by Deirdre Bair
His doctors were aware that the Capone family’s financial reality was straitened now that others had taken control of the Outfit and the Capone brothers no longer had access to unlimited sums of money. The brothers (usually Ralph) scrutinized every bill that was submitted and questioned every item on it, with the doctors trying to manage Al’s care while keeping enough distance to avoid acknowledging where the money came from. Ralph was supporting Palm Island, Prairie Avenue, and his Wisconsin businesses. His share of the Outfit’s intake barely covered all these expenses, and sometimes it did not. Sonny wanted to help, but he had a wife and three (soon to be four) daughters to support. During the war, his impaired hearing had made him ineligible for the draft, so he took a job in an airplane depot; after it ended, he bought a partnership in a restaurant and was working long hours to make it successful. The help he could offer was limited.
Occasionally, the financial uncertainty would become too much for Mae, and she would indulge in wishful thinking and say that it was only a matter of time until Al got better and could take his place at the head of the Outfit he had led for the six brief years from 1925 to 1931. The entire family vacillated between refusing to accept that Al would never again be the man they once knew and resigning themselves to a new life highly constrained by financial realities.
Al was aware that Ralph had taken charge of his financial affairs, and he seemed both relieved and content that he no longer had to deal with what some family members called “business.” In retrospect, they believe he had gone through “a major transformation” and was serenely happy to be free from his past professional life. He reveled in being a family man, a husband, father, and doting grandfather, and in his periods of lucidity he had no regrets about leaving the Outfit behind and seemed relieved to be free from it. The remarks he made during his glory days, of wanting to put that life behind him, were now actually possible, and even with diminished mental capacity he found enjoyment in his every day.
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Perhaps it was because of the many years of confinement in a tiny jail cell that Al was no longer comfortable in the large bedroom he had always shared with Mae. His sleep was disturbed, thus disturbing hers, until by chance they discovered that he was calmer and more likely to sleep through the night if he was in one of the two single beds in a small bedroom at the back of the house. He slept fairly well there, but Mae did not, so she was still in the master bedroom, where her husband sometimes joined her. He was with her there on the night of January 21, 1947, when she heard the unusual sound of what Dr. Phillips later called “stertorous” (labored) breathing. She knew at once that Al was dying and the endgame had begun.
Chapter 24
THE END
The end, when it came, was sudden and unexpected. In the psychological tests given at the start of 1947, Al had demonstrated a small improvement in mental age to somewhere between twelve and fourteen. Mae continued her loving ministrations, the rest of the household provided distractions that amused him, and the three brothers (Ralph, John, and Albert) were there to do the heavy work of soothing and calming him after an outburst and protecting him whenever he was out in public. No major changes appeared likely.
Thus it came as a shock to Mae Capone when she was awakened around 3:30 in the early morning hours of January 21, 1947, by her husband’s respiratory distress. The day just ended had unfolded like any other. Al had recently undergone a routine examination, and the doctors pronounced his health good and stable; he was active and had no physical complaints, and his laboratory test results were unchanged. When Dr. Phillips later pressed Mae for details of Al’s day, she told him that only one thing had been different: he was unusually “melancholic and disinclined to talk.” Mae reluctantly admitted that Al had tried to make phone calls she described in the vaguest terms as to “some of the relatives” and that he had “some difficulty” with them so he slammed down the phone. She was used to his moods fluctuating from one moment to the next, so she wasn’t concerned about his silence and depression, even though he had not exhibited these traits before.
In the last weeks of his life, Al had been free from the panic attacks that drove him to sleep in the small secluded guest room, so he was in his own big bed in the master bedroom next to Mae in the early hours of January 21, when she heard him gasping and snorting. She tried to prod him awake enough to drink some water, but he “strangled” when he tried to swallow it. Within minutes, he went into “a clonic type of convulsion” that came and went every several minutes. The rest of the household was awakened by her shouts to call Dr. Phillips, who arrived at 5:00 a.m.
By the time he arrived, the convulsions were occurring every three to five minutes. Al’s “limbs were spastic, his face drawn, pupils dilated, and eyes and jaws were set.” After medications were given, his body immediately relaxed, and within the next hour and a half he was awake and aware of his surroundings. Dr. Phillips engaged several nurses for round-the-clock care, and as Al’s condition stabilized, everyone began to relax. Two days passed, and by January 23 the seizures had stopped entirely, he was mostly conscious, and the paralysis on his face and in his arms and legs had abated. The only dangerous symptom he still had was the deep chest congestion that indicated bronchial pneumonia.
At first, no one was seriously worried that he would die, but despite oxygen, penicillin, and the newest and best medications to treat his heart failure, he grew steadily worse. The next day, his doctor called in cardiac specialists to confirm for his family, particularly the belligerent Ralph, that Al was being given the best possible treatment. Besides penicillin, he was given digitalis and Coramine, and there was nothing else to do except wait and hope that the medicines would cure the pneumonia and slow the progression of his heart failure.
Al Capone drifted in and out of consciousness several times on January 24, just long enough to recognize those attending him and give hope to his wife and family that he was going to get better. He was cognizant enough for the two older granddaughters to be brought into his room to say good-bye to the Papa they loved. It was one of the last times the two older girls walked up the grand staircase, holding a hand on either side of their mother. Mae took the precaution of having her parish priest, Monsignor Barry Williams, on call, and on January 21 he administered last rites and prayed with the family. It was good she did so, for on January 25 at 7:25 p.m., “with no warning whatsoever, he expired.”
On the death certificate, Dr. Phillips described the “primary cause” as “bronchial pneumonia 48 hours contributing apoplexy 4 days.” Al Capone’s death certificate also stated that he was “retired” from his “usual occupation.” With the exception of an occasional mention buried deep in the obituaries of a “paresis, a chronic brain disease causing loss of physical and mental power,” there was no mention of the underlying neurosyphilis, either on the death certificate or in any of the accounts that filled the front pages of newspapers around the world.
Over the years, rumors of what killed him have grown, with the one most often cited claiming he did not have syphilis but diabetes, which had been deliberately ignored during his years of imprisonment. His family, reluctant to feed the public’s appetite, did not bother to deny or correct this rumor when it emerged. If his syphilitic condition was mentioned, it, too, was couched in rumors that Al had been actively and punitively denied proper treatment in prison, the implication being that it was exactly what such an evil criminal deserved. The family did not deny or confirm that rumor either, but it was at least partially true: treatment had been slow in coming and was sometimes not the most modern or the most effective available at the time.
After her beloved husband died, Mary Josephine Coughlin Capone never went up to the second floor of her Palm Island house again, choosing to sleep in the bedroom of the garage apartment. She covered the living room furniture with sheets, never served a meal in the dining room, and took all her meals on one of the three long porches on the house’s exterior (two of which have since been removed). Her granddaught
ers have fond memories of eating on the porch, for they were often with her. “Mama Mae seemed to need our company,” one recalls. “It’s as if the house died when he did. Even though she lived to be eighty-nine and was only forty-nine when he died, something in her died when he did.”
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As expected, the death of Alphonse Capone, former Public Enemy No. 1, was worldwide news. It is not known how word initially got out—perhaps the contingent of reporters who routinely camped out at Palm Island saw Dr. Phillips’s early morning arrival on the twenty-first—but what had been a small group ballooned to the point of bursting. Their ranks were swelled by “tourists and the curious…a virtual parade of rubberneckers [who] strolled by or stood around, chatting, some laughing.” Anytime someone came or left the house, reporters and photographers swarmed the visitor’s car to shout questions and take pictures, so during Al’s last days Ralph decided to give them periodic bulletins that were always upbeat, with the basic theme that his brother did have pneumonia but was going to recover. To try to stop them from writing dire prognostications and to demonstrate how relaxed he was (and by extension, everyone else), he brought them cold drinks. They photographed him holding bottles of beer and quoted him as their source, but they still wrote inflammatory stories about Al Capone’s imminent demise. All over the world, almost every story was front-page news, with only a few exceptions like the Miami Daily News, where the publisher, James Cox, instructed his editors to treat the death like any other obituary. “I don’t want that son of a bitch on my front page,” he said.
When Al’s death happened, Dr. Phillips thought he was helping Ralph to defuse the situation, but in his typical clumsy fashion he only fueled the fires. He told the press that Al Capone’s death was sudden, coming after the several days when he was “stricken with apoplexy,” most likely his way of describing a stroke. He unleashed reporters’ imaginations when he continued with “his wife, Mae, collapsed and is in very serious condition.” Some wrote that she was in such serious distress that news of Al’s death had to be withheld from her until she could be stabilized. In reality, Mae was at his bedside and indeed devastated; she did break down in sobs, but she was a strong woman who quickly recovered her equilibrium and shared with Ralph the task of deciding how to bury Al’s body with dignity and without creating a media circus.
Meanwhile, reporters were combing newspaper morgues, as their libraries were called, for every possible reference to Al Capone’s life in crime. Haste made for poor fact-checking, so from the beginning multiple myths were created. Things that happened in Brooklyn were transposed to Chicago and vice versa. Stories of where and how he acquired his facial scars all vied to be the most sensational as each one gave a different time, place, and assailant. Even the paper of record, the New York Times, made egregious errors such as the one it reprinted from an Associated Press story, misstating that he had been born in Naples and brought to New York as a child. From the public to the private, nearly everything written about him was wrong: when family members were listed by name, his brother Erminio (John) was identified as his father, and his son, Albert, was “Alfred.” The household was under siege, and the family braced for further onslaughts, particularly when it came to making funeral arrangements.
Teresa and Ralph wanted Al’s body to be interred in Chicago, next to the remains of his father in the plot the family owned at Mount Olivet Cemetery. It is not known if Mae agreed to this because it was what she wanted or because she was too exhausted to oppose them, but that was what eventually happened. A local undertaker, the Philbrick Funeral Home in Miami Beach, took charge of the body, and here again versions of events proliferated. The most prominent and lasting account held that the body had to lie in the small back bedroom for four days because the funeral home’s hearse could not get near the house. Some newspapers said the crush of sleek black limousines crowding the causeway as people came to pay respects kept the hearse from getting in; others said the family did not want photographers to take pictures of the dead Al, so an empty hearse came and went until one dark night a few days later when the crush of rubberneckers had lessened. While some papers accepted this fiction, the reality was far simpler: the hearse came the day after his death, January 26. It took Al Capone’s body to the Philbrick Funeral Home, where it was prepared for between three hundred and four hundred selected guests to see it and pay their last respects.
Al Capone was buried in a dark blue suit, black tie, and white shirt. The funeral directors secretly took photographs of him in his casket without the family’s knowledge, and in them he looked remarkably the same as he had in life. Dr. Phillips was given a set and kept them until his death. Phillips wanted the family to consent to an autopsy so his brain could be studied, but the family refused and Al Capone went to his grave with his body intact. The Miami undertakers liaised with a firm in Chicago, and on February 4, a brutally cold day, he was laid to rest beside his father.
It was a relatively modest send-off compared with the mob funeral extravaganzas of the past because the bosses of the Outfit decreed that only those who had been close to Al Capone should attend. There were flowers from others, but they were relatively discreet wreaths and bouquets. On the casket was a gardenia blanket with orchids on top of it from Mae and the family. Reporters still pressed for advantageous positions to photograph any mob figures in attendance, but whether Ralph’s glowering looks or the big strong men who stood guard over the invited members deterred them, they did hang back. At the graveside service, the Tribune reported that most surviving members of the Outfit had gathered under the tent erected next to the burial plot, “hiding their faces, cursing photographers, and elbowing aside all except the few who were allowed under the awning.” The old-timers were there: the Fischetti brothers, Jake Guzik, Murray “the Camel” Humphreys, and Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt, along with “half a hundred of the smaller fry from the vast areas which once comprised the vice empire of prohibition.” The Capone cousin Charlie Fischetti was heard to say, “I’ll kill any son of a bitch who makes any pictures.” Matty Capone made the same threat to a reporter who tried to take his mother’s.
The entire burial ceremony was a brief one of less than an hour. The Archdiocese of Chicago forbade a requiem Mass but allowed a brief graveside ceremony because Al had repented of his sins in his last years by going to confession and receiving Holy Communion and often went to daily Mass with Mae or his mother at St. Patrick’s. It was said that the graveside service was only permitted because of Teresa’s piety. Al Capone (as his black granite tombstone read, not his full and legal name, Alphonse) was buried next to his father and brother Salvatore (Frank).
One could say that Capone’s death marked the true end of that era: Prohibition had long been repealed (1933), but in a strange congruence Andrew J. Volstead, the Minnesota congressman who gave his name to the act, died on January 20, 1947, just five days before the outlaw who arguably profited most from it.
All the coverage after Capone’s death concentrated on cataloging his rise and fall, with emphasis on the latter. Many stories were pompously self-righteous, with a tone of “he got what he deserved.” Even the staid New York Times hoped that someone would send a wreath to put on his open casket that read, “The wages of sin is death.” Much was made of the more than seven hundred killings (a hotly contested figure) that happened during the few brief years of Al Capone’s reign and of the fourteen or so witnesses who were murdered so they could not testify at various trials. Of all the carnage that took place in those years, the writers grudgingly admitted that Capone was “officially…tied up with only two slayings.”
None asked how he could have risen so swiftly, and at such a young age, to the pinnacle of such power that he held an entire city in the palm of his hand and every time he squeezed, he made it do his bidding. In retrospect, the unasked question might have been one of the reasons for the worldwide fascination with his flamboyant life and outsized career.
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As if to dispel any remainin
g myths about Capone’s enormous wealth and vast empire, Abe Teitelbaum (who did much to arrange the secret transport of his body from Florida to Illinois) felt compelled to address the continuing question of what happened to Al Capone’s money. Rumors were brewing of how he had squirreled vast stashes of cash in various places that in his senility he could no longer remember. Several days after his death, Teitelbaum told reporters those stories were not true and that Capone had died penniless, totally dependent on “the generosity of his brothers and other members of his family.” He added that the government was still pressing for unpaid back taxes and there were serious problems with trying to find enough money for Mae to hang on to the house. He only implied that the Outfit was still footing the Capone family’s bills, but the implication was enough to sustain the rumors of the lost or forgotten bundles of cash.
Besides the public’s fascination with the whereabouts of Al Capone’s alleged money, there was an equal fascination with the location of his remains. The Capone descendants are not sure which story is true about why the remains of the three Capone men buried in Mount Olivet were removed in 1950 and reinterred in the Mount Carmel Cemetery. The fact that the stones in Mount Olivet of Al’s father and brother gave their full names and dates of birth and death while his only read “Al Capone” with no other information on it leads some family members to think the plan to move the three was in place even before Al was first buried. Others think all three were moved because of the many curiosity seekers who trampled the graves and took whatever souvenirs off Al’s they could, while at the same time leaving crumpled papers, empty bottles and cans, or worse.