Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Had the Commission’s ambitious scheme been carried out, it would have established Johnny Torrio as the preeminent racketeer in the nation, and it would have meant the end of Al Capone’s career. However, the intricate set of rules and regulations on which the racketeers agreed proved impossible to enforce. Although Capone left Atlantic City humiliated by his professional rivals, he had no intention of relinquishing control of the Chicago rackets to his former mentor. He had long wanted to retire, but only when he decided, on his own terms; it was unthinkable for jealous rivals to push him aside. He was still a young man, hardly more than thirty. At the same time, he was shrewd enough to realize that the Commission’s plan was a veiled threat against his life. Should he attempt to violate its provisions, he would probably be killed as mercilessly as he had killed Frankie Yale. So he had come, when he least expected, to a major turning point in his career. He could attempt to retain control of his organization, which meant certain death; or he faced oblivion. Neither choice was acceptable, and so he contrived a third course of action. He would wait. Perhaps better than anyone else he recognized how volatile the rackets were. The cast of characters and their alliances changed constantly; nothing was engraved in stone, not even the Commission’s edicts. Facing the question of where to wait, Capone selected a place that came as a shock to his family and colleagues, but would prove to be the safest place of all for a gangster in disgrace: jail.

  • • •

  Capone left Atlantic City believing that the instant he set foot in New York or Chicago he would be “on the spot,” that is, marked for death. In a desperate ploy to elude both the rival gangsters who wanted to kill him (or so he thought) and the federal authorities awaiting him on his return to Chicago, Capone arranged to have himself arrested on a minor charge. He began by telephoning two detectives, James “Shooey” Malone and John Creedon. Officially, the men were employed by the Philadelphia Police Department, but in fact they spent a fair amount of time in Miami, where Capone had given them tickets to the Sharkey-Stribling fight and entertained them at his home on Palm Island. Now he told Malone and Creedon that he would pass through Philadelphia on May 17, carrying a weapon. According to a report which Malone and Creedon hotly denied, each man would receive $10,000 in return for the favor of arresting him. This was a generous sum, as much, in fact, as Capone paid to have someone killed.

  What followed was one of the most bizarre interludes in Capone’s entire career. On the appointed evening, the detectives waited in the lobby of a downtown movie theater while Capone and his bodyguard, Frankie Rio, amused themselves within. When the boys emerged, Malone declared, as agreed, “You’re ‘Scarface’ Capone.”

  “My name’s Al Brown,” answered the racketeer, following the script. “Call me Capone if you want to. Who are you?”

  “I extended my right hand, showing the badge,” Creedon said later. “Capone put his hand in his coat pocket and pulled out a gun, which he handed to me.” In addition to the .38-caliber pistol, Capone reportedly handed Malone a roll of bills in the amount of $20,000—the payoff to the detectives for performing this “arrest.”

  Thereafter, events—all of them carefuly choreographed in advance by Capone—moved at an astonishingly rapid pace. Creedon and Malone immediately took Capone to City Hall, where police questioned him until two o’clock in the morning. His demeanor throughout was subdued and cooperative; he was nothing like the brash, tough-talking hoodlum they had expected to encounter. “I had a most interesting discussion with Capone shortly after his arrest,” said Philadelphia’s director of public safety, Lemuel B. Schofield, who talked with Capone in the early hours of the morning. “His manner was in great contrast to the snarls of . . . his bodyguard. . . . Capone quieted him and said: ‘Listen, boy, you’re my friend and have been a faithful pal, but I’ll do the talking.’ ” And talk Capone did. “I’ve been in this racket long enough to realize that a man in my game must take the breaks, the fortunes of war,” he told Schofield. “I haven’t had peace of mind in years. Every minute I was in danger of death. Even when I’m on a peace errand we must hide from the rest of the racketeers. You fear death every moment, and, worse, worse than death, you fear the rats of the game, who would run around and tell the police if you didn’t constantly satisfy them with money and favors. I’m tired of gang murders and gang shootings. I spent the week in Atlantic City trying to make peace among the various gang leaders of my city. I have the word of each of these men that there will be no more shootings.” His contention that he was simply “trying to make peace” in Atlantic City was, of course, a fiction woven with shreds of truth.

  By dawn, the district attorney, John Monaghan, assumed control of the case. A grand jury indicted Capone at 10:30 A.M. on a charge of carrying concealed weapons. One hour later, he and Rio pleaded guilty as charged. At 12:15 P.M. Judge John E. Walsh sentenced the men to one year in prison, and thirty minutes after that, they began serving their sentences. The process of catching the elusive Al Capone, from arrest to incarceration, had taken just sixteen hours—a record for Philadelphia jurisprudence. The entire legal charade in Philadelphia was, as the Chicago Tribune’s headline aptly characterized it, “QUAKER JUSTICE IN JIG TIME.”

  In his career as a racketeer, Capone had, among other crimes, killed several men himself, ordered dozens more to be eliminated, violated the Prohibition Act, bribed thousands of police and Prohibition agents, and he had engaged in large-scale prostitution, yet despite widespread public knowledge of his activities and a string of arrests, Al Capone had never been sentenced to jail—until now. It was Al’s habit to admit to a lesser crime in place of a major one. In the past, he had admitted he was a bootlegger but not a pimp, he had condemned heroin while snorting cocaine, and now, when he was suspected of planning the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, he confessed to carrying a concealed weapon, hoping the public would be satisfied that justice would be done if he spent a year behind bars. Such was Capone’s plan; the reality of doing penance in prison proved somewhat grimmer than he had anticipated. Capone and Rio were transferred to the nearby Holmesburg County Jail, where Capone was ordered to exchange his custom-made suit for ill-fitting blue denim prison garb. He received a brutal prison haircut and a prison number: 90725. Finally, he relieved himself of the eleven-and-a-half-carat diamond ring he wore on his pinkie—estimated value: $50,000—and entrusted it to his lawyer with instructions that it was to be given to Ralph Capone. The passing of the ring symbolized the transference of power; Ralph would be the acting head of the Chicago organization until Al’s return. Meanwhile, the two detectives who had arrested Capone furiously denied they had conspired with the prisoner. “It’s enough to make anybody want to quit being a copper,” Malone complained. “Here we take a chance and pinch two of the most dangerous characters in the racket. They have guns on them and know how to use them. Then everybody hollers ‘Frame up!’ ”

  Malone protested too much, and a consensus formed that Capone’s Philadelphia escapade was nothing more than a show trial staged not by the prosecutor but by the accused. The bizarre circumstances of his arrest and imprisonment stirred controversy across the country. The various law enforcement officials in Chicago and Washington who had been trying in vain to get their man greeted the news with restrained enthusiasm masking their utter incredulity. Al Capone in jail, just like that. How could the Philadelphia Police Department succeed where all of them had failed, and succeed so quickly, in just sixteen hours? The shrewd ones, such as George E. Q. Johnson, preferred not to look this particular gift horse in the mouth. “The Capone conviction speaks for itself—and says a lot,” he commented. The remark could be interpreted in any number of ways. For those who wanted only to see Capone in jail, it suggested that Johnson was heartened by the sudden development; and for those whose suspicions were raised by the manner in which Capone had been caught, it suggested that it was a frame-up. In either event, Johnson continued to pursue both Al and Ralph Capone for tax evasion.

  For John Stege, Chica
go’s deputy police chief, Capone’s arrest in Philadelphia was a source of profound embarrassment. Why, reporters angrily demanded, hadn’t he thought to jail Al Capone for carrying a gun in Chicago? “I’ve arrested Capone a half-dozen times, and many times found guns on him. The same goes for a hundred other gangsters around town,” Stege blustered, but, he added, “the minute you get them before a municipal court judge, the defense attorney makes a motion to suppress the evidence. The policeman is cross-examined, and if he admits he didn’t have a warrant for the man’s arrest on a charge of carrying concealed weapons, the judge declares the arrest illegal and the hoodlum is discharged,” and so on and so forth. Stege’s excuses only served to persuade the public, if further proof were needed, that the Chicago Police Department was hopeless in dealing with the likes of Capone.

  In contrast, Capone had demonstrated convincingly that he knew how to get things done. For its speed and daring, the maneuver was especially impressive, for he managed to evade his racketeering rivals and the federal government at the same time. Whether it was actually necessary for him to go to the extreme of placing himself in jail for a year is another matter. One of the reasons Capone had survived as long as he had was his obsession with security; even if he faced the prospect of certain death in New York or Chicago, he could have returned to his Miami Beach retreat, where he had been living in “retirement” for over a year. It is more likely that he simply panicked after the Atlantic City conference, and his scheme to seek a safe haven in jail was yet another symptom of his dwindling grasp of reality—the result of neurosyphilis silently overtaking his reasoning abilities.

  • • •

  In Chicago, the Capone family rallied and showed they knew as well as Al how to mount a public relations offensive. Rather than hiding in disgrace, his mother, Teresa, now a vigorous fifty-nine; his sister, Mafalda, who had recently graduated from Lucy Flower High School; and various younger Capone brothers took the bold step of inviting reporters into the Capone family home on Prairie Avenue. Teresa wore an elegant black silk dress for the occasion, and she spoke to her guests in a charming mixture of English and Italian through which she managed to make herself understood. “Their living room, with its soft light and velvet rugs, was full of friends talking in high Italian voices of Al’s capture and sentence, but the mother was neither too busy nor too excited to talk of her son and tell of his kindness,” noted the man from the Chicago Tribune, as his gaze fell on the Dresden candelabras, luxurious tapestries, and a large gold crucifix. Mafalda, at eighteen, seemed to use the occasion to announce her availability for matrimony. Confined to her bed with a cold, she invited the reporters into her boudoir, where, dressed in a green silk negligee and reclining beneath a canopy of rose-colored satin, she greeted the men. Mafalda made, in the words of one reporter, “a radiant hostess,” and an eloquent one. Of course her brother carried a gun, she said, coyly arranging her negligee over her alabaster shoulders. “Would anyone expect him to walk the streets anywhere without protection?” she asked in purring tones made all the more seductive by her upper respiratory congestion. “If people only knew him as I know him, they would not say the things about him they do. I adore him. And he is his mother’s life. He is so very good, so kind to us. You who only know him from the newspaper stories will never realize the real man he is.”

  Meanwhile, the object of Mafalda’s unqualified love and admiration turned restless and irritable. In interviews given through the bars of his deluxe cell, Al Capone stridently repeated his claim that he had convened the Atlantic City conference (when in fact he had been summoned) and that he had insisted the other racketeers make peace with one another (when in fact they had convened with the purpose of removing him from the rackets). And as the weeks in jail turned into months, Capone denied the rumors that he had arranged for his arrest to save his own skin. He found few believers, especially because his life in jail bore too much resemblance to his life on the outside. At the time he entered prison, there was much talk about what a dirty, overcrowded place Holmesburg was, strictly for hard cases, but Capone was soon transferred to Eastern Penitentiary, where he lived in a section of the jail known as “Park Avenue,” in a large cell equipped with rugs and comfortable furniture. He had a supply of liquor at the ready, he could make long distance calls whenever he wished, his food was brought in from the outside, and he received as many visitors as he desired in the privacy and comfort of the warden’s office. His guests included Ralph, Jack Guzik, and Frank Nitti, who were all engaged in overseeing the organization in Al’s absence. Capone made himself a popular if not beloved figure at Eastern Penitentiary when he purchased $1,000 of handmade crafts from the other prisoners. All prisoners had to work, and Capone drew the most undemanding job available, as a library file clerk. He subscribed to magazines and passed the idle hours reading. He continued to give interviews to the press with almost the same frequency as he had on the outside, but now, instead of proclaiming his innocence, he waxed philosophical, musing about that little fellow Napoleon, the greatest racketeer of them all, in Al’s view, and yet, “I could have wised him up on some things. The trouble with the guy was he got the swelled head. . . . He should have had sense enough after that Elba jolt to kiss himself out of the game, but he was just like the rest of us. He didn’t know when to quit and had to get back in the racket. He simply put himself on the spot. . . . If he had lived in Chicago, it would have been a sawed-off shotgun Waterloo for him. He didn’t wind up in a ditch as a coroner’s case, but they took him away for a one-way ride to St. Helena, which was about as tough a break.” Even if the reporter who wrote this story helped Al touch up his phrases a bit, Capone was still colorful copy, whether or not he was behind bars.

  As the summer drifted into the fall, and fall into winter, Al became impatient with the year-long jail sentence he had given himself. He grew restless and longed to seize the reins of power again. Headlines told of his numerous appeals to win an early release from prison:

  “CAPONE CRIES ‘ENOUGH,’ BEGS FOR A PAROLE”

  “CAPONE LOSES PHILADELPHIA FREEDOM PLEA”

  “SCARFACE AL’S LAWYERS FILE NEW PETITION”

  “CAPONE IN SIXTH LEGAL MOVE TO GET OUT OF JAIL.”

  “CAPONE LOSES ANOTHER FIGHT FOR FREEDOM”

  No matter what arguments his lawyers made on his behalf, Capone remained caught in a trap of his own devising.

  • • •

  At the beginning of October, the Capone organization suffered a new setback. A grand jury returned seven indictments against Ralph Capone, who had been serving as the acting head of the organization. The charges resulted from Nels Tessem’s relentless scrutiny of Ralph’s dealings at the Pinkert State Bank in Cicero. In addition, the Treasury Department had recently become familiar with a bootlegging operation he managed; its shipments between Ontario, Canada, and Chicago totaled more than $1 million. Then there was the matter of his large diamond ring and the two limousines he owned while he was pleading poverty to the IRS, not to mention the handsome suite he maintained at the Western Hotel, as the Hawthorne Hotel was now called. The evidence of his wealth was overwhelming. Six of the indictments were to be expected; they concerned his failure to pay taxes. The seventh invoked an ancient statute originally designed to punish profiteers during the Civil War. Now it was applied to Ralph’s hiding his $25,000 bank account while claiming he was nearly broke. As a result of that maneuver, he stood accused of defrauding the U.S. government.

  The Treasury Department arrested Ralph in a highly public manner, as if to send a warning to all other racketeers. On the evening of October 8, he attended a boxing match. As he took his ringside seat, Special Agent Clarence Converse, who worked with Tessem, approached Ralph, arrested him, and led him away in handcuffs. The hour was late, which meant that Ralph would have to spend the night in jail; in the morning he went free on a substantial bail of $35,000. The trial was set for the following May before Judge James H. Wilkerson.

  Unlike his younger brother, who h
ad willingly gone to prison on a minor charge, Ralph faced grave federal charges, not to mention a hostile judge and the wrath of the Chicago press. Furthermore, he was burdened by the stigma of being the brother of the notorious “Scarface” Al Capone. In his dealings with the IRS over the years, Ralph had shown himself to be both dishonest and dumb. Nonetheless, he eagerly sought vindication. He had spent his entire career in the shadow of his younger brother Al, profiting greatly as a result, but he had never commanded the respect, loyalty, and admiration that Al had. If nothing else good came from the trial, it would at least give Ralph a chance to stand on his own. For the first time since he had been indicted, he did something smart: he hired the best defense lawyers money could buy. If the government wanted a fight, a fight he would give them.

  Unfortunately for Ralph, he resumed his blunders. Now that he was under indictment, he attracted a fresh contingent of investigators prepared to apply new techniques to law enforcement. He drew their attention when he carelessly resumed his bootlegging business from his suite at the Western Hotel and from a nearby saloon called the Montmarte Café without realizing that the telephones were tapped. At the other end of the line, hanging on his every word, was a daring, even reckless young Treasury agent. His name was Eliot Ness.

  CHAPTER 8

  Public Enemies

  HE WAS A MAN WHOM DESTINY, like a temptress, alternately beckoned and scorned. Today, thanks to several decades of television shows and movies depicting his exploits, Eliot Ness stands as the archetypal sleuth of the Prohibition era, the man who finally brought Al Capone to heel and cleaned up Chicago. The appeal of the Ness legend is obvious, for it simplified the complexities and ambiguities surrounding Prohibition, and it condoned violence and anti-Italian prejudice, for Ness was nothing if not the scourge of that particular immigrant group. Because he was clean-cut, handsome, and boyish, he made these darker impulses seem healthy, normal, and wholly American. If Capone personified what Americans, especially rural Americans, hated and feared about the big cities in the 1920s—the crime, the slums, and especially the immigrants—the legendary Ness appeared to be the remedy: an all-American boy who had grown up amid green lawns and white picket fences, and who represented a nation whose citizens respected the laws and spoke the same language. America the way all Americans, immigrants included, wished to see it.