The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  "Muni. Paul Muni. Jew pretending to be a guinea. Not worth your time, Al."

  "Like I didn't know already." He twisted his mouth. '"Alio, Louie,' what's that, 'Alio'? I was born in Brooklyn, not Naples, for chrissake."

  "Al," Mae said.

  "Sorry. For Pete's sake. I'm as American as Charles Lindbergh."

  He lost focus. "You know, I offered to help rescue his baby boy. All I asked for was a little fresh air while I got on the horn, called in a couple of markers, maybe a year or so off my sentence. He turned me down cold, and his boy wound up in some hole in the ground. Charley Luciano, he put his crew to work on the New York docks, protecting this country from Nazi spies, and the government's letting him rot in Sing Sing. My pal Lucky. Fuck this country." He flapped a hand. "What's the show tonight, Danny?"

  "All Through the Night. Bunch of gangsters fighting Nazi spies."

  "Aw, shit."

  Mae excused herself and stood. Vasco rose politely after her. "I'll let you boys enjoy your show. I have letters to write, starting with Muriel."

  Muriel, Mae's sister, and her husband, Louis Clark, lived at the Palm Island estate part-time. During the winter season the household might include them, Danny and his wife, Winifred, Sonny and his family when they left their own Florida home to join him, Capone's brothers and their wives and children, their sister Mafalda, and Teresa Capone, their mother. The size of the house seemed far less palatial when one considered how many people were sleeping under its roof at any given time.

  Brownie poured coffee from a silver carafe into white-and-gold china cups and the three men carried them into the living room, balancing them on their saucers. Sonny was busy threading a reel of film from a large open flat can through the mechanism of a motion-picture projector bolted to a metal table that rolled out from behind a panel in the wall opposite the fireplace. The whole affair was as big and bulky as an icebox and when he flipped the switch, a cooling fan inside the machine clattered to life and whirred loudly. Walking past to take his seat on the great davenport, Vasco felt the wind of the fan and also the heat of the lightbulb that projected the images onto a screen that pulled down from the ceiling in front of the portrait of Al and Sonny. Considering the volatile nature of the celluloid that passed within inches of the bulb, Sonny had not exaggerated the fire hazard.

  The sun was long gone, and with the drapes closed over the glass doors, the beam from the projector was the only light when Sonny turned off the ceiling fixture. Capone was chewing Sen-Sen tonight; Vasco recognized the flat slim box he poured into his palm and smelled licorice. The powerful Capone jaws worked with an abrasive noise like worn gears. His molars must have been ground down to stumps after many years of such abuse.

  The movie, an action-comedy, was puerile, unconvincing, and enormously entertaining, as two rival racketeering gangs battled each other and the police on an urban back lot, then joined forces to defeat Fifth Column saboteurs peopled by the usual studio cast of foreign subversives. The heroic crooks were named Gloves and Sunshine and Starchie and Spats. When Sonny turned the lights back on to reverse the film, Danny Coughlin was snoring with his head tipped back over the top of his overstuffed chair and his coffee cold and untouched on the end table beside him.

  "Malarkey," Capone said again; Mae's Irish upbringing had had its effect on her mate. "If Johnny couldn't get the gangs to work together when there were millions to be made, whaddaya think this mug Bogart's chances were? And those names are a crockashit. Reporters make 'em up to sell papers. Anybody called my pal Jake Guzik 'Greasy Thumb' to his face, I'd've shot him in the head."

  Which was precisely what had happened, and how, by a route so twisted no one could have predicted it, Peter Vasco had come to share a sofa with Al Capone. He glanced over his shoulder at Sonny, engrossed in the action of the projector. He couldn't believe he wasn't aware of his father's conversation.

  "I give this Bogart points for balls. His old man was a doctor, Winnie says. She reads all the movie magazines." Winnie would be Winifred, Danny's wife, away on a visit. "If the old man was as tough as Doc Phillips, I can see where he got it. I could've used all three of 'em when that crazy Polack came at me in the Hawthorne along with the whole North Side."

  Vasco figured it out then. In order to increase his concentration for fire control, Sonny had turned off his hearing aid so the soundtrack on the film wouldn't distract him. He'd forgotten to turn it back on after the movie finished. Vasco's heart began to beat with a slow, steady rhythm. It was a fallacy that the pulse quickened with excitement. That, or he was some kind of freak.

  "If I knew what was waiting for me, Padre, I'd've listened to my old man and gone into your line, or maybe learned to cut hair."

  Vasco sensed that this was prelude to a personal memoir.

  An inactive hearing aid. An ill-timed binge. He couldn't believe his luck. For this one moment in eternity, God had turned His Devil's side away.

  He sat perfectly still, afraid to move or speak and risk interrupting Capone's train of thought. He would make notes later.

  THE CONFESSIONS OF AL CAPONE

  1899-1920

  Compiled from Transcripts by Special Agent P. Vasco

  Division 5 FBI File #44/763

  TWELVE

  Deanie O'Banion said if all the mugs who said they were altar boys crowded into Holy Name at the same time, the walls would bust. He had his own old robe, white with a mothy black collar, in a big glass frame in the flower shop. His wife Viola set it up on an easel at his funeral. I bet he stole it. The point is none of us was born in the rackets. It was a brand new business and we made up the rules as we went. Deanie broke the rules he helped write and he went to hell for it. Not that we aren't all of us going to hell. The trick is to get your innings in first.

  I was the fourth of nine, in Brooklyn, 1899, a last-century boy: "After the Ball" was playing on the Edison in the parlor. If you believe these characters who say I was born in Italy because no real American would ever do what I did, I'm there right now, deported, ducking Yankee bombs with that bald-headed ginzo Mussolini. You're just dreaming I'm here in sunny Florida. The only one of us who didn't come into this world a U.S. citizen was Jimmy, and he became a cowboy.

  I'm no Italian. I buy my suits from Marshall Field's and from Sewell Brothers here in Miami and I had boxes at Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field all the years I lived in Chicago. Baseball's my game. I don't know how to play bocci, but I can tell you there's no balk to third base.

  When I had a car custom made, Jake said I should get a Rolls Royce or a Duesenberg, but I went to Detroit. I wanted a Lincoln, but Henry Ford wouldn't have anything to do with it. He refused to even meet with me. So I went to General Motors and had them build me a Cadillac from the ground up: special heavy-duty frame, truck springs, steel plates in the doors. You wanted to get in and wire a pineapple to go off under my ass, you had to know the combination to the door lock. The engineers used transmission gears to crank the windows up and down because they were bulletproof, an inch and a half thick, and heavier than a son of a bitch. It wound up weighing seven tons and cost me twenty grand. In those days you could buy four houses for less. I didn't care. The economy can always use a boost and it gave people a lift when they saw me rolling down Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive. "There goes Al," they said.

  But to get back to Brooklyn. Father Garofalo baptized me in the basement of St. Michael and St. Edward on St. Edward's Street. I got my catechism in the same basement. It smelled like potatoes and pee. When I think about it, I spent a lot of time in basements when I was young. I learned to shoot pool there good and I popped bottles with a revolver underground in the Adonis Social Club on Flushing. My ears ring when I think about it. I know I'm part mole. For years I did all my moving around at night and slept till noon.

  I was pretty good at school at first, though you won't hear that from anybody but me. If I'd stayed at P.S. 7, I might've become a bookkeeper with a big company. I was always good at figures, especially when ther
e was a dollar sign in front of them. And I've always been interested in history. I read a book about Napoleon when I was locked up in Philly, too late to profit from his mistakes. But in sixth grade they moved me to P.S. 133, big ugly building looked like a jail and that's how they ran it. My teacher slapped me for talking back and I pasted one on her, knocked her ass over teakettle into the potbelly stove. I swear I didn't mean to hit her that hard. I was fourteen then and didn't know my own strength.

  Anyway the stovepipe came apart and dumped soot all over her. It got a big laugh. Not from the principal, though. He beat the shit out of me and punctured my eardrum. I didn't see any point in going back after that.

  I got a hiding from my old man, too, when he found out. He was as good with a strop as he was with a razor. Once when a census taker came around asking my mother how many children she had before they were married, my father excused himself and came back with his razor. The census taker left, and when a policeman came around, the old man told him what had happened. The cop said—speaking Italian—"Gabriel, don't threaten no census takers no more," and left. See, the Black Hand had forced my old man to put a telephone line in his barbershop to take bets, and the cop didn't want to have to run him in and give up the five bucks a week he got for looking the other way. That's how it was then. It's probably fifty bucks now.

  After that I didn't stay home much, not that I ever did. Jimmy was gone, my brother Frank was moving furniture, and Ralph was out selling artichokes for Ciro Terranova, the Artichoke King, he was called, because he had a corner on the market, which he hung onto with strong-arm men like Ralph; but even after my sister Rosalia died before she was one, there were still five of us crowded in a three-room apartment that smelled like pee. Every place smelled like pee then, except the saloons, so that was another good reason for not staying home.

  I liked to have fun. Who doesn't: There was no radio, and if you had a nickel for the movies you hoped it was a western, because if there wasn't a lot of riding and shooting you had to read title cards to know what was going on. I wanted to read, I'd go to the library. How it worked, you gave the man at the door your money and you'd go in and sit down on a folding chair and there would be a lady up front playing piano along with what was happening up on the screen. She'd play slow when people were just talking on title cards and fast when something exciting was going on, so you'd listen at the door and if she was playing fast you went in and if she was playing slow you didn't. I learned this in 1909 when I was ten, before I could read the sandwich board out front that said what the movie was. Broncho Billy Anderson never wasted time talking on title cards.

  But you couldn't always be at the movies. They didn't run late or on Sundays, and nickels didn't fall off the backs of wagons like pieces of coal. Or dresses, like in the garment district in Manhattan; I got that from Charley Luciano, who had Jew friends across the river. These days, you've got Boy Scouts, the YMCA, gymnasiums where kids can play basketball or whale on each other in a ring, with gloves and leather helmets so they don't come away silly. Not then, not there. I joined a gang.

  Partly it was for protection, because if you didn't belong to one you were fair game for all of them, and believe me, there isn't a thing happens to a man in prison doesn't happen to a boy on the street without someone to stand behind him. But mostly it was from not having anything better to do. Sure, there was work: I clerked a candy store on Fifth Avenue, set pins in a bowling alley— "being an angel in Polack heaven," we called it—cut paper in a bindery, which let me tell you dries your hands and makes them crack and bleed. I see a Cuban cane-cutter on the street here, bandages on his hands, I tell Danny pull over, I give him a twenty.

  Being in a gang, it's like having a family that looks after you but doesn't smack you with a paddle when you don't know where Serbia is and don't give a shit what the Bulgarians are up to there. And the basements where you shoot pool and craps don't smell like pee. Rat shit sometimes; but rats don't stink as bad as people.

  If they ever make a movie about the Five Points Gang, they can throw away the slow sheets. That asshole Dutch Schultz told me the punks down there are still singing songs about it, like Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Trust a kike to shine up to your good side. You say he's dead? Fuck him, and good riddance to bad rubbish; but even a clock that's busted is right twice a day, Johnny told me. The pope gave me a medal, I wouldn't be prouder than saying I belonged to Five Points. We'd march up the street banging on washboards and tubs, diddy-dum, diddy-dum-dum, diddy-dum-durn-dum, singing, "We're the boys of Navy Street, and touch us if you dare." Top of the lungs, every cobblestone and wooden spoon hitting the boards and tubs on "dare." Then we'd beat the shit out of the Irish gangs, or they'd beat the shit out of us. It depended on who had the numbers that day. This went on till the police whistles blew, then we'd scatter like cockroaches when the light goes on. Not one of us was ever collared after any of those affairs. The Irish cops were too fat and drunk to chase us far and the dago cops were too smart to try. So we had plenty of time to dish it out and eat it up. By the time I was eighteen I had enough bloody noses to last a lifetime. I think of those days, I can taste the blood and snot. I'm not kidding. It's like I just got popped.

  Four years from school to my first rackets job. To a kid that's forever, but it seems now like a lot happened fast. I made friends, got arrested, lost my cherry. And I met Johnny Torrio. Cherry first. That's more important than you'll ever know, Padre. A man's life falls into two parts: before he got his tie straightened and after. Her name was Constanzia, but hookers are like hotels, reaching for the moon from the toilet. You ever see a hotel sign says The Royal Arms, don't go in, because those arms have got needle tracks. I had Constanzia in a brass bed in the back room of the Harvard Inn on Coney Island. I think it lasted three minutes, but that may be the golden glow of middle age obscuring the true facts. I remember thinking, if this is what it's about, why all the hollering? But then I couldn't wait to go again. Food's like that, booze too. To hell with heartburn and puking. Anyway they tell me, Doc Phillips and the quacks in Alcatraz, that's probably when I picked up the bug. Wouldn't you know it? One bang and I'm doomed. I'm Norma Shearer.

  It was through Charley Luciano I hooked up with Constanzia. I don't hold it against him. You can't stay mad at Charley, even when he's slipping you the knife. In those days we figured if a dame took care of her teeth she was clean everywhere, so the first thing we did, we looked at her teeth, like Jimmy says you do when you're shopping for a horse. But you don't fuck horses unless you're one of those crazy Genna brothers. They'd fuck anything and shoot it in the head after. Charley ran Five Points. He was older than me by a couple of years, had some killings under his belt when I met him: pimps, rats, nobody you'd miss. Impressing women was never a problem for him. His trouble was they impressed him back. He had a droopy lid like he was winking all the time and was always combing his hair, even when we were squatting in some alley waiting for the beat cop to walk past before we broke a lock. Combing his hair and talking about some dame he was meeting after the score. Lucky, they call him now. There's a story going around that he got that name after some mugs took him for a ride, sliced him up with razors, and left him for dead on Staten Island, and he survived. Benny Siegel swore it was true, but they don't call him Bugsy on account of his bad temper, like we did Moran in Chicago; he's as looney as they say I am sometimes, had this scheme to personally put Hitler on the spot or something like that, right in the middle of a war. Nobody ever came back from a ride, not even Charley, unless it was women took him. He might be able to talk himself out of that deal. His name's Luciano. It don't take a genius to come up with how the newspapers arrived at Lucky.

  Those names. Scarface. Three Fingers. Dingbat. The Enforcer. All malarkey. Those reporters get all their ideas from Dick Tracy. They was to start calling Churchill Fats and Roosevelt Gimpy, they'd be drafted in a week.

  Right from the start Charley's weakness was women. He couldn't take a whore to bed without he had to fall in l
ove first. The reason he never married, there was always another hooker around to fall in love with before he finished falling out of love with the last. It didn't surprise me when he went to the joint finally on a white slavery rap. Sure, he was framed, but Charley wasn't the first mug to furnish the frame. There's talk of deporting him back to Sicily when the war's finished, place he left when he was in diapers. If I were him I'd tell those boys he's got prowling the waterfront hunting for Nazis to take their time.

  The first time I laid eyes on Johnny Torrio, I knew he was quality. Charley introduced us in Johnny's office at Fourth and Union. Johnny used to run the Five Pointers, which was how they knew each other. He was a natty little guy dressed like a banker, wore a Homburg like Woodrow Wilson. Always smiling, twinkle in the eye. He had some gray hairs even then. I was looking for a job, and Charley thought I'd make a good bouncer down by the Navy Yard where Johnny had a place.

  "Those sailors are a rough bunch," Johnny said, looking me over. He was an Old Country wop, but he left when he was little, so you wouldn't know he wasn't Brooklyn born from the way he talked. "He's a big fellow, but how do I know he won't fold up first time someone clips him?" Johnny was the first one to call me the Big Fellow. It stuck.

  "You don't know Al. He grew up in the Yard. When he was ten he called out a recruit twice his size."

  "How'd it turn out?"

  "His corporal broke it up," I said. "Big break for him." Johnny nodded, smiling and twinkling. Then he hit me right on the button.

  Point of the chin, where it rattles your brains. I hardly saw him move. I took a couple steps back and almost tripped over this contraption on a stand, thing with wax cylinders and like a telephone receiver, you talked into it and a machine recorded your words. I'd never seen anything like it.