Days later, Director Bennett briefed the attorney general on the final plans for Al’s release and postprison life: “Ralph has now agreed to place his brother under the case of Dr. Joseph E. Moore in the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Moore is an outstanding specialist in the treatment of general paresis and is also a consultant to the United States Public Health Service on venereal diseases. . . . Dr. Moore, however, is most anxious to avoid publicity with respect to the case. . . . He [Capone] is not to be admitted under his own name and no reference is to be made to the fact that he is to go to Johns Hopkins. I believe that it would be decidedly to the advantage of the Government to cooperate in this matter and therefore suggest that Capone be transferred just prior to the completion of his sentence from Los Angeles to . . . Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. . . . thus avoiding the publicity which would follow were he discharged in California.”
Although the prison authorities knew the extent to which neurosyphilis had diminished Capone’s mental capacity, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and even the attorney general himself persisted in regarding Capone as a prized source of information about the current state of racketeering. Their stated reason was that despite his condition he provided valuable leads. However, the transcripts of Capone’s remarks reveal no usable leads at all, and a more likely reason for the interviews was that none of the authorities could resist the chance to visit with the infamous Al Capone himself. Even Attorney General Frank Murphy traveled all the way to California to chat with the mad oracle of Terminal Island. Needless to say, no racketeer in his right mind would ever want to meet, much less help such people, but Capone, having little idea of the consequences of his words and actions, and flattered by the attention, was happy to oblige. He talked with one and all—various FBI agents, the attorney general, anybody who was willing to listen. Nor did he merely respond to questions in a tight-lipped evasive manner; he told the authorities everything he could recall, which was not much, and went on to weave fantastic stories for them, essentially tales told by an idiot.
On October 25, 1939, to cite one instance, FBI agent D. W. Magee traveled to Terminal Island, purportedly to discuss groundless rumors that Mae Capone planned to divorce her husband. The conversation soon turned to a current target of FBI scrutiny, the Chicago Motion Picture Operators Union, which had become infiltrated by Capone syndicate operatives Nick “Nickelodeon” Circella, Willie Bioff, George E. Brown, and Tommie Malloy. To judge from the FBI’s confidential record, the meeting contained more black comedy than serious inquiry. “Al Capone seemed in high spirits during the course of the interview,” the agent dutifully recorded, “and stated that he knew NICK (NICKELODEON) CIRCELLA well; that he remembered GEORGE E. BROWN, but could not place WILLIE BIOFF. . . . He suggested that his brother RALPH CAPONE would be more in a position to furnish information on these individuals, and stated that TOMMIE MALLOY had been one of his men, but MALLOY got out of line and subsequently was killed in an automobile accident, giving Agent a confidential wink of his left eye while making his statement.” Capone proceeded to make even wilder claims, boasting he had made $10 million during Prohibition, “but stated that he had never been interested in any vice racket,” unlike Johnny Torrio. Capone’s statements appeared clear-cut, but he often became fuzzy and disconnected. He repeatedly asked the FBI agent, “What are we talking about?” and Agent Magee would have to remind him of the topic under consideration. Later in the conversation, he boasted about his close friendship with Jack Dempsey and lashed into William Randolph Hearst. “On one occasion,” Capone insisted, “HEARST had encouraged DEMPSEY to bring him, CAPONE, to HEARST’S beach residence at Santa Monica, California, where CAPONE claims to have witnessed various sexual activities which disgusted him.”
Only when he talked about his family, the agent noticed, did Capone seem happy, especially when it came to Sonny, but even on this subject Capone’s mind teemed with brilliant fantasies, referring to Sonny as a lawyer and a Notre Dame graduate. “He stated that he received a letter from the school authorities at Notre Dame informing him that his son was a diligent student but that he shunned recreation,” the agent solemnly noted, as Capone detailed other cherished illusions about his life after his release from prison:
He stated he was going to his Florida home to join his wife and his son and enjoy a family life. . . . He stated that TOM CALLAHAN, Head of the Chicago Office of the United States Secret Service, was going to accompany him and RALPH CAPONE to Florida. . . .
CAPONE stated that he and RALPH intended to establish four furniture and automobile factories in Florida, and that this would give employment to thousands of people. He stated he did not intend to go to Chicago and neither he nor his brother RALPH was going to engage in any rackets. He stated he and the family owned a lot of stock in the Pabst Brewery; that they had extensive interests in greyhound racing establishments; that he still owned the Colosimo Cafe and the Metropole Hotel in Chicago. . . . He stated they had paid over $300,000 income tax last year.
He continually stated that RALPH CAPONE was making all the plans. He spoke of other connections in the past, naming CLARENCE DARROW as one of his former attorneys. When conversing on old activities and racketeering connections, CAPONE gave confidential, sly winks of his left eye at frequent intervals.
Winking and smiling his way through the interview, Capone could no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood; almost nothing he said was accurate. He had no relationship with Clarence Darrow, nor did he own any part of the Metropole Hotel, which had once served as his base of operations in Chicago. Although Sonny had attended Notre Dame, he had failed to graduate and was not a lawyer. Furthermore, Ralph did continue to play a major role in the Chicago rackets. As for the $300,000 in taxes the family had recently paid, that was the amount the IRS recently declared Al owed on his release from prison. Agent Magee noted, “CAPONE, during the course of interview, seemed to have plenty of courage and spoke in big figures,” but the calculations and bravado came from a man who had lost his mind, if not his heart.
• • •
“Do you feel the need of prayer?” asked the Reverend Silas A. Thweat of the convicts during the Sunday service at Terminal Island.
Al Capone raised his hand.
“Are any of you here feeling the need of a savior?”
Al Capone stood.
• • •
As the expiration of Capone’s sentence approached, his new lawyer in Chicago, Abraham Teitelbaum, made final arrangements, but the actual date of release remained in doubt, for in late October the government reminded Teitelbaum that his client still owed an additional $20,000 fine for income tax evasion. Relying on Ralph’s ready access to cash, Teitelbaum paid the full amount “under protest” on November 3 and smoothed the way for Al’s emancipation.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons selected November 16, 1939, as the final day of Al Capone’s jail sentence. In the morning, his train from Los Angeles arrived at the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, federal penitentiary, where the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, in their combined wisdom, had decided to release him. Ralph arranged for a limousine to transport Mae and Sonny to the prison but, wanting no part of prisons and wardens himself, kept his distance. The convict Mae and Sonny retrieved from the Lewisburg Penitentiary bore only a superficial and haunting resemblance to the sleek, confident, well-dressed Capone who had entered the Cook County Jail that long-ago day in October 1931. The man who stood before them now, grinning lopsidedly, a trail of spittle trickling from the corner of his mouth, had the demeanor of a jailbird, timid and wary. He wore drab, shapeless, prison-issue clothing. And then there were the shoes: heavy, dark, clumsy, and institutional. To look at them was to feel the dehumanizing effects of the eight years he had spent in confinement. He had lost weight, but he did not look fit. Only forty, he seemed at least a decade older, his hair thinning, his posture stooped. The glint in his gray eyes had vanished, replaced by an apprehensive dullness. At least his voice was reassuringly
calm, but as soon as he spoke it was apparent that his pronunciation was indistinct, his thoughts disconnected. He sounded as though he were babbling in his sleep, and he had only vague recollections of where he had been for the past eight years; in the weeks to come Capone would startle his family with his constant praise of the federal penitentiary system, especially the splendid care Warden Johnston had lavished on him at Alcatraz.
Before they could leave the prison, the Capones had to endure a brief meeting with a prison administrator, in this case Myrl E. Alexander, who as a young warden’s assistant had interviewed Capone years before, on arrival at Atlanta. Since Capone was non compos mentis, it was Alexander’s assignment to make certain that the family understood that the prisoner’s release was conditional and subject to parole regulations. Alexander reviewed the formal conditions of release for the uncomprehending Capone, who sat beside Mae, radiantly happy to see her husband again, and Sonny, dressed incongruously in a white summer suit. Quietly and expectantly they waited for the moment of Capone’s freedom as Alexander attached various bureaucratic strings. The parole would last until May 3, 1942, Alexander carefully explained. Until then, the prisoner—they still called him that—would have to report regularly to a parole officer, avoid alcohol and drugs, and so on and so forth, including the condition that he “shall not associate with persons of bad reputation.” The clause gave the government considerable leeway in administering Capone’s parole, for it could, without stretching a point, conclude that his brother Ralph, formerly Public Enemy Number 3, was a person of bad reputation. Mae and Sonny were afraid to complain about the conditions, and the prisoner himself was too befuddled to understand them. “Capone didn’t seem to realize exactly where he was at the time of our final interview,” Alexander said later, “and it was obvious that he probably had some memory loss and was not fully aware of his surroundings or the full content of our conversation. He was indeed a different kind of person than the one I had interviewed earlier in Atlanta. That final day at Lewisburg he seemed more pathologically foolish and disoriented.”
At the end of the interview, the Capones rose in unison. Mae left the warden’s office first, followed by Sonny, and finally Al himself. They walked out of the prison’s front gate to the waiting limousine, just like that, without guards, guns, or manacles. “They departed in a limousine parked outside the front entrance to the prison,” Alexander recalled, “and that was the last I ever saw or talked with Capone.”
Had Capone been able to comprehend his new condition, how he would have savored those first moments of freedom. The cruel paradox of his situation was that once he finally obtained his freedom after eight harrowing years of imprisonment, he could no longer appreciate his deliverance. For the rest of his life, he would be a captive of his severely impaired mental state, unable to function on his own, unable to comprehend, except in the simplest ways, what was going on around him.
Once the limousine bearing the reunited Capone family drove away from the Lewisburg Penitentiary, Al disappeared from public view. Few Americans realized that he suffered from any major health problems, let alone “paresis” or neurosyphilis. At the time of his release, Look magazine published a sensational article titled “When I Get Out of Prison: Al Capone Talks,” which portrayed him as confident, robust, and ready to go back to work, actually strengthened in mind and body from the ordeal of jail. “Capone is sane,” the magazine declared. “He is mentally and physically adjusted to re-enter civil life.” The article left the impression that he would shortly return to his Palm Island estate and resume his racketeering. The new attorney general, Frank Murphy, lent the authority of his office to the coverup, telling reporters that he had visited Capone only last June and found him “physically in perfect condition; he was in much better health than any one I see in this room.” Though he knew perfectly well that Capone was Baltimore-bound, Attorney General Murphy talked glibly of keeping tabs on him in Miami, “where there is already some indication that unsavory characters are assembling, perhaps in anticipation of Capone’s visit,” the New York Times suggested. By spreading these misleading stories, the Department of Justice avoided speculation that his dismal health resulted from his treatment in jail.
The truth was that the Capone family, as they had planned all along, drove Al directly to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where they committed him to the care of Dr. J. Earle Moore, the eminent syphilologist. There Al Capone the ex-convict—a frail, docile man, ignorant of his own predicament—embarked on an unusual course of treatment. While medical opinion decreed his illness was irreversible, the Johns Hopkins doctors were experimenting with advanced drugs and other techniques for treating syphilis. Perhaps a miracle would occur. There was always hope, if nothing else.
CHAPTER 12
After Capone
RICHARD “TWO-GUN” HART was not a religious man by any stretch of the imagination, but when he looked back over his life it seemed an invisible hand had controlled events. When he was a young man, the hand had pointed him westward, away from his family, especially his younger brother Al. Later, as he entered middle age, the hand prodded him back to his past, the family he had renounced, and even the identity with which he had come into this world. The changes occurred slowly, imperceptibly, by degrees that eventually described the arc of his destiny.
After serving as a bodyguard to President Calvin Coolidge during the summer of 1927, Hart spent the next four years wandering from one Indian reservation to the next across the Northwest, chasing bootleggers, getting himself in and out scrapes with the law and the Indians alike. He stood trial at least once more, this time for shooting an Indian fugitive to death. The jury acquitted him, and his reputation as a fearless lawman remained intact. Of all the Capones, he, not Al, was the most violent. Everywhere he went, people knew who he was—or thought they did. The legend of “Two-Gun” Hart was so well known in the Northwest that in the spring of 1930, when he was in Tekoa, Washington, the post office was able to deliver to him a letter bearing no address, merely the word HART and a sketch of two revolvers.
Wherever he went, his ability to contain lawlessness made a memorable impression. He appeared at the Bonner County fairground in Sandpoint, Idaho, in the summer of 1930, where various Indian tribes from northwestern states were holding their annual meeting which was, essentially, a five-day-long party. “They came with ponies, some dragging teepees, buggies, and old Model-T Fords,” recalls one observer, Harold Hagen. “They set up their camps in the woods and fields surrounding the fairground. Mostly what they did was gamble, usually blackjack. They spread blankets on the ground, and when night came they hung Coleman lanterns on sticks and kept right on.” Only one lawman was there to police the 500 or so Indians who had assembled: “Two-Gun” Hart. As Hagen remembers, “He was dressed Western-style, with his two guns. He didn’t mingle much, but he was always in evidence. He appeared to have an easy relationship with the Indians, who seemed to like him. There was a small platform with a four-piece band, and Hart would pick up a fiddle and join in. There was no boozing. Occasionally an argument would start, but before anything got very far someone would threaten to call ‘Two-Gun’ Hart, and that would end it. In retrospect, I realize the Indians knew all about Hart and had good reason to mind their manners when he was around. But I didn’t hear a word of griping about him the times I visited their big pow-wows. I had a real sense they liked and trusted him.”
Hart returned to the wrinkle in the prairie he called home later in 1931. The Depression had preceded him. “I just remember the hard times. Real hard times,” says his youngest son, Harry. Jobs were scarce in Homer, the winters colder than ever, and with Prohibition heading toward repeal, it looked like “Two-Gun” would soon be out of a job. He was approaching his forties, putting on weight, no longer a young man ready to endure physical hardship for the sake of catching a few bootleggers, and he had a wife and four children to support. But he had few prospects. The flow of newspaper articles recounting his adventures slowed to a
trickle; law enforcement was no longer the glamour game it once was. If gangsters and bootleggers died young and rich, it was said, lawmen lived long and died broke. Hart was just beginning to learn the bitter truth of that observation. Indeed, the rest of his life would consist of an often humiliating struggle to make ends meet. He accepted a position as a justice of the peace in Homer, but the pay was low, and he soon found himself accepting the sort of odd jobs he had taken when he had first arrived years before. At various times he painted houses, worked as a paperhanger, and maintained a fish camp. Folks from Sioux City came to the camp, caught fish, and held fish fries. “There was nothing else to do, no work, nothing,” recalls Harry of the lean years. “Eventually we got on relief. I used to pick up the commodities in my little wagon.”
So the early years of the Depression were not kind to Al Capone’s adventurous older brother; in fact, the entire decade would be humbling. There were at least some rewards, however, as his life began to come full circle in ways that seemed determined by divine prestidigitation. The underemployed Hart filled the empty hours with music. “He could make the piano just vibrate,” says another family member. He also played the violin, but the mandolin held the most fascination for him. This was an exotic instrument for these parts and one of the few clues to his Italian origins. “He used to sit down on Main Street and play and play, and the old timers who didn’t have that much to do would listen,” according to Harry. “And I would sing along with him.” At about the same time, Al Capone, confined to Alcatraz, was also consoling himself with the mandolin’s sweet strains, playing soft tunes to himself by the hour.
Although his mean streak was often in evidence on the job, Hart was indulgent toward his children, especially his youngest. “Things were tough, but he treated me very good,” Harry says. A former roustabout, Hart retained his fascination with carnivals, and every Fourth of July found him participating in Homer’s festivities, which not even the Depression managed to dampen. Hart also remained on intimate terms with firearms, which continued to play an important role in the family. “I would always go pheasant hunting with him,” Harry recalls, “and he was a very good shot. The first time I ever went out with him my dad had a pump shotgun, and he got up and bing-bing-bing he got three of them before the other guy even got off a shot. He was that good. He taught me how to shoot a gun, how to handle guns. You don’t point it at anybody, and I’ve always taught my grandkids how to handle guns because I’ve been around guns all my life.”
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