The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  "Question of faith?"

  "I have no questions."

  "Atheist?" The heavy brows drew together.

  "No, sir. I just stopped asking."

  "Is that why you quit the seminary?"

  "I failed. Many are called..."

  "No judgments, understand. I have Roman Catholics in the field. Good men. None of them studied for the priesthood, which is why I asked to see you. One of the reasons. How much do you remember from your training?"

  Only every novena, the names of all the saints, where the good vintage was kept so it wouldn't get mixed up with the swill they served for the sacrament. He practically farted in Latin. "A fair amount."

  "We'll arrange a refresher course."

  "A refresher course?"

  "Are you still in contact with your father?"

  He sat a little straighter, and he had not been slouching.

  "I got a card last Christmas."

  "No scenes in public, I hope."

  "Our differences are private. With all due respect," he added. So it was possible to forget who he was talking to when that subject came up.

  Hoover smiled. He had excellent teeth; Vasco suspected extensive orthodontia in early adulthood. They gleamed like new appliances against the Director's swarthy skin.

  "There's no need for secrecy. Did you think, just because you applied for a low-clearance position, your background wouldn't be checked? Paul Anthony Vasco had a wife and a child to feed and clothe, a roof to provide. That was difficult enough for an unskilled laborer during the Depression, and harder still for a recent immigrant in a city crawling with them. He drove a beer truck when beer was illegal and performed odd jobs for the Capone organization. I've been called a puritan and a martinet, but I'd be worse than that if I held a man's bad choices against him after all this time. Worse yet if I visited the sins of the father upon the son. You wouldn't be working here if I did."

  "We haven't spoken since before I joined the seminary. He thought the decision was a joke."

  "Your dropping out would only support that opinion, in his eyes. I understand."

  "No, sir, I'm afraid you don't."

  Hoover's smile was a thing of the past—dead, petrified, and buried in dust. But Vasco was committed and stumbled on.

  "My father liked his work. He had a decent job driving a cab in Cicero, but one day a thug hailed him, threw a pistol into the backseat with some cash, and told him to step on it. He did, just as a policeman came running up with his gun out and ordered the thug to throw up his hands. That night the same thug came to our apartment, took back his pistol, and gave my father a hundred-dollar bill from a roll he carried in his pocket. He also gave him a business card and said to look him up if he ever got tired of pushing a hack. My father quit the company the next day."

  "What was on the card?" The Director seemed to have forgotten his pique.

  "Al Brown, Antique Dealer. I'm sure I don't have to tell you who Al Brown was, sir."

  "Al Capone. That must have been early in his career. He dropped the alias when he got big."

  "The gun had been used to murder a man named Howard," Vasco said. "My father said the barrel was still hot. I don't want to know anything about those odd jobs."

  "No one would blame you. Nothing is worse than betrayal. However." Hoover dragged another folder off a nearby heap. The file was much thicker than the one that contained Peter Vasco's life and secured with a piece of dirty cord.

  He slipped the knot and spread it open. His fingers were pink and immaculate, like a baby's.

  "This wind wasn't so ill it failed to blow some good. Your flirtation with the spiritual life wasn't enough to take you out of Division Four. If it weren't for your father's indiscretions I wouldn't have been able to use you at all." He drew out a newspaper clipping and placed it on Vasco's side of the table.

  Vasco had to climb out of his chair to see it. It was brown and brittle and had a five-year-old date scribbled in red ink in one of the margins. He saw a picture he'd seen before, of a broad flat face photographed close up under a white Borsalino hat with the brim turned up rakishly on one side, and a headline:

  CAPONE LEAVES ALCATRAZ

  TWO

  "I THOUGHT THE BUREAU CLOSED THE CAPONE FILE YEARS AGO."

  "Treasury did. Violation of the Volstead Act was their jurisdiction, but they couldn't even nail him for that. We know of three murders he committed personally, on top of the legions he conspired in; that was Chicago's baby, but the police there were so crooked they didn't even pretend to try. They put up some squawk when we didn't bring them in on the Dillinger kill. If we had, he might still be in business."

  Vasco read the article without learning anything he didn't already know; in fact, he knew more than was written. Capone was released from federal prison after serving seven years of an eleven-year sentence for income tax evasion. Good behavior and poor health were given as the reasons, but the precise nature of his illness couldn't be detailed in a family newspaper.

  "Syphilis," said Hoover, as if he'd asked. "God punishes where man cannot or will not. I'd have seen he went to the chair, but I suppose a vice-related contagion is more poetic. The wages of sin, etcetera, if you'll pardon the blasphemy." Vasco chose not to point out that, yes, Virginia, there was venereal disease in the Bible. He avoided religious discussions, the more so when the other person knew he'd studied for the clergy. He didn't like the way people walked on eggs around him when they found out. Even the Director wasn't immune. Vasco asked what Capone had done to bring him under Bureau jurisdiction at last.

  "He's too far gone to work a jigsaw puzzle, much less knock over a bank. It's a wasting condition, body and mind, and he's in the third stage. His medical record is in the file. You'll want to read it, but we have Frank Nitti, his closest associate, to thank for the best and clearest diagnosis: 'Al's as nutty as a fruitcake.' "

  "If that's true, I don't understand why he's under investigation."

  "He isn't. His friends are, Nitti and Al's brothers Ralph and Matt and that blob Guzik. After Prohibition was repealed the boys in Chicago turned to narcotics and labor racketeering, and of course they were always up to their eyes in gambling and prostitution. At the moment our chief concern is their activities in the black market. Every tire and pound of butter those rats smuggle past the OPA helps to cripple the war effort. Imagine what it would mean if we succeeded in dangling just one of them by the neck for treason."

  Vasco had not failed to note the we. "But if Capone—"

  "No. He isn't involved in that. Not that he wouldn't feed at the trough if his accomplices could trust him to keep his mouth shut. In the stage he's in he's inclined to babble, and if it weren't for who he is his friends would have measured him for a cement overcoat long before this, to protect their own skins. But we can't count on their nostalgia forever. That's why we have to work fast, before Capone gets the same treatment he dished out to so many others during the beer wars."

  We. There it was again, the brotherly collective pronoun, but he'd decided to lay off asking questions for a while. He had the bizarre feeling the Director had rehearsed this conversation, just as he prepared for his oral reports to Congress when the budget needed hiking. Too many interruptions might force him to go back and start all over again, and that would be unpleasant for them both.

  "We know what they're up to," Hoover said. "We always have, just like all Chicago. The challenge isn't even to prove it in court, but to make the proof stick. Even when some ambitious assistant D.A. manages to land a witness who can't be bribed or scared silent, the judge throws out the case or the jury votes for acquittal on any number of phony technicalities because they've been bought off by the defendant's friends. Bootleg profits and public apathy gave those characters the opportunity to create an ironclad system of corruption unique since pagan times. In that town, it isn't just possible to get away with murder, nor even probable; it's a one-hundred-percent certainty."

  He had to ask. "What about a change of venue?"<
br />
  "The Capone mob's pockets are deep enough to include the people who make that decision. In any case it's not a sure thing. Three years after Treasury got Scarface Al, they tried the same thing with Dutch Schultz in New York. The trial was moved to a hick town upstate. Schultz went up there a week before it convened, spread money around like suntan oil, and was found not guilty on all counts. Building up a federal case takes time. The less time these hoodlums have to poison the jury pool and soften up the district judges, the better. We need to keep them busy defending themselves against local charges so they don't have the chance. But they won't remain distracted as long as they can swat those charges away in early innings. What's required is an absolutely unimpeachable witness; one who can't be threatened or bought, and whose testimony can't be ignored, because his very name is synonymous with crime in the twentieth century."

  Vasco had begun to see where the conversation was heading. He still didn't know why he was part of it, but he returned to his chair without asking. Standing in front of the platform brought his eyes on a level with the Director's, and he sensed that was a source of irritation. Hoover's pupils had shrunken to pinpricks, and if anything his speech was faster. Tiny flecks of spittle flew like sparks from an emery wheel.

  "Capone knows literally where all the bodies are buried," he went on in more measured tones. "He put them on the spot, and he can name his accomplices and provide details that no slippery criminal attorney can twist into something else, that no court can ignore. His evidence will be reported on every front page in the country and shove the war news below the fold. Winchell, the ham, will eat it up. It's been five years since he helped nab Lepke and he still acts like he strapped him in the hot seat and threw the switch." No love was lost between the radio gossip columnist and the FBI man, although they used each other. "It's the chance for every ward heeler in public office to advance himself on the legit, by convicting every last hoodlum in Chicago. Then it'll be our turn."

  "If they put Capone on the stand, what's to prevent the defense from having his testimony disallowed on the grounds of mental incompetence?"

  Hoover tapped a rounded fingernail on the open folder. "According to his medical file, his dementia is progressive, not regressive. That means his memory of the distant past is more reliable than of events much more recent. He could tell you, for instance, what Johnny Torrio wrote on the card he sent with flowers to Big Jim Colosimo's funeral in 1920, but he couldn't remember what he ate for breakfast this morning, or for that matter if he even had breakfast. Any sampling of doctors can establish that in court. But Capone will never appear on the stand.

  "This case will be years in preparation. He isn't expected to live that long. If he did, his former associates would see he never made it as far as the Illinois state line, even if they have to pump some maniac full of dope and send him in guns blazing, the way they did when they killed Cermak in '33, and to hell with it if he never makes away, as long as he does the job. We can't take that chance."

  This was a revelation to Vasco. The FBI had gone on record saying that Mayor Cermak of Chicago was an innocent bystander, slain by bullets intended for President-elect Roosevelt, who was riding beside him in an open car in Miami, Florida. Hoover himself had turned aside speculation that the corrupt city official had been marked for a very public murder after he'd welshed on certain promises he'd made to Caponeites. The shooter, an Immigrant Italian bricklayer named Zangara, had been arrested by the Secret Service, labeled an anarchist, and executed after a brief trial. Vasco felt the sinking sensation that he'd been let in—inadvertently, it appeared, almost casually—on a state secret that would make it impossible for him to leave that room without agreeing to some concession. It was like seeing one's own kidnapper removing his mask, because he wouldn't be around to identify him later. Worrying about getting fired was beginning to seem like the good old days.

  Hoover retrieved the old newspaper clipping and began tidying the file with a spinsterish attention to detail. A fusty puff reached Vasco's nostrils as the folder was closed, a smell of old ledgers moldering in an uninsulated storage room.

  "The evidence will be presented in the form of a deposition, with a signed affidavit attesting to its accuracy and the circumstances under which it was obtained. Assembling it will take months, possibly years, if Capone holds out that long. Unfortunately, what the Lord giveth He also taketh away, because while it destroys inhibitions, tertiary syphilis also brings on episodes of severe paranoia. I'm informed by agents with the surveillance team that the sight of a strange automobile parked near Capone's Florida estate is sufficient to trigger an anxiety attack; complaints to the local authorities have forced our field men to use commercial vans advertising businesses well known in the area, swimming pool services and kosher foods delivery; many of the neighbors are wealthy Jews, retired and otherwise. Jolson rents there in the winter.

  "It's a big house on an island, but only three people reside there full-time: Capone, his wife, and his son. His sister-in-law and her husband visit, and the two Negro servants don't stay over. The only others allowed inside are his brothers. Ralph is fiercely protective of Al. He's running Chicago now and doesn't get down often, but he employs bodyguards to patrol the grounds in shifts and sit in automobiles outside the gate and cruise the neighborhood on an irregular schedule. The toll man on the causeway has a direct telephone line to the house, in case a carload of assassins tries to cross over. The bodyguards are licensed private detectives, legally permitted to carry firearms, so in theory we can't touch them and neither can the Miami Police, although they take them downtown from time to time to show them who's boss. We hope to put a stop to that. It agitates the household and makes it that much harder to penetrate."

  Penetrate, Vasco thought. Like a Communist cell or a nest of enemy saboteurs.

  Hoover rattled on, like Miss Gandy at her typewriter. "Convince Ralph, you convince Al. But Ralph is suspicious by nature, and the wars with the O'Donnells and O'Banion did nothing to restore his faith in the brotherhood of man."

  These names from the past—Nitti, Guzik, Torrio, O'Donnell, O'Banion—sent a caterpillar scampering up his spine. They brought back old nightmares, meals eaten in tense silence, the boards creaking under the linoleum while his mother paced back and forth in her uneven tread, waiting for his father to come home from some unexplained errand in the dead of night, or for the landlady to call her to the telephone downstairs and hear bad news from a stranger. The names had sprawled across extra early-bird editions of the Tribune and Herald-Examiner, and shuddered the glass tubes in the Philco in the parlor, misspelled often, mispronounced frequently, but accompanied usually by words never heard in normal conversation: slain, bludgeon, massacre. It had taken Peter Vasco months to connect the surnames to the diminutives Paul Vasco slung around when he drank: Frank, Jake, Johnny, Spike, Deanie. By then his mother was drinking too.

  None of them came to the apartment. That night the man who called himself Al Brown showed up to redeem his pistol for cash was the only time he ever visited. Peter assumed they all looked like the lower primates in editorial cartoons, beetle-browed trolls in cloth caps with stubble cross-hatching their chins. It had been a shock when Dion O'Banion's photograph appeared with an account of his assassination, his round face and long upper lip resembling the young choirmaster's at St. Francis. Torrio might have been any philanthropic captain of industry the day shotguns shattered his jaw. All family acquaintances.

  Once again, Hoover appeared to have read his mind. "Your father's connection to the Capone gang is the Bureau's best hope of infiltrating that society. Those people respect four things only: money, violence, religion, loyalty. They can never have enough of the first two, and it doesn't matter to them that no self-respecting priest will grant them burial in consecrated earth, for all their solid bronze caskets and hundred-thousand-dollar floral displays; they baptize their children in church, give them first communion, send their families to Mass and sometimes attend themselves. Hymie Weiss w
as gunned down on the steps of Holy Name Cathedral on his way to confession, right across from the florist's shop where O'Banion bled out among the roses and horse manure. When they're not slaughtering rivals or suborning juries, you can find them in some shadowy booth fiddling with their beads and begging forgiveness for their crimes against America. I pleaded with Homer Cummings to let me install wire recorders there, but he said it was a Treasury matter. If I'd been with Treasury and gone to Andrew Mellon, he'd have said it was Justice. They were both afraid of the Supreme Court. This filth thinks it can fix God the way it fixed city hall."

  It occurred to him that the Director spoke in present tense, as if the days of gangster funerals, corpses bleeding in gutters, and smoky speakeasies where naked girls bathed in bathtubs foaming with French-Canadian champagne weren't as obsolete as crystal sets. He wasn't grandstanding, Vasco was certain; this wasn't just fire-breathing for the yokels. Hoover believed every word. For him, a case unclosed by the Bureau was a war unwon. When the guns went silent there would be no treaties or conditions, only a single victor standing in a scorched field. In spite of himself—his part in the battle was emerging from the fog, and it frightened him nearly out of his senses—he felt his blood beginning to glow. Such was the power of Hoover's gravitational pull.

  Vasco scarcely heard the peck at the door. Hoover yelped an invitation and Helen Gandy came in carrying a sheet with perforated edges, torn from a roll of Teletype paper.

  "You said to bring this in right away."

  "Yes. Thank you."

  She cast the young man a reassuring smile on her way out. He wondered just how deeply she was in her employer's confidence.

  Hoover read the text swiftly and set it aside. "As I was saying. Loyalty is a lesser coin of their realm—they expect it without necessarily giving it in return, and reward it, after all their baser needs are gratified. Your father performed his duties for the Capones consistently and giving satisfaction for ten years, then opened a bar in Cicero after Repeal, probably with financial assistance from his former superiors. That's assumption without evidence, but the relative ease with which he procured a license from the Illinois State Liquor Control Commission, when federal law barred former bootleggers from eligibility, suggests political influence. They were protecting their investment."