by Deirdre Bair
Chapter 10
INVENTING AL CAPONE
The first time Al Capone tried directly to influence public opinion happened in January 1927, just after Theodore “Tony the Greek” Anton’s body was found: tortured, frozen, and dumped in such a way as to serve a warning that the killers could get away with murder whenever they wanted. Several days later and without reference to Anton, Al called a very different kind of press conference. What made it extraordinary was that he did not summon reporters to his hotel headquarters but instead invited them to his house on Prairie Avenue. There, he met them in house slippers and a pink apron (!), waving the large wooden spoon with which he had been stirring his mother’s spaghetti sauce (not his, for he liked to eat but didn’t cook). He treated them to a sit-down dinner in the dining room, with platter after platter of Teresa’s cooking, washed down with good red wine (which of course they did not mention when they wrote stories about what a good, kind, and happy family man he was). Temporarily, the press conference had the moderating effect he wanted: in their stories of gang warfare, reporters inserted references to how Al Capone deplored the violence.
Capone was kept busy as 1927 unfolded, settling scores, masterminding takeovers, and fending off investigations into his business practices, so when he did talk to the press, it was usually as a spur-of-the-moment response to something that had happened, with remarks that were generally impromptu and off-the-cuff. He was a master of “spin” long before the term was coined, a shrewd manipulator who could think on his feet and was usually in command of every comment he uttered. The occasional problem arose when some of the reporters, as adept at turning a phrase as he was, managed to turn what he said against him. He knew he could not afford to be depicted as a foolish and ridiculous buffoon, which meant that he had to do more than react and respond whenever he found himself in an awkward situation. He realized that he had to conduct and control the outcome of every encounter with the press.
One way to do it was to put reporters on his payroll, as he was alleged to have done with Jake Lingle of the Chicago Tribune, but there were too many other honest journalists he could not bribe. Robert St. John in Cicero was most notable among them, seeing Al’s machinations for what they were and refusing to be part of them. Others, like Harry Read, a city editor at the Chicago Herald and Examiner, recognized the extent of Capone’s control and sought a quid pro quo; Read did not cut a deal that involved taking money but agreed to one that was guaranteed to give each man what he wanted: Capone would supply tips for exclusive stories and interviews for Read to assign to reporters who he thought (and hoped) were honest and independent, and Read would in turn give Capone tips on how to comport himself so that the resulting articles would be flattering and positive.
Anthony “Tony” Berardi Sr., the photographer most often assigned to cover Capone, credited Read with having “educated the guy in this respect.” He quotes Read as telling Al Capone that he was now too prominent a figure to “act like a hoodlum” and that he had to learn how to “quit hiding [and] be nice to people.” Berardi’s photographs became one of the most complete archives of Capone’s Chicago years, and he photographed Capone objectively even as he despised him for the harm he did to the reputation of every Italian-American. Berardi thought they all suffered guilt by association simply for bearing a name that ended with a vowel: “I knew what he was and what he did…He hurt the Italian people.” Berardi took his photographs as he saw each situation unfolding, no matter how Capone was behaving: if they flattered him, fine; if not, they showed the reality of what was happening. They remain one of the most useful and accurate archives of Al Capone’s multifaceted public life.
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There was a territorial truce as 1927 began, a fragile truce that should have given Capone time to concentrate on his family, but because of his stature throughout Chicago that proved impossible. He had been absent from Prairie Avenue for such long periods of time that an overt jousting for position had developed among the women. Mae wanted her husband around to mitigate the constant bickering in the house, particularly now that Mafalda was at an age where she felt she had the right to sass and argue with her as much as Teresa did. Mae was also getting antsy about being so confined during the winter months and wanted to get away from the household conflict and the never-ending snowstorms. She wanted Al to take her on a vacation as far away from Prairie Avenue as she could get, and Los Angeles seemed like a good bet for warmth and sunshine. Al liked the idea of California and thought it might be a good place to look for a second home, especially because life in Chicago had taken on another dimension that was quite literally overwhelming.
In today’s parlance, Al Capone had become a celebrity whose every doing was a feast for the newspaper paparazzi of the time. Everything he said or did was fed into the endlessly grinding publicity mill, and within the small world of Chicago journalism he had camp followers and hangers-on who were always on the lookout for a scoop. He could not appear anywhere without a slew of reporters and photographers waiting to capture every word he said and every move he made, in the hope that one day they could shout the magic phrase that was more myth than reality in the news business: “Stop the presses!” Because his every move was followed, Al Capone had no privacy, and that in itself was dangerous, for who knew what enemies were lurking in wait to do him harm.
Despite the temporary truce, rival gang leaders were still looking for ways to kill him as soon as an opportunity presented itself. Then there were the crazies who seemed to crawl out of the woodwork, and on that front there were those who would be delighted to have Al Capone do a little harm for them. There was the woman in London who invited him to come to England and kill a neighbor with whom she was feuding. There was the man who somehow managed to get past Capone’s massive security measures and onto the floor of the Metropole where he had his well-guarded office. The man promised to take out an insurance policy for $15,000 in Capone’s name; his only condition was that Capone first had to loan him $3,000, after which he could then kill the man and recoup his money by collecting the insurance! It took several bodyguards to subdue the poor fellow and toss him out onto the street.
Capone was never alone, and he had no time for anything personal. When Tony Berardi invited him one afternoon to go to the gym for a few rounds of boxing, he refused, saying there were so many men waiting outside his office door to see him “on business” that he simply could not take the time for pleasure. Nor could he take time for his family either, because even going home for Teresa’s Sunday dinner was fraught with complications and dangers. It seemed that if he wanted to spend time with Mae and Sonny, a good way to do it would be to take them to Los Angeles. It would also be a good way to combine business with pleasure, for the Outfit had begun to make inroads into organizing and extorting unions, and those in the movie industry were ripe for the picking.
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Here, the accounts differ. Some newspaper articles and the biographies based on them claim he left his wife and son at home and only took Ralph and several bodyguards, telling Mae it was to be a scouting expedition and if everything worked out, he would take her and Sonny a short time later. Other accounts have him taking everyone: Ralph, the bodyguards, and also Mae and Sonny. His descendants claim the latter is true, as in later years Mae Capone often spoke of this trip as the first time she saw the West Coast and how she wished she could have stayed longer.
The entourage departed from Chicago’s Union Station on December 6, 1927, unbothered because members of the press had all been told at an earlier press conference that Capone was on his way to St. Petersburg, Florida. He had to resort to such ruses for self-protection, for the gang leaders’ truce was breaking down, Joe Aiello in particular was still gunning for him, and he feared who might board the train if his true destination was known.
Capone had deliberately called the press conference just before he left, where, as one of his earliest biographers put it, he “allowed his imagination to take over.” He wanted to control th
e focus by initiating questions where he could give self-serving answers that would, in today’s parlance, make excellent sound bites. He began by asking what he had done “to deserve such persecution.” He told his audience that his hands were spotlessly clean, he had never killed anyone, and certainly he would never have anything to do with “a vice resort.” His mission had always been to rehabilitate hoodlums, burglars, and robbers, to turn them into responsible citizens and return them to an upright, God-fearing, and law-abiding society. And what did all that public-spirited good behavior get him? Nothing but “constant public abuse.” It was all so unfair, he said plaintively. His mother and family were hurt by unjust tales of his terrible criminality; it was “getting too much for them and I’m sick of it all myself.”
He insisted that all he had done since coming to Chicago was to give the public “what the public wants.” Yes, he admitted, he did break the laws of Prohibition, but so, too, did the people who bought his booze. What, he asked, was the difference between his selling it and the customer who bought and drank it? Weren’t the legal and moral issues blurred here, and didn’t both parties share equal responsibility for breaking the law? “I’ve been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor,” he concluded, and most of the people who read newspapers agreed with him. In their eyes, Al Capone was a hero.
Nevertheless, he was leaving Chicago and going just before Christmas, implying that it would be a permanent move, which was alarming to all those on his various payrolls who worried they would not be getting their holiday handout. Before he went, he said he wanted to thank the friends “who have stood by me through this unjust ordeal.” He offered “forgiveness” to his enemies and said the “coppers” would have to “find a new gangland chief” to persecute.
“Maybe they’ll find a new hero for the headlines,” he mused, but that was wishful thinking indeed, for his notoriety was only just beginning.
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The trip to California was not the long and leisurely vacation Mae wanted. Instead, it was a short one of eight days, with six of them spent on trains to and from Los Angeles. A host of reporters and photographers was waiting when the train arrived at the city’s Union Station, eager to watch the chief of police and his deputies, who had assembled to tell Al Capone that he and his party were not welcome. The Capone group was allowed to keep the reservation at the Biltmore Hotel, where rooms had been reserved in the name of Al Brown (that mysterious fellow who owned the used-furniture store in Chicago), but when the hotel people learned who he really was, Al Capone and his party were permitted to stay only for one night—two at the very most—just long enough to make return train reservations. The same public officials who met them upon arrival would be at the station to make sure they departed.
Capone tried to put a good front on the unceremonious booting he got in Los Angeles, telling reporters afterward that he had been treated “just fine,” and “by prominent people, too.” Although he never left the hotel grounds in the less than two days he was there, he claimed to have visited the homes of movie stars and toured a film studio before going to elaborate lunches and dinners at the homes of various dignitaries. He was also said to have told reporters that he went to Tijuana, Mexico, for the horse races at Agua Caliente; it was a mythical claim because his only visit to the West Coast was in December 1927 and the racetrack did not open until June 1928, but one that has been magnified over the years to insist that he used the visit to become a kingpin in Baja crime circles.
There are those who swear that he was personally responsible for persuading the Mexican government to build a hotel-casino called the Rosarito Beach Hotel. He was said to be the driving force behind marinas built to shelter his booze-running boats at a place called Los Coronados and that he also had tunnels constructed in which to hide the stuff. None of this was true: liquor was legal in Mexico, and there were never any tunnels built into the sandy beaches. There was a marina, but it had been built by the government to lure people to the hotel and casino, both of which were already in severe disrepair in 1927 and totally unusable by 1930. As they have with so many other urban legends, guides have made a good living ever since escorting gullible tourists to see the ruins of things Al Capone never ordered to be built because he was never there.
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And so the little band of travelers left the Biltmore, returned sheepishly to Union Station, and got back on the eastbound train, only to learn that Chicago didn’t want Al Capone either. The police chief had called in reporters to proclaim that Capone had only gone to Los Angeles because his force had driven him out of town and would certainly not permit him to return. Capone was not cowed and responded with a brief statement of his legal rights: “I’m a property owner and tax payer in Chicago. I can certainly return to my own home.”
On the return trip, everywhere the train stopped, crowds held back by cordons of armed policemen thronged to catch a glimpse of the notorious criminal. The cheering hordes hoped he would at least appear on the platform for a breath of fresh air so they could see him, while the local police proclaimed themselves ready to shoot him if he tried to step down even for a moment. At several stops along the way, enterprising reporters found a way to board the train but were kept away from Capone by his bodyguards. When the train entered southern Illinois, only Jake Lingle succeeded in getting a story, but only because Al Capone wanted him to have it.
Lingle was the chief crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune and was most likely deeply embedded in the Outfit’s payroll shortly after Capone took over the organization. Naturally, he painted Capone as a much-maligned public benefactor. There were dangers in getting too close to Capone that often outnumbered the rewards, and Lingle made a very convincing example of what could happen to those who did. He was one of Capone’s favorites at the time but several years later was also most likely assassinated on his command, when he overstepped the bounds of what Al Capone wanted to be known about himself and the Outfit.
In this instance, Lingle was still a Capone favorite and happy to write what Al told him to say, that he was “a citizen with an unblemished record…hounded from his home by the very policemen whose salaries are paid, at least in part, from the victim’s pocket.” Capone pretended to be dismayed when Lingle quoted him as saying everything that happened since he left for Los Angeles had left him “feeling very bad, very bad.” In a plea for public sympathy, he painted himself as a sad victim of unfortunate circumstances who had no idea why he was of such interest to the public or “what all this fuss is about.” It was Capone’s blatant pitch to sway public opinion and get the better of the authorities, but he was also crafty enough to be plotting strategy as the train rolled on toward Chicago. He decided not to be on it when it arrived.
Al left Mae and Sonny on board to detrain in the city, but he got off in Joliet on December 14, where six shotgun-carrying local policemen were waiting and where he was promptly arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. He was the only one with a sense of humor as he reached into his pocket to offer the ammunition as well, saying, “You’d think I was Jesse James and the Youngers, all in one.” The unsmiling officers led him to the police station, where he was booked and locked into a small cell with two smelly derelicts. He promptly paid their fines to get rid of them and had the cell to himself for an overnight stay.
Early the next day, his lawyers arrived to oversee him as he peeled off bills from his large wad of cash and paid the steep fines and court costs of almost $3,000. A cheering throng was there to see him off in the cortege of big black sedans driven by his men who had come to bring their leader and his lawyers home. They went directly to Chicago Heights, where Jake Guzik and the others on the Outfit’s “Board of Directors” threw a welcome-home bash to celebrate his return. After the party, Capone disappeared until just before Christmas, to reunite with his family when he thought it was finally safe to return to Prairie Avenue and the holiday celebrations.
Once he was in Prairie Avenue, still more rumors flew about where
he had been, most of them assigning him to the house of one of the many underlings who lived in the Chicago Heights area, but he had not stayed with them after the party; instead, he had gone to Freeport and the home of Raphael and Clotilde Capone, where he spent long hours closeted in conversation with him before letting her pamper him with her excellent meals. Al did a lot of thinking as he and Raphael talked, mostly about the indignities he had just been through and how to ensure they never happened again.
Here he was, the best-known and most feared figure in Chicago’s criminal world, as well as the de facto director of how it functioned politically. His name was known internationally by 1925, and until the end of 1927 he was more admired than reviled throughout the world. Thus, it was galling to be turned away from Los Angeles, made into the butt of jokes, and turned into a laughingstock by posturing public officials and low-level policemen. It was especially embarrassing to find that the statements he gave to reporters he counted on to do his bidding sometimes received an entirely different response from the public. Granted, the statements were self-serving and self-aggrandizing, but the public had always been sympathetic before. After the Los Angeles debacle, he realized that the public was snickering more than admiring him. Clearly, he needed to do something other than what he had been doing.
When he finally returned to Prairie Avenue after the Los Angeles fiasco, he found the house surrounded by police who had orders to arrest him every time he tried to leave it. He was the No. 1 target of the authorities, who decided that since they could not force the criminal element to leave the city unless they actually witnessed them committing a crime, they would instead shadow their every move, hoping it might make them uncomfortable enough to pull up stakes and move away. It had an effect on the press, as reporters began to emphasize the negative whenever the opportunity presented itself. It began when Mae became so upset by the constant surveillance that she actually broke her vow never to speak to the press and called Jake Lingle to ask him to write a story begging everyone camped outside to go away, if only for Sonny’s sake. Like everything else that was now printed about any of the Capone family, this story also had the opposite effect from what she (and Al) had intended.