Al Capone

by Deirdre Bair

  His betting was even more out of hand with his new passion, golf, where he had no talent but almost always won because the other players feared his terrible temper if they didn’t let him win. Golf was an excuse for heavy drinking and betting, made particularly dangerous because he and his cohorts carried loaded weapons onto the course and did not hesitate to take them out and at least brandish if not fire them. An accident was bound to happen, and eventually one did, when he slammed down his golf bag in a fit of temper and his gun went off. Some accounts say the bullet hit the flesh of his right leg and plowed through to the left, while others said he merely shot himself in the foot and became “a terrible sight…hopping around on the other foot, bellowing like a bull.” Official government medical records taken later say the bullet never touched his leg at all but penetrated his scrotum and made a large hole there. He did spend close to a week in the hospital, enduring the pain and the even more excruciating tongue-lashings Mae gave during her visits.

  Mae was nobody’s fool, and even though she stayed at home and kept herself aloof from Al’s involvements with other women, she was well aware that his public embarrassment over the golfing incident was compounded by the private affair he had launched with the sister of his caddy. Mae heard the gossip that he was so besotted with Babe Sullivan, the crafty girl who only dispensed her favors in exchange for gifts and money, and that he was supposedly swearing to divorce his wife if she would marry him. Ida Mae Sullivan was smart enough to know that would never happen, and she didn’t care; she was content with fancy dinners, diamond bracelets, and loads of cash she brought home to help her parents feed her many siblings. She was young and fearless and got her thrills from being in the company of all the big shots and flashy entertainers she met at Capone’s parties.

  The parties were legendary, particularly after he took over most of the rooms at the Metropole (and later did the same when he moved to the Lexington). He was not the only one to install a mistress (and sometimes more than one at the same time); his men were given suites for their ladies of the moment as well. Everywhere he made his headquarters, it became known as Caponeville, a name shouted out by the guides on tourist buses, but one always uttered with a mixture of resentment by those who felt they had to prostrate themselves to his power. In both, there was grudging respect for the homage they had to pay to the one man who could grant what they wanted.

  Under Al Capone’s direction, the Metropole became “a covert annex to the mayoral campaign of Big Bill Thompson,” or as Pasley put it, “Mayor Thompson, [who] was for America First, and Capone, [who] was for America’s Thirst. They weren’t so far apart at that.” After Thompson’s election, there was a constant traffic jam between the hotel, city hall, and police headquarters as men formed lines and waited their turn to plead their cases or pledge their fealty. From city hall, there was “a steady stream of purchasable magistrates, administrators, and politicians,” while from the police building came “officers to collect their reward for such services as escorting consignments of liquor to their destination, warning of raids about to be staged…furnishing Capone’s triggermen with officially stamped cards, reading: ‘to the Police Department: you will extend the courtesies of this department to the bearer.’ ” Pasley called this last period of Thompson’s mayoralty “so weird that the world sat back and gasped, incredulous.” As for Capone, it was “coincident with the apotheosis…of the gangster, when the shadow of Al Capone was cast across City Hall and County Building as the Frankenstein monster of politics.”

  Thompson further rewarded Capone for his political support by inviting him to be on the welcoming committee for the Italian airman Francesco de Pinedo, Mussolini’s goodwill ambassador for Fascism who, on May 15, 1927, landed his hydroplane on Lake Michigan during a round-the-world flight. Actually, there was another and more important reason for Capone’s invitation: the committee was a prestigious one that included the Italian consul and other prominent Italian-Americans; Capone was invited mainly because Thompson feared an anti-Fascist riot and knew he was the one person who could guarantee that it would not happen. Capone made sure it didn’t, and the event was peaceful.

  Still, he had not “arrived” in the social circles where he wanted to be, and he was intelligent and sensitive enough to know when he was being mocked or snubbed. Despite the reverence, adulation, and homage the public gave him, despite the deference and respect—grudging to be sure—paid by some elected officials, despite the power he held over the famous entertainers in his speakeasies and cabarets who feared what would happen to them if they did not comply with his every whim and wish, in the eyes of the political and social leaders he most wanted to impress, he was still an ill-mannered, semiliterate outsider. He could throw bushels of cash at schools, churches, and hospitals, he could stand up at sporting events and wave his hat to the spectators who cheered his mere presence, and he could guarantee public officials that events would take place without incident because his men would see to it, but he was still a lower-class Italian, a “dago” and a “wop.”

  He could make the joke that “when I sell liquor, they call it bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, they call it hospitality.” He left unsaid the fact that the residents of Lake Shore Drive were perfectly happy to accept gifts of his booze by the case while he was never invited to help them drink it at their parties. When they went slumming in speakeasies, they could give themselves a cheap thrill by hobnobbing with dangerous criminals because they were old money, and they could thumb their noses with impunity at the social class they inhabited simply because they were born into it. Al Capone was new (and openly dirty) money, and he could use it to try to wedge his way into their environment by acting, dressing, and living in a manner he thought mirrored theirs, but he could never be a part of it. They might have enjoyed toying with what was sometimes called “gangster chic” to describe the middle class’s attraction to the underside of society that began during Prohibition and particularly to the larger-than-life figures who inhabited the criminal world. However, there was an unbridgeable difference between the residents of Lake Shore Drive and Al Capone of Prairie Avenue: when they tired of their pet crooks, they always had the option of dropping them and going home; there was never any chance that they would let Al Capone go with them.

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  Al Capone might have quit school in the sixth grade, but he had never stopped learning about things that interested him. He had acquired a genuine appreciation of culture, particularly of music and the theater. He loved opera, especially the works of Verdi, and amassed a large collection of recordings by Caruso. He learned enough about the genre that he could discuss how various singers approached their roles and what special talents they brought to them. As he listened to recordings, he read scores and followed them carefully whenever he attended a performance, usually surrounded by strategically positioned bodyguards who studied the audience and not the stage. In one season alone, he required seats for thirty-eight men who were carefully positioned around him, including the two gun-toting thugs who stood backstage on either side of the curtain.

  Where he was welcomed, and where he felt most secure and comfortable, was in the company of entertainers, many of whom got their start in his nightclubs and cabarets before going on to great fame. Stories of his interaction with many have been expanded and exaggerated into legends of great friendships, most of them originating within the memoirs and biographies of the entertainers themselves. Sophie Tucker’s biographers claim she played cards with Al Capone every night for a year, but he was still in Brooklyn and not yet in Chicago when this was supposed to have happened; perhaps they played together in other, later years, but with all his other activities and hers, surely only occasionally.

  Joe E. Lewis ran afoul of Capone’s prime assassinator, Jack McGurn, and his thugs, who disfigured him horribly, bashing his skull with rifle butts, slitting his throat and peeling back his facial skin, crushing his jaw, and otherwise beating him senseless. Th
ere is disagreement over the reason for the beating, with most sources saying he wanted to leave an Outfit-controlled club to perform at one owned by the North Side gangster Ted Newberry, while others merely cite a host of Lewis’s alleged insults and bad behavior. The basic conclusion of every account is that no one could insult the Outfit and get away with it. Some say that Lewis miraculously returned to performing, swathed in bandages, within weeks; others claim he was hospitalized for over a year. Stories abound about how Capone found ways to provide the alcoholic Lewis with the cash he was always in need of, with everything from tips on rigged horse races where Lewis was sure to win to allegedly playing the Good Samaritan and proclaiming to the public that he paid all Lewis’s medical expenses. He also put out a more sinister story to reporters when he let it be known that if Lewis had come to him in the first place, he would have persuaded the performer to stay, thus making the beating unnecessary. He left unspoken what form the persuasion would have taken, and no reporter was brave enough to ask.

  Al Capone played the role of Lewis’s caring friend while he was entirely responsible for the beating. McGurn took all his orders from Capone and would never have dared to make such a heinous attack on his own volition. It made Al Capone look good before a public curiously indifferent to his complicity and allowed him, in this and every other atrocity to date, to stand aloof and above the violence. After Lewis recovered, and whenever he worked in Chicago, it was only in Outfit-controlled clubs, where Capone made sure his access to the bar was always open and his gambling bills always paid.

  There were many examples of the dual behaviors, double standards, and even the double life that Al Capone had forged for himself, and his relationships with entertainers provided many of the clearest illustrations. For a man of the historically segregated time in which he lived, he was mostly color-blind when it came to hiring and promoting African-Americans. Although no blacks worked directly on the Outfit’s payroll, some of Capone’s descendants are convinced that the main reason for the Outfit’s success as a business entity was that there were always men of many different origins and nationalities on the payroll. Although they were mostly white, they were not all Italian and therefore not bound by the customs, superstitions, and rules of honor that had to be respected in the old country. Managing Slovaks and Germans was much easier than overseeing Sicilians, who were suspicious of Neapolitans, or Calabrians, who were wary of them both. The divisions between northern and southern Italians were enormous, because those from the North despised those from the South, whose cultural cringe in the face of northern claims of superiority often led to irrational vendettas.

  In Chicago’s Outfit-controlled territories, whites and blacks mingled freely in the rough area around Thirty-Fifth and State, where the two most popular cabarets, the Plantation and the Sunset, catered to an African-American clientele. Their buskers guided white voyeurs safely to bars and brothels, and despite an article in the original Vanity Fair magazine that warned against the dangers of mixed socializing, on New Year’s Eve 1926 five hundred “white and colored” celebrants could be found there drinking heavily and dancing with each other.

  In the segregated club world, Capone’s reputation for treating African-American musicians fairly was supreme. The jazz bass player Milt Hinton called him “more or less a Robin Hood in the black community.” Hinton and Cab Calloway were not on the Outfit’s payroll, but they both had uncles who worked for it. Hinton recalled how Al Capone “had all the black guys, he’d sit down and talk to them. I’m the boss, I’m running it, but you’re going to run the south side. You’re going to make money as long as you buy your alcohol from me.”

  Capone also had Louis Armstrong playing at the Sunset in what one of Satchmo’s biographers surmised was his “first exposure to gangsters and their ways, a world he would remain connected to for years to come.” Armstrong quickly became a pet of Capone’s and for a time enjoyed his special protection whenever he played in Chicago. To him, Capone was “a nice little cute fat boy, young, like some professor who had just come out of college to teach or something.” He was a gentleman with Armstrong, but not so with the clarinetist Johnny Dodds, a man of great dignity who had the misfortune of not knowing how to play a song Capone wanted to hear. The story goes that Capone whipped out a $100 bill, ripped it in half, and put half into each of their pockets with the warning “Nigger, you better learn it for next time.” Earl “Fatha” Hines, who also played at the Sunset, told how most musicians overlooked such crudity because of Capone’s other good deeds toward them, such as when he made two bodyguards accompany Hines on a road trip to clubs where whites did not welcome blacks. Hines knew he and the other musicians were only protected “because we kept their clubs open,” but he was also astute enough to know that he and the others “belonged” to a ruthless man who would do anything to ensure that these possessions were secure.

  A terrified Fats Waller found out just how much of a possession he was when four of Capone’s henchmen kidnapped him with guns drawn, shoved him into a big black gangster car, and took him to the Hawthorne Hotel, where he was plunked down in front of a piano and ordered to play. It was Capone’s birthday party, and it lasted for three days, during which Waller played whenever and whatever the Big Guy commanded. The kidnapping had a happy ending, because the same men took him home, again with their guns at the ready to protect him, for Capone had stuffed Waller’s pockets with $1,000 bills.

  One “possession” he could not buy was the boxer Jack Dempsey. Capone loved the fights and wagered heavily on them, here again losing more often than he won. Dempsey had become a friend some time before the famous September 22, 1927, “Battle of the Long Count,” which he lost to Gene Tunney, but Capone did not, as so many legends have it, know Dempsey or visit him at his Benton Harbor, Michigan, training camp before his 1920 fight there, simply because he was not yet an important presence in Chicago’s gangland. Capone’s spending on boxing was not confined to betting. Boxing had not only become big business, as exemplified by the “gate” (gross ticket sales) for the Dempsey-Tunney fight at $2.75 million; it was also a society sport frequented by high rollers from the upper echelons of society who sat at ringside in black tie beside elegant women in furs and jewels and by celebrities from Hollywood to Wall Street. Dempsey’s wife at the time was the silent film star Estelle Taylor, who was seated for the Chicago fight at ringside near Alfred Sloan of General Motors and Charles Schwab of Bethlehem Steel. Also sitting near them was Al Capone, who made sure he and his retinue occupied some of the best seats. He also let journalists from every venue know that he threw the biggest and best parties, and of course they were all invited to the one he was hosting after the fight. Everyone knew that he had bet $50,000 on Dempsey to win and that the party was in his honor and would cost the same or more. Everyone came to it, from the madam Polly Adler to the gossip columnist Louella Parsons and the sportswriter Ring Lardner.

  Capone wanted to ensure that the party was a victory celebration, so he offered to fix the fight in Dempsey’s favor. He could make such a casual offer because he had the clout to ensure it happened. Dempsey, who according to one of his biographers was embarrassed that he “remained Capone’s great hero,” sent a letter written in his painstaking longhand, asking him to “lay off” and keep the fight a fair one. He signed it “your friend…Jack Dempsey.” Capone had the good grace to do as Dempsey asked, but the next day a huge floral delivery arrived at his training camp, unsigned and bearing the message “to the Dempseys, in the name of sportsmanship.” Everyone knew who sent it.

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  By 1927, Al Capone had become the most feared leader in the second-largest city in the country, not only of its acknowledged criminal element, but also as the de facto director of how it functioned politically. Even Charles G. Dawes, the vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge from 1925 to 1929, was forced to admit that the government of the city of Chicago and all of Cook County was powerless to stop him. All forms of governance, legal or oth
erwise, had broken down and were helpless when pitted against Al Capone.

  His name was becoming increasingly famous throughout the world despite his infamous deeds, which brought admiration more than opprobrium, but it was still galling when he was made the butt of jokes and turned into a laughingstock by posturing public officials and low-level policemen. He knew how to quell this, which he did during the quiet period in which 1926 was ending, mainly because enough gang leaders had been killed that the ones still alive felt they had no other option but to agree once again to the territorial truce Capone constructed, which simply reasserted the boundaries established by Torrio in 1920. He proposed minor changes when he convened all the still-living gang leaders at the Morrison Hotel to divide up the city into bootlegging fiefdoms, a solution they grudgingly accepted.

  “I told them we are making a shooting gallery out of a great business and nobody is going to profit by it,” Capone said after the cease-fire, bragging that for the first time in several years he was able to ride to Prairie Avenue all alone in his bulletproof car. Before the truce, he said, he needed the protective cavalcade of flotilla before and behind his so that every journey looked like a funeral procession, which it “had to…so it wouldn’t be one.”

  But there were different kinds of funeral processions: some took place after a sudden and unexpected death, and they were shocking and difficult to accept; others were slow and steady declines that brought great relief to those left behind. To those who lived in Chicago during the years of his domination, Al Capone’s eventual downfall encompassed both and a bit more: a shock that it could happen, a relief when it was over, and then an enduring and unending drive to stand over the metaphorical grave site and ponder what had happened. The most amazing thing about it was how quickly it occurred.