Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  "Warden, I got a big family and they all want to see me and I want to see them all. I don't see why I can't have them all come at the same time."

  "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."

  "How about my friends, Warden, when can I see them?"

  "Capone, your friends and associates will not be permitted to come here as visitors."

  He smiled feebly. "It looks like Alcatraz has got me licked."

  Johnston granted his request for another interview the next week. "Don't get me wrong, Warden," Capone began. "I'm not looking for any favors, but you know maybe some of these other 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 conducting legitimate enterprises would need any help from you?"

  Capone gave his version of the Chicago newsboys' strike and how, acting in behalf of Colonel McCormick, he ended it. "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."

  "That is very interesting," said Johnston. "You may want to tell me some more sometime."

  To gain the kind of leadership he had enjoyed at Atlanta, Capone tried to dispense favors to his fellow inmates. He offered to have money sent to their relatives, to buy musical instruments for those who, like himself, wanted to play in the prison band (he had taken up the tenor banjo). Johnston thwarted all such gestures. When it became apparent that Capone could not obtain the smallest special consideration, he lost face, as Johnston intended him to, especially among the small fry who composed the majority of the Alcatraz population. They mocked him to his face. They threatened him.

  The men who conceived the Alcatraz prison did not even pay lip service to the principle of rehabilitation. What Cummings and Bates had in mind was a custodial and punitive institution. There would be no rewards for good behavior other than the usual reduction of sentence by ten days out of every forty served and work credits, no trusties, only punishment for breaking rules. A policy of maximum security, the Attorney General believed, combined with minimum privileges and total isolation from the mainland, would serve as a deterrent to Public Enemies and those who would emulate them. It deterred them no more than the prospect of the electric chair, the noose or the gas chamber reduced the homicide rate. In fact, despite the propaganda emanating from the Attorney General's office, comparatively few big-time gangsters ever went to Alcatraz. There were not enough of them to fill the cells. The "notorious mail robber" might be an obscure wretch who had broken into a postbox. Some inmates were first offenders. If the new prison profited anybody, it was the wardens of the old ones. Alcatraz took some of the strain off them. No court could sentence convicts to Alcatraz. Only those already serving terms could be transferred there, if the warden so recommended and the director of the Bureau of Prisons approved. During the thirties a decline was noted in prison mutinies, race riots, escapes, aggressive homosexuality, and killings, which Cummings ascribed to the prisoners' fear of ending up on "the Rock." ("I closed Alcatraz in 1963," wrote Bates' successor, James V. Bennett, in his autobiography, "because it was too costly to operate and too typical of the retributive justice that has no place in our philosophy.")

  "It was necessary to admonish [Capone] several times, when he was being instructed in the rules and routine," Johnston recalled, "but no more than other inmates for they all found the regulations stricter than any to which they had been accustomed in other prisons. After the first tenseness was over he got in line and made an average adjustment in work and behavior."

  His day began at 6:30 A.M. with the clanging of a bell and a burst of electric light. He had twenty minutes to dress and make his bed. To shave, he had to shove a matchbox through the bars of his cell. A guard would place a razor blade in it and allow three minutes before returning to reclaim it. At 6:50 the bell sounded again, the floor guard took the morning count. A third bell signaled that all prisoners were accounted for. Fourth bell: breakfast. The turnkeys, standing inside locked steel cages, pulled back a lever, and with the din of a cannonade all the heavy steel cell door bolts simultaneously shot back. Falling in between his neighbors, Capone shuffled toward the mess hall adjoining the cell blocks. The prisoners ate ten to a table, with the Negroes segregated. They all sat facing the same direction. Armed guards watched from a steel-barred gallery above. The prisoners ate in silence. Talking was forbidden not only in the mess hall, but in the cell blocks and the bathhouse. In the recreation yard during the morning and afternoon recesses they could talk for three minutes and on weekend afternoons for two hours. This rule of silence was later relaxed.

  The food was served cafeteria-style from a steam table. Bad food had caused more prison riots than perhaps any other single factor, and Johnston was determined to provide three palatable meals a day with a calorie value of at least 3,100, 1,000 more than the Bureau of Prisons specified. Typical breakfast fare consisted of oatmeal with milk, fried bologna sausage, cottage fried potatoes, toast or bread with margarine, and coffee. Capone learned to clean his plate, for if a prisoner left a scrap, he got no food the next day. Recognizing the calmative properties of nicotine, Johnston also issued to each man three packs of cigarettes a week, and for heavy smokers he installed a tobacco and cigarette paper dispenser in every cell block so that they could roll their own. But he would not approve a commissary such as most prisons had, where the men could buy, with the few cents a day they earned in the workshops, candy, chewing gum, soda pop. At the 7 A.M. mess-hall bell the officer heading the guards' table raised his arm, and the prisoners rose. When he dropped his arm, they started back to their cells. A snitch box they passed on the way discouraged attempts to palm cutlery. It buzzed the first few times Capone passed it until the guards realized he was wearing metal arch supporters and replaced them with plastic ones.

  No prisoner could wear a watch. Bells told the time. They rang for one reason or other about every half hour. After a brief interval in their cells, the prisoners were counted again and lined up according to their assigned workshop. Capone's first job was operating a mangle in the basement laundry room, to which the Army posts around the bay area sent their wash. (A private stationed on nearby Angel Island wrote home that his laundryman was none other than Al Capone.) Prisoners working outdoors or by a window endured the further torment of seeing ocean liners steaming through the Golden Gate, motor cruisers, sailboats and ferries skittering across the bay, the green and wooded hills of Marin County to the north and to the south, the San Francisco skyline-all within two miles.

  Midmorning. Bell. Recess. Bell. Work. 11:30. Bell. Prisoners counted. Bell. Noon. Bell. Lunch. 1 P.M. Bell. Work. Midafternoon. Bell. Recess. Work. 4:30. Bell. Prisoners counted. Bell. 5:30. Bell. Supper. Bell. Back to cellblocks. Bell. Prisoners counted. Bell. 6:30. Bell. Lockup. 9:30. Bell. Lights out.

  The routine was varied on the weekend to allow for religious worship Sunday morning, a weekly bath and two hours of leisure both Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The prisoners could spend their free hours exercising in the yard or pursuing a hobby indoors. Capone, who learned to read music and improvise, usually chose to play his banjo with a five-man combo he had organized. He sang, too, and composed a song entitled "Mother."

  In their cells before lights out the prisoners could read books or magazines borrowed from the prison library, but to intensify their sense of isolation, Johnston denied them newspapers and radio. The deprivation led Capone to commit his first offense. He tried to bribe a guard to talk to him about the outside world. It cost him the loss of some good behavior credits.

  Correspondence was also severely restricted. A prisoner could write one letter a week to a relative and from relatives receive
no more than three. He could correspond with nobody outside his family except his lawyers. Censors read all incoming and outgoing mail, deleted any portion that did not confine itself to family affairs, and sent on a typed copy of what remained. The first letters Capone got from his wife were so drastically expurgated that he, not yet familiar with the system, upbraided her for her laziness when she visited him. "If you're too busy to write," he said, "don't send telegrams."

  There were no fixed visiting days. Each monthly visit, limited to forty-five minutes, had to be arranged through Johnston, a pass is sued and instructions given on where and when to board the island boat. A sheet of plate glass, floor to ceiling, separated visitor and prisoner. At head level ran two strips of steel a few inches apart, perforated by quarter-inch holes, with a thin sound diaphragm sandwiched between. The holes were staggered so that no object could pass through. To vibrate the diaphragm, voices had to be raised to normal speaking level. Thus, the guards present could hear every word exchanged and interrupt if forbidden topics were broached.

  The first time Capone's mother came, accompanied by Mafalda, the buzzer sounded at the landing dock snitch box. The bewildered old woman was searched in vain. Only after the buzzer went off again, necessitating a second search, was the trouble traced. Mama Capone's old-fashioned corset had metal stays.

  Wondering what message a letter contained before the censor got through with it or what a man's wife had been trying to tell him before the guards stopped her made for the sleepless "hell nights," as the prisoners called them. They were the harder to bear when, as happened almost every night, the guards could be heard practicing marksmanship in the yard. For targets they used man-shaped dummies, leaving them for the prisoners to see next day, a warning against trying to escape. Though Johnston forbade corporal punishment as a general rule, the guards did not hesitate, at a show of resistance, to knock a man senseless with water shot from a high-pressure hose, to break an arm or leg with their truncheons, or to truss him up for days in a straitjacket. The usual punishment, however, was solitary confinement, or the Hole, on a diet of bread and water with, twice a week, a "subsistence meal," such as a paper cup full of beets and potatoes mashed together. Nearly everybody committed to Alcatraz spent some time in the Hole. The limit of human endurance there was thought to be about nineteen days.

  During Capone's years on Alcatraz several prisoners attempted suicide, and a few succeeded. Those who failed wound up in the Hole. A counterfeiter named John Standig made an attempt at suicide before he even got to Alcatraz by jumping from the train taking him there, but he suffered no mortal injury. On Alcatraz, where he later made another attempt, he told an inmate: "If you ever get out of here, tell them I wasn't trying to escape. I was trying to kill myself." A blood transfusion saved Jimmy Grove, an ex-GI imprisoned for raping an Army officer's daughter, after he cut the arteries in both arms. What amounted to suicide, the first successful one, was managed by Joe Bowers, a German-born criminal. In April, 1936, he was bandaged and taken to the Hole after he had broken his eyeglasses and slashed his throat with the jagged edges. Upon his release he scaled the steel fence surrounding the work area, knowing the guards would shoot him. The bullets dropped him 75 feet into the bay. The following year Ed Wutke, an ex-merchant marine, serving twenty-seven years for a murder at sea, was found dead in his cell, his jugular vein severed by a blade from a pencil sharpener.

  Many prisoners went insane, fourteen of them violently so in 1937 alone, with innumerable others quietly "stir crazy." Mental illness was not a condition Johnston readily recognized. If capable of functioning physically, without disruption to the general routine, the madman was ignored; if uncontrollable, he was confined to the hospital ward. A consultant psychiatrist visited the island at irregular intervals, sometimes months apart. There was the prisoner from Leavenworth who screamed whenever a plane flew over the island, and the old prisoner who kept his head wrapped in towels as a defense against invisible tormentors. There was "Rabbit," a docile prisoner until he scooped up every movable object in his third-tier cell, wrapped his bedding around them, and the next time the door opened, hurled the bundle over the railing. Dragged away clawing and howling, he was never returned to the cell blocks. There was No. 284, Rube Persfal, assigned to the dock detail, who seized an ax, laid his left hand on a plank of wood and, laughing wildly, lopped off every finger. Still laughing, he laid his right hand next to it and begged a guard to chop it off. Though committed to the hospital, he was not officially declared insane.

  Five men tried to escape during Capone's imprisonment. Before they could get off the island one was killed, one wounded, and one recaptured unhurt. Two others sawed through the bars of a workshop window, broke open a fence gate with a Stillson wrench, and dived into the water. They were never found dead or alive, but they could not have swum far against the riptide, with the dense fog then swathing the bay. Of the mutinies that erupted at the rate of about one a year, none lasted more than three days.

  The laundry room, where Capone worked, was damp and badly ventilated, and when an Army transport anchored in the bay with an accumulation of wash, the work load became backbreaking. In Janu ary, 1935, Capone was at his usual station by the mangle when thirtysix of his co-workers walked out in protest. For every three prisoners Johnston employed one guard, a ratio two to three times higher than that maintained in most federal prisons. The strikers were quickly surrounded, separated, and removed to the Hole. Because Capone took no part, he aroused a good deal of enmity. A month later one of the strikers, Bill Collier, was catching laundry as Capone fed it into the mangle. He complained that it came through too fast and too wet. Capone paid no attention. So Collier picked up a sopping bundle and flung it into his face. Before the guards could stop the brawl, Capone blacked his attacker's eye. Both men spent eight days in the Hole.

  Another strike, this time general, took place without Capone in January of the following year. The immediate provocation was the death of a prisoner with a stomach ulcer, whom Johnston had refused medical treatment because he thought him a malingerer. As Capone stuck to his post, the prison rang with cries of "Rat" and "Scab!" But it was not cowardice that kept him from joining the rebels. He knew the odds. "Those guys are crazy," he said. "They can't get anything out of this." He asked to be excused from work and allowed to remain in his cell until the strike ended. "I have to protect my skin, if I'm going to get out of here alive," he told the guards. He did not stand alone. Nearly all the prison "aristocrats"-the spectacular felons like Arthur "Doc" Barker, last surviving son of Ma Barker's murderous brood; the kidnappers George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Albert Bates and Harvey Bailey, who had collected a ransom of $200,000 for the Oklahoma oil magnate Charles Urschel; Roy Gardner, train bandit and escape artist-shared his prudence and likewise incurred the hatred of the mutineers.

  Capone's request was granted. His first day back at work, the strikers having been starved into submission, an unknown hand hurled a sash weight at his head. Roy Gardner, seeing it coming, threw himself at Capone, shoving him aside. The missile struck Capone's arm, inflicting a deep cut. He was then shifted to the bathhouse cleaning squad.

  The bathhouse adjoined the barbershop. On the morning of June 23, five months after the second strike, Jim Lucas, a Texas bank robber, reported for his monthly haircut. When he left, he seized a pair of scissors, crept up behind Capone, who was mopping the bath house floor, and drove the blades into his back. Capone recovered after a week in the hospital and Lucas went to the Hole.

  A San Francisco lawyer, representing Mae Capone, appealed to the Attorney General to have Capone imprisoned elsewhere, but without result. Other attempts followed to kill or maim "the wop with the mop," as his enemies now referred to him. His friends exposed a plot to doctor his breakfast coffee with lye. On his way to the prison dentist one morning he was jumped and almost strangled before he broke his attacker's grip and floored him with a blow.

  The chief medical officer who treated Capone's various injuries, Dr.
George Hess, had formerly worked under Ossenfort at Atlanta and so knew the patient's aversion to a spinal puncture. He broached the subject again but did not press Capone when he recoiled. "Those sons of bitches!" Capone complained to Al Karpis, who had been transferred from Leavenworth in 1936 under a life sentence for kidnapping. "They told me they couldn't care less if that's what I wanted to die from." Yet he could not overcome his horror of the doctor's needle.

  Perhaps more than anything except sexual relief, the prisoners craved news of their old haunts and associates. Their only hope lay in the newcomers, and they would maneuver tirelessly to get close to them and befriend them. The problem, if they succeeded, was to hold a conversation out of earshot of the guards. The first Sunday Karpis appeared in the recreation yard an inmate approached him quietly. "My name is Frank Del Bono," he said. "Al would like to talk to you. He knows a lot of people you know. He'd like to talk to you if it won't put any heat on you."

  Karpis did not commit himself immediately. Before any involvement with Capone he wanted to find out how the Chicagoan stood in the eyes of other prisoners. He consulted those whom he considered the elite, a few of whom, like Doc Barker, had been his partners in bank robbery or kidnapping. "Everything I heard about Capone was good," he recalled after his release thirty-three years later. "The ones who hated him were mostly scum, white trash. I told Del Bono I'd talk to Al any time." During their initial encounter, sitting in the recreation yard, their backs to the cellhouse wall, Capone asked if he needed money. No, said Karpis, his people were taken care of. The kidnapper could play the guitar a little, and at Capone's suggestion he joined the band. They talked for the next few Sundays, as they bent their heads together over a music stand, pretending to study a score. Karpis was the first of several new arrivals who kept Capone abreast of developments in the underworld.