Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  The Italian immigrants were victims of a myth that continued to plague their descendants. According to this myth, they had criminal instincts. Yet considering the hardships they bore, it is remarkable how few offenses they actually committed. With resignation and dignity, they accepted the menial tasks available to them at wretched pay, and while, in 1910, they made up approximately 11 percent of the total foreign-born population, they produced only about 7 percent of the foreign-born convicts and juvenile delinquents. Nine years later a federal study covering seventeen nationalities in prisons placed the Italian twelfth in the ratio of commitments per 100,000.

  Resignation, however, was not characteristic of the younger Ital ians. As they grew up poor in the world's richest nation, as educational, social and economic opportunities, purportedly accessible to all Americans, eluded them, they did not, like their elders, passively accept frustration. Without yet having established legitimate values of their own, they rejected their parents' old-country traditions as irrelevant to the challenge of America. To some of them, a small minority, it appeared that only crime could open the door to the good life, and they joined the ranks of professional gunmen and bombers, extortionists, vice peddlers, labor racketeers, gamblinghouse operators and bootleggers.

  It was this lawless first- and second-generation minority who began to combine the methods of predatory Italian secret societies like the Neapolitan Camorra, the Carbonari and the Mafia with those of American big business. From their crude, undisciplined early forays evolved one of the most efficient enterprises in the history of organized crime.

  At no stage in its evolution did it represent more than a minute fraction of the Italo-American population. Crime among the latter never exceeded the average for either foreign or native populations. But the criminal few reinforced the prejudices that immigrants from other countries had brought with them. They saw the "dago," the "ginzo," as not only criminal by nature, but physically unclean and of low mentality. The effect of such vilification was to draw its victims still closer together. They formed proud, tight enclaves which no outsider could penetrate. They were further divided among themselves along traditional lines of class and regional origin just as their forebears had been in the mother country, where the urban artigiano looked down on the contadino and the educated galantuomo derided them both. Regardless of station, the Sicilian viewed the Neapolitan with distrust; the Roman stepped warily when dealing with the Calabrian. This insularity existed to an even greater degree at the criminal level. Not until the thirties would the Mafia, Sicilian in origin, admit a non-Sicilian. Joseph Valachi, a Mafia "soldier" turned informer, whose parents came from Naples, testifying in 1963 about organized crime before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, explained why, thirty-three years before, he had at first hesitated to join a Mafia family: "I refused for the simple reason when I was in Sing Sing, I met an oldtimer . . . and he used to have trouble in his days and they had wars in his time, what he terms `Sicilians against Neapolitans,' and he was a Neapolitan, and his name was Alexander Senaro. So he was preaching to me and giving me the lowdown on this, like, for instance, he used the expression, 'If you hang out with a Sicilian for 20 years and you argue with one of his kind, well, this Sicilian will turn against you.' He made me have some fear in myself, and when they approached me, that was what I had in mind. That is the reason I sort of turned it down. . . . '

  The sense of community ran so deep among some Italo-Americans that they were likely to keep in touch all their lives, no matter how widely their careers diverged; this partly explains why the pallbearers at a gangster's funeral have been known to include criminal court judges and state prosecutors, why, at testimonial dinners for a retiring city official, police inspectors have sat beside dope peddlers. Albert A. Vitale, for example, leader of the Italian-American Democratic Club, had been a New York City magistrate for ten years when, in 1930, the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court removed him from the bench. The offense was his association with racketeers. Three months earlier his political club had given a dinner in his honor. The guests numbered seven Italo-American racketeers, among them Ciro Terranova, the "Artichoke King," so called because he terrorized merchants selling artichokes into dealing exclusively with his wholesale produce company. Vitale's ouster scarcely diminished his prestige. The guests at another dinner which the Federation of Italian-American Democratic Clubs tendered him after he returned to private law practice included General Sessions Judge John J. Freschi, State Supreme Court Justices Salvatore A. Cotillo and Louis A. Valente, Magistrates Joseph Raimo, Thomas Aurelio and Michael Delagi.

  Again, in 1952, the New York State Crime Commission, investigating alliances between politicians and racketeers, subpoenaed witnesses for questioning about a meeting that took place several years earlier at the Biltmore Hotel. The five men present were Generoso Pope, publisher of the newspaper Il Progresso Italo-Americano; a former General Sessions judge, Francis X. Mancuso; county Democratic boss Carmine De Sapio; Judge Valente; and the racketeer Francesco Saveria, alias Frank Costello. All except Valente, a Genoese by birth, were descended from Southern Italians. The object of the meeting, it appeared, had been entirely innocent. Publisher Pope had convoked it to plan a fund-raising campaign for Italian children orphaned by war. Without embarrassment, judge Mancuso admitted to having known Costello for about thirty-five years. "His people come from the same town my people come from," he noted. "I may say there is intermarriage in the family. My first cousin married his first cousin." Costello was also godfather to Generoso Pope, Jr. It was after dining with the publisher's son, one evening in 1957, that he was shot and wounded by an unknown assailant.

  Al Capone was an atypical Italo-American in that he took scant pride in his foreign roots. "I'm no Italian," he would protest when the press gave his birthplace as Naples or Sicily. "I was born in Brooklyn." The date was January 17, 1899. On the corner of Tillary and Lawrence streets, a block from the Capone home, stood St. Michael's Church, an odd little white stucco building partly constructed below street level so that one had to descend a flight of steps to enter it. Like most of the neighborhood Italians, Gabriel and Teresa Capone worshiped at St. Michael's, and three months after Al's birth they had him baptized there by the Reverend Gioacchino Garofalo.

  Life in the sector where Al lived his first ten years was harsh, but never drab, never stagnant. Hordes of ragged children gave the streets an explosive vitality as they played stickball, dodged traffic, brawled and bawled, while their mothers, dark, heavy-thighed women, bustled to and fro balancing on their heads baskets laden with supplies for the day's meals. Fruit and vegetable carts, standing wheel to wheel, made a bright, fragrant clutter along the curb. The fire escapes that formed an iron lacework across the faces of the squat tenements shook and shuddered as the El trains roared by close behind on Myrtle Avenue. The completion of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903-up to that time, the world's greatest suspension bridgeand its opening to trains, as well as vehicular traffic, had brought vast new masses to the area, seeking cheaper housing.

  The patron saint of the Capones' neighborhood was St. Michael, and in addition to September 29 (Michaelmas), the parishioners devoted May 8 to his glorification. The daylong festivities began in front of the church as St. Michael's Society, about 200 strong, assembled for a parade. At their head, flanked by bevies of white-clad little girls, solemnly stepped the bearer of St. Michael's banner, which depicted the archangel, a flaming sword in his right hand, towering triumphant over the cringing Spirit of Darkness, his left hand clasp ing a shield inscribed Quis UT DEUS? ("Who is like God?"). Accompanied by Attanasio's Brass Band, they paraded down Tillary Street, past the docks on Navy Street, and circled back to their starting point via York Street. All along the line of march Italian and American flags fluttered from windows, cherry bombs burst in the gutter. (The explosions, heard afar in the surrounding foreign colonies, prompted the rumor on one occasion that a Black Hand gang was blowing up its victims' homes.) When th
e parade ended, Father Garofalo celebrated high mass. Attanasio and his fellow musicians then mounted the bandstand erected next to the church and shivered the air with clarion operatic overtures. The evening was given over to more music, dancing in the streets, feasting and fireworks. Hundreds of goblets containing Bengal lights dangled from telegraph poles, and as the grand finale they all went off with a mighty sizzle and hiss, casting long tongues of orange flame against the night sky.

  In warm weather the corner of Sands and Navy streets was often the scene of a musical diversion, attended by hundreds. To the accompaniment of an organ grinder named Paolo Scotti, who claimed kinship to the great operatic baritone, and the tinkle of coins falling at his feet, "Signor Tutino Giovanni, Dramatic Tenor," would render Verdi arias. As he sang, he would fix some buxom girl in the crowd with a soulful gaze, clap his left hand over his heart, and stretch out the right in amorous supplication. . . . Capone acquired a passion for Italian grand opera.

  Sands Street at night, all night, catered to more robust tastes, as droves of sailors piled ashore, clamoring for liquor and women. It was one of the roughest haunts in the country, the Barbary Coast of the East, where mayhem and murder constantly threatened the unwary. At the pothouse bars that sold raw liquor straight and cheap the thirsty customers lined up three and four deep. If their money ran low, there were pawnshops a step away open all night. There were tattooing parlors, gambling dives, dance halls, fleabags with rooms for rent by the hour, and a galaxy of bangled, painted whores, known by reputation in every port of the seven seas, like the Duchess, and Submarine Mary, who had a mouthful of solid gold teeth.

  Capone's schooling began not far from the Sands Street stews at P.S. 7 on Adams Street. His teacher, a sixteen-year-old girl named Sadie Mulvaney, had received her pedagogic training from Catholic nuns, but despite her youth and unworldliness, she managed to enforce order among some of the borough's toughest delinquents. One of them was Salvatore Lucania, better known in later life as Lucky Luciano. He and Al took to each other, and they remained lifelong friends. Miss Mulvaney would remember Al as "a swarthy, sullen, troublesome boy," though no more troublesome than many of her other pupils. He was big and strong for his age, quick to anger, and then murderous. In winter his nose tended to run, a weakness for which his schoolmates, at risk of severe injury, ridiculed him. The fight-loving Irish boys called him Macaroni.

  After school hours he liked to loiter on the docks, gazing at such nautical wonders as the Navy's 100-ton floating crane. He never wearied of watching the change of U.S. Marine guards behind the main Navy Yard gate. Many of them were raw recruits still needing elementary drill, and before they could fall out when relieved, they had to mark time in drill formation. If a recruit was out of step, the commanding corporal would keep the entire detail marking time until the blunderer caught on. One afternoon Al, who was then about ten, but looked fourteen, arrived at the gate with several companions. Having observed the routine for weeks, he understood the corporal's strategy. On this occasion there was an exceptionally obtuse guardsman. The detail had been marking time for three or four minutes, and still no light dawned. At length Al yelled at him: "Hey, you long-legged number three there! Get in step! You're holding 'em up." The recruit changed step, and the detail was dismissed. Crimson with shame and anger, the recruit ran up to the gate, making as if to spit at the boy through the bars. Al flew into a rage and, though the recruit was twice as big, challenged him to a fight. The corporal intervened, ordering the recruit back to the guardhouse. You got his goat for sure," he told Al. "But if he really spits on you, I'll put him on report."

  "Don't do any reporting," said Al. "Just let the big so-and-so step outside the gate. I'll take care of him." And fists clenched, eyes blazing, he swaggered up and down before his awed companions.

  Not long after, discussing the cocky little Italian with the sergeant of the guards, the corporal remarked: "If this kid had a good Marine officer to get hold of him and steer him right, he'd make a good man for the Marines. But if nothing like this will happen, the kid may drift for a few years until some wise guy picks him up and steers him around and then he'll be heard from one day."

  The prophecy came true sooner than the corporal imagined. Capone fell under the influence of a Navy Street Neapolitan gangster seventeen years his senior. John Torrio, born in Naples in 1882, was already an underworld figure of some note. "Terrible John," his followers called him, but more commonly "Little John." He stood no higher than Capone's chest, a pallid, round-faced, button-eyed man, with small, delicate hands and feet. But his size and surface mildness were as deceptive as those of a slumbering pit viper. He had belonged to Manhattan's historic Five Pointers for seven years until that gang of eye-gouging, skull-bashing desperadoes began to vanish into prisons or the grave. He then formed an affiliated gang with headquarters nearby in a saloon he ran on James Street. Torrio was a calm, reflective man. While he had no moral compunctions about murder and would unhesitatingly order the execution of an adversary, he himself shrank from physical violence. He claimed that he had never fired a gun in his life. He had practical objections to violence. He considered it a poor solution to problems of business rivalry. He preferred diplomacy, palaver, alliances. There was, he felt, enough profits in racketeering for all to share peaceably without risking injury or death. In this he anticipated the more sophisticated outlook of the midcentury racket chieftains. Torrio, in his heyday, was the nearest equivalent to a true mastermind criminal outside the pages of detective fiction, and he enormously influenced the policies and tactics of his younger friend and protege. "I looked on Johnny like my adviser and father," said Capone in middle age, "and the party who made it possible for me to get my start."

  In 1907 the Capones moved to another Italian community about a mile south of Navy Street. They squeezed themselves, eight of them, into a flat on the second story of a two-story cold-water tenement at 38 Garfield Place. The oldest son, James, had meanwhile vanished at the age of sixteen, and many years would pass before his family learned what had happened to him.

  Torrio became a figure as familiar to Capone in the new neighborhood as he had in the old, for on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Union Street, above a restaurant within sight of Garfield Place, he started a "social club" with the name in gilt letters on the windows: THE JOHN TORRIO ASSOCIATION. Capone passed it every day going to and from school.

  He entered the second grade at P.S. 113 on Butler Street, a sixblock walk from his home. Up to the sixth grade he maintained a B average. He then fell behind in arithmetic and grammar, mainly because of truancy, and he had to repeat the grade. That year, his fourteenth, his attendance dropped to thirty-three days out of a possible ninety. When a teacher reproved him, his volcanic temper erupted, and he struck her. Thrashed by the principal, he quit school, never to return. He worked sporadically first as a clerk in a candy store at 305 Fifth Avenue, next as a pinball setter in a bowling alley, then as a paper and cloth cutter in a bindery. There was a poolroom at 20 Garfield Place where Capone father and son both played and Al became the neighborhood champion.

  He could not roam very far from home without crossing territory overrun by bellicose, adolescent street gangs. Any stranger was apt to arouse their hostility, a reaction that reflected the prejudices of their elders. The easterly stretch of Flushing Avenue, near Capone's former home, was unhealthy for Neapolitans, being a Sicilian stronghold. Vicious knife fighters, the Sicilian gangs had adapted to Brooklyn street combat the ancient island practice of disfiguring an enemy, particularly an informer. They would slit his face from eye to ear. This "rat" work became so widely recognized as a Sicilian practice that non-Sicilian gangs took to imitating it after felling their prey in order to divert suspicion from themselves. Not that the other Italian gangs were benign. They, too, fought with knives to maim and sometimes to kill.

  Northwest, up to the Navy Yard wall, the Irish predominated. To them, especially those who worked on the docks where their leaders strove to monopolize
the labor market, the hungry "greasers" were cheap competition, threatening their livelihoods. The preferred weapons of the Irish gangs were fists, bricks and stones, hauled to the field of battle in onion sacks. For shields they used covers filched from garbage cans.

  The Jews, occupying territory northeast, in the Williamsburg section, despised the Italian for what they considered his excessive individualism and lack of social consciousness, which left him indifferent to group efforts toward the general betterment. The Jewish gangs, however, showed less belligerence than most. Dread exceptions were the Havemeyer Streeters, who waged implacable warfare against all Gentile gangs. They repeatedly smashed the windows of the Williamsburg Mission for Jews because it sought to convert Jews to Christianity.

  Street gangs proliferated in every slum of every city, and the greater the foreign influx, the more numerous the gangs. They were a symptom of the disorganization that afflicted so many uprooted families. In the small towns and rural villages from which the majority came society was stable, changeless, stratified, its traditions and code of conduct long fixed and unchallenged. Whatever problem might confront the head of the family, there were time-hallowed precedents to guide him. But in the maelstrom of the vast, everexpanding American metropolis, with its continual swift changes, its ebb and flow of polyglot masses, its ethnic collisions, the old, familiar standards were unavailing. The baffled parents were hard put to comprehend their children's needs, let alone to respond to them, and as a result they lost authority. They could no longer command their children's unquestioning obedience, no longer control them. The breach widened as the children learned the language and the strange, new American ways, while the parents stubbornly clung to their Old World values.