Al Capone

by Deirdre Bair

  A far more florid and garish tale is repeated by other writers who all base their versions on the one that originated in 1931, when Walter Noble Burns published a book titled The One-Way Ride. Contemporary readers must bear in mind that the years from 1926–27 to around 1933 were the heyday of the public’s fascination with Al Capone and that these years coincided with the rampant proliferation of media. The movies became America’s favorite pastime, and everyone who could get to a theater went to see the films and newsreels that covered his every move. The appetite for print was burgeoning beyond the capacity of writers to file enough copy to satisfy it, which is probably how truth and fiction became inextricably mixed.

  No doubt a great deal of what was printed as fact was highly embellished, if not actually fiction created out of whole cloth. And this is probably why Burns, who wrote a long and otherwise mostly accurate book based largely on Al’s run-ins with the law, got so carried away when he wrote about the Scalise-Anselmi murders (and Giunta’s as well, he who usually gets the short shrift and is sometimes absent from the various retellings). It is also why Burns’s account has carried the day in many later versions.

  Burns invites his reader to imagine a private dining room somewhere other than the Hawthorne Hotel, in which the three guests of honor might have been drinking drugged wine, when suddenly guns might have been pulled and bullets might have flown, even though in the end the three men do indeed die. Over the years, Burns’s tale became the one embellished by others, who describe how the turncoats gorged themselves on food and drink to the point of stupefaction, after which they were so drunk they allowed themselves to be tied up in their chairs by Capone’s men. How three trained killers could sit quietly and let this happen is one of the several mind-bogglers in the various fables, all of which end with Capone supposedly standing behind them while all this is happening, roaring curses as he became so enraged that he battered them to death with a baseball bat. Where the baseball bat was stashed throughout the evening and why he settled on it as his weapon of choice are never explained, only that Al Capone used it. His men, hardened killers all, were nevertheless struck dumb, according to Burns, horrified by their out-of-control leader but too frightened to do anything to stop him. Once he exhausted himself with the alleged bashings, his men loaded the three bloodied bodies into their own car and drove to Hammond, where the car was abandoned on a side street and burned with them in it. They were then riddled with bullets just to make sure they were well and truly dead.

  But this is the legend that grew, directly implicating Al Capone by word of mouth or in the occasional article that hinted at it in the years immediately after his death in 1947. Each time it was told, it acquired such a veneer of veracity that by the time George Murray presented it in his 1975 book, The Legacy of Al Capone, it had become the point of departure for all other depictions. It was re-created in Brian De Palma’s 1987 movie, The Untouchables, where one of the most riveting scenes had Robert De Niro as Capone, swinging a baseball bat repeatedly against the splattering head of an enemy, spewing blood and gore all over the pristine white tablecloth that fills the screen and horrifies even the hardened henchmen who watch him in stunned silence.

  So many questions could be asked about the actual incident, starting with whether or not Al Capone was really there. There is no record of the actual date he left Rockford for Chicago or where he went after he got there. He had sneaked around so quietly that once his court appearance in Chicago was over, it took the reporters who had been there several days to track him down. The children of his own brothers who either were living in the Prairie Avenue house or were frequent visitors to it say they have no way of knowing when (or even if) Al eventually showed up there, or how long he remained in Chicago before he went to the gangland convocation in Atlantic City that began on May 13, 1929. However, it does seem suspect that he, who took such pains to stage-manage the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre from the safe distance of his Florida home, would risk the possibility of detection and subsequent conviction by participating in such a visible crime while he was most likely sequestered in his headquarters at the Hawthorne Hotel.

  And yet so many of his contemporaries placed him at that grisly scene, each providing a detail here, an observation there, a random speculation that, when added up, allowed others to morph all the speculation into hardened fact. In one sense, the story became a simple one: that in his own way, Al Capone was as reckless and fearless as Frankie Rio and that he had no qualms about killing three men in cold blood so soon after the unfathomable massacre in the garage on North Clark Street. General agreement came to be that there had to be truth somewhere in the stories about Al’s participation.

  When the most recent (and the strongest and longest-lasting) trend of mythologizing Al Capone as the character Scarface was picking up steam in the 1980s, the writer Sean Dennis Cashman referred to the spate of 1930s movies that portrayed gangsters as fallen heroes and good guys who had gone wrong. He compared Capone’s life to a whodunit written for stage or screen, saying it would not matter if the audience came late to the performance, for “they will certainly discover who did it, but they will not know what it is that he did.” Indeed.

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  Even though none of the heinous deeds could be pinned firmly or directly onto Capone, his high visibility meant that whatever his antics, he was fast becoming a worrisome problem for his fellow crime bosses. At least this is what reporters in Chicago wrote as they scurried to find him, staking out his hotel headquarters and the house on Prairie Avenue, eventually knocking on the door and trying to bribe Ralphie (who answered and slammed it in their faces). Why no one thought to look for him in Miami remains unknown, but Capone was back there in April 1929, conferring in secret with selected allies before they went to the mob boss convention in Atlantic City. Home movies taken at Palm Island show a happy Capone cavorting at his swimming pool with a smiling Lucky Luciano and other members of the New York crime families shortly before they convened on May 13–16. The movie showed much jollity and many high jinks, but there is no way to determine if the participants were genuinely friendly or just pretending to be for the camera. Nevertheless, they did gather at Al Capone’s mansion before their official meetings, where the discussions would once again be about defining territories and delineating illicit spoils.

  Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the political boss of Atlantic City and its racketeer in chief, made all the arrangements, booking them into posh hotels where no one would dare to bother them. The mob domination by men of Sicilian origin that had been centered primarily in the East had finally been broken after a reign of murderous terror similar to Chicago’s, but theirs was carried out by men who eschewed Capone’s flashy high-profile visibility. These new lords of crime were a diverse group of relatively young men, similar in age to Capone (who was then thirty) and of Jewish, Irish, and Slav origins, as well as Italians who were natives of other regions and who complemented the remaining Sicilians. Capone’s rivals from Chicago Frank McErlane and Joe Saltis were there; Dutch Schultz, Frank Costello, and Lucky Luciano represented New York; Max Hoff, Sam Lazar, and Charles Schwartz drove down from Philadelphia. The only major Chicago crime figure who was not there was Bugs Moran, but one other Chicagoan did attend who was, in his way, as powerful as Al Capone, who knew that he could not afford to ignore or offend him.

  Moses Annenberg was well on his way to building the publishing empire that started with the Daily Racing Form and ended with TV Digest and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His rise was meteoric, and by 1929 he was feared by many as the most dangerous and powerful non-Italian racketeer in the country. The distrust and dislike between the two men was mutual, but Capone knew better than to ignore or offend Annenberg. Both men were careful to hide their private mutual distrust behind a public show of cordiality.

  The criminal group that met in Atlantic City brought new and different approaches to conducting gangland business, many of which had originated with John Torrio and were further implemented by Al
Capone. They were still largely separate criminal entities; they were cooperating simply to make as much money as possible while avoiding bloodshed. All the newspapers sent reporters to cover the event, from the New York Times to every newspaper in Philadelphia and Chicago. They all contributed to wire services, so every paper throughout the country had swift access to everything that happened in the Atlantic City meetings. Because reporters were barred from most access, they resorted to creativity in what they wrote. In many accounts, Capone was quoted at length, not only because he provided the most colorful copy, but also because the other gang bosses took care to avoid publicity.

  Capone said the same thing to everyone. He gave the impression that he was speaking with all due sincerity when he said there was enough business in crime to make everyone rich, so it was time for the rulers of all the fiefdoms to stop killing each other and treat their daily doings as just another business. He said they should all learn to go about their murder and mayhem as simply another job, one to be put aside for another day when they went home at night to have dinner with their wives and families. He also claimed that much of the three-day convocation had been devoted to drawing up a written agreement that they all consented to sign.

  Much speculation has surrounded what actually went on in the meetings, but all the rumors end in a consensus that the attendees did agree to form a loosely allied—but still separate—confederation of crime that would let them create and rule over mutually agreed-upon areas in different parts of the country. In Capone’s case, it meant that the feuding gangs throughout Chicago were to stick to their own territories and try to avoid bloodshed. Each gang controlled its own fiefdom, but if the statutes that were released to a reporter from the United Press wire service were true, the power in Chicago would mostly be shared by Torrio and Aiello, which was a definite insult to Capone. Although long gone from Chicago and no longer in charge of the Outfit’s day-to-day functioning, Torrio was still considered the gray eminence who had the final say. If such a plan as the Atlantic City statutes had gone into effect, Torrio would have been the big winner, reaping most of the money for the Outfit; Joe Aiello would have shared it, but, more important to Aiello, he would have held most of the power, and that was what he really wanted.

  Capone knew better than to stage a public protest while at the meetings, for he knew that none of these larger-than-life personalities would consent to any diminution of their empires. He knew they would never agree to put aside their guns and stop the killings and nothing would really change. By his reasoning, things would eventually calm down, and in the meantime all he had to do was to get himself safely out of harm’s way and wait. However, with the likes of Bugs Moran and Joe Aiello gunning for him, he knew there was plenty to worry about right now.

  He knew how much he was envied and hated and how many “hits” had been put out on him in Chicago. Moran was determined to avenge the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; Aiello was still offering $50,000 to whoever managed to murder him; the Unione Siciliana was not going to surrender its sovereignty to any Neapolitan, least of all him; and there was a growing number of smaller Sicilian cohorts who wanted revenge for the killings of Scalise, Giunta, and Anselmi. Also, the New York contingent was still simmering over his audacity in killing Frankie Yale, on their turf and without their permission. So many groups were determined to kill Al Capone that there was a very good chance that if he went back to Chicago directly from Atlantic City, he might not live another day.

  Nevertheless, Capone was determined to operate from a position of strength, which he demonstrated by going to Atlantic City unlike all the others, who took their usual flotillas of goons and gorillas. He took only the three people he trusted most: Frankie Rio as his only bodyguard and, to protect the Outfit’s business interests, the treasurer, Frank Nitti, and the business manager, Jake Guzik.

  Although the agreement to divvy up the spoils geographically was created in dead seriousness, the newspapers provided much humor about how it came together. Bugged rooms were a serious concern, so the mob leaders held many of their meetings on the famed Boardwalk, taking walks in small groups of two or three or riding in the wicker carriages that carried them past the parade of tourists who gaped in starstruck awe at the unusual sight before them. They were all well and fashionably dressed, most of them in fairly discreet fabrics and colors. Everyone, that is, with the exception of Capone, who sported his usual shiny materials, flashy colors, and pale pearl gray fedora. Not surprisingly, he became more than an item of conversation among reporters who covered the gathering; he became a major item of business on the mobsters’ agenda.

  He was just too much of a publicity hound to suit the others, and because of him more than the usual contingent of reporters who followed the mob were there, eager to snatch up every scrap of information and, if there was none, to make up what they did not actually see or hear. After all, there were reams of daily copy to file, and Al always provided excellent material. When he said he would rather the newspapers didn’t print a line about him, no one paid attention.

  They issued banner headlines speculating on whether he was retiring or being pushed out after he gave his canned reason for asking reporters not to write about him: “No more brass bands for me. There’s a lot of grief attached to the limelight.” Through reporters, he posed rhetorical questions to his fellow mobsters, asking what they were aiming for, to “get yourself killed before you are thirty?” He had some good advice for them all: “You’d better get some sense while a few of us are left alive.”

  He knew what he had to do to stay alive, and once again it was to follow Johnny Torrio’s example. Capone decided to do what Torrio had done in 1925, when he allowed himself to be sentenced to nine months in the Waukegan, Illinois, jail, but this time nowhere near Chicago. He heard there was a pretty good prison in Philadelphia, far enough away from imminent danger and in a city where officials were known to be easily persuaded to look the other way by some of the very people who were with him in Atlantic City. One or two months there would be just the ticket. Mae could be counted on to provide his jail cell with every luxury he wanted, and the faithful Frankie Rio was ready to join his boss in getting himself arrested so that he would have full-time protection even in jail. Al Capone could rest, relax, and recoup; what more could an exhausted gangster want?

  Unfortunately, it didn’t work out exactly as he planned.

  Chapter 13

  IN PRISON

  Mae was in Miami and sheltered from most of Al’s travails, but in all of their daily telephone conversations she implored him to settle his problems and come to live quietly on Palm Island. As for Sonny, the fear of kidnapping was always uppermost in Mae’s mind, but even though Sonny was at the age where a father’s presence was important, and much as Al loved him, they both knew what a difficult time the boy would have if he was seen in public with his father, or the damage that could be done to Sonny if they were together when an assassin came gunning for Al. If there was no other way for Al to ensure their well-being than by staying far away from them, then that is what he would do.

  He did not tell Mae until he was ready to put his plan to keep himself safe into effect, but he knew what he was going to do even before he went to Atlantic City. When the conference ended, he would pretend to be returning to Chicago via Philadelphia but instead would follow Johnny Torrio’s lead and make sure that he went to jail. He probably talked it over with Ralph, Jake Guzik, and Frank Nitti (who was becoming increasingly important to the Outfit), and the night before he took action, he told Mae but instructed her not to tell his mother.

  Mae had become a full-time resident of Florida now that Sonny was happily enrolled in school and wanted to spend vacations there playing with his new friends. Two of her sisters and a brother were also living nearby, so she had pleasant company. Unfortunately for her, Teresa liked Florida too and was often a long-term houseguest who no longer asked permission to take over the kitchen and express strong opinions about how the entire household shou
ld be run. Mae generally ignored her, for the mostly secluded life she led on Palm Island suited her much better than Chicago, where not only Teresa but also Mafalda watched her every move as closely as did the reporters and photographers who followed Al. Despite the constant stream of people in and out, the guards at the gates, Al’s bodyguards in the house, his mother, his brothers, and their retinues all being there, Palm Island was Mae’s refuge, and she reveled in being there.

  Teresa and most of the rest of the family were in Chicago, however, when Mae called to tell them that Al had been arrested. Once the newspapers began their breathless reports of what had happened, the family agreed that they needed to do something to counteract all the negativity, so they invited reporters into the Prairie Avenue house to present their side of Al’s story. When one looks at the barrage of press coverage the occasion generated, the kindest way to describe the family’s efforts is to say that everything they tried to do backfired. Teresa was almost sixty, relatively young looking and in good health, but at that cultural moment sixty was considered old age, and that was how she was portrayed, as a doddering old woman. Of Ralph they said nothing, for he was noticeably absent. Albert was now using a variant of Teresa’s maiden name, Rayola, and although he held low-level jobs within the Outfit off and on throughout his life, he was such a cipher that the press mostly ignored him. Apparently, he said nothing quotable, nor did John, who was lackadaisically shuffling through daily life and hoping to follow Al and Ralph. Matty was still enrolled at Villanova—technically, for he paid no attention to his classes and was determined to quit.