by Deirdre Bair
No one present that day really talked about what happened in that room even as the story of “the Oath” took on mythical—and mystical—importance over the years. It was not until eighty years later, in the first decade of the new century, that the youngest generation of this particular Capone family, having endured painful years of taunts, derision, and ridicule for bearing the name, demanded to know just what exactly “the Oath” was, why it had been sworn, and what it meant for those living three or four generations later. The relationship to the famous (or infamous) gangster still haunted them, and his name still carried such resonance that strangers often greeted them with hands formed into machine guns with accompanying ack-ack sounds or with snide comments about mobs, the Mafia, and hidden money. For the several generations who had prospered in legitimate businesses and professions, this was not a welcome association; rather, it was an ongoing embarrassment.
Only one person who was in the dining room in 1929 was still alive in 2015, and only she has revealed what was said there. Her relatives persuaded her to tell, and she insists that she has told them the truth, but the problem is that she has told several different “truths,” all of them contradictory. In some versions, she said it was something that happened between Al’s father, Gabriel, and Raphael in the old country that created a lasting bond their children were required to honor and respect in the new. In some versions, the closeness between Al and this family was because Teresa Raiola and Clotilde Tufano were related in some way, so their connection had to be honored by their children. But the last and most persistent family myth given as the real reason for “the Oath” was that one of Raphael and Clotilde’s “sons” was actually the illegitimate son of Al Capone, brought into their family by him and raised by them on his behalf. The two younger sons in particular, Joseph (Pip) and James (Jimmy), were much more like Al and unlike their other brothers in physical appearance. When Pip, the middle son, lost his temper, he would tell his five sons “you don’t know how close you are [to Al],” a maddening taunt that has haunted them all.
And yet, in all these rumors the only verifiable truth is that Al Capone continued to visit this family and use their house until he went to prison and after that his men continued to bring food and money until the end of Prohibition, clumping up and down the stairs between hallway and dining room as they went about his business.
Chapter 6
THE ROAD TO POWER
Al Capone’s spectacular rise to leadership of the Outfit meant that he could not take one step in public without it being a hot topic for a world suddenly hungry for celebrity gossip. Communication was swift and easy in the 1920s, when everything desirable fell under the general rubric of the “modern.” Even in the most isolated hamlets across America, people could listen to radio broadcasts that connected them to the larger world; small towns had one and sometimes two daily newspapers, and many major cities had at least half a dozen or more; it was the golden age of magazines, and most little towns had a public library. As for the many writers who earned their daily bread by writing for the “pulps” (or making up stories if the facts were too dull), what sold best was glorified grit and glamour, and that included criminals as well as movie stars. After Prohibition went into effect, booze runners, politicians, café society, and speakeasy habitués became grist for this mill. If the high living they portrayed was far removed from the daily struggle of most Americans, the media preferred to turn a blind eye to reality and concentrate on feeding them a steady diet of dreams, which was what most of the public wanted anyway.
Al Capone was tailor-made to fill newspaper column inches and radio minutes—no, actually much more—reams and hours of print and sound. Everyone knew his name, and it conveyed equal measures of envy and fear. By 1926, when he was twenty-seven and in control of the Outfit, the gross income taken in from rackets and vices was estimated at a conservative $105 million a year (approximately $1.377 billion in 2015). The Outfit had to meet a weekly payroll of approximately $300,000 (about $4 million in 2015) to cover salaries for a thousand or so men. It also had to factor in another steady stream of payments lumped together as “official graft disbursements” for public officials, elected or appointed. And Capone did not stint himself; by 1929, when he was thirty, his estimated personal net worth was over $40 million (approximately $550 million in 2015). Like so much else in his life that he compartmentalized, he threw his money around in public but spent much of it tastefully and thoughtfully in private.
He liked to make a huge splash at Matty’s and Mafalda’s schools at holidays and Christmas, lavishing baskets of gifts and goodies and arranging entertainments for faculty and students. Although both his siblings got decent marks, neither liked school and they did not make friends, but Al insisted that they had to graduate from high school, and they dared not disobey him, so they did. When Mafalda graduated from the Lucy Flower Vocational High School, there was no question of her going to college or getting a job; Italian women who were fortunate to have brothers or fathers to support them did not do such things. She stayed at home waiting for a husband to come along, all the while complaining bitterly that she never had a boyfriend and would never marry, because no one “would dare to go out with the sister of Al Capone.”
Al was responsible for Matty’s enrollment at Villanova, a Catholic institution outside Philadelphia, because he insisted that from then on, there would be educated (male) college graduates in the Capone family. Matty was uneasy in the strange new environment and unhappy to be away from his mother’s ministrations; he enrolled in 1930 and lasted the better part of an academic year until he was arrested for driving without a license. It’s not clear if he left or was asked to leave, but he went back to Chicago and the welcoming bosom of his family and the less-welcoming world of the Outfit. Al let it be known that he did not want his kid brother coming to harm, but Matty hung around, so Al gave him unimportant and relatively safe jobs to do, even as he made sure to keep the boy carefully on the fringes of whatever was happening in the increasingly violent gang wars.
Al bought a grand piano suitable for the concert stage and put it into the Prairie Avenue living room, even though no one in the family was interested in playing it. Matty and Mafalda had neither talent nor interest; Sonny had some lessons but used the hearing impairment that resulted from his ongoing ear infections as the reason it was too difficult and soon gave it up. Al loved music, particularly opera, and he tried to learn to play so he could sing arias along with it, but he, too, gave up the piano when he found he was more comfortable singing along with his mandolin. And besides, he was at home so seldom there was simply not enough time for learning through piano lessons.
Although there was not much change in his demeanor once the entire family was in Chicago, he did make a noticeable change in his dress, albeit exactly the opposite of Mae’s. She kept her life intensely private, staying quietly at home except for weekly Mass and an occasional shopping foray. She made no friends in the community and depended for companionship on then-expensive telephone calls to her sisters in Brooklyn and their occasional visits, which she paid for. She and Sonny attended Sunday Mass regularly but in the early Chicago years almost never with Teresa, who always went to the earliest Mass while Mae chose a later one. Mae was easily recognized in the church, and some of the now-elderly children of parishioners remember their mothers saying she was a lovely and gracious lady who always kept to herself. She greeted everyone warmly, but other churchgoers were cautious with their responses. It was the same when Sonny was twelve after his homeschooling ended and he attended school; he made some friends, and when his mother came for events, everyone was courteous but distant, and no one attempted to befriend her. So Mae had to find pleasure in other things, and one of the most satisfying was shopping.
Mae engaged the personal shopper at Marshall Field’s department store who specialized in helping rich women select the most prestigious lines of clothing, and soon she was wearing only designer dresses and the finest accessories. Usually, th
ey were packed and sent to the house for her approval, but every once in a while she went to the store for private fashion shows, bundled in hat and veil and, in cold weather, wearing furs with collars that covered her face. She always had several fur coats at any given time, and unlike her husband, whose taste in jewelry was vulgar and flamboyant, hers was quietly exquisite. Everything she did, bought, or wore was designed to keep herself out of the public eye, while her husband’s clothing was exactly the opposite.
He had a new nickname now, Snorky, which in the slang of the era translated loosely as a “swell” or “sharp” dresser. He would order a dozen custom-made suits at a time, costing a total of $5,000 or more (around $66,000 in current dollar value), but unlike Mae, who preferred soft colors and earth tones, he chose suits that were lime green, lemon yellow, and even lavender. He preferred them double-breasted because he thought they made him look taller and slimmer. His overcoats were a tad more discreet, usually dark-colored cashmere or camel’s hair, while his favorite custom-made fedoras were pale pearl gray. The joke around Chicago was that no one else could wear that color for fear of being arrested because it was so closely associated with Al Capone. He always used a tailor at Marshall Field’s department store, Oscar de Feo, who remembered filling orders for twenty suits and topcoats for Al, along with multiple suits for four or five of his best friends at the time. He wore a diamond pinkie ring, and depending on who told the tale, it ranged from 4.25 to 11 carats. He also sported huge diamonds in his tiepins, cuff links, and belt buckles, and he was fond of giving diamond-studded belt buckles to anyone who caught his fancy, particularly members of the media. His pockets were always filled with wads of money, big bills that he dispensed with brio, again to anyone who caught his fancy or told him a sob story.
It is often difficult to discern the truth in the sob stories that became embellished over the years with each retelling. One that was told so often it took on flourishes of mythological proportions was a tearjerker, but its details were basically true: Al Capone was indeed in a restaurant on a cold winter night when a shivering, soaking-wet newsboy asked him to buy a paper from his large unsold pile. Capone bought them all, paying the boy what amounted to several weeks of a workingman’s salary, and told him to go home, get warm, and give the money to his mother. And, he concluded, the boy had to promise to go to school the next day and every day thereafter.
As Capone’s power and influence grew, and concurrently his fame, there were many more stories like this one, many of them created by people who had not been there. There were witnesses for this one because it happened in a restaurant, but many other anecdotes grew from situations where the only witness was the person telling the tale. When stripped of their flourishes and exaggerations, most of them turn out to be true acts of kindness that passed into history because the recipient told anyone who would listen time and again about Al Capone’s generosity.
As for Capone himself, he did such things for a number of reasons: First, they were the right thing to do within his culture. Certainly, he flashed wads of money in public and loved the adulation (and the positive publicity) it brought him, but there was also the upbringing he got from good and decent parents who taught him that the Italian (and Italian-American) way was to show quiet generosity to those who needed it. In his case, the generosity was often flamboyant and on a grand scale, but it was still sincerely given.
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As the decade unfolded, the public violence in Chicago was like nothing the country had ever seen, but on Prairie Avenue things for the most part were progressing smoothly, at least on the surface. The Capone men were almost always absent, and the women had made accommodations among themselves so that the household was for the most part tranquil. They managed this by trying hard never to be in the same room together when the men were not around. Peace reigned because they stayed in separate parts of the house. Although she managed to hide her true feelings most of the time, Mae never really got along with any of the Capone siblings, nor they with her, and as the years progressed, she was skillful in managing various family dramas to make them end with no clear winners or losers and everyone saving face. Al was the revered patriarch and the major support of their family, and his word was law, so everyone took care to coexist as peacefully as possible.
The women hid the ongoing friction because the role each one played allowed her to assume a primary place within the familial structure. Mae was Mrs. Al Capone, and she expected that her status as Al’s wife meant deference would be paid to her; Teresa was Mama Capone, and tradition dictated that she, as the Italian matriarch of the family, would be revered and her demands and desires within the home respected. Mafalda, who sided with her mother completely, played the role of the family’s privileged princess who never hesitated to let Mae know she was an “American” (non-Italian) outsider. It was always two women pitted against one in an ongoing battle of wills.
As for the brothers, Mae was firm about what she wanted from them and was sophisticated enough to manipulate them into doing her bidding even as she kept what she thought of them to herself. She told no one within the family that she held them in contempt as hangers-on who were nothing without Al. It was not until years later that she confided in Al’s doctors that she never got along with any of them and that there was “more or less constant friction” in all their interactions. How much of this Mae told her husband remains between them, but Al was shrewd, sharp, and insightful, so he probably knew most of what went on in the Prairie Avenue house, in part because Teresa usually told him everything, especially his wife’s real or imagined sins.
No matter where he was, Al Capone made his daily telephone call to the women, either at noon, which was when he usually woke up when staying in one of his hotel hideouts after a long night of debauchery and drunkenness or secret Outfit strategy meetings. If he didn’t telephone when he first woke, the women knew he would call around their dinnertime (which was early for him; he had probably just finished lunch). Mafalda usually grabbed the phone and passed it to Teresa, thus irritating Mae, to whom it was passed only when Teresa was good and ready to let her have it. Al knew their moods and could recognize Teresa’s smugness and Mae’s resentment just by listening to their voices, but he was a good Italian son and, in his way, a devoted husband, so he usually humored his mother and cajoled his wife back into good humor.
As for his siblings, Al’s concern for their welfare had become ferociously protective, but when it came to his son, his love surpassed all that he felt for everyone other than Mae. She shielded the boy from learning about his father’s profession for as long as she could, but that did not last long, for even very young children learned early how to taunt and bully a weaker playmate. Sonny was frail as a young boy, and his ongoing illnesses and hearing impairment made him an easy victim of teasing, which intensified over the years. By the time he was twelve, he had become physically robust enough for homeschooling to end, but attending a school presented new difficulties. Al was in despair over what the boy faced each day: “I can’t tell you what it does to my twelve-year-old son when the other school children, cruel as they are, keep showing him newspaper stories that call me a killer or worse.” There was nothing he would not do for Sonny, but there was little to be done in this situation.
All through these years, Sonny was his mama’s boy, and for his own protection she seldom allowed him to be seen in his father’s company. Keeping him out of the public eye was the deliberate strategy his parents hoped would protect him from ridicule or worse, because Mae had an almost irrational fear of kidnapping. She was determined to shelter Sonny and keep him as far away as possible from his father’s profession; it was around this time that she began to use the sentences that became a mantra in later years: “Your father broke my heart. Don’t you break my heart, too. Don’t do anything like what he did.”
Speculation was that Sonny stayed close to his mother because he was too puny to follow his father, that if he had been robust and healthy from childhood, Al wou
ld have played more of a role in his upbringing. However, the illnesses that began when he was a toddler became a steady stream of ear infections and mastoid problems from the ages of five to eight. In the days before antibiotics, surgery was often the only treatment option, but there was a very real fear that it could seriously damage his hearing, possibly resulting in deafness itself.
Here again, there are different stories about what Al decided to do about Sonny’s medical treatment. In one, he feared that doctors in Chicago were not up to the job after most of them refused to treat the boy, saying his case was so severe that the only outcome would be total deafness and they did not want such an outcome to damage their reputations; in another, all the Chicago doctors Al contacted were so frightened of what he might do to them if the operations were a failure that they all painted the dire possibility of deafness as a way to ensure that they would not have to accept Sonny as their patient. No doubt both stories are partially true, leaving Al to seek treatment for his son elsewhere. He, who dealt on a daily basis with shoot-outs and assassination attempts, disregarded all the horror stories of what could happen to the Outfit if he went elsewhere to take charge of Sonny’s treatment; he left Ralph and Jake Guzik in charge of business and with several bodyguards hulking in the background boarded a train for New York with Mae and Sonny, who was in the throes of a crippling ear infection so severe that neither parent could stand to see him in such pain.