Al Capone

by Deirdre Bair

  Eventually, Teresa and Mafalda came to Palm Island, but Mae made it very clear that this was her house and she was in complete charge of it. She had daily but never live-in help, which is a matter of some disagreement within the later generations of Capones, some of whom believe this was her choice as a precaution against what they might reveal about the family’s private life, others who think it was because she could find no one willing to live in a dangerous gangster’s house. However, she did have a daily staff that included a cook, a manservant who acted as butler and general overseer of the property, and several maids and cleaning people. When Teresa visited, she immediately bustled to take over the kitchen but only after she secured Mae’s blessing. And if Mafalda had any criticisms, she was smart enough to keep quiet and keep them to herself.

  Mae took to the role of chatelaine of a grand property as if she had been born to it and had done it all her life. Just by her discreet participation in public events, she did much to soothe any reservations townspeople might have had about Al Capone and to placate most of the ill feelings his overwhelming presence in the Ponce de León aroused. She was known for her generous contributions to philanthropic and charitable events, but what really secured the affection of the community was a private matter that very quickly became a staple of local lore.

  After the lease expired on the rental house and the owners returned, they were surprised to find the place in better condition than they had left it and to find that Mae had left many of her little touches behind as gifts, among them some of the fine china and silver flatware she had bought for her large parties. She had also left an unpaid telephone bill of more than $700, which the upset owners believed she had done deliberately. Before they even had a chance to spread the news of the deadbeat Capones as town gossip, their doorbell rang, and they answered it to find an attractive blond woman standing there.

  It was Mae, who told them she had just realized that one last phone bill must have come after they departed and she was there to pay it. She extracted a $1,000 bill from her purse and told the owners to keep it all because there might be some other minor damage that would need repairing. She made a gracious farewell and they never saw her again, but they lost no time in telling all of Miami about what had happened. Over the years, the tale has been embellished in a number of legends, both favorable and not about the Capones, but the truth is that no one could ever say Al and Mae did not pay their way, and usually more than what was due.

  ___

  Al Capone was thrilled to own Palm Island, as the house came to be called in the family’s private shorthand. He envisioned himself spending the late winter and early spring overseeing the initial changes and additions to the property, swimming in his pool and fishing from his boat, and in general ingratiating himself with everyone in Miami who mattered. And if Outfit business was done there (as it surely was), that would only add to his pleasure. It was such a relief to be warm, in balmy breezes and sunshine, and away from the misery of a Chicago winter and nonstop violence. If there was any time in his life when he hoped to have the opportunity to develop what might loosely be called an inner life, it was during the early months of 1928. But as always, “business” interfered.

  Local newspapers learned the details of how he purchased Palm Island through Henderson, and the stories caused an outburst of public indignation. Calls for the mayor to resign went unheeded, but the city council ordered a standing police detail of three to five men to follow Capone wherever he went. Things eventually quieted down because it was an election year and he had many allies in the local Republican Party who benefited from his “donations” to their campaigns. And yet tranquillity still eluded him.

  The flurry of outrage over the house purchase was brief, but as it was dying down, there was another one in Chicago that had more serious repercussions. The primary election of April 1928 was nicknamed the Pineapple Primary because of the shape of the bombs that were set off seemingly nonstop, and even though Al Capone was not there, the Outfit was closely involved. The election for state and local offices did major damage to the homes of four supporters of Mayor Big Bill Thompson, who was not up for reelection that year but whose slate was facing another of the numerous so-called reform opponents he faced periodically. Diamond Joe Esposito, a rival to Al and the Outfit who was supporting the rival reform faction, had been warned by Al’s men to withdraw, but he felt honor-bound to keep his word and thus sealed his death sentence. He was gunned down in front of his home by a barrage of bullets from a speeding car, his death witnessed by his bodyguards and his wife and children. As was usual in such events, none of the witnesses identified his killers. His death would have been ignored as just another gang-related assassination, but shortly after his funeral two more bombs went off at the homes of other anti-Thompson candidates.

  Thompson and his cohorts also knew how to spin a story, so they accused their opponents of planting the bombs themselves in order to diminish voter support for the mayor’s slate. Naturally, the opposition fought back, rightly claiming the bombings were the work of Capone’s Outfit on Thompson’s behalf to instill enough fear and chaos to ensure that he was victorious. As the accusations flew and the violence continued, the Chicago primary became national and international news, and reporters from all parts of the world flocked to the city. Things were so bad that shortly after Capone returned to Chicago for a brief spell, Judge Frank Loesch, the president of the Chicago Crime Commission (CCC), gritted his teeth and went, hat in hand, to ask for his help in controlling the situation.

  Loesch knew that what the press had written was indisputable: the “Caponites” (as one of Al Capone’s many biographers called his henchmen and their willing workers) were in control. With threats, bribes, murders, and beatings added to the continuing bombings, the only choice for the honest voters who braved the gun-carrying thugs on patrol at the polling stations seemed to be a ballot box rigged for the Thompsonites. Everyone expected his slate to coast to easy victory because the police had largely absented themselves, leaving Capone’s men free to make sure every dishonest ruse or ploy prevailed.

  Perhaps if Mayor Thompson had not been so cavalier, the election might have settled into history without consequences after the usual low voter turnout and the desultory shrugs that crime and Chicago politics were synonymous. Unfortunately for Thompson, he enraged the electorate when he had the bad taste to boast to reporters that Chicago was no different from any other major city, where “you can get a man’s arm broken for so much, a leg for so much, or beaten up for so much.” The only difference between Chicago and New York, he concluded, was that “we print [news stories about] our crime and they don’t.”

  To the astonishment of pundits, pollsters, and political reporters, there was a huge voter turnout; approximately 400,000 voters were expected to cast ballots on primary day, April 10, 1928, but the actual number was more than double, well into 800,000. Thompson’s slate was rousingly defeated, and as the Chicago Tribune reported, “an outraged citizenship resolved to end corruption, the machine gunning, the pineappling, and the plundering which have made the state and the city a reproach throughout the civilized world.” For Al Capone, this meant that he was in a decidedly uncomfortable spotlight. Bombs continued to burst and vitriol to flourish; someone had to be blamed, and he was an easy target.

  ___

  Damon Runyon, the newspaperman who chronicled Broadway and the seamier side of New York, became Capone’s Miami Beach neighbor when he bought an expensive house just across the bay on Hibiscus Island. He lost no time in contributing to the general blame and mockery that intensified against Capone after the Pineapple Primary in 1928, and he kept it up for years afterward, such as in a biting 1931 satire titled “Gentlemen, the King!” Runyon acted as the narrator who listens in as a mobster answers a child’s question about Al Capone’s “pineapples” and has the mobster produce one for the child to see. The narrator immediately recognizes it “as a bomb such as these Guineas chuck at people they do not like, especial
ly Guineas from Chicago.” It is interesting that Runyon resorted to ethnic slurs, for his fascination with “gangster chic” and his friendships with gangsters were well-known. He hung out with Arnold Rothstein at Lindy’s in New York and when in Miami was a regular at Al Capone’s lavish parties. In all his writings, he was stridently against establishment wealth and privilege and on the side of the poor, the picked upon, and the dispossessed, all of whom Capone claimed to represent. Runyon wrote with gusto about gangsters who flouted their ill-gained wealth in the face of “old money” and excused how they got it by blaming Prohibition for forcing them into lives of crime. Al Capone often said the same about his own career.

  Runyon was well-known as a “womanizing narcissist,” and his tastes were so similar to Capone’s that some said he deliberately copied them: he also liked high living, flashy expensive clothes, gambling, and playing the horses. He made no secret of his closeness to Capone and hinted that he used many of his attributes as models for his characters. And yet from their very first encounter, he joined the general clamor deriding, ridiculing, and denouncing his so-called friend.

  Capone had a lot of these fair-weather friends among the famous and the talented, and their impressions, true or not, have helped to form the opinion posterity has created of Al the man, as opposed to Capone the ruthless killer. Many, among them entertainers like Louis Armstrong and Harry Richman, claimed they accepted his hospitality because they were afraid to refuse it, while others, including the early film star Bebe Daniels, said they accepted it because curiosity got the best of them. Very few were like Polly Adler and Sophie Tucker, who excused his profession and had only had good things to say about the polite gentleman with whom they occasionally played cards and partied.

  Some of Al’s detractors were like Runyon, who had access to immediate publication in newspaper columns and books, where they had ready outlets for snide commentary that elided their own unseemly and quite possibly unethical behavior. Biographers of his contemporary detractors have influenced subsequent cultural histories, which repeat many of their opinions and observations as the truth. Reporters on the major daily papers in the biggest cities also contributed to the creation of Al Capone as a cultural phenomenon. Prominent among them was the Chicago Daily News columnist Ben Hecht, who wrote the screenplay for Scarface, the 1932 gangster movie that became one of Hollywood’s most successful films ever made. Newsmen covering the crime beat were expected to convey the facts about the nefarious activities of the Outfit’s henchmen, which they usually did, but many found it almost impossible to write about murder, mayhem, and carnage without using a vocabulary that was colorful in the extreme; thus, the truth became enveloped in bloody bombast used to sell papers. Myths were created that became accepted as fact, but the metamorphosis of Al the man into Capone the cultural phenomenon was neither simple nor direct.

  Contradictory versions also endure in books. Here are but two examples of how he was portrayed: Fred Pasley, who published in 1930 what he claimed was objective biography, titled it Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man and asked the reader to think about how Capone was able to create so many different personae, all of them true to a certain degree. An even more popular book appeared shortly after Pasley’s, but the author Richard T. Enright’s title tells the reader what he is expected to think before he turns a single page: Al Capone on the Spot: The Inside Story of the Master Criminal and His Bloody Career. These two were just the beginning; depending on who was counting, between five and seven books appeared from 1929 to 1931 purporting to give “the real truth.”

  “Journalists took the leading role in inventing Al Capone,” wrote the cultural historian David E. Ruth in a book entitled Inventing the Public Enemy. He credited Al’s contemporaries with “sifting known facts, conjuring up others, and, perhaps most important, choosing the defining metaphors.” Certainly Ruth is correct, but only by half, for Al Capone was a smart man, smart enough to know how to manipulate the media, and with varying degrees of success he became adept at doing so.

  He seldom said anything uncomplimentary about anyone, and he left few personal documents or letters to tell what he really thought of events or people. He might have been “Sunny Jim” to the press, but he knew when to keep his political opinions to himself or when friendship was genuine and when it was not. He knew when he was being used, but he also knew how to use others, and he did it suavely and smoothly. He gave the impression that everyone in the world was his friend—until such time as they were not. With some of those former friends, he had the wherewithal to deal with them, and usually he did. But for those whom he could not have his minions kill or intimidate into silence, and for those he could not manage or manipulate, he had to find other ways to get his message out.

  Capone read all the daily papers and kept up to date on current affairs, especially with the newest methods of doing corporate business. He was always on the lookout for anything that could further the operations of the Outfit, and he knew he needed help to counter the mostly negative publicity he had attracted since the trip to Los Angeles. As was usual for him, he tried to find the best man for the important job of changing his public image. That seemed to be Ivy Lee, the public relations genius who had succeeded in defusing the outrage over John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company by turning him into an admirable, civic-minded philanthropist. Although the novelist Upton Sinclair dubbed Lee “Poison Ivy” for his ability to manipulate public opinion, Lee had created a stellar reputation for himself through the careful acceptance of clients that included corporations such as Bethlehem Steel and individuals such as Charles Lindbergh and Walter Chrysler. Among his many honors, Lee had been appointed to the Council on Foreign Relations and had the ear of President Herbert Hoover. He was certainly not interested in sullying his reputation by representing Al Capone, so Capone had to look elsewhere.

  Once again, Capone turned to Harry Read, the Chicago editor who had hitherto managed to provide him with positive stories while maintaining the carefully distanced relationship that allowed him to claim that his actions were ethical. Read advised Capone to talk as often as he could to the press but to steer clear of saying anything about Chicago politics. He took Read’s advice, so he stayed mainly in Miami and said little about the Pineapple Primary while he concentrated instead on becoming, as the investigative reporter Gus Russo put it, “the toast of Chicago—at least among the city’s downtrodden blue-collar segments.” On his occasional forays back to the city, Al could count on ovations lasting as long as five minutes whenever he watched the Cubs play baseball; crowds cheered him at prizefights and yelled to ask for betting tips when he went to the races. Little guys, the ordinary working classes, loved him because “he gave writers and perfect strangers tips on fixed fights and horse races.”

  John Kobler, who conducted extensive interviews throughout the 1960s with elderly people who had known Al Capone in his heyday, wrote in his 1971 biography of an aged waitress who told him she thought he was “a wonderful person.” Her reason: “He took from the rich and gave to the poor, didn’t he?” Kobler quoted a “former Negro doorman” who still lived near the site of the Four Deuces as saying, “These folks ’round here never knowed who paid the rent, but it was Al…They was all fine boys and they was real good to me.” The waitress and the doorman were typical of most Chicagoans, who did not fathom the connection between Capone and the corrupt political establishment.

  “It is a curious fact that Capone is the object of a sort of hero worship,” wrote Pasley, the on-the-spot observer. “Time had, indeed, wrought vast changes in our fellow townsman. Few now would recognize in the political Big Shot the roughneck bouncer of the Four Deuces, or in the tailored and chauffeured man about town the vulgar hoodlum.” Pasley’s beat was gangland, and he saw the gore and the mayhem firsthand, often on a daily basis. He was a skeptic who marveled at the preferential treatment Capone received everywhere he went. To illustrate his contention, Pasley quoted the columnist and sportswriter Westbrook Pegler wh
en he covered the Stribling-Sharkey prizefight on February 27, 1929, in Miami Beach.

  Pegler called Capone “the doyen of the racketeers” as he described the deference Jack Dempsey paid when he escorted Capone to a prime seat in the press box. He waxed sarcastic when he acknowledged that the “Gangland King” was “not there in an official capacity, but the public impression is such that persons are on official business at all times, wherever they may be.” Capone probably did have a heavy bet riding on the fight, so perhaps Pegler should not be criticized for interpreting Dempsey’s welcome as “an exchange of amenities between two professions having much in common,” that is, boxers in fixed fights and those who fixed them. Like Runyon, Pegler never turned down Capone’s hospitality but always made sure to cover himself with a snide remark about his reason for having accepted it.

  Al Capone had learned well from Harry Read and wanted to reward him. Read did tell the truth to his superiors at the Chicago American when he said that he wanted to recover from pneumonia in a warm climate and in April 1929 would go to Miami to do so. He neglected to mention that he intended to combine his recovery with picking up some good stories about Capone’s latest doings. Read gave his editors the Ritz Hotel as his contact address, but he never stayed there; Ralph was waiting in the lobby to whisk him to Palm Island, where Al insisted he stay. To cover such blatantly unethical behavior, Read scheduled a series of photo shoots that showed Al fishing or swimming and claiming to be “in retirement from the booze business,” as he insisted on portraying himself to any reporter who wrote about him. That might have gotten past editorial scrutiny, albeit grudgingly, but Read made the fatal mistake that cost him his job when he allowed Al, Ralph, and their bodyguards to load him onto a private plane bound for a jaunt in Cuba.