From its bloody beginning to its peaceful conclusion, the entire incident had been an education for him; he had seen the power of the racketeers to intervene in daily affairs and to enforce peace, and he began to learn the potency of restraint. In the years to come, when he had ample opportunity and power, Capone always refrained from attempting to settle the score with Gallucio, who never amounted to anything more than a minor Brooklyn thug. Instead, Capone put him on his payroll as a $100-a-week errand-runner. Of course, if any harm had come to Gallucio, suspicion would immediately have fallen on Capone, so discretion in this instance proved the better part of valor.
The scarring incident, for all its symbolism, was essentially a youthful escapade, and more importantly, Capone managed to keep his job with Frankie Yale despite the uproar he had caused. However, his next violent encounter, less celebrated and far more vicious, became a milestone in his youthful career in crime. After the fight with Gallucio, Al learned to make himself useful to his boss, especially in the always ticklish matter of collections. In Brooklyn in those days, youthful hoodlums were addicted to practicing “the look”: a deadly gaze designed to strike mortal fear into the hearts of their enemies. Done right, this Rasputin-like, mesmerizing gaze could be more effective than a blow to the chin, but it was not for amateurs. Trying to give “the look” with just the right degree of menace, it was easy to appear ridiculous rather than intimidating, so the young hoods practiced in their mirrors, often for hours at a time, until they got it right. Yale had the look, as did his bodyguard, “Little Augie” Carfano. Eventually Capone acquired the look, too, and he soon had an opportunity to employ it in the service of his boss.
In addition to his other interests, Yale bankrolled a number of dice games. He told Capone he was especially vexed by one character, Tony Perotta, who had broken a dice game and now owed Yale $1,500: a considerable amount of money in 1919. Perotta’s position was especially vulnerable because he was in the United States illegally; if any harm came to him, the police would be unlikely to conduct a diligent investigation. Al knew Perotta slightly and agreed to collect the money.
Capone found Perotta, predictably enough, leaving another dice game. Confronting him in the hallway, Capone demanded payment. “No,” said Perotta, “this isn’t fair. We’ve known each other a long time, and now you’re doing this to me?” Capone tried again to make Perotta pay, but not even throwing “the look” could make him change his mind. The incident quickly got out of hand, and before he knew what he had done, Al had shot the man. And Perotta died. When he next saw Capone, Yale, greatly displeased, demanded to know why the younger man had killed Perotta. “The guy complained,” Al told him. “He had a big mouth. He deserved what he got.” Yale stood back, beheld the young man willing to do a “piece of work” (the standard euphemism for murder), and embraced him. From then on, Frankie loved Al; he loved the man who would one day kill him, as well.
• • •
Al was nearing nineteen now; though he still lived at home on Garfield Place, he was in every way a man, except in the eyes of the law. Although he had encountered many women at Coney Island, he became deeply attached to a girl who lived right on Garfield Place, in a house nearly within sight of his. Her name was Domenica, but everyone called her Susie. Only thirteen years old, she had already acquired a reputation around the neighborhood for wildness, and Al soon caught the fancy of this impulsive young creature. Her extreme youth posed no obstacle to him, and they were so often in one another’s company, and seen together so frequently, that marriage and children, in no particular order, seemed the inevitable outcome of the romance. But at this crucial moment the relationship ran into trouble. Either Al or his parents began formal matrimonial negotiations with Susie’s family, only to learn that the girl’s parents were utterly opposed to the match. They insisted their daughter was too young to marry, they wanted no part of hoodlums or racketeers, and they did not consider Al Capone a fit husband for their daughter. The romance ended, and Susie, the wild one, went on to marry another Italian youth, who, as it happened, also had connections to the rackets.
To avoid the stigma he had acquired among the law-abiding inhabitants of Garfield Place, Al began to look further afield for a mate. He passed the time at a club located in a basement on Carroll Street—a small place where Irish and Italians could be found. It was here that Al met a young woman to whom, despite everything to come, despite the other women, the violence, the lengthy jail sentences, despite all that, he would always remain devoted. Her name was Mary Coughlin. She was a saleslady in a department store, slender and pretty, and on the strength of these qualifications she became his Madonna. Everyone called her Mae.
Mae was different from the other girls Al had known; she was older than he, not a child but an adult. She was Irish. And her family was more prosperous than the Capones. Though she lived just a brief stroll from Garfield Place and the dank stretches of the Gowanus Canal, she came from another culture, the world of middle-class respectability. At the time Mae and Al met, the Coughlins resided at 117 Third Place, where they occupied a pleasant, substantial row house, three stories tall, with a traditional Brooklyn stoop. The street was broad and lined with trees, in all respects a respectable middle-class Irish enclave. Like her new swain, she was the product of immigrant parents, but hers had fared rather better in America than the Capones. Her mother, Bridget Gorman, was born in December 1873 and emigrated to the United States at age nineteen, and her father, Mike Coughlin, had been born in November 1872 and came to the United States in 1891. He soon found employment with the Erie Railroad, for which he worked as a clerk. Although they had both been born in Ireland, Mae’s parents probably met after they came to New York. Before marriage they lived not in Brooklyn but in southern Manhattan (in what is now called SoHo), Michael on Grand Street and Bridget on West Houston. On January 28, 1894, they were married at a nearby church, St. Anthony of Padua, which describes itself as the oldest Italian Catholic church in the archdiocese of New York. As such it was an unusual choice for the wedding of these two young Irish immigrants, but since they lived on the border of Little Italy, St. Anthony was a sensible location. They subsequently moved to Brooklyn, living first at 6 Manhasset Place, and finally on shady, serene Third Place, far from the crowding and corruption of Manhattan. At the time Mae met Capone, the Coughlin family included her parents, two older sisters named Winnie Mae and Muriel, and a younger brother, Dennis, known to everyone as Danny.
There is no record that Mae’s parents objected to her relationship with Al, or were aware of his gangland connections, but it is likely that they viewed their daughter’s alliance with skepticism, at best. The Coughlins were known as decent and law-abiding folk; there was no taint of gang activity or racketeering about them. Neither they nor their daughter Mae had anything to do with the likes of Frankie Yale, or his Irish equivalents, the so-called “White Hand” gangsters like “Peg-Leg” Lonergan or “Wild Bill” Lovett, who ruled the Brooklyn waterfront. At the same time, the Coughlins’ address bordered an Italian neighborhood, so it was not uncommon for their children to become familiar with Italians, despite the antagonism between the two immigrant groups, but romance and courtship were another matter entirely. Believing that Italian husbands routinely beat, cheated on, and degraded their wives, many an Irish father declared that he did not want his daughter marrying an Italian; she must marry a white man. In this climate of prejudice, the Coughlins could only have regarded their daughter Mae’s relationship with Capone with trepidation. By the standards of the day, theirs was virtually an interracial romance. However, young Italian men of Al’s background viewed matters differently, as did some Irish girls. For the Italians, taking an Irish wife meant marrying up the social scale; furthermore, they considered daughters of Hibernia to be sufficiently pious and submissive to make good, devoted, patient wives. They would concentrate on their churches and children and stay out of their husbands’ affairs. Capone’s mentor, Johnny Torrio, for instance, was married to an Ir
ish girl from Kentucky, and she was devoted to her husband, his interests in vice and racketeering notwithstanding. Italian men in pursuit of Irish mates were also aided by the reluctance of their Irish counterparts to marry at a young age. The Irish male typically waited until the age of thirty before assuming the burden of maintaining a home, while Italians of Capone’s background frequently wed before they reached twenty.
Although Al was only nineteen when they met, Mae was fully two years older, a disparity she went to considerable lengths to obscure throughout her life. With Mae leading the way, the romance progressed quickly; by April she was pregnant with Al’s baby. She would not have known about his bout with syphilis unless he chose to tell her, and even if he did confide, he assumed he was now healed and the episode over. However, the latent syphilis would eventually have serious consequences for the entire Capone family.
Although Mae was pregnant, the couple did not wed immediately. For immigrant Catholic families, this was an unusual situation, and it suggests that there were great tensions in the relationship at this juncture. It is possible that Al and Mae would never have married, were it not for one external factor: the draft. On September 12, 1918, when Mae was seven months pregnant, Al went down to his local draft board, located between Fourth and Fifth Streets on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, and registered with the Selective Service System. This was an action he had been required to take earlier, but he had failed to do so. At the time of his registration, the clerk, Dorothy Wasserman, noted that Alphonse Capone was five feet seven inches, of medium build, with “gray” eyes, and “dark brown” hair. He gave his present occupation as a “paper cutter” at the United Paper Box Company in Brooklyn, and listed his mother, “Theresa Capone,” as his nearest relative. (A registration card for one “Alfonso Capone,” born in Montella Avellino, Italy, in 1896, living in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and working as a butcher, has been widely reproduced and described as the registration card for Al Capone of Brooklyn. It is, of course, nothing of the sort.) Once Capone had registered with the Selective Service System, he was vulnerable to being sent into combat overseas along with hundreds of thousands of other American boys. However, if Al were married, with a child to support, the likelihood of his being drafted declined. Thus his marrying Mae would, at one stroke, help him avoid the draft and resolve his domestic problems. More than ever, circumstances dictated the path he would follow in life.
From then on events moved forward swiftly, the milestones crowding one another. On December 4, 1918, Mae gave birth to a baby boy, whom they named Albert Francis Capone. He was universally known as Sonny, and his godfather was the man who was virtually a father to Al, Johnny Torrio. That Torrio was willing to stand as godfather suggests that he had counseled Capone through the entire ordeal of courtship and pregnancy.
Sonny was apparently healthy at birth, but as he grew older it became apparent that he was sickly, with a tendency to catch persistent infections. As time went on, he also became hard of hearing. That unusual symptom suggested that Al had transmitted his syphilis to Mae, who in turn transmitted congenital syphilis to their child. At the time of Sonny’s birth, the disease was a leading cause of deafness in children. “When deafness occurs in the congenital syphilitic,” stated a respected medical textbook of the era, “it should be regarded as syphilitic in origin until proved otherwise.” Even though Sonny’s deafness did not appear until well after his birth, there was still a high likelihood that congenital syphilis was the cause, for its effects are often delayed for years, with the most common cases in males appearing between the ages of eight and fifteen: precisely Sonny’s situation. In addition to deafness, syphilis causes stillbirths and miscarriages. Both Al and Mae came from large families, and it would have been natural for them to have a large brood of their own, but Sonny remained an only child. This raises the suspicion that latent syphilis made it impossible for Mae to carry another child to term, and neither she nor her husband would have known the real reason why this was the case. So it was that the elusive disease continued to exert an invisible but decisive influence on the Capone family. It had already disabled their boy and shortchanged them of their chance to spawn a large family, and its most serious consequences were yet to come.
Al was a father, but not yet a husband. When the couple belatedly applied for permission to wed, they misrepresented their ages, even though the marriage license they signed was a sworn affidavit. On this document, they both gave their ages as twenty, when in reality Al was still nineteen and Mae twenty-one. As his occupation he furnished not “bartender” but the more respectable-sounding “paper cutter.” Further embarrassments awaited the young couple. At the time, the law specified that a man came of age at twenty-one; thus Al, who was legally a minor, had to obtain his parents’ consent to marry. The law of the day also specified that a woman came of age at eighteen, so Mae was spared the humiliation of having to ask her parents’ permission to join the father of her newborn child in holy matrimony. If she had, they might well have refused her request.
Finally, there was the matter of syphilis. Had the couple been required to take a blood test, it would have revealed Al’s condition, but they circumvented that obstacle. In lieu of a test, their marriage license contained the statement “I have not to my knowledge been infected with any venereal disease, or if I have been infected within five years I have a laboratory test . . . which shows that I am now free from infection.” They were not required to respond to these precautions specifically; it was simply a declaration, not a question requiring an answer. Thus the disease continued to elude detection.
Having negotiated the intricacies of the law and shaded the truth according to their whims, Al and Mae wed as soon as the bride was physically able, following the birth of their child. On December 30, when Sonny was just three and a half weeks old, the ceremony took place at the Coughlins’ splendid church, St. Mary Star of the Sea, hard by the Brooklyn docks. The church was distinguished by its impressively long transept and its soaring bell tower, which afforded a view across the length and breadth of Brooklyn. It was because of splendid buildings such as this that Brooklyn had acquired its nickname, sentimental but accurate, as “the Borough of Churches.”
The Reverend James J. Delaney presided at the nuptials, and Mae’s sister Winnie Mae acted as a witness and probably as a bridesmaid as well, but this could not have been a joyful wedding, despite the grand surroundings, not with the parents of the bride predisposed to dislike the bridegroom, and the couple having recently become parents themselves. Still, the ceremony was far removed from the floozies at the Harvard Inn and, for Al, it constituted a giant step toward respectability. Suddenly he had direction in life. Mae certainly exerted a more wholesome feminine influence than the Sands Street whores of his youth had. For the rest of their married life, Mae always represented virtue, conventional morality, and rectitude to Al; her existence legitimized all his ventures, however nefarious and immoral. She was the family member who dutifully attended Mass, and, following the example of Johnny Torrio’s Irish wife, remained wholly, willfully ignorant of her husband’s business life. Pale, bland, compliant, soft, and silent. Virtue on a pedestal towering over him. Otherworldly. A household goddess. That was just the way Al wanted his wife, but Mae’s isolation could only have made for a stultifying domestic life. His constant lip service to the conventional pieties of hearth and home lacked true spontaneity and warmth. By marrying Mae, Al both obeyed and disobeyed his ingrained sense of campanilismo. True, she came from the neighborhood and had spent her childhood only blocks from Garfield Place, but she was Irish. Mae, for her part, found herself cut off from her family. She had married into the Capone clan rather than the other way around, and she would have to learn to acquiesce to her rather formidable mother-in-law, Teresa, and to acquire the rudiments of the Italian cooking her husband favored. Language posed a more serious barrier, for at home the Capones still spoke Italian in a guttural Neapolitan accent, and Mae often found herself unable to understand her in-law
s, whom she thought enjoyed a secret rapport with one another that she would never be able to share. She remained an outsider.
• • •
Now that he was married, with a wife and child to support, Capone veered toward a legitimate career once again. He gave every appearance of having put his youthful gang experiences behind him and of wanting to return to a quiet, respectable occupation. He quit working for Frankie Yale, and more importantly, he decided the time had come for him to leave Brooklyn, to remove himself and his new family from the gangs, the dangers, and the temptations of his former life.
It is generally assumed that he made a seamless transition from the underworld of Brooklyn to the underworld of Chicago at this juncture, but, in fact, when Capone left home, he went first to Baltimore, where he worked not as a hit man, racketeer, bartender, or pimp, but as a bookkeeper for a legitimate construction firm run by Peter Aiello, who also headed a building and loan organization. Capone’s position was purely clerical. Each morning, soberly attired in a suit and tie, Al went to the Aiello offices in the Highland Town section of Baltimore.
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