Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  Saturday, October 24

  Flamboyant as ever in a heather-purple pinchback suit, Capone flashes an unnaturally wide smile at the audience, shakes Ahern's hand, and sinks heavily into his seat. He has cut his index finger, and it is bandaged. He jumps up a moment later, his hands locked behind his back, as judge Wilkerson begins to read the sentence.

  "It is the judgment of this court on count 1 that the defendant shall go to the penitentiary for five years, pay a fine of $10,000 and pay the cost of prosecution."

  Capone's fingers twist and turn behind his back, but the forced smile lingers.

  On counts 5 and 9 the judge imposes the same sentence; on counts 13 and 18, a year each in the county jail plus the same fines and court costs.

  The smile fades at last.

  "The sentence on counts 1 and 5 will run concurrently," the judge continues. "The sentence on count 13 will run concurrently with numbers 1 and 5, and count 18 will run consecutively." The earlier six-month sentence for contempt of court is also to run consecutively with count 1. The indictment for violation of the liquor laws is not pursued.

  It adds up to eleven years' imprisonment, fines aggregating $50,000 and court costs of $30,000-the stiffest penalty ever meted out to a tax evader (though there have been many stiffer ones since) .

  Wilkerson denies bail, pending the appeal, and asks U.S. marshal Henry Laubenheimer when he can remove Capone to Leavenworth. Capone gasps as Laubenheimer replies, "At six-fifteen tonight, Your Honor." But following Ahern's plea, Wilkerson agrees to let Capone stay temporarily in the Cook County Jail. "Good-bye, Al, old man," says Fink, his voice breaking. Silently and tearfully, Ahern clasps his client's hand.

  As Capone leaves the courtroom, surrounded by deputy marshals, a little man prances up to him, brandishing an official-looking document. "Internal Revenue," he says. "I have a demand for liens on the property of Alphonse and Mae Capone." To prevent the couple from selling or transferring any assets before satisfying the tax claims, the bureau has frozen them with what it terms "a jeopardy assessment." Capone turns crimson, hurls an obscenity at the little man, and draws back his foot to kick him, but the deputy sheriffs march him into their office for fingerprinting. Recovering his self-control, he waggles his bandaged finger at the officer. "This is one finger the Government doesn't get."

  In the freight elevator he finds himself next to the man he has known for two years as Mike Lepito, now revealed to him as Special Agent Malone. "The only thing that fooled me was your looks," he says without rancor. "You look like a wop." He manages another dim smile. "You took your chances and I took mine. I lost."

  "Get enough, boys," he says to the news photographers. "You won't see me again for a long time." The deputy marshal assigned to take him to the jail in an unmarked car hangs back, fearing a rescue attempt. "I wouldn't go into that car for all the money in the world," he confides to Sullivan. So the revenue agent and a man from the narcotics bureau assume the risk.

  To the reporters who have followed him to the jail, Capone says: "It was a blow below the belt, but what can you expect when the whole community is prejudiced against you?" The news photographers ask him to pose behind the bars of the receiving cell. "Please don't take my picture here, fellows," he pleads, retreating into a corner. "Think of my family."

  His temper erupts again when, on the way to a fourth-floor cell, he hears a camera click. He spins around, grabs a tin bucket, and lunges at the offender, howling, "I'll knock your block off I"

  The jail guards subdue him and rush him along to his cell, the reporters all following. As the turnkey opens the cell door, Capone finds two other occupants sitting on their cots. One is a Negro who, he learns shortly, has violated parole; the other, a skid-row bum unable to pay a $100 fine for disorderly conduct. Capone's sense of gesture reasserts itself. After questioning the bum, who is too awed by the legendary presence to utter a word in reply, he turns to the reporters. "I'm going to help this guy if I can," he announces, peeling off a $100 bill from the roll in his pocket and handing it to him.

  The reporters leave. The guards take Capone to the jail hospital for the routine shower and medical examination, a humiliation that considerably deflates him.

  But this was still Chicago, and to some of its officials Capone was still the "Big Fellow," capable of repaying favors with handsome rewards, and for a while they enabled him to run his organization from jail. Warden David Moneypenny moved him to a one-man cell on the fifth floor with a private shower. He let him make phone calls and send telegrams. In gratitude, when the warden had to go to Springfield, Capone arranged for him to borrow one of his chauffeurdriven Cadillacs. Capone's old political cronies aided him further by obtaining passes to visit him, then turning them over to members of his gang whom he wished to talk to, such as the new Public Enemy No. 1, Joe Fusco, Murray Humphreys, Johnny Torrio, Red Barker and Jake Guzik. Torrio raised the cash Capone needed for his lawyers' fees and other expenses. The prisoner dared not draw on the secret repositories of his own money lest Internal Revenue discover them and impound everything.

  The most consequential gangsters to visit Capone during his months in the county jail were the New Yorkers Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz. Torrio brought them at Capone's insistence. The Dutchman had been challenging Luciano's claims to certain territorial monopolies, thereby endangering the general peace that had prevailed since the massacre of the Mustache Petes. Capone cast him self as arbitrator. He wanted the Italian and the Jew to reconcile their differences and work in amity with other gang leaders to revitalize the national organization, in which he himself expected one day to play a commanding role. For this conference Warden Moneypenny permitted the use of the death chamber, and it amused Capone to preside, sitting in the electric chair.

  But the outcome was not satisfactory. The Dutchman infuriated Capone by his sweeping demands. He behaved as though the entire New York territory rightfully belonged to him. He clearly preferred his individual independence to any alliances-a Mustache Pete at heart, after all. "If I'd had him outside," Capone said years later, "I'd have shoved a gun against his guts." The conference broke up acrimoniously with nothing settled.

  What troubled Capone even more was that Torrio, unaccountably, appeared to favor Schultz. Before his old mentor returned to New York, he conjured him to have nothing to do with the Dutchman. Torrio was noncommittal.

  In December anonymous telegrams to the Department of justice, describing Capone's privileged life in jail, put an end to it. After an investigation, U.S. Marshal Laubenheimer ordered Moneypenny to ban all visitors except the prisoner's mother, wife, son and lawyers. Capone was transferred to the hospital ward with a detail of deputy marshals assigned to twenty-four-hour guard duty. "I didn't want him to mingle with the other prisoners," said Moneypenny by way of explaining why he had maintained Capone in comfortable privacy. "I was afraid he'd be a bad influence on them."

  On February 27 Capone was playing cards with two fellow inmates of the hospital ward, when a deputy warden called him to the door to tell him that the District Court of Appeals had rejected his appeal. He shrugged, rejoined his companions, and finished the game.

  Three days later there occurred one of the most atrocious crimes of the century. To Capone, it suggested an opportunity to regain his freedom.

  Ten days after Bruno Richard Hauptmann kidnapped the Lindbergh baby from his home in Hopewell, New Jersey, the Hearst columnist Arthur Brisbane, to whom Capone had got word that he could "do as much as anybody alive in getting the baby back," was given special permission to interview him.

  "I don't want any favors if I am able to do anything for that baby," Capone told Brisbane. "If they will let me out of here, I will give any bond they require." He offered to leave his brother Mitzi in his place as hostage. "You don't suppose I would doublecross my own brother?" What, exactly, did he claim he could accomplish? "I have a good many angles and anybody that knows anything would know that he could trust me. There isn't a mob that wouldn't trust me to pa
y that money, if the relations of the kidnapped child wanted me to pay it, and there isn't anybody would think I would tell where I got the child, or who had it. . . .

  "I would soon know whether the child is in the possession of any regular mob that I can connect with or in the possession of any individual working his own racket that would have sense enough to know that he could trust me, and know that it might not be a bad idea to do me a good turn." In the event of failure, "I would come back here, take my brother's place, and let justice go on with her racket."

  The screaming Hearst headlines, together with the credulous Brisbane's endorsement ("It is possible that Alphonse Capone could do that which could not be done by others. . . . His power in whatever he undertakes is known to many. . . . This writer believes that whether he succeeded or failed, he would return") touched off a public clamor to free Capone. Republican Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut fostered the notion that the Capone gang had planned the kidnapping "for this very purpose."

  No federal court would even discuss Capone's proposition and Lindbergh himself said, "I wouldn't ask for Capone's release even if it would save a life."

  If the U.S. Supreme Court consents to review the decision of a District Court of Appeals, it grants the convict's application for a writ of certiorari (meaning it wishes to be "made certain"). The Supreme Court rejected Capone's application on May 2, and on May 4 he left the county jail. But his destination was no longer Leavenworth, as originally intended. Jake Guzik and other convicted Caponeites had started to serve their terms there, and the federal authorities thought it prudent to keep them far away from their leader. Capone, they decided, should go to the Atlanta Penitentiary.

  The last day the guard was doubled outside the hospital ward, and Capone was allowed to spend it with his family there instead of in the visitors' room, separated from them by a wire screen. They stayed until late afternoon, his mother, who brought an enormous dish of macaroni with cheese and tomato sauce, hot from her stove, speaking only Italian, Mae Capone and Sonny, all the brothers except Ralph (who had just been delivered to the McNeil Island Penitentiary) and the two sisters, by turns laughing, eating and weeping.

  /I YOU'D think Mussolini was passing through," said Capone, as both the prisoners behind the jailyard fence and the crowd outside the gate hailed him. "Good-bye, Al . . . Good luck, Al . . . You got a bum break, Al...... He gazed around him with evident satisfaction. "I'll bet Mussolini never got a send-off like this."

  It was 10 P.M. when the U.S. marshal's car, accompanied by fifteen police cars, pulled out of the yard in a blaze of light from the Very flares that were fired to provide extra visibility in case of trouble. Capone sat in the back seat between a Secret Service agent and an automobile thief named Vito Morici, to whom he was handcuffed. Laubenheimer and a deputy marshal sat facing them on jump seats. At the Dearborn Station, where another crowd had gathered, Capone, indicating Morici's topcoat, said to him: "Throw it over your arm so nobody sees the handcuffs." Dan Serritella, who was on trial for his defalcations, and Matt and Mimi Capone walked with the prisoners as far as the train gate.

  The Dixie Flyer carried five day coaches and three Pullman cars behind them. In Car 48, the second to last, Drawing Room A and an upper berth had been reserved for Capone and Morici. The latter, a thin, runty youth in a threadbare suit and scuffed shoes, was going through to Tampa, Florida, to face a federal trial for transporting a stolen car across state lines. Five deputy marshals, in addition to Laubenheimer, rode the train. As soon as the manacled prisoners took their seat, they were locked into leg irons. The Dixie Flyer left on schedule at eleven thirty.

  Capone talked volubly to the guards, but the youth shackled to him, barely half his size, sat mute, overawed, all but blotted out by the older man's bulk. Capone talked mostly about Chicago. His organization, he told Laubenheimer, had been a boon to the city, for it had given jobs to men who would otherwise have been committing crimes. The handcuffs and leg irons were removed while the prisoners prepared for bed, Capone slipping into monogrammed skyblue silk pajamas, but Laubenheimer then insisted on putting back the handcuffs, and so the two men had to occupy the same berth. The diminutive Morici lay awake all night, clinging fearfully to the edge lest Capone roll over and flatten him.

  At every station stop next day a crowd of two to three hundred was waiting for a look at Capone through the train window. The sight never failed to lift his spirits. In the South the thermometer climbed to ninety, and he drank quarts of lemonade, ordered from the dining car. He bought soda pop for Morici.

  The train steamed into Atlanta's Union Station at 7:46 P.M., only eleven minutes late. After Morici had been transferred to another car for the rest of his journey to Tampa, Car 48 was shunted to a siding to avoid reporters, and from there Laubenheimer and his prisoner were driven four miles to the penitentiary. The inmates, 3,000 of them packing cell blocks built to hold less than 2,000, somehow knew the instant the car entered the driveway and set up a tremendous clamor, banging the bars of their cells, some cheering the newcomer, others taunting him.

  Warden Arthur C. Aderhold, a man devoted to ritual, called through the outer gate that was cut into a gray stone wall 30 feet high and 600 feet long: "Who are you?"

  "Marshal Laubenheimer of Chicago," came the answer.

  "Are you in charge of whoever is in your party?"

  "I am."

  The gate swung open. Stopping twenty paces farther on at an inner gate, the warden faced the prisoner. "What is your name?"

  "Alphonse Capone."

  "What is your sentence?"

  "Eleven years."

  Laubenheimer corrected him. "The sentence here is ten years. After that period has been served, the prisoner is to be returned to Chicago to serve a one-year sentence in the Cook County jail."

  "Your number is 40,822," Aderhold informed Capone.

  The marshal handed the warden a paper, which he signed and handed back: "Received from H. C. W. Laubenheimer, United States Marshal for the Northern District of Illinois, the body of the within named prisoner...

  In the receiving cell Capone was ordered to strip to the skin. A prison guard took away his clothes, leaving in their place a blue denim uniform. Fingerprinted and photographed, his hair cropped close to his skull, Capone was then consigned to the hospital ward for three to four weeks while the penitentiary physician, Dr. William Ossenfort, determined whether he carried any communicable disease.

  A Wassermann test, which Capone took under protest, proved negative. He admitted that probably, three years before, he had contracted syphilis, but considered himself cured. The technique of analyzing a Wassermann being still somewhat crude, Ossenfort wanted to investigate further by making a spinal puncture and applying the test to the spinal fluid, as well as to the blood. This Capone would not hear of, and Ossenfort could not legally compel him to submit to it. Capone worried nevertheless. When, in the sizzling temperatures of the southern summer, he developed prickly heat, he wondered whether it might not be a symptom of syphilis after all. Ossenfort calmed his anxiety by showing him that he, too, had prickly heat.

  "When not aroused," Ossenfort said later, "Capone was quiet, pleasant and fairly well spoken. He would have made a good administrator and a forceful leader."

  The overcrowded penitentiary had no single cells, only two-man and eight-man cells. Capone was assigned to an eight-man cell, whose occupants included a wildcat promoter, a former judge convicted of using the mails to defraud, an Ohio criminal notorious for the variety of his offenses, and four mail robbers serving twenty-five years. One of the mail robbers came in from the recreation yard shortly after the guards brought Capone. He had flame-red hair and the accent of a Jewish vaudeville comedian. Capone recognized Red Rudensky, or Rusty, as he had always called him, the ace "mechanic" of the early bootleg days. Rudensky, who had long hero-worshiped the gang leader, warmly clasped his hand. "He still had that inner radiation of somebody who's been through it all," he recalled.

  Capone co
uldn't sleep the first night. He roused Rudensky and sat on his bed. "Imagine," he said, "some creep gets me on a damn tax rap. Ain't that a helluva deal?" He suffered frequently from nightmares in the months that followed, yelling "Nol Nol" in his sleep and swearing. Rudensky would pummel him awake.

  The other prisoners, by and large, admired Capone. When Rudensky, who stage-managed the occasional prison entertainments, introduced him, they gave him a standing ovation. There were deadly exceptions, however. "The little shots who wanted a crack at the big ones," as Rudensky remembered them. "I sent out word to lay off Big Al, but while ninety-nine percent would go along with anything I asked, there was always the creepy twenty-five or thirty cons waiting for a chance to make trouble. They had a healthy respect for Al, and figured that between us anyone who gave him trouble would get it back fast. Still, two hillbillies, both in on a morals charge, decided to put our strength to a test. I got the neck chop and the knee one day in the yard. Al was roughed up at chow. But inside twenty-four hours I had a revenge team take it out in spades. The two jackasses were pounded into bloody pulps during work hours. One wound up with a broken cheekbone and a fractured skull. The other never used his right arm again for work."

  Rudensky's fondness for Capone grew. He arranged the smuggling of cash to him from the gang through a trusty who drove a supply truck. With this money Capone bought privileges from certain guards and loyalty and protection from his fellow prisoners. A corps of bodyguards surrounded him at work and at recreation. He seldom handled the cash himself. Rudensky frequently kept thousands of dollars for him in the hollowed-out handle of a broom. "A nod from Al in the yard was all it took for me to take care of those he wished to bestow largesse upon."

  Capone worked eight hours a day cobbling shoes. For exercise he first tried baseball but proved to be a poor batter and a worse fielder. He switched to tennis. Money talked for him on the tennis courts, too. He never had to wait for a free court. If he wanted to play singles, he would point to the opponent he preferred, and the other player would retire; if doubles, one member of a team would give up his place. In his rages, when he muffed a shot, he broke a good many rackets.