"Two for his nibs." Sonny turned up the top card of the deck, the jack of clubs. "I said, first time I met Diamond Jim—"
Sonny raised his voice. "Your turn, Danny."
"Sure." Danny played a card.
Capone looked up, nodded. He understood he'd strayed into forbidden territory. "It's a good town, Padre. You and I ought to go back for a visit sometime. I'll show you parts of the city you never knew was there."
"It's a long train ride, Dad."
"Doc Phillips says there's no reason I can't travel. I'm getting better all the time."
"A few minutes ago you said Phillips was full of shit."
"Sonny, the girls!" Ruth's voice snapped from the kitchen.
"Sorry, dear."
"Everybody makes sense sometimes, even doctors." Capone laid his hand faceup on the table. "Straight flush."
Danny said, "Cribbage, Al."
Sonny gathered in all the cards. "The Cubs game starts in ten minutes. You like baseball, Peter?"
"I do, but I'm feeling stuffed. I can use some fresh air." Bloated was the word. He was growing fat on Florida.
Capone said, "I'm in. That cabbage stink makes me sick."
"I always thought it tasted better than it smelled." Danny poured contraband wine into his water glass. "I guess I'm a lousy Irishman when you come down to it."
Sonny said, "You and Dad get comfortable on the porch. Danny and I have a bet on the game. Cubs win, I wash the Lincoln for a month."
"What if they lose?" Vasco asked.
"They never lose when I have money on them."
"Sonny's right," Capone said. "He's got the touch, not like his old man. I bet the one horse on the track don't have hoof-and-mouth, it trips and breaks its neck in the stretch."
As they rose, Sonny leaned close and murmured in Vasco's ear. "Keep your voices down. Danny can't be trusted because of booze."
A small screened porch opened off the back of the house, whitewashed wicker chairs with flowered cushions and a weathered rug that had taken on the contours of the planks beneath. A board fence kept the small backyard private from neighbors and there was a beach smell of salt air and mildew, a not-unpleasant change from the stuffy cooking odors inside.
Capone sat and unbuttoned his vest, releasing the first installment on the belly of palmier days, built on oysters and pasta and gallons of wine. He glanced back at the screen door to the house, then slipped a leather case from his inside breast pocket with his initials hand-tooled on it. It looked as if it had been designed to hold a miniature double-barreled shotgun. He pulled it apart in two sections and drew out a cigar. He stuck the cigar in his mouth, put the case back together and returned it to its pocket, and patted the others.
"Got a light, Padre?"
"I don't smoke. I'm sorry."
"Well, they taste almost as good when you chew 'em." He winked, grinning around the obstruction in the corner of his mouth. It pulled his face out of line as if it were sculpted from soft clay. "I knew it was cribbage we were playing. I never liked the game, but it's Danny's favorite, so I figured a way out that wouldn't hurt his feelings. You can get away with plenty when everyone thinks you're bugs. Winnie wears the pants in that family. I feel bad for Danny when she's around. She made him a souse. What do you miss most about Chicago, after the noise?"
"I shouldn't say it after you fed me so well, but I'd have to say the food."
"Yeah?"
"Definitely. Italian, Irish, Polish, kosher, even Chinese. Made by Italians, Irish, Polish, Jews, and Chinese. I doubt you could do better even in the countries they came from."
"Tell you something about them Chinks. You can insult them, their wives, their kids, and their ancestors, they won't spit in your food. Lop off your head with a hatchet, but they'll never dishonor the trade." He masticated the end of his cigar. "The food's up there, all right, no doubt about it. You couldn't beat the menu at the Metropole. Steaks thick as manhole covers, you could leave your teeth home and still eat the veal. Only reason I pulled up stakes and moved to the Lex is the Met started going downhill in '28.1 stepped on a roach so big one day the Moran gang could've used it to smuggle six sticks of dynamite into my suite." Vasco felt the low hum of excitement that preceded an extended Capone trip down memory lane; it tingled in the soles of his feet like a motor starting up. "What do you miss most about Chicago?"
Capone took the cigar out of his mouth and glanced again at the door. Then he put back the cigar and winked again. "The girls, Padre. What else?"
THE CONFESSIONS OF AL CAPONE
January-March 1920
Compiled from Transcripts by Special Agent P. Vasco
Division 5 FBI File #44/763
EIGHTEEN
I FELL FOR CHICAGO BANG OFF THE TRAIN. BROOKLYN WAS BIG, BUT IT didn't feel big, all cut up into little countries the way it was: Polacks here, Jews there, Micks over there, even the Italians sorted themselves into Sicilian and Neapolitan and Calabrese neighborhoods and you stuck out like a boil if you weren't from there. Chicago was big. Everything about it was big and fast and loud and it didn't stand still for a second. You could feel the trains rumbling under your feet like you were standing on top of an ocean and then they shot out of the ground and a minute later there they were over your head, racketing along seven stories up and then going into a hairpin turn right in the middle of the shopping district, what they called the Loop, the wheels screeching and spraying sparks that rained down on you like welding arcs, you saw the inside wheels lift right off the rails and the cars leaned out and you always thought they were going to fall off this time but they never did. We could've used one or two of those brass-balled motormen when we went to war with the North Side, but I guess they thought that was too tame.
Every other car on the street was red-topped or yellow or checkered, and I think if I had it to do again I'd go into the taxi business. It was just as crooked as the rackets but none of the men that ran the companies ever went to jail. There always seemed to be an election coming up: You saw gasbags in derbies and toppers waving their arms on platforms in the parks and yelling through megaphones in touring cars with the tops down and somebody's name on a banner on the side. And you saw girls everywhere on the sidewalks wearing clothes you only saw in magazines back East, hats with feathers and dresses they had to wiggle into like socks and strings of pearls you could rope and hog-tie them with if you could only catch up to them, because they broke from the gate like quarter horses. Beautiful girls in powder and paint. Not much up top—titties had went out of style, though I don't know where they went—but nice little asses, you could palm both cheeks in one hand.
The place stunk big too, all that burning coal and the stockyards right there in the middle where most cities put their statues and playgrounds. On a hot day in July it smelled like a buffalo took a bloody dump right under your nose.
Anyway there it was, all those brick warehouses and cattle pens and a thousand miles of railroad track and tall buildings like church steeples jammed in cheek-by-jowl on a lake the size of Florida, and all of it run by a half-dozen smart guys: Deanie O'Banion with his North Side muscle: Mike Merlo, president of the Unione Siciliane, what now they are calling the Mafia; two ward heelers, a little squirt named Kenna they called Hinky Dink and a fat blowhard looked like Major Hoople with a walrus moustache, Bathhouse John Coughlin was his moniker because he started out working in a Turkish bath: Mike da Pike Heitler, a big-time pimp: and Diamond Jim Colosimo. In the prime of life, all of them, and all dead in four years, except Heitler, who lasted ten, and Kenna and Coughlin, who lived to get old. You can't kill a politician with a stick.
Everybody liked Jim, even people who wanted him in the ground. He weighed at least three hundred, but he had teensy feet, so he always looked like he was trying to sneak up on you on tiptoe: back-slapping his way through his cafe, all those tables shoved together, he was like the Queen Mary going through the Soo Locks. He slicked his hair and waxed his moustache and wore sack suits and white shirts with elep
hants on them. First time we met I said, "Mr. Colosimo, I never thought I'd see anybody louder than Chicago." He had a big laugh, big like he was. He said, "Diamond Jim to you, Alphonse." He's the only one ever called me Alphonse outside of my mother and my teachers and Father Garofalo, who baptized me. "You like elephants, Alphonse?" And he gave me my first, hand-carved in Africa from genuine elephant ivory. It's still on my mantel. It brought me more luck than it ever did him. But I'm getting ahead of the story.
Johnny Torrio met us at Union Station, with a teddy bear for Sonny and a bottle of Evening in Paris for Mae, all wrapped up in gold foil and tissue from Marshall Field's, and didn't he look like a million in a camel's hair Chesterfield with a white silk scarf around his neck and a brown homburg. You'd've thought he ran Standard Oil. He leads us out to a limousine parked in a red zone at the curb. Diamond Jim owned two, and this one was imported all the way from England, with the steering wheel on the wrong side and the driver sitting in a sort of cockpit up front, separate from the passengers with nothing to keep the rain off him but his hat. This driver wore a swell uniform with brass buttons and puffy pants and high shiny boots like a lion tamer. When we were rolling Johnny spoke to him through a black tube on a hose he blew into to get his attention. Johnny tipped the redcap a buck for wheeling out our luggage. I gave the guy at Grand Central a quarter. Right then and there I decided to start tipping bills instead of coins, and I never backed off from that decision: ten-spots to hatcheck girls, C-notes to waiters and bartenders; working stiffs. They paid back plenty in friendly service, the best tables, no waiting. It was my first lesson in doing business in Chicago.
What I saw on that drive, busted glass glittering on sidewalks and in gutters; acres of it, street after street, clerks and bartenders with coats on over long aprons sweeping up the pieces and not making much headway. I thought it was window glass. I heard about tornadoes rubbing out jerkwater towns in the Midwest and asked Johnny if they really hit in big cities. He made that dry chuckle of his, like stirring dead leaves. "No, Al, it was Hurricane Andy hit yesterday. Andrew Volstead?" That's when I remembered the Volstead Act went into effect at one minute past midnight that morning. All that glass was from people dropping armloads of bottles from liquor stores and bars, drugstores, getting careless in their hurry to stock the pantry before the whole country went dry from Prohibition.
I said, "What happens when they run out?"
"That's the reason I brought you out here. You think I think you couldn't hold your own against a couple of Micks because you beat up one of their own in Brooklyn?"
I didn't know what he meant. Gosh, was I dumb. But I knew better than to ask, because when Johnny screwed that little smile on his face you knew he'd buttoned up tight. You waited until he decided the time was right.
He had us set up at the Metropole, six-room suite bigger than Mae's parents' house back on Third Place, which I turned into my base of operations after we bought the house on Prairie Avenue. He left us to unpack, then sent back the car to take us to Colosimo's Cafe on South Wabash. Dinner to welcome us to town, the driver said. Mae begged off. She was tired from the trip and Sonny was fussing. "Have a good time, and try not to be too late."
It's night now, and there's a real nut-cutter blasting off the lake with pieces of ice in it. I'm wishing on my way to the car I had a good coat like Johnny's. God put the wind there, I figure, to blow away the stockyard stink, but He could lay off in January. There's a blanket in the backseat and I don't mind saying I wrapped myself up in it like a little old lady. The heater in that secondhand Nash of Sonny's is better than anything we had in those days, limo or otherwise.
We get to the place, which is not in a good area of town, what they called the Levee, where all the Deadly Vices are on display and have been ever since the big fire, but it's all lit up like the Woolworth Building, with colosimo's spelled out in big copper letters across the front of the ground floor and also in flashing electric bulbs up and down a sign attached to the upper stories. I sprint across the wind and push in through a gold-plated door.
"Surprise!"
I near pissed my pants. The whole joint's in evening duds—men in stiff shirts, women in beaded dresses, with me in my best brown suit, also my only suit—and they're all on their feet, drinks in their hands, shouting surprise and singing, "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." I was so wound up from the trip and my big opportunity I forgot it was my twenty-first birthday. But Johnny hadn't. He set up the whole thing.
He sticks a glass in my hand, slaps me on the back, asks if I was really surprised. I say, "What do you think?" and show him my rod, which if it hadn't caught in the lining of my coat, the city would've had the first of its splashy funerals four months early.
Johnny's nose went white around the nostrils. The rough stuff made him sick, which in order to understand him you had to understand how he did business. The whole reason Diamond Jim called him out there from New York was he got tired of Black Handers putting the arm on him for protection. He paid them off a couple of times, but when they got to be a nuisance he went to family. Johnny was a blood cousin to Jim, which if you came from the Old Country was as close as a brother, and he had a reputation for settling disputes that couldn't be settled peaceably with a simple demonstration of muscle; just enough to back anybody else off from getting ideas, but not enough to start a war. It's like blowing a whiff of pepper up a drunk's nose to sober him up. Only Johnny always got somebody else to do it, because he himself was allergic to pepper.
The way Johnny told it, he set up a money drop with three of these punks under a railroad bridge at midnight, and when they came out to pick it up, they got four barrels of buckshot instead. It was two boys from Brooklyn behind the shotguns, Joe D'Andrea and Mack Fitzpatrick. Johnny mixed the gangs; he was a pioneer that way. I followed his example when I brought in Jake Guzik to keep the books. You can't beat a Jew when it comes to numbers.
So this night at Jim's he takes me aside and says, "Listen to the advice of an old man: Hire some gorilla to carry your rod for you. That way they might put you in jail, but they'll never hang you." It was good advice, but I couldn't take it. Times were changing. In 1928 my pal Patsy Lolordo caught a slug in the head on account of his bodyguards went for a walk. When push comes to shove the only thing you can depend on is a gun in your hand.
What a night! A band, champagne, mounds of linguini, and piles of pastrami on rye, they had this stage that came up out of the floor on hydraulic lifts with cute little girls in their undies wriggling on top of it to the music. I had Diamond Jim's elephant in my pocket, bringing me luck already, and Johnny made the rounds introducing me. O'Banion impressed me at first. His tux fit him like a second skin—with special pockets, I found out later, sewn in to carry the three guns he never went without—and a fresh carnation from his own shop in his lapel. He had the cleanest hands I ever saw, pink with white nails; they spent a lot of time in potting soil and he washed them six or seven times a day.
Deanie wore a built-up shoe on one foot because that leg was short, but he still limped, so what he did, he picked out a spot and stood there all night and shook hands with everybody who came up, with his left hand in the side pocket of his coat with a piece of artillery in it. They said he killed twenty-five men, maybe fifty tidying up the North Side, let's figure ten, it still don't make him the choir boy he said he used to be, but I say it was that trick of his of standing still and letting the world come to him that got him his reputation as a muckety-muck, a man who held court. Truth to tell he looked like a fairy Irish tenor with that pie face and that cat's smile.
There was gambling upstairs, roulette and craps and poker, with a blackboard to clock the horses when they ran anywhere in the country. Dogs, too; they were popular, probably because racing them was illegal, same as booze. Now they're legit no one plays them but widows living on their dead husbands' pensions here in Miami. Colosimo's had girls, too, but I was on my best behavior as to that, because it was clear to me Mae was in cahoots with John
ny on the surprise party or she'd've wished me a happy birthday sometime that day. Wives keep track of all the occasions. But I dumped a couple of hundred at poker, most I ever lost up to then. I didn't have it. I thought I was in Dutch right off the bat, my first day, but then Diamond Jim dropped a hand like a big pillow on my shoulder and said don't worry, my credit's good. Figuring back over the next ten years, I lost ten million trying to win back that two hundred.
Diamond Jim. Let me tell you, back then, you had a nickname, you had it for a reason, not because some newspaper writer thinks "Dingbat" sells more copies than plain John Oberta. Diamond Jim sparkled like a big fat chandelier: brilliants on all his stubby fingers, stuck in his tie, on his cuffs—Christ, on his belt buckle, which is where I got the idea to have such buckles made for my special friends. Johnny said he even carried them loose in his pockets and played with them like rosary beads. I believe it, though I never got to see it. Jim didn't last that long.
When the poker game broke up, Johnny drifted over and sat across the table from me. He had a glass of club soda. I never saw him drink or smoke or show any other vice. Apart from setting up some murders I guess he could pass through the eye of the needle slick as spit. "Having a good time, Al?"
"Swell, Johnny. Swell place. Jim's a swell guy." I was drinking, can you tell? Hell, I was of age, even if the country wasn't anymore.
"Swell's the word. I just wish he wasn't so comfortable."
"You mean fat?"
"Fat is fine. Fat means you have time to eat and drink because your business is in good hands. It inspires confidence. Get fat, Al. I wish I could. I haven't gained a pound in ten years."
The Confessions of Al Capone Page 25
