Al Capone is not dead—yet.
But Al lives every day with death and knows that it will get him in the end.
The world has put the finger on him. He is on the spot and—today, tomorrow, next week or next month, perhaps next year—sometime the gats will spit, the machine guns rattle, or the sawed-off shotguns roar.
And then the world and gangland will make holiday while the costliest coffin is borne behind the longest parade of flower-laden limousines and Al Capone will ride in the Last Parade. . . .
The descriptions of murder and mayhem that followed paled beside the booklet’s grisly illustrations. Readers were confronted with a full-page photograph of the dead Frank Capone, the bullet holes visible in his chest; another shot showed the bodies of Scalise, Anselmi, and Guinta lying beneath sheets in the morgue, with only their heads visible; in his portrait, Frankie Yale sprawled in a pool of blood beside the car in which he had tried to elude Capone’s hit squad (which had consisted of Scalise and Anselmi); and there were gory shots of other, lesser gangsters lying in roadside ditches or slumped behind the wheel of a car, their straw boaters tilted at a fatal angle.
Other artifacts of the rapidly growing Capone cult were outright frauds, but their popularity testified to the racketeer’s hold on the world’s imagination. In Germany, Peter Omm’s Alkoholkrieg in U.S.A. purported to be a true account by a Chicagoan calling himself Lemon Scoots. After returning from the Great War, Lemon wrote, he became a saloon keeper and bootlegger, rising to become a lieutenant of Capone himself. Said one reviewer of this work, “Anything glaringly improbable in the account is easily explained by the unfathomable gullibility of the Americans.” A more successful hoax flowed from the pen of an English writer, Hugo C. K. Baruch. Under the nom de plume of Jack Bilbo, he concocted Carrying a Gun for Al Capone: The Intimate Experiences of a Gangster in the Bodyguard of Al Capone. Published in both England and the United States by Putnam in 1932, the work became a best-seller and remained in print until 1948, yet no one seemed to realize that the author, who had never laid eyes on Capone, wrote the book entirely out of his imagination. The English, particularly, were fascinated by Capone at the time; his notoriety inspired Owen Collins, a journalist, to write a well-intentioned study in 1932 entitled King Crime: An English Study of America’s Greatest Problem. Edgar Wallace, the English mystery writer, visited Chicago for four days during Capone’s tax trial, long enough to decide Capone was the victim of a witch hunt and to find inspiration to write a play about him on the transatlantic crossing home. The result, called On the Spot, became a hit in London and Paris.
It was but a short step from these bloody, simplistic dramatizations to the comics. Among the best known was Chester Gould’s innovative daily strip, Dick Tracy. Gould’s strip began appearing in the Chicago Tribune and other papers in 1931, when the comics habitually relied on fantasy heroes such as Tarzan and Buck Rogers or tame domestic satire. Gould, in contrast, took his inspiration from the news of the day, especially the newfound fascination with crime as an expression of social outrage that was characteristic of the Depression. Gould brought the criminal ethos to life through the character of a detective who remorselessly punished the wicked. “Big gangsters were running wild but going to court and getting off scot-free,” he observed. “I thought: why not have a guy who doesn’t take the gangsters to court but shoots em?” According to Max Allan Collins, who has made a careful study of the strip, Gould’s inspiration for his detective came from Eliot Ness, whom he envisioned as a latter-day Sherlock Holmes, a man both fearless and technologically adept. Ness took the direct action that Gould calculated would appeal to his readers. Having chosen his model, Gould confronted his contemporary detective with an array of contemporary crimes to solve; he pursued kidnappers as well as gangsters. (Gould’s retelling of the Lindbergh kidnapping gave the real-life tragedy a happy ending.) But Dick Tracy was no sentimentalist; he was as hard and remote as his victims, a sleuth whose style reflected the hard-boiled school of detective writing forged by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. And Tracy was a trained professional; in his strip Gould regularly provided tidbits of information about fighting crime; he instructed readers on the proper procedure for photographing suspects, for instance, or taking fingerprints; the times demanded no less. True, Dick Tracy was only a comic strip, but it revealed a new way of thinking and feeling about daily life in crime-ridden cities. Gould’s art work contributed to the strip’s emotional appeal; panels were arresting to the eye: cinematic, menacing, blotted with black silhouettes of distorted human forms toting machine guns. Scenes of stark confrontation occurred in claustrophobic dark alleys or in the blinding glare of headlights. Gould transformed the gory photos of gangland slayings into comic book art for children to imbibe along with their milk and cereal.
In the guise of a character named Big Boy, Capone appeared in Dick Tracy early in December of 1931, not long after his tax trial had made him a front-page staple across the nation. In Gould’s story, Big Boy is spending his idle time listening to a moll inspired by Texie Garcia, a popular speakeasy entertainer, play the piano. Tracy knocks on the door. Big Boy instructs the moll to continue playing (“He’s pecking the ivories—he doesn’t suspect anything,” Tracy remarks) and fires a volley of shots through the door, hitting Tracy’s sidekick. Tracy breaks down the door, only to find the moll alone in the flat; Big Boy has vanished into the night, and not even Dick Tracy can capture him.
Gangster fantasy found a home on the airwaves as well as in the comic strips. The radio version of Dick Tracy was broadcast early enough for children to tune in, as was the crime show, Gangbusters. In The Shadow, another popular radio series, Orson Welles portrayed Lamont Cranston and spoke chillingly of the evil lurking in the hearts of men. Crime fantasies were everywhere: in the newspapers and magazines, on the air, and on the nation’s movie screens; and directly or indirectly, they reinforced the impression that Capone was the archvillain of the day. The plays and movies and comics succeeded because audiences wanted to believe that Al Capone was omnipotent, that he was evil incarnate, and they enjoyed projecting their fantasies onto him. In the realm of popular culture, he became the eternal Other. In the United States, Capone’s alien nature was often thought to derive from his Italian immigrant origins. Surely the foreign blood coursing in his veins explained why he turned to a life of crime. But in Europe, Capone became a distinctively American phenomenon, the culmination of democracy’s tendency to spawn a demotic, gangster culture. Capone was among the most readily identifiable of all Americans, the gangster who ruled Chicago, that quintessentially American city. Despite their diversity, all these representations of Capone shared one important element: they described a man who never was.
As Capone’s reputation became bloated with myth and pseudofacts, a fresh roster of criminals captured the attention of the American public and fed its appetite for crime. They were a new breed, this group—not gangsters, but loners, outcasts, and misfits. Capone was a creation of the 1920s—the flashy, amiable, and highly sociable bootlegger. His immediate successors were different, distinctly products of the Depression. They were WASPs from rural backgrounds or small cities, places that were not supposed to be breeding grounds for criminals, places that honored American values, that had been dry before, during, and after Prohibition. Far removed from the Gowanus Canal or Chicago Heights, they were places where people studied and feared the Bible—the “real” America. But it made no difference; the farms and small towns of the Midwest proved just as liable to spawn criminals as the tenements of the East Coast. And some of these criminals were women, shattering another cherished stereotype. The new breed made no pretense about being Robin Hoods; they never even got rich. Capone, in comparison, was a tycoon of crime. This ugly crew fascinated Americans for one reason in particular: they robbed banks in an era when banks ruthlessly dispossessed so many farms, homes, and businesses. Many law-abiding citizens felt like robbing banks themselves, but these people went out and did it. In contrast,
Capone never robbed a bank in his life, preferring to control them quietly, from behind the scenes.
Their number included “Baby Face” Nelson, “Ma” Barker, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, but above all there was John Herbert Dillinger. He resembled a nightmarish version of Clark Gable: thick hair, neat mustache, perpetual snarl, and chilling, feral eyes. He was a loner, a thrill seeker, and a renowned lover. Popular lore had it that his penis was extraordinarily long, but there is no evidence to support the claim. However, there is no doubt that this Indiana farm boy was extraordinarily violent. His short career in crime implicated him in ten bank holdups, ten shootings, and three jailbreaks: a one-man crime wave. Borrowing the concept of a public enemies list from the Chicago Crime Commission, the FBI’s chief, J. Edgar Hoover, named Dillinger as the most wanted criminal in the country. The attention only served to glorify him. This was the Depression; Americans were suspicious of the federal government, and they rooted for underdogs like Dillinger, seeing him as an engine of social justice. “Dillinger does not rob poor people,” explained an Indianapolis fan. “He robs those who become rich by robbing poor people. I am for Johnnie.” Even the New York Times editorialized about his “charmed life.” Had John Dillinger never existed, it would have been necessary to invent him, for he acted out a populist fantasy of revenge on the big business interests that had brought the country to its knees. In contrast to Capone, the organizer and insider, Dillinger was an outsider, and more than that, he was an outcast. Capone had maintained his own code of conduct: do things his way, and he would take care of you. With Capone morality was relative, everything painted in shades of gray, good and evil cooperating and compromising, one hand washing the other, and perhaps soiling it in the process. He was that quintessentially social phenomenon, the racketeer. At bottom, all his businesses operated on the principle of organizing people, bringing them together and extracting money from the interaction. In the process, he became virtually a government unto himself. But Dillinger was a loner. There was no subtlety about him; everything was black and white. An anarchist to the core, he despised the system; he was thoroughly, bracingly misanthropic and rebellious.
His final, most uproarious spree began in January 1934, when federal agents arrested Dillinger in Arizona and sent him home to Indiana and a murder trial. Foiling his captors, he escaped from a jail that was thought to be highly secure, assembled a small gang, and resumed robbing banks with gleeful abandon. In response, Homer Cummings, the attorney general, pressed Congress for anticrime bills, manpower, and machinery to cope with Dillinger and his like. “I think we ought to have a reasonable number of cars—cars that can go as fast as the devil,” he said. “And we ought to have two or three armored cars.” Despite Cummings’s enthusiasm for the latest techniques in law enforcement, there is no evidence that more cars, laws, and money would succeed where society as a whole had failed. By the spring, 5,000 law enforcement officers were involved in trying to capture Dillinger, as their quarry eluded them, driving across the country from the sheltering arms of one girlfriend to another. Movement was his element: the headlights flickering across darkened country roads, the sound of insects filling the night, the click of weapons being loaded, the dry fear mounting at the back of the throat.
In May, federal agents tracked him to a roadhouse located in the north woods of Mercer, Wisconsin. Hearing their barking dogs, Dillinger leaped from a second-story window to temporary safety at the last possible moment. Since Ralph Capone was then in the process of converting Mercer into a refuge from his notoriety in Chicago, there is a strong possibility that Dillinger received assistance and shelter from the Capone organization. Later that summer, Dillinger slipped into Chicago, where he continued to elude the police, despite having one of the best-known faces in the country. He did take steps to disguise himself; he dyed his eyebrows black, wore glasses, and treated his fingertips with acid to obscure his fingerprints. Again, there is suspicion that he relied on the Capone organization to protect him in the city it still controlled.
For the previous five months, the FBI’s chief agent in that city, Melvin Purvis, had been obsessed with capturing the new Public Enemy Number 1. Just thirty at the time, Purvis was more trigger-happy than other FBI agents; his approach to law enforcement was to kill violent criminals, not arrest them. On July 22, he received word that Dillinger had been spotted at the Biograph movie theater on North Lincoln Avenue in the company of two women: Polly Hamilton Keele, a pretty redhead who was one of Dillinger’s girlfriends, and Anna Sage, a onetime madam. It was Sage who would betray Dillinger to the FBI; by prior arrangement, she wore a skirt of a conspicuous shade of bright orange, her signal to Purvis’s men that she was with Dillinger. The trio bought tickets to see, appropriately enough, a gangster film starring Clark Gable, Manhattan Melodrama, and went inside the theater. Meanwhile, Purvis and several other agents quietly converged on the Biograph, trying to look inconspicuous; just before assembling, they had received an order from J. Edgar Hoover himself to shoot Dillinger only if he drew his gun. Chicago was in the midst of a stunning heat wave at the time; the day before, the temperature had reached 108 degrees. Over twenty agents had staked out the theater by the time the movie ended and the audience dispersed into the hot night. Among them was a surprisingly nonchalant Dillinger, who left the theater with his two female companions. As he walked to the former madam’s apartment, he passed Purvis, looked at him, in fact, without recognizing him. Overcoming his paralyzing fear, Purvis managed to signal the agents to move in on Dillinger.
Polly was the first to notice that something was dreadfully wrong, that they were being followed. She poked him in the ribs, and Dillinger, who had narrowly eluded the police so many times in the previous months, once again ran for his life. Disobeying Hoover’s orders, the agents drew their weapons and began to fire (they could always say they thought they had seen Dillinger produce a weapon). All at once, four bullets entered the body of John Dillinger, including one in the back of the neck, and he fell dead in an alley. He was only thirty-one years of age. A little later Anna Sage, having changed her dress, returned to the scene of the shooting, where passers-by stooped to dip their handkerchiefs in Dillinger’s blood. (Later on, when the story of the betrayal came out, journalists employed a bit of poetic license and christened Sage “The Woman in Red.”) His body was then taken to the Cook County Morgue, where attendants found $7.70 in his pocket along with a .38-caliber pistol; the safety catch was still on.
During the next few days over 20,000 curiosity seekers turned out to pay their last respects to his bullet-ridden corpse despite temperatures that continued to hover around the 100-degree mark. Eventually his remains were shipped home to be buried in Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis, under heavy police protection. In Chicago, the alley where John Dillinger had died quickly became a tourist attraction, and in his memory, an unknown memorialist wrote on a nearby wall:
Stranger, stop and wish me well,
Just say a prayer for my soul in Hell.
I was a good fellow, people said,
Betrayed by a woman all dressed in red.
In the Gangster Summer of 1934, as Dillinger flashed across the consciousness of America like a comet trailing blood in its wake, Al Capone continued to serve out the remaining eight years of his prison sentence in near anonymity. Comparing him to Dillinger, the New York Times referred to Capone in a new way, the past tense. “Al Capone,” the paper editorialized, “was significant because he was obviously the product of a whole environment, social and political.” Significant, yes, but also a has-been. Al Capone had begun the decade as an internationally notorious figure who, despite his conviction for income tax evasion, commanded a vast racketeering empire, but by the summer of 1934 he was broken in mind, body, and spirit, and nearly forgotten by the organs of publicity that had once outdone themselves to celebrate and condemn his career.
• • •
As midnight tolled the arrival of Sunday, August 19, a continge
nt of forty-three prisoners secretly left the Atlanta Penitentiary to board an armored train. They were accompanied by Warden Aderhold and a corps of heavily armed guards. No one would confirm the train’s destination, though everyone knew they were bound for the West Coast and Alcatraz. At 6:10 A.M. the train, distinguished by its barred windows, pulled away from the penitentiary, coasted along the rail spur to the main line, and as the sun rose over the South, headed west. Despite the attorney general’s refusal to reveal the identities of the prisoners on board the special train, there was widespread suspicion that Al Capone was among them, and as the train rumbled across the tracks of the Southern Pacific through Texas, spectators gathered to watch it pass; they were frightened away, however, by a guard who threatened to shoot.
Capone was indeed on board the train; as the newest, most formidable penitentiary in the country, Alcatraz had been designed expressly with his kind in mind. He had just become part of the federal government’s latest experiment in crime deterrence. The name of the game was isolation; deprive a convict of the glamour endowed by publicity, ran the government’s theory, and you have drawn his fangs. There was one other pressing reason for the veil of security covering Capone’s transfer to Alcatraz: the fear that remnants of his gang might hijack the train, liberate Al, and kill his captors. Although the scenario appeared to be far-fetched, Warden Aderhold took it seriously indeed; in an era when Dillinger could elude thousands of federal agents, he believed that one could not be too careful. For reasons of security, then, Capone spent the entire journey confined to the car, his legs shackled in irons, his wrists manacled. When he went to the bathroom, a guard accompanied him. He was kept away from the barred windows, shrouded in darkness, unable to see the passing countryside. The sweltering heat made the confinement all the more unbearable, and since it was deemed unsafe to let the convicts wash, the cars carrying them were soon reeking. As the train neared Yuma, Arizona, Capone, extremely restless, stretched his legs and inadvertently opened a radiator valve with his foot; suddenly his car filled with scalding steam. Once the damage was repaired, he broke out in a rash, and guards cooled him down with an alcohol sponge bath.
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