Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Page 44

  The course of neurosyphilis is unpredictable, the victim now seemingly normal, now disoriented, his speech unintelligible, a prey to tremors and epilepsylike seizures. In even his best periods Capone lacked mental and physical coordination. He would skip abruptly from subject to unrelated subject, whistling, humming and singing as he chattered. Despite his gross overweight, he walked rapidly, with jerky, automatonlike motions. By 1942 penicillin had become available, but in extremely limited supply, the War Production Board having imposed a tight quota. Dr. Moore of Johns Hopkins managed to procure dosages for Capone, who was thus one of the first syphilitics to be treated with antibiotics. Though no therapy could reverse the extensive damage to his brain, his condition was apparently stabilized.

  On March 19, 1944, after suffering a humiliating defeat in the Republican gubernatorial primary, Big Bill Thompson died of pneumonia in his suite at the Blackstone Hotel.

  In April the Chicago police were hunting Matt Capone, the sometime university student for whom Al had once entertained such glowing expectations. Matt ran the Hall of Fame Tavern in Cicero. The night of the eighteenth his two bartenders, Walter Sanders and Jens Larrison, fell to squabbling over a $5 bill missing from the cash register. About twenty people saw Sanders shove Larrison into a back room, saw Matt fumble for something in a drawer behind the bar and follow them, heard two shots. None of the three men reappeared. Larrison's body was found in an alley two miles from the tavern. Matt hid for a year, then surrendered. But the murder charge against him was dismissed because Sanders, the state's vital witness, never reappeared.

  Within two weeks of Matt's surrender, Capone's old, reliable "En forcer," Frank Nitti, faced with another term in Leavenworth for labor racketeering, put a bullet through his head.

  It is doubtful that any of these events penetrated Capone's understanding. On January 19, 1947, at four o'clock in the morning, he collapsed with a brain hemorrhage. Dr. Kenneth Phillips arrived, followed by Monsignor Barry, who administered the last rites. The United Press reported Capone dead. But he rallied, and Phillips pronounced him out of danger. The following week he developed bronchial pneumonia. Reporters gathered in force outside the locked gate. As the hot day wore on, Ralph let them through and brought them iced beer. Saturday evening, the twenty-fifth, at the age of fortyeight, Capone died in the presence of his mother, his wife, his son, his brothers and sisters. Phillips tried without success to persuade the family to permit an autopsy "to make possible the study of the brain for medical history."

  An icy wind shook the tent pitched on Plot 48 in Chicago's Mount Olivet Cemetery. Snow thickly covered the earth. The small band of mourners included, besides the immediate family, cousins Charlie and Rocco Fischetti, Jake Guzik, Sam Hunt, Murray Humphreys. Red Rudensky, a reformed character, had come from St. Paul. Torrio was not present. The archbishopric had forbidden a requiem mass or any elaborate ceremony but issued no injunction against burial in the same consecrated ground that held the remains of Capone's father and his brother Frank. Monsignor William Gorman explained to the reporters: "The Church never condones evil, nor the evil in any man's life. This very brief ceremony is to recognize his penitence and the fact he died fortified by the sacraments of the Church." The bronze casket was modest by gangster standards, as modest as the headstone later placed over it.

  QUI RIPOSA Alphonse Capone Nato: Jan. 17, 1899 Morto: Jan. 25, 1947

  The week before, Andrew Volstead had died at eighty-seven in Granite Falls, Minnesota, his belief unshaken to the end that "law does regulate morality."

  RALPH CAPONE NOW OVERLORD IN VICE

  ... in his own right [Ralph Capone] is now one of the overlords of the national syndicate which controls gambling, vice and other rackets.

  -United Press, July 28, 1950

  From the report of the hearings, October, 1950, before the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, United States Senate (Chairman: Senator Estes Kefauver) :

  The roots of the criminal group operating in Chicago today go back to the operations of the Torrio-Capone gang....

  Since the last reorganization of the [racing] wire service in the Chicago area the city of Chicago has been serviced by the R. and H. wire service owned by the Capone mobsters, Ray Jones, Phil Katz, and Hymie Levin. .. .

  The manufacture and distribution of slot machines has been a lucrative field of operation for a number of Capone mobsters. The Taylor Manufacturing Co. in Cicero, one of the largest manufacturers of gaming equipment in the country is partially owned by Claude Maddox, a Capone mobster ... and Joseph Aiuppa... .

  Ed Vogel, old-time Capone henchman ... is believed to control the distribution of slot machines in the North Side of Chicago and in the northwest suburbs... .

  Roland Libonati, Democratic State Senator from the West Side and a close associate of Capone's, spearheaded the opposition to the reform legislation proposed by the Chicago Crime Commission and Governor Stevenson and backed by the bar. . . .

  [In his book Mafia, published two years later, Ed Reid, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, listed eighty-three Mafiosi by order of importance. He assigned forty-first place to Libonati.]

  There is little doubt that members of the Capone syndicate use proceeds from their illegitimate activities to buy their way into hotels, restaurants, laundry services, dry-cleaning establishments, and wholesale and retail liquor businesses...

  Paul Ricca . .. one of the two or three leading figures in the Capone mob; Louis "Little New York" Campagna and Charlie "Cherry Nose" Gioe . . . were prominent in the mulcting of the movie industry... .

  The two major crime syndicates in this country are the AccardoGuzik-Fischetti syndicate, whose headquarters are in Chicago; and the Costello-Adonis-Lansky syndicate based in New York. Evidence of the Accardo-Guzik-Fischetti syndicate was found by the committee in such places as Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, Miami, Las Vegas, and the west coast... .

  The Kefauver Committee questioned both Ralph and Matt Capone at great length. A month later Ralph, Jr., or Ralph Gabriel, as he preferred to call himself, drank half a quart of scotch in his Chicago apartment, swallowed a quantity of cold tablets from a bottle whose label warned against mixing them with alcohol, and began a letter to a girl he loved. The pills were his final solution to the problem of carrying the Capone name. Through school and college, marriage, fatherhood, and a long series of jobs, the name, always discovered sooner or later, had unfailingly brought him grief. It had tainted his relations with his girl, Jeanne Kerin, a nightclub singer. "Jeanie, my sweetheart," he wrote. "I love you. I love you. Jeanie only you I love. Only you. I'm gone-" He got no farther.

  In 1952 James Capone died, totally blind, in Homer. The same year Teresa Capone died, aged eighty-five. She was buried not in Mount Olivet Cemetery, but in Mount Carmel, at the opposite end of the city. When the family realized how many tourists were coming to see the grave of Al Capone, they bought another plot in Mount Carmel and had the caskets reburied there. The marble shaft with the Capone names still stands in Mount Olivet, left behind to side track tourists. The real graves in Mount Carmel are marked by small black marble stones, clustered around a granite slab, each bearing the words "My Jesus Mercy."

  The fifties carried off a good many Caponian charter membersSam Hunt, Terry Druggan, Claude Maddox, Phil D'Andrea, Jake Guzik, Louis Campagna, Frank Diamond-nearly all of them dying abed of a heart ailment. Diamond was an exception. He was killed by a shotgun blast. A coronary struck down Torrio in a Brooklyn barbershop on April 16, 1957, and he died soon after in the hospital. He was seventy-five. Bugs Moran, serving a ten-year sentence in Leavenworth for bank robbery, met the end he had often said he feared most: He died of lung cancer. Judge Lyle, who considered him the likeliest of all the gangsters he had ever observed to undergo a religious repentance, wrote to the Catholic prison chaplain, asking about Moran's last hours. "George Moran died a peaceful death," replied the chaplain, "and was strengthened with the full Last Rites (Penance-Extreme Unction-Ho
ly Viaticum-Apostolic Blessing) of the Catholic Church while he was fully conscious. This happened some days before he died and was not a 'last ditch' stand. Your theory certainly proved out very satisfactory in his case. I am sure that God in his mercy was very kind to him in judgment."

  From a tapped telephone conversation in November, 1957, between Sam Giancana, Capone-trained top boss of the Chicago syndicate, and Sam Magaddino, his Buffalo opposite number, concerning the arrest at Apalachin, New York, of sixty-three Mafia leaders:

  MAGADDINO: It never would've happened in your place.

  GIANCANA: You're fuckin' right it wouldn't. This is the safest territory in the world for a big meet. . . . We got three towns just outside of Chicago with the police chiefs in our pocket. We got this territory locked up tight.

  Only once after Capone's death did his widow emerge from anonymity. This was in 1959 when the Columbia Broadcasting System televised The Untouchables, a two-part film, further sensationalizing Eliot Ness's sensational account of his gang-busting adventures. Mae Capone, Sonny and Mafalda jointly brought a $1,000,000 suit against the network, the producer of the film, Desilu Productions, and the sponsor, Westinghouse Electric, complaining that the dead man's name, likeness and personality were used for profit. They lost, and in the fall the American Broadcasting System launched The Untouchables as a weekly series.

  Capone's last lawyer, Abraham Teitelbaum, probably did not overstate the case by much when he said: "I'm sure Al died penniless." Capone alone never owned the sources of his once vast wealth. He shared them with partners, with the organization, and when he could no longer function, the sources reverted to them. No doubt they provided the means for him to live his last years comfortably-Ralph and Jake Guzik would have seen to that-but his personal property was heavily mortgaged, and what cash the family could raise went chiefly to pay back taxes. Mae sold both the Palm Island and Prairie Avenue houses. For a time she and Sonny ran a restaurant in Miami Beach, the Grotto, she handling the cash register and Sonny working as headwaiter. The venture failed.

  At last accounts Mae was dividing her time between Miami, Chicago and Ralph's Wisconsin retreat. Ralph himself was retired. Mafalda and her husband were operating a delicatessen-restaurant in Chicago. Their son was practicing law.

  From Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics-Report of the hearings held in September and October, 1963, before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Chairman: Senator John L. McClellan) of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate:

  Captain William J. Duffy, director of Intelligence for the Chicago Police Department ... estimated that there are 300 men in the Chicago area who devote their full efforts to organizing, directing, and controlling a far greater number of people involved in criminal activities like gambling, narcotics distribution, pandering, loan sharking, labor racketeering and terrorism....

  Captain Duffy stated that his office believed that there are 26 men who lead 300 full-time gangsters in control of Chicago's organized crime. These men are divided by the Chicago police into two groups, one of which is known as the "Mafia" group. . . . The other group consists of the "Associates of the Italian Organization." .. .

  Prominent in his testimony about the first group were . . . Sam "Mooney" Giancana; Anthony Accardo; Felice De Lucia (Paul "the Waiter") Ricca; and Rocco Fischetti. Among the associates he named Murray "the Camel" Humphreys and Gus Alex [a pro- t6g6 of Jake Guzik]... .

  He emphasized that the power of the Chicago organization rests in a single characteristic . . . -the ability of the group to commit murder and other acts of violence without fear of retribution... .

  Chicago's Superintendent of Police Orlando W. Wilson had earlier reported to the committee that since 1919, 976 gangland murders had been committed in the Chicago area. Only two of the murderers were convicted.

  In the rosters of the Chicago Mafia and its associates, submitted to the committee by Captain Duffy, all four surviving Capone brothers figured among the gangsters controlling the West Side.

  A fifth black marble gravestone took its place in the Mount Carmel plot in February, 1967. After ailing for several years with a weak heart, Matt Capone was dead at fifty-nine.

  CAPONE BROTHER RUNS S. W. SUBURB VICE RING

  A man who reluctantly bears one of the most chilling names in the annals of crime-Capone-now reigns as overlord of a growing vice and gambling empire in the southwest suburbs....

  Leader of this crime syndicate expansion move is Alberto Capone, aging (62) brother of the late Al Capone.

  Alberto uses the name Bert Novak. He has also gone by the name of Albert Rayola... .

  Capone operates out of two bases in Suburban Hickory Hills-Castle Acres Motel . . . and Hickory Lodge Cocktail Lounge... .

  Both places are within shouting distance of the Hickory Hills City Hall, seat of what is probably the shakiest suburban administration in the Chicago area, or perhaps the nation. . . .

  Mayor Thomas Watson admitted that he lived in fear since his election in the 13,000 population suburb as a reform candidate in April, 1967.

  Three days after Watson's election, early morning shotgun blasts damaged his parked auto. Watson has also received frequent terror-type anonymous phone calls... .

  he Better Government Association] is convinced that [Ca pone] is the principal syndicate man behind the rising tide of gambling and vice in such nearby suburbs as Crestwood, Alsip and Willow Springs... .

  Chicago Sun-Times, January 19, 1969

  An avid golfer, the last of the active Capone brothers would appear on the suburban links, wearing a golfing glove studded with costume jewelry.

  Until 1970, the Hawthorne Inn, renamed the Towne Hotel, remained a meeting place of the Chicago syndicate. Rossmar Realty, Inc., whose president was Joseph Aiuppa, an early Capone triggerman and latterly the ranking Cicero Mafioso, owned the hotel, as well as the adjoining Turf Lounge, a gangster rendezvous since Capone's day. On May 24, 1964, the Sun-Times had reported under the headline STATE POLICE BREAK UP DICE GAME IN CICERO GAMING FORT:

  State police battered down steel doors to raid a barboot [Greek dice] game in a basement of a Cicero coffee house and arrested 15 men fleeing through a network of catacombs.

  The raiders, armed with crowbars, sledgehammers, axes and an FBI warrant, said it was the most impregnable gambling fortress they had ever broken into.

  When the officers, led by State Chief of Detectives John Newbold, entered the one-story coffee house at 2208 South Cicero (which runs at right angles to 22nd Street) in the suburb, it was empty.

  By tapping and pounding on the walls, the detectives turned up a secret door in a panel. This led to an empty back room. Here in the floor was a trapdoor encased in steel straps that was bolted shut from below.

  After several minutes of sledge-swinging, the raiders broke through and found themselves in an underground passage that led to another steel door.

  This door took another several minutes of similar ax and crowbar work before it yielded. Crashing through, the police found an elaborate barboot dice game layout. They arrested four men as keepers. . . .

  Spilling out into catacombs were 11 other men who were arrested as players. . . .

  It was the third time in slightly more than a year that the big barboot game had been knocked over.

  King Features Syndicate, Inc.

  Noon recess. On the steps of the Federal Building Capone forces a smile for the thousands who gathered in the streets.

  Investigators and prosecutor. Left to right: Elmer L. Irey, chief of the Internal Revenue Service's enforcement branch; U.S. Attorney George E. Q. Johnson; Frank J. Wilson, who directed the investigation of Capone's tax delinquencies; and Arthur P. Madden, head of the Chicago tax intelligence unit.

  Wide World Photos.

  The defendant and his counsel. Left: Michael Ahern; right: Albert Fink.

  Capone on the eve of his trial.

  Brown Brothers.

  The raiders found an undergro
und passageway leading to the Towne Hotel... .

  On February 17, 1970, a fire, starting in the kitchen, totally destroyed the hotel. When state officials questioned Aiuppa about the ownership, he invoked the Fifth Amendment sixty times.

  Since the mid-sixties, when Sam Giancana expatriated himself to avoid the attentions of the FBI, the head of the Chicago syndicate and a member of the Mafia's national council has been the Capone bodyguard, a suspected co-planner of the St. Valentine's Day massacre, Tony Accardo.

  Sonny Capone's efforts to earn a living had not been rewarding. A man of unexceptionable ethics, he quit his first postwar job as a used car salesman in disgust over his employer's fraudulent practices, such as turning back speedometers. He next apprenticed himself, at $75 a week, to a printer, in whose shop he hoped to buy a half interest if he could persuade his mother to advance the money, but she decided against it. Through his brother-in-law, a detective in the Miami Police Department, he met several officers. They thought highly of him. A marksman of tournament quality, he joined their pistol team, became a member of the National Pistol Association of America and the Florida Peace Officers' Association. Of his wife, whom he taught to shoot, the society page of the Miami News carried this account (April 6, 1958) :

  Diana Capone, a slender, red-haired Miami Shores housewife, owns three pistols. She is an expert with each of them. To prove it she won 20 trophies in the recent Flamingo Open Pistol Shoot....

  The soft-spoken, blue-eyed mother of four daughters does her big talking with a gun. She asks no odds from the men. . . .

  Diana often beats [her husband] in a match.

  "It makes Albert awfully proud . . . ," she says.

  After the Grotto failed, they moved to Hollywood, Florida, where Sonny worked for a tire distributor. On the morning of August 7, 1965, he went shopping at the Kwik Chek Supermarket near his home. As he wheeled his groceries past a drug counter, an irresistible impulse overcame him. He pocketed two bottles of aspirin and a box of radio transistor batteries, costing all together $3.50, none of which he needed or wanted. A store detective saw the theft and arrested him.