by Deirdre Bair
Also, none of the people who knew and took care of Jeanette in her old age know anything about what she and Vinny did for a living before they met Al, but they all insist that neither she nor her brother ever worked a day in their lives from that time on. They do agree that she liked to play the horses and that she always excused her penchant for the ponies by saying that she only frequented the track because her brother “worked there.” Whatever the work was, she never specified; she was often quite happy to brag about how she “made a killing” on a modest bet as she showed off new and expensive pieces of jewelry that she always insisted she bought for herself. However, there was one exception, a necklace she wore all the time and that she allowed others to think was one that Al had given her (a claim she hinted at but never made directly). She was a mystery woman during Al’s last few years of freedom, a role she parlayed into exoticism for the rest of her life.
Mae was supposed to have known all about Jeanette, and there have been numerous versions of how she reacted to her in the different stories others tell about the two women. Mae’s descendants state emphatically that she never mentioned this mistress. Some people who knew Mae in Florida, either friends or people who worked for her at Palm Island, think that she tolerated Jeanette because she had no other option; some of Al’s brothers’ descendants offer the unlikely opinion that she might have been too frightened of her husband to do anything but accept his mistress (or mistresses). The group of people unrelated to the Capones who recall hearing their elders talk about this triangle of husband, wife, and mistress offer a totally different view: they are convinced Mae was relieved that Al had other outlets for his sexuality so that her health and well-being were not further compromised by another outbreak of disease. They all insist that even though they continued to sleep in the same bed when Al was at home, Mae “put herself [sexually] out of bounds” as soon as they moved to Florida and both were content with the situation.
Whichever of these versions might have been true, entirely or in part, Mae kept her own counsel and said nothing to anyone. If she did confide in someone, it was most likely her brother and sisters, who were spending more and more time with her in Florida before settling there themselves, but neither they nor their descendants who so loved and revered Mae ever revealed anything about the personal life of their beloved sister and aunt. At some point during their years together, Al and Mae must have talked about “that other thing,” for during his darkest years in prison Al told Mae, “I love you alone and have forgotten all about the other party.” He told her that it was “all over,” that she was the only one he loved, and that he would be true to her for the rest of his life.
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Al Capone was genuinely ill in the first weeks of January, felled by the flu that Sonny brought home from school and that swiftly infected many of the others who lived in the house or worked on the grounds. The flu was epidemic in the winter of 1928–29; Mae caught it first, but she and Sonny recovered quickly, whereas Al seemed unable to shake it. When he took so much longer than the others to get better, Mae asked Dr. Phillips to phone the family’s Chicago physician to confer about treatment. Dr. Phillips knew that Al’s general health was robust enough that he would eventually recover, but to ease Mae’s worrying, he made the courtesy call.
Although she seemed happy enough with the life she led, Dr. Phillips saw how worrying about her husband kept Mae thin, jittery, nervous, and often unable to eat or hold down her food. He admired her courage to be married to such a man whom she knew for what he was and still loved deeply, but he also felt sorry for her. His sympathetic ear allowed him to gain her confidence, so she entrusted him with information about the family dynamic, for she made no secret of her dislike of all of the Capones and especially Ralph.
This was exceedingly helpful to Dr. Phillips, who was afraid of Ralph, the braggart and blowhard who knew nothing about medicine but still never hesitated to second-guess everything about Al’s treatment, his hand running threateningly over the bulge under his armpit where the gun he toted was always at the ready. One of the reasons Dr. Phillips was not happy when Al anointed him the family’s physician was that he was afraid of Ralph’s trigger temper, so he found it helpful to capitalize on Mae’s dislike of all the brothers to keep him reliably apprised of the shifting moods and relationships among them.
Al did recover, and by the third week of January 1929 was well enough to start visiting his usual haunts, attending Hialeah races, hitting the nightspots, and dining at the best restaurants, where he threw big bills to all and sundry. In early February, he chartered a boat to take him, his brother Albert, and several bodyguards to Bimini in the Bahamas. He also took Dr. Phillips, who was reluctant to go, but Al insisted that the doctor needed a little holiday. Even though Dr. Phillips never got over his uneasiness around Al and his brothers, the physician went because he knew better than to cross his patient.
The trip was a brief weekend jaunt, and Al Capone returned to Miami in time for two major events; the first was a party he planned to host at Palm Island on February 14, allegedly for no special reason, perhaps to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day, but most likely (as he and his brothers told everyone) he just wanted to have a party. Several weeks later, he planned to throw another, much larger one after the Stribling-Sharkey boxing match, where he had ringside seats and upon which he had let it be known that he was betting heavily.
He was in robust good health by February 14, and it showed when he kept his appointment earlier that day to meet an assistant district attorney who was coming down from Brooklyn to question him—so he was told—about his possible role in the killing of Frankie Yale in New York on July 1, 1928. The guns that had been used to mow him down during a car chase were traced to Capone’s great pal Parker Henderson, who had bought them as surreptitiously as he had bought the Palm Island property. But because Al was nowhere near Brooklyn on the day of Yale’s murder, he was cavalier enough about the meeting to visit the office of the Dade County prosecutor alone, without any of the several lawyers who always accompanied him to anything that even hinted at a legal encounter. It was an act of hubris on his part and one that was later used against him with great effect.
He thought it would be a brief and fairly routine exchange, and to demonstrate that he was showing respect for the law, if not for the Brooklyn lawyer himself, he arrived exactly on time. As usual, he was impeccably dressed, and if there is accuracy in the contemporary newspaper accounts (which vary about what actually happened during the meeting), Capone sauntered from his car and took his time chatting with well-wishers who greeted him outside the building, making sure to pose long enough for photographers to get their best shots. Once inside, he was surprised to find that the Brooklyn prosecutor was not alone but flanked by the Dade County prosecutor and the county sheriff, as well as by a court stenographer, who was there to record everything he said. Grim visages and serious questioning were not at all what he’d expected.
None of the questions were about Yale’s murder; every single one was about Capone’s financial dealings, and he had the same dismissive answer for them all. To questions about where Parker Henderson got the money to buy the property for “A. Costa,” or who sent money from Chicago and how it made its way to him, he replied, “I don’t remember.” And when questions were posed in such a way that he could not say he did not remember, he simply lied. Asked if he was a bootlegger, he said no, he had never been a bootlegger. When asked what Jake Guzik did for a living, Capone replied, “He fights.” When the questioners grew so annoyed with his evasions that they asked specifically if it was his cousin Charlie Fischetti who sent him large sums of money, a nonplussed Capone could only ask in return, “What has money got to do with it?” Capone was a smart man, but if he had any intimation that money would have everything to do with his life from then on, he gave no sign of it. This meeting was arguably the beginning of the serious investigation into his financial dealings that led to his downfall, but it did not gather strength until after a ga
lvanizing event that happened on that very same day, back in Chicago.
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While Al Capone was being questioned in Miami, six of Bugs Moran’s men were gunned down in a garage on Chicago’s North Clark Street, in a bloody crime that transfixed the world press and all its readers. Occurring on February 14, the date when love is celebrated, the event naturally became immortalized as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Capone had made sure he was nowhere near Chicago when it happened, and everyone from law enforcers to newspaper reporters had different opinions of his role in it. Some accounts slightingly dismissed him as a “Cicero mobster in the public’s mind and not instantly suspected in the crime,” but most painted him as a suspect from the very beginning, with every accusatory finger firmly pointed in his direction as the criminal mastermind. The outgoing police commissioner, William Russell, whose tenure had been ineffectual in curbing crime or controlling the Outfit, suspected Capone from the beginning and made a comment that (coming from him) was laughed at. Russell called the massacre “the death knell of gangdom” and declared “a war to the finish” on Al Capone. His prediction was off on the former but correct on the latter.
There had been so many other violent and vicious killings before the massacre, none of which could be directly tied to Capone, even though “everyone knows” became the most frequently heard comment that he was behind them all. Usually it was followed by a dismissive shrug because “everyone” also knew that nothing could be done about it. The statement was particularly rife after the ill-advised murder of Frankie Yale in New York. Even the esteemed Literary Digest got into the blame game with an editorial cartoon showing a gigantic gun-toting gangster whose body arched all the way from Chicago to Manhattan and who was meant to be a caricature of Capone. Yet while the brutal killings of gangsters by other gangsters filled the papers on an almost daily basis, as long as all these killings did not touch the lives of law-abiding citizens, there was a certain amount of silent rejoicing among the good people over the daily demise of yet another of society’s outcasts, and there was no outcry for an organized effort to stop them.
Then the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre happened, and there was an abrupt change in public opinion. General indifference came to a swift and stunned end with the nonstop barrage of horrific photographs of the dead bodies and the bathetic stories about the only survivor, a dog belonging to one of the victims. Despite Chicago’s reputation for criminal brutality, the public expressed far greater outrage at these killings than they had at previous gangland mass murders. This one was considered so heinous that if all the years of previous bloodshed were added up, they still could not compare with the magnitude of its effect on public consciousness. When that lone event was single-handedly being blamed for harming every aspect of local society from culture to commerce, the city’s moneymakers and movers and shakers were finally galvanized into taking serious action to stop the killings. It seemed there was no better way to start than to go after the kingpin who dominated so much of the fabric of the city’s life. Al Capone became firmly fixed in the legal sights of different government agencies and the several groups that sprang up around them. And yet he still thought he could thumb his nose at the law.
Accusations flew as multiple inquiries limped along. At least four and possibly five (depending on how they are counted) independent investigations looked into the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Among them were those of the district police, the detective bureau, the State’s Attorney’s Office, and the coroner. These initial attempts to sort out what had happened, and when, and who was responsible, turned into a fiasco resembling the incompetent and bumbling policemen in Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops silent films, when high-ranking officials in several departments were either fired or assigned elsewhere. All sorts of evidence was either stolen, destroyed, or buried in unmarked files, so most of what actually happened is to this day considered lost and probably gone forever. With all these bureaus working at cross-purposes, and “each agency [having] its own agenda and turf to protect,” even Commissioner Russell, who should have been directing the central clearinghouse, was “sometimes so overloaded with theories or dead-end leads that no centralized operation could be mounted.”
Rewards proliferated: The Chicago Association of Commerce offered $50,000 for the arrest and conviction of the killers. Independent citizens banded together and raised $10,000. The city council and the state’s attorney each put up $20,000. And still, nothing could be pinned on Al Capone. Allegations of guilt abounded, but none proved provable, and no arrests were made.
There was need for a scapegoat, and local bootlegging, “so commonplace that it certainly didn’t merit a massacre,” provided a good place to begin. It offered a convenient focus for all the stymied agencies because there were so many speakeasies in the city (ten thousand or more by most counts) and Al Capone’s Outfit controlled so many of them. And yet, now that he was spending so much time in Florida and expending great effort to present himself as an upright and law-abiding local citizen, there was speculation throughout Chicago that he had indeed lived up to his public declaration to give up his life of crime. Assigning blame and then prosecuting him seemed an impossible task.
Capone appeared to be a law unto himself, and no one who worked with him or for him dared to suggest directly that he watch his step until things cooled down. Instead, he floated seemingly above the fray, truly “untouchable” in a very different sense from what that word later came to stand for. However, the Chicago grand jury had no such qualms about his imperviousness, and three days after the massacre, February 17, he received a subpoena to appear before it in Chicago on a bootlegging charge. Capone laughed at the summons, since it was something the law had been unable to pin on him for almost a decade, and set out to ignore it—but in his own inimitable fashion.
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The February 17 subpoena from a U.S. marshal in Chicago instructed him to return from Miami for a March 12 appearance before a federal grand jury that was investigating what was commonly known as “bootlegging.” When Fred Pasley wrote about it a year later, he described Al’s summons sarcastically as “a Volsteadian paradox that the Government in one role should stalk as criminals the class [that] Prohibition has enriched and in another should seek to share in its gains. There is an element of comedy in it.” Capone thought much the same and decided to ignore the subpoena.
He persuaded the hesitant Dr. Phillips to provide him with an affidavit saying that he was still suffering from “broncho-pneumonia pleurisy with extreme chest congestion” and that he had been confined to bed for the previous six weeks—an outright lie and risky for the doctor to swear to, because his presence on the jaunt to the Bahamas was well-known on account of the newspaper publicity it garnered. The fact that he would risk professional censure with a sworn statement shows just how frightened he was of his most famous client and his entourage.
Capone’s lawyers used the affidavit to ask for a forty-day postponement, but the judge denied it and instructed him to show up one week after the original date, March 19, 1929. At the same time, the U.S. marshal used the publicity about how the allegedly bedridden Capone had been cavorting all over Miami and the Caribbean to charge him with contempt of court and set a $5,000 bond he would have to post if he wanted to remain at liberty after his Chicago appearance.
Capone took his time and arrived in Chicago one day late, on March 20, apparently unaware of the ruckus he had kicked up among the many different government entities that now had him firmly in their targets for differing reasons. The press kept up the pressure by printing Bugs Moran’s alleged comment about the massacre that “only Capone kills like that.” It was an embarrassment for the legal enforcers, who were made to seem ineffectual and powerless because they were unable to pin it or any other crime on him.
J. Edgar Hoover, who was named director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (as the FBI was then known) in 1924, had been curiously lax about pursuing bootleggers throughout Prohibition b
ecause he rightly recognized that putting them out of business was a battle he could not win. He suddenly became interested in Al Capone when he saw how the Treasury Department under Andrew Mellon (a hypocrite who thought the Volstead Act a stupidity and routinely flouted it) was looking into Capone’s tax evasions. That was something else entirely, and J. Edgar, described by a friend as akin to “an electric wire, with almost trigger response,” was perceptive enough to realize that it might be the quickest route to prosecute Capone and at the same time ensure glory for himself. Here, too, another turf war was at stake, because Hoover could not bear to think Mellon’s Treasury Department could succeed where his own bureau could not. This was a fight he thought he could win, and he geared up for it.
Hoover was only twenty-nine when he was appointed to the position he held for the rest of his career, and one of the people who recommended him highly was his great good friend Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the woman who described him as an electric wire. Willebrandt was an unusual woman for her time: she served in both the Harding and the Hoover administrations as an assistant attorney general from 1921 to 1929, a moral crusader charged with enforcing Prohibition and widely known as the “Prohibition Portia.” She was often called the most powerful woman in the federal government and “possessor of one of the keenest legal minds” in the entire country. “If Mabel had worn trousers, she could have been president” was a remark often attributed to her lifelong friend Judge John J. Sirica (later of Watergate fame). Her original interest in Al Capone was certainly because of the beer wars in Chicago, but she turned her sights on him seriously in 1929 because she was so incensed by what she believed was Dr. Phillips’s false and flippant affidavit. She was determined to punish both the doctor and his patient with contempt citations.