The public saw through these lies, and discontent with the Thompson administration mounted. The voters realized that the forces of lawlessness were running the town with the assistance of Thompson and Crowe, yet the mayor remained adept at deflecting criticism from himself. He continued to divert attention from his own failings by attacking imaginary enemies—especially the tyrannical King George. To hear Thompson tell it, King George was doing more harm to Chicago and the United States than any other individual on the face of the earth. As an example of royal malice, Thompson cited the price of bootleg bourbon, which, he said, had increased tenfold, to $15 a bottle: “King George’s rum-running fleet, 800 miles long, lies twelve miles off our coast, so every time you take a drink you say, ‘Here’s to the King!’ ” Such was Thompson’s idea of a campaign issue, and the preliminary polls showed that his strategy worked; everyone expected the reformers to go down in defeat once more.
When Thompson was forced to address a realistic concern, such as crime, it was only to utter more nonsense. Shortly before the election, the mayor took his ease in his lavish office at City Hall, where he told the Associated Press that Chicago was the “most maligned of all cities.” As he spoke, noted the reporter, “a gesture of his great right arm swept to encompass the north, west and south sides of the throbbing municipality . . . and, continuing his movement, he thrust his gold-rimmed spectacles athwart his florid forehead.” He scowled when the reporter had the temerity to raise the issue of crime. Crime in Chicago, Thompson informed the Associated Press, has decreased 67 percent during his administration; Chief Hughes told him so only a little while ago. “Sure, we have crime here,” Thompson continued. “Chicago is just like any other big city. You can get a man’s arm broken for so much, a leg for so much, or beaten up for so much. Just like New York or any other big city—excepting we print our crime here and they don’t.”
As election day approached, public outrage found vent in political rallies. At one, Edward R. Litsinger, a candidate for the Cook County Board of Review, asked a throng, “It costs $243,000,000 to run Chicago. What are we getting?”
“Bombs!” came the response. “Pineapples!”
Thereafter, Chicago’s primary election of 1928 became known as the “Pineapple Primary,” in memory of the homemade bombs—“pineapples”—thrown during the contest. They immediately entered the emerging folklore of the era, as Capone’s friend Damon Runyon, writing from the relative safety of New York, noted in his story “Gentlemen, the King!” In the tale, a child and a mobster named Jo-jo discuss the notorious Al Capone; one thing leads to another, and the child asks Jo-jo about the famed pineapples. “And what does this Jo-jo do,” writes Runyon, “but out with a little round gadget which I recognize at once as a bomb such as these Guineas chuck at people they do not like, especially Guineas from Chicago. Of course I never know Jo-jo is packing this article around and about with him, and Jo-jo can see I am much astonished, and by no means pleased. . . . Well, the next thing anybody knows . . . Jo-jo . . . is telling lies faster than a horse can trot about Chicago and Mr. Capone, and I hope and trust that Al never hears some of the lies Jo-Jo tells, or he may hold it against me for being with Jo-jo when some of these lies come to pass.”
Although Runyon’s tale dismisses the pineapples with wry humor, they were, in reality, a source of dread in Chicago. Through the smoke and shouting of the primary campaign, the name of one man was constantly invoked as the cause of all the evils afflicting that city. He was not a candidate, he was not even present in Chicago; he was, in fact, over a thousand miles away that winter, lolling about in his Palm Island villa. Despite his absence and his silence on public issues, everyone in Chicago from Senator Deneen to Mayor Thompson held Al Capone personally responsible for the city’s crime and violence. Thus he became a campaign issue despite having no role in the election. Furthermore, there was no proof of his involvement with the bombing incidents, nor was his ubiquitous organization ever shown to be involved. Rather, the bombs appear to have been the work of local freelancers who offered themselves to the politicians, especially in the Thompson camp, whose careers were at stake in this election and who felt free to resort to them because Capone made a convenient scapegoat.
The election itself was, in the words of one newspaper correspondent, “a day of sluggings, ballot-box stuffing by shotgun squads, and kidnappings.” The chief outrage was the murder of Octavius C. Granady, a black lawyer running against Morris Eller, a Capone ally, in the “Bloody” Twentieth Ward. Machine-gun-wielding thugs chased Granady’s car, and when it finally crashed into a tree, they shot him to death. In this case, there were arrests; seven men were subsequently tried for murder—three hoodlums and four policemen, all of whom were acquitted.
Despite the violence of election day, public indignation created by the bombs and Thompson’s self-serving lies sent voters to the polls in record numbers. In the most significant contest, they voted out Robert E. Crowe, who had shown himself to be thoroughly corrupt and devious, and replaced him with Judge Swanson. The rout of the Thompson machine amounted, in the words of one observer, to “ballot rebellion.” Before the election, Thompson had vowed to resign if his man Crowe lost, but in the wake of defeat, he was, predictably enough, having second thoughts: “Why should I resign?” he inquired. “You’d think I’d lost the whole fight.” Thompson remained in office, but he never recovered from the trouncing his administration received in the primary. Newspapers everywhere hailed the defeat of his corrupt political machine. “The primary brought results that are gratifying to the entire country. It was a mighty blow for the restoration of law and order in Chicago,” the Washington Post commented. The Kansas City Star put it even more succinctly: “There is a God in Israel.” The humiliation Thompson suffered at the polls shattered his presidential campaign. Thereafter he lost all interest in Chicago, indeed in politics itself. During the next few months, he was nowhere to be seen; when reporters asked for his whereabouts, they were told the mayor was in the Wisconsin woods, hunting.
• • •
Throughout the election Capone maintained a dignified silence on the recommendation of his friend Harry Read, the city editor of the Chicago American, who continued to advise Capone on the best way to handle himself in the press. Once the winds whipping off Lake Michigan had dispelled the smoke of Chicago’s Pineapple Primary, Read left Chicago for Miami. He checked into the Ritz Hotel on April 20 with the stated purpose of recovering from pneumonia. In reality, Ralph Capone greeted him on his arrival and immediately spirited him away to Palm Island. In the days to come, Read was in attendance at the Capone villa nearly every day. To establish an image of Capone in exile and in retirement, he arranged for the racketeer to pose for photographs that showed him fishing; they appeared in the American. Read was able to get away with that much, but he went beyond the limit when Capone invited him aboard a flight to Cuba. With considerable embarrassment, the American later published an account of the excursion, which began on April 23:
The party flew to Havana, arrived without incident, and registered at the Seville Biltmore Hotel. Mr. Read had lunch, joined the party on a trip to the Tropical Garden, where beer is given away, stopped at a restaurant where dinner was had, and returned to the hotel.
The Capone party went to several cabarets that night, but Mr. Read was in bed at 8 o’clock. . . .
On the following morning at 6 A.M. emissaries from the Cuban secret police came to the hotel and told Capone they had been asked by the American embassy to question him and the persons who had arrived on the plane with him. Capone and the others, including Mr. Read, accompanied the secret police emissary to headquarters, where it developed that the questioning had to do with reports that Capone intended bombing some public buildings as part of a May Day labor demonstration.
On hearing this Capone laughed heartily. After the arrival of the chief of secret police Capone was asked what he was doing in Cuba. He said he came over to spend some money and drink some wine. The chief stated tha
t the Cuban Government was glad to have him as a visitor and hoped his stay would be a pleasant one.
Notwithstanding the warm good wishes of Cuba’s chief of secret police, Capone flew home to Miami immediately following their little chat. From this point forward, everything about Capone’s life in Miami was dedicated to establishment of a legitimate persona. If he was wholly a creature of the dark, lurid, obscure underworld during his early years in Brooklyn, he now played the heliotrope in Miami Beach, always seeking the sunlight of legitimacy.
For the moment, he gave the appearance of living in permanent, comfortable retirement. He enrolled Sonny, now nine, at the Gesu Catholic School, which offered a cloistered, safe environment for his only child, as well as a veneer of respectability. In addition, he supervised the renovation of the Palm Island villa to his precise specifications. For the sake of security, he enlarged and reinforced the concrete wall running around the perimeter of the property and installed a telephone by the front gate to announce callers. For the sake of luxury, he arranged for the installation of an oversized swimming pool, and when it was finished, Al could tread water in the pool while gazing at the waters of Biscayne Bay, a pleasing prospect accented with white sails and the wakes of power boats churning past. At one end of the pool he built a Moorish-style two-story cabana. He also added a decorative rock pool stocked with tropical fish and renovated the dock fronting the bay. Capone kept two boats tied up to his dock: a speedboat named Sonny (later Sonny and Ralphie, after his nephew) and a thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser, which he used for fishing expeditions. The renovations cost $100,000, more than twice what Capone had originally paid for the house, but they transformed what was already a comfortable, dwelling into a secure luxury residence.
Within, a large portrait of Al and his son dominated the living room. The second floor was somewhat less spectacular, but considerably homier. A narrow staircase led to a landing providing access to three bedrooms. In the largest, Capone slept on a king-sized bed; the other important piece of furniture in the room was a substantial wooden chest in which he stored his spending money. “Don’t keep your money in a bank. Keep it like I do,” he advised his men. This habit was both a vestige of his immigrant past and a necessity for racketeers seeking to avoid paying taxes.
Mae did her part to rehabilitate the Capone image. She decorated the Palm Island villa with a vengeance. It was the first home that was truly hers, that she did not have to share with her mother-in-law and Al’s brothers, and she embarked on a furious shopping spree. Mae favored Louis XIV replicas, an ornate style in which scrolls, curved armrests, and gilded decorative motifs abounded. She also bought a number of dinner services trimmed with gold, a set of thirteen spice jars, a brass and enamel vanity set, an art deco cosmetic tray and jeweled bottle set, ivory miniatures, a silver-plated juicer, a pair of glass torchères, and a set of four metal elephants—their trunks held high in a traditional sign of good luck and potency. Devoid of taste, reeking of money, this was exactly the kind of opulent decor that the wife of any newly rich magnate might be expected to purchase. Everywhere she went, she left a trail of thousand-dollar bills, to the delight of local merchants. To the extent that respectability could be bought, Mae did so, and she paid for it in cash.
She was also exceedingly careful about the impression she made on her Florida neighbors, although the gestures she made to demonstrate that she was not some uncouth gangster’s moll were as unintentionally revealing as a shoot-out would have been. Although Al could be reckless with human life, Mae was exceedingly respectful of property. For example, when the lease ran out on the house rented by the Capones, the owner, a Mrs. Stern, expected the place to be riddled with bullet holes. Instead, she found her home in immaculate condition, even better, in fact, than she had left it. In the cabinets she discovered a dozen new sets of silver and china, all of it glistening, untouched. And on the day the Capones’ last phone bill, bloated with $500 in long-distance calls, arrived, Mae Capone herself pulled up in her Cadillac. Her platinum hair glistening unnaturally in the sunshine, Mae walked up to the front door, rang the bell, and told the owner, “I came to pay our telephone bill.” She withdrew a thousand dollar bill from her pocket book and handed it to the astonished Mrs. Stern. “Keep the change,” said Mrs. Capone, “I’m sure we must have broken something while we were here and I hope that will cover it.” She bade her former landlady farewell and drove off into the Miami sunshine. Al himself wouldn’t have handled it any differently, and her behavior suggests he had told her exactly what to do.
While Mae decorated, Al shopped for clothes, which were becoming something of an obsession for him, as well as a way to meet people who would otherwise cross the street to avoid him. A flash of green, he knew, never failed to bring such people around to his side. One day his new friend, Parker Henderson, brought him around to Sewell Brothers, a men’s clothing store on East Flagler in downtown Miami. Al immediately won over Sewell, who found the racketeer surprisingly good company and great for business. On that first visit, Capone purchased dozens of $35 silk shirts and $12 sets of silk underwear—over $1,000 in merchandise, all paid for in cash. Dressed in his new garb he looked, said the owner, “like a tourist,” which was precisely as Al wanted it—with one small exception. “He was wearing a belt with a diamond-studded buckle,” Sewell remembered, “but the belt didn’t match his clothes, so I asked him to let me give him a new one. Then I put on a $100 Panama hat on his head and cocked it down over the scar that started on his left forehead and creased his face. ‘This is a gift from me to you—and the belt, too,’ I told him. He reached out with his hand and said, ‘Let me shake your hand. This is the first time anybody ever gave me anything.’ ”
There was more to this glad-handing than Capone’s love of fancy tourist attire. Jack Sewell happened to be the son of one former mayor of Miami, John Sewell, and the nephew of another, E. G. Sewell; the latter was among those calling for the immediate departure of Al Capone from the community. So this particular merchant was extraordinarily well connected in Miami, and Capone’s patronizing his store and purchasing his goodwill carried distinct political overtones. In befriending Sewell, Capone displayed the same strategy that had worked so well for him when he joined forces with Mayor Lummus to purchase the Palm Island villa.
Capone did more than patronize Sewell’s store. He directed all his visitors from Chicago to buy their resort wear at Sewell Brothers. And Jack Sewell himself became a frequent visitor at the Capone’s villa, where he was startled to hear Capone complain (or was it boast?) that he had just dropped $250,000 in a poker game. Sewell found it next to impossible to dislike Capone. Like so many others before him, he was overwhelmed by the racketeer’s genuine charm, his staggering generosity, and his uncanny knack for finding common ground with relative strangers. It might be a fondness for gambling, Italian food, bootleg booze, or women; in Sewell’s case, it was boxing. When Al learned that his great friend Jack was a boxing enthusiast like himself, he immediately arranged a sparring session. This was a testimony to Sewell’s mettle, for few men were willing to step into the ring with the most notorious racketeer of the day. “When I looked at him, standing there in his bathing trunks and puffing on a cigar, I thought, ‘This fellow should be easy,’ ” Sewell remembered. “We had no gloves, so we just slapped at each other with open hands. I found out right away that he wasn’t easy. He was as hard as nails, strong and quick, and he had a very good defense. Four tough bodyguards stood about watching us in silence. They always made me feel uneasy. Later Capone told me he had fought professionally under the name of Al Brown.” This was fiction of course; “Al Brown” was the alias Capone had employed in Chicago to elude police investigation of his racketeering activities.
On another visit to the villa, Sewell met Capone’s chief pimp and accountant, Jack Guzik, whom Al termed “the father of the syndicate.” As Sewell later recalled, “it was the first time I ever heard the word ‘syndicate’ applied to the mob.”
Sewell was under
no illusion about the nature of Capone’s activities, nor was anyone else in Miami who dealt with Capone, as Sewell later explained when IRS investigators questioned him. “I don’t believe there was a politician in town who didn’t solicit Capone’s aid, his financial aid,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of them around the hotel. . . . There were all kinds of people up there, Catholic priests on down.”
• • •
In May, Capone finally ventured north to Chicago, slipping quietly into Cicero, where disturbing news awaited him. For well over a year his bootlegging arrangement with Frankie Yale had been unraveling. Yale complained that a growing number of trucks were being hijacked along the great northern route from Brooklyn to Chicago, but Al suspected that Yale himself was responsible for the disruptions. Because this pipeline provided Capone with one of his principal sources of revenue, he took Yale’s chicanery seriously. To learn more, he dispatched a crony, James “Jimmy Files” De Amato, to Brooklyn, charged with the mission of reporting back to Chicago on Yale’s activities. A month after his arrival in Brooklyn, where he ran a crap game on Coney Island, De Amato was shot to death on the street. In Brooklyn, the demise of “Jimmy Files” was regarded as just another minor gangland murder, but Capone realized that his ruse had been discovered. The “hijackings” of Capone’s bootleg booze continued, and his concerns about Yale grew. In the early months of 1928, Yale survived two mysterious attempts on his life, and he began making noises about retiring.
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