Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Occasionally Hart returned to playing the role of lawman and exhibited flashes of his former intensity, which made a lifelong impression on Harry. “Gypsies used to come to Homer every year on horseback. They always had their caravan, quite a few wagons. There’s a place south of town where they always stayed. My dad knew the head guy real well at the Gypsy camp. Old man McKinley, who lived near the camp, got to hollering about them. ‘Dick, Dick,’ he said to my dad, ‘those so-and-so’s they got my billfold.’ My dad got ahold of the head Gypsy and told him, ‘You give that billfold back to him. If I catch you. . . . ’ Dad, he made ’em give it back.” On another occasion Hart brought his passion for justice to bear on one of his children. “My brother Bill used to get these lids off coffee cans, and you know he’d sail them. He sailed one out and hit a guy’s car across the street. The guy complained, so my dad put Bill right in the jail cell and locked him in for a day.

  “I can remember one of the guys in the jail telling my dad that if he didn’t have these two guns on him he wouldn’t be so tough. When he heard about that he took everything off, the handcuffs and everything, got in the jail cell, had the guy lock the jail cell, and then he went ahead and showed the guys how tough he was with his fists. The other guy was going to whip him and beat the hell out of him, but he didn’t get the job done. My dad didn’t back down from anybody. The other guy didn’t wake for a while.”

  By 1933, everyone in Chicago and for that matter throughout the Midwest was in a froth of excitement over the new world’s fair. For Chicago, the exposition was squarely in the best tradition of boosterism, announcing the beginning of a new era, one that had nothing to do with the Depression or racketeers. If Al Capone symbolized the old Chicago, a city of gangsters and corruption and violence, the world’s fair symbolized the airy promises of the future. For a city and a nation badly in need of good news, it proved a whopping success, attracting over 5 million visitors. Among them was Richard “Two-Gun” Hart, who paused to have his photograph taken in full Western regalia: sitting tall in the saddle, wearing a buckskin jacket and riding boots. When he left the exposition, he donned more conventional clothing and made the pilgrimage to his mother’s house at 7244 Prairie Avenue and accepted a contribution from Ralph to help him get through the year. From then on, he returned to Chicago from time to time, and Ralph always came through. Thanks to this money, “Two-Gun” Hart was able to feed his family, to keep a roof over their heads, and to outlast the ravages of the Depression. He was still on the family dole, still living with his family in Homer, Nebraska, when his younger brother Al was finally released from prison in November 1939.

  • • •

  “Al Capone, the eminent Chicago racketeer, is a patient at the moment at the Union Memorial Hospital. He is suffering from general paresis, the end result of a syphilitic infection,” noted H.L. Mencken, the writer, editor, and critic, in his diary on November 29, 1939, two weeks after Capone arrived in Baltimore. The announcement that Capone had finally won his freedom had inspired newspapers across the nation to commemorate the events with overstated and inaccurate headlines—“Capone is Free After Seven Years—Al Has Lost Even His Hair,” “Al Capone, the Greatest Gangster of Them All, Comes Out,” “Capone Smuggled to Freedom: Disguise Worn to Dodge Rival Gangsters”—but Mencken was much closer to Capone and to the truth of the racketeer’s plight. Himself an eminent hypochondriac, Mencken happened to be a good friend of the physician who treated Capone, Dr. Joseph E. Moore, an associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and Dr. Moore confided details of Capone’s medical condition to the writer, who reviewed the tragic course of the racketeer’s syphilis.

  Capone says that he was infected very early in life and assumed for years that he had been cured. . . . His wife has apparently escaped infection. The symptoms of paresis began to show themselves in Capone during the early part of his imprisonment. He was then locked up in Atlanta. The medical officers there wanted to make a lumbar puncture to ascertain his condition accurately, but Capone refused. In 1937, after he had been transferred to Alcatraz, he suddenly developed convulsions. They are often the first sign of paresis. He was put on malaria treatment, but after nine chills the convulsations [sic] returned and became so alarming that the treatment was abandoned. By that time Capone, who is not unintelligent, had been convinced that his condition was serious and so he made arrangements for intensive treatment after his release. Dr. Moore was recommended and hence Capone came to Baltimore.

  Mencken was above all a brilliant iconoclast, and he had long railed against the follies and hypocrisies of Prohibition, so for him Capone was not simply a gangster to be reviled and discarded; he was, at the least, an interesting case history, and possibly considerably more than that, as much a product of the American way of life as Charles Lindbergh or Henry Ford. However, many members of the medical community felt differently and took the unorthodox position of refusing to treat Capone.

  Dr. Moore [Mencken wrote] planned to enter him at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Wilford Smith, the superintendent, consented, but the lay board of trustees made objections and so Capone was sent to the Union Memorial Hospital instead.

  Almost the same thing happened there. The medical board was in favor of receiving him, if only on the ground that a first class hospital should take in every sick man and waste no time upon inquiring into his morals. . . . After Capone got to hospital the women of the lay board began setting up a row, led by Mrs. William A. Cochran, whose husband is a pious Prohibitionist and wowser. As I write this row is still going on, but Capone remains at the hospital. The lady uplifters argue that his presence is keeping other patients out of the place. The medical board replied that that is unfortunate but unavoidable. It argues that a hospital as a matter of ethics can’t refuse any sick man who applies for treatment.

  Moore has put Capone on the malaria cure and at the moment it seems to be working very well. Capone has already developed a temperature as high as 106 degrees.

  The “malaria cure” Capone received was generally reserved for only the most serious cases. Dr. Moore inoculated his patient with the expectation that malarial fevers would raise the body’s temperature and destroy or at least inhibit syphilis. This particular treatment had a fairly exotic pedigree. Decades earlier, Russian physicians noticed that nearly all their officers who returned from duty in the Caucasus Mountains had syphilis. However, none of the men who also had malaria developed the deadly tertiary syphilis. Of course Capone already had tertiary syphilis, so the treatment, while dramatic and seeming to offer relief in the short run, offered no long-term benefits.

  When Mae learned that the hospital was actually giving Capone malaria, she became hysterical and claimed the doctors there were trying to kill her husband. Because this treatment involved allowing the fever to persist so that it could counteract the syphilis, her fear, while misplaced, was understandable. The usual treatment involved giving the patient tertian malaria, which produced a fever and chills every other day. However, it became apparent that Capone was immune to that particular version of malaria because he already had been inoculated with it in jail. Instead, he received inoculations for quartan malaria, which produces symptoms every fourth day. Even this treatment produced limited success; it killed the spirochetes that had been slowly eating away Capone’s central nervous system and turning his brain to jelly, but there was no way to reconstruct the nerve cells destroyed by neurosyphilis. It was beyond the ability of any physician to restore his mental abilities and his personality.

  Mencken continued:

  I am told that he bears the accompanying discomforts very philosophically and is, in fact, an extremely docile patient. His mental disturbance takes the form of delusions of grandeur. He believes that he is the owner of a factory somewhere in Florida employing 25,000 men and he predicts freely that he’ll soon be employing 75,000. This factory is, of course, purely imaginary. Otherwise Capone’s aberrations are not serious. He is able to talk rationally about his
own condition and about events of the day.

  He is occupying two rooms and a bath at a cost of $30 [a] day. He sleeps in one room himself and the other is a sort of meeting place for his old mother, his three brothers and his wife. The brothers spend the days playing checkers, with occasional visits with the patient. They made an effort lately to rent a house in Guilford but were refused when their benefactor became known.

  The mother, an ancient Italian of the peasant type, can barely speak English. The brothers, all of them apparently born in this country, are relatively intelligent fellows. The wife, who is ignorant but apparently no[t] unintelligent, moves a cot into Capone’s room every night and sleeps there. He has two night nurses and one day nurse. He is naturally very popular with the hospital staff and especially the orderlies, for he is not only a good patient, he is also likely to leave large tips.

  His chills come on every second day and Moore plans to keep him in bed here until he has had fifteen of then. He will then be transferred to Miami. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has notified Moore that so far as it knows there is no project on foot to kill Capone. Thus no guard upon him is maintained and any visitor to the hospital is free to barge into his room.

  Capone’s syphilis treatment at Union Hospital sounds like a medically sanctioned, premature hell, as if he were getting a head start on atoning for his sins. Actually, the reason for the apparent medical madness inflicted by Dr. Moore on Capone was simple enough: raising the body’s temperature helps to kill infection, just as having a fever does. The fever treatment caused a temporary neurologic remission, and physicians noticed that patients afflicted with syphilis seemed to improve when they had a fever. The procedure, which had been around since the First World War, involved placing the patient in a so-called fever box, in which the heat steadily rose until the body temperature reached 105 degrees. The treatment amounted to nothing more than a glorified sweatbox, and while it might have helped Capone behave better, it could not cure his neurosyphilis.

  There was one other treatment for syphilis, and researchers in the field had been aware of it since the 1920s: penicillin. While it was known that the penicillin mold could inhibit the growth of bacteria, specific medical applications did not develop until World War II, when the U.S. government supported research in this area as part of the war effort. Thus several more years would pass until Capone finally received the most effective syphilis treatment of all, but even if he had been given penicillin from the day he arrived at Union Memorial Hospital, the outcome of his treatment would have been precisely the same, for penicillin can only arrest the disease; it cannot not reverse its effects.

  If any good came out of the agonizing treatments Capone underwent at Union Memorial Hospital, it was that his health ceased to decline. There were no more breakdowns, and he recovered his emotional equilibrium, although the improvement might have been the result of his leaving prison. Once Capone’s condition stabilized, he moved from the hospital, where, as Mencken noted, he was vulnerable to intruders, to a secure rented house in the Baltimore neighborhood of Mt. Washington. Even though he was living once again under the same roof as his family, the ordeal of his syphilis treatments continued. Once a week, Dr. Moore’s junior partner, Dr. Paul Padget, arrived to give Capone a spinal puncture to test his spinal fluid for the presence of spirochetes. The procedure involved inserting a needle between the vertebrae in the lumbar region and drawing the spinal fluid. Dr. Padget performed the procedure in the presence of several Capone bodyguards, who dumbly observed the pathetic spectacle of the once-great “Snorky” reduced to a state of affable helplessness. The results of these tests demonstrated the inevitable: after a certain point, the treatments failed to improve Capone’s condition. By this point, he lacked the mental capacity to evaluate the meaning of these results or to care for himself. Still, he was capable of basic functions. He could talk. Walk. Eat. Recognize people well known to him. When he hallucinated he usually kept his visions to himself and those around him were not aware of his departures from reality. He was generally genial and cooperative, no longer subject to wild mood swings or outbursts of violent temper. Nor did he complain or indulge in self-pity, partly because he was unable to comprehend that he was permanently disabled, which in a way was a mercy.

  As Capone underwent his syphilis treatments, James V. Bennett, the head of the federal penitentiary system, continued to harass his former inmate. On December 21, he wrote to Dr. Moore to warn that Capone would have to satisfy his tax bill before the doctor could receive his fee. “I presume you realize that the government has been trying to collect $300,000 in back income tax from your client,” Bennett advised. (Actually, the amount the government claimed Capone owed was $201,347.) “They have not succeeded in finding any property on which the levy can be made. He has had some rather intelligent attorneys, and I dare say it will be terribly difficult to find anything tangible in the records of the Treasury Department.” The letter failed to discouraged Moore or the hospital from treating Capone, whose medical expenses were paid by Ralph out of his share of the proceeds of the rackets in Chicago.

  After four months of syphilis treatment in Baltimore, Capone and his family bade farewell to Dr. Moore and the other men in the long white coats, and Al was driven to Florida, to the house on Palm Island where he had always planned to retire from the rackets. When he arrived on March 22, 1940, he readily adjusted to his comfortable new surroundings, though he gave no indication that he remembered them from his previous life. “Although the former gang leader must stay in bed most of the day,” the Miami Herald reported, “he is able to sit in the sun and walk around for short periods behind the high walls of his estate. However, he cannot go out sightseeing or even go swimming in his ornate tiled swimming pool, because all forms of exercise are forbidden. While he lies in beds and fights to regain the cocksure energy that pushed him to the top of the racketeering in the prohibition era and afterwards, Capone’s chief diversions are reading and listening to the radio. He avidly reads newspapers, particularly the stories concerning himself.”

  When he regained his strength, he tried to play a little tennis on the lawn, but he was not really up to the game anymore, and golf was out of the question for a man in his condition. Now and then he played pinochle with “the boys,” but it was painfully apparent that the calculations demanded by the game were beyond him, and the other players were careful to give him every advantage. When he was inadvertently beaten, the old Capone briefly flared. “Who’s this smart guy?” he shouted. “Tell the boys to take care of him.” No one lifted a finger anymore; everyone realized the poor old man was out of his head. Still, Al appeared content, sitting on the dock overlooking Biscayne Bay, dressed in pajamas, his hair graying and unkempt, a fishing pole stuck in his powerful hands, to all appearances an old man passing the time, each day an exact replica of the one that had come before it and the one that would come after it. He was forty-one years old.

  Since the day the police had shot his brother Frank to death on the streets of Cicero, Al Capone believed himself doomed, but he was mistaken about the form of the ruin that would be visited upon him. Assuming that he would die like Frank, Al had spent most of his adult life on the run, living with a fear that drove him to take security measures the likes of which no other racketeer took. Because of his caution, and his luck, he contrived to escape the doom he knew—sudden death from gunfire—only to fall victim to the doom he at first refused to acknowledge and later failed to comprehend because it had destroyed his mind: slow death from tertiary syphilis. In this way Capone finally did fulfill his vow to quit the rackets—but at a steep price. He had to lose his mind before he was able to find peace.

  Even if Capone had not been afflicted with syphilis, even if he had come out of jail stronger and sharper than ever, it was a different world now, and he would not have been able to return to business as usual. Law enforcement agencies were far more sophisticated in their understanding of how the rackets operated. Prohibition—the nation’
s great gift to gangsters—was long gone, and the racketeering landscape had changed. Once Capone’s domain had included most of Chicago, as well as bootlegging and racketeering networks reaching all the way from New York to the western states. He had residences throughout the city, as well as hideouts in Chicago and in Lansing, Michigan. Wherever he went, his mistresses, bodyguards, and flunkies were ready to do his bidding. He administered his empire with the meticulousness of an accountant and the ruthlessness of a gunman. He befriended entertainers of every description and bankrolled Chicago’s booming jazz scene. But all that was over now, part of the past, a memory, a yellowed newspaper clipping. While the Capone family still owned the little house on Prairie Avenue, Al rarely returned to that address, and he never again visited the little cottage at Round Lake, near Lansing, or the Burnham Wood golf course, where he had whiled away the sultry summer days playing crooked gangster golf. Nor did he return to the haunts of his Brooklyn boyhood, now the spawning ground of a new generation of racketeers. His large suite at the Lexington Hotel, decorated with portraits of Lincoln, Washington, and that other distinguished public servant, “Big Bill” Thompson, was long gone. His world had shrunk to the Palm Island villa, which Ralph had managed to snatch from the jaws of the IRS.