Capone

by Laurence Bergreen

  After eating and mumbling his way through breakfast, Capone and the rest of the convicts devoted the morning to work. At first Capone pushed a broom. Later he toiled in the laundry, but when a soldier stationed on the island wrote home to boast that Al Capone himself was washing his dirty clothes, number 85 was abruptly reassigned to cleaning the bathhouse. During his entire time on Alcatraz, the most dignified labor he was permitted to perform was ferrying books and magazines between the library and the cells. At other times, he belonged to the bucket brigade; the sight of Capone’s tall, slumped form slowly pushing a mop became so familiar to the other convicts that they took to calling him “The Wop with the Mop,” and the name stuck with him through all his years at Alcatraz.

  The men broke for lunch at 11:30, a heavy meal consisting of pot roast and beans, as well as more coffee. Afterward, they returned briefly to their cells, and then resumed their menial, repetitive, mindless work assignments. As they marched back and forth in the cell house during the day on their rounds, they frequently underwent the scrutiny of a metal detector designed to sound an alarm if a convict carrying a hidden weapon passed through it, but the device was notoriously fickle, ringing loudly when unarmed men walked through but allowing the occasional knife to pass unnoticed. The men ate dinner at 6:30, often chili with apples for dessert and ample coffee. They then marched back to the rows of cells, each man waiting in front of his while the guards performed their final count of the day. On completion, a whistle blew, and the guards locked the men in their minuscule cells for the night. Capone could read if he liked, but the prison library eschewed crime magazines in favor of Westerns, and even the Saturday Evening Post was heavily censored, the offending pages snipped out before the convicts could see them. He became fascinated by magazines, and, taking advantage of a loophole in prison regulations, he eventually subscribed to eighty-seven periodicals, including Harper’s Monthly and the American Mercury. Subsequently the American Mercury ran an impassioned denouncement of Alcatraz entitled “America’s Torture-Chamber.” The writer, Anthony M. Turano, declared that Alcatraz existed solely to inflict a “special social vendetta on the gangsters” and stood as a “monument to human stupidity and pointless barbarity.”

  The prison staff censored the convicts’ mail even more stringently than they did the magazines. A prisoner never received an original, handwritten letter from the outside. Before it reached his hands, a clerk carefully reviewed, abridged, and copied it, substituting an impersonal typewriter for the individuality of the handwriting of a wife or brother or son. The same procedure applied to all outgoing correspondence. Because of the work involved in recopying letters, inmates were permitted to send just one letter a week, and their correspondence had to be addressed to immediate family members only. The warden permitted no letters to lawyers, girlfriends, or even in-laws. Inmates were not even permitted to use nicknames in their letters; all the people about whom they wrote had to be named in full. Since the guards retyped incoming and outgoing mail, every word the inmates wrote and received was fully known to the administration and provided an endless supply of gossip for the guards. From the moment he set foot on the island, then, Capone was under a microscope.

  Despite the severe restrictions on writing, the Alcatraz experience turned everyone from the warden to the guards and inmates into diarists and autobiographers. Some of these accounts found their way to popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, while others appeared in books produced by little-known publishers, sprinkled with inexact spelling and punctuation, and all the more convincing for those lapses. Nearly all these records offered detailed observations on Capone in captivity, for he quickly became the institution’s most famous test case.

  Although it took the presence of Al Capone to confer lasting, widespread fame on Alcatraz, the small, rugged island had already endured a long and bloody history as a fort and a military penal colony. It received its original name, Isla de los Alcatraces—Island of the Pelicans—as early as 1775, when two Spanish explorers, Captain Juan Manuel de Ayala and his pilot, José Canizares, sailed close enough to the island to remark on the countless pelicans it harbored. During the Civil War, “Fort Alcatraz,” as the island was then called, became a prison when the Union confined a handful of captives there. In the early years of the twentieth century, the island served as a military prison for a fluctuating number of soldiers and aliens until Homer Cummings, sailing past its rocks rising out of the waters of San Francisco Bay, decided that Alcatraz would make a splendid site for the newest federal penitentiary. Cummings liked the drama of the place because he intended the new maximum security facility to demonstrate to all Americans—especially gangsters—that the U.S. government would not tolerate lawlessness and violence, although those are exactly the elements that Alcatraz, with all the publicity it received, popularized for a new generation of Americans coming of age in the Depression.

  Once Cummings took control of Alcatraz from the War Department in 1933, he moved swiftly to place his imprint on the institution. The federal government expended several hundred thousand dollars refurbishing the island’s existing facilities and renovating its penological pièce de résistance, the monolithic cell house. On October 12, 1933, Cummings explained the purpose of the new super prison in a national radio broadcast, stating, “Here may be isolated the criminals of the vicious and irredeemable type so that their evil influence may not be extended to other prisoners who are disposed to rehabilitate themselves.”

  The fanfare with which Cummings introduced Alcatraz served to focus public attention on the penitentiary and churned up controversy as well. San Francisco’s chief of police, William J. Quinn, its Board of Supervisors, and the San Francisco Chronicle all denounced the idea of creating a prison designed expressly to house gangsters. They warned that the island was nowhere near as secure as Cummings liked to believe; by some accounts, as many as twenty-three desperate military prisoners had escaped successfully, either by swimming or commandeering a boat. To prove the point, two young women, Doris McLeod and Gloria Scigliano, swam out to the island on different occasions, and if they could accomplish this feat as a lark, surely desperate prisoners could brave the bay’s waters as well.

  None of these arguments and demonstrations, convincing though they were, deterred Cummings from the pursuit of his goal to establish a super penal colony in San Francisco Bay, but he did increase its security, equipping guards with an arsenal consisting, in part, of Thompson machine guns, hand grenades, and tear gas guns. On January 2, 1934, he appointed James A. Johnston as the first warden of Alcatraz. Now the super penal colony required a supply of super criminals equal to its reputation. John Dillinger would have been among the first to be assigned there, but he was already dead, as were so many other gangsters and badmen who had inspired Cummings to create Alcatraz in the first place. In their absence the slightly older Capone filled the bill quite nicely.

  • • •

  During his first months at Alcatraz, Capone repeatedly tested his status as a prisoner during highly charged interviews with Warden Johnston—“Pussy foot,” to the inmates. Johnston’s appearance was deceptively mild: a “friendly, ruddy-faced, white-haired perfect gentleman,” in the words of a visitor, “just about the last person in the world you would pick on appearance to herd the toughest, meanest, most dangerous collection of criminals in the land.” But Johnston was tougher than he looked. He had spent two decades in California prison administration, first at Folsom and later at San Quentin. Along the way, he developed a succinct formula for the handling of incorrigible prisoners: “examination, classification, and segregation.” In essence, it meant removing the most dangerous criminals from a prison population and confining them under relentless scrutiny. The scheme had helped maintain order at Folsom and San Quentin, and now, as warden of Alcatraz, Johnston was employing it again, in its toughest test of all.

  Such was the man to whom number 85 poured out the thoughts he was forced to keep to himself at all other times. “You�
��re my Warden now,” Capone announced one day, “and I just thought I better tell you I have a lot of friends and I expect to have lots of visitors and I want to arrange to see my wife and my mother and my son and my brothers.”

  The warden explained that Capone could receive visitors, except for his brother Ralph, an ex-convict. “And only two persons may visit at the same time.”

  “Warden, I got a big family and they all want to see me, and I want to see them all,” number 85 complained.

  “They cannot all come at the same time because the regulations limit the number of visitors to two relatives at one time. That rule will apply to you as it will govern all other prisoners. When you write to your wife tell her what I have just told you. Also tell her to advise me when she wants to visit and I will send her a pass with full instructions.”

  With that, number 85 “shrugged his shoulders, smiled a sick sort of smile and walked away,” Johnston recalled. As he left, the prisoner had a parting thought:

  “It looks like Alcatraz has got me licked.”

  If Johnston thought he was finished with Capone, he was mistaken, for the following day number 85 returned, and this time he indulged in flights of megalomania, the consequence of his neurosyphilis. “Don’t get me wrong, Warden, I’m not looking for any favors,” Johnston recalled the convict saying, “but maybe some of these older cons ain’t got any friends, but I gotta lot of friends. Maybe you don’t know it, Warden, and maybe you won’t believe it, but a lotta big businessmen used to be glad to be friends with me when I was on top and they wanted me to do things for them.”

  “What kind of businessmen . . . would need or require any help from you?” asked the startled warden.

  With that, number 85 flew into a tirade. As transcribed by Johnston, the stream-of-consciousness recollection of his late, great days in Chicago serves as a harsh but poignant portrait of Capone hovering on the threshold of psychosis.

  Warden, you musta heard about how the big Chicago papers were always fighting, you know what I mean, fighting each other for business. Talk about gangs, talk about rackets, talk about battles, them guys didn’t stop at nothing. Them circulation fights sure was murder. Just the same the top guys were all smart guys. They knifed each other like hell and they didn’t give a damn what happened and you wouldn’t think they’d speak to each other till somebody outside the circle, you know somebody that didn’t belong to their own gang, was getting in their hair and then they yelled murder and hollered for help like when the newsboys went on strike. Them newsboy strikes and them newsboy raids on different papers sure were tough battles. They sure had the big boys worried. And who do you think settled all them strikes and fights?

  Me, I’m the guy that settled all their strikes and all their circulation raids.

  Capone was shouting now, banging on the warden’s table, bringing armed guards padding to the office like faithful dogs.

  Mesmerized by his uncanny presence, Johnston threw caution aside and challenged number 85. “You mean to tell me that the circulation managers of the papers asked you to help them settle their labor troubles?”

  “No, Warden, you don’t get me. Warden, I never did any business with any managers. I was no piker and I didn’t do any business with pikers. I didn’t butt in. I waited for the high-ups to send for me, and when I call ’em high-ups I mean the highest top guys that own the newspapers send for Al whenever they were in trouble. . . . And Al always delivered, and Al never got anything for doing what he did for them. The big boys always sent for Al and they were glad to talk to Al when they needed Al, but they sure put the boots to me when they got me down.”

  Number 85, his face flushed, his breath coming in rasps, concluded his speech and waited for Johnston’s reaction to these astonishing revelations. Silence reigned, but eventually the warden did reply, his tone as icy as Capone’s had been fiery.

  “That is very interesting,” he said. “You may want to tell me some more sometime.”

  A perverse bond formed between the two men; it was based more on mutual loathing than respect, but it was nonetheless real for that. It was the bond between a kidnapper and his prize hostage. Almost every day, it seemed, number 85 was in the warden’s office to ask for special favors, permission to lend money to the other prisoners, to bend the rules, only a little, when it came to visits. In every case, the answer was, inevitably, no, but that did not discourage Capone from asking. Johnston became fascinated by the power he held over this man, once the most feared criminal in the nation, the former Public Enemy Number 1 who was now merely his convict number 85. It was literally a power of life or death; he could with complete freedom consign Capone to the torture chamber of the isolation ward, as he did on several occasions. It was within his power to drive his prisoner mad or to keep him sufficiently content to remain rational.

  Capone, for his part, came to treat the quietly sadistic warden as his father confessor, whom he alternately tried to cajole, flatter, and impress. “I made the dough, plenty of it,” he boasted during another of their sessions. “I got mine. I never denied it, but I didn’t put it into a sock, I put it out, I spent it, I gave it away, I kept it circulatin’. I took care of my family and I took care of my friends and their families. Nobody went hungry or wanted for anything when Al was around. You oughta heard ’em. It was Al gimme this and Al gimme that and Al donate and Al contribute and Al subscribe and Al buy tickets and Al they need something for the hospital and Al they need something for the church and Al they want you to put up the dough for a soup kitchen and Al never said no. I always came through.” So it went, week after week, Capone bursting into the warden’s office to spew out his pent-up reflections and fantasies and Johnston listening in chilly silence, the two of them locked in an embrace of penance.

  • • •

  In December 1934, number 85’s first significant breach of the prison’s rules occurred. At the time, he was working in the laundry, feeding clothing into the mangle, a machine consisting of two rollers that pressed and smoothed out the cloth. The job was one of those boring, pointless, infuriating activities of which daily life at Alcatraz consisted. His partner in this task was William Collyer, number 185, a soldier sentenced to life for murdering an Army officer. Usually, Capone was affable on the job, and when the guards were not around to enforce the rule of silence, he kept up a constant patter about his exploits in Chicago. In fact, one of his coworkers was so impressed by the relentless boasting that he decided Capone “must have put the go into ego.” On one occasion, however, Collyer’s laggard behavior infuriated Capone, who hurled a wad of wet laundry at him. Collyer responded by throwing a bench at Capone, and the two came to blows. The transgression earned both men confinement in leg irons and a night in an obscure part of Alcatraz known as the Dungeon, a holdover from the days when the island had served as a garrison for the Spanish.

  Collyer demonstrated to the other cons that you could take on Capone in Alcatraz, man to man, with bare fists, and live. The fight with Collyer taught number 85 something, as well: he would receive no special favors from the warden or anyone else. He was not the only big shot criminal on the Rock, as he had been in Atlanta; he had to compete with “Machine Gun” Kelly and other men whose names had been more recently in the news and on the lips of Americans; he could consider himself their equal and no more. It was not like the outside; as the warden himself never tired of repeating, every man was equal on the Rock, which, translated into the lingo of the con, meant that every man was vulnerable, especially Al Capone. While number 85 tried to fit in as best as he could, obscure punks transferred from Leavenworth and McNeil caused most of the ruckuses, assaulting the guards, throwing food, and muttering about insurrection. They had been nobodies on the outside, and they desperately wanted to prove they could be Somebody on the inside. From then on, the testing of Capone’s mettle began. At first the treatment fellow prisoners accorded him was mild, a shove here, a slur there. Since Capone was easily excitable, these slights infuriated him. For petty insu
lts, nothing matched the treatment he received on the baseball team. “Pussyfoot” Johnston permitted prisoners on good behavior to play indoors a modified form of baseball. Like everyone else, Capone wanted to play on the team; more than that, he wanted to manage it, but as first baseman he proved so clumsy that he was relegated to the outfield, and then to the bench. His self-esteem wounded, he stormed off the field, and he consoled himself by tossing horseshoes. If another con beat him at that game, Capone refused to talk to him afterward.

  Unable to defend to himself, Capone attracted a new tormentor named Jimmy Lucas, an ornery little (140-pound) hard case, as his prior record demonstrated. Serving a life sentence for murder, he had escaped from the Huntsville, Texas, penitentiary; while on the loose, he robbed a bank, was recaptured, and sent to Leavenworth; and from there he had been transferred to the Rock in January 1935 to serve a thirty-year sentence. There Lucas joined forces with another inmate, Cecil Snow, and together they laid a trap for Capone. The bait came in the form of a secret escape plan. They confided to Capone that they could sneak a cache of machine guns onto the Rock; they would then blast their way out of the cell house and escape aboard a waiting speedboat. If Capone wanted to participate in the jailbreak, he would have to contribute $15,000 toward expenses. Seeing the preposterous plan for what it was—extortion—Capone refused to have any part of it, but he was unable to rid himself of Lucas’s tactics of intimidation. Lucas belonged to an entrenched clique of inmates from Texas and Oklahoma; to the man, they hated Capone, and they vowed to get him any way they could. The clique, known as the Texas Cowboys, started spreading rumors that Capone was ratting on the other inmates. Was a guard accepting favors from a prisoner? Capone was said to have turned them in. Was an inmate somehow found to have concealed a bottle of whiskey in his cell? Capone had told the guards. There was no truth to the rumors, but their mere existence polarized the inmates into pro- and anti-Capone factions. Al Best, number 107, belonged to the small group who remained loyal to Capone. “Outside of losing his head so easily and bragging about what he has done, Capone has a heart as a big as a house,” Best wrote after he was freed in 1937. “He wanted to do his time in Alcatraz as easy as he could—but the majority of the men had it in for him and were out to get him.”