Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Although Capone conducted his business at the Downey Hotel, he lived with the Mastropietro family in their house on Saginaw Street, where he vicariously enjoyed the domestic tranquillity he would never be able to purchase with any amount of money or blood. He played with the Mastropietro children and their friends and relatives by the hour, and he loved to toss babies high into the air and catch them in his big strong arms. He lavished small presents on the older children. Giovanna Antonucci was one who recalled those innocent shopping sprees with Capone: “He took us kids by the hand downtown, in Lansing, Michigan. We went to a big department store, and he got us all clothes; he dressed us from head to toe. I got a taffeta dress, white patent leather shoes, everything. And my brother got a new bike and new clothes. People knew him in Lansing; he wasn’t hiding. I remember walking down the street and the people would stop and say to him, ‘Hi, Al!’ People would go by in a car, and they’d stop and say, ‘Hi, Al!’ They all knew him. Nobody was afraid of him. We liked him. He was good to us. We wished he would never go home. He talked soft. You could barely hear that man talk. And he wasn’t a criminal, not at all. To tell you how nice he was, he had a young fellow, one of his young bodyguards. We all knew him. Next door to us lived a pretty girl, an American girl—I mean not Italian, we were American, too—and he was going to take her out on a date. But before he did, Al said to the young man, ‘Are you taking this girl out?’ And the young man said, yes, he was. And Al told him, ‘You take her out and bring her home the same way you’re taking her out.’ Meaning, don’t get funny. Don’t mess around. That’s the way Al was, a perfect gentleman.”

  Yet life with “Uncle Al” Capone on Saginaw Street was not quite so tranquil as it appeared. A sense of menace permeated the household, and even the children sensed it. “I remember him sitting on the porch,” recalls Grazia Mastropietro of Capone’s stay in her home, “and at that time, I knew the Chicago police were looking for him. And there were two local policemen sitting in the window of the house across the street. They were there the whole time he was here. And then there were cars that drove by the house very slowly.”

  Giovanna Antonucci remembers the secrecy with which Capone and his men cloaked themselves; they lived in a world that children and other innocents were not permitted to enter. “My brother and I were curious about Al and his men so we opened the doors to peek at the men. All the men were playing cards, drinking. They all wore guns in holsters, and we were scared. We shut the door right away. Then we’d peek again, to see how they were talking and playing cards. Meanwhile, Grazia would crawl under the table and untie everyone’s shoes, and the men would pretend not to notice. They always kept all the window shades down. No window shades were up, ever, because, you know, somebody could walk by or drive and shoot them. But since we were kids, we were left alone. Nobody bothered us; they were nice to us, and we liked them. When all of us children were playing out of doors, Al would call me: ‘Come here, Giovanna,’ and he’d give me five dollars, or maybe even more. ‘Go buy ice cream for all these children,’ he’d say, meaning the ones I was playing with. And I would go to the drugstore and buy our ice cream. So of course we liked them, especially Al.”

  Although Capone, the compulsive extrovert, paraded about the streets of Lansing, the elders warned their children to keep his presence a secret. The last thing they wanted was for one of their children to start talking about their summer guest, Al Capone, in front of friends and strangers. “You were brought up with fear,” Grazia remembers of that time. Decades later, the stigma of association with Capone persists. Grazia’s daughter, now a young mother, recalls, “When I was a child I would ask my grandma to tell my girlfriends about Al Capone, but instead of saying anything she would pull me into another room by my sleeve and say, ‘Don’t you tell those girls that we knew him.’ ” Her mother solemnly observes: “That was the one thing. They would kill you if you opened your mouth.”

  If “Uncle Al” introduced an element of danger into the Mastropietro home, he was also instrumental in dispelling another menace that Angelo had long endured in Lansing. At the time, many of the Italian merchants were being victimized by the last of the Black Handers, the freelance Italian blackmailers who preyed exclusively on other Italians. “All the merchants were told that they had to kick in protection money every week, or else,” Grazia notes. “But they didn’t have it. Many of them were starving during those years in the early twenties. All they had were their businesses. They used to threaten to beat them up or blow up their businesses if they didn’t give them tribute. Even then it wasn’t killing, it was beating them up or blowing up their store, which was bad enough. They got together, these merchants, and went to see my father and petitioned him for help, and my father went to Capone to help. Capone told my father, Angelo, to tell the Black Handers: ‘Al Capone says leave these Italians in Lansing alone.’ And he did the same thing to the Purple gang in Detroit: ‘If you bother these people in Lansing you deal with me.’ Capone got word to the Purple gang, and they did lay off, and that was one more reason the Italian merchants respected my father and loved Al Capone.”

  Capone opposed the Black Hand partly for selfish reasons, because they threatened his own rackets, and partly because he wished to be seen as a hero to his people. In this quest he succeeded, at least in Lansing. Grazia Mastropietro says, “My mother would say to me about Al Capone, ‘Don’t ever let anybody tell you he was a killer or some sort of thug. He is a beautiful gentleman.’ ” Grazia’s mother felt justified in saying these words to her daughter because in a world of corruption and prejudice, Al Capone stood as a force for law and order and self-respect. He was capable of bringing justice and even a measure of prosperity to the Italians of Lansing. To them he was no gangster, and his bootlegging activities were a source of pride rather than shame. He was an employer, a friend, and an arbiter of justice. This new role was immensely flattering to Capone’s ego; it afforded him the respect he had never been able to buy with any amount of money or bullets in Brooklyn or Chicago. In those urban centers he was constantly branded with terms such as “pimp,” “gangster,” and “murderer,” but in Lansing he was regarded as a fixer with important connections, a man in a position to help people. Even today, the Italians of Lansing who knew Capone remain quick to leap to his defense. They are neither naïve nor blind; they are bitterly realistic and pragmatic people who have struggled to survive in their adopted home. The uncomfortable fact was that Capone helped them achieve their version of the American dream. Furthermore, he was, at least to them, polite, charming, generous, loyal—all those things a criminal mastermind is not supposed to be.

  Yet the Al Capone who took children into town for ice cream in Lansing was the same Al Capone who impulsively pumped five bullets into Joe Howard in Chicago. He cultivated extremes of good and evil, and according to the racketeering code by which he lived, he accomplished his good works through evil. His crimes only intensified his desire to purchase redemption at any price. For Capone, giving away money or gifts was often the cheapest way to feel good. For instance, he beseeched his friend and protector Angelo Mastropietro to accept a shiny new car as a token of gratitude, but Angelo refused these and other blandishments from Capone, explaining that he was motivated by friendship and loyalty, not by the expectation of material reward. Yet most other Italian families in Lansing could not afford Angelo’s noble gesture. They knew Capone was always good for a touch, sometimes cash for household expenses such as food, but more a gift for a special occasion. “There was one family so poor that they could not afford a wedding dress for their daughter when the time came for her to be married,” says Grazia Mastropietro. “Capone not only bought her the dress, he paid for the wedding, and he gave her a dòte, a dowry. He also gave money to high school kids for college. I can’t say it was the equivalent of four years’ tuition, but it was a start.”

  As a result of his generosity, Capone began to see himself in a new light. If he could do the same back in Chicago, perhaps people there w
ould regard him with the affection and respect he had won in Lansing. If only he could be more like his friend Angelo Mastropietro, to whom traditional values such as friendship, loyalty, honor, and family mattered more than anything else in life. To accomplish this lofty goal, Capone knew he would have to resign the role he had inherited from Johnny Torrio, but he was ready to walk away from the precarious position of power in which he found himself, as well as the headlines that smeared his name. If nothing else, he might live longer. As a practical matter, he could turn over the day-to-day operation of the organization to Ralph and to Jack Guzik. Indeed, they were already running it in his absence. Then he could devote himself to clearing his name. Of course, the obstacles he faced seemed insurmountable, beginning with the murder of McSwiggin, but how wonderful to live without that dry lump of fear at the back of his throat, to walk about Chicago as freely as he went about the streets of Lansing, where people, when they saw him, called out, “Hello, Al!” and waved instead of firing a machine gun or plotting to poison the very pasta he ate.

  His brother Vincenzo, he knew, had transformed himself from a potential gunman into the lawman everyone called “Two-Gun” Hart. He had even made himself famous as a marshal and Prohibition agent. Of course his transformation, which meant partially concealing his identity, had been extreme and bizarre, and Al could never go that route, but he felt the temptation to legitimacy to which Vincenzo had succumbed. As the tranquil summer weeks passed, it was a temptation on which Capone meditated. Should he reform? Leave behind his life of crime? More importantly, how would he accomplish this transformation? It was impossible.

  No, Angelo counseled him. With God’s will anything was possible.

  • • •

  Although he delighted in the company of children and consoled himself in the arms of Virginia, perhaps Capone’s greatest pleasure during these summer months was listening to his opera records, the big stacks of glistening black 78-rpm discs he purchased in Lansing. “Al loved music,” recalls Grazia Mastropietro. “He bought a phonograph, and he bought every Caruso record he could find in Lansing. He would play them by the hour.” What a luxury it was to sit in the Mastropietros’ living room, listening to the gorgeous music unfold. Capone was obsessed with opera as only an Italian could be. Although he adored Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s violent and melodramatic Pagliacci, whose tormented souls are consumed by infidelity and retribution, he loved the musical epics of Giuseppe Verdi most of all—Aï da with its pageantry, the tragic inevitability of La Forza del Destino, and finally, late at night, when the children were asleep, the harsh, rich, dark strains of I Vespri Siciliani, the Sicilian Vespers, Verdi’s romanticized version of the uprising that gave birth to the Mafia. Here was an opera to inflame Capone’s imagination with its portrayal of the clash of historical forces, pressures he fancied having confronted in his own struggle against the authorities in Chicago. In his reveries, he saw himself not as a racketeer or a pimp, but as a champion of the freedom and dignity of Italians in the United States; like the ancient Sicilians, he was prepared to resort to violence when provoked, to assert his dignity as an Italian-American and as a man. He found many cues for such flights of fancy in the opera’s libretto, written by Eugène Scribe, which told of the thirteenth-century patriotic uprising by the Sicilians against their French oppressors and the birth of Sicilian statehood.

  The oppression and prejudice that Al Capone faced in contemporary America had its origins in a far more recent historical event: the assassination of the superintendent of police in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1890. The aftereffects of this murder were felt by all Italian-Americans trying to make their way in their new home. At the time, New Orleans, renowned for its flourishing prostitution industry, was also a city rife with anti-Italian prejudice. The mayor, Joseph A. Shakespeare, spoke for many citizens of New Orleans when he declared, “Our genial climate, the ease with which the necessities of life can be obtained, and the polyglot nature of the population unfortunately has singled out this part of the country for the idle and emigrants from the worst classes of Europe: Southern Italians and Sicilians. . . . We find them the most idle, vicious and worthless among us. . . . They are without courage, honor, truth, pride, religion or any quality that goes to make good citizens.” Not long after he uttered these words, the city’s youthful superintendent of police, David C. Hennessy, was assassinated. As the hunt for Hennessy’s murderers began, the police found a so-called “Mafia gun” near the scene of the crime. “The weapon was of the murderous Italian make,” noted the New Orleans Daily Picayune. Mayor Shakespeare ordered the police to arrest “every Italian you come across.”

  A month later, in November 1890, a grand jury indicted eleven principals and eight accessories to the crime. Newspaper headlines carried the story to every corner of the country; it was the first time most Americans heard of the “secret organization styled ‘Mafia.’ ” In the streets of New Orleans men regularly taunted Italian immigrants with the question, “Who killa de chief?” and walked away laughing. After four months of turmoil, the trial for the murder of David C. Hennessy commenced on February 16, 1891, at old St. Patrick’s Hall. Ultimately, the jury declared a mistrial in the case of three of the accused, and found all the others not guilty. In the morning, the citizens of New Orleans were confronted with the intolerable headline in the Daily Picayune: “NONE GUILTY!”

  A month later, the White League, a white supremacist organization, held a rally to protest the verdict. The meeting attracted hundreds of irate people, who listened to a procession of speakers intent on whipping them into a frenzy. Eventually the mob raced to the prison where the Italians had been confined since the conclusion of the trial. Arriving at the prison, the mob met with no obstacles; neither the police nor the sheriff dared to offer resistance. As twenty armed men entered, guards obediently opened the cells holding the Italians, all of whom tried to flee for their lives. Although each vigilante carried a list of the eleven Italians who were supposedly guilty of killing Hennessy, the angry mob indiscriminately shot Italians to death. Meanwhile, outside the prison walls, other vigilantes strung up two more Italians. The mob also hanged another man, Antonio Bagnetto, from a tree in front of the prison, and during the next few hours women stopped by to immerse their handkerchiefs in the blood of the two corpses. The lynching—mass murder is a more accurate description—claimed the lives of eleven Italians in all, five of whom had played no role in the trial.

  Astonishingly, both the New Orleans authorities and the press hailed the vigilantes responsible for the deaths of innocent men. Even the New York Times, while deploring the lynching, conceded it was a “terribly effective method of inspiring a wholesome dread in those who had boldly made a trade of murder.” The leader of the lynch mob, a lawyer named William S. Parkerson, became a hero, receiving congratulatory telegrams from all over the nation, and he later undertook a speaking tour around the country, insisting that his lynching demonstrated that southerners were the most patriotic of all Americans. Meanwhile, Mayor Shakespeare stirred up a fresh quarrel with the city’s Italians, telling them, “I intend to put an end to these infernal Dago disturbances, even if it proves necessary to wipe every one of you from the face of the earth.” Faced with such threats, Italian immigrants to the United States, who had once favored New Orleans, avoided the city where they were greeted with the taunt “Who killa de chief?” and would be for decades to come. Instead, they congregated in northern cities such as New York and Chicago, where they hoped American society would accord them a more benign reception. But it was not to be. In the decades to follow, shotguns gave way to pistols and machine guns, and lynchings yielded to jail, and the deadly rivalries repeated themselves in the manner of a Greek tragedy, strophe after bloody strophe.

  Such were the origins of the historical nightmare in which Al Capone found himself in the summer of 1926. Prejudice, hate, revenge, and economic need had been the controlling facts of his life, but he yearned to escape these conditions, if only to save his own neck. C
apone spent many hours discussing his options with his friend Angelo Mastropietro. The easiest choice was to continue to hide out in Lansing, secure among his friends and allies who controlled the police. Another option, also relatively easy to accomplish, was to slip across the border to Canada, his family following shortly afterward. And then there was the idea of returning to Chicago. Of all the choices, it was the most hazardous, the most likely path to his becoming an assassin’s victim. But if he survived, if he submitted himself to the authorities who wanted him in connection with the shooting of McSwiggin and managed to clear his name, he might begin to embark on a new life. Capone chose the last option, the riskiest and most difficult of all. In the end, it was the only one worth pursuing.

  He began holding conversations via long-distance telephone with law enforcement officials in Chicago, and soon the word spread throughout Lansing’s Italian community: Al Capone was thinking of turning himself in. The negotiations between the Chicago law enforcement authorities and the notorious racketeer required great delicacy. When Capone had second thoughts about proceeding, his friend Angelo urged him to continue. Otherwise, Angelo argued, Capone would have to spend the rest of his life on the run, and sooner or later he would be caught. It was better to surrender in a situation over which he had some control, some chance for rehabilitation, if not vindication. Eventually Capone realized he could not walk away from his allies, enemies, and the corpses, and the bloody memories; he would have to own up to some, if not all, of the consequences.