrived.
Art Madden, one of the savvier government agents in Chicago and a keen student of Capone, dismissed the offer. “Capone could be useful only if the kidnapping was perpetrated by underworld characters,” he advised his superiors. “Even if that were the situation, there is reason to believe that Capone, under an eleven-year sentence, has necessarily lost much of his influence.” If any underworld character could help, Madden discovered, it was Lucky Luciano in New York. Remarkably, Lindbergh was desperate enough to give serious consideration to Capone’s offer, and he discussed it at length with Elmer Irey and Frank Wilson, the dogged IRS agents who had built the tax evasion case against Capone. Visiting Lindbergh in New jersey, they prudently advised the aviator to ignore the outlandish and distracting proposal. (Police finally discovered the badly decomposed body of the Lindbergh baby in May.) Assessing Capone’s empty ploy and the enormous publicity it received in the Hearst press, Time magazine concluded: “The whole affair was a typical Hearstian exploit—shrewd, bold, and precisely on the borderline of journalistic integrity.”
By now Capone, his bluster gone and his desperation obvious, had become a figure of fun in the press. Only a year before, political cartoonists had depicted a giant Capone standing astride a miniature representation of Chicago. Now they depicted a rail-thin Uncle Sam lording over a fat, cowering Capone, kicking him into a jail or lecturing about the importance of paying taxes. One artist imagined Capone sitting at a desk in a jailhouse schoolroom, taking grammar lessons. “There ain’t no gat on this here table,” he tells his instructor, who replies, “That’s ungrammatical, Mr. Capone. You must say there is no gat on this table.” Now that Capone was fair game, a humorist and screenwriter named Homer Croy invited the racketeer to create his own “advance epitaph” for an anthology Croy planned to publish, and in case nothing came to mind, Croy proposed several: Gone but not forgotten, Excuse me for not coming to the door, or Anyway, I don’t have to worry about my income tax anymore. “I think they are all rather amusing,” Croy wrote, but an official of the Federal Bureau of Prisons who intercepted the letter thought otherwise. “I wonder why you did not realize that there is nothing very humorous about an eleven year sentence,” he admonished Croy. “I would not ask Capone or any other prisoner to try to view such a situation humorously.”
One final appeal now stood between Capone and the start of his actual jail sentence in a federal penitentiary, and that was his petition before the Supreme Court of the United States for review of his case. It was extremely unlikely that the Court would consent to review, but the action delayed Capone’s removal from the Cook County Jail for another six weeks or so. Finally, on May 2, came word that Capone’s petition, his last resort, had been rejected without a word of comment from the bench. With that decision, Capone’s time in the purgatory of the Cook County Jail, his legal maneuvering, his appeals, and his false hopes of winning an early release all came to an end. When he heard the bleak news, Capone fell into a deep gloom and began pacing his cell with nervous, angry steps. A journalist pressed his nose against the wire mesh separating Capone from the rest of the world, wanting to know how he felt, now that he was sure to serve his sentence. Summoning all his self-control, Capone replied in a low growl, “Nothing to say.” His lawyer, Michael Ahern, dejected and exhausted from the long legal battle, finally gave up; it was, he said, “the end of three bitter years for us and the end of Al Capone.”
The end of Al Capone: ominous words, ones that Capone himself dismissed, but Ahern, who had seen more of the criminal justice system than his client had, knew better. This was the end of Capone’s career. The public Capone, the biggest bootlegger in the nation, the well-heeled gambler, the self-styled Robin Hood and celebrity, was finished, but as for the man himself, he was about to embark on the most bizarre and difficult part of his life. His battles from now on would be private ones—with himself, his health, and his sanity—rather than with gangs and prosecutors and glory-seeking Prohibition agents, and they would prove to be the most discouraging battles he had ever fought.
The wheels of the legal system had ground slowly and deliberately since Capone’s trial, but once he had exhausted his last appeal, the machinery abruptly lurched into high gear. Within hours of the Supreme Court ruling, the U.S. marshals were ready to deliver him to a federal penitentiary. Capone expected to join his buddies at Leavenworth, but without warning the attorney general decided to send him to a more remote location, where he would be less likely to encounter his colleagues: the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, reputed to be the meanest prison in the entire system. It was also among the most crowded; designed to house 1,800 prisoners, it now held more than 4,000. With time off for good behavior (ten days a month), he would not be out until January 19, 1939, at the earliest, the day after his fortieth birthday. His son would be twenty-one years old by that time, a fully grown man in his own right; would he be able to recall his father as anything other than a convict?
• • •
On the afternoon of May 3, 1932, Al bade farewell to the Capone clan: Mae, Sonny, his mother and sister, and his brother Matthew. He then packed his clothes, and readied himself for the journey to a lower circle of hell. As darkness fell, he began his trip to the Atlanta Penitentiary under extremely heavy security.
To make certain that the prisoner actually reached the train taking him to his final destination (and, one suspects, to gratify his own desire for vindication), Eliot Ness rode shotgun, accompanied by the rest of the Untouch ables. “I was determined to see there would be no ‘rescue’ or that no assassin’s bullet would cheat the law,” he wrote of the scene.
We arranged a five-car caravan to escort “Snorkey” from the Cook County jail to the old Dearborn Station. Lahart, Seager and I were to ride in the first car. Behind it was to be the car with Capone, followed by Robsky, Cloonan and King in another, followed by two automobiles carrying Chicago policemen. All of us were heavily armed: my crew was ready with sawed-off shotguns, revolvers and automatics loose in shoulder holsters. . . . As Capone was led into the warden’s office, the shouts of other prisoners echoed down the jail corridors.
“You got a bum break, Al!”
“Keep your chin up, Al—it ain’t so tough!”
“You’ll own the joint before you’re there very long, Al!”
Two marshals proceeded to handcuff Capone to another prisoner, Vito Morid, bound for a Florida prison. Morici began to put on his overcoat, and Capone advised him to drape it over their manacled wrists to conceal the handcuffs. At that moment, Eliot Ness stepped forward.
I led the way into the jail’s inner courtyard where a horde of photographers went into action, their flashbulbs exploding with blinding frequency. Capone, who had been surly for days in his jail cell, made no attempt to cover the scar on his face but strutted forward toward the photographers.
“Jeez,” he said, a proud note in his voice, “you’d think Mussolini was passin’ through.”
The jail’s gate swung open, and the caravan left, the crowd parting before it. “After that it was every driver for himself. Fenders and bumpers clashed and pedestrians were trampled in the stampede to avoid being hit by the fast moving officials’ motors,” a reporter said of the commotion. “Police officials described the ride to the Dearborn station as the wildest and noisiest in their experience.”
Sirens wailing, the cars drove along Ogden Avenue to Clark Street, where the St. Vale
ntine’s Day Massacre had occurred two years before. Pausing at a stoplight, Capone gazed at the dark, hulking form of the Federal Building, where he had lost his tax case. Minutes later the caravan pulled up at Dearborn Station, where they were besieged by another crowd of journalists, detectives, deputy marshals, and curiosity seekers. Capone and Morici, still shackled together, awkwardly climbed out of their car and lurched into the crowd, cursing and elbowing photographers away, but they discovered it was not an entirely hostile gathering, not by any means. The boys in Chicago Heights had arranged for Capone’s friends and family members to be at the station to wish him Godspeed.
Clearing the throng at last, Capone and Morici, manacled and stumbling, were led to the Dixie Flyer, a regularly scheduled Pullman train bound for Atlanta. After the Untouchables had thoroughly searched its eight cars, the prisoners entered, followed by photographers, flashing away. Inside his car, Capone regained his composure and made a point of presenting a bella figura for the cameras. He removed his coat, took his seat, and lit a cigar. Though manacled, he was smiling—the same sickly smile he had displayed during his tax trial, and when the cameras moved in for a close up of his famous scars, he did not flinch from their scrutiny. “I don’t know much about Atlanta,” he said to the reporters. “For one thing, it’ll be hot.” He tried to make the best of a bad situation, saying he hoped to lose a little weight and join the prison baseball team, claiming he was a “pretty good pitcher and first baseman, if I do say so myself.”
In the midst of the tumult his eyes fell on a vaguely familiar form, a slim young man with blue eyes and hair parted in the center. It was Eliot Ness, the man who had done so much damage to his bootlegging business and humiliated him by parading captured delivery trucks up Michigan Avenue. “Well, I’m on my way to do eleven years,” he told Ness. “I’ve got to do it. I’m not sore at anybody. Some people are lucky. I wasn’t. There was too much overhead in my business anyhow, paying off all the time and replacing trucks and breweries. They ought to make it legitimate.”
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