Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

“Once in the racket, you’re in it for life,” Capone supposedly said in 1931. “Your past holds you in it. . . . If I could go to Florida and live quietly with my family for the rest of my days, I’d be the happiest man alive. But no such peaceful life is in the cards for me.”

  And yet Capone’s exit would arrive sooner than he might have expected. The event cementing his hold on the city also set the stage for his downfall—although Capone would never be tried for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the court of public opinion would convict him, the media behind his national celebrity turning against him.

  After the stock market crash that October, resentment grew over Capone’s conspicuous wealth. With a quarter of Americans out of work, the new U.S. president became desperate for a victory . . . and the possibility of one presented itself in taking down the nation’s most famous bootlegger.

  In their search for a hero to fight that battle, the government and the media would pluck from obscurity a federal agent three years younger than Capone—a scrupulously honest man in America’s most dishonest city, working in the most corrupt law enforcement agency in the nation’s history.

  This ideal G-man, with a growing record of arrests, convictions, and daring undercover work, had a dislike of guns and violence, preferring to leave his service revolver behind even when on duty. Those who met him but had never seen him in action usually found it hard to envision him going on raids or tussling with gangsters.

  He was not lacking in courage or conviction; as one friend put it, “I have never known a man who lived by a stricter code.” But in person he seemed remarkably mild-mannered, passive, even shy. He had an easy smile and a good sense of humor, but was recalled by that same friend as “extremely modest and introverted,” a person “who could get lost in a crowd of two people.”

  Yet serving as an officer of the law built up his self-confidence; having the authority of the federal government behind him gave the young G-man an inner strength he perhaps couldn’t muster on his own. Eliot Ness did not believe in Prohibition but felt it should be respected. Moreover, he understood the true danger of the ill-advised dry law was the power and influence it gave to organized criminals like Al Capone.

  Physically, they were polar opposites—Capone, big and imposing; Ness, slim and retiring. Where Capone outfitted himself flashily, Ness dressed with professional care, his brown hair parted neatly down the middle. Even as a Prohibition agent he had a collegiate look, with a boyish, lightly freckled face and the broad shoulders of a student athlete.

  Still, his gray-blue eyes could turn cold in an instant. Ness “immediately strikes one as ‘all business,’ then smiles and winks,” wrote one Chicago reporter, “as if the fact that he is merely acting in a role is just between you and him.”

  And yet their backgrounds were more alike than either might ever have known. Both were first-generation Americans, sons of immigrant fathers who worked as bakers in the old country. Once in America, Capone’s papa chose a new trade, barbering, while Ness’s remained a baker, yet both fathers went on to build successful independent businesses in their adopted land.

  While Capone and Ness had similar role models in their fathers, each learned very different lessons. Ness was proud to be the son of a man “who never cheated anyone out of a nickel.” Capone embraced a career in crime, the life of a struggling honest businessman not for him.

  Capone and Ness shared a certain ambition, each with an impulse to turn his chosen field into a fully modern profession. While Capone applied the methods of corporate business to organized crime, Ness worked to elevate the role of the police officer in American society, urging the adoption of new technologies and scientific techniques.

  Both men were willing to work hard to succeed, each in his own way—with energy, charisma, and recklessness, the assets of their remarkable youth. Capone became the head of a multi-million-dollar criminal syndicate at age twenty-six, while Ness at twenty-seven took charge of the federal squad tasked with bringing Capone down.

  In the Untouchable Eliot Ness, fate and the federal government had found the perfect foil for Scarface Al.

  The central irony of the now-legendary struggle between Ness and Capone is how little direct contact the two men had—one phone call, and a single face-to-face meeting when, in 1932, the convicted Capone was put on the Dixie Flyer to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

  And yet they continue to do battle, each locked in the other’s terrible embrace, like Holmes and Moriarty on the cliff’s edge over Reichenbach Falls.

  Part One

  Prairie Avenue Boys

  “Diamond Jim” Colosimo with Dale Winter (top) and following his murder (bottom), May 11, 1920.

  (Authors’ Collection)

  One

  1895–1920

  Over the years, many would claim (falsely) that Al Capone had been an immigrant, as if they wanted to disown one of America’s most notorious native-born sons. But Capone himself insisted on setting the record straight.

  “I’m no foreigner,” he would say. “I’m as good an American as any man. My parents were American-born and so was I.”

  In this, as he so often did, Capone specialized in half-truths.

  When Gabriele Capone moved his family from Italy to a better life in America, he chose a place called Brooklyn. Perhaps he’d been warned of New York’s overcrowded ghettoes with their rotten wooden firetraps, where cholera or typhus drove the rich from the city while corpses of the poor littered the Lower East Side. A father relocating his brood might well want to avoid crime-ridden streets where an immigrant’s meager daily wage could wind up in a mugger’s grasp.

  But in 1895, Brooklyn was rife with opportunity. The Brooklyn Bridge, an engineering marvel known worldwide, had been finished in 1883. The ever-growing City of Brooklyn was annexing other towns and cities in Kings County, with talk in the air of one great emerging metropolitan area. Clearly opportunities existed in Brooklyn that did not in Gabriele’s home region.

  Gabriele was born in 1865 in small-town Angri, southwest of Naples, on the edge of Salerno province in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Unlike many of his countrymen, he was literate, training outside the oral traditions of his village, working as a baker (pasta-making a specialty) and a lithographer. He married Theresa Raiola in 1891, their son Vincenzo (James) arriving the next year. And in 1895—with second son Raffaele (Ralph) also in tow and Theresa pregnant with Salvatore (Frank)—the family made its way across the Atlantic.

  At first, they continued to pronounce their surname phonetically—Caponi—though that would soon change. Classified at Ellis Island as Italian, the Capones were more rudely branded as “dagos” or “wops”—low-class, unintelligent southern Italians, disposed to crime.

  Thousands of Italians came to Brooklyn before the Great War, a world bordered by factories on the north and warehouses on the south, its streets mingling neighbors and kin from Campanian and Calabrian villages among bright flowers and holy imagery and sublime cooking smells. On front stoops, mothers with babies at their bosoms would oversee armies of kids in the street, while neighbors sat in sunshine and shared gossip and letters from home.

  However poor the inhabitants of a tenement, a certain joy and exuberance might be found—in the Union Street marionette theater, perhaps, or a festival like the feast of the patron saint or the Assumption of Our Lady, electric-bulb-lined arches lighting up the night as statues of saints were paraded, until fireworks and explosions pronounced the proceedings at a joyful end.

  But those who had known Italy were soon confronted by a generation not so tied to heritage, who studied English and spoke in the language of the streets. America, even Brooklyn itself, was their world, a world that bred restlessness in its youth.

  In the neighborhoods near the Navy Yard, from Red Hook to Greenpoint, Old and New World ways came together and sometimes clashed. Here the Capone family settled, an area dominated by defense spending, relatively immune to economic recessions.

  Seagulls soared above,
offering a constant, cawing reminder of the nearby Atlantic. But the fresh sea air was tainted by a caustic bouquet of oil, fumes, and rot. Sailors and shipbuilders came in droves, bringing with them a wealth of gambling, prostitution, and saloons—on Sands Street, chippies prowled and dancehall girls pranced, while tattoo parlors thrived on drunken bad decisions, and cheap whiskey was often laced by the Mickey Finn that led to a mugging.

  A summer’s day might bring the stench rolling in from the Gowanus Canal, a nasty gash in the marsh-like landscape, its murky green-brown waters hungry for rusty vessels, dead machinery covered in funereal snarls of green, nature in a particularly ironic mood. The canal attracted a legion of lawbreakers, who often made it home to a special kind of swimmer—a floating corpse, bloated and ripe.

  The Capone family’s two-room flat had a single potbelly stove and no running water, with access to an outhouse. Theresa now had three little children to care for—cooking, warmth, and bathing required hauling up water, coal, or wood. A fourth child came on January 17, 1899. Baptized without a godfather, he was given the Latin name Alphonsus, though he would be known by its English equivalent: Alphonse Capone.

  To support his growing family while saving to start his own business, Gabriel (his name Americanized now) toiled as a manual laborer, baker, and grocery clerk before taking up barbering. The shipyards made a ready market for Gabriel’s scissors and razors, with many workers and sailors passing through—the same clientele who frequented brothels, gambling joints, and saloons. While less congested and safer than New York’s East Side slums, the Navy Yard soon revealed itself as a dicey place to raise a family.

  Tall, handsome Gabriel Capone made friends with ease. His literacy helped him stand out among his countrymen, who often addressed him as “Don.” Theresa soon had nine children: Erminio (Mimi) came along in 1901; Umberto (Albert) in 1906; Amadoe (Matthew) in 1908; Erminia in 1910 (dying the same year); and, finally, in 1912, dark-haired Mafalda, who developed a particularly close relationship with Al. The Don’s children, however, were not free from discrimination and ethnic conflict.

  The active young Capone boys fled their two-room flat, making the street their major playground. On the street and in school, name-calling could escalate into violence, teachers thrashing students and debasing them racially. Children united along ethnic lines, often with older kids, forming surrogate families that taught survival.

  Smoking started in primary school, crap games under a street-corner gaslight around age eight or nine. Sex had to wait for high school and a mature twelve. Childhood pursuits like flying a kite off a rooftop had their place, as did swimming in the East River, though a kid got no more than three lessons before he drowned. The Fourth of July meant single-shot pistols, a bargain at a quarter, and Election Day was about nicking barrels and boxes for the big fire—didn’t matter who won, if the fire burned high and bright.

  An older youth, Francesco (Frank) Nitto, his family also from Angri, lived near the Capones at two Navy Street addresses within half a mile of Al’s family. Typically, Nitto dropped out during the seventh grade, age fourteen. The close proximity of their homes suggests the short, feisty Nitto knew the Capone boys—at least the older ones, James, Frank, and Ralph.

  The whole family needed to work not only to survive but to improve their lot, one economic unit with everyone pitching in. Theresa would bake bread and the older boys would sell it on the street. The brothers hawked newspapers and shined shoes—low-income kids following their honest father’s lead. Of course, dishonesty could also help support the family—stealing food, clothing, and other necessities from pushcarts or stores.

  Gabriel became a citizen in 1906, making his wife and children citizens as well. He moved the family to Garfield Place in Park Slope, and opened his own shop in the building where they lived. Young Nitto, working as a barber years later in Chicago, listed Brooklyn as the site of his professional training. He and his family moved from Navy Street to Garfield Place, even closer to the Capones, where Frank likely learned barbering from Gabriel.

  The oldest Capone boy—Vincenzo, called James—became fascinated with the romanticized dime-novel West and the lure of wide-open spaces away from crowded, crime-ridden streets. Gabriel arranged a job for his oldest son caring for horses in rural Staten Island, a world and a ferry ride away. Finally, in 1907, an opportunity arose for James to work with horses, traveling with a touring circus.

  James bid his little brother good-bye at the Staten Island Ferry, not to return for decades, his exit saving him from the life of crime consuming many of his brothers. Influenced by movie idol William S. Hart—whose last name he assumed—James came to work in various law enforcement capacities out west, including Prohibition agent. The oldest son leaving home, however, meant more than just family heartache, but a loss of income.

  The family’s new, more predominantly Italian neighborhood bordered Irish Red Hook and a Sicilian enclave, where turf wars among youth gangs often broke out. The corner of Broadway and Flushing, near a saloon, became young Capone’s territory, shared with racetrack touts, bookies, and drug dealers. From there and other such notorious corners, kid gangs cheerfully terrorized Jewish neighborhoods, turning over pushcarts and milk cans, yanking on the beards of old men, and busting out random windows.

  Frank Nitto, more than a decade Al’s senior, emerged as a leader among the young toughs. He adopted Capone as a mascot for his gang—the Boys of Navy Street. Even as an eight-year-old, Capone had proven himself a born fighter, and the teenaged Nitto trusted him enough to have him join the group in battle.

  For some time, local Irish roughnecks had been harassing the Italian women of Capone’s neighborhood—first by coming up behind them and lifting up their skirts, and later graduating to property destruction and theft. These brazen assaults demanded a response, and Nitto took it upon himself to deliver it.

  The task of broadcasting Nitto’s message fell to young Capone, then about eight. Nitto’s boys lifted a washtub from one of the women they were planning to defend—they would get it back to her before her next batch of laundry—and strapped it to Al’s chest. With stick in hand, he became the group’s drummer boy, leading their march into enemy territory. As they arrived outside an Irish bar, they drew their rivals out with a mocking chant: “We are the Boys of Navy Street—Touch us if you dare!”

  The Irish emerged to do battle, but they proved no match for Nitto’s crew. Capone, probably younger than any other combatant, stayed right in the thick of it—urging his allies on by rapping the washtub and keeping up the chant. When police arrived to break up the scuffle, the Irish had been walloped—and the Boys of Navy Street had vanished, scurrying away over the rooftops.

  For Nitto, this was a rare instance of fighting in the open. In later years, he would prefer to do battle in the shadows, catching his targets off guard. For Capone, on the other hand, this scrap set the tone for his future criminal career. He couldn’t help but announce himself by breaking the law loud and proud, and he always liked to be seen fighting for something larger than himself—whether for his family, his business, or the neighborhood women.

  Perception mattered to Al Capone. He would soon meet a mentor whose lifestyle proved what Capone always seemed desperate to believe—that one didn’t have to be a thug in order to be a gangster.

  Near the Capone home, the John Torrio Association, from its second-floor window, wielded great influence over the Italian gangs. Torrio, perhaps New York’s most improbable criminal leader, was among its most prosperous.

  In a field where size, strength, and brute force ruled, Torrio was short, soft, and nonviolent. An elementary school dropout, he was one smart crook, who—in a world where gang leaders battled to the top—boasted he never fired a gun. Others fought his wars, his strategic expertise making young toughs rich by ghetto standards.

  As a teen on New York City’s Lower East Side, Torrio didn’t join gangs; instead, he organized them, moving them into grown-up criminal activities. His James Stre
et Boys committed the usual petty larceny but also worked with Tammany Hall, the New York City political machine, to help steal elections. Torrio’s political influence expanded his criminal activities into gambling and prostitution, as he formed relationships with the likes of budding gangsters Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Ciro Terranova, and Frankie Uale. Soon Torrio joined Uale across the river in Brooklyn, where racketeering flourished.

  Born Frank Ioele (Yo-A-Lee) in Calabria, Italy, plump and of medium height, Uale was a tough street fighter who rose fast in the Five Points ranks. Like Torrio, he moved from traditional gang activities into new areas, including prostitution and unionism. Unlike Torrio, Uale was known for violence, ready to kill an opponent or beat an underling, even his own brother.

  At age eight, Al Capone moved into the neighborhood near Torrio’s office. The avuncular little gangster regularly used local boys to run errands, at first innocuous ones, then—if they proved trustworthy—making payoffs and delivering contraband. It’s likely Al ran such errands, beginning a relationship with Torrio that lasted for decades.

  To navigate the turbulent world into which he had been born, young Al had little choice but to join a street gang. For those hardcore street kids, such gangs served “as a training school,” one resident remembered, prepping them for more serious forms of crime. While the Irish were scrappy kids up for any fight, and tough Jewish youths worked hard at defending themselves, the Italians earned a reputation for preferring blades and bullets over fisticuffs and street-corner diplomacy. Still, most kid gang members would come to be solid citizens, going into business or on to higher education. The others would graduate from crap games, stealing, and truancy into organized crime, armed robbery, and incarceration.

  At his father’s suggestion, the teenaged Al set up a shoeshine box under a large clock on a busy street. By chance, the spot proved the perfect place to observe the workings of a protection racket run by local godfather Don Batista Balsamo.