by Deirdre Bair
Some reporters described the interior of the house as a setting filled with expensive knickknacks and other gewgaws: overstuffed, overblown, and in general bad taste. Some wrote of how Teresa tried to impress them in her best black dress, while others said she received them in an ordinary “house dress” (as a woman’s daily garb was called then). Some said her mixture of Italian dialect and “broken English” was charming; others claimed she was dour and sour as she loaded her table with Italian dishes. They wrote disdainfully about her food, neglecting to write about how much they relished eating it.
Mafalda got the worst of the press coverage. She was seventeen and had just graduated from high school, and like all good Italian girls of a certain class and upbringing she was living at home and waiting to marry the first suitable man who came calling. She had been in bed, recovering from a bad cold or flu, and she got up to greet reporters in a bathrobe. In various accounts, it became a sheer and slinky green negligee that showed her adult body to great advantage, especially after she was said to drape it “coyly” to show off one bare shoulder. The hints, if not the outright statements, were that she was showing off her body to announce that she was now ready for matrimony. In reality, Mafalda had grown to become a heavyset woman, short and squat, with unruly black hair and thick eyebrows. There was nothing pretty about her, but that did not stop reporters from describing her as “radiant” and “eloquent” or calling her a gracious hostess who invited them into her “boudoir.” Nothing like that would ever have happened in Teresa Capone’s house, especially with Mafalda’s big brothers there to make sure she was properly chaperoned.
What both women labored to do was to try to soften the public perception of their beloved Al. Mafalda came across in some accounts as arrogant when her intention was to defend loyally her brother’s reason for carrying a gun: “Would anybody expect him to walk the streets anywhere without protection?” Teresa insisted that if people could only know her son as she did, they would not write such terrible things about him. She was overwrought when she told them that Al was her “life,” and she adored him: “He’s so very good, so kind to us.” She pleaded with them to persuade readers who only knew him from newspaper stories to change their opinions; otherwise they would “never realize the real man he is.” Everything the two women said about the loving son and brother they knew at home was true, but of course it was not at all true of the man who conducted his grim business before the eyes of the world. Naturally, the reporters focused on that side of Al “Snorky” “Scarface” Capone, the one who was in the public eye. That was what their jobs required, so that was what they did.
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Capone made sure he went to jail in Philadelphia as planned, and the basic gist of the stories that were written about what happened there was true, that he and the ever-faithful Frankie Rio were arrested for carrying guns when they left a very public downtown movie theater. Later, most of the newspaper “gangsterologists” learned that Capone had carefully arranged for the policeman James “Shooey” Malone to be there when they left the theater and to go through the sham of finding concealed weapons. Capone had met and befriended Malone a year earlier at Hialeah racetrack in Florida, where he had also met John Creedon, the colleague Malone brought along to assist with the arrest. Both men had attended parties at the Palm Island house, and rumor (unproven but possibly true) has always had it that Capone paid each of them $10,000 to arrest him.
Capone, who never carried a gun if he could help it, and Rio, who usually carried for them both, made sure the bulges under their coats were conspicuous. It was a carefully stage-managed arrest, in broad daylight at one of the largest and most popular theaters on Market Street, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, and it did not take long for the press to pounce.
Before leaving Atlantic City, Capone and Rio made sure they had a few thousand dollars in their wallets, a rather small amount that they would need for fines, spontaneous handouts, and, if necessary, bribes. They did not anticipate needing the larger amounts they usually carried because they expected to be sentenced at their arraignment to a fairly comfortable week or two, perhaps a month, in jail. To their surprise, bail for each was set at $35,000, so they had to spend the night in the city’s Moyamensing prison while their high-profile lawyers argued that they were being treated unfairly. The lawyers were strident and vociferous, as was Rio, who really didn’t want to go to prison. Capone signaled for Rio to shut up, while he, relieved just to be in the relatively safe hands of the law, was polite and deferential. However, as soon as he heard how high the bail was set, he was deflated, knowing he would be imprisoned longer than he expected.
Capone appeared before a judge again in May 1929 and thought that his sentence would probably be for several months at the most, ideally giving him enough time to rest, recoup, and decide what to do next. It was another shock when the uncompromised and uncompromising judge sentenced both him and Rio to a one-year term ending in May 1930 in the notorious Holmesburg prison, where conditions were so punitive that prisoners had recently rioted by setting fire to their mattresses. Capone let it be known that any lawyer—anywhere—who could spring him from Holmesburg would receive a $50,000 bonus on top of his normal fees, but none were able to do so. He and Rio remained there during Philadelphia’s hot and humid summer until August, when enough strings were pulled that they were transferred to Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary.
Al Capone got the rest he needed at Eastern Pen because the warden gave him full run of the facility, allowing him to live there as if he were vacationing at a fine resort hotel. After his family’s public relations fiasco in Chicago, he told Mae to stay put and stay quiet in Florida and to tell Sonny that he was away in Europe traveling on unspecified business. Sonny was of the age where children overhear conversations at home, and he knew where his father was, and to make sure that he did, his classmates at school let him hear it from them. Enterprising reporters who had no real news to write invented the story that Al told them every time “his little son” saw a picture of a ship, he asked his mother if his father was on it and if it was bringing him home. Sonny was far too old and intelligent to have said such a thing, and even if he did, Al was far too protective of the boy to have told it to reporters. But at home, Mae did keep up the facade that Al was away traveling, and Sonny pretended to accept it, even though he knew she made her frequent trips to Philadelphia in order to turn Al’s cell into a downright posh apartment.
She had his own mattress and bedding shipped in, and she bought the latest, best, and biggest radio, one that cost the then-astronomical sum of $500. He kept the volume loud enough for other inmates to hear it, while he himself sat in his easy chair, reading under the lamp she thoughtfully provided, or at his desk, where he wrote his many loving letters to her. His feet were never cold, because she put thick and expensive rugs on the floor, and he was always warm and comfortable because he wore his own fine silk underclothes (which he kept in the capacious chest of drawers she provided). His hand-tailored wardrobe of suits and casual wear hung in a wardrobe she also sent. Mae saw that Frankie, whose cell was next to Al’s, enjoyed many of the same perks as his boss. Both men held court as they passed out favors to other inmates by adjudicating internal rivalries and dispensing gifts of money for their struggling families. They were highly popular among those who vied for their favors, and, more important, it provided excellent insurance, because their devoted following protected them from anyone who might have wanted to do them harm.
The only event that upset the daily equilibrium occurred in early September 1929, when Capone’s tonsils became severely inflamed and had to be removed. Dr. Herbert Goddard, a surgeon from the State Board of Prisons and a member of the prison’s board of trustees, performed the successful operation and afterward found a contingent of reporters eager to hear the results. He had nothing but praise for his famous patient, painting him as an ideal prisoner who was the picture of kindness, goodness, and cooperation. Dr. Goddard acknowledged that
yes, indeed, Al Capone was in the rackets, before going on to praise him for his “brains [and] a high degree of intelligence.” He was one of Capone’s staunchest boosters at the time as he argued with reporters who thought otherwise: “You can’t tell me he’s all bad after I’ve seen him many times a week for ten months.” Dr. Goddard had come to his conclusion freely and independently, for despite Capone’s trying, he never accepted a single gift or gratuity.
That was the thing about Al Capone: he made friends wherever he went because he was sincere in how he related to people. He genuinely liked to meet people whose lives were far removed from his own closed and encapsulated criminal world. He was curious about their families and their daily lives, their education, expertise, and interests. He liked to hear their stories; that is, until they angered or disappointed him. Then he could turn on a dime to become a vicious and relentless dispenser of justice and punishment.
Visitors to Eastern Pen were supposed to be restricted, but the warden and the guards did not enforce the rule for Capone, whose constant stream of trusted lieutenants came and went with a wink and a money-filled handshake whenever he wished to see them. Family members also came and went much as they pleased. Mae usually came to Philadelphia in a private train compartment, so discreet in her travel arrangements that she was never photographed or written about. The distances were too great for Teresa and Mafalda to get there routinely from Chicago, but they also traveled by train in private compartments on the few occasions when they did visit. Al didn’t want to eat prison food, and as Philadelphia was famed for its Italian community, Mae quickly found restaurants that were only too happy to prepare and deliver his daily meals. He ate well and left prison heavier than he went in, with one headline blaring that he had gained eleven pounds.
Capone was a frequent visitor to the warden’s office, where he sat at the desk to conduct his business and used the phone as if it were his own private line. He still made his daily calls to Mae in Florida and his mother in Chicago, but mostly he kept abreast of the Outfit’s business through frequent calls to Ralph and Jake Guzik. He became a good friend to the warden, who often sent his private car to drive the erstwhile prisoner to dinner at his house.
Capone’s work assignment was supposed to be in the prison library, but the “work” consisted of his occasionally browsing for books and magazines to take back to his cell. He liked to read magazines, especially those that kept him abreast of current events, financial affairs, and world politics. Reporters were often surprised by the knowledgeable and insightful comments he made. John Kobler had the good fortune to conduct most of his research during the 1960s, when many people who were present during Al’s incarceration were still alive. Kobler wrote that Capone was happy to invite reporters into his cell because their conversations broke up what might otherwise have been long and—after a while—boring days. Kobler cast a doubtful eye on many of the stories that quoted him effusively, correctly noting that Capone’s life was one of such routine that there was hardly anything new, leaving them to fill “column after column with the minutiae of his daily existence.” Some reporters translated his expressions of boredom into supreme discontent, with several headlines standing for them all: “Capone in Sixth Legal Move to Get Out of Jail” and “Scarface Al’s Lawyers File New Petition.” The lawyers certainly did file multiple petitions because this was what he paid them to do, but they all knew he was hoist on his own petard and would have to serve his full term. After a while, the headlines changed and in doing so correctly expressed the monotony of his days: “Capone Picks Cubs to Win 1930 Flag,” “Capone Doesn’t Go to Church on Sundays.” More intriguing was the breathless headline for the story written by one imaginative reporter who learned of his library forays: “Capone Reads Life of Napoleon.”
Capone allegedly told the reporter that Napoleon was “the world’s greatest racketeer” and that he could have “wised [him] up” about how to run his “business,” that is, the country of France: “The trouble with that guy was he got the swelled head. He overplayed his hand and they made a bum out of him.” He was probably thinking of himself when he said that Napoleon “was just like the rest of us. He didn’t know when to quit [and he made it] too easy for the other gangs to take him.” He sensed a kinship between himself and Napoleon when he added that Napoleon should have had “sense enough…to kiss himself out of the game.”
His insight into Napoleon’s failings eerily corresponded to a conversation he had with Frank Loesch at their secret 1928 meeting in Chicago before the Pineapple Primary. Loesch had asked Capone how he expected to “beat the law”; he replied that he would always beat it but would most likely “die at the business end of a shotgun.” In prison, he told reporters that the same thing would have happened to Napoleon if he had lived in Chicago, but in his case he believed in a very different outcome: “They’ll only get me when I’m not looking.” And there was no chance of this happening while he was in Eastern Pen.
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All in all, it was not an unpleasant life. Visitors today can see it for themselves as the prison has been turned into a museum that is one of Philadelphia’s primary tourist attractions, with Al Capone’s cell much as he left it. However, all vacations must come to an end, and his peaceful respite ended when he and Rio were released two months early for good behavior, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1930. Here, too, Capone used “pull” to make his exit, with the warden as his willing accomplice.
He knew, as did the warden, local elected officials, and members of various police boards, that his release was going to be a media event unlike any the staid City of Brotherly Love had ever seen. Capone knew that reporters were ready to form caravans that would choke highways as they followed him wherever he went, but even more troubling was the fear that other gangs might be lying in wait and gunning for him. It was more to ensure his safety than to divert the press that he proposed a secret plan that everyone quickly agreed made sense. It was put into effect on March 16, the day before the release was to become official. Capone and Rio were sneaked into the warden’s private car and taken to another prison in nearby Graterford. They were hustled into a part of the facility far removed from other prisoners, to stay overnight and wait until the legal hour for their release in the late afternoon on the seventeenth. At that time, a large car driven from Chicago by some of Al’s men pulled inside the gates, loaded the two ex-prisoners, and roared away toward Chicago and home. Depending on who wrote the story, it was either a Cadillac, a Packard, or a Lincoln. It might have been all three, because Al’s men took the precaution of using multiple vehicles as decoys. The ruse worked, and they were long gone when the warden stepped out the front doors of Eastern Pen and told the waiting crowds, “We stuck one in your eye. The big guy’s gone.”
Chapter 14
“THE ELUSIVE ‘SCARFACE’ AL”
There were howls of outrage from the Chicago reporters when none could track him down. Because they had no real news to write, it became a contest to see who could pen the most embellished take, and their articles became exercises in shrillness, frustration, and hyperbole. In one, Capone was “the grand mogul of Chicago’s gangland,” and he and “a select crew of men at arms” were said to have boarded a “Chicago Express” at the North Philadelphia Station. In another, he was “the elusive ‘Scarface’ Al” who vanished into “a new cloud” when the “Broadway Limited” arrived in Chicago without “the notorious passenger who had been reported on it.”
The Philadelphia papers did their share to contribute to the general hysteria. They were as furious with the warden as they were with Capone when they wrote how he was “aided by perfect cooperation from his former enemies—the police.” Of his secret departure, they could only complain that he “disappeared more mysteriously today than at any of the many times when authorities of the law have searched the continent for him.”
If the major metropolitan dailies had cared to look beyond their own private fiefdoms, they might have noticed how they were being pa
rtially scooped by two suburban papers that got his whereabouts not entirely but at least half-right. “Capone Here?” the Rockford Daily Republic’s headline queried. The lead paragraph outdid all other papers combined: “ ‘Scarface Al’ Capone, Chicago’s notorious gangland king often painted as the world’s most sinister racketeer, was reported to be on his way to Rockford today with a gang of personal bodyguards traveling in several high powered automobiles.” Not content with that, the story had them “fully armed and traveling in automobiles with bullet-proof windshields.” Unfortunately for this paper, its reporter was forced to admit that after all the hotels and the homes of his (unnamed) “relatives” had been searched, there was no trace of “Capone and his satellites.”
The nearby Belvidere Daily Republican offered another possible scenario: that he had taken the train as far as Champaign before sneaking off and getting into one of several Packard limousines, his going directly to Rockford while the others took alternate routes and served as decoys. The story reported that he was driven to the home of an alleged cousin named Phillip Vella for the express purpose of meeting with Mrs. Tony Lombardo, the widow of one of his Outfit associates slain in a gangland shoot-out.
Several things were wrong with this story: So many reporters had boarded the Broadway Limited, starting at Philadelphia and then at every stop along the way, that it would have been inconceivable for Capone to have been on it, let alone to have gotten off anywhere along the way. As for Mrs. Lombardo, at some point he would certainly have paid a sympathy call on the widow of the man described as his “left bower,” the slang expression of the time for a right-hand man. However, as Lombardo had died in 1928, it was unlikely that seeing her in 1930 was his first priority after ten months in prison.