by Deirdre Bair
They took him to New York in December 1925, where a Dr. Lloyd, who had an office on St. Nicholas Place in Harlem, agreed to do the necessary surgery. Rumor had it that Al was so distraught over the boy’s condition that he offered the doctor $100,000 to save Sonny’s life; the truth was that the boy’s life was never in danger, only his hearing, and Al offered and the doctor was satisfied with his usual fee of $1,000. Sonny’s children believe their grandfather offered the doctor “a generous bonus,” but whether he did and whether the doctor accepted one remain in the realm of speculation. Sonny did lose most of the hearing in his left ear, but the surgery was successful enough that although he still had painful earaches from time to time, they were never as severe as the attack that had his father courting serious danger to his person in order to get the boy to New York.
Sonny grew into a healthy and cheerful young man but a shy one, which his daughters later attributed to his unease about his inability to hear clearly. For one who had been too sickly to attend elementary school, he thrived in high school, where he got good grades and became a good golfer and an excellent marksman. In his early adulthood, he took prizes for his shooting abilities, an irony that did not escape the press.
Al adored Sonny, hovering over him, fussing and worrying after the operation for many years to come. But suddenly Mae presented an even bigger worry. In 1925–26, she began to exhibit some alarming symptoms that led her to consult the family physician, Dr. David Omens, who recognized them as syphilis. It was advanced enough that he referred her to the Mayo Clinic. He had to frighten her into going there, for she was more worried about the publicity that could result if someone reported that Al Capone’s wife had been diagnosed with neurosyphilis and was being treated in the hospital than she was about her health. She told Al she had syphilis, but as far as she knew then and later, he did not consent to be examined, let alone treated. When Dr. Joseph Moore, the physician who took care of Al at the end of his life, contacted Dr. Omens to see if Al had gone quietly for treatment in Chicago, he found no record that Al had ever been treated by anyone, neither Dr. Omens nor “any other private physician prior to his commitment to prison.” This led Dr. Moore to conclude that “the date of [Al] Capone’s infection is therefore unknown.” The treatment Mae received at the Mayo Clinic relieved her symptoms but only for the time being. From then on and for many years afterward, she was treated periodically by Dr. Omens and other physicians.
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There was a reason why Mae never knew whether Al sought treatment for his syphilis: it was not the sort of thing an Italian husband discussed with his wife, especially not on the telephone, which for months at a time was the only contact they had with each other. The gang wars were so violent that Al had to take extraordinary precautions to protect himself. There were times when he could not leave his fortified headquarters for days if not weeks on end. Al Capone was only in his mid-twenties when his life became an ongoing battle of wits just to survive. He had risen so far and so fast that he was every other gang’s favorite target and they were all out to get him. Dealing with them took precedence over everything else, from his relationships to his health. The only thing that mattered was staying alive, and the next few years would find him inventing creative ways to do so.
Chapter 7
THE FORTUNES OF WAR
Al Capone’s professional life had become one encounter after another with rival gangs who wanted to kill him, so he spent most of the last half of the 1920s either in one of the hotels he turned into armed-fortress headquarters or on the lam in a hideout, as the gang wars that raged throughout Chicago left him victorious and turned him into a folk hero to the rest of the world.
There have been many books—hundreds by some counts—written about Al Capone, from the contemporary accounts published during his earliest heyday in Chicago to the present, almost a century later. Every one of them is an attempt to sort out what really happened on many different fronts, from gangland rivalries to political chicanery. Sociologists and cultural historians have weighed in, and in the field of economics there is even a Harvard Business School (HBS) case study showing how Al ran the Outfit as if it were a major corporation. The HBS study examined the years 1920–33, when Al controlled literally hundreds of “brothels, speakeasies, and roadhouses, which served as venues for gang administered gambling, prostitution, and illegal alcohol sales.” It qualified differences in the vast sums of money that the Outfit took in yearly by saying verifiable revenues were probably somewhat more than $100 million (almost $1.5 billion in 2015), while concluding there were probably millions more that were unaccounted for and undeclared. The study concluded that the Outfit was able to operate freely because of “political ties” and because “according to Capone himself…half of Chicago’s police force [was] on his payroll.”
When the case study gathered statistics about how Al Capone came to control all of Cicero and a large swath of Chicago, one of the most striking findings was that even though Prohibition was well under way in Cicero in 1921, there were still many saloons and beer gardens operating openly in the little town of sixty thousand people, but there was not a single brothel or gambling den. By 1924, along with 123 saloons, twenty-two brothels were operating openly alongside 161 gambling dens. To arrive at these astonishing numbers, the Torrio-Capone outfit had battled and bested gangs controlled by at least five different ethnic groups whose names have become synonymous with vicious killings, the most notable among them being the three brothers still alive of the six Sicilian Genna brothers; Dean O’Banion and his cohorts, Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran; and the Irish O’Donnell brothers. Since 1921, there had been 349 murders, of which 215 were gang related. In 1925 alone, Greater Chicago was averaging one murder or more each day, with more than a hundred bombings in that year alone.
The conclusion of the Harvard case study was that there were roughly 700 gang-related deaths from 1920 to 1930, with Al Capone either “directly or indirectly responsible for over 200.” The purported reasons why he ordered the killings ranged from attempts at hijacking beer (Joe Howard) to being in the wrong place at the wrong time (William H. McSwiggin), to double-crossers (Frankie Yale), to those who refused to support his slate in various elections (Diamond Joe Esposito). By the end of 1927, there were at least seven would-be assassins imported by other gangs, from New York, Cleveland, St. Louis, and other cities, all of whom Capone and his men dispatched before they could dispatch him. When all the killings were added up, “the brutality, efficiency, and wealth of Capone’s organization demonstrated the destructive forms of American entrepreneurship in the early 20th century.”
When Torrio turned the Outfit over to Capone in 1925, he said he had to do it because “I am getting too prominent for my own good.” He certainly was, for once he was gone, there was no one in his organization more powerful than Al Capone, and he became everyone’s new target. The closest anyone came had been the drive-by shooting of Weiss and Moran in January 1925. Capone went briefly into hiding until things cooled off, only to find when he emerged that his bodyguard-chauffeur had been tortured and dumped at the bottom of a well by O’Banion’s men for refusing to tell them where he had gone. This sort of retaliation was typical: if they could not get Al Capone, they got someone else, such as happened on the night of November 28, 1926, when he was dining with his friend Theodore “Tony the Greek” Anton, the owner of his favorite restaurant, conveniently located on the ground floor of Capone’s Hawthorne Hotel headquarters in Cicero. They were the only diners late that night when Anton went to answer the doorbell and never returned. There are rumors here, too, that men from the Outfit carried out Anton’s murder on their boss’s orders after he did something that displeased Al Capone. To this day, however, the accepted story is that he was kidnapped and murdered by an unidentified rival gang.
Capone made his headquarters at the Hawthorne Hotel until 1926. He had bulletproof shutters installed on the windows and stationed armed guards all over the lobby. Everyone who worked on the hotel’
s staff knew they were also working for Al Capone: few ordinary citizens dared walk in for a drink or a meal for fear of what they might encounter, and no one booked a room because they were all taken by men from the Outfit. Tour bus conductors called it “Capone’s Castle” and pointed it out to sightseers eager for a harmless fright.
Torrio had bought the building shortly before Al arrived in Chicago. It housed a gambling den in a space called the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, and there was also a bar frequented only by members of the organization, clearly off-limits to the local populace, where prostitutes who worked from rooms on an upper floor could be hired openly. After Capone took over and created his redoubt, he found that he had no secrecy or privacy at the Hawthorne Hotel because everyone knew when he was in the building. He needed another place, somewhere private where he could carry out his escapades so discreetly that only those members of his entourage that he chose to accompany him would know where he was and what he was doing.
At the end of 1926, Capone bought a small apartment building on a quiet residential street some distance from the Hawthorne, where he became the only resident. He had the front door reinforced with steel plating, built an eight-foot-high brick wall that surrounded the garage and the backyard, and had a tunnel dug between the house and the garage so he could enter and exit the property without being seen. He was now driving a seven-ton, bulletproof, armored Cadillac sedan, custom fitted at a cost of $20,000 (more than $250,000 in today’s money). The windows were bulletproof glass, with the rear one designed to be lowered so that a machine gun could be aimed out. The body was covered with specially made steel, and the fenders were designed to be “non-dentable.”
Those who were permitted to see inside the building saw rooms furnished like any typical middle-class home, except for the bedroom, which was an over-the-top bordello, complete with a mirrored ceiling. This was where he entertained his mistresses and, according to one of his many biographers, where he inhaled so much cocaine that it resulted in a deviated nasal septum. Although the Outfit did deal in drugs, no evidence has ever verified that Capone used them, but women, one after the other, did indeed pass through the bedroom as if through a revolving door, and liquor flowed through the rest of the building in body-punishing quantities. There is nothing in Capone’s voluminous medical history to support the contention that he used drugs, so this charge remains in the realm of conjecture. Furthermore, he also knew that if he took drugs, there was the very real possibility that he would be vulnerable to danger to his person as well as physical damage to his surroundings. Drugs could well render him helpless to call the shots; drugs meant losing control, and that he would never risk.
Capone might have imbibed liquor to the point of such stupefaction that it deranged him enough to destroy his surroundings and beat or kill anyone who dared to thwart him, but he did so while still exerting a kind of self-control: he only drank with abandon when he was in one or another of his headquarters or hideouts, surrounded by devoted attendants and most particularly his brother Ralph, who could always be counted on to keep him safe. He was known for giving parties for outsiders that could last as long as a week, such as the one he threw at the Metropole Hotel for Jack Dempsey after he lost the heavyweight championship of the world to Gene Tunney in 1927. The famous New York madam Polly Adler, who was a guest, said the party lasted “a solid week, during all of which time the champagne and every other kind of liquor flowed like Niagara…and his guests, among whom were legal lights, politicians, and mobsters from all over the country, made the most of his lavish hospitality.”
He began to hold these parties shortly after Torrio retired and left him fully in charge of the Outfit. With gang wars roiling, he needed his wits about him more than ever, and entertaining lavishly was another way to announce his ascendency. The first thing he did was to let all Chicago see that he was now the boss by moving his headquarters from Cicero to the Metropole Hotel on South Michigan Avenue, in what was then a busy hub of the city’s commerce and culture. He could not afford to commandeer the entire seven-story building, but he took enough space that his daily rental bill was around $1,500 (over $20,000 in today’s money). It was often more if the booze bill was high or his men did damage to the premises. Capone created a private five-room suite for himself on the fourth floor, with the room he used as an office opening into a turret-like structure with circular windows and an impressive view of the streetscape below. He kept two so-called guest rooms on each of the fifth and sixth floors, where his full-time bodyguards took turns sleeping after their shifts. He also had a gym installed where he insisted that the men work out on a regular basis, although he himself was never seen there. Eight bodyguards traveled with him on a rotating basis, some in his bulletproof car, others in cars that flanked it front and back. The bodyguards were so formidable that they actually became the focus of an article about him in The New Yorker, where they were described as offering the protection of a “double-walled fortress of meat.”
There was one other aspect of the hotel’s structure that particularly appealed to Capone. A network of basement tunnels had been constructed to connect the hotel with other buildings on Michigan Avenue and the nearby streets, created to ease deliveries of supplies in winter, everything from coal for heat and food for the restaurants. In the Outfit’s line of work, Al Capone recognized that the tunnels would provide handy escape routes if they were needed.
There were even more connecting delivery tunnels under the Lexington Hotel, one block up the street and where he moved his headquarters in 1928. Long after his death, a 1986 television special was hosted by Geraldo Rivera, who claimed that when a particular underground vault beneath the hotel was opened, it would reveal that Al Capone had stashed his fortune there, the hypothetical vast amount of missing money that had been rumored to exist since the day of his death. The NBC network went overboard on hype and publicity to create an audience riveted to their sets for the two hours it took for Rivera to find nothing at all in an empty vault.
The Lexington was a far grander address, and Capone rented a far more ostentatious space. He took a ten-room suite on the top floor, where, from his office, he had a panoramic view of Chicago’s South Side, all of which his Outfit controlled. His decorating choices received startled attention from those who were ushered into his most sacred inner sanctum. There, he sat in a chair with a bulletproof back, a gift from Dominic Roberto, one of the cohorts who helped him rule the Chicago Heights area. On the wall behind him were three framed portraits: two reporters who saw them agreed that two of the three were steel engravings, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but they disagreed on the third and most prominent that hung between them. One said it was a drawing of Big Bill Thompson, the crooked mayor of Chicago; another wrote that it was a portrait of Al Capone himself, “wearing knickerbockers and holding a golf club.”
If all his earlier headquarters could be compared to fortified medieval castles surrounded by moats, the Lexington was as impervious to the possibility of hostile attack as Fort Knox. There were “all kinds of traps and escape routes…alarms, hidden panels, moving walls, everything a security-conscious gangster required.” Capone always entered and exited his private floor via the freight elevator, and he always rode it flanked by the gun-toting “wall of meat” bodyguards. He also carried a holstered pistol under each armpit. There were so many obstacles an intruder would have had to overcome before ever reaching his bedroom that even if one managed to do so, he would find bodyguards who always slept on a cot outside Capone’s door. And if the would-be assassin should manage to kill the guards, he would still have to make it through a steel-plated locked door in order to get to Al Capone. Nothing was left to chance: Capone’s meals were prepared in his private kitchen, where every move the chef made was supervised by men Capone trusted. And he did not stop there: when the food was served, he watched as the chef tasted it first.
All these precautions were necessary because of the carnage of the past several years. So, too, were the periodi
c escapes he took to places where no one would think to look for him. As the violence went on and on, and the arson, mayhem, and murders became increasingly grisly and grim, no matter who had actually committed the outrage, the authorities looked first for Al Capone. He quipped that they held him “responsible for everything but the Chicago fire.”
By the start of 1928, he insisted that he was “tired of gang murders and gang shootings. It’s a tough life to lead. You fear death at every moment, and worse than death, you fear the rats of the game who’d run around and tell the police if you don’t constantly satisfy them with money and favors.”
During a fourteen-month period from 1926 to 1928, he lived mostly in hiding at the Hawthorne Hotel because he was too afraid of what might happen if he slept in his own bed on Prairie Avenue, where he was “afraid to sit near a window or an open door.” He told reporters that he wanted to stop the killing so he could go home at night like any other businessman: “Why not treat our business like any other man treats his, as something to work at in the daytime and forget when he goes home at night?” He said he couldn’t stand listening to Sonny’s plaintive plea as he asked his father “why didn’t I stay home.”
Not everyone was sympathetic to Al Capone’s self-created plight. Alva Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist whose story about him in The New Yorker described his phalanx of bodyguards, was coldly appraising when he described Al’s “soft, fat, sentimental features, large red lips with exaggerated curves of sympathy, large eyes with active tear ducts, black eyebrows which contract rather fiercely when certain ideas strike him.” Johnston’s physical description might have been exaggerated, but he took Al Capone’s measure correctly: in August 1928, he was the first writer to anoint him “the greatest gang leader in history.” Capone was nothing if not canny, a man of shrewd intelligence who was pleased to accept a title that conferred supremacy in his field, but he did not let it go to his head. Instead, he appraised his situation realistically: “I’ve been in this racket long enough to realize that a man in my game must take the breaks, the fortunes of war. I haven’t had any peace of mind in years. Every minute I’m in danger of death…I don’t want to end up in the gutter punctuated by machine gun slugs.”