It seemed he had put the rackets and the gaudy Brooklyn street life behind him for once and all. He made himself into a valued worker at the Aiello construction firm, displaying a good head for figures and for business in general. He became familiar with accounting procedures and learned to read a balance sheet: essential skills on which he would capitalize throughout his life. “Evidently he was a good employee, and evidently my father liked him,” says Peter Aiello’s son, Mike. Capone apparently enjoyed the prospect of a secure, respectable future with Aiello Construction.
As Al began to get his life on a secure footing, with a wife, a child, and a reputable career away from the corrupting influences of Brooklyn, his father’s health began to decline. He stopped going to the barber shop each morning and, now that his children were getting older and leaving home, eased into retirement. At the beginning of 1920, the census taker came calling and found that the Capone household at 38 Garfield Place had shrunken to just six: Gabriele; his wife, Teresa; their three sons (Erminio, now seventeen and working as a “candymaker,” Albert, fourteen and still in school, and Amedoe, eleven); and the lone Capone daughter, Mafalda, who was a schoolchild of eight.
On the morning of November 14, 1920, Gabriele went, as he often did, to a poolroom at 20 Garfield Place, across the street from his home. There he collapsed without warning and died of a heart attack. He was fifty-five years old. A doctor named W. E. Martin took charge of the body at the Capone home at 38 Garfield Place and determined Gabriele Capone had died of “chronic myocarditis,” or heart disease. He was buried three days later at Calvary Cemetery in the borough of Queens; Al returned to New York to attend the funeral, as did the entire family, with the exception of Vincenzo, the oldest child, who had ceased to communicate with the family. Emigrating to America had been the great adventure of Gabriele’s life; beyond that, he had little to show for all his years of work, but he had left a bounteous legacy in the form of his large family; he was survived by his widow, eight children, plus two grandchildren (from Al and Ralph) about which the family knew and others (from Vincenzo) of whose existence they were ignorant.
The death of Gabriele marked the end of Al’s legitimate career. It is possible that the sudden absence of parental authority made the young Capone feel free to abandon his bookkeeping job and his carefully acquired aura of respectability. In any event, he resumed his relationship with Johnny Torrio, who had during the intervening years expanded his racketeering empire with the quiet cunning of a visionary. Torrio had abandoned the hotly contested streets of Brooklyn for the comparatively open spaces of Chicago, where he now worked for the prodigal vice lord there, “Big Jim” Colosimo. The opportunities were enormous: gambling, brothels, and, with the advent of Prohibition, an entirely new profit center based on illegal alcohol. Torrio persuaded Capone that he could make much more money working in the Chicago rackets than he ever could in a legitimate field of endeavor. Capone accepted the offer, for wherever Johnny Torrio went, Al was sure to follow, with his family, his newly acquired bookkeeping skills, his latent syphilis, and his scars.
Torrio’s recruitment of Capone was shrewd, for Al had served a dual apprenticeship, learning street crime with Frankie Yale and bookkeeping with Aiello Construction. Now he would be able to combine these experiences in Torrio’s new organization, putting his skill with numbers to darker and more lucrative use than he had in Baltimore.
Al’s career move had consequences for the entire Capone family. With campanilismo still a fact of life, everyone from his widowed mother, Teresa, to his little sister, Mafalda, was poised to follow his lead. His acceptance of Torrio’s offer was a bold move for Al, the biggest he had taken in his twenty-one years. With it, he vaulted over his older brothers to assume the leadership of the family, and from this time forth his mother, his brothers, and his sister all pinned their hopes of prosperity in America on him and his relationship with Johnny Torrio.
At the beginning of 1921, the rising young bookkeeper gave notice to his boss. Peter Aiello was surprised and sorry to lose the capable young man, whom he genuinely liked and wished well. As a parting gesture of goodwill and appreciation, Peter Aiello lent Capone $500. Al never forgot the generous gesture; he vowed to repay the loan as soon as he was on his feet in Chicago, a promise he eventually honored in a way that his former boss could never have imagined. “He said that he was cut out to do bigger and better things,” Mike Aiello notes of Capone’s leave-taking, “and he needed money to go to Chicago because he had some opportunities there.”
* * *
1. A pseudonym.
CHAPTER 2
Where the East Meets the West
SIOUX CITY, IOWA, rises above the banks of the Missouri River like a drowning man struggling to surmount treacherous waters. At its highest point, the city looks across the fast-flowing river toward the Nebraska border and its smaller sister town of South Sioux City. Beyond them, looming as an indistinct shape on the horizon, is a range of mountains; actually, it is more of a ridge, a wrinkle in the immense flatness of the prairie landscape. There, some sixteen miles from Sioux City, near the southern boundary of Dakota County, lies the hamlet of Homer, Nebraska, population 500, give or take a few souls, depending on the weather and time of year. A road runs from Sioux City all the way out to Homer, as does a rail line skirting the tiny town center. Nowadays trains roll right past Homer without hesitation, but in years gone by a few paused briefly at this whistle-stop to take on water or coal, and, incidentally, to discharge the odd vagabond.
In the spring of 1919, one such guest of the railroad alighted at Homer, shook the dust and grime from his clothes, and walked into town. He knew no one, and no one knew him. He was twenty-seven years old, but he looked even older, careful and alert, like a man who had traveled widely, and indeed he had. He was different from the other tramps, however; there was something stiff and military in his bearing. He was short, wiry, and muscular, with a prominent nose—a true Roman nose—dark eyes, a shock of black hair, and an olive complexion. In a region whose sparse population consisted predominantly of immigrants from Scandinavian countries, his dark, striking features set him apart. His name, when he chose to utter it in his flat, nasal voice, gave little clue to his origins: Richard Joseph Hart. This was not his real name; it was, rather, one he assumed in tribute to his hero, the silent-movie cowboy star William S. Hart. On the screen, in popular Westerns such as Wagon Tracks, White Oak, and Three Word Brand, William S. Hart sat tall in his saddle and fired his pistols with magnificent accuracy and without any remorse. He was tall, handsome, aloof—a man who resorted to violence only in the service of good, to restore the established order and rid the West of its bad men. It was a persona with profound psychological appeal to Richard Hart, who was himself caught in a personal conflict of good and evil, a drama so intense it had obliterated his identity.
His desire to escape his origins and to create a new identity had led him to Homer, whose strangeness and isolation held him as if it were a magnet and his soul iron. He had seen much of America and even something of Europe, thanks to Uncle Sam, but after his years of wandering, he was ready to settle down for good, to raise a family, hold down a job, and make a name for himself. Though he would occasionally leave Homer in years to come, he would live here for the rest of his life. It was precisely the refuge Richard Hart was seeking, a forgotten town where he could be whomever he pleased and spend the rest of his days living out his fantasy of the Wild West as invented by Hollywood and enacted by William S. Hart.
The stranger’s real name was Vincenzo Capone.
He was the oldest of Al Capone’s brothers, the lost Capone, who had run away from Brooklyn at the age of sixteen, joined the circus, and later served with distinction in the American Expeditionary Force during the Great War. But now the war and its glories were over, and he had been mustered out to return with his sharpshooting medals to the Midwest and the open spaces he had come to favor during his days traveling with the circus. While the rest of his brothers dri
fted half-consciously into lives of crime, Richard was determined to differentiate himself from them, and not merely by changing his name. If they found themselves on the wrong side of the law, he would make certain to be on the right side, and more than that, and in emulation of his cinematic role model, to enforce his idea of the law. So strong was his drive to be right and to do right that he set himself on the path to becoming, without realizing it, a mirror image of the fledgling crime family he had fled. He became, in short, not a good man, but an outlaw’s idea of what a good man must be: a man as self-assured, aloof, and violent as William S. Hart up on the screen, his guns blazing, his face a mask of self-righteousness. No doubts, no uncertainties, no ambiguities—not with a fast horse and a six-shooter in either hand. In the silent movies, it was always obvious who were the good men and who were the bad, and in the struggle between right and wrong, Richard Hart knew to which side he belonged. Or so he thought.
Once the train had pulled away and turned into a distant puff of smoke, Richard Hart was surrounded by silence disturbed only by a constant, mournful wind. Here and there a sign creaked forlornly on its hinges, and in one or two of the windows facing the street an unseen hand moved a curtain aside to permit a clearer view of the new arrival. In this windswept landscape, the ridge that had beckoned in the distance transformed itself into a gentle, rolling hillside. The little town offered a small café, a post office, and there was even a newspaper, the Homer Star, which was widely read in those parts, but Homer was above all a farming community, and the talk centered on agriculture: aerating, composting, fertilizing, and endlessly, the weather, rain being a special obsession with Homer’s farmers, like farmers everywhere: the amount of rain, the frequency of rain, the chances of rain. It was all as far from Brooklyn—or any big city—as you could get, which was just as he wanted it.
Richard was an ambitious, even driven man, hungry for a reputation and glory, but he was forced to content himself, at first, with the limited career opportunities available in Homer and the surrounding towns in the northeast corner of the state. He found employment briefly as a timekeeper with a railroad crew, and later he hired himself out as a housepainter and paperhanger, but he did not succeed at these ventures. He did, however, make himself known. He talked of his adventures in the war, displayed the sharpshooting medals, and joined the local American Legion post, where he tried to exploit whatever status would accrue to a veteran. Hart was also fond of boasting of his physical prowess and daring. He would wrestle any man who took up the challenge, and he claimed he drank a pint of warm cat’s blood every day, though no proof of the habit was forthcoming.
Folks in Homer might have been tempted to dismiss the newcomer as a braggart, but within weeks of his arrival in Homer, fate presented him with a chance to display his physical courage. Situated at the base of the ridge, Homer and other towns in the area were subject to flash floods, which could be destructive and deadly. On May 19, 1919, an unexpected downpour inundated the neighboring town of Emerson, Nebraska, and Richard threw himself into the rescue efforts, coming to the aid of a girl named Margaret O’Connor. The Homer Star related that “Hart pushed little Margaret O’Connor up to a fence where she hung to the barbed wire until rescued by her father. The elder O’Connor had to tread water up to his neck to rescue the girl.” As dramatic as the deed was, it paled in significance beside Hart’s other rescue that day, which involved an entire family named Winch. Their nineteen-year-old daughter, Kathleen, quickly caught his eye, and the two were soon in love and inseparable. Their courtship continued throughout the summer of 1919.
The Winches had arrived in Homer only a year before their deliverer. They came of German stock, and William, the father, had done a bit of everything: tended bar, worked in a hardware store. He was known as a stubborn man; as one of his grandsons was fond of saying, “He’d argue black is white.” It was a trait he shared with his daughter’s fiancé. William and his wife, Bertha, were Lutherans, and they regularly attended St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Homer. There were, incidentally, two other churches in town, Methodist, which was a bit higher on the social scale, and Catholic, which was a bit lower, but Richard avoided all three houses of worship and the ties to tradition they represented.
On September 1, Richard Hart wed Kathleen Winch in a small, simple Lutheran ceremony in Homer. Three children—all boys—followed in quick succession. The father named his oldest child after his movie idol, William S. Hart; he would be known to all as Bill. Hart named the second child after himself. Richard Jr. Sherman, the third child, was born in 1923. (A fourth child, Harry, would be born several years later, in 1926.) As a husband and father of three children, Richard Hart Sr. was by now an established presence in Homer, but he continued to conceal his origins. On his youngest son’s birth certificate, for instance, he gave his birthplace not as Naples, Italy, where he had actually been born, nor Brooklyn, New York, where he had spent his boyhood; rather, he claimed to have been born in Oklahoma, and he allowed the impression to stand that his dark coloring came from Mexican or Indian forebears.
Hart’s burgeoning family offered proof of the new life he had chosen in Homer, as did his career, which suddenly acquired new status with the arrival of Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified on January 16, 1919, and went into effect exactly one year later. Section I read: “After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.” And Section II: “The Congress and the several States shall have the concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” With these words the buying and selling of alcohol became a federal offense.
A watershed in major cities such as Chicago and New York, Prohibition had long been the rule in rural areas such as Homer. In the Midwest, where the Anti-Saloon League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and other Prohibition groups wielded great political clout, the populace was already “dry” either by custom or by local ordinance—which is not to say that no one drank, or that liquor was not available. It was indeed, but buyers had to know where to look for it; they had to know which drugstore or café sold alcohol under the counter or for “medicinal” purposes. The illegal liquor trade flourished, though in secret, and gave rise to its own vocabulary. The term moonshine had been in use since at least the eighteenth century, referring to the phantom presence of illegal alcohol, or spirits distilled at night, hidden from prying eyes. Those engaged in brewing the stuff became known as moonshiners, and those engaged in selling or transporting it, especially in the Midwest, became known as bootleggers. The term, which became popular in the 1890s, derived from the practice of concealing liquor in the upper part of the leg or boot. Elusive, illegal, self-employed brewers and distillers had long flourished throughout the Midwest and especially in the South, and there were as many regional variations on the process of making beer or whiskey as there were recipes for other staples. Isolated farmers frequently distilled whiskey solely for their own use, or for their families, and often the most effective Prohibition agent was not a federal agent but a wife outraged by her husband’s drunkenness.
To wage war on the moonshiners and bootleggers and to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, the federal government created a new breed of law enforcement official: the Prohibition agent. Carrying state or federal commissions, the Prohibition agents had greater authority than local law enforcement officials. But these men were generally new to their trade, and their lack of experience hampered their effectiveness, for even in the best of circumstances, Prohibition was an extremely difficult law to administer. At the same time, the agents’ low wages made them exceedingly vulnerable to bribery. Most bootleggers had a ready supply of cash, and Prohibition agents everywhere quickly discovered they could earn more and escape the hazards of their job simply by accepting bribes
. Most, but not all, Prohibition agents succumbed to these blandishments. The job also attracted men with a taste for danger, who were willing to lay their lives on the line for a cause. Among them was Richard Hart.
With his love of guns, his adoration of William S. Hart, and his need of a steady job, Richard instinctively gravitated toward this type of work. In the summer of 1920 he sought and obtained a commission from Nebraska’s governor, Sam McKelvie, as a Prohibition enforcer. He had a badge, he had a gun, and he had power. The proliferation of bootleggers courtesy of the Eighteenth Amendment promised to keep Hart occupied for a long time to come.
Within weeks of receiving his appointment, Hart completed his first successful Prohibition raid. In Martinsburg, Nebraska, north of Homer, he captured five stills and began generating both publicity and a reputation as a lawman to be reckoned with. “Pictures of Hart’s raid results were taken for publicity purposes,” the Homer Star noted, because “it is believed they may some day have historical significance.” No one was more acutely conscious of the possible significance of such artifacts than Hart himself, who made a point of being photographed with his booty whenever possible. In an early picture, he is seen standing with two other Prohibition agents between two stills and a ramshackle collection of bottles and jugs. He wears a gun, a six-pointed tin star, and a Stetson that appears to dwarf his compact frame; his left hand rests on the coils of one of the captured stills. This was a relatively restrained pose for Hart; as his career unfolded, he would become more flamboyant, always in costume before the camera, as if he were William S. Hart himself, acting in a real-life Western. However, as Hart quickly discovered, one raid and one notice in the paper did not suffice to rid the area of moonshine. Within the next ten days, he returned to Martinsburg twice to raid more stills, but no matter how fast he worked, the stills spread even faster.
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