by Deirdre Bair
Capone appeared to have settled into a quiet life in Alcatraz by that date. Johnston’s rules and regulations were so harsh that in their helpless frustration inmates retaliated by lashing out with murders, suicides, and every sort of violent attack. But when it came to Capone, for the most part his tormentors had moved on to other targets and victims; except for taunts and insults, proximity had become indifference, and he was pretty much left alone. He was more a symbol of their mockery and laughter, particularly for his shambling and lopsided gait. Even though it was a direct sign of his disease, it was of no real concern to officials. Occasionally, he mumbled as he shambled, saying something that had no connection to his current circumstances; less frequently but still often enough to be noticed, he uttered gibberish. Still, he seemed healthy, and because he was well behaved, officials found nothing to worry about until the end of January 1938.
Mae made her usual request for the monthly visit in February and this time with Mafalda. Johnston granted this one more quickly than usual but with his usual strict directives: she was to board the ferryboat that left San Francisco at precisely 10:00 a.m. on Monday, February 28. She knew that if she was not on that particular crossing, he could refuse to let her see her husband at all, so she was making arrangements to follow his instructions when the most serious incident to date occurred.
It was a Saturday, February 5, and Capone had trouble arising that morning. Instead of dressing in his workday coveralls, he dressed in the blue suit he was only allowed to wear on Sundays and holidays. The guard chastised him and made him change, after which he followed the guard to breakfast but was unaware of the time or the meal he was to eat. He was allowed to return to his cell, where he was unsteady and delirious, gagging and trying to vomit. The prison doctor was summoned, and he realized immediately that something serious had happened. Capone was taken to the prison hospital, and a specialist was summoned from San Francisco.
By Tuesday the eighth, headlines to lead stories in daily papers around the world read, “Al Capone Goes Berserk,” “Al Capone Loses Mind in Prison,” and “Al Capone Goes Insane.” All over America, listeners were glued to evening news broadcasts to hear the details, most of them highly exaggerated. Capone did resist the guards who took him to the hospital, but “the paunchy scar-faced immigrant” was never “strapped in a madman’s strait jacket.” No doubt he did hum the occasional Italian aria or spout incomprehensible gibberish, but he didn’t spit at inmates, nor did he spend hours making and remaking his cell bed because he was not there but in the hospital and in isolation. While in medical care, he was neither comatose nor at death’s door, even though he slept a lot and was often unaware of his surroundings.
Johnston did not have the good grace to inform Mae of Al’s breakdown, so the Capone family received the news the same way as the rest of the world, through newspapers and radio. Mae sent a telegram to Johnston on February 9 from Miami that began, “Due to the rumors,” for she had not been given any facts. One of the main rumors being bruited by the newspapers was that Al would be transferred to another facility, most likely in the East, where he could receive the care Alcatraz was not equipped to provide. Mae begged Johnston to tell her if this was true before she began the slow cross-country journey, because he might be long gone to the East while she was still in transit going west. She signed it “respectfully yours,” but Johnston gave her no courtesy or comfort, replying in his usual hard-nosed and disrespectful fashion: her husband was stable and unrestrained; no transfer was necessary, but one might occur in the future. He told her not to make the visit she had been promised but to stay in Miami and “await further advice.” He said he would not send her further reports about Al’s condition but would communicate his information to the director of the Bureau of Prisons in Washington. “In the meantime,” Johnston told Mae, if she wanted to know anything, she should contact Director Bates, and—although he left it unstated—she should hope for the best because he had no intention of trying to ease her anxiety. Johnston was a strict moralist who believed that inmates deserved the most serious punishment he could mete out, and he extended this view to include those who loved them.
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There were other stories about Al Capone’s breakdown, but they were given far less space in newspaper accounts. Most of them concerned two separate petitions by his new attorney, Abraham Teitelbaum. The first was to the Bureau of Prisons to ask that Capone be transferred to a facility where he could be given the treatment he could not get at Alcatraz. Although unnamed, it probably meant Atlanta, where the prison hospital was far superior. The second and equally important petition was to ask the Supreme Court to cancel the one-year sentence in Cook County Jail. Capone had enough deductions for good behavior in Alcatraz to make him eligible for parole on January 19, 1939, after which he was to be escorted directly to Chicago to begin serving the sentence there. Everyone in authority who was monitoring his case knew how ill he was and that a transfer to another prison hospital should have been granted immediately, but it was not.
He stayed on at Alcatraz for the rest of 1938, in the hospital rather than in his cell, undergoing treatment consisting mostly of weekly injections of the useless bismuth and tryparsamide and once even a lumbar puncture that confirmed tertiary syphilis. The medications were all given by injection, which should have put to rest the myth that he never sought treatment for syphilis when he first had it because he was so terrified of shots. He had injections throughout his remaining year at Alcatraz, and there is no record then or afterward that he did anything to avoid needles. The lumbar puncture also confirmed other signs of syphilis, both physical and mental. At times, his speech was slurred and he stumbled when he walked. Mentally, he had periods of grandiosity wherein he was going to reform the world and end the Depression by giving money and jobs to all who needed them. His devotion to Catholicism sometimes had him speaking directly to God and the angels.
And yet within days of the attack, he was still capable of clear and defined periods of lucidity, as can be seen in the letters he wrote to Mae and Sonny. Leaving Alcatraz in January 1939 was uppermost in his mind, as was reassuring Mae that he was completely recovered. But he also told her how he prayed to “God above to make me well, which she has and I thanked her for making me well and sure am in perfect health again.” In a letter to Sonny, whom he called “Junior,” he praised Mae for her devotion to them both and then told Sonny how proud he was of him at Notre Dame. Al was lucid enough to realize that Sonny might have had questions about his father’s career that for any number of reasons he was reluctant to ask. Al told him, “If you’ve got something on your mind that you want to keep between you us two [sic], not to hurt your dearest mother…what I’m trying to get at is this, maybe you’ve got something on your mind about your future. Son all I want you to do is not hold it back as your Mother and your dear dad will go to the limit for your health and future.”
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Teitelbaum was kept busy during Al’s last months at Alcatraz. Financial concerns weighed on the family, and money had to be found to pay the fines and costs associated with the federal felony counts, which were now assessed at a whopping $37,617.51. The weakness of the government’s case for his conviction was shown once again when it could not find any assets to attach. The Prairie Avenue house had been in Teresa’s name from the beginning, as Palm Island was in Mae’s. Nevertheless, the government served papers on Mae’s house, which Michael Ahern had unwisely told her she could ignore, and that bad advice then allowed the government to proceed toward foreclosure. Mae endured the strain of possibly losing her home from 1936 until two days before Al was due to be released in January 1939. By that time, Ralph had fired Ahern and hired Teitelbaum, who helped him arrange a $35,000 mortgage. Headlines described him as a “mob lawyer” because he had represented quite a few gangland figures; however, he was shrewd and thorough and served all his clients (but especially Al) well. Al’s brother John Capone (now officially John Martin and in Chicago at the time) took Teite
lbaum a cashier’s check for that amount plus an additional $2,962.29 in cash. Teitelbaum submitted it to federal officials in Chicago in full payment of the debt. The final amount included an extra $74.78, which was loosely categorized as “processing fees.” The government got its every last penny, but Ahern and Fink were not so lucky when they submitted their final bills: Ralph told them, in effect and in far more colorful language, to go away. And they did.
By the end of 1938, prison officials decided that Al Capone was too ill to be returned to the Cook County Jail after he left Alcatraz, and besides security there was too lax to house him. Federal officials overruled Judge Wilkerson, who wanted him back, and decided to keep him on the West Coast in a federal prison where he could receive good medical treatment while serving his last year in a strictly monitored setting. They decided on Terminal Island, a facility in Southern California just south of Los Angeles.
Getting him there involved laughably complex security designed in response to bizarre rumors. During the night of January 6, 1939, Capone was incoherent and rambling when he was awakened and taken from his hospital bed. The prison staff was on high alert because word had spread of the possibility that he would be abducted during the transfer, by either the Outfit, various regional gangland groups, or even bands of drunken kids out for a lark. All were supposedly ready to spirit him away to an undisclosed destination, but it appears that no one considered why any abductors would want him in his present condition or what they might do after they got him. Nevertheless, authorities were convinced the kidnapping might be carried out by someone who just wanted the thrill of trying to get away with it.
An associate warden headed the contingent that was put in charge of getting Capone to the Oakland train station across the bay from San Francisco, in darkest night and deepest secrecy. Two guards stood on either side of the befuddled prisoner, whose arms were handcuffed and legs were shackled to each of them. Other guards carrying machine guns surrounded them as they all got on board a night train going south. Still maintaining excessive secrecy, they left the train the following morning at the Glendale station north of Los Angeles and got into black cars that sped them to the prison, where A-85 became TI-397.
Beginning with his time in Atlanta, Al Capone’s medical condition was of particular interest to the doctors who worked for the prison system and were routinely rotated throughout the various institutions. The chief physician at Terminal Island, Dr. George Hess, had not previously been his primary doctor but did examine him in both Atlanta and Alcatraz and now was in charge of his care. He saw to it that Capone was not put through the usual processing for incoming prisoners but was taken immediately to the hospital, where he stayed until he was discharged on November 16.
Throughout his time at Terminal Island, the treatments that were begun at Alcatraz continued. Besides the injections of bismuth and tryparsamide, injections of malarial fluids were added to his treatment, for it was thought that inducing high fevers in patients would kill the syphilis. None of these pre-antibiotic remedies worked, and the disease typically progressed to the tertiary stage of dementia called neurosyphilis. His periods of lucidity continued to alternate with those of delirium. Guards who talked to reporters were happy to report that he was “nutty as a fruitcake” and gave florid descriptions of his behavior; visitors who were let in to provide various services to inmates told stories of how Al had found Jesus. And yet at the same time, Secret Service agents from Chicago who were sent to assess whether the decision not to return him to Cook County Jail was justified told reporters that he was in perfect health. Granted, all these stories were told by people who had self-serving reasons for telling them, but there was probably a modicum of truth in all of them. One above all rings true: Mae, who visited faithfully, told family and friends that her husband was just fine—which he was when in her company. Just being with her was enough to bring him back to reality.
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The longed-for day of his release finally arrived on November 16, 1939, but even then there were strings attached to keep him from going home to Palm Island. Instead of being discharged directly from Terminal Island, he had to make the cross-country trip by train to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where his release papers were processed. Afterward, Mae had to agree that he would continue inpatient treatment in a medical facility. Because he was released early for good behavior and because his full sentence did not officially end until May 1942, he had to accept the stipulation or else remain in prison. Mae had no problem agreeing with his prison doctors, who wanted him to go to Baltimore for treatment with Dr. Joseph Moore, one of the most respected physicians in the treatment of neurosyphilis.
Al Capone left Terminal Island on November 13 under the same cloak of secrecy as he had arrived. To bypass members of the press, who had gathered at Los Angeles’s Union Station, he was driven to San Bernardino and put on a train that headed east through St. Louis—not Chicago, for there was still a lingering whiff of fear that his men might abduct him. After everything legal was signed and sealed at Lewisburg, Al was put into a car with several gun-toting officials who took him to a spot on a highway near Gettysburg where Mae and Ralph were waiting in a car of their own.
The memorandum written for the Bureau of Prisons detailing the swap stated only that the exchange took place. There was nothing about the intense emotionalism of the reunion, when husband and wife, who had only seen each other through glass, embraced for the first time since 1931. The agents did not write about how the happy and tearful people inside the Capone car took off so swiftly for Baltimore, as if fearing that at any moment their happy reunion might be rescinded.
Chapter 23
THE ENDGAME
Al Capone was admitted to Baltimore’s Union Memorial Hospital directly after he was released to his family, and he stayed there until just after the 1940 New Year. Dr. Moore reluctantly agreed to take charge of his treatment only after making inquiries to the Bureau of Prisons about who would pay his fees. James V. Bennett, the new director of the Bureau of Prisons, advised him to be wary, because the government still could not find any assets to attach for payment of Capone’s back taxes. The family was financially hard-pressed, but they had hitherto found the money to pay for every fine the government levied. Mae and Ralph both assured Dr. Moore that he would be paid, and thus Al’s treatment began.
Dr. Moore had admitting privileges at Johns Hopkins Hospital and wanted Capone to be treated there. The hospital administrators were worried about the publicity such a notorious patient might generate and refused to take him. Moore also had admitting privileges at Union Memorial, so that was where Capone went. He was put into a private room with a connecting door to a two-room suite that Mae rented, one for her to live in and the other for visiting family. Mae also rented a large brick Georgian colonial house in a quiet neighborhood, where Teresa stayed, and she and Ralph often joined Mae in the hospital.
Here again, exaggerated rumors abounded: reporters claimed the family rented the entire floor of the hospital so they could empty it of all other patients (they could barely pay the $30 a day for the small suite); Al was said to have brought in a food taster because he was sure his food was being poisoned (he was often in states of unreality, but food was not something he obsessed about); he supposedly kept bodyguards, a barber, and a masseur on steady call (if his brothers could be called bodyguards, they were indeed there; the hospital barber came at regular intervals; and a masseur was part of the physical therapy program).
During his early examinations, Dr. Moore concluded that the disease had been in the advanced “paretic psychosis” stage since 1936, or perhaps even earlier. In notes that he knew other doctors might consult, he initially described the treatment in Atlanta and Alcatraz cautiously but firmly as “inadequate.” The Alcatraz doctors were the focus of his scorn as he noted that it took them until August 1938 to begin the “fever therapy” (malarial injections), even though Capone had presented behavior to suggest that he was “insane” six
months before that. And when they eventually did get around to inducing malarial fevers, the treatment was administered with flaws, leading Dr. Moore to call it more strongly “entirely inadequate.” It was not until Capone arrived at Terminal Island that serious treatment was begun, but by that time it was too late to slow the progress of the disease.
When Al Capone entered Union Memorial, he had deteriorated to the mental age of a seven-year-old. Dr. Moore described him as boisterous, physically and mentally overactive, and with “grandiose ideas, a marked tendency toward confabulation, euphoria, and lack of insight.” Ralph exacerbated Al’s behavior when he made the uninformed, grandiose decision to tell him to disregard what Dr. Moore prescribed because he was “a quack and [then made] a multitude of other nonsensical statements.” Ralph told Al not to worry because he would soon spirit him away to be treated by vaguely described “other doctors.” Al became irrational, angry, and violent, and Dr. Moore had a difficult time quieting him down; he had an even more difficult time relieving his patient’s ongoing anxiety as Al brooded and brought it up for the next month or so. Each time, he became agitated and uncontrollable in varying degrees.