Capone returned to Miami on June 17, having decided it was time to take action. As a young man, he had once killed for Yale; now he decided the time had come to eliminate his business partner and former boss. At forty-three, Yale remained as violent as ever, and any plan to eliminate him posed grave dangers. Whether it was actually necessary to kill Yale was another question. It was likely that Yale was chiseling on their bootlegging arrangement, yet that was not in itself grounds to assassinate him. But Capone was growing more sensitive to slights these days, whether they were real or imagined, as his syphilis gradually eroded and distorted his personality, and he was capable of manufacturing any number of reasons why Yale ought to be killed. The Capone who wanted to execute “Banjo Eyes” for cheating at golf was perfectly capable of planning the death of Frankie Yale for more serious offenses. Once he had decided to act, he summoned six colleagues from Chicago to plan the assassination. They included Jack Guzik and Dan Serritella; the others Capone called “bodyguards,” although they were actually hit men: “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Scalise and Anselmi, and Fred “Killer” Burke. He then approached his friend Parker Henderson Jr. for another favor. Claiming that his life was in danger, he asked young Henderson to procure some weapons for the “bodyguards” who had just arrived from Chicago, and Henderson, as always, was glad to oblige. He contacted a gun dealer in Fort Worth, Texas, and ordered six revolvers and six shotguns; he paid for them himself and left them in an unoccupied room at the Ponce de León Hotel, from which Capone’s men retrieved them. Their plans complete, Capone’s six men, now armed, boarded the Southland Express for Chicago on June 28. To avoid harassment by Chief Hughes or any other glory-seeking police chiefs, they disembarked in Knoxville, Tennessee, and drove off in a used automobile, heading not for Chicago but for New York.
When the assassination hit the newspapers, Capone wished to be seen in “retirement,” fishing in Biscayne Bay and gambling at Hialeah. Even as he awaited consummation of his plan to kill Frankie Yale, however, a fresh scandal broke, this one much closer to home. The crisis began when the Miami Daily News exposed the details of the Capone-Lummus-Henderson conspiracy to purchase the Palm Island villa and even published copies of some of the legal instruments involved in the transaction. The revelation that Capone’s real estate broker had been none other than Mayor J. Newton Lummus reignited the anger of Miami civic organizations, who once again clamored for Capone’s expulsion. The infuriated members of the City Council of Miami Beach passed a resolution declaring Capone an “undesirable resident, and, by reason of his reputed connection with the Chicago gangsters and underworld, . . . a menace to the community.” If he remained, he and his underworld connections “would prove a tremendous detriment, both from a moral and monetary aspect” to the community.
There were angry calls for Lummus to resign, but he bluntly told the council that as the mayor of Miami he had no intention of obeying the dictates of the City Council of Miami Beach. There were many other men in the community as bad or worse than Capone, he said, but his argument did little to placate his critics. However, Lummus adroitly lent his name to the resolution condemning Capone, knowing that it lacked any legal force. The mayor returned directly to his real estate business, and Capone once again found himself beset by bad publicity. His name was by now known everywhere, and the local controversy became a national issue. “MIAMI BEACH SEEKS TO DRIVE OUT CAPONE,” readers of the New York Times learned. “HE REFUSES TO LEAVE CITY—Authorities Appoint Policemen to Tail Him Constantly if Defiance Is Continued.”
Capone remained in Miami, but no matter how lavishly he furnished his home or how much cash he distributed in the community, he was constantly confronted with the brutal reality of the rackets. In Chicago, he had managed to keep his family and his career in crime separate; his office in the Metropole Hotel was miles from his house on Prairie Avenue. Whenever he wanted to avoid the police or a rival gangster, he could move from one hideout to the next. But in Miami, he was forced to conduct business in the villa where he lived with his family. Without his brothers to protect him, he had to bring strange bodyguards—and their weapons—into his home. Visitors were startled by the sight of guns displayed atop Mae’s Louis XIV furniture. She complained about the unwelcome guests, but Al realized the necessity of maintaining security. He created a spectacle wherever he went. When the Capones dined in a Miami restaurant, for example, they arrived with a retinue of thugs, one of whom lugged a large bass fiddle case, which contained the gold-rimmed plates Al favored and a cache of machine guns, should a show of force become necessary during the meal.
Capone’s Florida “retirement” turned out to be more stressful than he had anticipated, and there were telltale signs of the pressure. His temper was likely to erupt at odd times and places, and he was given to destroying his clubs at the golf course for no apparent reason. At the same time, his compulsive need for contact with people grew even stronger in Miami. His career as a racketeer made ordinary human relationships all but impossible, and when he could not win a friend, he was prepared to buy him at any price. As his dealing with Sewell suggests, he would go to any lengths to establish an ordinary relationship, which to Capone meant one over which the fear of death did not hover. Yet the social acceptance he craved could never be his. He could inspire fear, earn limitless amounts of money, and satisfy his lust with numerous prostitutes, but just beyond the glittering rim of his racketeering empire, beyond the clubs and whores and endless money and bootleg booze, there was the terrifying prospect of death and darkness waiting to pluck him at an early age. To forget his troubles, and to make the time in Miami pass more quickly, he began to gamble obsessively. Capone’s losses at gambling had already become part of gangland’s lore, but in Florida his losses at the Hialeah race track increased exponentially. Every week he gambled away hundreds of thousands of dollars, making the bookies with whom he dealt extremely happy but also a little suspicious; they could not understand why Al shrugged off the losses as if they were inconsequential.
Capone was losing touch with reality because of his advancing case of neurosyphilis—not all at once, and not consistently, but he gradually retreated into episodes of megalomania and paranoia. Under the influence of the spirochetes gnawing at his nervous system, he became ever more temperamental—by turns gloomy, ebullient, and violent—without apparent cause. He suffered from a dimly perceived but keenly felt need for greatness or grandeur lurking just beyond his reach, tantalizing him, driving him on, tripping him up. He was a Caliban driven mad by syphilitic voices and visions he could scarcely comprehend, the proverbial beast who, delighted by the beauty of a butterfly floating through his field of vision, snatches at it, only to crush the insect in his brute fist, and is overwhelmed by his innate clumsiness, violence, and guilt.
• • •
Sunday, July 1, was warm and sunny in Brooklyn, and the borough’s neighborhoods reverberated with the tolling of church bells. One of the most conspicuous sights in Brooklyn that placid morning was a large, gleaming, dark brown Lincoln coursing slowly through the streets. At the wheel was Frankie Yale, out for a Sunday morning spin. Yale drove alone, but he had little to fear, for his brand-new car featured a bulletproof chassis. As he pulled up to an intersection, he failed to notice a black Buick following him. The Buick held four men, and they did not look like churchgoers. One was “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Capone’s trigger-happy assassin; the others were Scalise, Anselmi, and Burke. When Yale finally did catch a glimpse of the car in his rearview mirror, he instantly realized what it meant.
Stepping on the gas, Yale turned onto Forty-fourth Street, tires squealing, as the Buick gave chase and rapidly drew even with Yale. The two cars raced along a residential street lined on either side with trees and identical rows of brownstones. At 923 Forty-fourth Street, Solomon and Bertha Kaufman were hosting a party celebrating their son’s bar mitzvah. The sound of the speeding cars attracted the attention of the guests, who looked out the large street-level window to see shotgun
barrels protruding from the Buick, aiming directly at the head of the driver of the Lincoln. There was a blast, and Frankie Yale slumped at the wheel, dead. His car’s body had been bullet-proofed, but not the windows. His attackers did not stop there; they had come to do a job, and they wanted to make sure it was done thoroughly. One of them raised a machine gun and began firing into Yale’s body as the Lincoln continued to roll along the street, out of control. This was the first time that weapon had ever been used in a gangland hit in New York. As the sound of gunfire faded, the Buick gained speed, turned a corner, and disappeared. The assassins later abandoned the car, leaving behind a Thompson machine gun, a sawed-off shotgun, and two revolvers. Yale’s Lincoln proceeded along the street, rolling up onto the sidewalk, heading toward Mrs. Kaufman’s home, and colliding with the stoop in front of the house. As it came to a standstill, the door flung open, and Frankie Yale’s corpse, beautifully attired and bloody, fell out onto the street before the appalled guests.
Although Frankie Yale had died on a Brooklyn street and not in Chicago, his murder was among the most significant gangland hits of the decade, for next to Al Capone, Yale had been the best-known, most feared racketeer of the Prohibition era. Yet for all his prominence, no one knew why he was dead or who had killed him; the press and public reacted only to the gruesome circumstances of his murder and the biggest gangster funeral New York had ever seen. The funeral took place on July 5, and 100,000 people turned out to pay their last respects to Yale and to gape at the floral arrangements; perhaps the most outlandish consisted of a large heart fashioned of roses pierced by a dagger, all of it surrounded by a clock of white and blue violets pointing to the time of day when Yale was hit, and underneath, the legend: “We’ll see them, kid.” It became a source of local pride that the number of mourners, the length of the motorcade, and the cost of the floral arrangements for Frankie Yale’s funeral exceeded even that of Dion O’Banion’s funeral, which had long been considered Chicago’s grandest display of the underworld in mourning.
Once Yale was laid to rest, his widow Maria expected to come into a great deal of money, but she was disappointed. Only $3,000 turned up, most of which Frankie had been carrying at the time of his death; desperate for cash, she was reduced to auctioning his renowned diamond-studded belt, but it fetched only $75. Soon Maria Yale, widow of the most powerful ganglord in Brooklyn, was working ten hours a day sewing pants in a factory to support her family.
Once the shock of Yale’s assassination wore off, the finger of suspicion pointed at Capone. His emissaries of death had been remarkably careless about covering their tracks. Their Buick carried Illinois license plates and was traced to Chicago. The weapons they had used to kill Yale and then discarded were found and traced to Parker Henderson, who was now as eager to cooperate with the police as he had once been to do Capone’s bidding. He explained how he had purchased some of the guns used to kill Yale for Capone. Employing a machine gun also proved to be unwise, for police later recovered it and traced it to a Chicago arms dealer, Peter von Frantzius, who had the distinction of supplying weapons to all the major Chicago underworld figures. The evidence, though circumstantial, was so convincing that Capone might as well have pinned a note to Frankie Yale’s corpse, admitting guilt.
The newspapers, if not the police, closed in on him: “YALE DEATH TRIO TRACED TO CHICAGO,” declared the Chicago Tribune only days after the murder, and several weeks later added: “CAPONE’S GUN KILLED YALE, SAYS INFORMER.” New York’s police commissioner, Grover Whalen, announced that Capone was responsible for Yale’s death, and made a highly publicized journey to Chicago for a fruitless meeting with the Chicago police, who were not about to get in the middle of a dispute between rival hoodlums; as far as they were concerned, “Scarface” had done them a favor. For the record, Capone denied any involvement; he said he had always liked Frankie Yale and had even sent a small wreath to the funeral, for the sake of appearances.
• • •
Throughout much of the summer Capone was in and out of Chicago Heights and Lansing, Michigan, where he attended to his bootlegging business in the post-Yale era. When Michael Hughes, the Chicago police chief who had threatened to place all Chicago gangsters, including Capone, under house arrest, stepped down, Al returned to Chicago itself to catch up on business. The visit was meant to be brief, for Sonny and Mae remained at the Palm Island villa. However, Al still had important family ties in Chicago. His mother continued to live in the house on Prairie Avenue, accompanied by several of the younger Capone brothers. And his older brother Ralph, now thirty-four, had finally remarried in May 1928 and now lived on the South Side with his new wife, the former Valma Pheasant, and continued to manage nightclubs. Although Al Capone’s return to his mother and brothers in Chicago marked at least the second time he had broken his pledge to retire from the rackets, no newspaper or policeman troubled to remind him of his promise. By now it was apparent that Capone would “retire” whenever it suited his convenience and reemerge at an equally convenient opportunity.
Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, Al made his first public appearance in Chicago at the Minerva Athletic Club on South Halsted Street. This was actually a gambling joint run by a member of the Capone organization, “Dago” Lawrence Mangano. For the benefit of the journalists who were present, Capone bemoaned the death of Frankie Yale, and once he had unburdened himself of his grief, he “eased his bank roll out of a pocket and went into action with hoarse imprecations.” After several unlucky rolls of the dice, “Mr. Capone removed his coat, showing a mauve silk shirt, and went to work again. His luck switched for a few moments, but the dice again went against him, and his loss, with many cluckings of sympathy from his bodyguard, was chalked up at ten grand.”
Capone did more than gamble during his stay in Chicago. On July 30, he moved his Chicago offices from the Metropole Hotel to larger quarters at the Lexington, located at Twenty-second Street and Michigan Avenue, only a block away. At first he took a suite of ten rooms under the name “George Phillips.” Within several months, Capone and his men had the run of the place, which became indelibly associated with him. The Lexington was an imposing hotel with pretensions to architectural grandeur; its façade combined Moorish and Italian elements with broad “Chicago windows.” Within, Al’s new office, perched in a corner of the uppermost floor, offered a commanding view of Chicago’s South Side—Al Capone’s empire—which he surveyed from a chair equipped with a bulletproof back: a gift from Dominic Roberto and the boys in Chicago Heights. He took other safety precautions, preferring to ride a freight elevator to his floor, always in the company of his bodyguards. “The Lexington was a fabulous place, filled with all kinds of traps and escape routes,” recalls Vern Whaley, a reporter who visited shortly after Capone moved in. There were alarms, hidden panels, moving walls, everything a security-conscious gangster required, and no one was more security-conscious than Al Capone. Whenever he spent the night at the Lexington, Louis “Little New York” Campagna camped out on a cot strategically located beside the door leading to his master’s boudoir. To prevent another attempt to poison his pasta, Capone arranged for his meals to be prepared in a private kitchen under the supervision of his men, and before a room-service cart was wheeled into his presence, the meal underwent the scrutiny of a food tester, usually the chef himself.
Capone was less fastidious about his sexual behavior. His girlfriend of the moment lived in a small suite at the hotel, always on call should her services be required. She was blond, Greek, and young, probably no more than sixteen. When she noticed a sore on her genitalia, she went to a physician, Dr. David V. Ohmens, whose practice included members of the Capone organization. The girl took a Wassermann test, which was positive, and began a series of injections. There was still no cure for the disease, so the treatment was of limited value. Even though his mistress was diagnosed as syphilitic, Capone refused to take the Wassermann test himself. Ralph’s case had gone away on its own (as syphilis does four-fifths of the time), an
d Al expected the same resolution. So there would be no test, and no treatment for him. In any event, Capone had, in all likelihood contracted his case of syphilis years before, as an adolescent in Brooklyn.
He was far more sensitive to a new threat to discipline in his ranks—not prostitutes, not drinking, but heroin. Harry Read dropped by the Lexington one day, where he found a group of Capone’s men searching a bodyguard’s room for evidence of the drug. They dismantled furniture, removed and inspected the brass knobs on the bedpost, unscrewed and inspected electric switches, and hammered away at the floor in search of hollow hiding places. Capone told Read that the man who had occupied the room had been addicted to heroin, a discovery that prompted the racketeer to administer a thrashing and to send him off for a “rest cure” in Kentucky. “I love the son of a bitch,” he said, “but if he ever goes back on that stuff he’ll wind up in a cement overcoat.”
• • •
Although Capone’s insistence on security appeared extreme, violence was ever present. The end of summer brought with it a response to the slaying of Frankie Yale. In Chicago’s Italian community, September 8 marked the festival of Our Lady of Loreto; in expectation of the event, the poverty of Little Italy was temporarily hidden behind a façade of brightly-colored ornaments, paper lanterns, banners, and parades. The air was filled with the sounds and smells of sizzling sausage and fried dough dusted with powdered sugar. This year, anxiety lurked behind the gaiety, for days earlier, a kidnapping had shocked the community. The victim was the ten-year-old son a wealthy sewer contractor, A. Frank Ranieri, and the ransom was set at $60,000. Frantic, Ranieri did what most Italians in his place would have done; he went to Antonio Lombardo, Capone’s handpicked chief of the pivotal Unione Sicilione, for help. Just before Ranieri arrived, however, Lombardo decided to go for a walk in the Loop in the company of his two bodyguards. It was rush hour, and the streets were jammed. Lombardo liked that; a dedicated self-promoter, he wanted to see and be seen. He had recently published a biographical sketch describing how he had overcome hardships facing immigrants and had risen to his eminent position. In reality, he supervised alky-cookers and funneled money extorted from racketeers to local politicians, but that was not how he described himself. “Like most successful men,” his biographical sketch concluded with unintended irony, “he has received much, but has given more to the community in which he lives. It is to such men that Chicago owes her greatness.” Al Capone himself could not have said it better. As Lombardo walked through the community to which he claimed to owe so much, two men fell in step behind him, pulled out .45-caliber revolvers, and fired dumdum bullets into his head.
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