Al Capone

by Deirdre Bair

  That Loesch called all his public enemies “prominent” was an interesting word choice. It certainly described Al Capone, by now a firmly established worldwide legend whose flamboyance made him deserving of first place, while Ralph’s rank of No. 2 was only because of his relationship to his younger brother. Jake Guzik made the list at No. 10 with one of the more colorful descriptions: “vice monger, business manager in the Capone Syndicate, paymaster in the bribery of politicians and public officials.”

  The CCC huffed and puffed as it put out a call for police officers to arrest every one of the criminals who made the list on the trumped-up charge of vagrancy, saying for every one rounded up, each police officer would be commended and given “creditable mention and special consideration.” No one took this directive seriously, first because “vagrancy” was such a vague, ill-defined, and unenforceable charge and second because so many police officers (by the commission’s own admission) were being paid off by Guzik.

  The phrase “Public Enemy” only helped to solidify the positive perception of gangsters identified with it in the public’s eye. The FBI adopted the phrase for the ubiquitous posters that hung in every post office across the land, and it became such an ingrained cultural byword that it was even the title of the Hollywood movie that made James Cagney a star. All these gangster glorifications made Al Capone even more famous and more of a target for the increasingly furious and frustrated entities of law enforcement.

  He was already larger than life, and his name had become a synonym for power both admired and feared, and like all such publicity there were two sides to his renown. There is a popular expression in Australia that tall poppies make for highly visible targets easily chopped down. Al Capone, the relentless publicity seeker, should have realized that he was the tallest poppy and therefore the most visible and that a modicum of discretion might have been advisable.

  How such a street-smart man could have disregarded all the warning signs once so many different organizations composed of outraged civic leaders banded together is puzzling. The men of the Secret Six were well aware of how Capone was idolized far more than he was vilified, and he knew that their political influence and financial clout reached to the highest levels of government and that they controlled the media outlets that would allow them to manipulate public opinion. They had more than enough of both money and method to turn the public against him, a public that, despite its better collective judgment, still mostly admired and adored him.

  But Al thought the Secret Six could never turn his fans against him, especially after the grudging admiration in the New York Times, which wrote that “the free advertising that has accompanied [his celebrity status] ought to be worth literally millions of dollars.” The paper even noted his transfiguration when he toned down (temporarily, as it turned out) some of his bilious green and sleazy yellow silk suits for custom-made “soft blues,” “modest grays,” and the other trappings of a “successful businessman.” The term “businessman” was one Capone had long insisted described him best, and it seemed he had been widely successful in planting that image when Fred Pasley’s 1930 biography was reviewed in the Saturday Review of Literature. The reviewer concluded that all Capone could be accused of was “supplying a huge public demand” for liquor and that his business acumen should place him on a par with other titans of industry and commerce, such as “Mr. Ford, Mr. Hearst, and Procter and Gamble.”

  Capone also counted on public-spirited generosity to keep the public firmly on his side, particularly after the Great Depression began: he established a soup kitchen that on any given day fed as many as two to three thousand out-of-work people. It was an altruistic stance, and it did keep the public more or less on his side; that is, until the rumors mounted that he paid for little of it himself but rather used bribery and extortion to get other businesses to stock his pantries. Rumors like this started the rumblings that encouraged many attacks against him, such as the one in Harper’s Magazine that called him “an ambidextrous giant who kills with one hand and feeds with the other.”

  These attempts to retain the public’s goodwill were certainly interesting, but they never seemed the result of a concerted effort on Al’s part, and they did nothing to curb his opponents. Capone’s descendants attribute his relative indifference to sheer exhaustion; it had been a stunning gravity-defying spree during the six or so years when he rose to become one of the richest and most powerful men in America. Getting to the top and then staying there took so much energy that he had few long respites aside from his stay in the Philadelphia prison. The occasional disappearances to Rockford or the few fishing trips on which he sneaked away with Ralph to the wilds of Michigan or Wisconsin served the same purpose, but they were few, far between, and of short duration.

  All his relatives insist that he was not ill but simply exhausted during the years 1929–31 and that there were no symptoms of the mental deterioration that later contributed to his death. The medical records kept by his physicians support their contention. Mae Capone’s pleas for him to retire and let someone else take over intensified during this period, and family members say he was so tired he actually paid attention to her and promised to try.

  One sign of his exhaustion can be found in how the remarks he had made earlier about wanting to retire proliferated during this time, especially statements about wanting to be able to stay at home without fear of attack, to be able to dine with his family and spend time with the son who (thanks to his mother) was growing into a fine young man. As his problems intensified throughout 1930, Capone admitted, “I’m no angel. I’m not posing as a model for youth. I’ve had to do a lot of things I don’t like to do. But I’m not as black as I’m painted. I’m human. I’ve got a heart in me.”

  “Yes,” wrote Dale Carnegie, author of the vastly influential How to Win Friends and Influence People. “That’s Al Capone speaking: the most sinister gang leader who ever shot up Chicago. Capone doesn’t condemn himself. He actually regards himself as a public benefactor, an unappreciated and misunderstood public benefactor.” Capone, according to Carnegie, defended himself by avoiding the reality of his criminal activity and insisting that he had spent the best years of his life “giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time.” Carnegie quotes a version of the remark Capone said many times previously: “All I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.”

  However, he was wise enough to know that retirement was not possible. “Once in the racket, you’re in it for life. Your past holds you in it. The gang won’t let you out. Murder, murder, that’s all this racket means. I’m sick of it.” He insisted he would be “the happiest man alive” if he could only go to Florida and live quietly for the rest of his days. Even as he said it, he knew it was a fantasy.

  ___

  Swanson’s directive to go after the money was paying off as first Ralph, then Jake Guzik and other members of the Outfit were being sentenced to prison for nonpayment of federal income taxes. As one after the other was convicted, there was no one Al Capone could depend on to run the Outfit, so it was up to him to stay in charge of operations. And yet, even though he knew that because of the convictions the others were facing, the CCC and the Secret Six would have their sights trained on him, he seemed passively indifferent as he sat back and depended on his lawyers to keep him out of jail.

  Throughout his career in crime, Capone had never been in awe of wealth and power, legitimate or otherwise, so if he had wanted to intimidate his wealthy and well-connected enemies through reprisals, he would probably have tried to do so. He seems to have done nothing to try to harm them, and to date no documentation has been found to show that he authorized any of his usual methods against these particular adversaries or the large staff they had assembled to assist them. There is no evidence either in legal documents, in public accounts, or within the memories of his family that he took the Secret Six seriously enough even to make any comment or express concern about them.

  Physical intimidation aside, there wer
e any number of levers Capone could have pulled in the media to counter the Secret Six. He had many reporters and editors on his payroll, so he had his own press outlets and could easily have responded to the Six’s negative stories. He could have used his people to organize a campaign painting himself as a philanthropic and highly public do-gooder whom the rich and powerful were harassing for selfish reasons of their own; he could have used class warfare to paint them as men who thought themselves above the law, waging a vendetta against ethnic citizens for no valid legal reasons. And yet he did nothing.

  All the activity against Al Capone that began in the spring of 1929 was coalescing throughout 1930. On the side of law enforcement, President Hoover was getting regular reports from Mellon, Irey, and others who reported to him. On the gangland side, Capone knew that within Chicago his rivals were well informed about the government’s fixation on his and his cohorts’ undeclared income. He knew they were counting on this distraction and lack of focus on running the various businesses to create opportunities for inroads (or worse).

  Still, Al Capone kept to his low-key, defensive media campaign about wanting to retire to the quiet life, and the many interviews he gave to that effect seemed to be working well enough with the public. Loesch was aware of how Capone was playing his “poor picked-upon Al” role for the press and got busy mounting a barrage of his own to counteract it. He told the Chicago Daily News, “If Al Capone is not murdered, the law will get him, or he will die in poverty.” It was an ominous prediction that became true in both parts, but Al Capone’s response was to appear indifferent, detached, and oblivious. In retrospect, he should have paid closer attention and taken a stronger stand.

  Chapter 16

  ON THE ROAD TO JAIL

  A new player entered the game to get Al Capone in March 1930 when Agent Frank J. Wilson began to focus on sending Ralph Capone, Jake Guzik and his brother Harry, and Frank Nitti all to federal prison. He boasted to his Washington superiors that they were only the warm-up for his “most strenuous efforts…making real headway” in building the case against Capone. Wilson bragged about being so effective that he had foiled Capone’s most “sensational method, to prevent further molestation of [Capone] and his gang.” Wilson claimed he had “reliable informers” who told him that Capone ordered his henchmen to murder him and the three other agents working with him: the U.S. attorney George E. Q. Johnson, Special Agent in Charge A. P. “Art” Madden, and the Cook County state’s investigator, Pat Roche. To support his contention, Wilson cited “imported gunmen” who had been spotted in Chicago “cruising around in a blue sedan bearing a New York license tag.”

  This astonishing claim takes on aspects of a silent movie shoot-’em-up in Wilson’s explanation, in which he said that the “tip” was “partly corroborated through information furnished voluntarily to the Chicago Tribune from a source considered dependable by them which was entirely unrelated to the original source which furnished us the above report regarding the plot to murder us.” It was a breathtakingly roundabout and convoluted defense for a highly dubious assertion, but Wilson and the other agents were still frightened enough to go into hiding while police searched for Capone so they could bring him in for questioning. They were frustrated when he could not be found because Cook County detectives on the Outfit’s payroll tipped him off, which allowed Capone to keep several steps ahead of his pursuers, moving between a variety of alleged hideouts in Cicero and elsewhere. Wilson claimed that these same detectives supposedly told Al that the Feds were wise to his planned assassination, which was the only reason he called it off and gave in long enough to show up and face his accusers.

  Wilson never offered any specifics about this alleged hit, so it must remain in the realm of unsubstantiated, undated fact. However, what makes it unlikely that Capone ever conceived such a plan stems from the three incidents that led the combined wrath of government and law enforcement to bear down on him: the firestorm that followed the murder of McSwiggin, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and Lingle’s assassination. All three turned what had been overwhelming public approval solidly against him, so it is unlikely that he would have risked losing even more support by taking such a glaringly visible action. Al Capone was a smart man who made the decisions about what would happen to his enemies—real or merely suspected—and who controlled whatever actions transpired, but he always did so from behind the scenes.

  Because of the trials and convictions of his Outfit cohorts and his own tax problems, frenzied publicity accompanied Capone wherever he went, so that was another reason why it was unlikely he would have ordered such public “hits” as the one on Wilson and his colleagues. For Wilson’s inflamed dramatization of this unproven allegation to be true, Capone would have had to be more than dumb, actually stupid. And he was neither.

  Nothing had yet been pinned on him, but research into every aspect of his public and private life was ramping up. A top secret report prepared at the start of 1931 by the Treasury Department’s Intelligence Unit gives an indication of the ferocious digging that was well under way. The report began by describing Capone as “without a doubt, the best advertised and most talked of gangster in the United States today.” That contention should have included the rest of the world, for long before he was tried, members of the foreign press were gathering in Chicago to devote “reams and reams of newsprint and magazine paper” to the “Big Shot,” another of the many names now tagging him. However, despite all the copy he generated, the writers of the intelligence report had to concede that “possibly some of the stories are true, but no doubt a great deal of the stuff printed originated in the fartile [sic: fertile] brow of some newspaper reporter or magazine writer.” The “punk hoodlum” who first arrived in Chicago had become “Capone, the immune; Capone, the idol of the hoodlum element; the dictator, free from arrest and prosecution.” He was indeed still free because every criminal case against him had to be dismissed “for the reason that no policemen could be found in Chicago who knew Al Capone!”

  “That Al Capone is shrewd, there is no doubt,” wrote the intelligence agent before using an ethnic slur to make his point. “Together with his native Italian secretiveness, [it] has made this case a most difficult one to handle.”

  ___

  From his so-called retirement in New York, John Torrio had been quietly masterminding Capone’s situation, just as he had done since the Atlantic City mob boss gathering and Capone’s subsequent imprisonment. Now that Guzik was in prison, Torrio was once again directing the day-to-day running of the Outfit, flying from New York to Chicago on the average of once a month to receive reports and issue orders. He oversaw the alliance holding the North Siders and the Outfit peacefully together, and now he had the urgent task of devising a strategy to spare Capone from a second prison sentence. Torrio told Capone to start a defense by hiring his own personal tax lawyer, Lawrence P. Mattingly, who had a respected practice in Washington, D.C. Capone did as directed, even as he continued to remain aloof and passively indifferent to his plight. In retrospect and with the perfect hindsight that goes with it, he allowed his lawyer to make decisions that did not serve him well.

  Capone had always been careful about distancing himself from all records of the Outfit’s profits, and he made sure that none were kept for how he spent his personal income. There were no bank accounts in his name; he used intermediaries to transfer money through telegrams and checks that were often written to third parties who used fictitious names and took care to disguise their handwriting. He carried huge wads of money and paid cash for everything; the house in Chicago was in his mother’s and Mae’s names, and Palm Island was in Mae’s. The Outfit’s books were kept in duplicate—some even in triplicate—and they were not kept in one place. The bookkeepers were trained to make references to Capone in an abbreviated, coded shorthand, and those ledgers were separate from the Outfit’s. Now the dilemma was whether to admit that he had made money in years past, even though illegal, and, if so, how much.

  The issue b
ecame whether or not he should offer to pay the Bureau of Internal Revenue on the chance that Mattingly could structure a deal that would allow him to admit to a certain income, pay the taxes and any fines, and then walk away from the threat of prosecution. The general thinking at that particular time was that the bureau simply wanted to collect money owed and did not want to expend the time or face the expense of taking tax dodgers and delinquents to court, and Mattingly decided to pursue this course. Hindsight provides serious flaws to the lawyer’s initial thinking: the bureau’s philosophy might have applied to other tax delinquents, but Al Capone was a different matter entirely.

  Al Capone came out of hiding and began to move around Chicago in March 1930. The bureau requested that Mattingly come in person to the office—and to bring his client with him. Because he was in court for a trial, he asked for and was granted a continuance until April 17, but he did agree to bring his client. It was a decision that led most lawyers who re-created Al Capone’s trial in the years since to reach the same conclusion: a wise counselor would never have agreed to put his client in such a precarious situation by complying. But that was exactly what Mattingly did.

  On the morning of April 17, as directed, he and Capone appeared in the bureau’s office before several agents and a stenographer. The recorded remarks showed that Agent C. W. Herrick of the Chicago bureau began the interview with an early version of what would become the law known as the Miranda ruling. Herrick told Capone that any statement he made would be subject to scrutiny in order to verify it, and anything he said in the meeting not only could be used against him but “would probably be used.” Contemporary legal scholars believe this is where Mattingly should have ended the interview and removed his client from the premises. Instead, he said Capone was there to comply with the request for a meeting but at no time would he admit either guilt or liability and that everything he said would be off the record. Obviously, the bureau’s agents did not agree to Mattingly’s demand, because they did not refrain from combing the text of Capone’s remarks to find even the scintilla of a lead they could use for further investigation.