Guzik said a newspaper had referred to Capone as a “brothel-keeper,” but Al didn’t know what the word meant. “Then he looked it up and it made him kind of sore!”
Guzik also volunteered his opinion of the word “hoodlum.”
“I don’t know what they mean by that word. I’ve never been able to figure out where being a hoodlum stops and respectability begins. There’s a lot of good square guys in this racket; and I know lawyers and bankers I wouldn’t sit in the same room with without keeping my hands on my watch.”
Soon, “like a gust of wind, Capone himself blew in.”
The gangster cut an impressive figure, big but not fat, his movements “lithe and graceful.” Typically well dressed in a double-breasted blue serge, he was brusquely affable, greeting his guest with a firm handshake, black hair thinning at the temples but wavy above his thick neck. His expression seemed “Mephistophelian and droll.”
Behind his desk now, Capone ordered champagne from a waiter who seemed to materialize. Then a table was laid for supper, which at five o’clock was early for O’Brien, but the feast was hard to resist. Silver buckets of iced Piper-Heidsieck, 1915, began to appear, and then—“like something in the Arabian Nights”—came antipasto, platters of Parmesan-drenched spaghetti, squab, fennel, and more.
Capone went from gracious host to roaring beast, lambasting a waiter slow with service.
“It petrified me,” O’Brien admitted. “I should not have been in the least surprised to see him rend the wretched creature into pieces.”
Quickly Capone returned to smiles and hospitality, his mood swing reminding O’Brien of temperamental “artists and opera singers.” Guzik had said Capone was unfailingly generous—“He doesn’t spend two dollars a day on himself. He gives the rest away.”
Their conversation stayed casual, not a formal interview, though O’Brien would regret not asking for Capone’s advice to young men on “How to Succeed”—what wonderful guidance “this eminently successful young man might have given!”
Capone showed the journalist a letter offering $2 million for the ganglord’s memoirs. He had no interest in taking the offer, but longed to answer the fabrications written about him. Maybe O’Brien was interested in writing his real story . . . ?
Apparently, the meetings with Guzik and the behind-the-scenes vetting had led to this. O’Brien was the man to write Capone’s story—a “square guy.”
Capone was called away—a senator was phoning from Washington, D.C.—leaving O’Brien to mull the possibility of such an exciting project. The autobiography of Al Capone, as told to Howard Vincent O’Brien! Such a book, he mused, might be “the most significant contribution to current history that could possibly be written.”
Upon his return, Capone signed a document before two witnesses: “This will authorize you (Howard Vincent O’Brien) to act as my agent in the sale of the manuscript of my autobiography, which will be the only one I ever consented to write.”
Capone made clear to his prospective coauthor how important family was to him. He gestured to Sonny’s framed photo on the desk and said pointedly, “I don’t want my boy to get mixed up in my business, either.” As he talked to his wife on the phone, Capone referred to himself as a “kid,” and when his mother came on the line, he spoke in Italian.
He truly seemed to want out of the rackets, yearning to be free of bodyguards and cops both bent and straight. He longed for a life of real family, not crime family, away from lawyers and courts and jail cells, with no reporters and photographers hounding him.
“Everybody seems to think I like Prohibition,” Capone told O’Brien. “I don’t. . . . It’s a lousy racket for the retailer. He’s got to work twenty hours a day and spend everything he makes to keep the cops off him. No, I’m against Prohibition.”
The topic of murder came up—as a business practice.
Big corporations, O’Brien was told, forced out competitors till devastated men found a high window to crawl out of—that was murder, too.
The gangsters’ code of ethics, their sacred “standards of right and wrong,” fascinated O’Brien. A man was square or he wasn’t—they did business with dishonest cops, judges, and reporters but detested them. That their own business was outside the law was to them irrelevant. But they made “a sharp distinction between the honest, forthright crook; and venal respectability.”
More meetings followed, after O’Brien had a promising conference with the editor of Collier’s about running the autobiography as a serial. The editor hedged, however, fearing Capone would want only to talk about his soup kitchen and how often he called his mother on the phone.
Sure enough, as O’Brien began to question his prospective coauthor, the response would inevitably be, “No, I couldn’t say that. It wouldn’t be fair to my people.” This became Capone’s standard refrain whenever O’Brien touched on a sensitive subject—such as the baseball bat banquet, for example.
O’Brien sensed he was learning more than was healthy. Capone said as much one day.
“You know,” the gangster reflected, “sometimes I lose my temper and I say, ‘Gee, I wish somebody would bump that guy off,’ and then one of these young punks who wants to make a name for himself goes ahead and does it. And then I have to pick up the pieces.”
An example would seem to be Mike “de Pike” Heitler, last seen April 29 playing cards with Capone mobsters Lawrence Mangano and Frankie Pope. The next morning, Heitler’s charred remains were found near Itasca, Illinois, in a burned icehouse fifteen miles from a torched car belonging to the big-time pimp’s longtime girlfriend. Unwisely, Mike de Pike had been in touch with Judge Lyle and State’s Attorney Swanson. Heitler, loosely affiliated with Capone, had significant West Side vice holdings but resented the Outfit’s cut.
Asked about Heitler, Capone said, “Well, you see, that fellow had a reputation of being a professional stool pigeon for many years.”
Collier’s interest in the autobiography eroded, and O’Brien abandoned the project as his welcome rapidly ran out. Important-looking hoodlums gave him disapproving stares from the sidelines. Occasionally a cold-eyed unknown would ask him a question with the authority of an executive. Their behavior made O’Brien wonder whether Capone was “merely a cog in the machine,” constantly evading questions as much to protect himself as his “people.”
For all his fame, Capone seemed not to be Public Enemy Number One, but somewhere “down the list”—in the Outfit, men were above him and perhaps above them, “shadowy figures whose names never appear in print.” Perhaps Capone was “a symbol,” and not “the potentate” he seemed to be—“titular head of a great corporation; but behind him is a board of directors; and behind them, stockholders.”
The identities of those stockholders, O’Brien felt, would come as a shock to the public.
For a man contemplating his autobiography when much larger, pressing matters needed attending, Capone seemed to know publicity was doing him no favors. O’Brien sensed this “board of directors who sit in the shadows” disapproved of the grandiose myth his host had generated.
“Their sordid but profitable affairs do not thrive in the bright white light of publicity,” O’Brien wrote. “In their own vernacular, Capone is providing too much ‘heat.’ ” Would those incorruptible government men be investigating the Outfit’s finances and knocking off their breweries if the papers had never heard of Scarface? A swaggering public figure like Capone was bad for business.
One day soon, O’Brien presciently wrote, Capone would disappear into private life, or prison, or perhaps the grave. The forces of public good would cheer, headlines announce a new day, arrests and deportations be made, but as Capone retreated into legend, the Outfit would roll on.
“And in faraway hideouts,” O’Brien wrote, “thin-lipped men will sit quietly . . . counting up the profits.”
The idea of a secret, shadowy collection of unidentified mobsters acting as Capone’s puppet masters reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of h
ow the Outfit worked. The press and popular culture tend to depict the gang as having the strict, top-down hierarchy of a legitimate corporation, with Capone at its head.
But the Outfit was never so neatly organized—instead, as criminal-justice historian Mark Haller observed, the Chicago mob was “a complex set of partnerships,” a conglomeration of illegal businesses held together by a loose network of alliances.
By 1931, four men had emerged as “senior partners”: Capone, his brother Ralph, Jack Guzik, and Frank Nitto.
“They shared more or less equally in their joint income and acted as equals in looking after their varied business interests,” Haller writes. “The senior partners, in turn, formed partnerships with others to launch numerous bootlegging, gambling, and vice activities in the Chicago Loop, South Side, and several suburbs.”
Acting as entrepreneurs, the partners benefited from their larger organization’s resources—including political influence and protection from the police—while pursuing their own independent ventures.
These assorted enterprises, Haller writes, “were not controlled bureaucratically. Each, instead, was a separate enterprise on a small or relatively small scale.” Taken together, they added up to a massive criminal organization, its leadership much more diffuse than most people realized, divided among scores of gangsters.
Outside observers, who had come to view Capone as Chicago’s emperor of crime, were surprised to see him treat men like Guzik and Nitto as his equal—or possibly even superior. Capone’s status in the Outfit depended entirely on his ability to make deals and forge alliances with other gangsters, building the organization piece by piece, racket by racket.
In any venture, Capone might have one or more coequal partners, men he had to deal with on an equal plane. He emerged as the city’s leading racketeer because he had a stake in more operations than his partners.
Such wheeling and dealing had been easier in Capone’s early years, when he could still operate with relative anonymity. Now he could no longer move about the city freely, thanks to necessary, rather elaborate security measures and the constant spotlight of publicity.
This could only have limited his ability to make deals and forge new alliances. That he spent more and more time away from Chicago also helped diminish his influence. He could run his rackets from afar, but only to a point, and his partners—most especially Nitto and Guzik—seem to have stepped in to fill the power vacuum back home. Their shared talent for staying out of public view gave them additional advantage over the increasingly notorious Capone.
“Because he lived chiefly at his Miami home after 1927 and spent much of 1929 in a Philadelphia prison . . . ,” Haller writes, “Capone was perhaps the least important of the four partners.” The media, meanwhile, painted him supreme.
Capone seemed increasingly willing to give up that mantle. He wanted to retire, he continually said; he was worn-out, exhausted.
“We don’t want any trouble,” he would say before offering a bribe or a favor, and the older he got, the more he seemed to believe it.
“He looks fifteen years older than his age,” observed one Chicago journalist. “He is thirty-two years old but, as he himself frequently remarks, he ‘has lived a thousand.’ ”
But then he’d issue grandiose statements to the press, as if to exonerate himself in the court of public opinion. This only served to further elevate his celebrity status, generating more notoriety—and the heat he claimed to abhor, further placing his organization in jeopardy. How long could Capone’s partners put up with such behavior?
Gus Winkeler of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre hit squad found out. As his wife Georgette told the FBI, in 1931 her husband worked out a deal with an experienced fixer to ensure Capone’s acquittal on the tax charges. The cost would be $100,000, barely a fraction of the Outfit’s massive profits.
But as the FBI reported, “Winkeler went before the Board of Directors of the ‘Syndicate’ with the above proposition, but they refused to advance the money, or aid in any way, and, in conclusion they told Winkeler to mind his own business.”
Winkeler told Georgette “that the boys,” including Frank Nitto and Louis “Little New York” Campagna, “apparently were in favor of Capone going to jail in order that they could carry on the operation of the ‘Syndicate’ for their own profit.”
This would have come as a surprise to the federal officials considering Nitto’s application for parole in mid-1931. As part of his plea bargain, Nitto personally promised George Johnson “he would leave his gang connections and lead a useful, upright life.”
Under the terms of the deal, Nitto would be eligible for parole as early as July, with time off for good behavior. And his behavior at Leavenworth was exceedingly good—he worked as a chauffeur and laundryman at a home outside the prison walls, his supervisor in an official report describing him in Boy Scout terms: “Trustworthy,” “Friendly,” “Pleasant,” “Energetic,” and “Faithful.”
Still, Nitto kept up with events in Chicago. Shortly after arriving at Leavenworth, he met with his brother, William, a visit prison officials allowed before learning Nitto had no brother. After that they monitored his visitors more closely, preventing him from seeing “Tony Nitto,” another alleged relation.
Yet they didn’t stop their prisoner from corresponding with his fictitious sibling, and “William” sent him a stream of letters during his confinement, to which Nitto occasionally replied.
On March 8, Nitto received a pair of visitors from St. Louis, identified in the official register as Mr. Rogers and Mr. O’Hare—obviously reporter John Rogers and his pal E. J. O’Hare, both informers on Capone to the feds. Prison officials kept no record of what Nitto and his visitors discussed, other than “Business.”
Perhaps they talked about Nitto and O’Hare’s shared dog-racing ventures, or maybe gave Nitto an update on the Capone investigation. After all, Leslie Shumway, the gangland bookkeeper O’Hare handed over to the feds, had testified before the grand jury less than two weeks before.
On May 5, Nitto had what prison officials recorded as another “Business” meeting in the warden’s office. This time he met with two tax investigators deeply involved in the Capone case: Frank Wilson and Nels Tessem. Again, no other record of the meeting made it into Nitto’s prison file—whatever was discussed, the tax men kept it to themselves.
Armed with George Johnson’s promise of an early release, Nitto applied for parole on June 18, 1931. He was to move to Kansas City, where a job waited for him at a dairy company, whose manager confirmed the position would pay $150 a month. Two character witnesses, fellow Italians claiming to be close family friends, also sent letters urging Nitto’s release.
“During the past ten years or so that I have been acquainted with Frank,” wrote one, “I have learned to know him as [an] honest trustworthy citizen, a man of his word at all times. He has always been one of the first and largest givers to all deserving charity campaigns.”
The other writer hit precisely the same notes, claiming he had “never met a man, whom I consider more trustworthy and honorable than Mr. Frank Nitto. He has been at all times a liberal giver to all deserving charities. In other ways he has at all times been a good neighbor and a credit to the community in which he lived.”
Nitto’s best advocate was his wife, Anna, whom he’d married two days after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In a letter to the parole board, Anna said Nitto’s incarceration marked “the first time he has been away from me” since their marriage—they “were the closest of companions.”
She went on to stress his determination to turn his back on a criminal career.
“We both agreed,” she wrote, “that to return to Chicago, where he is known and every one aware that he has been in the penitentiary, would be the wrong thing to do. . . . As soon as he is released I will join him at Kansas City, make him a home and keep him in the straight and narrow path in the future. . . . Please grant my prayer, and send my husband back to me.”
With some reluctance, Nitto admitted to “something like $200,000.” When asked how the government believed Nitto had made all that money, he replied, “Well, all they done was take the bank receipts.”
What kind of business did they claim he’d been in?
“Well,” Nitto replied, “they didn’t exactly know the nature of the business. . . . They didn’t go into details as to the losses and things like that.”
Although Nitto was guilty of a major sin of omission, he had described Frank Wilson’s work fairly accurately.
But the parole officer pressed: “What kind of business were you in?”
“Well, the last time there I was gambling and working around the racetrack.”
“You weren’t in the liquor business, beer business, or anything like that?”
“I handled some of that, too, sir.”
But Nitto went on to deny having any leadership role.
“In fact,” he said, “I wasn’t working for myself. I was working for another person, which I have already told the authorities, and I just done all this banking business for this other person and from that I drawed [sic] a salary and also had a small interest in it. Naturally, the deposits were large, but it wasn’t all mine.”
“You have a pretty good idea about what your part was?” the parole official asked.
“Well,” Nitto replied, “I made some money.”
When asked exactly how much, Nitto put his take at “about $80,000 or $90,000.” He said he would have been happy to pay whatever tax he owed, but the law “was so complicated, I didn’t understand it myself.”
Nitto told of his arrangement with George Johnson to plead guilty with consideration for parole; the prosecutor was supposed to file a report on the prisoner’s behalf, recommending his release.
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 37
