Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  “That’s a strange idea coming from you,” Ness said. “If it was legitimate, you certainly wouldn’t want anything to do with it.”

  Capone glared at his young antagonist, who slowly backed down the aisle to the end of the car, then turned and jumped to the platform. It was the last time he ever saw Al Capone. “There goes two and a half years of my life,” he thought as he watched the Dixie Flyer creak to life. Sensing the movement, Capone glanced out the window; he wouldn’t be seeing Chicago again for years. The procession of cars gathered speed, and he settled into a game of poker with his grim captors.

  “I felt as if a terrific weight had been lifted from my shoulders now that the shadow of ‘Scarface Al’ no longer hovered over Chicago—and over us,” Ness recalled. He thought briefly of all the other hoodlums still at large in Chicago, men like Jack McGurn and “Bugs” Moran, but, he decided, “None possessed the genius for organization which had made Al Capone criminal czar of a captive city.” Now Capone himself was finally in captivity, but despite their last, bitter exchange, Ness, who thrived on causes and who had defined himself against everything he believed Al Capone represented, felt empty rather than triumphant. As the Dixie Flyer shrank to a pair of glowing red lights and the crowd dispersed, Ness left Dearborn Station, pondering one final thought:

  “Only then did it come to me that the work of The Untouchables’ was finished.”

  • • •

  The Dixie Flyer bearing Capone rumbled south through the night, and radio stations broadcast hourly bulletins of its progress and itinerary. As the gleaming cars passed through whistle-stops in the light of dawn, crowds appeared, hoping to catch a glimpse of the celebrated ganglord within. “They pressed alongside the Pullman cars and peered into the window,” the New York Times reported. “Capone answered their waves with broad smiles and the gesture of a handshake. In some of the small towns, little Negro boys stood well back from the train and pointed at the car in which they thought Capone was a passenger, seemingly afraid.”

  Agitated and unable to sleep, Capone held a marathon press conference with reporters accompanying him for the ride, and he continued to complain that the federal government had singled him out for unfair treatment. “I’ll be made an issue in the next Presidential campaign,” he insisted. “ ‘We sent Capone to the penitentiary,’ they’ll be saying. It wouldn’t seem so bad if they didn’t use the income-tax law for political purposes. There’s a lot of big men in Chicago who beat the government out of most of the taxes they ought to pay and they get away with it. I tried to settle with the government and they used it against me. I don’t think that’s playing fair, but they’ve got me and I’ll have to take the medicine.” He went on to discuss his bootlegging, claiming that the government had exaggerated his profits. Even in his best months, he never managed to move more than 5,000 cases of whiskey, and what with overhead, payoffs, and raids, he could never clear more than $10 a case. It was a lousy business, bootlegging—couldn’t the IRS understand that?

  As Capone rationalized the hours away, passengers from other cars occasionally walked past his seat, hoping to catch a glimpse of the celebrity about whom they had read so much. The bolder among them stopped to offer their best wishes, to shake Capone’s hand, to receive a gift from the gangster in the form of a twenty-five-cent cigar. Even the engineer conveyed his kind regards to the celebrated prisoner. Meanwhile, the conductor, one James A. Brown, recalled previous trips the racketeer had made on the very same Dixie Flyer, bound for Florida during the lush times, when the whiskey and jazz never quit. In those days Capone had taken over the entire train for private parties and distributed lavish tips. Now he was manacled to a petty thief named Morici, at the mercy of marshals, hounded by the press. How the times have changed, Brown said with a sigh, how the times have changed us all.

  Capone arrived at the Atlanta Penitentiary via a rail spur, and the marshals who had accompanied him from Chicago surrendered their charge to prison officials. After walking a flight of stone steps into the prison, he entered the receiving office, where the warden, A. C. Aderhold, startled him by asking, “What is your name?” His registration papers noted the bare facts of his prison term; his complete sentence or “full time” lasted until May 3, 1948, but with time deducted for good behavior, his “short time” extended until “only” January 19, 1939. His previous criminal record, as listed in the papers, was dismayingly long, with no less than seventeen entries between 1919 and the present. After registering, Capone was ordered to strip. He yielded his clothes (a tailor-made suit, silk underwear, and his immaculate fedora), a fountain pen, a rosary, and $231 in cash. He bathed, and then, for the first time, he donned a denim prisoner’s suit. He had left Chicago as Alphonse Capone, and twenty-four hours later, at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, he became convict number 40886.

  At the time he entered Atlanta, the federal prison system was a relatively new aspect of American law enforcement. As recently as 1895, federal offenders had been sent to state prisons, their upkeep paid by the federal government. In the years to come, the Department of Justice established five federal penitentiaries, an equal number of reformatories, as well as prison camps, reform schools for juvenile offenders, and other correctional institutions. With the advent of Prohibition and an influx of convicted bootleggers, the federal penitentiary system experienced its first serious overcrowding; of 18,000 federal inmates, 6,000 had to be farmed out to state prisons. The overcrowding precipitated riots, scandals, and a congressional investigation. Now, the federal penitentiary system faced a new challenge: Al Capone.

  The Atlanta Penitentiary suffered from the ills afflicting other facilities in the organization. Charges of corruptions swirled constantly around the guards and reached all the way to the warden’s office, but Warden Aderhold himself was known as a remote, incorruptible public servant determined to treat all his prisoners exactly the same. There would be no chance of Capone influencing him with the promise of a spin in Mae’s shiny Cadillac. The prison’s population was swollen with bootleggers; they came from the South, generally from rural areas, where they had brewed their moonshine, but the revenuers had caught up with them as surely as they had caught up with Capone. Aware that the biggest bootlegger of all had at last become one of them, the other convicts cheered and jeered when Capone entered the prison, but he had nothing to do with them, at first. Like all new arrivals at the penitentiary, he passed his first three weeks in quarantine, undergoing medical examinations and inoculations. There were no more interviews, no more headlines, and no more lawyers; from now on his relatives would have to assume responsibility for directing his long-shot legal appeals. There was only the promise of occasional visits from immediate members of the family, as long he was on good behavior. With the exception of a prison baseball game on Sunday afternoon and a movie shown to prisoners on Sunday night, years of endless days stretched before him, each one precisely the same as the others.

  In quarantine, Capone was questioned by Warden Aderhold’s young assistant, Myrl E. Alexander, who later rose to become head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons during the Kennedy administration. Alexander was concerned and open-minded, as prison officials go, and he was willing at first to take an unbiased view of Capone. “When he entered my office I saw that he wasn’t the short, pudgy man I thought he seemed to be,” Alexander later recalled. “He was rather tall, slightly balding, smiling as he entered, but obviously the Capone pictured in the newspapers. As we went through the usual questions about family, education, and so on, he responded promptly and intelligently. Then, as we discussed his sentence and his offence of violating the Income Tax Code, he had no problem acknowledging his bootlegging activities. But he hotly denied the allegations of prostitution and narcotic activities. He staunchly declared his respect for his mother, sister, and wife as evidence of his ‘hatred’ for prostitution and other activities.”

  “Sure,” Capone told Alexander, “money was made in the bootlegging business. The public demanded booze and I suppl
ied it. Lots of it. But I also spent a lot of money in helping the poor, supplying food kitchens, and making jobs for the unemployed.” Angered by Capone’s characterizing himself as the “major welfare agency in Chicago” and running out of patience with his ranting, Alexander terminated the interview. A week later, Alexander received an explanation of Capone’s puzzling and unpleasant behavior, his rapid shift from calm deliberation to megalomania, in the form of the results of Capone’s medical examination. His Wassermann blood test conclusively demonstrated that he suffered from “Central nervous system syphilis.” This was the first time Capone’s neurosyphilis had been officially diagnosed. After years of latency, the disease had finally erupted into the tertiary stage. The jail’s medical staff began treating convict number 40886 with one of the standard procedures of the day, bismuth therapy, but the disease was incurable, and Capone’s illness amounted to a death sentence, one that would take years to reach its culmination. Until then, it would slowly take over his brain, further distort his personality, and destroy his memory.

  Nor was syphilis Capone’s only serious medical problem. The examination revealed that he also suffered from chronic prostatitis. At thirty-three, he was far too young to have prostatic hypertrophia, a condition commonly afflicting older men, so the likely cause of Capone’s condition was gonorrhea. It was certainly possible for him to have both syphilis and gonorrhea at the same time; they were caused by different bacteria: Treponema pallidum for syphilis, and Neisseria gonorrheae for gonorrhea. But he acquired the diseases from the same source: prostitutes. Gonorrhea generally has far more serious consequences for women than for men, and Capone’s case did not attack his central nervous system the way syphilis did. Typically gonorrhea causes a burning sensation and discharge from the penis, after which it disappears, only to return from time to time. It leaves behind scars which, if untreated, can create a urethral obstruction. To alleviate the obstruction, the prison administered a standard medical treatment in the form of weekly prostate massages, which appeared to help. His urine, which had been cloudy at the time of his admission, eventually became clearer, but remained discolored. “The prostate soon quieted down, and at this time he had a large, boggy, soft prostate that is easy to massage,” noted the prison’s urology consultant after several months of treatment. “This patient should continue on prostatic massages, followed by bladder irrigations at least once weekly until such time as the pathology clears.”

  Despite all his medical problems, Capone could still function more or less normally, and after his quarantine ended he joined the general prison population, which could only have come as a relief after the confinement and isolation he had endured since his arrival in Atlanta. He was assigned to share a cell with a popular convict named Red Rudensky, a small-time safe cracker. “Rusty,” as he was known, was short and powerfully built; his impish face and impossibly large nose seemed better suited to a comic than a retired robber. In prison, he was earnestly trying to reform himself by studying the Bible and Koran. He also dreamed of becoming a writer some day, and he later published an autobiography entitled The Gonif (Yiddish for “thief”), which included his years in the Atlanta Penitentiary. During his career as a small-time hood, Rudensky had been on the fringes of the Capone organization, as well as its Detroit affiliate, the Purple gang, and he was absolutely astounded to learn that he would now room with Al Capone himself. Although he remained genial, Rudensky had seen enough of prison life to predict that “Atlanta would soon strip Capone down to the bare essentials—mainly guts and patience—and if he didn’t have one or the other he’d be in trouble after his high living and days of czarship.”

  When the new man appeared, the two shook hands, and Capone was quick to remember Rudensky by his street name: “Hey, Rusty, how’s it with you?” From the start, Rudensky, having heard rumors of Capone’s syphilis, was apprehensive about his cell mate’s condition. “Al’s complexion was pale, almost sheet-white, and his eyes seemed tired and beady, but he had the inner radiation of someone who’s been through it all.” Not surprisingly, Capone was on edge, and he was unable to sleep during their first night. He lay on his bunk, smoking cigars, and when that no longer pacified him, he woke Rudensky. “How the hell am I gonna take it?” he asked and began weaving fantasy and reality into a diatribe. “Imagine, some creep gets me in a damn tax rap and now I suppose they’ll be cutting each other up on the outside for splits. Here I am with a million bucks in half a dozen banks and I’m sitting in a hole like this. Ain’t it a helluva deal, Rusty?” So it went night after night, Capone obsessively complaining about his lot. Nor did he find respite in sleep, for nightmares made him scream “No! No! No!” or whimper in agony. On one occasion, he became so distraught that Rudensky jumped on top of Capone and slapped his scarred cheek to wake him from tormented slumber.

  Although sympathetic to his cell mate’s misery, Rudensky failed to realize that Capone was suffering from more than the pangs of confinement in jail. He was undergoing withdrawal from cocaine. Given the freedom he had enjoyed in the Cook County Jail, it is entirely possible that he had been able to smuggle the drug into that prison, but here in Atlanta it was impossible for him to continue his addiction. Unlike heroin, cocaine does not inflict an easily identifiable withdrawal syndrome on the user; there is no classic process of going cold turkey. Psychologically, however, withdrawal from cocaine can be agonizing, often accompanied by feelings of depression, weakness, hallucinations, and paranoia. Even when these symptoms relent, and life becomes bearable again, the desire for the drug does not completely abate. So, deprived of his cocaine, Capone was destined to be inwardly tormented even though he suffered no physical symptoms.

  In time the balance between the two men changed. Rudensky had expected to function as Capone’s subordinate and errand-runner; instead, he became Capone’s confessor and guardian. In fact, Rudensky, unlike the newcomer Capone, ranked fairly high in the convict hierarchy, as he soon demonstrated. Within weeks of his arrival, Capone had became a target for other prisoners, “grubby two-bit nonentities” as the loyal Rudensky described them, who would shout out, “Where’re the broads and booze now, fat boy?” Nor was the contempt limited to a few prisoners. Another inmate, Bryan Conway, recalled that “Capone was unpopular in Atlanta . . . because he was a weakling and he couldn’t take it”—meaning the constant harassment and threats. Fearing Capone would crack up under the pressure, Rudensky cautioned the hecklers to lay off. Two convicts disregarded the warning, and as Rudensky delicately put it, “I sent word out to lean on them a little, not too hard but enough to let them know I meant business. My subordinates unfortunately were a little over-zealous and put the creeps in the infirmary with broken ribs and fractured jaws.”

  After that unpleasant episode, Capone’s life in jail stabilized. With Rudensky’s help, he assembled a small contingent of prisoners who served as his protectors. “It was right comical to see Capone exercising in the yard surrounded by his guard,” said Conway, evidently one of the Capone-haters. “Of course they weren’t armed with machine guns, as his Chicago bodyguard was, but every man had a long knife or a blackjack. Such weapons were plentiful in Atlanta at the time.” The question of whether the men were, in fact, armed would eventually become a source of controversy in Atlanta, with profound ramifications for Capone. Even if they were not armed, as was probably the case, the mere existence of a group of prisoners looking out for his safety proved to be a fecund source of stories that Capone was indeed receiving preferential treatment in Atlanta, not as lavish as the treatment he had received in the Cook County Jail, which had required the collusion of Warden Moneypenny, but visible enough to attract notice at the highest bureaucratic levels.

  Despite the threat of violence that hung in the air like a gunpowder haze, Capone proved to be a placid prisoner. He spent his days working in the shoe shop, cutting and sewing leather, repairing soles. “A hulking figure in cheap, baggy cotton clothing, swart-skinned, sits hunched over a whirling electric stiching machine,�
�� wrote a reporter who saw Capone at work. “Hands once soft from a life of luxurious ease, Oriental in its splendor . . ., now calloused, deftly fit a heavy strip of sole leather on a bulky, shapeless show upper. . . . The machine thumps and pounds. The heavy needle bites into the coarse leather. He snips away the loose ends of waxed cord and passes the shoe on to another denim clad figure, then picks up another shoe upper and sole block. Then another. And another. Eight hours a day. Forty-four hours a week.” Despite the tedium, he proved to be a patient, methodical worker and, one suspects, grateful for the distraction the manual labor afforded him.

  Rudensky, for his part, held a more visible and sensitive position writing editorials for the prison’s newspaper. Since he burned to practice journalism on the outside some day, he pursued his job with feverish dedication. “Just seeing your idea down in print, it gives you the best damn feeling. You should try it, Al,” he would urge, but Capone demurred.

  “Hell, Rusty, I have trouble writing a letter home. A pencil seems to weigh a ton.”

  Writing was an ordeal for Capone, and as his illness progressed, his facility with language deteriorated. In July 1932, he wrote this barely coherent note to the warden: “My wife sent to me five pictures of herself and my Baby all different poses and I was call and was informed that I could only receive one and that I would have to send the other four back home telling me that with your permission I would be allowed to have the other four. Sir rather than send them back and infere they may get lost. Sir if I am not allowed to have then wish you would send for me so I may have them distroyed in your presents as I dont want them to go astray as some New’s paper may get them.” (Capone never did get the extra photos.)