The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  "He couldn't even do that for thirteen years."

  "Not legally, no, sir. But I seen me some blowin' off when the law said no; I did indeed. What time you got, sir, if you don't mind my asking'? My old pocket winder needs cleaning."

  He looked at his strap watch. "I have three-eighteen." He'd stopped himself shy of giving it in military time; he pledged to spend the long ride purging himself of Bureauese.

  "What's two minutes?" With sudden energy, the bartender rang a brass bell hanging above the bar. "What'll it be, sir? I'll be sure and pour it slow."

  "Kentucky rye." It had calmed him in Hoover's office. No other kind of alcohol sprang to mind.

  The man behind the bar set down a pony glass and filled it with Old Overholt. "Not many asking for it these days. Folks got suspicious of American brands when they started spiking 'em with wood alcohol and fusel oil. If it sounded imported they lapped it up, even when it came from a car radiator with iodine to taste. These days it's Scotch, Scotch, Scotch. Can't keep it in stock."

  "What's your preference?"

  "Soda pop, sir, same as you. I made that promise to Cassie on our wedding day. A man's nothing if he don't keep his promises."

  That soured the taste of the whiskey, but it was too sweet for him anyway. He still couldn't see what people saw in it, why wars had been fought over it. Passengers were entering the car. He had the bizarre feeling they'd been hovering on the platform outside, listening for the magic bell. The bartender left him to take orders. Scotch did seem to be the variety of choice. Vasco let his drink stand unfinished and left money on the bar, including a tip that wasn't so generous he'd be remembered later.

  Back in his compartment, he spread out the Capone file on the bench opposite and selected a ragged sheaf of pink onionskin containing an incident report by the Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff's Department dated April 28, 1926. A bullet-mangled body had been discovered in a ditch beside a country road a few miles south of Chicago. All means of identification had been removed, but another report filed later that day, rescued from the disorderly pile of material, identified the victim as William Harold McSwiggin, a young assistant state's attorney; Jake Lingle, a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, signed a statement to that effect.

  A bundle of crumbling newspaper clippings harvested over succeeding weeks provided more details. Two more bodies surfaced in woods and a puddle of brackish water, O'Donnell Gang members ambushed in front of a Cicero roadhouse by an armed motorcade. McSwiggin was believed at first to have been an innocent bystander cut down while investigating the O'Donnells from inside. The blame fell heavily on Capone: His men were swept up by the paddy wagonload for interrogation, and he himself surrendered to authorities in the Federal Building to give a statement accounting for his whereabouts on the night of the assault. A Grand Jury was summoned. A second was announced days before its term ran out at the end of a month. There would be six in all.

  A weary Capone finally told reporters: "Of course I didn't kill him. Why should I? I liked the kid. Only the day before, he was up to my place and when he went home I gave him a bottle of Scotch for his old man."

  The "old man," a detective sergeant and thirty-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, said, "Those bullets weren't meant for my boy." The innocent-bystander theory had become official policy.

  Then it began to unravel. Capone made a second appearance in the Federal Building: Vasco looked again at a man obviously harried, but smiling for the benefit of the photographer on the front steps, one hand in the trousers pocket of a beautiful suit. I paid mcswiggin, ran the headline.

  "I paid him plenty," he was quoted in the article, "and I got what I was paying for."

  By October, the state attorney's name had slipped from page one and begun its migration to two paragraphs in the Contests section. The press had many other fish to fry.

  That spring and summer, the battle for the streets seemed to have escalated from trench warfare to full mobilization. Three cars had been involved in the attack on the O'Donnells. Less than five months later, ten seven-passenger sedans cruised past the Hawthorne Inn on Cicero's Twenty-Second Street, where Capone was dining in the ground-floor restaurant with Frankie Rio, one of his bodyguards, and poured at least a thousand rounds into the building, by police estimate; the walls and fixtures were so torn apart there was no telling how much had been sprayed from shotguns and how much from Thompsons. Thirty-five cars parked on the street were clobbered with holes and four people hit, none of them Capone or Rio, who pulled his employer to the floor and piled on top of him at the sound of the first report. The savagery had become commonplace, but Vasco was shaken by the incompetence and casual disregard for collateral victims. A shard of glass pierced the eye of a woman seated in a parked car. Capone paid for her medical treatment.

  According to Lingle of the Tribune, it was the Big Fellow's first personal experience with mechanized weaponry. "That's the gun," he said. "It's got it over a sawed-off shotgun like the shotgun has it over an automatic. The trouble is they're hard to get."

  Not so hard, it seemed, that exactly three weeks later they didn't chatter from upper-floor windows across State Street from Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, killing Hymie Weiss and a companion and wounding two others. Police reports and newspapers agreed that it cleared up any mystery as to who had bankrolled the siege on the Hawthorne Inn. A photo in the Herald-Examiner showed the cornerstone of the church chewed up by bullets, leaving the chiseled inscription to read: every knee should heaven and earth. Vasco made note of it to look up later.

  More morgue pictures, McSwiggin quartered on an autopsy table, his intestines draining in a sink. "Red" Duffy, one of his criminal companions, had been dumped in a puddle by his friends while still alive. He'd died with his lips skinned back from his teeth like an angry dog's. According to the report, a coroner's assistant had been obliged to break his fingers in order to open his fist, but he wasn't clutching any telltale buttons or incriminating messages, a la Edgar Wallace. Hymie Weiss was uncircumcized.

  Cook County, Vasco learned, tattooed ID codes on big toes in case the tags slipped off. If you died violently or without a physician in attendance, you went to your reward marked for all eternity. It should have furnished a subject for conversation in Limbo. He'd always pictured the place as a huge waiting room with magazines on tables and the doctor running late. The work would have been stacked up that year.

  There was balance in the file. Capone's highly publicized efforts to feed the unfortunate during hard times was documented; a photostat of an invoice, stamped paid and signed by Jacob Guzik, his financial officer, listed six pages of utensils, canned goods, and fresh produce to supply the soup kitchens he'd established throughout Chicago, totaling more than twenty-five hundred dollars. Men and women dressed in their shabby best were photographed lining up outside one of the locations, months before the Salvation Army and the federal government came on board. Guzik had signed the hospital bill for Anna Freeman, the woman injured in front of the Hawthorne: a whopping five thousand. Capone's own signature appeared nowhere. A cagey man, even in his philanthropy.

  Young Peter Vasco hadn't been aware of the turbulent events at the time. It would be another year before uncles John and Albert gave him a rocking horse. He assumed his mother had taken charge of keeping him uninformed. His father was seldom home, going out before Peter got up and returning hours after he'd gone to bed.

  Rio, the man who'd saved Capone's life in the restaurant, appeared in a photo with his eyes rolled to one side as if looking for a way out. He slicked his hair like Valentino, but his upper lip was badly out of line, as if it had been torn by a bullet or a razor and stitched by an amateur. Vasco vaguely recalled a man with a funny lip sharing a jug of brown homemade wine with his father at the kitchen table. It was late; the boy had gotten up for a drink of water and come upon them in their shirtsleeves. He remembered the red suspenders the stranger wore with a tie that matched, and the way the conversation stopped when he'd entered the
room in his nightshirt.

  He shook his head. A lot of men had bad lips back then, cratered by smallpox or split by a fall on a loading dock. He didn't even know when the meeting had taken place. It didn't mean Frankie Rio had been in his home or that it had anything to do with "Terrible 26," as the delirious press called it. An acquaintance with Scalise and Anselmi was too close to Capone for comfort, but his personal bodyguard? Paul Vasco drove a beer truck, played fetch for spear-handlers on the fringe of the Outfit. ("Performed odd jobs," Hoover had said; and who would know if not J. Edgar Hoover?) The boys could be clumsy, but they knew better than to engage menials for important work.

  He'd spent too many hours with that file. It was warping his imagination. He was like the hypochondriac who read impenetrable medical journals and concluded he suffered from beriberi.

  Time to part with that folder filled with ancient horrors, wars no one cared who'd lost and won. He indulged himself once more only, mining the desiccating heap of paper to excavate the record on Jake Lingle, the Tribune journalist who always seemed to be around when a John Doe in the morgue needed a name and Al Capone had something to say worth putting out on the AP wire.

  He had no trouble finding it. That was the telling thing.

  The train stopped in Raleigh to exchange passengers. He got off, bought packing material at a Piggly Wiggly, and sent the Capone file by special delivery to Washington, using the address of a paper-and-pen supply company with direct ties to the Bureau, as instructed. What he hadn't read was an omission less dangerous than if he were caught in possession, and in any case the man he'd been assigned to befriend and betray had far more to offer, and at first hand; assuming his brains hadn't broken down into a pile of debris worse than his file.

  North Carolina was hot and sodden, at a time when the District had not yet accepted a spring season unclouded by icy rain or even a snow shower; climatologists predicted a modern Ice Age, touched off by promiscuous plosive activity in Northern Europe. The conditioned air from the compressors in the day coach evaporated the sweat from his body and chilled him—if not to the bone, then at least to the flesh beneath the skin. He thought fondly of the warming properties of Kentucky rye, but vetoed a return to the club car so soon, in case the bartender fixed him too well in his memory.

  Possibly it was an unnecessary precaution. He'd begun to suspect that his background was less valuable to undercover work than his general lack of color; but then since adolescence he'd been determined not to become "a character," as Paul Vasco referred to the plug-uglies who drifted in and out of their apartment, gnawing on toothpicks and adjusting their genitals as if they were capsules of nitroglycerine that might detonate if not allowed to swing free. He was perfectly satisfied of the stability of his own in the sling of his BVDs. The habits of a lifetime provided their own camouflage. His only adult relationship had ended when he was informed that an entire pair of socks need not be thrown out when one had a hole in it and every other pair in the drawer was the same color and style. The door had slammed in the middle of a dissertation on the wisdom of rotating tires.

  "Dear God, I'm a stuffed shirt," he breathed aloud.

  "Huh." The woman seated across the aisle, cloche-hatted and knitting a gray scarf suitable for sending to a soldier in the Aleutians, chuckled aloud and stepped up the operation, as if that were the source of amusement.

  He returned to his compartment and rang for the porter to make his berth. Left alone he stripped to those marvelous BVDs and factory-matched socks and climbed in. The slight sway of the car put him into a deep sleep, interrupted only twice, when the train made another passenger stop and when it lurched and shuddered with the coupling and uncoupling of cars.

  In the morning he put on his robe, washed and shaved in a cramped but spotless lavatory, and went back to the compartment to open his valise. In a little while he looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the compartment door. He wore a sixty-dollar gray suit over a black dickey and white clerical collar, all supplied by the FBI wardrobe department; really just a large walk-in closet supervised by a fussy Special Intelligence officer, but stocked with an impressive variety of uniforms and business attire, formal wear, and ragtag garments appropriate to stevedores, taxi drivers, and handymen. An elevator operator or street sweep would not have come away from that room unprepared. In that light, the Director's fascination with movie stars seemed less a symptom of public vanity and more a matter of free exchange. Washington and Hollywood shared a dependence on putty noses and padded suits; likely a barter system existed, trading professional consultation on Bureau-related films for access to studio tailors and seamstresses.

  The train got into Fort Lauderdale at noon. He'd boarded it a civil servant, part of the drab fabric of the wartime bureaucracy, and left it a soldier in the service of God, which was invisibility of another kind. People he encountered in the crowd smiled politely or touched their hats and looked straight through him.

  Very quickly he wondered how priests in that part of the world kept their collars fresh. He'd brought changes, but it seemed he might go through them all the first day. If the weather experts were right about the cooling of the earth, the news hadn't reached Florida. Deceptively mild, the air, creaking with gulls and smelling faintly of fish and diesel oil, grew heavy as he walked along the platform and broke him into a sweat.

  "Father, can I take your bag?"

  He blinked at the colored porter with his handcart—the first person to call him Father—and shook his head. "No, thank you; my son. Could you direct me to the local branch of the Everglade State Bank?"

  It was the porter's turn to hesitate. Vasco considered explaining the vagaries connected with Mammon and the Church, but thought it better to blend with the scenery. When the directions were forthcoming he thanked the man again and walked to the streetcar stop in front of the station.

  When he got off, the breeze through the open windows had refreshed him. He went through a heavy leaded-glass door into a marble lobby and felt the air-conditioning brush the back of his neck.

  The bank was a prime example of post-Dillinger architecture. Behind the tellers' cages the vault door was sealed tight, and the cages themselves were enclosed in ribs of glistening rock maple and bulletproof glass. A Hispanic guard stood in an ostentatious spot with his thumbs hooked inside his Sam Browne belt, the checked handle of a big revolver leaning out from his hip. A challenging pair of hickory-colored eyes watched the man dressed as a priest carrying a large valise up to the writing bench.

  Vasco dipped a pen, filled out a withdrawal slip, and walked to the tellers' cages, waving the ink dry as he went. A plump young woman with a pretty face smiled at him through the bars, called him Father, and asked what she could do for him. A tiny silver crucifix winked at him from the hollow of her throat. He smiled back and slid the slip under the glass.

  Budgeting and Accounting had wired the equivalent of a Division Four clerk's annual salary in his name to Everglade's main office in Miami, to draw on for expenses. This was the same bank that had approved Paul Anthony Vasco's application for a loan, and with good reason. It was an open secret in Washington—open to everyone, it seemed, but holders of ephemeral national office—that the Bureau had bought up a number of failed banks and other businesses during the Depression, and used them to direct funds to various operations around the country and as fronts to prevent paper trails from leading to the FBI. It was doubtful that the ordinary employees of these institutions knew who they were really working for, but Vasco watched closely as she read the slip. Nothing but friendliness showed on her face when she asked for identification, and still when she handed back his brand new Florida driver's license with a picture of him wearing a collar. She excused herself to check his balance.

  In her absence he glanced toward the guard, but the man had lost interest when a tommy gun failed to materialize from the big suitcase and switched his attention to a middle-aged man coming in the door in baggy shorts and a Panama hat, anchors on his shirt.
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  "Sorry to keep you waiting, Father. We just got notice of the account from Miami this morning." The teller counted out two hundred dollars from her drawer. "Are you new to Florida?"

  "Yes. My father lives here in town and I've been transferred to Our Lady of Redemption in Miami."

  Her smile grew brilliant, exposing braces. "That's my aunt's church! I guess I'll see you there next visit."

  "I guess you will." He smiled back, and held the expression for the guard's benefit until he was outside. He hoped Hoover knew what he was doing; and felt a twinge of guilt for doubting him.

  Either Southern hospitality was everything it was cracked up to be, or ecclesiastical garb sweetened hearts soured by the heat. The first person on the street he asked for directions to a respectable hotel, a large-hipped woman in a thin cotton sundress carrying a grocery sack, glanced from his lifted hat to his collar, then down to his valise, and told him how to get to the Sea Breeze Motor Court on Atlantic. A quart of ice cream had sweated through the sack and dripped down the side of her dress, turning it transparent and showing her girdle.

  The Sea Breeze was a shotgun arrangement of rooms in a pink stucco building with a scripted neon sign identifying the office at one end. The office smelled of disinfectant and chewing gum and the female clerk nursed a short soggy cigarette stub smoldering in her face. But his room was clean, with the damp of the ocean apparent, if not the ocean itself; it was across the street, behind a row of shops selling bathing suits and tackle. Four pale blue ribbons stirred feebly in front of a window-mounted air conditioner to show it was doing its job.

  He opened a window to help out. He turned on a radio, but getting only static on all stations snapped it off and unpacked the Bible that had traveled with him all the way from Cicero and sat on the bed to search for the verse that had been all but shot away along with Hymie Weiss in front of Holy Name. He found it in St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (2:10):