Despite all these difficulties, Capone learned to accept his place within the structure of the prison’s rituals and routines with less complaint than the average inmate did. Although he was confined to a prison undeniably mean and miserable, Capone patiently stuck it out and did his time. In fact, his first few years at Alcatraz were remarkable for their absence of trouble; warden, guards, and inmates alike discovered that the mighty Capone, the ruthless, feared ganglord who had once brought an entire city to its knees, was generally amiable, docile, and touchingly eager for the good opinion of all. One young newcomer to the rock was startled when Capone sidled up to him and shook his hand. “Anything I can do for you,” he said in the manner of an unctuous major domo, “don’t hesitate to call on me.” Of course there was nothing number 85 could do for the new member of the Alcatraz men’s club, or, for that matter, himself.
Number 85 had changed, physically as well as mentally. He was no longer the shrewd, occasionally temperamental Capone of old. His relentlessly advancing case of neurosyphilis, two years in the Atlanta penitentiary, and the regimentation of Alcatraz had all taken their toll on mind and body, and as 1934 slipped into 1935, he was a shabby counterfeit of the man he had once been. Some of the changes were superficial—the receding hairline, the prison pallor, the shrunken gut—but other, more insidious changes suggested his inner decay: his sunken eyes ringed by frighteningly dark circles, his stooped posture and shuffling gait, and his increasingly slurred speech. Number 85 spent ever more time in his own world, muttering to himself, staring into space, singing softly, detached from the brutal reality of Alcatraz and its tough crew. Rather than foment rebellion and shout defiance at the authorities, as was expected of him, he preferred to lose himself in pristine reveries of his wife and child and to pursue an improbable new ambition: he wanted to start a band consisting of Alcatraz inmates.
This was no transient daydream for number 85; it was an obsession that took hold of his disintegrating mind and which he pursued relentlessly during 1935. At first he approached Warden Johnston with the idea of purchasing instruments for the inmates. Money was no obstacle; he would pay whatever it cost. The sound of clarinets, flutes, trombones, gleaming brass, and throbbing drums would emanate from the island of the damned to mingle with the foghorns. No, the warden said, that would not be possible. After all, prisoners were not even allowed to speak in this prison, much less play marching songs. Number 85 did not let the matter rest there, however. A band would be good for morale, he said. Finally, after a year of campaigning, Warden Johnston yielded slightly, allowing the prisoners to form a band. They could practice for up to twenty minutes a day. However, Capone was absolutely forbidden to buy instruments for others; prisoners were required to use their own funds. To emphasize that the band would not be a Capone enterprise, the warden placed another inmate, number 199, in charge of the band. Known as Arthur Charrington in his previous life, he had spent his nights playing in an orchestra in Chicago and his days helping Dillinger rob banks.
Capone then decided he would play the banjo. He had not previously played this or any other instrument, nor is there any evidence that he was able to read music prior to jail, but he patiently familiarized himself with the rudiments of music theory and was eventually able to decipher musical notation and to pick out a few simple tunes, softly singing along. At first the members of the Alcatraz band managed to cooperate with each other, Capone plucking on the strings of his banjo, “Machine Gun” Kelly banging the drums, and a young kidnapper named Harmon Waley blowing on sax. The seeds of conflict were sewn, however, when Capone exchanged his banjo for its Old World counterpart, the mandolin. Other convicts whispered that Capone’s new instrument cost $600 and that his sheet music consisted of original orchestrations shipped directly from Europe. Matters came to head during one weekend practice section when Capone complained that Waley was blowing his saxophone too close to his—Capone’s—head. Suddenly Capone lost his temper, swearing at the young man, who silently waited for Al to turn his back. The instant he did, Waley smashed his saxophone into Capone’s head, knocking him from his stool. The two of them fell to the floor, pummeling each other, until the guards broke up the fight, which earned the participants a week in isolation. With that fight, number 85 dropped another notch in the convict hierarchy. Shunned by jealous inmates, he henceforth played—and sang—by himself.
Although music afforded Capone solace and respite from the constant threats he now received, it could not offer him physical protection. At the beginning of January 1936 a convicts’ strike brought him even closer to danger. The inciting incident involved the death of an inmate, Jack Allen, who had been complaining for days of severe stomach pains without receiving medical attention. The doctors assumed that Allen was fabricating symptoms, and the inmate was thrown into solitary for his trouble. In the morning, he was found unconscious, and he died soon after on the prison’s operating table of a perforated ulcer. Best observed, “This death of Allen really hurt everyone.”
The inmates immediately began to organize themselves for a strike, but Capone refused to participate. He was sympathetic to their cause, but, as “Machine Gun” Kelly reminded him, the moment Capone joined the strike, the guards and prison officials would assume he was organizing it, and, at the very least, his sentence would be lengthened by several years. Other prisoners took Capone’s determination to sit out the strike as an excuse to abuse him. “Phony Capone,” they called him, as they shouted threats to kill him, his wife, and son. Capone was so frustrated, infuriated, and unnerved by their taunts that he retreated to his cell, pulled the blankets over his head, and cried.
Guards and inmates alike remarked on Capone’s childish and erratic behavior; unaware of his neurosyphilis, they assumed he was going crazy from too much time in stir. The strike went forward without his involvement and against formidable odds. “It is difficult to organize a prison mutiny, even among the men of the high average intelligence of those at Alcatraz,” another convict observed. “You can’t trust everybody, and sometimes even the strong weaken and reveal the secrets of their crowd. Alcatraz either brings out all the strength of a man or it breaks him into a sniveling snitch and a coward.” For five days the prisoners refused to perform their work assignments. The warden dispatched the leaders to D Block, where in the darkness of their solitary cells they began a hunger strike, which ended only when prison doctors started to force feed them with a rubber tube. If an inmate refused to allow the tube in his mouth, guards held him down, and the doctors inserted the tube into his nose. The crude procedure proved effective, and at last the strike was broken. In the end, the protest accomplished nothing, but the inmates continued their talk of rebellion, although it was now an empty threat. Throughout the grim ordeal, Capone managed to keep clear of trouble.
Over the next several months the Texas Cowboys attempted to ambush the man who had cried in his cell. Desperate men, many of them serving life sentences, they had but a single intention: to kill Al Capone. To avoid them, number 85 tried to hover near a guard, but it was only a matter of time before he forgot himself and left an opening. The inevitable confrontation occurred on June 23, 1936. That morning he had just received a new mandolin in the mail, and now in the clothing supply room, he was showing it off to one of the guards. In the next room, overhearing Capone, was his enemy Jimmy Lucas, getting his monthly haircut from a convict barber, another Texas Cowboy who went by the name of “Hard Rock.” As Capone continued his boasting in the next room, “Hard Rock” unscrewed his steel barber shears and slipped Lucas a lethal weapon in the form of one of the blades.
The two of them waited for Capone to leave the supply room and return to the bathhouse, where he was mopping floors, but as their mark continued to talk, Lucas finally lost patience and charged into the adjoining room. Before the guard could move, Lucas sank the shaft of sharp steel into the soft flesh of Capone’s lower back. The two of them fell to the ground, struggling, Lucas repeatedly stabbing Capone until the guard suddenly
struck the young Texas Cowboy in the head with a blackjack, knocking him out. Al Best, who had been only several feet from the fight, ran to the aid of the bloodstained victim. “The dirty shit stabbed me,” Capone said as he tried to regain his footing. “Please take me to the hospital.”
“I helped Capone to quiet down and then helped him upstairs to the hospital,” Best recalled. “When the shirt was removed they saw all the stab wounds, including one real bad one near the kidneys. The officer brought the half shear up to the doctor, and they noticed that the tip was broke off. I went downstairs and swept the floor, but I couldn’t find it. The doctor then X-rayed Capone’s body to try to find the missing piece. It turned out this piece of steel was embedded in his thumb. Capone must have put up his hand to shield his eyes. They removed the small piece of steel and put Capone to bed in the hospital.”
The fight’s aftermath was swift. Capone burst into the headlines after an absence of two years, and newspapers carried a full account of the stabbing, implying heavily that the appalling conditions of Alcatraz were the underlying cause. Johnston questioned Capone in the hospital; the warden learned that Lucas had been trying to extort money from Capone, and when he refused to pay, Lucas began spreading rumors that Capone was an informer. As Johnston pursued his inquiry, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco and the FBI both launched investigations into the attack, an inquiry that subjected Warden Johnston’s regime to its first real scrutiny from the outside world. An FBI agent traveled to Alcatraz to interview Johnston, who described the attack in detail and explained that Capone’s multiple stab wounds were “not serious, and that he would be ready for release from the Prison Hospital in a short period.” There was talk of prosecuting Lucas in a federal district court, but as the FBI and Johnston reviewed the problems involved in maintaining security for both Lucas and Capone, they concluded, as the FBI report put it, “a chance of escape would be eminent,” and the matter was dropped. On his own, Johnston meted out severe punishment for Lucas; his thirty-year sentence was lengthened by twelve additional years, and he was ordered to spend six months in isolation. Inmates agreed among themselves that just nineteen days was the absolute limit of human endurance in isolation. “Anyone who stays in solitary longer than this time-tried limit is tempting death,” noted one. Lucas managed to survive the half year in darkness, but the experience left him mentally unhinged—“stir bugs,” the cons called it.
Even before the attack, a series of newspapers articles had questioned the wisdom of Alcatraz’s unforgiving regimen. “Just a Life of Hell—That’s Felon’s Alcatraz Story—Monotony Breaks Spirit,” declared the headline of a representative account, which had run the previous February in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Why, a man can talk only six minutes a day in that place,” said a convict named Alfred “Sailor” Loomis, a counterfeiter who had recently been released. “It’s the ‘island of mistreated men.’ Soon it will the ‘island of mad men,’ ” he warned, and he proceeded to relate appalling tales of the Gas Chamber, the Dungeon, and the entire dark side of Johnston’s all-men-are-equal regime. Yes, the inmates are bad, Loomis argued, but conditions at Alcatraz made them even worse.
Two months later, in April, “Dutch” Bowers, a post office safe cracker, became the first inmate to attempt to escape the Rock. He had previously tried to commit suicide—which amounted to the same thing as attempting to escape Alcatraz—by breaking his glasses and slashing his throat. Once he recovered, he was assigned to a work detail at the incinerator; one afternoon he started chasing a windblown piece of paper and suddenly broke for the barbed wire surrounding the perimeter of the island. Guards shouted for him to halt, but he ignored them and hauled himself up the wire, above the rocks and pounding surf. Two guards fired on him, and he fell fifty feet, breaking his neck. The inmates saw in the foolish escape attempt proof that Bowers had gone “stir bugs.” That horrifying death and Capone’s stabbing generated further publicity, all of it portraying Alcatraz as a penal colony of men pushed to the brink of sanity, an unimaginable hell located right in San Francisco Bay. A growing sector of the public viewed Alcatraz as an exercise in government-sponsored sadism rather than the last word in criminal deterrence.
• • •
No one worried more acutely about the welfare of Al Capone than his family. News of his stabbing sent shock waves through the Capone clan. During his months in Alcatraz, they had rarely visited because, as they knew only too well, their journey to Alcatraz was certain to bring the newspapers hovering like vultures. The government had succeeded in permanently stigmatizing not only Al but the rest of his family, who lived like exiles and outcasts in their own country. Mae rarely left the grounds of the Palm Island hacienda; she spent her days in isolation, worrying about Sonny’s welfare, trying with a complete lack of success to live down the notoriety of being married to Al Capone.
It appeared that even the house, her last refuge, would soon be taken from her. In October, the government announced its intention to auction it off to the highest bidder as part of the penalty for Capone’s failure to pay taxes. On October 20, newspapers carried word that “The stucco mansion, the tiled swimming pool and the extensive grounds on Biscayne Bay will be sold to satisfy a Federal Tax lien of $51,498.08 recently filed against the gangster’s wife.” Ralph took the lead in trying to head off the IRS, assisting Mae, and keeping Al abreast of the painful developments, especially the imminent loss of the Palm Island estate. As Ralph explained in a letter to his brother, “We had them beat until they served notice on Mae as transferee and would have beat them only for the fact that when Mae was originally assessed in 1931, she did not protest the assessments. The law provides that the assessment must be protested within ninety days or lose the right to. . . . I am sorry this had to be the final outcome of everything, but we did our best and it is all due to another mistake on the part of your attorneys.” Days later, Ralph wrote again, this time with a much brighter assessment: “Well you need have no more worries about the Florida home. I paid the whole thing in Jacksonville last Saturday, the total amount was $52,103.30. We have obtained a complete release and there is no further claim against the home by the Gov. I obtained a mortgage on the house for $35,000.” Ralph explained that he borrowed the rest of the money required to satisfy the claim, and his easy access to cash, not to mention a mortgage, suggests how well established he had become after his own release from prison. Sounding like a member of the Miami Chamber of Commerce, Ralph went on to paint a cheery picture of the local scene for Al: “Everything points to a big season in Miami. . . . They built 37 new hotels in the past six months.”
In contrast to Ralph’s even temper, Mae was overwrought from the ordeal of nearly losing her home. She sent an urgent telegram to Warden Johnston beseeching him for permission to visit her husband. She then wrote a long, frenzied letter to Al himself to tell him of her impending arrival. She began by marking a solemn anniversary, her tone veering eerily between Victorian homily and gangster tough talk:
93 Palm Island
Miami Beach, Fla.
Saturday, Oct. 24, ’36
My Dear Husband:
Honey five years ago today, you were taken away from us, it was a dreadful and sad day, and dear this five long years has been cruel and terrible not only that you were taken away and moved from place to place, but everything in general has come up to annoy and make you and your dear ones have a heavy cross to carry—but darling you have been grand, took it all like a major, and in spite of all have gone through this crisis, and held your own. . . .
Honey I sent a wire to the “Warden” last night asking for permission for Mattie [Al’s younger brother Matthew] to come along with me, so most likely I will get the answer today. I called him last night and he was overjoyed and happy to go with me, so dear as soon as I get his answer I shall make different train arrangements as I have my ticket bought. . . . I spoke to your mother on the phone today, she sent me some fresh Italian sausage. . . . Well sweet I will close, no more to say, take c
are of yourself and never give [up], grit your teeth and grin always, you know Honey it really hurts people to see they can’t get us down, so I don’t mean maybe. I will see you soon. “God” bless you. Love and kisses. I love you.
Forever your loving Wife and Son.
Capone’s joy at the prospect of seeing his wife again can well be imagined, but at the same time the restrictions surrounding visits made them extremely frustrating and painful experiences for inmates and relatives alike. After taking a ferry to the Rock, visitors walked up the switchbacks past the breathtaking views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco skyline to the cell house, where they had to clear the metal detector, and were then ushered into a special room separated from Broadway by a thick steel wall. As number 85 learned, visits were brutally brief—no more than twenty minutes’ duration. Nor could the inmate hold, touch, or even stand in the same room as the visitors who had, in all probability, traveled halfway across the country to see him. In the presence of a guard, the wife, mother, or son of an inmate peered through a three-by-nine-inch hole in the wall, hardly large enough to reveal a face, covered with inch-thick glass. On the other side, the inmate, also in the company of a guard, walked to the far end of Broadway, where the peep holes were located. There he was allowed to glimpse the face of the family member who had come to see him. They could try to talk, if they wished, through a small panel to the left of the glass window, but screens made communication so difficult that convicts had to shout to be heard, and in Alcatraz, with its rule of silence, every word a convict said to his visitor reverberated throughout the cell house, obliterating privacy. Such were the infuriatingly impersonal conditions under which Al and Mae “visited” that day in October 1936.
Capone Page 79