Rudensky, with his years of prison experience, was sharp enough to read the ominous signs and to guess what they meant for his cell mate. “The pile is like a giant poker game if you begin to read the faces,” he wrote. “You begin to play your hand by the atmosphere and begin to smell and sense the action. That’s the way it was on the hot, windless, Saturday afternoon of August 18, 1934. Call it a long nose . . . or a hunch, but I knew something was going to happen.”
Returning to the cell block before dinner that day, Rudensky found Capone in a characteristic pose, lolling on his bunk, staring at Sonny’s photograph.
“Rusty,” he sighed, “did you really ever see a better lookin’ con’s kid?”
“I guess not, Al,” said Rudensky in reply to a question his cell mate had asked countless times. “How the hell many cons’ kids do you suppose I’ve seen?”
“I’m getting damn lonesome just looking at shoes and these damn guards,” Capone continued. “I mean I’m getting anxious to get out.”
Without warning, he turned “purple,” Rudensky recalled, and “slammed the picture back down on his bunk, almost shattering it.”
“Damn it, Rusty,” Capone shouted, “I want action! Where the hell are my big friends? What are those high paid lawyer sons of bitches doing?”
Another con, annoyed by the uproar, called out, “Knock it off, Al.”
Capone quieted down and, sitting with crossed legs on the edge of his bunk, idly toyed with a cigar. In the summer heat, his underarms were damp with perspiration, and the veins in his neck twitched with every beat of his heart. “At that moment,” wrote Rudensky, “I couldn’t picture him the leader of scores of sharpies, guys who sliced up the biggest gangland empire in history.” Pitying Capone, he spoke soothing words, suggesting that he give his big-shot lawyers just a little more time.
After dinner, a guard came by the cell to summon Capone. “Nobody’s taking me any damn place unless I tell them where I’m going,” Capone said.
Three more guards—“bulls” or “screws” in prison parlance—formed a line in front of the cell, waiting to escort the prisoner. “You’re going to see the Warden, Al,” said one. “Take it easy.”
Suddenly someone called out, “You’re going to the Rock, Al, a nice long ride to Alcatraz.”
The words instantly galvanized Capone. Astonished, Rudensky saw “all the fire and hate and strength and torment erupt suddenly. He was all power and anger as he leaped at the nearest guard, shouting obscenities.”
The bulls drove the seething prisoner to the wall of the cell, fixing him with their weight. For a moment Capone stopped screaming for the lawyers and people with pull in Washington, glanced at his friend and cell mate, and pleaded, “What the hell are they doing to me, Red?”
Summoning his immense strength, Capone threw the bulls off him, grabbed the precious photograph of Sonny, and hurled it at the face of one of his tormentors, screaming, “You’ll never take me out of here!” Rudensky joined the fray, and another bull struck him a blow that sent him sprawling to the floor, unconscious. When he woke, Capone was gone. Rusty never saw his friend again.
“Capone, to me, wasn’t a big shot gangland giant in the end but a tired, sick, lonely man,” he later wrote. “Guided in other directions, his imagination, drive and fearlessness might have made him a heroic general, captain of a fleet or a mighty business mogul. He had a brilliant knack for organization, which, channeled in the proper direction, would have made him a success in any business operation.”
So much for what might have been; instead, he carried the memory of Capone’s last words: “My God, you don’t come back from the Rock.”
• • •
As the real Al Capone languished in the federal penitentiary system, his fictional counterparts grew in potency and allure. Although the U.S. government was determined to keep him from view, the public simply could not get enough of the man, especially with the Depression at hand and disillusionment with American institutions on the rise. Angry, bored, frustrated, Americans became a receptive audience for fictional accounts of Capone’s exploits. They applauded him on Broadway, hissed him at the movies, and read about him in pulp magazines. The newspapers’ banner headlines had made him famous, but Hollywood, especially, built him into a legend. As Capone languished in jail, a sick, defeated man, the legend gradually supplanted the reality.
During Capone’s rise to power in the 1920s, gangster melodramas proliferated on stage; among the most popular was Broadway (1926), which played for well over a year on the Great White Way. The following year, Edward G. Robinson portrayed a Capone-like killer named Nick Scarsi in a Broadway hit called The Racket. Ironically, “Big Bill” Thompson prevented a touring company from presenting the play in Chicago and sullying that city’s pristine reputation. So The Racket went west to Los Angeles, where it became the basis of a movie starring Louis Wolheim in the role Robinson had created on stage.
Gangster melodramas achieved their greatest popularity on the screen. Indeed, the film industry had relied on violent, sensational crime as a prime subject ever since Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 short film, The Great Train Robbery, baptized the American public into the secular religion of moviegoing. Early gangster movies of the 1920s included Chicago After Midnight, Lights of New York, Me Gangster, and Underworld, the latter directed by Joseph von Sternberg. There were many others as well, so many that they elicited protests from politicians in New York and Chicago, who claimed their fair cities were being unfairly smeared, and from various self-appointed guardians of public morality. In October 1928, the New Yorker, taking note of the gangster movies’ popularity, remarked, “Women’s clubs and mother’s clubs throughout the land are protesting the output of underworld pictures.” As the 1920s staggered to a close, gangster movies disappeared briefly from the nation’s screens, only to reappear in 1930 in greater numbers than ever. By 1931, fifty-one new gangster films reached the theaters, almost one per week. The rigors the Depression visited on Americans made the gangster life appear both tantalizing and understandable, and the new breed offered harsh, realistic depictions of criminal figures, presenting the criminals with a measure of sympathy. In Born Reckless, to name one instance, the director John Ford told the story of a racketeer who tries to leave his life of crime behind and go legitimate, but who finds no work and faces the prospect of annihilation. At the time, millions of dispossessed Americans were prepared to endorse the film’s anger and disillusionment.
In search of authenticity, several movies in the new cycle attempted to evoke Al Capone, although any resemblance to the real Capone was purely coincidental. Among the first was Doorway to Hell, which opened in November 1930, almost a year before the tax trial that sent him to prison. In this melodrama, Lew Ayres played a racketeer known as Louis Ricarno who is slain by a rival gang. Since the movie showed Ricarno moving to Florida, as Capone had, and participating in a racketeer’s convention in Atlantic City, just as Capone had, there could be no doubt as to the movie’s source of inspiration.
Although Doorway to Hell was a hit in its day, the next Capone-influenced film, Little Caesar, became a lasting popular phenomenon. Its pedigree was slightly more authentic than its predecessors’, for the movie originated as a popular crime novel by W. R. Burnett, who as a young man left his native Ohio for Chicago, determined to make his name as a writer. On his first night in Chicago, Burnett was awakened by a “terrific explosion across the street” that threw him out of bed. He stumbled to the lobby of his hotel to inquire what had happened, but the blasé clerk told him some garage owners were waging a price war, and the interested parties had resorted to tossing “pineapples” to make their points. Heady stuff for a young man from Ohio. “On me, an outsider, an alien from Ohio, the impact of Chicago was terrific. It seemed overwhelmingly big, teeming, dirty, brawling, frantically alive,” Burnett recalled. “Capone was King. Corruption was rampant. Big Bill Thompson, the mayor, was threatening to punch King George in the ‘snoot.’ Gangsters were shooting e
ach other all over town.” Burnett yearned to get all this excitement and destructive energy into a novel, which he planned to write in the “illiterate jargon of the Chicago gangster.” He came to know a small-time hoodlum, an embittered man, cynical and alienated, who served as the model for the book’s protagonist, Rico Bandello. The author never intended Rico to represent Capone; he left that to another character, a mob boss named “Big Boy,” which happened to be one of Capone’s many nicknames. Burnett had no idea what he had wrought in his terse, violent novel; “I was afraid I was giving birth to a monster,” he later confessed, but Little Caesar turned out to be a profitable monster indeed. Published by the Dial Press in June 1929, it became an immediate best-seller. As the economy worsened—almost 2.5 million Americans were out of work by the spring of 1930—the book’s bleak view of human nature grew in appeal. It soon came to the attention of Jack Warner, the movie producer. Erroneously assuming the character of Rico was based on Al Capone, he bought the story for his studio and immediately put it into production.
Little Caesar, the movie, opened in January 1931, highlighted by Edward G. Robinson’s stinging portrayal of Rico. Robinson had made a specialty of playing gangsters, and when audiences imagined how they really talked and acted, they thought of Robinson’s tight, nervous mannerisms and staccato speech rhythms. It was generally assumed that Robinson had modeled his mean, snarling little Italian hood on Capone, and for years after, people assumed that Capone himself was a snarling little man. The fact that Capone was actually large and affable often came as a surprise to those encountering him for the first time. Further blurring the line between fantasy and reality, the movie version combined Rico’s dramatic assassination—and his memorable but fictional last words: “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”—with a gangster funeral that employed newsreel coverage of Dion O’Banion’s last rites.
For all its embellishments, Little Caesar was accepted as a realistic portrayal of Capone and Chicago’s gangland. The critics praised Robinson’s sullen, controlled performance, and it drew huge, excitable audiences. In New York, a crowd of 3,000 stormed a theater at Broadway and 47th Street, shattering glass and assaulting the box offices. The movie proved especially popular with children; a 1933 survey found that impressionable young boys from poor neighborhoods were prone to identify with the doomed Rico. As they watched it over and over, the boys absorbed a gangster lingo coined in Hollywood; expressions such as “You can dish it out, but you can’t take it” and “Take him for a ride” immediately entered the language. Although audiences took Rico’s tragic fate for Capone’s, Burnett knew better—or so he told himself. He had never intended his Rico to be anything more than just another small-time hood, an urban American anti-hero. But Capone himself, he said, “is immune. He has a villa in Florida; he is a millionaire; his name has become a household world. The old pre-prohibition slogan ‘you can’t win’ is shown to be nonsense.” Burnett wrote those words in 1930; within a few short years, they no longer rang true, except in Hollywood.
Although Little Caesar was in the final analysis a generic gangster movie, it succeeded primarily because it evoked the special Capone aura. Scores of other gangsters—Yale, O’Banion, Torrio, McGurn, and Weiss, to name but a few of that bloody fraternity—had attained a measure of notoriety during the 1920s, and their lives and spectacular deaths might have inspired hit movies. Instead of those men, Capone, with his love of press conferences, his brash conduct during his income tax trial, and above all the row of scars on his left cheek, became virtually synonymous with gangland in the mind of the American public. He came to incarnate the dual spirit of the age, representing both the amiable lawlessness of the 1920s, that flouting of Prohibition’s flimsy hypocrisy, and the angry, disillusioned tenor of the 1930s, when times were so hard that a life of crime came to seem not just justifiable but inevitable.
With every passing month Capone’s fame and popularity grew, in Hollywood if not in Washington, D.C. Inevitably, a producer planned a feature film unashamedly based on Capone’s life, and it wasn’t just any producer, but Howard Hughes, who would in later years become a reclusive billionaire sequestered in his Las Vegas lair, every bit as fabled a character as Al Capone. At the time, though, Hughes was a wealthy aviation engineer and test pilot desperately trying to buy his way into Hollywood. He had purchased the film rights to a crime novel called Scarface, written by Armitage Trail, but little of that work survived the screenplay by Chicago’s best-known journalist, Ben Hecht. Prolific, poetic, coarse, and versatile, Hecht was a veritable writing machine who had learned his trade at several of the city’s daily papers before turning his ferocious energy to short stories and novels. Following the money, Hecht moved to Hollywood, where he ground out gangster screenplays with equal verve. By the time Hughes hired him, Hecht was able to command a fee of $1,000 a day for his services, payable in cash. It was a deal that Capone himself would have envied.
Hecht and the director, Howard Hawks (another highly capable professional), decided to graft the grit of Capone’s story onto a gaudy background inspired by the Borgia dynasty. That was their theory; in reality, the notion meant they invented an unconsummated incestuous relationship between their Capone stand-in, whom they rechristened Tony Camonte, and his sister, Cesca. To make their tale of Camonte’s violent rise come alive, the film’s makers were extremely fortunate in their casting choices. Paul Muni imparted an irresistibly sinister appeal to the role of Tony Camonte, in part because he avoided obvious gangster mannerisms. Of course, he sported scars on his cheek, although these were X-shaped instead of Capone’s parallel stripes. Ann Dvorak played the sister who is the object of Muni’s lust, George Raft his companion Rinaldo, who is given to cutting out paper dolls. His secret marriage to the vivacious Cesca prompts Tony, who has shot and killed his way to the top, to turn on Rinaldo and kill him, as well. The other major death scene depicts the assassination of Camonte’s rival Gaffney (played by Boris Karloff) in a bowling alley; just as Gaffney makes a strike, the machine guns roar, and he and the bowling pins fall in unison. At the end of the movie, Camonte, like so many other Capone stand-ins, meets a violent end. The film’s closing scene shows him sprawled on the street beneath a huge electric sign flashing the message “The World Is Yours.” Of course, the real Capone lived on, but the world no longer belonged to him.
When production began in the summer of 1931, there were a few unorthodox elements. In his zeal for realism, Hughes hired a retinue of underworld types as “technical advisers,” and the machine guns used in the shootouts fired live ammunition. Scarface shared with other cinematic depictions of gangland a tendency to sermonize, in large part to placate Hollywood censorship represented by the newly established Hays Office. In fact, the Hays Office was so infuriated by Scarface’s violent excesses that it forced Hawkes to soften the edges of the story and to add the clumsy subtitle The Shame of the Nation to ensure that audiences disapproved of what they had paid to see on the screen. The Hays Office in its wisdom even forced Hawkes to include a preposterous scene at the picture’s conclusion. In it, an extra representing Camonte—Muni would have nothing to do with the alteration—submits to a harangue insisting that crime does not pay, and then he is hanged. When the movie finally cleared the Hays Office and opened in May 1932, it had two different endings: Hawkes’s original for the big cities, and the anticrime sermon for the rural regions where censorship was tight. No matter what version they saw, audiences came away from Scarface thinking they now knew Al Capone: he was a thin man with a wan smile who had shot his boss to death, stolen his blonde moll, lusted after his sister, killed his best friend, and had recently been gunned down on the streets of Chicago. (As for Capone himself, he sat wasting in his cell in the Atlanta Penitentiary.)
On the strength of its violent spectacle, the movie ranked as one of the year’s ten most popular films, and it earned critical praise. Variety claimed Scarface “bumps off more guys and mixes more blood with rum than most of the past gangster offerings com
bined.” Little moments were even more chilling than the bloodbaths: Muni fondling his machine gun, Raft toying with his paper dolls. Here was a gallery of psychopaths who wanted to rule the world—and almost did. In its mixture of psychology and gore, the movie was horrifying but also witty. No matter how the Hays Office meddled, Scarface glorified Capone in particular and gangsters in general; they were rich when most folks were bust, they claimed and cast aside women as they pleased, and they got away with murder. Anyone who read the newspapers knew that crime did pay. Both movies and newspapers, illusion and reality, suggested that the United States, land of the free, was also the land of exploitation, inequality, and despair. Gangsters seized the popular imagination because they thrived on desperation: the belief that it was impossible to change anything in society, to right wrongs, to rise above one’s caste.
As Scarface played to rapt audiences across the country, the public was inundated with accounts of Capone’s exploits in hastily published biographies of dubious authenticity, pamphlets, and souvenir booklets. Filled with photographs of dead or dying gangsters, these booklets created a pornography of death and violence. They were printed in large quantities on cheap paper, and they circulated primarily in the Chicago area, where they quickly became collectors’ items. Adults read them, showed them to friends, and hid them away from the prying eyes of children. Among the most popular in this shady category was Richard T. Enright’s Al Capone on the Spot. Enright’s commentary was vigorous, ripe and portentous, in the best pulp magazine manner:
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