Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  • • •

  Capone received additional news of the world beyond Alcatraz from a new prisoner, Alvin Karpis. After Capone, “Creepy” Karpis was the most notorious inmate of Alcatraz. As the leader of a gang he had formed with Freddie Barker, Karpis had the distinction of succeeding Capone and Dillinger as Public Enemy Number 1. In its inglorious heyday, the Karpis-Barker gang had pulled off two spectacular kidnappings. First they nabbed William Hamm Jr., the president of Hamm Brewing of St. Paul, Minnesota, a job netting the gang a $100,000 ransom; subsequently they took a bank president named Edward Bremer, for whom they received a $200,000 ransom, only to discover that the bills were marked. The gang disintegrated when Freddie and “Ma” Barker were shot to death, and “Creepy” himself was captured. When Karpis arrived at Alcatraz in August 1936, a few days before his twenty-eighth birthday, he was perhaps the only man relieved to be confined to the Rock; otherwise, he figured, he would have been executed for one of the various murders in which he had been involved during his hectic career. He ultimately spent twenty-five years at Alcatraz: a testament to his tenacity no less than his wickedness.

  From the start, Karpis was among friends on the Rock. No fewer than nine members of the Karpis-Barker gang served sentences at Alcatraz simultaneously, a melancholy reunion of kidnappers, robbers, and murderers. On first catching sight of Capone, he was astonished by the changes time and disease had wrought. Number 85 seemed a “pale, shrunken figure,” albeit “calm and controlled.” On reflection, Karpis decided that Capone was ill-equipped to survive at Alcatraz; most of the prison’s population consisted of small-time criminals. Capone, on the other hand, was a racketeer, a businessman surrounded by street fighters. One could call him a white-collar criminal, except that in his case the collar was stained with blood.

  Eventually the two men found a way to meet and discuss their common concerns. The rules of silence had been relaxed slightly, but private conversation remained a hard-won rarity. With the cooperation of another con acting as a lookout, Karpis and Capone were able to hold a fleeting conference in the shower room. There Capone immediately voiced his most urgent concern, the welfare of his stand-in, Frank Nitti, the organization’s hapless enforcer. Capone knew only that Nitti had recently been involved in a violent altercation with the law. “Why was Frank Nitti shot by that detective?” he immediately asked.

  Karpis revealed that he had seen Nitti several months after the shooting in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where many of the Capone racketeers had their summer homes. At the time, Karpis was staying in the house of the former mayor of Cicero, that grim Chicago suburb which had served as a Capone stronghold. Talking with Nitti on a beach beside the sparkling waters of Lake Michigan, Karpis learned that the detective was named Walter Lang, and even though Nitti had taken the bullet in his neck, he had recovered fully. “Nitti told me the guy shot him over a personal grudge,” Karpis told Capone. “Something left over from years before.”

  “Did he tell you what it was about?”

  “I didn’t ask.” It was the correct response—discreet, responsible. It was apparent that Karpis operated strictly on a need-to-know basis.

  Recognizing that he was dealing with a fellow professional, Capone briskly moved on to other pressing matters, inquiring as to the reasons behind the killing of Willie “Three-Fingers” White, who had once belonged to the Capone organization.

  “Whenever someone in your outfit is killed, you guys always claim he was caught talking to the FBI,” Karpis told him. “Sure enough!” The scuttlebutt, according to Karpis, was that White had talked to Melvin Purvis, head of the FBI’s Chicago office. Karpis thought he knew which syndicate gunman had killed White, and he was bursting with other gangster gossip as well, but fearing Capone’s reaction to it, he decided to keep his intelligence to himself. Capone thanked him, and their clandestine conference ended before the guards discovered it.

  Number 85’s next contact with the outside world occurred in a wholly different context, an interview with the new director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, James V. Bennett. On assuming his position, he decided to act, in his words, as “the talent scout for Alcatraz.” He took it upon himself to “review the records of all the men in the various federal prisons and decide who would be sent to ‘the Rock.’ I also had to supervise the performance of the men on Alcatraz and help determine who was ready to be sent back to prisons on the mainland.” An announcement that the director himself intended to visit Alcatraz and interview inmates lifted the hopes of the prisoners, nearly all of whom requested a hearing with him.

  Arriving at Alcatraz in the spring of 1937, Bennett discovered he had come to a prison unlike any other he had ever visited. He set up a desk in a “drafty, cheerless, half-lit corner” of the cell house, where he received inmates who one after the other requested transfer to prisons on the mainland; even the Lewisburg or Atlanta pen seemed a welcome alternative to the rigors of life at Alcatraz. As the prisoners spoke with Bennett, two armed guards kept a vigil, one pacing the floor, the other aiming his rifle at the prisoner’s chest. The show of firepower unnerved Bennett, and he ventured to complain to Johnston that the “men might not feel free to speak their minds” under these circumstances, but the warden reminded him that Alcatraz housed “the most desperate men in the world, and they might regard it as an accomplishment to assault the prison director.”

  Among the first petitioners was number 85, who took his seat and whose manner, despite the rifle leveled at him, took Bennett by surprise. “He did not snarl, as most of the movies, books, and plays about him had led me to expect,” the director observed. Instead, Capone smiled and attempted to ingratiate himself with the one man who might possibly ease the rigors of his sentence. He pointed out that he was serving the longest sentence ever given for income tax evasion and had been tried not for that offense, in reality, but for his notorious reputation. “I’m not lily white,” he explained, “but most of the stuff the newspapers reported about me was the bunk and they knew it.”

  Bennett described his flippant response: “I told him he was by his own admission certainly guilty of cheating the government out of its taxes and that he must have done more than sing loud in church to get all his money.”

  Maintaining his composure under these trying circumstances, Capone subjected Bennett to a familiar litany of protests and boasts, insisting he had given thousands of dollars to charity, fed the hungry, sheltered the homeless, and given jobs to the unemployed. Once again he invoked the newsboys’ strike as an example of his power in Prohibition-era Chicago, claiming that he had received $100,000 for his role in settling the dispute, which he had promptly donated to a hospital. Finally, number 85 raised the issue of obtaining a transfer to a prison on the mainland, where he could serve out the remaining three years of his “short time.”

  Until this point, Capone had given a credible simulation of sanity, but he lapsed into irrationality when he offered to cut a deal with Bennett. Capone promised “exclusive rights” to a book based on his life; he would tell the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons everything he knew about gangsters and gang wars. “I’ll tell you who to see and where you can check on everything I say,” number 85 added. “It’ll sell and I’ll throw in movie rights.” In return, all Bennett had to do was transfer Capone to another prison. Taken aback, Bennett demurred. “I’m not trying to bribe you,” number 85 assured him. “All I want is for people to know the facts.” Bennett quickly terminated the interview. Later, the director learned that Capone, rather than expressing bitterness at the outcome of the meeting, “vowed he would see to it that James V. Bennett was the next attorney general of the United States, perhaps because I could not be bought.”

  In the end, Bennett’s visit to the island proved a bitter disappointment for Capone and for all the other inmates who had pleaded for leniency or better conditions, for once he was safely on the mainland again, Bennett held a press conference and declared, “The convicts in Alcatraz are nothing but a bunch of cry
babies who already have more privileges than they deserve. Alcatraz will remain a place of maximum security and minimum privileges.” When rumors of his inflammatory remarks reached the cell house, the inmates called another strike, this one heavily influenced by Communist ideology. Johnston retaliated by vowing to starve the inmates who did not return to their assigned tasks immediately; most strikers caved in at this point. Despite the tensions roiling the cell house, the warden persisted in his habit of standing watch unarmed in the cafeteria as the men filed past him after meals. One recalcitrant convict, a bank robber named Barton “Whitey” Phillips, suddenly broke ranks, slugged Warden Johnston in the jaw, knocked him to the ground, and stomped on his head. The blows sent several of the warden’s teeth flying. Once the guards finally restored order, the rebel paid dearly for his attack. The bulls beat him mercilessly, and the warden consigned him to months in the darkness of an isolation cell. Phillips emerged a broken man.

  Capone was one of the few prisoners to resist the temptation to participate in the strike, but he appeared destined to remain at Alcatraz, imperiled by violent and jealous inmates, until the end of his sentence in 1940. He resumed his monotonous life, spending his days in his cell, making and unmaking his bed, singing softly to himself, and from time to time engaging in conversation with imaginary individuals. As the weeks passed, he became ever more passive and withdrawn, until February 5, 1938, when everything changed for him.

  The inmates were on their way to the Gas Chamber for breakfast that chilly winter morning when the food line abruptly stopped. One man was refusing to move. Karpis recorded the scene in his diary: “The obstacle is Al Capone, causing a bottleneck of traffic as everyone stares as they pass him.” Everyone in the cell house stopped to watch Capone and to murmur about his bizarre behavior.

  Capone is in a daze [Karpis continued]. I can see he has no idea where he is; the guard on duty is watching him closely. He’s dressed for the yard, not the mess hall. His work gloves have been shoved in his back pocket at the last moment and protrude from his coat.

  Continuing into the mess hall and sitting down with my meal, I see the end of the line coming through the cell-house door. In the last position, alone and disoriented, Capone shuffles down the middle aisle toward the steam table. Under the strict regulations here no one is ever permitted to be out of his regular position in line.

  About halfway down the aisle, Capone staggers, turns looking for help where none exists, and vomits on the dining-hall floor. Two screws escort him upstairs to the hospital. He never returns to population.

  Karpis and the other inmates did not understand why Capone was acting this way, but they knew he was suffering from more than a simple case of “stir bugs.” It was, in fact, the most violent symptom yet of his advancing case of neurosyphilis. His breakdown signaled that the disease had finally seized control of his nervous system, and he would no longer be able to function normally. Since his arrival at Alcatraz four years before, Capone himself had refused to acknowledge that he was suffering from the disease, but now even he had to admit that something was seriously wrong.

  The warden found Capone in the hospital, acting calmly, apparently lucid once again. “What happened to you this morning?” he asked.

  “I dunno, Warden,” Capone answered, “they tell me I acted like I was a little wacky.”

  Capone remained in the prison hospital, where a consulting psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Edward Twitchell diagnosed the patient as suffering from “paresis”—paralysis caused by neurosyphilis, and a term that became a euphemism for the disease itself. The doctors told Capone of the diagnosis, who calmly permitted them to perform a spinal tap, the one sure way to confirm his illness. When the fluid was checked (actually double-checked both at Alcatraz and in a San Francisco hospital), the results were unequivocally positive.

  Capone’s breakdown created an enormous problem for the prison administration. Warden Johnston could say whatever he liked about all prisoners being equal, but number 85 was the most famous convict in Alcatraz, and his health problem had to be handled delicately, especially in an era when the word syphilis was still not mentioned in polite society, if at all. He was too sick to return to the prison population, but, at the same time, Johnston did not want to let Capone leave Alcatraz. For the moment, he remained under observation in the prison’s small hospital ward, located in another wing of the cell house. Word of his condition began to leak out, and after three days of silence from Alcatraz, newspapers received the following terse communication: “It was announced at the Department of Justice today that on February 5, 1938, Alphonse Capone, an inmate of the United States Penitentiary at Alcatraz, became ill. Since that time he has been confined to the prison hospital on the Island. He is still under observation but the doctors have not made a definite diagnosis of the case.”

  A day later, Warden Johnston received a telegram from a frightened Mae Capone: “DUE TO THE RUMORS WOULD LIKE TO LEAVE AT ONCE SO I COULD BE NEAR MY HUSBAND IF ANYTHING SHOULD HAPPEN THAT HE WOULD NEED ME BUT WOULD NOT LIKE TO MAKE THE TRIP AND FIND THAT HE HAS ALREADY BEEN TRANSFERRED/ KINDLY PLEASE ADVISE ME BY RETURN WIRE COLLECT WESTERN UNION/ RESPECTFULLY YOURS/ MRS ALPHONSE CAPONE/ 93 PALM ISLAND.”

  In his reply, Johnston tried to allay her anxieties, but he pointedly ignored her request for permission to visit: “HAVE JUST HAD REPORT FROM PHYSICIANS ADVISING ME THAT YOUR HUSBAND IS QUIET, COMMUNICATIVE, COOPERATIVE, APPARENTLY COMPREHENDS HIS CONDITION AND NECESSITY OF FOLLOWING DOCTORS ORDERS AND THUS IT IS NOT NOW NECESSARY TO RESTRAIN HIM THEREFORE DISCOUNT RUMORS/ HOWEVER, THEY CANNOT DEFINITELY DETERMINE WHAT CHANGES MAY OCCUR AND THEY DO NOT WANT TO PREDICT/ IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES I SUGGEST YOU AWAIT FURTHER ADVICE AND IN THE MEANTIME KEEP IN TOUCH WITH DIRECTOR OF BUREAU, WASHINGTON, TO WHOM REPORTS WILL BE FORWARDED/ J A JOHNSTON.”

  As word of Capone’s breakdown generated headlines in Chicago and across the country, Johnston tried to contain the growing demand for more detailed information. Mae and other family representatives called repeatedly to urge Capone’s release, arguing that he was obviously too sick to serve any more time at Alcatraz. “I had to convince them that he couldn’t be released,” Johnston wrote, “but that he would be given good medical care.”

  As Mae fretted in Florida, her husband remained confined to the Alcatraz prison hospital, where he underwent a full battery of medical and psychiatric tests. It was this examination that revealed, among other things, his perforated septum, the result of his repeated use of cocaine years before. In sum, the confidential results showed that the Al Capone who had arrived on the Rock four years before, the man who had been convicted of income tax evasion, who had been the most visible bootlegger of the Prohibition era, the nation’s most celebrated and feared gangster, Public Enemy Number 1—that Al Capone was no longer; he had been overtaken by syphilis and was now a frail and desperately ill man.

  UNITED STATES PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE,

  U.S. Penitentiary, Alcatraz, California.

  Neuro-Psychiatric Examination.

  #85-Az.—CAPONE, ALPHONSE

  Informant: Inmate.

  White. Male. Married. Age 39. Received at Atlanta in 1932 to serve 11 years for Income Tax Law violations. Transferred to Alcatraz 1934. . . .

  Physical:

  He is a well nourished white man who is 5 ft 10-1/4 inches tall and weighed 215 pounds on admission in 1934 but has lost weight recently. His hair is curly and very thin on top. His complexion is dark and features are regular and definitely Italian in type. There are two linear scars, two and three inches long, on the left cheek and neck which resulted from knife wounds many years ago. He was treated for many months in Atlanta for Prostatic trouble. He denies the use of Narcotic Drugs and there are no needle scars on the body. He has a perforated nasal septum. He has had two courses of Anti-syphilitic treatment since 1934 and is now taking a third course. His heart action is normal and his lungs are clear and there are no physical complaints except some headaches which he attributes to Sinus trouble but X
ray plates do not bear out that explanation. His neurological examination shows some loss of the normal lines of facial expression. There is a very pronounced dysarthria or defect in articulation which is most noticed on test words such as “Methodist Episcopal” “Roman Catholicism” “Truly Rural” “Massachusetts Legislature” Etc. etc.

  The deep reflexes are equal and the knee-jerks are present but diminished. Romerg sign negative. Pupils are unequal and do not react to light but contract very slightly to accommodation. The right pupil is irregular in outline. Station and gait normal. No Babinski. No Gordon. No Oppenheim. No clonus.

  On February 5th 1938 he suffered a sudden disturbance of consciousness described as a fainting attack or possibly a Hysterical episode. Very shortly after that he had a definitely convulsive attack described as Epileptiform which lasted several minutes and was followed by stuporous sleep and later mental confusion. During the next few days he became quite disturbed, noisy, restless and twice soiled his room. Within about five days however he became much quieter, regained partial orientation and was tractable. He is at present looking quite clear and is feeling quite well.

  Mental:

  He comes to the examining room willingly and is cooperative and orderly. He appears to be properly oriented. His memory is good except for a period of five or six days recently during which he suffered convulsive attacks. His intellectual development is normal but Psychiatric tests were not undertaken because of the evident loss of ability to concentrate as well as much distractibility. His reasoning ability and judgement show considerable loss of acuity. His voluntary speech is free and circumstantial. He is definitely expansive in mood and has developed extensive plans as to his activities after his release. He is going extensively into Charity work and will build factories and industries etc to furnish employment to everyone needing it. He takes a great deal of pleasure in perfecting these plans and relating them. His mood is happy and he has no enemies he cannot excuse readily for their mistaken views etc etc. He still has some disturbances of consciousness at times as his mind wanders and he hears God and the Angels verbally reply to prayers etc. He however retains partial insight into these and says that he probably imagines some of the things he hears. These experiences are pleasant and he enjoys them and feels friendly toward those about him although he is very unstable and easily aroused by any excitement or confusion taking place on the Ward.