“Fuck Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein is a gambler and he should stick to his goddamn cards.” Capone sat forward and the leather chair, where Wyatt had sat, groaned like a cavalry officer taking Indian torture. “We got no interest in the retail side. We are strictly wholesale. And there’s gonna be wholesale fucking trouble if you don’t sell out to us and then start buying. Capeesh? That means ‘understand’—understand?”
Capone crushed the big fresh cigar in a glass tray on the desk; the waste of what must have been an expensive smoke made a certain wanton violent point.
Johnny raised a hand, gently. “Mr. Capone, I’ll consider your offer. For now, I have a club to run. You’re welcome to go downstairs and take a table and watch the show. As long as you behave yourself.”
Capone was out of the chair like a cannonball. His hands were on the desk and he was leaning his fat florid face right into Johnny’s pale skinny one and shouting, “Are you saying we ain’t civilized, Mr. Yale and me?”
Wyatt was astounded by how fast Bat moved.
And the bum leg wasn’t a factor, at all, the bulldog Bartholomew suddenly past the chair and was behind Capone and sticking the small snout of a revolver between the fat folds of the hoodlum’s neck.
“Time for you and your boys to go,” Bat said.
The two flunkies were moving forward.
Wyatt took the closer one, and wasn’t even fully off the couch when he kicked the hood behind the left knee. The world went out from under the guy—this was the bald one—and Wyatt knelt and withdrew the two revolvers from under the fallen flunky’s shoulders to point up at the astounded curly-headed one, who hadn’t even gone for his own guns, yet.
Rising slowly, Wyatt said, “I have to agree—you fellers need to move on.”
Johnny’s gun was out of the drawer, in hand, and the three of them—Doc Holliday’s boy and Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp—ushered their three Brooklynite guests out via the seldom-used front door. Wyatt brandished only one of the two guns he’d commandeered, sticking the other one in his waistband, thinking a pair of guns was redundant and a trifle showy.
Considerable restraint was displayed, when none of the guests got kicked in the ass as they started down the eight steps to the sidewalk.
Capone looked back to glower, “You fucked up bad.”
This seemed generally directed, but Wyatt responded.
“Maybe so,” he said, pointing a gun at Capone’s jack-o’-lantern head. “Not too late to kill you.”
At this, the three hoodlums scurried into the night, almost bumping into several well-dressed couples on the sidewalk who were making the speakeasy rounds.
Inside, the handful of diners—who had witnessed the conveying-by-gun of these guests out the door—were on their feet and milling around wide-eyed, whispering. The pair of waiters looked startled, too.
“Nothing to worry about, folks,” Johnny assured them, tucking his revolver (a little pearl-handled nickel-plated number) in his suitcoat pocket. “Your meals are on the house tonight.”
Then their host led Wyatt and Bat back into his private office.
“Now do you see what I mean,” Bat whispered to Wyatt, as they settled into the leather chairs and Johnny got back behind his desk. “Do you see why this boy’s mother wants you to talk sense to him?”
“I intend to talk sense to him,” Wyatt assured Bat. Then he turned back to Doc’s son and asked, “Johnny, have you considered putting some gambling in?”
Bat covered his face with a hand.
“You’ve got plenty of wasted space for it,” Wyatt was saying. “That front music room, we could start with a table in there—faro or poker. Lots of folks in this town might get a kick out of playing a hand or two with the likes of old Wyatt Earp…if I don’t sound too immodest.”
Johnny was rocking back in his chair, smiling, laughing softly. “No…No, Wyatt. You don’t sound immodest at all.”
TWO
BUCK THE TIGER*
*gambler lingo for: defy the odds
SEVEN
Al Capone was no fucking thief.
In this, the twenty-one-year-old businessman from Brooklyn took great pride. Sure, back when he ran with kid gangs, he was involved in the typical petty pilferage of such good-natured childhood pastimes as lunch money extortion, and knocking over pushcarts and scattering bread bins, taking free samples in the wake. Kid stuff, no worse than pulling old boys’ beards or breaking this window or shooting out that street lamp.
No one could say he didn’t have a good, decent upbringing. His papa, Gabriele, was a barber; his mother, Theresa, a seam-stress, loving and kind and a hell of a cook, as his going-on-two-hundred-fifty pounds proved. Papa having a trade, and the ability to read and write English, meant a quick climb for the Capones—only a few years in the really nasty tenements.
Yet the memories of squalor stayed with young Al. He was not likely to forget the early days with the family of six (Al had three brothers) sharing two unfurnished rooms with no gas or electricity, cold water from a sink in the hall, heat from the kerosene stove Mama cooked on, and a two-holer shitter out back for the whole goddamn building.
These beginnings had been as rough as the Sands Street neighborhood, which bordered the Brooklyn Navy Yard and its bedlam. His ears rang with the clamor of shipbuilding and shipping, punctuated by the screech of sea gulls; his nostrils twitched at the smells of acrid oil, rotting vegetation and brackish seawater. The stench off the Gowanus Canal—a manmade waterway for barges, a marshy brownish scar across Brooklyn—could bring tears to a grown man’s eyes, let alone a little kid. And that was the good part.
The bad? Saloons and brothels and pawnshops and gambling joints and tattoo parlors served the swaggering, drunken sailors who infested the Sands Street sidewalks, leaving gutters brimming with used lambskins and broken beer bottles. To this day, the sight of a sailor in uniform brought a bile of disgust to his throat.
Papa’s profession, honest though it was, was literally a nickel-and-dime affair. For years the old man assisted other barbers and worked part-time in groceries (where his English skills were valuable) and finally was able to open his own barbershop at 69 Park Avenue (in Brooklyn—this was a step up, but not hardly Manhattan). The family took an apartment over the shop, with such luxuries as electricity and indoor plumbing and even furniture…and such necessities as taking on a couple boarders.
Al’s memories of those years were pleasant. The new neighborhood was a mix of mostly Irish and such other nationalities as Chinese, Swedish and German. He had grown up around all kinds of people, which contributed to him being the kind of guy who could get along with everybody. His people were from Naples and it always surprised and disappointed him when Italians fought amongst themselves, Northerners against the Southerners and the Sicilians against everybody.
Hell, he wasn’t even Italian, not really. He was born here. He was American.
He’d started school at P.S. 7, near the Navy Yard, where he rubbed shoulders with the toughest Irish kids out of Red Hook and held his own, winning every fight and earning straight B’s. After the move, he found himself in a Gothic prison of a school, P.S. 133, and the teachers there, Irish women mostly, rubbed him the wrong way. Nuns had taught these young broads to use a ruler on unruly knuckles and Al did not go for such shit.
That was when he began running with kid gangs, and his truancy rate went up, his grades went down, and finally one of those Irish bitch teachers slapped him and he slapped her back. What the hell—seventh grade was farther than most guys got.
Around then the family moved again, to an even nicer Brooklyn neighborhood, into an apartment on Garfield Place, a quiet residential area with shade trees and row houses. Best of all, a pool hall nearby allowed him and his Papa to spend some father-and-son time together, with the old man passing along his considerable skill at pool to a fourteen-year-old pupil who at the moment wasn’t studying much of anything else.
Those were the best hours he ever spent with his
Papa, who he admired, though Al sure as hell had no desire to go into the nickel-a-haircut business. Anyway, he had another guy to look up to, another “father,” name of Johnny Torrio.
Moving to Garfield Place meant Al walked damn near every day by a restaurant on the busy corner of Union Street and Fourth Avenue; on the second floor a window glittered with gilt letters: john torrio association. Often the diminutive, dapper Italian leprechaun called Little John—with his pallid face and chipmunk cheeks and mild button eyes and tiny hands and feet—would reward neighborhood lads with trivial errands that paid a generous five dollars per.
The boys who proved trustworthy earned the right to perform more difficult, demanding tasks, such as making payoffs or deliveries. Occasionally a boy rose to Little John’s inner circle, as had Al, who had passed a test that few boys had.
Little John had left teenaged Al alone in the Association office, in full view of a pile of cash on the desk. Most boys presented with this temptation took it, and never did business with Johnny Torrio again. Al didn’t touch the money and won his mentor’s trust.
Al Capone was no fucking thief.
Little John was the father he wished he had—oh, sure, he respected Papa for making a living for the family, and a better one than most. But Torrio was wealthy and successful and fucking brilliant. Nothing in his growing-up years meant more to Al than the moments Torrio spent alone with him in that unpretentious office, teaching him the ways of business.
“Everybody wants to fight, Al,” Little John would say in a musical voice unusual for an Italian, an Irish brogue of a voice, really. “But the smart man makes alliances. He picks his fights carefully. He knows what ties to make, and when to make them—and when to cut ’em, if a tie starts in to binding.”
Such a reflective man, so calm, Little John was, to have come up through Manhattan’s Five Points Gang, that skull-cracking, eye-gouging bunch, available for hire to those needing a strike broken or votes discouraged (or encouraged) or anyone in the specific need of general mayhem.
“There is profit enough in the rackets,” Little John told him, “for all to share, in peace. You can’t enjoy the proceeds when you’ve been murdered, Al. Even injury is too high a price to pay.”
Not that the puny little guy was a pushover where it came to violence.
“I’ve never fired a gun in my life, Al,” he told his pupil. A dainty pink hand raised as if in benediction: Pope John Torrio. “But I have no practical objections to the use of force. I just consider it a poor solution to business problems…if sometimes necessary.”
Al already knew Little John approved of such tactics, “if necessary,” since by fifteen he was one of Torrio’s chief collectors of outstanding accounts, skilled in the use of fists, blackjacks and wooden clubs. But what about rubbing out a guy who’s in some way out of line?
“The execution of a business rival,” Little John would say, “is an unfortunate, occasional necessity in la mala vita.”
The evil life.
The life of crime. And Johnny Torrio, behind the gilt-lettered window of his association, was running the local Italian lottery, the so-called numbers racket—criminal but not hurting anybody. His other business interests included whorehouses and gambling joints, in the very Sands Street neighborhood Al had escaped. Johnny Torrio had helped make those sailors drunken.
“Little John,” fourteen-year-old Al had once asked, “is it evil? Are we evil, living this life?”
“Is your mother evil?”
“No! Hell, no!”
“Does she ask where the money you bring her comes from?”
“No.”
“Does money know where it comes from?”
“No.”
“Do we have anything in America without money?”
“No.”
A gentle, knowing nod. “Your mother knows that a man’s life at home is separate from the life he leads at work. We deal with whores in our business so that we can give a good, respectable life to the madonnas in our homes.”
“They’re…separate things? Work and home?”
“They have nothing to do with each other. Nothing. Does your mother praise you when you bring money home to her?”
“Yes! She says she’s proud of her good boy.”
“She is right to be proud of you, Al. I’m proud of you, too. No boy who has crossed the threshold of my association has ever had your aptitude. Can do sums in his head, calculate the odds so quick, so accurate. But it’s more than that—you calculate people, too. How much will a man pay for a bet? At poker? At craps? At numbers? How much is ten minutes with a woman worth? Good things to know. Important things to know.”
Al had been running with the South Brooklyn Rippers, but Little John paved the way for him to join the offshoot gang, the Five Points Juniors. But Al was disappointed by the piddling nature of the gang, limited as it was to petty vandalism and hanging out and small-time theft, none of which was Al’s style.
His style, really, was having a good time, and loitering on street corners with the guys was not his idea of one. Thanks to his Papa, he was the best pool player in the neighborhood and, despite his size, a hell of a dancer. The girls liked him, liked his natty style of apparel (picked up from Little John), and were frequently won over by his confident, brash manner.
Mae Coughlin he met at a dance at a cellar club on Carroll Street. The “club” was just a rented storefront with the windows blacked out where its young members, Italian and Irish alike, drank and gambled and danced with girls. Mae was respectable, a sales clerk at a department store, but she was a little older than Al, and she liked to have fun, too. Nice girls often frequented the cellar clubs.
What a nice girl—an Irish girl—like Mae ever saw in a fat Italian slob like him, Al would never know; but he wasn’t knocking it. She was smart and slender and blonde and pretty, and though she lived just a short stroll from Garfield Place, hers was a world away from his.
The Coughlins lived on Third Place in a three-story house on a broad tree-lined lane in an upstanding middle-class Irish enclave. Her father worked construction and her mother was active in the church and neither was thrilled about the prospect of Alphonse Capone, trash blown over from the rough neighborhood a few blocks away, for a son-in-law.
The unlikely couple had been dating for a month when Al asked his mentor for an opinion on a possible Capone/Coughlin union.
“Ask the girl,” Little John said without hesitation. “I married an Irish girl from Kentucky, and it was the best thing I ever done. We Italians like to marry young and those mick men wait around till they’re thirty and miss the good opportunities. Don’t make their mistake.”
Still, Al couldn’t bring himself to pop the question. Finally, when Mae missed her period, he knew he could expect a positive response, even from her parents.
A year ago December, he and Mae had been married at the Coughlins’ family church, the impressive St. Mary Star of the Sea, near the Brooklyn docks. Mae hadn’t suffered the embarrassment of going to the altar fat and pregnant, because they’d already had their son earlier the same month—Albert Francis Capone, who Al called “Sonny Boy.”
The marriage came in very handy with the draft board, giving him a deferment from getting sent overseas, the war still going on at the time. And, as a new father, he did his best to make a living for his new family.
For the past several years, he’d tried the occasional straight job, sometimes to serve as a front, for example the pinsetter job Little John arranged at a bowling alley; but also real legit jobs, such as working as a clerk in a munitions factory, then as a paper cutter at a book bindery. Clerking wasn’t so bad, he could exercise his brain; but that paper-cutter baloney was a big yawn, and tired his ass out, to boot.
Now that he was a married man, a father with responsibilities, Al needed real work. Good-paying work, legit or not…and probably not. But when he turned to Little John, his mentor gave him shocking news.
“My business interests in Chicago
,” Torrio said, “require my full attention.”
For years Little John had been taking the train to Chicago two or three times a year; he had a cousin there, Victoria, married to Big Jim Colosimo, the cathouse czar of Chicago.
“Take me with you, Little John.”
“No, Al. I need you here.”
“What’s here with you gone?”
“Frankie Yale. He’s looking after my interests. You look after Frankie.”
“Don’t you trust him, Little John?”
“Sure I do. With you standing behind him watching.”
And Johnny Torrio took the train west, and Al went to work for Little John’s second-in-command, Frankie Yale.
Already Al knew Frankie well, and liked and respected him. The stocky, black-haired, pug-nosed, dimple-chinned Yale, only five or six years older than Al, was already a stunning success in business—owning a mortuary, a nightclub (the Sunrise Café), a laundry, racehorses, prizefighters, even distributing a line of his own cigars.
Al Capone was no fucking thief, and neither was Frankie Yale—he lent workmen money at twenty percent per week; he provided shopkeepers insurance policies; and organized unions, the local ice men, among others.
True, Frankie had a notoriously short fuse. In a heartbeat he could go from gracious don to brutal wacko. He could explode in a torrent of filthy talk and put his own brother in the hospital, for a minor perceived insult (as he did with Angelo Yale, ten years his junior).
Al had never faced Frankie’s wrath—whether because Al had never given him cause or maybe because Frankie was careful not to go bughouse with somebody Al’s size.
Yale maintained three headquarters—one in a Brooklyn garage that housed his booze business delivery trucks; another at the Adonis Club, Fury Argolia’s restaurant; and finally at the Harvard Inn at Coney Island, on Brooklyn’s south shore. The latter was where, at Little John’s request, Frankie Yale gave formal employment to Al Capone.
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