Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Read online

  Holmesburg, with more than 1,700 prisoners jammed into cell blocks built to hold 600, was one of the country's worst jails. A few weeks before Capone entered it, the prisoners, rioting in protest against the foul food and brutal guards, set fire to their mattresses. The word went out from Chicago that a $50,000 fee awaited any lawyer able to procure Capone's release. None succeeded. Nor did an attempt to bribe the district attorney of Philadelphia, John Mono- ghan, with an offer of $50,000. But in August Capone was transferred to the city's larger and better-equipped Eastern Penitentiary. There Warden Herbert B. Smith made him more comfortable, giving him a cell to himself and letting him furnish it with rugs, pictures, a chest of drawers, desk, bookshelf, lamps and a $500 radio console. As his work, assignment, he drew the untiring one of library file clerk. For ordinary inmates visiting hours were limited to Sundays, but Capone's friends and family could come any day. From the warden's office he was allowed to telephone whomever he chose, and he spoke often to his lawyers, his underworld colleagues and various politicians, including Pennsylvania Congressman Benjamin M. Golder. He continued to direct his organization chiefly through Jake Guzik and Ralph Capone, with whom he remained in constant communication.

  The reporters Capone was willing to talk to had little difficulty getting to him either and they filled column after column with the minutiae of his daily existence. CAPONE GAINS ELEVEN POUNDS . . . CAPONE DOESN'T GO TO CHURCH ON SUNDAYS . . . CAPONE PICKS CUBS TO WIN 1930 FLAG . . . CAPONE READS LIFE OF NAPOLEON. . . . Concerning Napoleon, the following sentiments were ascribed to him: "I'll have to hand it to Napoleon as the world's greatest racketeer, but I could have wised him up on some things. The trouble with that guy was he got the swelled head. He overplayed his hand and they made a bum out of him. He should have had sense enough after that Elba jolt to kiss himself out of the game. But he was just like the rest of us. He didn't know when to quit and had to get back in the racket. He simply put himself on the spot. That made it easy for the other gangs to take him and they were no dumbbells. If he had lived in Chicago, it would have been a sawed-off shotgun Waterloo for him. He didn't wind up in a ditch as a coroner's case, but they took him for a one-way ride to St. Helena, which was about as tough a break."

  His views on a wide range of weighty issues were accorded equally serious attention. The modern woman, for example. "The trouble with women today is their excitement over too many things outside the home. A woman's home and her children are her real happiness. If she would stay there, the world would have less to worry about the modern woman."

  Though he looked forward ardently to his wife's visits, he could not, he told one interviewer, bear to have his son see him in prison. "My boy thinks I'm in Europe. Whenever he sees a picture of a big boat, he asks his mother if it's bringing Daddy home."

  He bought $1,000 worth of arts and crafts produced by his fellow prisoners and mailed them to friends as Christmas gifts. He donated $1,200 to a foundering Philadelphia orphanage. Such Samaritan deeds, described at length by the press, aroused a good deal of sympathy for Capone. A civil engineer from Chicago, a total stranger to him, coming to Philadelphia on business, obtained permission to visit him, clasped his hand and told him, "Al, we're with you."

  Shortly after entering Eastern Penitentiary, Capone had to have his tonsils out. The surgeon who performed the operation, Dr. Herbert M. Goddard of the Pennsylvania State Board of Prison Inspectors, could scarcely contain the admiration he came to feel for his patient. "In my seven years' experience I have never seen a prisoner so kind, so cheery and accommodating," he declared in a public eulogy delivered toward the end of Capone's term. "He does his work faithfully and with a high degree of intelligence. He has brains. He would have made good anywhere, at anything. He has been an ideal prisoner. I cannot estimate the money he has given away. Of course, we can't inquire where he gets it. He's in the racket. He admits it. But you can't tell me he's all bad after I've seen him many times a week for ten months. . . ."

  Good behavior won Capone a reduction of his sentence by two months, and it was announced that he would leave the prison on March 17, 1930. Warden Smith's solicitude followed him into freedom. With the complicity of the Philadelphia police and the governor of the state, John S. Fisher, he fooled the reporters, cameramen and rubberneckers waiting outside the prison, as well as any assassins who might be gunning for him. The police aided the deception by roping off a clearing before the main gate and patrolling all the approaches to the prison. Motorcycle officers stood beside their machines, gripping the handlebars as if to take off at any moment as escorts. On a nearby landing field a small private plane waited to fly Capone north, or so the pilot said. And from Warden Smith's office there issued periodic communiques: Capone was eating scrambled eggs for breakfast . . . he was restless . . . the commutation papers requiring the governor's signature were expected to arrive momentarily from Harrisburg. . . .

  Actually, Capone was long gone. The parole board had received the papers several days before. On the sixteenth Capone had been smuggled in the warden's car to the town of Graterford, about 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia, and lodged there pending the legal hour of release at 4 P.M. of the seventeenth. Some of his own men had driven to Graterford to pick him up. At 8 P.M., when he was 200 miles or so farther along on his way back to Chicago, Warden Smith emerged from the prison, smirking, and announced: "We stuck one in your eye. The big guy's gone."

  Nobody was more incensed than the Tribune's Jake Lingle, who could normally see Capone any time he wanted to. He had twice interviewed him during his imprisonment. He considered himself a personal friend. He had been a guest several times at the Palm Island house. He wore one of the diamond belt buckles Capone gave to people he particularly liked. Still fuming when he got back to Chicago, he telephoned Ralph Capone at the Prairie Avenue house. The wire had been tapped by a special Prohibition task force from the Department of justice and he was heard to inquire: "Where's Al? I've been looking all over for him, and nobody seems to know where he is."

  "I don't know where he is either, Jake," Ralph lied. "I haven't heard a word from him since he got out."

  "Jesus, Ralph, this makes it very bad for me. I'm supposed to have my finger on these things. It makes it very embarrassing with my paper. Now get this, I want you to call me the minute you hear from him. Tell him I want to see him right away."

  Ralph promised. Lingle called again an hour later. Ralph pretended he still had no word. "Listen, you guys ain't giving me the runaround, are you?" Lingle said. "Just remember, I wouldn't do that if I was you."

  "Now, Jake, you know I wouldn't do that. It's just that I haven't heard from Al. What else can I tell you?"

  "Okay, okay. Just remember to tell him I want to talk to him right away.

  The leader of the federal agents, Eliot Ness, wondered what power enabled a lowly legman to order a Capone around.

  The thick oak door of the Prairie Avenue house opened a crack to a reporter's ring, and Ralph Capone's nine-year-old son peered out.

  "Where's Grandma?" the reporter asked.

  "Out," said the boy.

  The reporter rattled a paper bag full of candy, and the door opened a little wider. "Is Grandma going to have a special kind of spaghetti for Uncle Al's homecoming?"

  "Yeah, walnut-flavored, prob'ly- Say, I won't tell you anything. Another paper sent some people out here to play marbles with me. I won ninety cents, and I didn't tell them a thing." The door closed.

  Capone did not venture near South Prairie Avenue for four days. Captain Stege, having proclaimed his determination to arrest him on sight and run him out of town, though he had no legal grounds for doing either, had set a watch of twenty-five policemen around the home. Capone spent his first night holed up in a Cicero hotel, the Western, rampaging drunk. In the early morning of the eighteenth the wiretappers intercepted a call from an unidentifiable member of the gang to Ralph Capone. "Listen, Ralph," said the caller, "we're up in Room 718 in the Western and Al is getting out of hand
. He's in terrible shape. Will you come up, please? You're the only one who can handle him when he gets like this. We've sent for a lot of towels."

  "I'll be up a little later," Ralph promised. "Just take care of things the best you can right now."

  When calm and sober, Capone crossed the street to his old head quarters in the Hawthorne Inn and for the next three days reviewed his financial situation with Jake Guzik. The figures gave them no cause for rejoicing. The Great Depression, now in its fifth month, was sharply reducing their profits. The carefree spenders of the jazz Age had little money left to spare for booze, gambling and girls. Capone's 1929 income-as much of it as Internal Revenue could trace, which is to say, a minute fraction of the actual total-came to slightly over $100,000, not exactly deprivation, but still down 50 percent from the 1928 IRS figure.

  There were other tribulations. The Ness team, driving a 10-ton truck with a flat bed to support scaling ladders and a reinforced steel bumper, had so far battered down the doors of nineteen Capone distilleries and six breweries, seized or destroyed more than $1,000,- 000 worth of trucks, equipment, beer and whiskey. The idea for the special task force had originated with the Chicago Association of Commerce Sub-Committee for the Prevention and Punishment of Crime, consisting of six business leaders. When the chairman, Colonel Robert Isham Randolph, declined to name his five colleagues lest he endanger their lives, the press dubbed them "the Secret Six." Along with the Chicago Crime Commission, founded in 1919, it constituted the most tenacious private force combating what Randolph described as "the most corrupt and degenerate municipal administration that ever cursed a city-a politico-criminal alliance formed between a civil administration and a gun-covered underworld for the exploitation of the citizenry." In April, 1923, the Crime Commission published its first list of "persons who are constantly in conflict with the law," twenty-eight of them, to whom Frank Loesch gave the name that caught the popular fancy-"Public Enemies." "Alphonse Capone, alias Scarface Capone, alias Al Brown" headed the list. Another of his bodyguards, Tony "Mops" Volpe, placed second and Ralph Capone third.*

  On Capone's fourth day of freedom he breezed into the detective bureau, having been apprized of his rights by his lawyer, Thomas Nash, who accompanied him there. "You were looking for me, I believe," he said. to Captain Stege.

  "You're no better than any other hoodlum," replied Stege, discomposed by the unexpected surrender. "You're not wanted in Chicago, and we don't intend to let you live here. You'll be arrested as often as you show yourself to any of our detectives."

  Stege, of course, had no more legal authority to order such arrests than he had to throw a cordon around Capone's home. There were no warrants outstanding against him, no county indictments. But the law in its frustration tended to treat gangsters with scant regard for constitutional guarantees.

  Challenged by Nash to specify the complaint, Stege lamely admitted that he held no warrant for Capone. But perhaps the state or the government would wish to press charges. A detective escorted Capone first to U.S. Attorney George Q. Johnson's office in the Federal Building, then to State's Attorney Swanson's office in the Criminal Courts Building. Neither prosecutor was prepared as yet to proceed against him on any grounds and they dismissed him. Assistant State's Attorney Harry Ditchburne, however, followed him back to Stege's office. "Al," he asked, "what do you know about the Valentine Day massacre?"

  "I was in Florida then," Capone replied.

  "Yes," Stege interposed, "and you were in Florida when Frank Yale was murdered."

  "I get blamed for everything that goes on here, but I had nothing to do with any of the things you talk about."

  "Perhaps you personally don't commit the murders," said Ditchburne, "but we're not far wrong in assuming your gang is responsible."

  "I'm not responsible for what others do."

  "You're not a good citizen. If you were walking along the street with your brother and he was killed, you wouldn't come here and tell us who killed him."

  "Well, put yourself in my place and see what you'd do."

  "There used to be a time when we wouldn't have a hundred murders in ten years, but since you gangsters have been at war, we've had three hundred murders a year." This was an exaggeration. The total number of gang murders since 1920 came to about 500.

  Stege: "That's why we're driving you out of town."

  "You, Mr. Ditchburne, as a lawyer, know the police can't do that," said Nash.

  "I'm not here to tell the police what not to do," the prosecutor retorted. "I'm here to advise them what to do. I'm not interested in protecting Capone. If he feels that he's being arrested wrongfully, he has his remedy. He can sue for false arrest."

  "Go as far as you like in suing me," said Stege.

  "I don't want to sue anybody," said Capone. "All I want is not to be arrested if I come downtown."

  "You're out of luck," Stege told him. "Your day is done. How soon are you getting out of town?"

  "I want to go to Florida some time next week. I don't know when I have to go to the federal court for trial on the contempt charge."

  "I've given you notice, and you can go because no one wants to put a complaint against you today. But the next time you go into the lockup and you go to court next morning." He turned to Nash. "You'd better advise him to get out of Chicago."

  "Lenin and Trotsky rebelled at that kind of treatment," the lawyer observed darkly.

  "I hope Capone goes to Russia," was Stege's parting shot.

  As Capone passed the press corps waiting outside the detective bureau, he remarked, chuckling, "I guess nobody wants me," and headed for the Lexington.

  To the first reporter who interviewed him at the hotel, the Tribune's Genevieve Forbes Herrick, he delivered a tirade of selfjustification. Capone probably never considered himself a criminal. His practices were, after all, only slightly rougher than those then prevalent among respectable big businessmen, such as the stock manipulators who bilked the public of millions or the industrialists who hired thugs to beat up labor organizers. . . .

  "I never had a number," he told Miss Herrick, "until they picked me up in the City of Brotherly Love for carrying a gun and gave me a year, not for carrying a gun, but because my name was Capone. I'd never been indicted before [glossing over the pending federal indictment for contempt of court]. Why should I be? All I ever did was sell beer and whiskey to our best people. All I ever did was supply a demand that was pretty popular. Why, the very guys that make my trade good are the ones that yell the loudest about me. Some of our best judges use the stuff. They talk about me not being on the legitimate. Why, lady, nobody's on the legit. You know that and so do they. Your brother or your father gets in a jam. What do you do? Do you sit back and let him go over the road, without trying to help him? You'd be a yellow dog if you did. Nobody's really on the legit, when it comes down to cases, you know that. Whatever I did in jail, everybody was watching to see that Al Capone didn't get any favors. When I'd been there six months, I came up for parole. I had a writ of relief, they call it, before the Supreme Court. It's even more important than a writ of habeas corpus. The judge is supposed to allow it or deny it, with reasons for what he does. If I'd been plain John Smith from Oshkosh, he'd have allowed it. All I did, you know, lady, was carry a gun. But because my name was Capone from Chicago, he wouldn't pay any attention to it. Yes, sir, there's a lot of grief attached to this limelight. Say, if I was just plain Izzy Polat- sky, living in Chicago, I'd not stand in the gutter trying to get a peep at Al Capone. I'd attend to my business and let him attend to his. No use making a laughing stock of the city. You notice I didn't come in with a brass band. Neither did I come in with all those bodyguards the papers talked about. One man, the driver of my car. I'm not afraid of anybody."

  He pressed a buzzer, summoning an aide. "Please ask my wife and sister to come here." Presently, Mae Capone and Mafalda, who were sharing the suite for a few days, entered and chatted awhile with the reporter. When they had retired, Capone asked her: "Did you notic
e my wife's hair?" Miss Herrick murmured a compliment. "No, I mean the streaks of gray. She's only 28 [she was actually thirty-one, two years older than her husband] and she's got gray hair just worrying over things here in Chicago. . . . I've been blamed for crimes that happened as far back as the Chicago fire. . . ."

  "The public has one idea of my husband," Mae Capone said many years later, when rejecting a publisher's offer of $50,000 for the story of her life with Capone, though she sorely needed money at the time. "I have another. I will treasure my memory and I will always love him."

  PRESIDENT Hoover liked to start his day with mild exercise. Before breakfast he would meet with members of his Cabinet on the White House lawn by the magnolia tree Andrew Jackson had planted in memory of his wife and, while discussing affairs of state, toss a medicine ball. Among Hoover's pressing concerns during the early weeks of his administration was Al Capone. "Have you," he would ask his Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, as he heaved the 15-pound ball at him, "have you-thwunk-got that fellow- thwunk-Capone yet?" And as the exercise period ended: "Remem- ber-thwunk-I want that man Capone in jail-thwunk!"

  It was Colonel Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, who, despairing of any decisive move against Capone by either city or state authorities, had led a deputation to the White House to ask the President to intervene. The two major aspects of Capone's activities that fell within the federal purview were bootlegging and income-tax evasion. He had never filed a return in his entire life. Following Knox's appeal, a two-pronged attack was launched, the one by Eliot Ness and his Department of justice raiders to wreck Capone financially, the other by Internal Revenue agents to send him to prison.