by Deirdre Bair
In the five years between his divorce and his death, he seldom saw his children because Betty did not allow them to be anywhere near a member of the Capone family. They were never present at any of Teresa’s Sunday lunches, nor were they ever with their grandfather Ralph in Wisconsin. They were kept away from the Capones not out of spite but rather out of Betty’s fear that the entire family’s ties to the mob and Ralph’s particular influence would not be positive for impressionable children. They were so sheltered by their mother that their father died without their knowing him or anyone else in the Capone family.
Ralphie’s son, Dennis Gabriel, was the father of sons who in turn fathered sons, most of whom still live in the greater Chicago area. Ralphie’s descendants insist that everything good about them is because of Grandmother Betty’s careful and loving influence. They remember her with great affection, and one grandson in particular credits her with turning his life around when he was a troubled and troublesome teenager. He remembers “nothing but warmth and love and lots of good family stories.”
Ralph and his three surviving brothers stayed in touch, although they were never in each other’s company as much as they had been when Al was alive. Mimi (John Martin) drifted between various businesses in Chicago and Miami, and of all the brothers he lived the longest, into his eighties. He stayed closest to Ralph and Mae, so his one son, Michael, has strong memories of family occasions in Prairie Avenue and Palm Island.
Matthew had a fractious marriage that produced one son. He had several run-ins with the law during Al’s last years, when he began to live under several different aliases. He suffered from a heart condition for several years before his death in 1967 at the age of fifty-nine. His one child took an altogether different name and retreated into a deeply private life that denied all connections to the Capone heritage.
Albert also used a string of aliases until 1942, when he changed his name to a variant of his mother’s maiden name, Rayola. He surfaced in newspapers from time to time: once in 1953, when he bought one of the first gambling stamps after the federal government required professional gamblers to get them; another time when he paid a small fine for wife beating; and again in 1969, when he was identified as “the principal syndicate man” in a new wave of gambling in Chicago’s southwest suburbs. He died in June 1980, at the age of seventy-four. He also fathered one son, whose family remains deeply private. Interestingly, the three younger brothers all changed their surnames, and they all did so during Al’s lifetime. Ralph was the only brother who kept the Capone name.
Ralph ended his days in Mercer, where he owned a roadhouse called Billy’s Hotel and Bar, where he could usually be found sitting on a stool observing the goings-on. Townspeople still speak of him with a combination of awe and fear. To some, “he became Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy all rolled into one. Others were less enchanted with the old mobster’s presence in their community.” He was generous to anyone who needed help, financial or otherwise, and was generally good for a donation to local causes; he routinely bought bicycles for children whose families could not afford them; and he contributed generously to the committees that mounted the annual holiday parades. Still, townspeople who frequented his bar trod carefully when they encountered him.
His several marriages ended in divorce, and newspapers that covered the proceedings usually cited domestic violence as the primary reason. In his last years, he and his third wife, Madeleine (who subsequently took the name Morichetti when she married again), lived in reduced circumstances on a much smaller property in Mercer, in an apartment above a garage. Ralph died in a nursing home at the age of eighty on November 22, 1974. Madeleine, several decades younger, made headlines from her nursing home in 2014 when she allowed a gun to be auctioned that supposedly belonged to Al and was used by him (in matters not specified). The only provenance for the weapon was Madeleine’s letter asserting that Ralph told her Al had used it. In 2015, her granddaughters auctioned a collection of jewelry and other objects, some of which they claim belonged to Al.
Mafalda lived to be seventy-six, weakened by dementia before dying in a nursing home in Oscoda, Michigan, on March 25, 1988. Her husband, John, survived her into the twenty-first century. They lived in Chicago for most of their married life, owning and operating a succession of delicatessens and pizza parlors until they retired in the mid-1960s. Mafalda never conquered her swift and violent temper, and over the years there were stories of how she insulted customers and once did not hesitate to throw out (physically) a policeman who she claimed was hassling one of them. Reporters wrote about her in modes that ranged between hilarity and sarcasm, and whenever they teased her by asking if she was related to “Scarface Al,” she always replied, “Yes, and I’m proud of it.” She grew closer to her husband’s family than her own after Al died, and, ironically, she was known among them as Mae Maritote, the name of the sister-in-law she never forgave for taking her beloved brother’s attention away from her. She was interred according to her instructions, right next to him in the family plot.
Mafalda’s daughter, Dolores Teresa, grew into exemplary womanhood. She attended Aquinas Dominican High School in Chicago, where she was a model student, active in extracurricular activities and an officer in any number of them. When the school presented its annual music festivals, she twirled batons in time to the music. At Purdue University, she majored in science and was secretary of the Pan-Hellenic Council and a member of the queen’s court, one of the highest honors for women students. After her graduation, she also retreated into anonymity, eventually marrying, having one child, and settling in a small town in Northern California.
In her private life and under another name, Dolores was doing what most of the children of Al’s siblings did: they worked hard to establish their own lives and distance themselves from their fathers and especially their (in)famous uncle. Quite a few have had high-ranking careers under different names, everywhere from Hollywood and the movies, to Florida and the leisure industries, and even in the greater Chicago area in a variety of businesses and professions. They continue to think it best not to draw attention to their Capone heritage.
Most of their children and grandchildren, particularly those of Al’s great-grandchildren who are reaching young adulthood, think “how cool” it is to have such a famous ancestor in their backgrounds, while their mothers say quietly, “It’s different for them; they never had to endure the disparaging remarks we heard whenever we said our last name.” They say their children can think this way because enough time has passed that Al Capone has become a legend so large that they cannot conceive of him as the actual person who was once a very real part of their family.
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The four daughters of Diana Casey and Sonny Capone were born into a world of love and spent their childhoods basking in it. Diana’s family became close to Al and Mae, and to Mae’s siblings as well. It was a warm and loving conglomeration, all of whom doted on the four little girls. Al and Mae loved their daughter-in-law and were delighted with her accomplishments, of which they considered the granddaughters the most spectacular.
Diana came from a background entirely different from the Capones, well-off, refined, and upper-middle class. She was a fiery redheaded Irishwoman with a temper to match and tremendous willpower. Her daughters remember her “deep abiding faith and an absolute conviction, a belief in God.” A devout Catholic, Diana led her daughters every night in family prayer as they said the rosary together. She was an excellent golfer who played with her merely proficient husband, the patient son who often took his father (who was not even that) to hit balls down the fairway. She and Sonny were also excellent marksmen who competed in various shooting contests, with her often placing higher than him. Reporters delighted in writing about the skills the younger Capones displayed with weapons. They were a popular young couple among their peers in Miami, and life seemed good.
Unfortunately, things did not remain on that even keel. The restaurant did not do well, and eventually it faile
d. Contrary to popular legend, Sonny never worked as a cook or a maître d’, and Mae was never a cashier or hostess there. Sonny tried hard to save the restaurant, reportedly going so far as to ask members of the Outfit for a loan, which they declined to give. Although the Outfit was known for not giving financial support to the children of members, the reason generally cited in the crucial instance of Al’s son is that Sonny was involved in a rather public affair and the Outfit frowned on visibly dishonoring wives. The marriage frayed when he became involved in what is loosely called the Miami Beach scene: “night life, heavy drinking, and deep sea fishing with wealthy sportsmen from the north east.” He himself was a teetotaler who managed to be part of the scene while not participating in most of it, but when Diana learned of his affair, she “literally had a fit.” She confronted him but did not immediately file for divorce.
Because she needed to get away and think, she took her children to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1961 to stay with Winnie, her younger brother Danny’s wife, who lived in Palo Alto. She did not look at it as a permanent move; she only closed up the Miami house rather than listing it for sale. In retrospect, her daughters believe that she hoped Sonny would come after her so they could resume the marriage. He did not, and when she returned for her older brother’s wedding, she found there were too many unsettling aspects of life in Florida to deal with and decided to make the move to California permanent.
Diana never filed for divorce, but Sonny did, in 1964, when he went to California to tell his daughters that he was planning to marry for the second time. He did not see Diana on that trip, because relations between them were so strained, but he wanted his daughters to hear directly from him that he was dropping the name Capone and would henceforth be known by his middle name, Francis. “There will never be another Mrs. Capone,” he told them.
After that, things between Sonny and Diana were “complicated, complex.” When the divorce was finalized, he gave her the proceeds from the sale of the house and all its contents, and he did the best he could to support her and their daughters. Diana made a good life for herself in the Bay Area. She worked because she had to, first doing office work in the electrical and insurance fields before finding her true calling, real estate. As soon as her daughters graduated from high school, they did what they could to contribute to the family. Born on Thanksgiving Day 1919, Diana was about to turn seventy in 1989, when her birthday would once again fall on the holiday, and she was looking forward to the lavish birthday celebration dinner her daughters were planning for it. She had been ill throughout most of the year, diagnosed six months earlier with the blood disorder acute myeloblastic dysplasia, a type of leukemia, and she had been debilitated by the treatment. By Thanksgiving week, she was hospitalized, and she died on Thanksgiving Day, the holiday on which she was born. Sonny and her daughters surrounded her, while their husbands and his third wife were in the lounge area waiting to support them.
The four daughters grew up, married, divorced, remarried, had children of their own, and became stepparents to their spouses’ children. They attended college and took graduate degrees, had professions in which they excelled and careers they enjoyed. All their lives they have been close, and they all settled in Northern California near each other. When they gather to celebrate holidays, just under two dozen are the direct descendants of Mae and Al Capone and the three surviving granddaughters who bore the Capone name at birth.
When they describe themselves, they remember the oldest, Veronica (Ronnie), as the one who most resembled the Capone family; Diane is the most like Mae and her family, the Irish Coughlins; Barbara takes after the fiery, strong-willed Caseys; and Theresa (Terri) is the composite of them all. Ronnie died on November 17, 2007, also of leukemia, her loss still mourned by her sisters to this day. The three who survive remember growing up as Capones and during their formative years feeling “saddled with a certain amount of responsibility to the name. There’s no doubt that we were all given rose-colored glasses to wear when we were born into the family—everyone does that to a degree no matter who their family. But I suppose ours were rosier than others.”
In the last years of Mae’s life, Ronnie and Diane told her of their childhood memories and pressed her to tell them stories about their heritage, which they in turn passed on to their two younger sisters, Barbara, who was an infant, and Terri, not yet born in the last years of their grandfather’s life. Mae’s stories all concentrated on the good qualities of the husband she adored, so Diane says she and her sisters must now “work through all of this. I have to admit, Mama Mae’s stories told us the reality that she wanted them to be.”
Mae stayed on in Hollywood, Florida, but she made frequent visits to be with Sonny and the granddaughters until she became incapacitated by extreme old age. She almost always stayed in Diane’s home, because during the early years of Mae’s visits she was mostly at home caring for her three young sons. Mae might have been reserved and retiring in public, but with friends and family she was vivacious and funny, outgoing, full of life, and a nonstop talker. Diane remembers sending her children off to school in the morning and settling at the kitchen table to have coffee with her, only to look up to see the boys returning at the end of the school day while she and Mae were still in their nightclothes and chattering away.
Throughout the years after Al’s death, when offers came for Mae to sell the story of her marriage for large sums of money (which she certainly could have used), she always refused, preferring to cherish her memories in private. Only once did she relinquish her privacy, when she and Sonny waged a losing battle to keep his high school classmate Desi Arnaz Sr. from filming The Untouchables, the 1987 movie that wrongly glorified Eliot Ness’s role in bringing down Al Capone. It was the occasion of Mae’s last argument with Ralph, who refused to join her in the lawsuit, where she asked for $1 million in damages. Mafalda, ever ready to defend or support her brother, was the only one of Al’s siblings who participated.
In 1985, Mae had a stroke and was diagnosed with the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. She was taken to live in a nursing home in Hollywood, Florida, and from then on was in a wheelchair until she became bedridden. She drifted into a coma in her last days, but when her granddaughters came, she had periods of lucidity. “She had a good life and she loved her life,” her granddaughters recalled. She was cremated, and they held a memorial Mass for her in California. Her ashes rest privately. Shortly after Mae died, Sonny moved to be near his daughters. He was completely distraught at the time: within a two-month period, he had lost his mother and his second wife, who died of lung cancer, and also his beloved dog. All those tragedies might have contributed to an otherwise unexplainable incident in his local Miami grocery store. Having done his shopping, he picked up several small objects and walked out of the store without paying for them. Police told reporters that when asked to explain, Sonny told them “everyone has a little larceny in him.” The grocery store’s manager described him as a “real good customer” and said he hoped Sonny would shop there again. His daughters helped him to move near them, where he lived the rest of his life and died in Cool, California, on July 8, 2004, survived by his third wife. He, too, was cremated, and his ashes rest privately.
To the end of his life, he told his daughters that he deeply regretted the affair that had split up their family, but by then there was no going back. For a number of years after the divorce, they thought “he kind of bailed on his family,” but they explain this attitude by saying it was a pivotal time in their lives, when they were in their teen years and concentrating on their new surroundings. In retrospect, they think he made many more overtures than they responded to, and they were probably just as responsible for the “ups and downs” in the relationship as he was. However, it was still a striking contrast to the years when he had been “absolutely the most loving father, when he thought all his girls were just perfect.” They still hold fast to memories of how he boosted and bolstered them when they were all a united family.
After
Sonny moved to be near them in Northern California, they all became close again and to this day, they are close to his widow, America. The daughters have many stories from their father about how he adored his father and how his father doted on him. “Even as an old man, he [Sonny] never got over the loss. We’d be sitting at the dinner table talking, and all of a sudden he’d start to cry over his dad.” They realized that he had raised them with the same love his father had always given him. When they consider this aspect of their grandfather, they wonder “how the same person could be so admirable and still be guilty of the terrible things he did.” They call it the conundrum they are still trying to resolve.
While most of the Capone descendants prefer to live privately, many have decided that they must now break their silence long enough to tell what they call “the real truth” about their family.
The catalyst for the group decision to “go public” came about when one descendant broke the family’s vow of silence. Ralph’s granddaughter, Deirdre Marie Gabriel O’Donnell Griswold, who now calls herself Capone, published a memoir in 2010 that can only be described as sheer fantasy. In it, she declared, “I am the last person of Al Capone’s family who was born with the name Capone. I am the last of the living Capones.” Obviously, it is a specious claim, as are many others she made in her book concerning her closeness to her famous uncle. No such relationship existed.
“It has become her truth,” said one of Al’s three surviving granddaughters as she explained why so many other Capones have decided to break their lifelong silence: she laughingly gave the “credit” for the family’s willingness to reveal the Al Capone they knew to her first cousin’s fabrications.