Al Capone

by Deirdre Bair

  There was a repeat version of his earlier return to Chicago from Florida as reporters who had boarded the train at Philadelphia and every city along the way detrained between Champaign and Rockford to scour every location between there and Chicago for Capone. By the time they gave up on trying to find him in Rockford, they rushed off to Chicago, all of them knowing that he had to appear before a federal grand jury on March 20 on charges of tax evasion. They were frustrated there, too, because he did keep the appointment, but not on that day. He learned that the city’s deputy police commissioner, John Stege, was still smarting over the slayings of Moran’s men on St. Valentine’s Day the previous year and wanted to nab him for questioning before the Feds could place him in their jurisdiction and out of the city’s reach. Stege had not only assigned every policeman and detective in the city to be on the lookout for Capone but also assigned a rotating group to watch the Prairie Avenue house and arrest him the minute he showed up there. Ralph was there and, when his brother phoned, told him not to go there or to Jake Guzik’s, because Stege had staked out his house as well.

  Capone was willing to be questioned by federal officials, but he was adamant about avoiding any legal entity connected to the city. Newspapers later quoted him as saying he was perfectly willing to subject himself to something along the lines of a “Federal Inquisition” but not to a “grilling by ‘them ignorant coppers,’ as he scornfully terms them.” Most of the reporters decided to join the police stakeout at the Prairie Avenue house, where Ralph, who usually answered the telephone, said truthfully that he had no idea where Al could be. Because he had chosen the car and its drivers, he knew they were taking a circuitous and zigzagging route that would leave them undetected.

  This trip was only one of the many road trips Al Capone supposedly took that have given rise to legends very much in the manner of the old saw “George Washington slept here.” If even half of those stories were true, it would have taken the Capone entourage at least a month to reach Chicago because hotels in every small town between there and Philadelphia claimed he slept there. Reporters did know about some of the booze hideouts where gunmen on the run holed up in Indiana, southern Michigan, and Illinois, and they had their sources and stooges in those localities primed to report any sightings of Capone. But if he did use any of them on this trip, he was careful to get in and get out before they were alerted to his presence. The journey might have seemed haphazard, but the route had been carefully planned beforehand, and Al Capone eluded them all.

  Eventually, he did go to Rockford, just long enough to arrange for secret transportation to his hotel headquarters in Cicero. The last surviving member of the generation who knew him described him during interactions with the family as his usual gentlemanly self but also uncharacteristically quiet and removed, spending most of his time when not on the phone seated at the dining room table looking over “the books” they kept for him in the upstairs closet. He was gone early the next morning before the household awoke to face the day, and according to the stories told by their descendants, they continued to store his books until some of his men took them away during one of the regular deliveries of food and money they brought throughout the Depression. But they never saw Al Capone again.

  Enough time had passed for Capone to have reached Chicago, so reporters were reduced to congregating at Prairie Avenue, desperate to find him and to write something other than how he had outsmarted them all by disappearing in plain sight. Family members had been burned so badly from their one brief foray into trying to manipulate press sentiment that they did not answer the phone, so those reporters who had various kinds of clout among the staked-out police were able to cross barriers and pound on the door. It was only opened once, by Ralphie, who gave them a smart answer about what kind of pasta his grandmother might cook for Uncle Al’s homecoming before he slammed the door in their faces. He was only twelve, but he learned quickly about how the family responded to outsiders.

  Reporters eventually learned of Capone’s whereabouts through a legal ruse, when a wiretap was placed on the family’s phone and news of a conversation got around. The name of the Treasury agent Eliot Ness meant little then, but it was he who ordered wiretaps on the house as well as on Ralph’s suite at the Western Hotel (as the Hawthorne had recently been renamed). Ralph used the hotel as his headquarters and had carelessly and stupidly resumed the direct management of his bootlegging activities. Ness also placed wiretaps on the several speakeasies where Ralph routinely made phone calls, and here again he was careless about what he said. Because of his brother’s success in averting every conviction for each criminal act he was ever accused of, Ralph thought the same invincibility would extend to him. Unfortunately, he was so shortsighted that he made an easy target for the Feds.

  Ness got permission for wiretaps after Ralph was indicted in October 1929, on seven separate counts of attempting to defraud the government of tax revenues, the same charges that would later be leveled against Al. The first six charges against Ralph were based on his flashy displays of wealth, starting with his large and vulgar diamond ring, his several expensive automobiles, his suite at the Western Hotel, and his flagrant and public spending on women, elaborate parties, and heavy betting. Still, he brazenly told the IRS that he had no income and therefore owed no taxes. Even more foolishly, he cried poverty and refused to pay the less than $5,000 the government originally fined him; by the time of the seventh indictment, he had incited an investigation that revealed he had more than $25,000 in one of his bank accounts. That finding led to the most serious charge against him, of attempting to defraud the U.S. government.

  Here again, he proved his obtuseness: instead of settling the tax bills, he demanded a trial and got it. It was to take place in May 1930, two months after Al was released from prison, and by that time it would be too late for Al to try to use his connections and intercede in a wiser and more cautious manner. The only intelligent thing Ralph did throughout the government’s investigation was to hire an excellent lawyer, but even that was futile, because the presiding judge was the incorruptible James H. Wilkerson, whom the Capone brothers would come to know well and who would make short shrift of both their legal representations.

  The wiretaps on Ralph had a beneficial side effect for law enforcement officials and the newspaper reporters who curried their favor: they provided up-to-date information about Al’s whereabouts and activities. He had been a model prisoner at Eastern Pen, quietly self-effacing, always with a smile and a readiness to cooperate on anything he was asked to do. He was the same with the Rockford family, still handing out $100 bills to the now-grown children. He had been the perfect gentleman for almost a year, and now it was time to release the pent-up emotions he had kept under stringent control throughout that time.

  He needed to release all the seething energy of having to sit on the sidelines and watch as Torrio, who ran the Outfit in his absence, gave long-distance orders about how to govern the Outfit and Nitti assumed more and more authority. He had to think about what could be done to heed the warnings Jake Guzik was raising about how revenues on every front had declined now that the Depression had gripped the entire country. For the next several days, Capone huddled at the Western with Guzik, who told him how sales of beer and whiskey were steadily dropping so that if projections were correct, by the end of the year they would be two-thirds less than what they had been in the heyday of the 1920s. The bad news continued, because gambling and prostitution were down as well.

  Occasionally, they conferred with trusted associates who kept the accounts or brought in reports from the various enterprises. The Outfit was still making money, but economic uncertainty ruled the land, and the little guys they had counted on to buy their booze, visit their brothels, and gamble their paychecks were either suffering hard times or, worried that they were coming, were holding tightly to the little they still had.

  For Al Capone, there were troubles on every front. The Prairie Avenue house was still surrounded by police, so he was unable
to go there to see his mother and the family. Unable to appear anywhere in public without being hounded, he stewed at the Western, drinking himself into an incoherent drunken rage. The wiretappers learned he was there when one of Ralph’s foot soldiers phoned and begged him to come get Al before he could do any more destructive damage.

  “You’re the only one who can handle him when he gets like this,” Ralph’s caller told him, adding that Al had drunk himself into such a stupor that they were sending “for a lot of towels” to clean up his messes. While he was throwing furniture and destroying the premises, he managed somehow to burn his hand quite badly. When reporters asked about it, he invented the excuse that he had put his hand on a hot pan while cooking roast beef. They all knew he never cooked, but they still reported the incident with his tongue-in-cheek explanation as if it were true.

  Once he sobered up, Al sent for Mae. She managed to elude the press as she slipped into town and was spirited to Cicero. He took a private suite for her at the Western, and whether or not either of them invited Mafalda to share it, she was there as well. He trotted both women out briefly when he began another public relations campaign in March 1930 to counter all the negative publicity that his release from prison had generated. The first interview he granted was to the Tribune’s Genevieve Forbes Herrick, one of the few female reporters on staff with the then-enviable reputation as a “front-page girl” for her ability to land interviews with elusive subjects. In the words of John Kobler, what he told her was a “tirade of self-justification.” He claimed Mae was only twenty-eight when in reality she was thirty-two, and he urged the reporter to look at her hair, nicely colored blond to cover her original brown but which he claimed had turned gray because she was so worried about “things in Chicago.” Painting himself once again as “poor picked-upon Al,” he concluded his protestations of innocence with the usual excuse he offered time and again: that no matter what happened in Chicago, he was unjustly blamed for every terrible thing, starting with the Chicago fire.

  Later the same day, he continued his saga of self-justification when he gave a second interview, this time to a reporter from the Chicago American. Here, he repeated his oft-made contention that he was only providing a service to the American public and that no one was being forced to take a drink or enter a gambling establishment. He used a euphemism to disguise the brothels he was ashamed of running when he said no one was being forced “to go to a place to have some fun.” All very true, but nonetheless all very illegal.

  The Capone women did not see much of Al over the next several days as he sobered up and prepared to appear in the office of Chicago’s deputy chief of police, the loudmouthed braggart John Stege, who had been boasting that he would arrest Al Capone the minute he appeared in the city. Because he had no grounds on which to make such an arrest, Capone called his bluff by leaving the Western in Cicero and moving very publicly into his suite at the Lexington in the heart of downtown Chicago. When Stege did nothing about such a blatant challenge, Capone decided to further capitalize on publicity by taunting him with a personal visit on March 21, 1930.

  First, he got in touch with his favorite photographer, Tony Berardi, asking him to come along and take pictures, and to make sure nothing untoward happened, he also took his lawyer Thomas Nash. They went first to police headquarters, where Capone strode up to the desk to ask if the chief of police, the state’s attorney, the U.S. attorney, or any other official—anywhere—wanted to see him. He was told no one did, so, still determined to stage an event and surrounded by a phalanx of policemen, he and his entourage went on to the federal building, where they found Stege. An exchange ensued between him and Capone in which they traded taunts that quickly degenerated into a foolish non sequitur.

  Stege asked if Capone had played a role in gangland hits, giving the examples of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and Frankie Yale’s murder; Capone proclaimed his innocence with his usual retort, that he was blamed for every heinous killing that happened no matter where. He indulged in a bit of gloating when he said no legal accusation against him had ever resulted in a conviction and that his only reason for calling on Stege was that he knew there were no grounds to arrest him. He wanted the deputy chief to be aware of his real reason for being there—the very fact that he could stroll in and demand a meeting showed how ineffectual the Chicago police were—but he was careful to say this in softer language, merely stating that he wanted to make sure he was neither harassed nor arrested whenever he moved about the city.

  Stege must have been frustrated by his powerlessness, but he still tried to exert authority. He knew that the Miami police were trying to invent some reason to arrest Capone whenever he showed up at Palm Island, so Stege shouted that his luck had run out and asked when he would leave the city. He knew that the day before Capone bearded him in Chicago, Miami police had raided the Palm Island house and confiscated a cache of liquor before arresting a group of men that included his brothers John and Albert. Undaunted, Capone told Stege he planned to go to Florida as soon as he could get away. Stege told him he was free to go before once again making the unenforceable threat that the next time he was in Chicago, he would be put in jail. In an attempt to defuse the increasingly testy exchange, Al’s diplomatic lawyer, Thomas Nash, who had a great deal of earlier experience representing mobsters like Dean O’Banion and Bugs Moran, responded by saying arrests without cause could not happen in America and even in Russia, Lenin and Trotsky had rebelled against them. Stege must have been semi-hysterical when he shouted, “I hope Capone goes to Russia.” Al Capone left his office on that high note and prepared to go to Florida for the tranquillity and privacy he sorely needed.

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  Even though arrest without cause was not supposed to happen in America, the governor of Florida still decided to try. On March 19, Governor Doyle E. Carlton sent telegrams to every sheriff in the state telling them to arrest Al Capone on sight the moment he crossed the state line. Capone’s attorneys in Miami demanded that the governor explain how he could keep a taxpaying American citizen and property owner who was not accused of any crime out of his own home. When the case was presented to the federal judge Halsted L. Ritter, he agreed with the lawyers, albeit reluctantly in the gangster’s case, that the United States was a country of laws, enforced “without reference to popular opinion or consequences.” He must have been dismayed when the headline for the story about his ruling ran in the Miami Daily News: “Federal Judge Weeps for Abused Al Capone.”

  The Miami paper’s headline was typical of the response that the police harassment there and in Chicago generated in Capone’s favor. Throughout the United States, civic groups, private citizens, even chambers of commerce, all vied to tell him he was welcome to visit them at any time. In Monticello, Iowa, voters went beyond asking him to visit; in a mayoral election, more than fifty citizens cast write-in ballots for Al Capone. Chicago newspapers reported that as far away as Java, Burma, and the Philippines “the [name of] the Scarface is as well known in the Orient as it is here.” He was that popular and that much of a folk hero.

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  Ralph’s trial began three weeks after Al was released from prison, with the Honorable James H. Wilkerson presiding in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Ralph feinted and parried, lied and evaded, but the prosecuting attorneys were clever. They made scant mention of his illegal activities to concentrate instead on his nonpayment of federal income taxes. It was fairly easy to prove that Ralph had a lot of money because he had opened multiple accounts under fictitious names in the Pinkert State Bank in Cicero that were quickly traced back to him. By the time of his trial, the government had amassed so many records of his misdeeds that a truckload of supporting documents had to be wheeled into court. Ralph still tried to wheedle out of the charges by claiming that his occupation was gambling and his banking practices were how all gamblers dealt with their winnings. As his defense, he argued that because the law allowed for gambling losses to be deductible against winning
s and because his losses were far greater than his winnings, he had not violated any laws. The trial lasted for two weeks, but the jury was not convinced by Ralph’s defense and took only two hours to find him guilty on all counts. His lawyers immediately began appeals. Judge Wilkerson sentenced Ralph to three years in Leavenworth prison and fined him $10,000. When Ralph heard the verdict, he was reputed to have said, “I don’t understand this at all.” He was not the only one.

  Ralph’s incomprehension was similar to Frank Nitti’s a year later, after he was also tried, convicted, and sent to Leavenworth. Nitti’s defense was that he didn’t pay income taxes because the laws were not clear, and he had a point. Confusion originated after the 1926 ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, that income from illegal sources could not be taxed, was reversed in 1927 by the Supreme Court in what came to be known as the Sullivan decision. It held that gains from illicit traffic in liquor are subject to income tax, and the Fifth Amendment does not protect the recipient of such income from prosecution for failure to file a tax return on such income. United States v. Sullivan took its name from the trial of Manley Sullivan, a small-time criminal whose defense was that if he declared illegal income, it was tantamount to waiving the Fifth Amendment rights that protected individuals from self-incrimination. In the decades since the Sullivan ruling, when bar associations and law schools around the country have reenacted Al Capone’s trial, the lawyers on both sides usually arrive at the same conclusion: that almost ninety years after the Sullivan decision, there were aspects of the ruling that were still unclear and questionable. Nevertheless, United States v. Sullivan was used in relentless pursuit against Frank Nitti and Jake Guzik, who were both convicted and sent to Leavenworth.