Al Capone

by Deirdre Bair

  In most accounts that tell of this first known (and allegedly one of his longest-lasting) mistress, he was said to have taken the fifteen-year-old Greek girl out of the game and set her up in her own apartment, where he kept her for years until she found a man to marry her and moved away.

  Most of the writers who have studied Al Capone’s life and career hint at this liaison with the Greek girl, but none have provided any foundation for its veracity, so it continues to be another of the legends surrounding him. Most likely, he did consort with the girls he managed, keeping one (or more) in particular until he became bored, or the girl got too old, or something happened to make her quit the business. However, even though he made good money from the beginning, it was not enough in the early days to have kept even a single mistress in the manner the legends convey. And besides, he always kept his eye on the main prize, which in this instance was amassing enough money to bring his mother and the younger siblings to Chicago.

  Despite his real or imagined appetites for prostitutes, Al Capone’s managerial work was first-rate, and by 1921 he was promoted to work in Torrio’s flagship, the Four Deuces, nicknamed for its address at 2222 South Wabash Avenue in the South Side Levee district. Here, he put his bookkeeping skills to work and began the first of the obfuscations designed to elude every government agency from tax collectors to law enforcement, this last group particularly active since the start of Prohibition. There was a brothel on a floor above the Four Deuces, but Capone wanted to distance himself from public connections with it; even though it was one of his most prosperous businesses and he had no qualms about frequenting brothels, he wanted to be known as a respectable businessman. At a fundamental level, he despised prostitution and was ashamed of his involvement with it. In later years, he flew into ferocious rages when anyone tried to question him about it, and reporters soon learned not to pursue that line of questioning.

  Working in Torrio’s headquarters marked the beginning of the financial creativity Capone employed for the rest of his business career. He needed a front to explain what he did for an occupation, so he had several different business cards printed up. One was for Al Brown, “Second Hand Furniture Dealer,” and it covered the few shabby pieces he moved next door into the street-front store at 2220 South Wabash. He also had another printed for “A. Brown, M.D.” with an address at 2146 South Michigan Avenue. He set up a waiting room and filled it with various medicinal bottles and supplies, but no one was ever there, and no office hours were ever held. Eventually, he had no use for these sham enterprises, and all that remained of them was the pseudonym he used from then on, Al Brown. When both buildings were raided several years later, confiscated materials revealed that they were the Torrio organization’s financial headquarters.

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  Al Capone had risen quickly in his new profession, and now that he was earning good money, he was able to bring everyone to Chicago. Teresa came, leaving the only neighborhood she had ever known without fear or protest, for now that her husband was dead, the custom was that the eldest son became the new head of the family and the widowed mother had to bow to his every whim or will. In this case, however, succession passed to her fourth but most gifted son, whose duty it was to support her as hers was to obey him. So they all could live together, Al bought the large two-family house at 7244 South Prairie Avenue for the then-grand sum of $5,500 (approximately $77,000 in 2015). Each floor held a self-contained three-bedroom apartment with a full bath, kitchen, and living and dining rooms. The basement contained a multitude of rooms outfitted with beds that were used by men who worked for Capone as well as members of his extended family.

  Because of the stairs, Teresa moved into the ground-floor unit, where she continued her role as the matriarch to whom all the other women in the family deferred. She (and later Mafalda when she was old enough) never hesitated to let Mae know that she might be Al’s wife but they were in charge of the household. When Ralph brought his longtime mistress who became his second wife to the house, and Albert (Bites) brought his first wife, they, too, were ignored and never allowed to prepare any of the dishes served at the family’s elaborate Sunday dinners. The first wives of Ralph and Albert were Italian, but they were quickly divorced, and subsequently not one of Teresa Capone’s sons was married to an Italian girl. Even if they had been, she would have treated them as dismissively as she treated the “American” wives they brought to her home.

  As for Mae, she became a great reader who sat with her novels and kept her mouth shut. For every criticism Teresa aimed her way, she sailed serenely past it. There was only one barb Teresa knew better than ever to level at her daughter-in-law, and that was about how she was raising Sonny. Mae made it clear that she was fully in charge of her son, and if anyone dared to challenge her, she could be instantly ferocious. Sonny was growing into a sweet child with a cheerful disposition, and Teresa did love him, so there was never a problem on this front. There was, however, a serious concern over Sonny’s health. He was a sickly infant who grew into a school-age child felled for long periods of time by every childhood illness that struck him. Recovery was always so slow that he did not attend school until he was going into the seventh grade. Until then, Mae arranged for private tutors to teach him at home. Because they were together all the time, mother and son forged a bond that endured throughout their lives.

  Of the brothers, Ralph and Frank did the most serious work for Al, while John did whatever chores he was assigned. John had no interest in school or in any profession and was content to do whatever did not bring notice or attention his way. Albert was the slow and steady one who eventually found a series of low-level quasi-legitimate jobs and stuck with them for most of his life. He was always a part of the family’s ritual Sunday dinners and holiday celebrations but always on the sidelines, listening and saying little.

  With the two youngest siblings, Al not only ordered Matthew and Mafalda to stay in school, he made sure they got good grades and behaved themselves. He, who quit school at the first opportunity, was unlike most Italians of his generation, for he believed in education as the way to succeed and he made it clear that he expected them to graduate from high school. Beyond that, he held no ambitions for Mafalda except marriage, but he was determined that Matty would be the first American Capone to go to college and graduate. Sonny was still a small child when they moved to Chicago, but Al was already envisioning the same educational path for him.

  Al bought the house on Prairie Avenue before the Capone women had a chance to see it. He quickly had bars installed over all the windows that might have allowed easy access to potential assailants, and he had a sturdy garage built for the car he later had reinforced with steel plating. He was also alleged to have had an underground tunnel dug between the house and the garage so that he would not have to walk outside in rain or snow, but none has ever been found. Reporters who wrote those stories hinted (but never actually mentioned) that he had it dug to avoid the possibility of drive-by assassination attempts, for this was his home and his family, and they were always sacrosanct and separate from his business endeavors.

  No one in the family had any interest in gardening or landscaping, so the exterior of the front of the property was barren except for one midsized tree, and there was never a single tomato or basil plant out back, let alone an actual garden. The house was simply there, existing in a curiously impersonal setting, giving no indication of the hobbies, interests, or occupations of those who lived inside it. It was sold shortly after Teresa died in 1952, but to this day the exterior looks the same as it did when the Capone family lived there.

  In their several moves throughout Brooklyn, they always lived on the fringe of an Italian enclave, but in Chicago Al moved them into a quiet middle-class neighborhood in the heart of the city’s South Side. They were the only Italians on a street where their neighbors were mostly upper-working-class families of Irish and German origin. Most of the residents owned their houses, and census records revealed that the street was home to a Scot who wa
s a Presbyterian minister and quite a few policemen, which added a touch of irony to Al Capone’s choice of where to place those he loved most.

  As the years in Chicago passed, Al Capone became flamboyant in every other aspect of his life, but where housing was concerned, he remained low-key and discreet. He never thought of moving to the fashionable sections of the city or building a showy suburban estate; 7244 Prairie was his first and only home in Chicago. His family was safe and secure there, and he knew that no matter how long his business—for no matter how unsavory that was what he called it—kept him away from home, he could still telephone every day and be assured that some part of his life was under control and progressing in a smooth and orderly fashion.

  Over the years, stories have circulated about the Capone family’s neighborliness, of how Al played ball in the backyard with Sonny or how he invited neighbors in to eat the spaghetti doused in sauce that he cooked himself or to drink the good wines that he served all through the Prohibition years. There are even stories of how Teresa and Mae would borrow the proverbial cup of sugar from neighbors and how they socialized with many of them, or how Mafalda rode a bike (which she never had) up and down the street. These are all nice and warm stories, but they are not true. When it came to foodstuffs, the Capone pantry was always fully stocked; if anyone borrowed sugar, it might have been a neighbor who was curious to know what went on in the only house on the street that had bars on the windows and big black cars with tough-looking men lounging around them out front or in the back, where Al Capone always had one poised and ready to go in case he had to leave in a hurry. Any neighbors who rang that particular doorbell would have had to be very brave as well as very curious.

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  Whenever he was asked what he did for a living, Al insisted, “I am a property owner and a taxpayer in Chicago,” and at least a part of his contention was true because he always took care to pay the property taxes on the house, and the annual real estate taxes in Cook County (the primary means of funding the public schools) have always been substantial. Prohibition brought violence and anarchy to the streets of Chicago, and from 1923 to 1925, as some of the most vicious gang wars and killings roiled the city, it was also engulfed in periodic cleanups by so-called reform administrations. These led the ever-astute Johnny Torrio, always the mediator, to make major changes to protect his interests when rival gangs ignored his philosophy that vice provided enough money for them all to profit. Ordinary citizens thought it a dull day if they did not wake up to news in their morning papers of violent killings, booze hijacks, and smashed stills, and in this climate Torrio decided to move his headquarters out of the city and into the suburb of Cicero, a factory town settled by immigrants from Bohemia. Residents were an upstanding mix of mostly Catholics and a sizable contingent of Protestants who kept two cemeteries (one for each religion). The locals did not tolerate prostitution until many years later, but many were already dedicated gamblers even before Torrio got there. Basically, it was wide-open and ready for corruption, and best of all it was a town where workers liked their beer and drank plenty of it.

  Chicago’s city government consisted of approximately three thousand voting precincts grouped into fifty wards, where committeemen worked for the elected politicians and dispensed patronage, and were thus the natural recipients of kickbacks and bribes. Gus Russo put it succinctly in The Outfit, his history of crime in Chicago: “For the gangsters, this translated as ‘we’ll get you elected, and we don’t even want jobs. Just look the other way when we do our thing.’ ” And, Russo added, “that’s just what the pols did.”

  Torrio did some traveling in these years, some of it for pleasure, but most of it to keep himself alive when other gangs started gunning for him. Gradually, he began to cede authority to two of the Capone brothers, Al and Frank. He put Al in charge of the day-to-day running of the operation in 1924, when he and his wife took his mother back to her native Italian village. She, who had left in penury and sailed in steerage, returned home on a luxury liner to live as the richest woman in the area when he installed her in a villa that took three dozen servants to staff. While Torrio was in Italy, Al took care of enforcing policies that kept rival gangs and possible miscreants in line; he put Ralph in charge of whatever physical enforcement was deemed necessary, and Frank became his front man for all things political.

  Al had set up headquarters in Cicero’s Hawthorne Hotel, and from there Frank handled payoffs and bribes to officials in Greater Chicago that ensured their cooperation in allowing the Outfit to function with impunity. “Vote early and vote often” was the phrase that suddenly came into widespread usage, and as Frank and his minions succeeded in rigging every election, the Capones were well on their way to securing control of all of Cicero for Johnny Torrio. As for Al himself, in the words of Phil D’Andrea, one of his faithful bodyguards, “he was a Republican when it fitted his clothes, I guess, and a Democrat otherwise.” D’Andrea acknowledged that Al, his brothers, and all his men “played both sides of the street…whoever was in, that is where they…” He left the rest unsaid.

  Johnny Torrio was much the same. He recognized that the solidly Bohemian population of Cicero was against every vice he offered but beer and gambling. He knew that once he installed a slate of public officials who would look the other way, the good citizens of Cicero could mount far less opposition than what he was up against in Chicago, where those with civic influence had the money and the media control to fight him. All went well for him and the Capones in Cicero until a young man who “burned with the reckless optimism of youth…set out to make a name for himself as a journalist.” Robert St. John was a young writer twenty years old when he persuaded a business partner to provide modest financial backing for the weekly paper they started in 1922 and christened the Cicero Tribune, its name a nod toward the far richer and more powerful Chicago Tribune. From the start, St. John’s intention was to reflect the population of “good, law-abiding citizens who simply wanted their beer” and were “very much against crime and prostitution and gambling and all the rest of it.” St. John, as a crusading editor, thought it was the right time and the right place “for a newspaper that would be on the side of the people and against the Capones.”

  Al Capone, who was busy positioning himself as the businessman Al Brown, did not take any kind of criticism lightly, particularly when it was personally embarrassing. Every time St. John uncovered and printed a story about his bribes, threats, and intimidation, the editor could be sure that he or his reporter would suffer some consequence. If the story even mentioned that he was a brothel keeper, retaliation was swift and severe. There was so much harassment that the paper had “a big turnover of reporters,” who nevertheless were successful in turning the population against Capone’s machinations.

  There was a primary election scheduled for April 1, 1924, and Al Capone and his cohorts had mounted a complete slate of candidates, all of whom they controlled and all under the aegis of the Republican Party. When it looked as if the townspeople, all solidly Democratic, were going to thwart his ambitions to take over city government, Al unleashed his famous temper against his brother Frank in front of his followers and some reporters. He launched a tirade of obscenities and thundered that Frank would be responsible if his slate was defeated.

  Frank, who learned well from Torrio, always operated behind the scenes with mediation rather than force. He was the quiet and self-effacing brother who dressed like a prosperous businessman, content to get things done discreetly and away from public scrutiny. Now Al was screaming at Frank, telling him the only way they would gain complete control of Cicero was through political influence, and Frank was not doing enough to ensure it. He told Frank to get the streets cleaned up and paved, get other public works started, do civic good in every facet of community life, and, above all, to make sure it all got printed in the Tribune’s rival paper that was his mouthpiece, the Cicero Life. It was an extremely smart move that soon garnered public goodwill as various projects got under way, all
of which Frank engineered with enough bribes to make sure the bidding was rigged and handsome kickbacks would come to the Outfit.

  On the eve of the election, despite the Cicero Tribune writing about every crooked ploy Al Capone planned, it looked as if he would get away with it and his slate would be elected. The Chicago Tribune, following the lead of its tiny neighbor, exposed the happenings in Cicero for the larger metropolitan readership and concluded that the election would be dishonest and blood would run before Election Day was over. It did, indeed, as Democratic precinct workers were beaten up and some even kidnapped so that they could not do their jobs. The Capone henchmen stood by the ballot boxes to inspect ballots before they were deposited, and if the voter had not voted for the Capone slate, he was threatened with a beating until he changed the ballot or else left without casting a vote. Women, who were eager to use their newly won franchise, were either turned away if they went quietly or shoved aside and threatened if they did not. As the day went on, word of the Capone chicanery reached Chicago, where the mayor was urged to send police to restore an honest calm. Eventually, a contingent was dispatched, but not in uniform or official cars. Instead, they wore plain clothes and used the same black sedans driven by the Capone men and every other gang.

  What happened next was both a comedy of unfocused behavior and a tragedy of confusion. Nearly everyone who wrote about Al’s role in the shoot-out after it happened also wrote about Frank’s death, and many different versions of so-called truth resulted. Most writers agree that between nine and a dozen plain black sedans just happened to drive down the street Frank Capone was attempting to cross. They were driving swiftly in single file, so when the first car screeched to a halt and all the others braked behind it, Frank—no doubt instinctively—reached for his revolver. Before he could get it out, he was hit by the gun blasts of so many plainclothes policemen that even though first one and then several others claimed to be the man who shot Frank Capone, his body was so bullet-ridden that any of them could have claimed the dubious honor. Herbert Asbury, an early historian of Chicago’s crime, has Al, seeing that Frank is dead, racing down the street toward another group of policemen, “gun blazing in each hand,” firing and fighting them off “until darkness came to his aid and he escaped.” No other writer risks such drama in his writing, but there is no question that whatever response Al made, Frank’s death was devastating for him.