Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  After the children departed, Al returned to his cottage, where he watched the sun slip from the sky and the lake water turn glassy and fade into the night. The only sounds he heard were the regular croaking of frogs and the occasional cheep of a bird. For once his nights did not reverberate with the rattle of the roulette wheel, the squeal of tires, and gunfire. The loudest sound heard at Round Lake was thunder. After a humid day, the gathering storms of night split the sky with jagged streaks, and then the rain would fall, beating incessantly on the cottage’s flimsy roof, which amplified the sound into a drumbeat. Sometimes the rain on the roof sounded like distant engines growling, as if automobiles lay in wait; at other times it subsided into a peaceful drone.

  When he grew restless, Capone found diversion in a spacious roadhouse, an isolated dancing-and-drinking establishment overlooking the lake. Originally the site was a stage coach stop; the roadhouse was built in 1913; in 1920, with the coming of Prohibition, it became a dance hall. Later on, in the 1930s, it was known as the Club Roma, a nightspot renowned for its hot jazz, but for now the house policy was ten cents a dance, and the sound of laughter, high girlish squeals, ricocheted across the floor. It was not a place where married women ventured; the girls who went there were looking for men to buy them drinks, and they were looking for a good time, an improvised encounter, makeshift hilarity. It was here, in these unpretentious surroundings, that Al drank and danced; it was also where he met a pretty young woman who later became his companion in the little cottage down by the lake.

  • • •

  As Capone’s stay in Lansing stretched on, an ever-increasing number of the city’s Italians became aware of his presence, and many became involved in sheltering him, either actively by providing such essentials as food and accommodations, or passively by not informing the wrong people of his presence or whereabouts. Capone, for his part, proved eager to purchase the goodwill of his hosts, yet he remained aware of the unfathomable gulf separating him, the racketeer and outlaw, from the rest of society, both Italian and non-Italian.

  No one felt that gulf between Capone and the rest of the world more keenly than a sixteen-year-old named Anthony Russo, who became a surrogate son to the racketeer. The Al Capone he knew was a warm, endearing, generous presence, a man who seemed larger than life but at the same time haunted, vulnerable, and doomed. Like many other Italians in the area, the Russo family had become acquainted with Al in Chicago, and from the first young Anthony basked in the reflected glory shed by the racketeer. He remembered how Al gave $200 cash gifts to his mother and had surprised him with a shiny new bike, then spent the afternoon riding it himself. But Anthony was not so naïve that he was ignorant of the sense of danger with which Capone lived; he knew of Capone’s yearning for the life of ordinary families, who could gather beside an open window, eating dinner, without fearing for their lives. He vividly remembered the way Al cautioned him never to get involved with the rackets. “If you do,” he once told the youth, “and I’m alive, I’ll personally kill you.”

  Despite this warning, Anthony made himself useful as an errand boy for Capone at Round Lake. The young man found his boss to be moody, troubled, but self-contained. “When he was angry at something,” Anthony remembered, “he wouldn’t talk, and of course everybody stayed clear of him. Everybody shut up, too. His mood was their mood. And when he opened up and started to talk they started to talk. But I never saw him talk in anger. I’m sure that there were times when he said, ‘Hey, get out there and beat the hell out of that SOB,’ but no matter what went wrong, when he calmed down he talked very reasonably to everybody. They knew him well enough that when he spoke he meant what he said. He was basically a happy-go-lucky guy, and, hell, we used to have more damn laughs.

  “Even at Round Lake, though, he always wore a tie and a white shirt. He used to send me into Lansing when he needed socks. Told me exactly what to buy. They were seven and a half dollars a pair. One-hundred-and-fifty-dollar silk shirts. That was a lot of money then. He’d give me a $100 bill, and I’d go out and buy him five pairs of socks, come home, go to give him the change, and he’d tell me, ‘No, keep it.’ I made more money this way than his bodyguards were making. Frank Nitti and Jack McGurn, I mean. McGurn was a hell of a golfer, a two-handicapper. He could have been a pro, but being on Capone’s payroll at $150 per week was a hell of a lot better then being a pro golfer in those days.” These were meager salaries for Al, who boasted he was making $33,000 each week and who showered $200 gifts on the adults. Nor did McGurn and Nitti get a cut of the organization’s gambling and profits, although Capone dangled the possibility before them, as long as they remained obedient and loyal. “It was just like working for a big organization,” Anthony observes. “You know, if those people had put their mind to a legitimate business as much as they had put their mind to that type of business, they could’ve made a fortune legitimately. Dummies don’t run those organizations. The dummies were the ones found in the gutter. The smart ones always knew how to keep their noses clean. No, Capone and his guys were highly intelligent businessmen with a lot of ideas. But even a big businessman was not making the kind of money he could make in the booze business, and of course the nice part about that business is that it’s an all-cash business.

  “It worked like this: Capone’s people would walk into a saloon, and they would say to the owner, ‘You oughta handle Ace Beer,’ which was Capone’s beer, and the guy would say—you always found a wiseass—.’Get outta here, you punks. I’m not gonna handle your beer.’ And Capone’s people would say, ‘You know, it might help your business.’ ‘Naw,’ says the owner, ‘get the hell outta here. Don’t bother me.’ Well, that was the wrong thing to say because the next morning he’d show up and the whole front of his place would be blown out. The owner would be standing there scratching his head and wondering what he was gonna do next, and the guy that was trying to sell him beer would say, ‘Gee, if you’d had Ace Beer I don’t think that would’ve happened to ya.’ Then he’d walk away. Now the owner doesn’t have the kind of money to rebuild, so he goes back to the Capone group to get money. From there on, he only does what they tell him.”

  Learning his way around the Capone organization, Russo recognized that one other man wielded immense power, more power, in certain ways, than Al; this was Frankie La Porte. Says Russo of La Porte: “He even controlled Capone. He was a very suave individual, he commanded a lot of respect, and as a result he quietly got all of this power to a point where anybody wanted to get into Capone’s confidence, Frankie was the guy they’d call. And he ended up being the one who would say to Capone, ‘This is what you’d have to do,’ ‘This is what I would want you to do,’ because of his connections throughout the whole United States. He became the go-between for Chicago, New York, Kansas City, St. Louis, Los Angeles. Frankie didn’t ever deal with the lower echelon. His dealings were always with the top guy in every town.”

  La Porte’s influence over Capone was of particular interest to Russo because Frankie had almost married the youth’s sister. “In those days all marriages were fixed in the Italian groups,” Russo explains. “If a fell a liked the girl, he’d talk to the parents. In fact, he didn’t even talk to the parents himself, he would send a representative. The parents had to approve first, and the daughter didn’t have a hell of a lot to say about it. Now Frankie was a good-looking kid, but there was an argument, and the engagement got broke up. My sister was brokenhearted over it.” The end of the courtship meant more than broken hearts; it also affected the future of racketeering in Chicago. Shortly before they were forced apart, Frankie had vowed to Russo’s sister, “If you don’t marry me, I’m going to go into a life of crime.” La mala vita. And Frankie La Porte kept his word.

  As he fell under Capone’s spell, Russo became convinced that two factors—the hypocrisy surrounding Prohibition and virulent anti-Italian prejudice—were largely to blame for Capone’s vicious reputation. Russo was especially sensitive to these concerns because his own family had suffered
from them. His father, who had emigrated from Italy, had been a stonemason in Chicago Heights. When Anthony was a small child, his father had taken a job constructing a chimney. During foul weather, the other laborers, a mixture of Germans, Poles, and Italians, stayed home because of the danger posed by the high winds. But Anthony’s father had a family to support; his wife was pregnant, and he needed the money badly, so he went to work that day. The wind blew the chimney over, and it crushed him to death. A week passed before the others cleared away the rubble and removed the body. As compensation for the death, his employers offered his widow—Anthony’s mother—the sum of $100 for her child and $100 for the child she was carrying. There was a condition: the money was to be held in trust until each child turned twenty-one. “It’s for your own good,” the employers told Anthony’s mother. “Everyone knows you can’t trust Italians.” Shortly afterward, the widow gave birth to her second child, and two weeks later she went to work in the onion fields outside Chicago Heights with her newborn infant strapped to her back in order to earn money to feed her children. Picking onions was arduous, backbreaking work, but it was one of the few jobs available to unskilled laborers. The pay could be as little as five cents a day. She somehow managed to keep from starving, and when her son Anthony became a teenager he found employment in the local fruit markets, and later on he went to work for Angelo Mastropietro in Lansing. “Angelo was a real high-class gentleman, and Al Capone recognized it,” Anthony recalls. “He wasn’t the ordinary hoodlum who was always cussing and drunk. He was always very straight about everything. He was one of those people you could trust. He would have been a terrific salesman for IBM. Let the customer do the talking, and you sit there and listen.”

  Anthony’s new job brought him face to face with the severe anti-Italian prejudice that existed outside Lansing, especially in the South. He often traveled to Tennessee to obtain sweet potatoes for resale in Chicago and Detroit. It was arduous labor, but it paid $150 a week. One night, a friend invited him to a pool hall in a little town called Dresden. When they arrived, Russo discovered to his surprise that the place was filled with men. His friend explained they had come to see him, for they had never seen an Italian before. “They think, if he’s Italian, he’s gonna kill ya on sight,” Russo says. “They expected me to walk in with a gun on each hip, and it was kind of comical to see.”

  Given this climate of prejudice combined with a certain fascination with Italians, Russo could understand how Al Capone had acquired a diabolical reputation, but the young man from his own experience judged that impression to be false. “In my personal opinion he was always a gentleman. He always urged me to stay straight. He helped those old people in Chicago, those old Italians. If it hadn’t been for him half of them would have been on welfare, or worse. Anyone ever needed any help and who went to him and asked him for help got it. He was just that type of individual. Nobody ever gave him any special title, they never referred to him as ‘Godfather,’ they just called him Al. Except for the old Italians, that is. They respected his power, and when they were in his presence and he’d go over to shake their hand, they would kiss his hand because deep down they were afraid of him, see. To them he was always Signore Capone. They looked up to him as the Boss; they had to have a leader to look up to because that was the way it had been in Italy. Capone was more important to them than the president of the United States because they couldn’t go to the president for help. Al was the one that they always went to. Someone was sick, they didn’t have money to be taken care of, you could always depend on him to take care of those things. Say that you and your wife had a daughter whose husband was giving her a bad time. Al was the one you’d get to help straighten out the problem. I don’t know what he gained by being kind to those kind of people because they couldn’t do anything for him; he was doing it for them.”

  According to Russo, Capone differed from the stereotypical gangster in one other critical way: “He never carried a gun. He didn’t have to; he had all those bodyguards. What’d he want to carry a gun for? The only time I did see him with a gun in his hand was when McGurn, Nitti, and I were driving out to his cottage at Round Lake one night. Al was already there. We were in a big Studebaker touring car, and McGurn says, ‘Boy, what a pretty moon tonight’ just as we come to a curb. We were going so fast we tipped right over. These guys all carried big .45s, which they gave to me. Now I’m just a kid. It’s a lonesome little road out there, but you never know when someone is gonna come around, so I was going to walk to the lake, to Al’s cabin, but Nitti says, ‘No, no, this is wrong.’ He says, ‘Al will kill us if Anthony shows up over there with all this stuff, he’ll kill us. I’ll go with you.’ I never forgot this. Now instead of me walking on my knees he loads a couple of guns on himself, and off we go. We aren’t too far from the lake. We walk over. Nitti knocks on the door. And he’s shaking. He knows that Al does not want to see this. He knows we are in trouble. I mean here’s a guy who’s wanted in Chicago and here’re all of his bodyguards in a wreck. So the police know that he’s in the neighborhood. Nitti knocks on the cabin door. Al says, ‘Who’s there?’ And Nitti’s so goddamned scared he can’t answer. Nitti knocks on the door again, and Al says again, ‘Who’s there?’ And Nitti still doesn’t answer. He’s too damn scared and I’m too damn dumb to answer. All at once the door flies open and there’s a big .45 pointed right at Nitti’s forehead. He got his voice back in a hurry.

  “ ‘Jesus Christ, Al, don’t shoot! It’s me! Jesus Christ!’

  “And Al says, ‘Come on in here. What in the hell happened? What is this?’ ”

  Nitti and Anthony entered Capone’s cabin. Once inside. Anthony saw someone else partly concealed behind Capone. It was a girl, a good-looking blonde. Not Italian. Her name was Virginia, and she was Al’s mistress at Round Lake. Virginia impressed the young Russo as a “beautiful gal, as nice as you can be and still be involved with that group. Al met her in the roadhouse. You’d get all kinds of types in that place. She was a very well-proportioned gal. Wasn’t tall. Good-looking. But you know she meant nothing to him. The wives thought they had the best of everything, and they did. Men like Al always treated their wives with respect. The gals knew that as long as they kept their mouths shut and their noses clean everything was gonna be okay. And they only came around when they were asked, and if they weren’t asked they’d stay in their room or wherever they were. Al’s wife never complained about the girlfriends. Now whether she didn’t dare to complain or she was smart enough to keep her mouth shut nobody knows. You could ask a woman in her position a question about her husband, and she never knew anything about his business. All she knew is that her husband was in the fruit business or he had a flower store or a meat market somewhere, and that’s all she knew. Most of the men were highly respectful of families, and Al would sometimes get melancholy and talk about how he hadn’t seen his family for awhile. He loved his son, and he was afraid for him. Once you get into that kind of life you really don’t want a lot of liabilities. The amazing thing was that nobody ever bothered Al’s wife. But then those people never bothered women. You never heard of wives getting hurt. They had a code of ethics no one ever understood.”

  • • •

  After several weeks in seclusion by the shores of Round Lake, Capone felt more secure in Lansing, and with the help of the Mastropietros he began to establish ties to the Lansing police force. Although he was wanted for questioning in Chicago, little more than 200 miles distant, the Lansing police conspired to keep his presence a secret, at least from the Illinois authorities. The pivotal figure in this conspiracy of silence was Lansing’s chief of police, John O’Brien, whom the world knew as a respected law enforcement officer. For him, the situation was simple; all he had to do to earn the money he accepted was to remain silent. The Mastropietros, for their part, lauded O’Brien’s behavior. “John O’Brien came to parties at our house,” Grazia Mastropietro says. “He knew Al Capone was in Lansing, but he didn’t bother him because Al was our friend. O’Brie
n was one of those to whom friendship is the first thing, and he protected his friends. For instance, if he had a friend who was a gambler and who was about to be raided, he told the man, and the man got out of town in time. It wasn’t corruption to warn a friend, was it?”

  Anthony Russo recalled that Al’s new ally, Chief O’Brien, “could be tough when he wanted. Boy, he could be tough. But he was always nice to us, of course. We were friends. We were family. He got his little piece out of knowing that Capone was in town. He got a few bucks out of it, just like any other police protection that you get. All he’s got to do is keep his mouth shut and keep the police away from the area.” But it wasn’t quite that simple, for several years later, when Capone no longer had need of his services, O’Brien’s profitable arrangement with the racketeer was discovered. “He retired in disgrace,” says Grazia. “By that time I was in high school, and my family sent me there to keep him company because he was so depressed. We were all afraid he was going to kill himself. He always liked me so much, and I used to talk to him a lot. He didn’t kill himself after all, but his career as policeman was finished.”

  Enjoying both Italian hospitality and police protection, Capone felt secure enough to leave his Round Lake hideout and to move freely and openly about the city of Lansing. He took a suite in Lansing’s Downey Hotel, where he held court with politicians and newspapermen. “When I first met Capone I was a boy of seventeen working at the office of the State Journal,” recalls Lloyd Moles, a veteran Lansing journalist. “I always knew what to expect when I started hearing ‘Uncle Al’ is coming. He would take over the second floor of the Downey, where he renewed friendships. Yet I had no knowledge of who he really was, even when I was introduced to him. He seemed to enjoy children and always had gifts for them. As a news reporter years later I asked the police if they knew that he had ever visited the Lansing area.” Not only did the police know that the nation’s most notorious racketeer was virtually a summer resident, Moles learned, but “Capone always notified them that he was in town.”