Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Diagnosis:

  Psychosis with General Paralysis of the Insane: Expansive type.

  June 4, 1938

  /s/ Romney M. Ritchey, Surgeon (R), Psychiatrist

  • • •

  Later that summer, prison doctors deemed Capone well enough to receive a visit from his family. It was preceded, as always, by an elaborate letter from Mae asking permission and a terse response from Warden Johnston granting the privilege. The visit was scheduled for August 3, 1938, seven months after Capone’s breakdown.

  When number 85 was escorted to the visiting area and looked through the peep hole that day, he received perhaps his biggest surprise of his five years in jail, for there, through the glass, he saw a tall young man who bore his features and yet looked almost wholly unfamiliar. It was his boy, Sonny, now nineteen years old. No longer the sweet-faced child in the photograph Capone displayed in his cell, Sonny was a young man, poised and remote. A college student, he was attending Notre Dame under an assumed name. Before he lost his mind, Capone had dreaded this moment: the idea of his son seeing him confined to jail, powerless, had struck him as the ultimate indignity, and for that reason Sonny had never visited him at Atlanta, let alone Alcatraz. But now, when they finally did meet, Capone was no longer capable of feeling shame; in all probability he did not even recognize this young man peering back at him through the glass. Sonny wore a light-weight summer suit, and he was tanned. He had a collegiate air about him; in fact, he looked like any prosperous businessman’s son. The last time he had seen his father, Sonny was fourteen, and Capone the king of the Cook County Jail. “He knew his father then as a fastidious dresser, a ‘business man’ who was flanked by a retinue of eighteen bodyguards,” wrote a journalist who had been tipped off to the meeting. “Father and son played together on the floor of the Capones’ luxurious apartment. The boy had been lavished with gifts while being kept in seclusion with his mother. But Capone was no longer dressed in finely woven, pearl gray business suits . . . The son looked at a man wearing an ill-fitting prison uniform issued by the toughest prison in the country, and said, ‘Dad,’

  “Capone reached forward to embrace him. But bars and nonshatterable prison glass separated them. ‘My boy,’ he said.”

  In these circumstances, communication was impossible. The visit ended almost before it began. Sonny and Mae were led from the visitors’ chamber, past the metal detector, down the switchbacks, and onto the ferry bound for the mainland. “I tried to keep all this from the kid when he was little,” Capone later reflected. “I tried to be a good father. I didn’t want him to know about me. Now he comes and sees me here, like this. It must have hit him between the eyes.”

  During his months in the prison hospital, to which he was now confined, number 85 was locked in one of its three “bug cages” for mentally unstable inmates. The cages occupied a corridor running off the ward, and since they were made of wire, they permitted communication between the inmates confined to them, unlike the regular cells with their thick walls. Confined in the bug cage adjoining Capone’s was a bank robber named Carl Janaway, formerly the “Terror of the Ozarks.” He had gone “stir bugs” shortly after arriving at Alcatraz and had been in the cage ever since. With nothing better to do, Capone and Janaway passed the time haranguing each other.

  “When we both get out of here, I’m going to give you millions of dollars, Janaway. I’m going to make you a millionaire,” Capone would say, to which the “Terror of the Ozarks” would reply from the safety of his cage:

  “Fuck you, Mr. Millionaire!”

  And Capone would respond with a taunt: “Bug House Janaway, the millionaire.”

  Then the shouting would start. “Don’t call me that! Don’t call me that!” Janaway ordered. “You goddamn dago!”

  But Capone repeated the taunt: “Bug House Janaway! Bug House Janaway!”

  Overhearing one of these fights, Alvin Karpis could only compare it to the behavior of “two six-year-olds in a sandbox.” The next development startled even him, and he found himself witnessing a scene from hell. Janaway picked up his bedpan, reached inside, grasped a handful of feces, and hurled it at Capone. “The missile hits the hog wire separating the two cages,” wrote Karpis, “splattering throughout Capone’s cell and freckling the body of Scarface like a volley of lead from a machine gun.”

  Capone howled with anger, quickly retrieved the bedpan in his cell, and threw a handful of his own feces at Janaway. Again it spattered on the wire and covered the victim with stains. Gleeful in their madness, the two prisoners threw one handful of feces after another at each other. “Everything within range slowly changes color as sickly green-brown lumps land indis criminately, changing the room,” Karpis recorded. Two orderlies appeared, but they were reluctant to intervene and became soiled themselves. By this time the cells of both Janaway and Capone had become so fouled that the men were slipping on the floor. At last, when they had exhausted themselves and emptied their bedpans of waste, the orderlies entered the cages, hosed down the “bug cages,” and led the men to the showers to cleanse themselves.

  • • •

  By hurling his feces at another prisoner and completely fouling himself, Capone in his madness finally achieved what his family and lawyers could not: his transfer from the Rock. The episode persuaded Warden Johnston that it had become too difficult to maintain number 85 at Alcatraz. The warden asked Dr. Ritchey to reexamine number 85, this time with a view to transferring him to a penitentiary on the mainland. “I now feel that if it could be arranged he should be transferred to Springfield or Leavenworth before the expiration of his time here,” Ritchey wrote to Johnston on November 19. “He is in good physical condition and there appears to be no medical objection to his transfer. He is now taking routine treatment [for syphilis] which can be continued in any Institution until his release.” Ritchey concluded his evaluation on a resounding note of irony: “He is ambulatory and cooperative and insists he is in better condition than at any time since his confinement.” Although the warden now had the medical rationale to transfer Capone, he was still concerned about the impression the move would make; he did not want to appear soft on a notorious criminal and thereby set a damaging precedent. Alcatraz’s reputation remained intact, however, because the American people heard a much different version of Capone’s situation. On December 20, the headline in the New York Times announced: “ILLNESS OF CAPONE BARS HIS RELEASE—Federal Officials to Hold him and Will Consult Family on Future Steps—HIS CONDITION DANGEROUS.”

  There was one other element critical to Capone’s transfer from Alcatraz, and that was his testifying against his beloved mentor, Johnny Torrio. At the time, the U.S. government was preparing a tax evasion case against Torrio similar to the one Capone had faced. After years of travel and dabbling in real estate, the grand old man of the rackets now lived in obscure but wealthy semiretirement in White Plains, a large suburban community north of New York City. However, the Internal Revenue Service had continued to track him down the years, and the IRS paid special attention to a tip that Torrio maintained a concealed interest in a wholesale liquor dealer—precisely the lucrative sinecure a retired Prohibition-era bootlegger would be expected to hold. Agents promptly appeared at the distributorship’s headquarters in White Plains, where they found a man they thought might be Torrio. But the agents weren’t sure what Torrio actually looked like (so effective were his efforts to avoid publicity), and the man in question insisted his name was “J. T. McCarthy.” Anyone who knew Torrio well would have realized that McCarthy was his wife’s maiden name, and the J. T. stood for Johnny Torrio. Eventually the agents figured this out, and further investigation disclosed that Torrio was using his hidden partnership in an otherwise reputable firm to conceal his income and thus to avoid paying federal income taxes.

  At this point, Torrio, assuming he was about to be indicted for tax evasion, applied for a passport. Fearing he would flee to Europe at any moment, the IRS became desperate. “We asked the State Department to ma
il Johnny his passport,” wrote Elmer Irey, who led the operation against Torrio, “and when he came to pick it up at the Post Office we arrested him on what are generally described as ‘trumped up’ charges.” Just four hours later, Mrs. Torrio posted bail in the amount of $100,000 cash and freed her loving husband. Meanwhile, the IRS was involved in a paper chase, trying to link Johnny Torrio to an old but incriminating check in the amount of $109; only a nearly invisible bookkeeper’s note, “J.T.,” tied Torrio to the check, which suggested that Torrio actually bankrolled the liquor dealer for whom he worked under the name J. T. McCarthy.

  The government claimed that far more compelling evidence against Torrio came from Al Capone himself. The revelation that Capone, while still at Alcatraz, had become a stool pigeon generated both headlines (“U.S. Reveals Capone Squealed on Torrio,” “Capone Aided U.S. in the Torrio Case”) and misunderstanding. The facts were these: Capone agreed to give a lengthy deposition to an assistant U.S. attorney named Seymour Klein. The timing suggested strongly that, by cooperating with the Feds, Capone expected to win an early release from Alcatraz, or, failing that, a transfer to another penitentiary. But there was much less to his “squealing” than the government implied. Since Capone had recently been diagnosed as psychotic by Dr. Ritchey and claimed to be on speaking terms with God and the angels as well as inquisitive attorneys, the information he divulged was of dubious value. The fact that he willingly testified against Torrio, whom he had revered and shielded for thirty years, was itself a symptom of mental instability. Klein traveled to Alcatraz twice during January 1939 to conduct his interviews with Capone, but the sessions proved to be a disappointment. The psychotic prisoner spent hours in rambling conversation, contradicting himself, telling Klein whatever he wanted to hear. In the end, the deposition, which ran to fifty pages, was useless. Even without Capone’s “assistance,” however, the IRS pressed its case in federal court. Torrio eventually pleaded guilty to evading almost $87,000 in taxes, threw himself on the mercy of the court, and spent the next two and a half years at Leavenworth. After his release, he continued to live in obscurity in White Plains, one of the ablest and most notorious racketeers of the century, now an old, forgotten man.

  In his epic poem, The Divine Comedy, Dante described a hell consisting of twenty-four circles. At the outermost ring were arrayed the lesser sinners; at the innermost, the greatest. Capone’s eight-year journey through the federal penitentiary system, from Atlanta to Alcatraz, had been a journey through a modern-day hell. Of all his prison experiences, Capone’s betrayal of Johnny Torrio ranked as the most bizarre, the most unlike him. Even in jail, Capone had always been recognizably himself, until this time. In his vision of hell, Dante recognized the gravity of such treachery, for he made the bottom of the pit of hell a frozen lake, reserved for traitors—to their family, their country, their rulers. It was at this state that Capone himself finally arrived. His journey there had been so slow that no one recognized how far he had declined until it was too late to effect a rescue.

  On January 6, 1939, several weeks after he gave his capricious deposition about Torrio, Capone was released from the “bug cage” to which he had been confined almost continuously since his final breakdown a year earlier. During that time, he had lived as if he were a laboratory animal, without privacy and without the freedom to do the simplest things for himself; by comparison even his earlier years among the general convict population at Alcatraz had been comparatively unfettered and even luxurious. There appears to be little justification for having confined him to the “bug cage,” for he was not prone to violence; in fact, he proved remarkably docile and compliant. That he was not considered especially dangerous at the time of his release can be inferred from the light security on hand during his transfer; instead of the armed guards and armored railroad cars in which he had arrived at Alcatraz four and half years earlier, only an associate warden was present. The convict walked slowly down the switchbacks from the cell house for the last time, looked out across the fog-shrouded bay as sea gulls wheeled overhead, occasionally diving at the waves, and stepped from the prison dock into a launch waiting to carry him across the choppy waters of San Francisco Bay to Oakland.

  • • •

  One of the strengths of the Capone family was that throughout the ordeal of Ralph’s and Al’s jail sentences it remained a family, intact and functioning, if not thriving. In effect, they managed the family business as best they could, and their strength came from their numbers. Al had no less than five siblings looking out for his interests; whenever one was incapacitated, the others filled in, and if none of the other Capones was as charismatic, theatrical, personable, persuasive, and intuitive as Al, they were Capones nonetheless. They had already survived the disappearance of the oldest son, Vincenzo, and they had overcome their grief over the death of Frank at the hands of the Cicero police, but the removal of Al from the field of battle, not to mention his mental deterioration, limited the family’s ascent and dynastic ambitions. No one else could quite take his place. The younger brothers—John, Mattie, and Albert—were ambivalent, at best, about devoting their lives to the rackets, for they had seen the price such a life could demand. As for Ralph, easy-going, accommodating Ralph, he simply lacked Al’s drive and daring, that thirst for innovation; he was content to be merely a racketeer, hanging around the racetrack and the nightclub, tending to his interests. His equanimity had enabled him to do his time in jail and to resume his life where he had left off. (He also had the good fortune not to suffer from tertiary syphilis.) That was not Al’s destiny, though. His drive and cunning were unique, to say nothing of his immense ego. An ego that would never let him rest, that tormented him during his days in jail as it had during his nights on the lam. No one was more acutely aware than Al that he had once been king of the Chicago rackets, the bootlegger to society, the bestconnected fixer in the entire city. There was only one Al Capone, as Capone knew better than anyone else. But there was no way he would be able to resume his role, not with the government prepared to hobble him for the rest of his life, and certainly not with his illness.

  Although he had finally rid himself of Alcatraz, he had to complete one last year of his sentence. Judge Wilkerson had ordered Capone to serve the time in the Cook County Jail, but the idea of exposing him to a new round of publicity, to say nothing of the potential for further corruption within the jail, prompted the Department of Justice to permit him to serve his final months in the Federal Correctional Institution, Terminal Island, near Los Angeles. Once again, he boarded a launch to reach the island prison, his legs shackled, but with Capone partly disabled from the neurosyphilis, there was little likelihood of his attempting to escape or behaving violently. On arrival, he immediately came under the care of the prison’s chief medical officer, George Hess, who ordered him confined to a hospital cell for observation. “During the first few days this patient was definitely confused, indifferent and somewhat depressed,” Dr. Hess took care to note. “The depression was punctuated with periods of irritability but he was at all times the same cooperative person as always. His stream of thought was superficial and the speech was slurring in character. . . . His treatment at the time consists of Tryparsamide and Bismuth, each once a week.” These medicines could slow the progress of the disease, though Capone’s neurosyphilis was far too advanced to be cured.

  Under the care of Dr. Hess, Capone’s months at Terminal Island passed in a daze. In June, the doctor performed a spinal puncture to check the progress of Capone’s neurosyphilis and confirmed that it had advanced far into the tertiary stage. By October, Capone was indulging in paranoid fantasies concerning William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher. “He brands Hearst as a degenerate and claims that Hearst is the one who is the cause of all the adverse publicity in his case,” Hess observed. “He then makes the remark that Hearst will not bother him again because they have run him out of the country and have sold his papers.” Capone also threatened to expose Hearst in the Miami Times, which he clai
med to own.

  Unlike other prison doctors, Dr. Hess took a proprietary interest in Capone and his welfare. Shortly after the October report, he spoke sternly with Al’s youngest brother, John, who with his wife visited Terminal Island. “I have impressed them with the necessity of keeping the patient’s activities suppressed at all times,” he wrote Bennett. Dr. Hess also offered John Capone advice on treating Capone’s neurosyphilis after jail, suggesting that the family investigate the outstanding facilities of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. For now, the plans were kept secret; even Al had no idea where he was going after his release. The physician spoke vaguely about a “private institute,” and left it at that. He proffered more explicit advice to James Bennett on the best way to handle the logistics of Capone’s release from prison: “I would like to volunteer a suggestion that we do not go via Chicago, chiefly because of the possibility of going from one station to another. I believe it would be better to go via St. Louis or any other route where a change of trains would not be necessary.”