Then came election day. Although Ness had outspent his rival by more than a three-to-one margin, he received only 86,000 votes as compared to Burke’s resounding 168,000. It was a disgraceful showing for Ness, who failed to understand how he could have lost by such a wide margin. He tried to give the appearance of taking defeat in stride, even to the point of attending Burke’s victory celebration, where he personally congratulated his rival. In the next instant, bitterness overcame him, and he remarked, “Who’d want an honest politician, anyway?”
Although he was only forty-three when he lost his bid to become mayor of Cleveland, Eliot Ness never recovered from the humiliation. He tried and failed to return to one of his former positions in business. There was talk of his becoming police chief of Detroit, but he lost the job because of his political ambitions. A year after the election, he returned to Cleveland for the fourth time to ask about an opening that paid only $60 a week, a fraction of his former salary. Ness did not get even this humble position. He moved from job to job, from bar to bar. He never put down roots, he always moved around, as if he were trying to find himself, or run away from himself.
• • •
Al Capone’s health remained strong enough for him to see the end of World War II, though he displayed little comprehension of what that struggle had been all about, even though one of his nephews, “Two-Gun” Hart’s boy, Richard Jr., had been killed in the Philippines in 1944. During the war years Capone occasionally went to restaurants with his wife and a bodyguard or two in the Miami area, looking dapper in a white straw hat, with a rose stuck in his lapel. There was a time that Capone would have taken over an entire restaurant, or commanded the attention of every patron when he arrived surrounded by a retinue of gunmen, but the times were changing, the country was entering the post-World War II era, and people barely noticed him now. Those who recognized him were often surprised that Al Capone was still alive; they thought he had died in jail years ago. They remembered the movies about his life, especially Scarface and Little Caesar, better than the man himself.
But there were some who did remember. In 1946, his former protégé from Chicago Heights, Sam Pontarelli, happened to be visiting Miami on his honeymoon when he was unexpectedly approached by a stranger who told him, “Al wants to see you.”
“I’m on my honeymoon,” Pontarelli replied. “Don’t bother me.”
“Look, I got my orders.”
Pontarelli relented. “Okay,” he said.
“Give me an hour.” “Get all your clothes,” the man said as he left.
When he arrived at the Palm Island villa, Capone was there to greet him. Like Harry Hart and others who saw Capone during this period, Pontarelli was struck by how healthy he appeared. “The man was in good shape. He had all his marbles,” Pontarelli recalls. “He grabbed me and kissed me,” Pontarelli recalls. “Gave me a big bear hug. ‘You stay here,’ he says, meaning in a carriage house adjacent to the main building. Then he says, ‘We’re gonna go eat tonight at the Tropicana.’ Next day, we went fishing on his boat, then skeet shooting. Three days go by, and it’s time for me to go home. My wife tells Mae we’re leaving in the morning. Al threw a nice going-away party for us, and then he grabs me, takes my hand, and I felt something. ‘What are you doing?’ I say to him. I look and it’s $500.” Pontarelli came away with a renewed admiration for Capone. The man had been to hell and back, and he still remembered the people who were with him all along. Sure he had been in the rackets, he had been a bootlegger, and maybe a few other things, as well, though not everything they called him in the newspapers, but Pontarelli did not fault Capone for that. “The man did what he had to do,” Pontarelli says today, “and he knew how to do it. He did it the right way. If there was a dollar to cut up, he cut it up fifty-fifty, not sixty-forty.”
Sam Pontarelli was one of the last emissaries from the world beyond the walls of Palm Island to see Al Capone. After that visit, Al went into a decline, not all at once, but slowly, unmistakably. He usually slept by himself in a plain, small bedroom, not much larger than his cell at Alcatraz had been. The room held two narrow beds and a night table. A window overlooked the front lawn of the house; from it the palm trees and houses across the quiet street were visible, and when there was a breeze, as there often was across Biscayne Bay, he would hear the palm fronds sway and softly scrape against one another. Even in this tranquil setting, he did not sleep well. By three o’clock in the morning a light went on in his room, and he was up and about the house. His grasp on reality became more tenuous than ever.
On January 18, 1947, he quietly celebrated his forty-eighth birthday. It was, by the standards of his milieu, a great age, and he had outlived almost everyone from the days in Chicago—with two notable exceptions. “Bugs” Moran was still at large, a small time hoodlum robbing banks and engaging in other forms of petty crime; and Johnny Torrio, Capone’s true mentor, lived on in quiet retirement in White Plains, New York. Shortly after his birthday celebration, Capone suffered a stroke and slipped into a coma. He remained in his small bedroom, attended by Dr. Kenneth Phillips (the physician who had exaggerated the length of Capone’s bout with pneumonia in 1929), as well as a staff of round-the-clock nurses. Fearing that his brother’s condition was serious, Ralph came down from Mercer, and other Capones converged on Palm Island from Chicago. Throughout the week, Capone’s condition worsened. He contracted pneumonia, and a high fever further weakened his body. Now his family, including Sonny, Ralph, Mae, Teresa, Mafalda, Matt, and Mimi, were all in constant attendance, crowding the little bedroom at the top of the stairs, hoping he would live even as they knew they were watching him die.
The endless, sleepless week dragged on until, at 7:25 in the evening on Saturday, January 25, the best-known, least understood gangster of all died in the presence of his immediate family. Beyond the gates of the house, a small group of reporters, keeping a death vigil, waited patiently for news from within the walls. As soon as Dr. Phillips closed the deceased’s eyes, Mae, realizing that after twenty-eight years of marriage to Al Capone she was now alone, collapsed. She required medical attention herself. Later, Capone’s physicians appeared before the reporters to give them the news for which they had been waiting. “As word of the death spread,” wrote the correspondent for the Miami Herald, “a procession of automobiles began to arrive at the high-walled home where Capone had lived out his anti-climactic years. More callers than the villa has ever had, even in the lush times when gangsters used it as a holiday retreat, were admitted through the gates. A block-long line of sleek, black limousines was parked outside.” A little later a hearse pulled up to the house and took the body to the Philbrick Miami Beach Funeral Home.
The following day, his body, looking “shrunken and colorless in a massive bronze casket,” was seen by about 350 visitors, who first had to submit to the scrutiny of guards stationed at the entrance of the mortuary. The last outfit Capone ever wore consisted of a new double-breasted suit of a somber blue hue, a white shirt, black tie, and white “sport shoes.” Although Capone was still enough of a name to command a crowd at this, his final appearance, his last rites were extremely modest compared with the great gangster funerals Chicago had witnessed during the Prohibition era, several of which Capone had instigated by sending the victim to his grave. But there would be no processions for Al Capone, no flags flying at half mast, no hundred-car-long cortege, no throng jamming the streets or any other reminder that the deceased belonged to gangland. Even the lavish floral tributes that had marked the last rites of so many other gangsters, including Al’s own brother Frank, were absent. The family’s plan was to give Al his send-off with the least amount of fuss possible. In Chicago, his lawyer, Abraham Teitelbaum, announced that Al Capone had died penniless: “As far as I know, Capone didn’t leave any money or any will. I think he died broke and I’m sure it is untrue that he was fabulously wealthy. I think he lived on the generosity of his brothers and other members of his family. He still owed the Government money, and the Florida
home in which he lived was heavily mortgaged.” As Teitelbaum implied, the thriving Chicago Outfit continued to funnel money to Capone’s immediate family.
Because Capone had died on a Saturday, his passing became grist for Sunday newspapers across the country, and their obituaries vied for the honor of kicking dirt on his grave. The New York Times described his death as the “end of an evil dream,” and drew the following moral: “Though ‘Scarface Al,’ once Public Enemy No. 1, died in bed in the midst of luxury, his career ended in mental and physical horror. Among the funeral wreaths his old gangster associates will doubtless shower on his bier there should be at least one inscribed, ‘The wages of sin is death.’ ”
The Chicago papers all summoned the specter of the gang lord who once ruled their town. “In the days of his power there were fantastic tales about him,” explained his old enemy, the Chicago Tribune, as if Capone had never been quite real, more a creature of the popular imagination than a historical figure.
His “syndicate” was credited with doing business of 25 million dollars a year and he was reputedly many times a millionaire; there was even a story that he had personally lost $7,500,000 in a few years of gambling. With awe, it was related that the armored car in which he rode weighed 71/2 tons and that he went about always with at least a dozen “torpedoes” [armed bodyguards] to protect his life.
Dozens of murders were attributed to him and his gang: murders for which no one was ever tried. There were many accusations, most of which no one troubled to deny, that he and his cohorts practiced bribery of public officials and policemen on a large scale. Capone was astute enough to realize the great money-making possibilities in labor rackets, and some of his underlings were still prospering in them long after he retired. He began toward the end of his sovereignty to understand the power of the ballot, and there were territories in which only his candidates could be elected.
Although the Tribune presented a fairly comprehensive account of Capone’s public career, the newspaper omitted the one episode that demonstrated how closely the newspaper and the racketeer were linked: the murder of Jake Lingle, the Tribune reporter who doubled as a Capone racketeer.
In his lifetime, Capone had enjoyed ties to newspapers and journalists not only in Chicago but throughout the country. He had always sold copies, and he had cultivated a number of prominent journalists, including Damon Runyon, Harry Read, and Jake Lingle. Surveying the reaction of the press, A. J. Liebling, that connoisseur of street life, was underwhelmed. In the glossy pages of the New Yorker he alone waxed nostalgic for Capone and dared to make fun of the censoriousness surrounding his death. Perhaps, thought Liebling, Capone had simply outlived his time, and people no longer appreciated him or his era. If he had died fifteen years earlier, Liebling wrote, “the event would have rated more space than a World Series, and I suppose it is a sign of having my particular age that I was astonished at the restraint with which most papers handled the news of his death in Miami Beach.”
Liebling neglected to mention that Capone, in a manner of speaking, had died a thousand deaths in the newspapers over the years. They had declared him finished, washed up, a has-been every time he was hauled in for a major murder investigation; they wrote premature obituaries when he was indicted for income tax evasion and again when he was convicted of the charge; they wrote him off when he went to the Atlanta Penitentiary and later when he was sent to Alcatraz. They declared him as good as dead when he was released at the end of 1939. “Death had beckoned him for years, as stridently as a Cicero whore calling to a cash customer,” as Time put it. No matter what they wrote about Capone, he kept coming back, a bit frailer in every incarnation, but still alive. So when the end came quietly, almost imperceptibly, it seemed an anticlimax to Liebling and to many other Americans, for the event occurred without benefit of the gallows, the electric chair, or the machine gun. No one had taken Capone for a ride, leaving his body to be found in three inches of freezing ditch water. At home, in bed, surrounded by grieving relatives, Al Capone died the death of a family man, not a gangster. It was not the end that Americans, conditioned by over two decades of violent gangster movies, expected; nor was it the end that law enforcement authorities wanted. The former preferred him to die in a hail of bullets, the latter in jail. Capone had managed to outwit everyone and everything—with the exception of syphilis.
The family arranged for the body to be shipped to Chicago, and on the afternoon of February 4 the mortal remains of Al Capone were laid to rest in Mt. Olivet Cemetery. It was a bitterly cold day, the ground was covered with snow. In keeping with the trappings of his funeral, even the Capone headstone was understated, as if to minimize his notorious reputation. The small slab read:
Qui Riposa
Alphonse Capone
Nato: Jan. 17, 1899
Morto: Jan. 25, 1947
Only a handful of mourners were present to pay their last respects to Capone and gaze on these words. Among them were Jack “Greasy Thumb” Guzik and Capone’s suave heir apparent, Murray “The Camel” Humphreys. One other mourner went unrecognized; he was Timothy Sullivan, Capone’s old caddie. Sullivan was under no illusions about Capone’s deeds, but, he recalled, “I remembered another side and I mourned him. I wanted him somehow to know I was there because, as a boy, I never had a better friend. Nobody had ever treated me or my family with such kindness.” He remembered the gifts Capone had lavished on the family, especially his sister Babe, who became Al’s mistress, and he remembered the wild rounds of gangster golf he had caddied.
Once the men had assembled at the graveside, they stood about in the snow, stamping their feet, trading gossip, looking out for undercover FBI agents. When Capone’s widow, mother and sister arrived, all the men doffed their hats. They watched tearfully as Capone’s coffin, all but obscured beneath a blanket of orchids and gardenias, was carried to the waiting, gaping grave. At this moment a few reporters ventured close to the canopy marking the grave, only to be reprimanded by Ralph. “Why don’t you leave us alone?” he barked. The reporters moved back, but only slightly; they had a job to do. Then Monsignor William J. Gorman, who was the chaplain of the Chicago Fire Department, made the following remarks: “The Roman Catholic Church never condones evil, nor the evil in any man’s life. But this ceremony is sanctioned by our archbishop as recognition of Alphonse Capone’s repentance, and the fact that he died with the sentiments of the Church.” As the women sobbed and the men glared at the reporters, the priest continued. “I never knew Alphonse Capone in life, but during the years that I was pastor of St. Columbanus Church on the South Side, I knew and respected his mother for her unfailing piety. So far as I know, she never missed a mass a day of her adult life. . . . She asked me to conduct this service today.” After that, the priest read a few prayers. The mourning racketeers recited their Hail Marys, and when they were done, the coffin was lowered into the grave. Father Gorman knelt and scattered a handful of frozen earth after it. By now the short winter afternoon was nearly over, and it was growing dark and gloomy in the graveyard. The women entered the waiting limousines, followed by the men, and gradually the cemetery emptied of its visitors.
In his forty-eight years, Capone led many lives, public and private, valiant and contemptible. At various times he was a pimp, a loving husband, a murderer, a bootlegger, martyr, role model, antihero—Public Enemy Number 1. He left behind so many lasting, unexpected impressions: the young boy who retrieved a widow’s stolen washtub (“We are the boys of Navy Street and touch us if you dare!”) . . . the trustworthy young apprentice to Johnny Torrio . . . the successful racketeer attired in a pink apron, cooking spaghetti and declaring his intention to retire . . . paying the hospital bill for Robert St. John, the crusading young journalist his goons had beaten . . . flinging coins from his car as he drove through the streets of Chicago Heights . . . cowering before Frankie La Porte . . . telling Sergeant Anthony McSwiggin to shoot him if he thought Capone was actually responsible for murdering his son, William McSwiggin . . . playing
Pied Piper to a group of young children as he took them for ice cream in Lansing . . . assenting to “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn’s plan for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre . . . murdering three would-be traitors with a baseball bat . . . warning a youthful admirer never to enter the rackets, or “I’ll personally kill you” . . . ordering a doctor to save a young black musician’s severed finger . . . skimming along Biscayne Bay in his powerboat with Sonny at his side . . . holding hands with his girlfriend, Babe, at the movies . . . raging at a waiter who dared serve him domestic Parmesan cheese . . . running a soup kitchen to feed thousands of unemployed men during the Depression . . . fitting a new suit during his tax trial . . . clutching his hands behind his back as Judge Wilkerson sentenced him to eleven years in jail for income tax evasion . . . journeying through the summer heat to Alcatraz, his legs shackled . . . hiding under his blanket during a prison riot . . . teaching himself to play the mandolin . . . rough-housing with his estranged brother’s boys . . .
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