by Deirdre Bair
And so, still under Judge Lyle’s threat of arrest, Capone hid in plain sight, with the police turning such a blind eye to his presence that the CCC had to hire special investigators to track him down. Despite all his hideouts being known, it took several days before they found him enjoying a high school football game in Cicero, surrounded by bodyguards while police officers in full uniform stood there looking everywhere but at him and his entourage. He eluded arrest this time as well, for the warrant had been issued by Judge Lyle in Chicago and the game was being played in Cicero: Chicago police welcomed the excuse not to be able to make an arrest outside city limits, and Cicero police were not about to arrest Al Capone and hand him over to them. He had frustrated Judge Lyle once again, but he was smart enough to realize that discretion would be the better part of valor, so he left town, taking a circuitous route back to Miami via New York, after a strategy meeting with Johnny Torrio.
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Al had intended to stay in Chicago long enough to give Mafalda away at her December 14, 1930, wedding to John J. Maritote, but that honor fell to Ralph when Al decided to stay alone (except for bodyguards) in Miami. He was the only family member who did not attend. Mae claimed the title of the official matron of honor, which in reality she shared with Ralph’s second wife, Valma Pheasant. There were only three bridesmaids, for the bride had few girlfriends and never a boyfriend until the sudden announcement of her engagement. “Who would dare to risk dating Al Capone’s little sister?” Mafalda had always moaned bitterly to anyone who cared to listen, so when the betrothal was announced, rumors abounded that it was a marriage arranged to unite two gangland factions. The bride was eighteen and the only female in the Capone clan, and the groom, John J. Maritote, was the twenty-three-year-old younger brother of Frank “Frankie Diamond” Maritote, a mid-level member of the Outfit. John was allegedly in love with another woman and unhappy about having to give her up, while Mafalda told the press she was blissfully happy to be marrying her childhood sweetheart. It seemed to escape her (and everyone else, from the family to the media) that she could not complain of never having had a date if she was marrying the man she had supposedly loved all her life.
Al pulled out all the stops for his baby sister’s wedding. Despite the heavy snowstorm on that day, more than four thousand invited guests showed up at St. Mary’s Church in Cicero, and at least another thousand rubberneckers stood outside to see the bride. Mafalda was already a hefty girl on her way to becoming a stocky, overweight woman. Her size made her strong enough to bear the heavyweight ivory satin gown, balance the twenty-five-foot train, and carry a bouquet that boasted more than four hundred flowers. It was a colorful procession that entered the church on that gray day, with all her attendants in deep pink taffeta, large hats of the same color, and bright blue shoes. The men, most of them large and tough, were nervous and uncomfortable in tuxedos. Sonny and Ralphie smiled and looked happy as awkward young ushers, unsure of what they were supposed to be doing. Teresa, as the bride’s mother, was resplendent in an enormous fur coat (probably mink) that made her look like a rotund brown ball. Some newspapers reported that police officers and detectives tried to move inconspicuously among the guests as they took half a dozen or so outside the church to confiscate their weapons.
After the ceremony, the family, the wedding party, and selected invited guests (between three and four hundred) went on to a private reception, while Ralph’s Cotton Club in Cicero hosted all others who managed to fit themselves in. The wedding cake cost well over $2,000 and was colossal: at least ten feet long, four feet high, shaped like a yacht, and decorated in a tropical theme. Family photographs showed the bride standing to the right of it, looking at the camera with a tentative smile on her face, while the groom stood well away from her on its left, not looking at his new wife but frowning at the monstrously huge concoction.
Hawaii was supposed to be where they honeymooned, but some newspapers had them returning to Chicago from Cuba, and to this day family members do not know if they went to one or both places. Rumor had it that Al gifted them with either $50,000 or $75,000 and a new house, but once the honeymoon was over, the glum couple moved in with Teresa on Prairie Avenue. John gave his profession as “movie projector operator,” although he was more often seen in his brother’s company in various gang hangouts than in any theater.
The couple welcomed their only child, Dolores Teresa, on April 10, 1932. After that, with the exception of ceremonial occasions, they were seldom seen out together in public, even though they owned various mom-and-pop delis and pizza parlors in Chicago in which they worked side by side. They lived to very old ages and stayed married until the end of their lives, for the most part out of the public eye except for an incident in January 1933. They were nearly gunned down after a visit to John’s parents’ home as they walked to their car with Mafalda carrying her nine-month-old daughter. Every newspaper in the country picked up the story, giving much the same account as the paper that scooped the others, the Chicago Herald and Examiner, of how four gunmen jumped out of a fast-moving car and began to fire at Al Capone’s little sister. None noted correctly that the intended target was Frankie Diamond Maritote, who was not there. All the stories reprinted most of what the Herald and Examiner wrote, that when Mafalda heard the first shots, she screamed, fell to the ground, and promptly fainted. John and unnamed others hid behind their cars to fire back until the would-be assassins got back into theirs and sped away. Both Maritotes were unharmed, Mafalda was revived, and they went home to Prairie Avenue.
After that, their only public notice came whenever a reporter desperate for a story wrote something loosely described as human interest. These stories usually focused on how the little sister of the jailed mobster was now reduced to ruling a greatly diminished domain from behind the counter of a convenience store and how she never hesitated to unleash her wicked tongue on any customer who displeased her.
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Al Capone had no choice about returning to Chicago when his trial on the 1929 contempt of court charge was finally and firmly set to start on February 25, 1931. Judge Lyle’s warrant for his arrest on vagrancy was still active, but it was no longer a threat, because he had been soundly trounced in the Republican primary by Capone’s firm ally Big Bill Thompson, who was seeking reelection in the forthcoming general election. Although everything connected with politics in Chicago during the Prohibition era was colorfully outsized, this mayoral primary had been over the top, with the two candidates exchanging one hilarious insult after another. Judge Lyle found another sobriquet added to his list when Thompson called him “the nutty judge.” He responded by calling Thompson a “blubbering jungle hippopotamus.” All Chicago roared with laughter, and Al Capone was amused, thinking that his problems with Lyle were over now that Thompson was on his way to being firmly back in power. But like many other Chicagoans, he was surprised when the even more corrupt Democrat Anton Cermak defeated Thompson to take office in 1931 by the largest margin ever recorded. Capone was surprised but not dismayed, for he knew Cermak was a smart man with whom he could do business.
Al Capone showed up in court that cold February day in 1931 in “a sumptuous blue suit, accented by white silk hankie, pearl gray spats, and diamond studded platinum watch chain.” The suit’s material was “soft as cat’s fur.” The next day, he sported “a misty-morning gray ensemble,” and on subsequent court appearances most papers wrote that he wore a different custom-tailored suit every day, but their accounts differed as to whether it was brown, blue, gray, or other colors described as “bilious Sulphur” and “Shrieking banana.” In most stories, he sported “the inevitable pearl-gray fedora and a gold watch chain studded with countless diamonds stretching across his vest.” Usually, it is only women who garner so much media attention for their clothing, but with Al Capone the press paid as much attention to what he wore as to what was happening in the courtroom. Although he was discreet enough not to hold actual press conferences, he welcomed the reporters who followed his every mov
ement, especially those gathered outside the courtroom to report what he said off the cuff, even if they occasionally had to invent it.
The case was heard before Judge James H. Wilkerson in the first of Capone’s two courtroom encounters with him, this one without a jury. Capone was in court to explain why he ignored a subpoena from the grand jury by claiming he was allegedly too sick in bed in Miami to appear in Chicago. If true, the prosecution asked, how then could he explain being seen in the winter of 1929 enjoying himself at restaurants and racetracks in Miami and flying to the Bahamas for more sun and fun?
During the lunch recess for this trial, Capone had to appear in another courtroom to face the still-pending vagrancy charge. Another judge (not Judge Lyle) set his bail at $10,000 before “continuing” that case for another week. To secure the bail, Capone’s lawyers put up property they claimed he owned, valued at $80,000. When some courtroom observers asked his profession, he joked that he was in “real estate.” Nice work for a man who was supposedly without income and in court to answer the accusation of vagrancy.
He went back that afternoon to federal court and the first trial, where Capone’s Miami physician, Dr. Kenneth Phillips, was asked by the prosecution to explain how someone so ill could have been such a healthy and active man-about-town. The doctor was visibly uncomfortable under questioning, finally admitting that the affidavit to which he had sworn was not his work but that of the Miami lawyer who prepared it under Capone’s direction. Dr. Phillips said all he did was sign it when it was presented to him. He did not say it in court, but in later correspondence with Dr. Joseph Moore, the other physician who treated Capone, Dr. Phillips admitted how afraid he was of Al and his brothers, especially of Ralph, and of how he usually did what they asked.
Accurate testimony by the two nurses who took care of Al during his January 1929 flu followed. In those two weeks at least, Al was too sick to get out of bed, let alone gallivant all over Dade County. However, everything hinged on the date the subpoena was issued, in early March, when Al was surely recovered well enough to honor it. Based on the fact that he did not, Judge Wilkerson found him guilty and imposed a sentence of six months in the county jail. Capone’s lawyers posted bond and filed an appeal. This time he only had to come up with $5,000, but the press reported it, and the various agencies who had him under surveillance took careful note of it.
There was still the matter of the vagrancy charge, but as with so much associated with the politically toxic Judge Lyle, it became yet another fiasco. After several continuances, the case was not heard until late April and then with a different judge presiding. When the policeman who signed the vagrancy complaint was called to testify, he said he only did so as a favor to another policeman. Claiming innocence, he testified that he had no reason to arrest Al Capone, for he did not know the man, nor did he know much about him. The frustrated prosecutor reluctantly admitted that he could not find a single witness, policeman or otherwise, who knew anything about Al Capone, and the judge had no option but to dismiss the entire case.
And so Al Capone beat the vagrancy rap and was out indefinitely pending appeal of his conviction for ignoring the grand jury summons. He wasn’t worried, and he fully expected that with his various “connections” he would win the appeal as well. At the end of April, he was ready to resume business as usual, but the respite did not last long. On June 5, 1931, a federal grand jury indicted him on twenty-four counts of nonpayment of income taxes. This indictment he would have to take far more seriously.
Chapter 18
JAIL IS A BAD PLACE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES
The fall, when it came, was swift. Even as Al was winning one lawsuit and trying to delay the other, his adversaries were busy lining up their evidence and preparing to strike. The criminal grapevine, populated as it was by politicians, civil appointees, and policemen on Al’s payroll, lost no time in letting him know what was going on. But for whatever reason, he did not give the investigation the serious attention it deserved.
Agents from the Bureau of Internal Revenue were putting pressure on men who had been bookkeepers and general overseers in the Outfit’s various establishments with threats that they either testify before a grand jury or face serious jail time. Some of them were so terrified of Outfit reprisal that several had to be kept in witness protection until they could give their testimony in secret sessions. Frank Wilson and his colleagues were also pressuring other gangsters as well as those who worked directly for the Outfit to tell what they knew. Wiretapping was widespread, and the records of calls made to and from Capone’s phones in the Lexington Hotel were added to the burgeoning files.
There were other acts of chicanery designed to put pressure on reluctant witnesses who had no mob connections but who had either openly or inadvertently helped Al Capone to hide money; if they refused to testify, they were also threatened with indictment for perjury. An agent who was a skillful spy was sent to infiltrate the Outfit’s domain, and he and other stool pigeons collected incriminating information that was duly reported to Wilson. Ralph’s headquarters, the Cotton Club in Cicero, was raided dramatically in a scene that could have been filmed for a movie: customers screamed and tried to hide, liquor was seized and bottles smashed, workers were arrested, and the safe was opened with acetylene torches in the hunt for evidence. By the spring of 1931 as the investigation was coming to a close, the documentation collected by the prosecution was literally mountainous. Wilson sent impassioned requests to Elmer Irey for permission to relocate to a bigger office because his present space could no longer hold the almost two thousand documents collected by George E. Q. Johnson, on top of the several thousand more his own agents had gathered. Irey eventually granted the request, and the unending flow of new and incriminating documents soon filled the larger space as well.
Agents Johnson and Wilson had both worked as secretively as possible, but not the publicity-seeking federal agent Eliot Ness, who sought the limelight as much as Al Capone did. He reveled in being called a gangbuster as he and his men raided breweries and stills in and around Chicago, each time making sure the press was there to take his photograph as he struck heroic poses over gallons of illegal booze being smashed to pieces and going down the drains and into the sewers. Ness did do serious damage to the Outfit’s income and profit, but the real work toward conviction happened behind the scenes in the offices of Johnson and Wilson, who were painstakingly putting together a paper trail that led to conviction on charges of tax evasion and defrauding the federal government.
The file, designated (Special Investigation) “SI-7085-F, In re: Alphonse Capone,” whose official address was given as the Lexington Hotel, was started much earlier, on October 15, 1928, by the special agent then in charge of the Chicago bureau, A. P. “Art” Madden. Wilson did not become involved until May 19, 1930, when Elmer Irey sent him to Chicago to take charge. Starting on May 23 and continuing to October 20, 1931, Wilson and his team gathered documents and testimony in Chicago, Miami, St. Louis, New York, and Washington and also in “other points” such as testimony taken from convicts in Leavenworth prison.
One of the first big breaks in the case against Capone came about because of an unrelated 1926 raid on the Hawthorne Hotel’s Smoke Shop, when it was searched for evidence connected to the McSwiggin murder. Among the papers confiscated by the Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office were several ledgers that no one then deemed important and that were among the several thousand documents turned over to Wilson’s office after his probe began. Wilson described how he stumbled upon them in the self-aggrandizing memoir he published years later in 1965. Wilson wrote of his frustration when he “prowled the crummy streets of Cicero, where a twitch of Al’s little finger had the force of an edict, but there was no clue that a dollar from the big gambling places, the horse parlors, the brothels, or the bootleg joints ever reached his coffers.” When he did find potential witnesses, some were so hostile that if compelled to testify, they would prefer to lie rather than betray Al Capone; others were so afra
id of him and the Outfit that they either “evaded…or left town.”
Wilson wrote of how he found the ledgers late at night after an exhausting day of reading documents, when he accidentally stumbled on a brown paper packet in an unlocked file cabinet drawer. He was curious about what was in the packet, and when he opened it, he realized it contained ledgers kept by the bookkeepers at the Ship gambling house for the years 1924–26 that gave detailed accounts of money taken in from gambling and paid out to principals in the Outfit.
No longer bleary-eyed, Wilson snapped to attention as he realized that the initials and abbreviations of names stood for Al, Ralph, Jake Guzik, and several other mid-level operatives who were entitled to differing shares of the profits. On other pages, he found the takes and totals of every gambling activity, from roulette and craps to bets on horses. Adding them up, Wilson estimated that net profits over eighteen months—for just gambling and only for that single location—totaled more than $500,000. All of it had been neatly divided and doled out to the three principals, their underlings, and an entry listed only as “Town,” which he surmised was the code name for payola to police and other Cicero officials.
And so the ledgers provided the federal agents with proof that Al made plenty of money that he did not declare as income, but they needed more than just the books to proceed before a grand jury; they needed the verbal sworn testimony of those who kept them to buffer the written evidence. As Wilson told reporters almost three decades after the trial, “Hanging an income tax rap on Al Capone would be as easy as hanging a foreclosure sign on the moon…Evidence of lavish living wasn’t enough. The courts had to see income.”