Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  The daily abrasions of tenement life further eroded family unity. What boy would want to linger an instant longer than necessary where eight, ten, twelve people ate and slept, washed and dressed in two or three dank, dingy rooms, where the fetor of excrement from rotten drains filled the hallways and vermin feasted on the garbage dumped out of windows, where you either froze or sweltered, where the grown-ups, in their distress and bewilderment, constantly screamed at one another and at you and whipped you for the least offense?

  The street gang was escape. The street gang was freedom. The street gang offered outlets for stifled young energies. The agencies that might have kept boys off the street, the schools and churches, lacked the means to do so. Few slum schools had a gym or playground or any kind of after-class recreation program. The average teacher was badly trained, unimaginative and chronically irritable, and the curriculum deadly dull. Still less were the churches equipped to provide activities that might have competed with the lure of the streets, and religion as taught in the slum parishes failed to reach the young.

  They formed their own street society, independent of the adult world and antagonistic to it. Led by some older, forceful boy, they pursued the thrills of shared adventure, of horseplay, exploration, gambling, pilfering, vandalism, sneaking a smoke or snuff or alcohol, secret ritual, smut sessions, fighting rival gangs. In his classic study of 1,313 Chicago boys' gangs, Frederic Thrasher quoted a member of the Bimbooms as follows:

  "When I first moved into the neighborhood I met two brothers who took me one night with the rest of the gang-about thirteen boys eleven to twenty-two years old. We stayed out till nine, pitching pennies on the corner. They showed me their hang-out up in a barn, where there was an electric light, and we began to stay out till two or three every morning.

  "We used to bring up pop and candy to eat, and play cards. It was a big room, with furniture and everything. The people had stored an old dining-room set, a library table, a kitchen table, and an army bed up there. It was not really a club, just a hang-out. Some of the big fellows got to bossing it, and we called them the 'Bimbooms.' Then they called the whole gang the 'Bimbooms.'

  "We loved baseball and sometimes we would all play hooky from school to go to a game. When we had our own team, we called it the 'Congress Athletic Club.'

  "On the corner, we would pitch pennies and then it got to be quarters. We played Rummie and Seven-and-a-half for money. I wanted to learn how to play Stud-poker, but no one would teach me. Oftentimes we shot dice for pocket-trash. Sometimes when we were hollering and playing games, the flying-squad would chase us away. The horse-cop would run us like anything, but we were too fast for him. Then he'd throw his club and we'd throw it back again at his horse's feet to make him prance. We'd call him 'Old Mickey Cop.'

  "In the wintertime, we'd hitch boards to street cars, and it was a lot of fun to see the fellows hit a switch and get spilled off. I never liked to go to Union Park with the family, but to go with the gang on the 'L' platform and blow up pigeons through their beaks or smash stolen eggs in the kids' pockets.

  "We used to keep pretty much to ourselves, and if another gang got fresh with us, a couple of guys would go down and get the Winchesters to come up and help us. One gang of fifteen or sixteen kids would try to run us off our corner just to be smart. They had a double-barreled shotgun which they would load with rock salt. And when it hit you, would it hurt! You tell 'em, boyl

  "We built a fort in a vacant lot on the corner to keep them from shooting us. Then they'd throw rocks and knock the boards off, so they could hit us. They would usually come around raiding about three times a week. We had beebee guns and a 22-rifle, in which we shot blanks to scare them, but we might have shot something else if we'd had it."

  The supreme thrill-and an activity important to the cohesion of the gang-was fighting. The captains would stake out a block or two as their gang's domain and declare war on any other gang that attempted to set foot inside the boundaries. Or they would mount a raid against a rival gang's territory.

  "Jimmie, the leader of the gang, is a bad actor. He would kill a policeman, if necessary, to get away. Most of the bunch are getting rounded up now, on account of their robbing expeditions. The greatest spirit of the gang is fighting and Jimmie would lead the boys to battle on the least pretext.

  "One fourth of July the bunch had a big fight with Danny O'Hara's gang. We had about two hundred on our side, and there were about as many there for Danny. Danny got hard with Jimmie and told him that he was trying to start a fight or something. First Jimmy busted Danny in the nose and then the whole gang started fighting. We had the traffic blocked on the boulevard for a long time, and finally the patrol wagon came, but they did not get any of the gang.

  "We had wars with lots of other gangs. We fought the Deadshots and there were about a hundred in the fight. Jimmie got bounced on, and when he saw our enemies were too big for us, he beat it.

  "We fought the Jews from Twelfth Street, but they had too many for us. They're pretty good fighters. We knew they had more than we did, so we went down with clubs and everything.

  "Another time we went to Garfield Park to lick the Thistles. We had only about seventy-five guys. They had said they could lick Jimmie and the rest of the gang and right away he wanted to go down there and fight them, but he got beat up as usual. There were too many of them for us, and half of them were about twenty years old.

  "We also had a war, starting over a baseball game at the park, with the Coons from Lake Street."

  Not all gangs were as belligerent as the Bimbooms. Not all were criminal. Some developed into social or athletic clubs, approved and aided by the adults of the community. For many boy gangs, however, it was a short step from random mischief to professional criminality. Practically every racketeer, Capone included, spent his formative years on the prowl with a gang.

  Nearly always the delinquent gang enjoyed the protection of some ward boss, for its members need not have reached voting age to render valuable services during elections, to intimidate, slug, kidnap, steal ballots, recruit repeaters. The bosses spared no effort to secure such allies. They would lease a clubhouse for them, buy them sporting equipment and uniforms, give them beefsteak dinners, picnics, tickets to prizefights and ball games. If arrested, a gang member could count on the ward boss to furnish bail and a lawyer; if convicted, to get his sentence reduced or quashed.

  The gang Capone joined during his mid-teens, as did Lucky Luciano, was the Five Pointers, into which Torrio may have introduced them both. It was based on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Its name derived from an intersection at the heart of the "Bloody Ould Sixth Ward" between Broadway and the Bowery, a warren of decaying tenements, gin mills and dance halls built on swampy land that emitted foul gases. Though the section had undergone some physical improvements, it was almost as noisome, its moral climate as debased, as when Charles Dickens, in his American Notes, three-quarters of a century earlier, described "these narrow ways . . . reeking everywhere with dirt and filth . . . hideous tenements which take their names from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed. . . ."

  For nearly a century the Five Points spawned the most feral gangs ever to terrorize the city. Following the Forty Thieves, the first gang from that district (circa 1825), came the Shirt Tails, so dubbed because they wore their shirttails outside their trousers; the Plug Uglies, mammoth Irishmen who protected their heads during combat under leather-reinforced plug hats, felled their victims with bludgeons, and stamped them to death with hobnailed boots; the Dead Rabbits ("rabbit," in the slang of the day, meaning ruffian; "dead rabbit" a super-tough brawny ruffian), whose standard-bearers led them into the fray behind a dead rabbit stuck on a spear. After the Civil War there emerged the Whyos. Legend ascribes the origin of the name to a. cry they uttered when fighting. Legend further holds that a qualification for membership in the Whyos was the commission of at least one murder. Filling contracts for murder and mayhem was the Whyos' main business, and
to potential clients they presented a printed price list:

  Every gang tolerated, when it did not actively recruit, a following of imitative juveniles. Thus, there were the Forty Little Thieves, the Little Dead Rabbits, the Little Whyos, and though some members were barely eight years old, they robbed, slugged, and occasionally killed with as much exuberance as their seniors.

  The word "racket" in its criminal sense probably comes from a device adopted by the old New York gangs. It was common practice for social and political clubs of the era to sponsor benefit galas in their own behalf. These were noisy affairs, what with the brass band and the general boisterousness stimulated by heavy drinking, so that they came to be known as rackets. Grasping the opportunity for easy and, to all outward appearance, licit profit, a gangster would organize a benevolent association of which he was the sole member, announce a racket, and with threats of demolishing their premises compel the neighborhood shopkeepers and businessmen to purchase blocks of tickets. James "Biff" Ellison, a Five Pointer dandy, who drenched himself with perfume, founded the Biff Ellison Association, and its rackets, held three times a year, netted him $3,000.

  The Five Points gang, successor to the Whyos, reached its zenith at the turn of the century under the generalship of an ex-bantamweight prizefighter, Paul Kelly (real name: Paolo Antonini Vaccarelli). From his New Brighton Dance Hall in Great Jones Street, one of Manhattan's brassiest, wickedest fleshpots, he mapped the operations of some 1,500 Five Pointers and laid claim to all the territory bounded by the Bowery and Broadway, Fourteenth Street and City Hall. A quiet, urbane man, Kelly was better educated than any of his fellow gangsters. He spoke Italian, French and Spanish, dressed with impeccable taste, and generally exhibited the appearance and manners of polite society. No gang chieftain could long retain power unless he proved politically useful, and Tammany Hall was beholden to Kelly for the help his hearties frequently gave its candidates at the hustings.

  By the time Capone joined the Five Pointers Kelly's prestige had somewhat deteriorated. Years of warfare with the apelike Monk Eastman's Bowery gang had strained his resources. Then his own henchman, the aromatic Biff Ellison, grew to resent his leadership. One winter night in 1905 Ellison and a member of the rival Gopher gang burst into the New Brighton, a gun blazing in each hand. A Five Pointer named Harrington went down with a bullet through his head. Kelly stopped three bullets. He survived, however, and after months of convalescence opened another dance hall, Little Naples. A reform group, the Committee of Fourteen, managed to have it padlocked. Kelly withdrew to Harlem, where he developed a new source of profit. He organized first the ragpickers, then the garbage scow trimmers into unions and served as their business agent. Eventually he became vice-president of the International Longshoremen's Association, AFL.

  Kelly did not sever his connections with the Five Pointers, what was left of them. Though the membership had drastically dwindled, the remnants included a core of battle-seasoned roughnecks whose fealty a man with Kelly's business and political aspirations found worth preserving. On Seventh Avenue, close to the Broadway theater district, he set up new headquarters for them, naming it quaintly the New Englander Social and Dramatic Club. Seldom did a front so innocent mask exploits so nefarious. In vain the police, investigating an epidemic of knifings, bludgeonings and shootings, repeatedly raided the place. They discovered nothing more sinister than a few club members enjoying a game of cards or checkers. They arrested Capone three times during his salad days as a Five Pointer, once for disorderly conduct and twice on suspicion of homicide, but they could support none of these charges.

  What enhanced the usefulness of some Five Pointer veterans in Kelly's estimation were their affiliations with other gangs and gang leaders. The Sicilian Frank Uale, alias Yale, of Brooklyn, for example, had the respect of John Torrio and his James Street boys; he knew Ciro Terranova intimately. At twenty-five Yale was making his mark in the Brooklyn rackets, and before long he would dominate them. His basic specialty was murder contracts, and he made no bones about it. "I'm an undertaker," he said. But he believed in diversification. He owned a dine-and-dance dive, the Harvard Inn, on the Coney Island waterfront, and a strategic location it turned out to be when, with Prohibition, he became one of the first New York racketeers to distribute liquor from coastal rum-running fleets. Yale also built up a stable of hooligans for hire in labor-management disputes. They were available to both sides as either strikebreakers or union goons. Inspired perhaps by Terranova's success with artichokes, Yale proceeded to force upon Brooklyn tobacconists cigars of his own crude manufacture. His portrait adorned each box-jetblack hair parted far on the left, stolid, squarish face above a stiff white collar and black necktie-together with the price, "20¢, 3 for 50¢." The price bore so little relation to the quality of the product that a "Frankie Yale" came to mean in the borough slang a cheap bad smoke. Racehorses, prizefighters, nightclubs, a funeral parlorall fell within reach of Yale's grasp. But his single greatest source of profit and power was the Unione Siciliane.

  Conflicting accounts by police, press and its own officers have obscured the nature of the Unione Siciliane, or Italo-American National Union, as it was renamed in the twenties. Some accounts describe it as a secret criminal society with close ties to the Mafia, founded and run from its inception by gangsters; others, as a much maligned fraternal association. The Unione Siciliane did indeed originate as a lawful fraternal association, one of the first to advance the interests of Sicilian immigrants. The place was New York; the time, the late nineteenth century. For modest dues its members received life insurance and various social benefits. Branches sprang up wherever there was a sizable Sicilian community. Gradually the association developed enough strength to swing an occasional district election. By the twenties the Chicago area, which contained the biggest chapter, had 38 lodges and more than 40,000 members.

  Meanwhile, a cadre of New York hoodlums had begun to infiltrate and pervert the Unione Siciliane. Their leader, a kinsman by marriage of Ciro Terranova, was Ignazio Saietta, known as Lupo the Wolf, a pathological killer. Largely through Saietta's maneuvers, begun in New York and extended to branches in other cities, the asso ciation acquired a dual character: the one side open and respectable, doing good works among needy Sicilians; the other, hidden and malevolent, linked to the Mafia, dealing in white slavery, extortion, kidnaping, industrial and labor racketeering, bank robbery, murder. Invariably, the president was also a Mafioso. During a six-year period the U.S. Secret Service traced sixty murders to members of the Unione Siciliane. Saietta himself maintained a "murder stable" in Harlem with meathooks from which he hung his victims and a furnace in which to burn them alive. According to one of the few Unione members whom the police ever persuaded to talk, the neophyte had to submit to a blood ritual. Led to an altar where a stiletto lay, the point toward him, he would prick his finger on it and swear eternal fidelity and secrecy.

  The more or less reputable officers of the Unione Siciliane, the businessmen, judges, state and city officials, professed to know nothing of how gangsters were exploiting it. They owed the association too great a debt to endanger it. The frequent fund-raising festivities, moreover, provided opportunities for politicians to meet and make deals with people in whose company they could not otherwise afford to be seen.

  The change of name to the Italo-American National Union effected no change of character, and the police greeted with skepticism the disclaimers issued by executive officers like Constantino Vitello, vice-president of the mother chapter in Chicago. "Crime?" Vitello protested in 1927. "It is heart sickening to us who for the sake of our Italian brothers and our American future spend our time without any remuneration, day after day, and then are told by those who know nothing about us that we are breeders of crime and disorder in Chicago. . . . Our president is former judge Bernard Barasa. Our officers are strong business and professional men. Our members are honest Americans. The constitution of the Unione, strictly enforced, declares that: No man who has a blot on his chara
cter may enter and those who are proved to have committed a felonious act while members will be expelled. . . ."

  For nearly a decade the national head of the Unione Siciliane had been Frank Yale.

  Yale hired Capone as a bouncer and bartender for his Harvard Inn, functions to which the younger Five Pointer brought excep tional endowments. When required to subdue obstreperous carousers, his huge fists, unarmed or clutching a club, struck with the impact of a pile driver. He was also fast and accurate with a gun, having perfected his marksmanship shooting at beer bottles in the basement of Brooklyn's ramshackle Adonis Social Club, a favorite Italian hangout.

  Capone did not emerge triumphant from every fracas that erupted at the Harvard Inn. He suffered a notable defeat there one night when Frank Galluccio, a Brooklynite and petty felon, dropped in with his sister. Capone made an offensive remark to her. Galluccio unclasped a pocket knife and went for the bartender's face. When the wounds healed, there remained (in the words of the Capone dossier compiled through the years by federal agents) an "oblique scar of 4" across cheek 2" in front left ear-vertical scar 21" on left jawoblique scar 21" under left ear on neck." Capone, normally vindictive, chose to forgive Galluccio. Some years after, in one of those magnanimous gestures which, he had learned, could win him quick, easy admiration, he hired him as a bodyguard at $100 a week. According to the story Capone later invented to explain his scars, he was wounded by shrapnel fighting in France with the famous "Lost Battalion" of the Seventy-seventh Division. But he got no closer to war than his draft board and was never called upon to serve in any capacity.

  It was the style among the young bucks of Capone's milieu to start a cellar club. This usually consisted of a rented storefront where, behind drawn blinds, the members gambled, drank and entertained girls. In 1918, during a party in a Carroll Street cellar club, Capone met a tall, slim girl named Mae Coughlin. She was twenty-one, two years older than Capone, and worked as a sales clerk in a neighborhood department store. Her parents, Michael Coughlin, a construction laborer, and Bridget Gorman Coughlin of 117 Third Place, were respected in the Irish community for their industry, rectitude, and religious devotion.