Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  Capone described his position this way: “The men with power are the men with money or the will to take it. They break down into just two classes: the squares and the hustlers. I am a hustler, but I got respect for squares.” By squares, Capone meant Henry Ford or Thomas Edison, “a guy with brains and determination and a willingness to work for what he wants.” A typical hustler, on the other hand, was a “stock market speculator, a guy who wants to make money out of money instead of producing something people want and need.” And Capone had “no respect” for such people, he said. “They are greater crooks than hustlers in the underworld. At least an underworld hustler has the guts to go out and take it at the point of a gun.” Through such statements Capone attempted to convey the impression that he was actually leading a workingman’s revolt against the bankrupt, hypocritical Establishment, but the argument was cynical and self-serving. The working class supplied the bulk of his customers, but he had no genuine interest in helping them, preferring to reap the rewards of their expenditures on vice. To the extent that Capone had political power, it was based solely on corruption. Although he did a fairly efficient job of redistributing some wealth, it was also true that this particular Robin Hood stole as much from the poor as he did from the rich—possibly more. Indeed, the disenfranchised were his natural victims, and the wealth he displayed in Florida came largely from the pockets of workingmen who had succumbed to the temptation to drink, gamble, or avail themselves of a prostitute. Although Capone aspired to a higher condition, and argued that his magnanimous ends justified his brutal means, he had no political plan or goals, no theory of social justice, only an undying contempt for the law coupled with an inexhaustible cunning.

  • • •

  In the afterglow of his soup kitchen triumph, Capone wanted to do even more to burnish his image. He decided the time had come, as it does to all great men of affairs, to publish his autobiography. In his spare time he had been reading Fred Pasley’s sensationalistic portrait, Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man, growing angrier with every page he turned. He saw the book as nothing more than another attempt by a journalist to smear him by linking him to every gangland killing in recent memory. In contrast, his autobiography would highlight his good works, his charitable contributions, his love for his son, and his loyalty to his mother, whom he called every day, no matter what. He lacked only a skillful ghostwriter to give the book its proper form, and after due consideration he dispatched an emissary to speak with Howard O’Brien of the Chicago Daily News. The go-between contacted O’Brien, informing him that he had been “thoroughly investigated” and was a “square guy” as far as Al was concerned—“Mr. Capone or his advisers had read everything I had ever written and there seemed to be no detail of my life which had escaped their scrutiny,” O’Brien recalled—and if he was interested in writing Capone’s authorized autobiography he should appear the next afternoon at the Lexington Hotel, one o’clock sharp, for Mr. Capone was a busy man and did not like to be kept waiting.

  Intrigued, O’Brien followed orders, and “exactly on the stroke of one at the lobby entrance of the drugstore a young man appeared. He was straight out of a gangster movie, impeccably dressed, and with the inevitable pearl-gray hat.” The man nodded and ushered the reporter into Capone’s corner office. “Capone, as starched and pressed as a fashion plate, wearing a double-breasted brown suit, rose to greet us. He was heavily built with an obvious tendency to fat. His manner was suave, his voice gently modulated.” O’Brien studied the surroundings: the filing cabinets, the view of Chicago, and the portraits of Washington and Lincoln—“and between the two was a drawing of Capone himself wearing knickerbockers and holding a golf club.” O’Brien found the setting appropriate to that of any corporate tycoon. Capone began by making small talk about golf, and then, getting down to business, he complained bitterly about Pasley’s book, calling it “libelous” and threatening the author. Alarmed, O’Brien said that few had troubled to read it. “Not at all,” Capone told him. “That book has sold seventy thousand copies in Chicago alone.” O’Brien assured him the figure was vastly inflated; the book hadn’t sold that many copies “in the entire solar system.” Capone excused himself to take a phone call. “From Washington,” the racketeer said by way of explanation.

  In his absence, Jack Guzik, who had been listening to the conversation, declared: “There is the difference between a Jew and a Italian. To a Jew seventy thousand is a big number.”

  When Capone returned, O’Brien laid out his ideas for the book, but he found that whenever he asked a “pointed question” his subject refused to cooperate. For instance, O’Brien wanted to know, was it true that Al had actually bludgeoned Scalise, Anselmi, and Guinta with a baseball bat? Capone dismissed such questions with a wave of the hand and the cryptic reply, “I can’t tell you that. It wouldn’t be fair to my people.” It quickly became apparent that Capone was far more interested in making money from the book than he was in clearing his name; in fact, he expected to earn “millions” from his life story. O’Brien tried to explain that very, very few books earned millions, but Capone brushed the thought aside. At the end of the meeting he signed a letter of agreement designating O’Brien as his authorized biographer and agent.

  O’Brien took the first train to New York, where he made the rounds of magazine and book publishers, telling them that he would have the benefit of Capone’s full cooperation and would write about an Al Capone dramatically different from the public’s impression of him. Why, the man even called his mother every day. But the editors balked at the idea of an “authorized” Capone biography. Still, the idea of writing his autobiography appealed strongly to Capone’s vanity and his hunger for status, so even without a contract he continued to meet frequently with O’Brien, endlessly making plans for the phantom book.

  They usually met in Capone’s office in the Lexington, where Al habitually stood by the big bay windows, gazing down on the site of the Century of Progress Exposition, where ground had recently been broken. The event, designed to celebrate the city’s history and replenish its exhausted coffers, was scheduled to open in 1933, and the city was betting heavily that it would revive Chicago’s economy, which the Depression had battered, as well as its image, which gangsters, Capone especially, had tarnished. To Al the world’s fair meant one thing, more paying customers for beer, and he had been lobbying unsuccessfully for a piece of the action. “I’d give anything for the beer concession,” he said to O’Brien, who expressed the opinion that Capone should be content with the millions he earned from his current bootlegging activities. “Yes, but that has to be split so many ways,” Capone patiently explained, “and there’s so much murder and bloodshed and general trouble that goes with it. I’d much rather be in a legal business.” In the weeks he spent observing Capone administer his organization, O’Brien discovered to his surprise that racketeering, though illegal, had its own stringently enforced laws. “I got the impression that most of the gangland killings were in reality executions, and in a strange sort of way, legal.” In contrast to the legitimate world, where people could seek justice in court, “in the extralegal occupations, gambling, prostitution and bootlegging, the victim of an injustice has no recourse to a court. The only way he can make a man pay a bill and keep honest accounts is to threaten him with death if he fails. It was my impression that if a man in the rackets behaved with reasonable honesty he was as safe as he would be in any stratum of society.” O’Brien would soon have occasion to test this theory as it applied to his own case.

  In all the time they spent together, O’Brien found Capone to be even tempered and businesslike, except for a lunch when he promised his biographer that real, imported Parmesan cheese would be served. When an inferior American substitute arrived, O’Brien was startled by the sudden change in Capone: “I thought he’d tear the waiter in two. He behaved like an angry leopard.” This was the only time O’Brien glimpsed the rage boiling within Capone, the only time the journalist found it conceivable that his
generally affable and businesslike host was capable of battering three men with a baseball bat. When Capone regained his composure, O’Brien tried to forget the incident, but it continued to trouble him.

  Other disquieting events followed. As he spent his days with Capone, O’Brien became familiar with three men, “shadows,” he called them, who periodically appeared in the office and ordered Capone around. Apparently this was the powerful Chicago Heights contingent—Roberto, Emery, and La Porte—to whom Capone owed his position and for whom he served as figurehead. O’Brien was astonished: Al was supposed to be the big boss of Chicago, but in this context he appeared to be just a “cog in the machine and not a ruler.” O’Brien thought he was gathering material that would make for a fascinating book, but then the three shadows with their shoulder holsters and pearl-gray fedoras began menacing him, throwing him “the look.” Later, Capone rather carelessly confided in his amanuensis: “You know, sometimes I lose my temper, and I say, ‘Gee I wish somebody would bump that guy off,’ and then one of these young punks who wants to make a name for himself goes ahead and does it. And then I have to pick up the pieces.”

  On hearing that confession, which may also have been an indirect threat, O’Brien realized he had gotten too close to Capone, and the stories he had heard could send him to his grave. In the name of self-preservation he decided to relinquish the project, daring to publish his recollections only after Capone was safely dead. Once O’Brien withdrew, Al gave up any more thought of writing his autobiography and the millions it might have earned.

  • • •

  As 1930 drew to a close, Al Capone was able to look back over the last several months with a sense of satisfaction. The IRS and Judge Lyle had left him alone, and, since his return to Chicago, he had significantly enhanced his reputation with his widely heralded soup kitchen. To assert his status as the city’s leading racketeer, if not its leading citizen, he gave his eighteen-year-old sister Mafalda a wedding Chicago would long remember. On Sunday, December 14, she married John Maritote, twenty-three, at St. Mary’s Church in Cicero, a locale, noted the New York Times, “in the Capone domain but reasonably distant from the battle zone.” Four thousand guests attended the ceremony and another 1,000 bystanders gathered outside the church on that wintry afternoon, all of them proud to be seen and associated with the public benefactor whom some called Public Enemy Number 1. Mafalda’s new husband was inevitably linked to the rackets; in fact, this was a marriage joining two underworld dynasties. Although the groom listed his occupation as “motion picture operator,” he was, more importantly, the younger brother of Frank Diamond, another Public Enemy.

  Chicago had witnessed many opulent gangster funerals over the last ten years, but nothing equaled the splendor of Mafalda’s nuptial ceremony. The bride wore an ivory satin wedding gown, complete with a twenty-five-foot train. In her ample hands she grasped a bouquet comprised of 400 lilies. Five bridesmaids, wearing matching pink taffeta gowns and blue slippers, formed the wedding party. During the ceremony, an organ played softly, but, according to one account, “there was an air of furtive repression upon many within the edifice, and detectives, unbidden guests, quietly removed five uneasy men, each of whom was carrying a pistol.” Ralph Capone, convicted tax evader, gave Mafalda away. As Mafalda left the church on the arm of her new husband, the mother of the bride, Teresa Capone, dwarfed in a mink coat, dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. It had been a perfect afternoon, with one significant exception. Although the wedding guests and journalists alike looked for him everywhere, Al Capone, fearing arrest, was nowhere to be seen.

  • • •

  Al Capone was fortunate in his antagonists. Although they were well funded and powerful, they were not especially popular. Among the most powerful were President Hoover, who had been discredited by the Depression, and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who was reluctant to take him on. There were others, such as the evangelist Billy Sunday, who railed against him, but they preached to the converted. Having enemies such as these actually worked in Capone’s favor and elicited some sympathy for his plight. To many, if a man was going to have enemies, he could do worse than to have Billy Sunday and Herbert Hoover crusading against him. Pledging their support of Prohibition, they had proved themselves friends of hypocrisy. A man with enemies like those might even have something going for him.

  Capone’s youngest enemy, Eliot Ness, was different. He was as much a showman in his own way as Al Capone was in his. Ness cultivated a reputation as the college boy who raided breweries in the morning, played tennis in the afternoon, and dodged bullets at night. Yet in the months since Capone had been out of jail, Ness had made little headway against the racketeer. Perhaps his chief accomplishment thus far had been to refuse an envelope containing a $2,000 bribe. However, Ness did make a point of telling anyone willing to listen that he had done so. Unlike his elders, Frank Wilson and George E. Q. Johnson, who habitually avoided publicity, Ness was a glory hound; if he could not actually get Capone, he at least wanted to be seen trying. He wanted everything to happen in the open, under the glare of photographers’ lights. He was a young man in a hurry because he had jumped on the anti-Capone bandwagon rather late, near the end of the journey, when Prohibition was about to become obsolete.

  In November 1930, Ness’s unflagging zeal earned him a promotion within the U.S. attorney’s office. “I was instructed by the U.S. District Attorney to report to William Froelich, who came in from Omaha as special Attorney General,” Ness recalled in his original memoir. “It was my job to ruin the income possibilities for the Capone mob. After conference with Froelich, I was allowed to pick a number of agents from any government service that I wished. I was to have a squad of about 12 men who would work with me directly under the authority of the U.S. Attorney and the assistant Attorney General.” The actual number of men in Ness’s group at any given time fluctuated between six and twelve, and original members of the “Untouchables,” as Ness came to call his group, included Martin Lahart, Jim Seeley, Samuel Seager, Lyle Chapman, Barney Cloonan, Thomas Friel, Paul Robsky, Michael King, William Gardner, and Joseph Leeson, who, at thirty, was the oldest among them. Having the combined forces of the Untouchables at his command gave Ness a greater sense of power and potency than he had ever known. Furthermore, the existence of the group became a terrific publicity device. Once the press picked up the name of the Untouchables and wrote up their exploits, Ness was finally able to taste a bit of the fame he had craved for so long.

  “Our first move was to make an analysis of how we could hurt the Capone mob and its income the most,” Ness wrote of that heady time. “If this group of 12 were to make a dent where 250 Prohibition agents and quite a few thousand police had not, a different kind of game would have to be played. . . . I was later to learn that Capone breweries were manned only about 40 minutes during a 24 hour period. The first observation we made was that the barrels had to be used over and over again, and that if we could successfully follow a beer barrel from a speakeasy, we would wind up locating a Capone brewery.” Two of the Untouchables, Leeson and Seeley, picked up the trail of barrels at a large saloon in the Loop. No detective work was required to ferret out its existence, for the place operated as if Prohibition had never existed. Hiding behind the saloon, Leeson and Seeley watched a crew of Capone men retrieve the empty barrels to take them to the brewery to be refilled. The Untouchables jumped into their Ford coupe and followed the truck on its rounds through the South Side. “When the truck was full,” Ness wrote, “it made its way to 38th and Shields, to an old factory building near the Chicago White Sox Kaminski [sic] Park.” Believing they had found a genuine Capone brewery, Leeson and Seeley rented an apartment nearby to conduct surveillance, only to discover they were mistaken. “The Capone gang,” they realized, “in its typically efficient manner, had specialized operations. This plant was used for cleaning barrels (which was done by a steam process).” The Untouchables discovered other cleaning plants and estimated that the Capone organizatio
n was selling at least $140,000 of beer each day in Chicago. As they found additional sites, they revised the figure upward, to $13 million a year—truly a big business.

  As their investigation continued, Leeson and Seeley followed the barrels from the cleaning plant to another fleet of trucks, heavily guarded. Initially concerned that they would be caught, the agents soon realized the Capone sentries had become so accustomed to going about their work without interference that they were extremely lax. Without being detected, the two Untouchables discovered that the barrels typically were driven from the cleaning plant at about 3:00 A.M. to another address, 1632 South Cicero Avenue. Once again, Ness and his group were convinced they had located a Capone brewery. Staking out the site, they observed trucks entering and leaving the building “laden down with their new load.” At last, Ness wrote, “We were now ready to make a Federal raid.”

  The Untouchables’ first major raid on a Capone brewery took place on the morning of March 11, 1931, under Ness’s direction. By then he had taken a fancy to another one of his men—in this case an agent he had recruited from the Prohibition Bureau to participate in the raid. His name was Bill Gardner, and he was, according to Ness, a “full blooded Indian, who was a very handsome boy, and a fashion-plate. Bill must have weighed about 240 lbs. and he was all muscle.” This was Ness’s idea of a real man, and he plainly enjoyed Gardner’s company, his looks, and the sense of masculine power he exuded.