by Deirdre Bair
Mount Carmel is on Chicago’s far west in the suburb of Hillside. The Capone family plot is an imposingly tall structure of white granite surrounded by shrubbery designed to hide the names of those buried beneath it. Each of the three graves is marked by a simple granite stone, and even though the cemetery staff does not tell the public where the plot is located, Al’s stone has twice been vandalized and replaced. On it, there is a simple cross next to his full name and the dates of his short life. Beneath them is the simple phrase “My Jesus Mercy.”
The simplicity of Al Capone’s tombstone belies his brief, florid, and dramatic life. The legacy he left behind is equally colorful and outsized. One wonders, if he had lived longer in full command of his intellect, what he would have made of it. But he was gone, which meant that so many others who were close to him had to deal with the unfillable void of his absence.
Chapter 25
THE LEGACY
The world as Al Capone’s family had known it ended abruptly when he died. For so many years, he had been the center of their lives; now, without him to set their course, they were all moving into uncharted territory, unmoored and adrift. During his glory days, his presence was electrifying, and they basked in the warm and affectionate familial encounters. As they shared his beneficence and generosity, the family was secure in the knowledge that whatever they needed, Al would take care of it.
During his years in prison, they clung to each other, ostensibly gathering to support Mae but in reality to comfort and support each other. In Al’s post-prison years, the Palm Island house was the family’s center, each member holding the illusory hope that he or she could be the catalyst that would bring him back to full health. A mostly unstated but deeply held hope pervaded, that he would fully resume his position in the Outfit and, with it, his grandiose and extravagant life, which by extension they had shared. After his death, everyone had to adjust to the new reality. With him gone, and with the new generations of Capones growing up, moving away from their parents, and not adhering so closely to “the ways of the old country” and Italian-American traditions, reasons for staying close diminished, and the family drifted off into largely separate lives, seeing each other only on ceremonial occasions.
Mae and Sonny remained in Miami, with Mae doggedly clinging to the Palm Island house until 1952, when she could no longer afford it. There were mutterings that she sold it because those who had taken command of the Outfit refused to give her the money such a house required for upkeep. Also, some said she could no longer depend on Ralph to meet her household expenses because the Outfit had marginalized him as well, to the point where he could barely meet his own needs. Capone descendants affirm there is truth in both rumors, and in the one claiming the Outfit turned Sonny down when he asked for a loan for his restaurant, because, although it did help widows in varying degrees, it did not assist children.
When Mae left Palm Island, she took the things that mattered most to her and sold the rest of the possessions, along with the property, to a real estate developer who was an early practitioner of “flipping.” He kept the house as she left it for several years until it was free from the “Capone Curse” and then sold it for a handsome profit. To maximize his profit, he also sold off piecemeal the furniture and objects Mae had lovingly collected, and some of these items still appear from time to time in auction houses and on Internet sites. They usually command high prices from collectors who want “a piece of Al.” The house went through several owners until 2014, when a real estate consortium bought it. After serious refurbishing, it is now available for rental functions and film and television shoots.
After Mae sold Palm Island, she moved to Hollywood, Florida, to live with Muriel, the sister to whom she was always closest, and Muriel’s husband, Louis Clark. Eventually, she bought her own small house in Hollywood, where she lived modestly until her last years, when she went into a nearby nursing home. She spent the rest of her life in privacy and seclusion, seeing her family and friends, attending daily Mass, and in later years making joyful visits to the homes of her granddaughters in California. She enjoyed good health until her last few years, and she was eighty-nine when she died on April 16, 1986. Mae never held a job, wishing to avoid public display at all costs. She was helped by Sonny and as years passed occasionally by Ralph, who was allegedly able to do so because of his ties with the Outfit, but in reality the money came mostly from his northern Wisconsin businesses.
Teresa died on November 29, 1952, in the Prairie Avenue house where she had lived since she came to Chicago in 1923. The house was sold shortly after she died, but the primary benefactor of the sale varies depending on the source. Some writers cite Mae as Teresa’s co-owner who received the profits; others claim that Ralph was the seller and the beneficiary; others say Teresa willed the house to Mafalda, who lived there for a short time before selling it. The truth is that the house had been put in Mae’s name as co-owner with Teresa, and after Teresa’s death she had every right to sell it and pocket the proceeds. Instead, she allowed Mafalda and her family to keep on living there, because they had been in residence since shortly after their marriage twenty years before. Sometime in the early 1980s, Mafalda made irrational phone calls to Mae, saying the house should be hers and she should be allowed to sell it. The always-gracious Mae gave her the deed and allowed her to keep the proceeds from its sale.
The Prairie Avenue house’s several subsequent owners have kept it much the same as it looked when the Capone family lived there. The exterior could serve today as the location for a film set in the 1920s and 1930s, and the interior is largely unchanged as well, with two full-floor apartments and numerous small bedrooms in the basement. In the 1980s, a movement began to have the house listed on the local historic register. It was the first of several such attempts, still ongoing in the twenty-first century, but every petition has been rejected. The century-old house, like Palm Island, is not one that buyers clamored for: as of 2014, when it was again up for sale, the owner cut the price by half and still had difficulty selling it. In early 2016 it was listed again, this time with online photos showing the interior in appalling disrepair. The desire for “a piece of Al” does not seem to include real estate.
Even before Al died, most likely around 1941, Ralph’s role in the Outfit was severely diminished, so even though he continued to play the role of his brother’s swaggering right-hand man, he no longer had his brother’s access to unlimited amounts of money. After Al died, he stayed briefly in the Chicago area, managing a dance hall, controlling cigarette machines that were also a front for slot machines and other gambling materials, and holding “interests” in water companies that sold and maintained filtration systems. Eventually, he drifted north in a permanent move to the Wisconsin area where he and Al once had their lavish retreats, both long since sold. Al’s Couderay property was turned into a restaurant known as the Hideout. It closed in 2009 for lack of patronage, went into bank receivership, and has been for sale on and off ever since. Ralph’s RaCap retreat has had several owners who remain largely out of the public eye, even though the latest keeps a large portrait of Al hung over the fireplace. Every now and again, something surfaces at auction purportedly from the house. Recently, a collection of twig porch furniture came to market without provenance and with an asking price ten times or more than what the chairs are really worth.
One of the most dramatic turns in Ralph’s life in the years leading up to and after Al’s death was the return of his long-lost older brother, Jimmy (Vincenzo), who appeared out of the blue around 1940. Throughout his adult life, he appeared to live on the right side of the law as Richard “Two Gun” Hart, a figure straight out of the legendary Old West, a sheriff who captured criminals, demolished bootleg stills, and smashed hijacked booze shipments.
But Jimmy’s path was not always straight and narrow; there were several episodes in his mostly law-abiding life where he was prosecuted for theft and sanctioned for cruelty. In recent years, his descendants commissioned a biography in which t
he author took great pains to incorporate revisionist family myths of his fearless crusades to uphold Prohibition laws. There are, however, enough documented sources to verify that Two Gun’s life was sometimes troubled and somewhat sad.
He lived mainly in Homer, Nebraska, ending up there according to family lore for a variety of reasons: First, it was where the train stopped to refuel when he was on his way west to Hollywood to become a star like one of his two heroes, William S. Hart. They said he liked the looks of Homer, so he hopped off and thought he would stay awhile. The other hero his family thinks might have induced him to settle there was General Black Jack Pershing, whose daring leadership Two Gun greatly admired and who he mistakenly believed was a native of the state (he was actually from Missouri). Although there are no records to show that Vincenzo or James Capone, or James or Richard Hart, served in the military, the family bases its contention that he served in Europe during World War I on several photographs and a cache of medals and souvenirs. They say he enlisted as James Richard Hart, the name he had used since leaving Brooklyn; however, there is no record of his service under his real or assumed names because all the records in the St. Louis military repository were destroyed in a massive 1973 fire.
Hart married a local girl, Kathleen Winch, the daughter of a grocer, in a romance that blossomed when he saved her and some others during a flash flood that enveloped the car in which they were riding. They had four sons: Richard Leo; soon followed by William, named for his father’s first idol and killed in the Pacific in World War II; Sherman, who went to work for Ralph Capone in northern Wisconsin, where his descendants live today; and Harry, the only one still alive and now in his late eighties, who remained in Nebraska. Harry vacillates between thoroughly enjoying telling one version of his father’s myths and legends, only to refute it with another before lapsing into grouchy silence and berating those who ask questions. There are numerous descendants of the three sons who survived to old age who all live in states near to Nebraska: they lead respectable lives in public professions; they all bear the name Hart, and mostly keep their Capone heritage private.
Two Gun Hart never made it to Hollywood, but that did not stop him from playing the role of a colorful cowboy character. He enjoyed wearing full regalia: the ten-gallon hat, the holster with two pistols he was adept at quick-drawing with either or both hands, and hand-tooled cowboy boots that had large hearts emblazoned on them to call attention to his adopted surname. His great-grandsons tell family stories of how, even in the 1920s and 1930s, the mere sight of him in costume was enough to turn hardened criminals into quivering messes. He wore only cowboy clothing when he worked throughout several western states for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Because he was a gifted linguist who spoke several Native American languages, he was welcomed among the people he supervised. At times, he was a champion of Native Americans’ rights and their protector on their reservations, but, at other times, he condoned corruption and was an arbitrary and capricious tormentor and prosecutor, particularly when it came to enforcing Prohibition. Eventually, he and the bureau parted company, and back in Homer he became the town sheriff, where he was accused of theft from hometown stores.
As sheriff, he had passkeys to all the town shops and businesses. Charged with protecting them, he was also accused of using the keys to steal food and household supplies. Granted, this was in the depths of the Depression, when the Hart family was so poor that they lived in a shack by the river where they had to catch fish if they wanted to eat. Also, the so-called theft has to be viewed in light of how the town economy worked, for barter was big in Homer and farmers, tradesmen, and merchants often exchanged goods for services. The biography commissioned by the Hart descendants does not address this murky issue, which was the real reason why a desperate Richard Hart returned to Chicago as Vincenzo “Jimmy” Capone. Quite simply, his family was destitute, and he had nowhere else to go.
Richard became Jimmy when he returned to the Capone family. They were beyond ecstatic to see him, with the exception of Mafalda, who resented him for being on the opposite side of the law from her revered brother, Al, during Prohibition. The Hart family believes that even as an adult she continued to see herself as the family’s princess who resented having to share any attention at all, even with a long-lost brother. She was the only one who did not welcome him.
Once Ralph was convinced that Jimmy was truly his brother, he took care of everything. People in Homer could not help but notice the new suits Two Gun wore when he returned from his frequent visits to Chicago or the wads of money that now filled his wallet. Naturally, his true identity as an Italian Catholic shocked his conservative midwestern Protestant wife and sons, but they and the townspeople eventually grew accustomed to the stranger who had lived among them for so many years. Even though there was a certain amount of embarrassment, if not actual shame, among the Hart family, they were so grateful for the security Richard’s revelation provided that they accepted their Capone identities when it suited them.
Mae and Al invited Jimmy and Kathleen to Palm Island, but Al could barely comprehend who he was. Jimmy and two of his sons, Sherman and Harry, were in Mercer when Al made his second (and last) visit in 1945, and from time to time they have contributed various versions of their memories to the lore of how Al spent his time there. After he died, Mae continued to send Christmas cards to the Hart family every year.
Ralph was generous in helping the Hart family, but he was not above using his brother when the need arose. The Kefauver Crime Commission called Ralph to testify in 1950 about his ties to organized crime, and in early 1951 the IRS was once again investigating him for tax evasion. The government agents were especially interested in the sale of RaCap and where the money to buy it came from and then went. Although the date of the actual sale was murky and had taken place long before his lost brother resurfaced, Ralph asked Two Gun “Hart-or-Capone” (as the Chicago Tribune named him) to swear under oath that he, not Ralph, was the buyer and seller. Two Gun testified before a grand jury for almost five hours and stuck to his story throughout: after thirty-five years of total silence, he said he wanted to see his mother, so he revealed himself to her and his brothers. He claimed that she gave him most of the money to buy the $40,000 property and Ralph put him on the payroll of his business at the time, listed in the commission’s proceedings as “a suburban cigarette company,” so that he could use his own earnings to pay for the rest. It was an obvious untruth, but no prosecution was begun at that time, although Ralph spent most of his remaining years trying to find enough money to pay off the IRS and keep himself out of jail.
When “Hart-or-Capone” came to Chicago to give testimony, he brought his wife of thirty-three years. Photographs show an elderly couple, with him nearly totally blind, suffering from diabetes, and so obese he could hardly walk. One year later, in October 1952, at the age of sixty, he died of cardiac arrest.
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While Ralph was dealing with government agencies, a personal tragedy struck when his only son, Ralphie, committed suicide on November 9, 1950. He left a note beside his “whiskey-soaked corpse” saying he could not live without Jean Kerin, who was identified by the Chicago Tribune as “a night club singer.” Ralphie was thirty-three, and his life had been one of failure and personal disappointment. He was an infant when his mother abandoned him to Teresa, who took him into her Prairie Avenue home. Despite being raised by Mae as a brother to Sonny, Ralphie was aware of the differences between them when he went to grade school and Sonny was privately schooled at home, or when Sonny and Mae went to Palm Island and he had to stay behind.
Both young men began their college careers at Notre Dame, but when Sonny left for Miami, Ralphie transferred to Chicago’s DePaul University, from which he graduated. In both, he was known by his birth name, Ralph Capone Jr. From various campus sources, it appears there was no onus attached to the name, for he was popular at both universities. He took part in drama department productions at Notre Dame and was a member of the editorial boar
d and a reporter for the DePaul yearbook. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree, but contrary to claims made by his daughter, he never attended Loyola University School of Law or took the Illinois bar exam.
Shortly after he graduated, he married Elizabeth Marie “Betty” Barsaloux and began to use his middle name, Gabriel, as his surname. Betty gave birth to two children: a son, Dennis, and a daughter, Deirdre Marie, whose birth certificates were both registered under the name of Gabriel. At his daughter’s birth on January 25, 1940, Ralph Gabriel was twenty-two, and Betty Gabriel was twenty. On her birth certificate, he gave his occupation as “Service Man, Cigarette Machine Company,” and she as housewife.
Ralphie was supporting his family by working for his father’s business of slot machines and other gambling paraphernalia as well as cigarettes. From there, he drifted into another job found for him by his father, working for a company that manufactured prefabricated homes for what was alleged to be a mob-related gambling resort. Next, he became the operator of a used-car lot, and by the time of his death he was a hopeless alcoholic who tended bar in one of Chicago’s seedier Rush Street dives. His marriage to Betty ended around 1945, and when he died, he was living alone in a shabby apartment where his body was discovered next to a half-empty bottle of whiskey, an empty bottle of cold medicine whose label warned against taking it with liquor, and the note to Jean Kerin (who professed amazement when reporters contacted her, implying that the relationship must have meant more to him than it did to her).