Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone

by John Kobler

  Capone learned that Machine Gun Jack McGurn was dead, killed in a bowling alley before a score of witnesses by two unidentified men. They killed him with machine guns on the eve of St. Valentine's Day, 1936, and left a comic valentine beside the body. It showed a couple who had literally lost their shirts, gazing dolefully at a signSALE OF HOUSEHOLD GOODS. The accompanying jingle described the state of McGurn's affairs at his death:

  The organization that Capone built was still largely intact and moving into ever broader spheres. Jake Guzik, released from Leavenworth in 1935, and Ralph Capone had picked up where they left off as, respectively, general business manager and director of gambling and vice. Mitzi Capone was handling horse bets at a new Cicero dive, the Hi Ho Club, and also acting as contact man for loan sharks. Phil D'Andrea had succeeded to the presidency of the Italo-American National Union. With Guzik, Willie Bioff and others he had infiltrated the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Operators, through which they extorted millions of dollars from the Hollywood studios by threatening labor trouble. Tony Accardo and Paul Ricca, but yesterday lowly Capone foot soldiers, were forging ahead fast as important Mafiosi. A new Cook County sheriff, John Toman, admitted the resurgence of the Caponeites. "But what can I do with only thirty-two-and-a-third deputies [sic] on a shift, and more than 400 square miles to cover?"

  The news that Capone was allowed to receive from his family in the fall of 1936 chiefly concerned his wife's struggles to retain the Palm Island house. After payment of the trial lawyers' fees and part of the fines, court costs and taxes owed, her capital was meager. "Ralph is taking care of Mae's case," Mafalda wrote on October 31, "so, please, dear, relax." Ralph himself wrote two days later, following a visit to Alcatraz by Mae and Matt Capone.

  ... of course they didn't bring very good news but they didn't bring bad. The bad that I am referring to is the sale of the house in Florida. We had them beat until they served notice on Mae as transferee and we would have beat them only for the fact that when Mae was originally assessed in 1931, she did not protest the assessments. The law provides that the assessment must be protested within ninety days or lose the right to a hearing . . . she spoke to Ahern about it and he said not to pay any attention to it, so when she was named as transferee and a lien was placed on the place, the attorneys . . . discovered the unprotested assignment of 1931, so in spite of our efforts the place was advertised for sale. .. . I am sorry this had to be the final outcome of everything, but we did our best and it is all due to another mistake on the part of your attorneys.

  But it was not the final outcome. On the tenth Ralph wrote:

  Well you need have no more worries about the Florida home. I paid the whole thing in Jacksonville, last Saturday, the total amount was $52,103.30. We have obtained a complete release and there is no further claims against the home by the Gov. I obtained a mortgage on the house for $35,000. . . . I managed to borrow enough to make up the difference.

  ... everything points to a big season in Miami, in fact there are several tourists here now and they built 37 new hotels in the past six months. . . . Mae just arrived from Chicago. . . .

  Among the first duties James Bennett set himself, after he succeeded Bates, was a tour of the prisons as an ombudsman. Upon arrival he would announce his willingness to interview any prisoner with a complaint. At Alcatraz a resentful Warden Johnston had a desk placed for him in a chilly, dim-lit corner of the cell house. Throughout each interview a guard stood facing the prisoner, pointing a rifle at his chest. "When I protested . . . ," Bennett wrote, "he explained that these were the most desperate men in the world . . . and they might regard it as an accomplishment to assault the prison director."

  One of the first prisoners brought to Bennett was Capone. "I'm getting along all right," he said. "Capone can take care of himself. But I shouldn't be here. I'm here because of my reputation, because there's such a misunderstanding about me. People don't know the things I've done to be helpful." And once again he recounted his services to Colonel McCormick as a peacemaker in the newsboys' strike. If Bennett would remain on the island for two weeks, Capone offered, he would reveal to him everything he knew about the underworld, "and I'll throw in the movie rights." Bennett declined with a twinge of regret.

  The mutiny that year, in September, nearly cost Johnston his life. When a majority of the prisoners (not including Capone) refused to work unless they could choose their workshop, the warden gave them a simple choice-unconditional obedience or starvation. About two-thirds of them soon resumed their tasks, while 100 remained locked in their cells a while longer. From the outset of his administration Johnston had observed a perilous custom because of its psychological value. At the end of each meal he would wait by the exit, alone and unarmed, with his back to the prisoners until the last man had marched out. On this occasion Barton "Whitey" Phillips, a young bank robber serving a life term, did not march out. As he passed close to Johnston, he felled him with a right fist to his jaw, and before the guards could reach the spot, stamped on his chest and head. Johnston survived, minus some teeth, but the beating Phillips took, followed by weeks in the Hole, left him a spiritless hulk.

  In late January, 1938, his fourth year on Alcatraz, Capone received a visit from a familiar figure and one unknown to him. Special Agent Sullivan and Assistant U.S. Attorney Seymour Klein from the New York district had obtained permission to question him about Torrio.

  A side effect of Capone's conviction, along with those of Druggan, Lake, Guzik, et al., had been a rush of gangsters to the tax collector to pay up before disaster overtook them, too. The lesson, however, did not impress itself upon them indelibly. Before long many of them, aided by accountants and lawyers, concocted what they imagined to be unbeatable schemes to conceal income. The normally sagacious Torrio adopted such a scheme after Repeal. Labyrinthine in detail, it was simple enough in essence. He would declare only a small fraction of his income; the bulk of it he would invest through dummy partners in a legitimate New York wholesale liquor firm.

  Sullivan and Klein were the first visitors ever allowed near an Alcatraz prisoner without supervision. At the start of the afternoon work period guards admitted them to Capone's cell, brought him back from his work, and, locking the cell door, left the trio alone. Klein, a little man, grew increasingly apprehensive as the massive Capone, with his notoriously hot temper, paced the cell, and he kept as far away from him as possible, letting Sullivan conduct the interview. Capone talked. In his hunger for communication, he talked all that afternoon and the next. He philosophized. He reminisced. He reviewed his entire career from school days in Brooklyn to his conviction. He mentioned Torrio frequently ("I carried a gun for him; I'd go the limit for him"). He couldn't forgive him for his partnership with Dutch Schultz (since murdered by Luciano's order), but neither could he betray him. He responded to Sullivan's probing with generalities. Torrio made his money the same way Capone did; he'd been in the rackets twenty years longer-nothing usable as courtroom evidence. The investigators returned East emptyhanded.

  Another year elapsed before Torrio stood trial, charged with evading taxes of $86,000 for the years 1933-35. The brilliant Max Steuer defended him and suffered one of his rare defeats. Midway through the trial Torrio changed his plea to guilty. He went to Leavenworth for two and a half years.

  When the guards decided that the weather was cold enough for the prisoners to wear their pea jackets, they so indicated with three blasts of a whistle. February 5, 1938, dawned unseasonably warm, and no whistle blew. Capone nevertheless put on his pea jacket. For a year he had been on library duty, delivering and collecting books and magazines. Al Karpis, who occupied the second cell to the left of his and so always followed him in the line to the mess hall, had a magazine to return, and he tossed it into Capone's cell as he passed it. Seeing Capone still there, wearing full winter garb, including a cap and cotton work gloves, he called to him: "No jacket today." Capone seemed neither to hear nor to recognize him but stood staring
vacantly ahead.

  He failed to fall into line when ordered, a breach of discipline ordinarily punishable by removal to the Hole, but the guards, sensing something seriously wrong, watched without disturbing him. He finally left his cell and entered the mess hall last in line. A thread of spittle glistened on his chin. As he moved mechanically toward the steam table, a deputy warden, Ernest Miller, spoke to him quietly and patted his arm. Capone pointed meaninglessly out the window. He started to retch. Miller led him to a locked gate across the hall and called to the guard on the other side to unlock it. They helped Capone up a flight of stairs ending at the hospital door.

  To Dr. Hess and to the consultant psychiatrist he sent for, Dr. Edward Twitchell, Capone's symptoms suggested the damage to the central nervous system characteristic of advanced syphilis. When Capone, in a return of lucidity, understood this, he raised no more objections to a spinal puncture, and the fluid was rushed to the Marine Hospital in San Francisco for analysis. Warden Johnston, stopping by Capone's bedside, asked him: "What happened to you this morning?" "I dunno, Warden," Capone replied. "They tell me I acted like I was a little wacky."

  The report from the Marine Hospital confirmed the doctors' diagnosis. Word of it reached the press, and front-page stories from coast to coast pictured Capone as a prisoner driven insane by the horrors of Alcatraz. Mae Capone telephoned Johnston, imploring him to free her husband, an act of clemency beyond his power. Capone was not seen again in the cell blocks or the mess hall. He spent the remaining year of his ten-year sentence (reduced to six years and five months for good behavior plus working credits) in the hospital ward, subjected to injections of arsphenamine, shock treatment and induced fever. The progress of the disease was retarded but not arrested. He alternated between periods of lucidity and confusion.

  His last day on Alcatraz was January 6, 1939. For the misdemeanor of failing to file a tax return, he owed another year, reducible by good behavior to about ten months. In view of his deterioration, it was decided not to drag him halfway across the country and return him to Cook County jail, as judge Wilkerson originally decreed, but to let him serve the sentence in the newly opened Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island near Los Angeles. Deputy Warden Miller and three armed guards took him there by launch, train and automobile, with six weights added to his leg irons, a somewhat superfluous precaution, since he was partially paralyzed.

  One Sunday the Harbor Region Ministerial Committee sent the Reverend Silas A. Thweat to Terminal Island to conduct a church service. "Do you feel the need of prayer?" the minister asked the seventy-five inmates who attended. Among the first to raise his hand was Capone. "Are any of you here feeling the need of a savior? If so, stand up before your fellows and confess the fact." Capone stood up.

  The following November, after the last of the fines imposed by Judge Wilkerson had been paid through a Chicago gang lawyer, Capone was transferred to the U.S. penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The day he arrived, November 16, Ralph and Mae Capone called for him and drove him to Baltimore's Union Memorial Hospital. Until spring he lived with Mae in Baltimore as an outpatient of the hospital under the care of Dr. Joseph Moore, a Johns Hopkins syphilologist.

  In Chicago, reporters asked Jake Guzik if Capone was likely to return and take command again. "Al," he replied in language harsher than he intended, for his loyalty had never wavered, "is nutty as a fruitcake."

  IMAGINARY killers haunted him. The sight of an automobile, especially an automobile carrying men, would throw him into a panic. Only his own Pontiac and Sonny's Chevrolet were allowed beyond the gates. Ralph, moreover, had cautioned Mae against letting any outsiders near Al lest, in his befogged mental state, he babble about the organization.

  The permanent household comprised, in addition to Sonny and his parents, Mae's sister, Muriel, and her husband, Louis Clark"Uncle Louie"-and an aged but alert fox terrier who barked furiously at the approach of any stranger. The two Negro servants, "Brownie" Brown, cook and general utility man, and Rose, the maid, lived off the premises. Once a fortnight Steve from Steve's Barber Shop in the Grand Hotel, a Miami hangout of racketeers and gamblers, came to cut Capone's hair. Mae's brother, Danny, with his wife, Winifred, operated two establishments frequented by resident and visiting gangsters, Winnie's Waffle Shop and Winnie's Little Club, which between them grossed $500 to $700 a day. Danny Coughlin was also the business agent for the Miami Bartenders' and Waiters' Union.

  At least four times a week Mae attended Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Miami Beach. Capone never accompanied her, not wanting, as he explained, to embarrass the pastor, Monsignor William Barry. Sonny had gone to the private preparatory school run by the monsignor, who took a special interest in the shy, semideaf boy, trying to cultivate in him qualities that would help him rise above the stigma of his name. In 1937 Sonny had entered Notre Dame under his father's alias, Al Brown. He withdrew after freshman year, when his identity became known. He was now working toward a BS degree in business administration at the University of Miami.

  Probably because Capone slept badly, the household kept strange hours, retiring at 10 P.M. and beginning to stir by 3 A.M. They spent most of the day around the pool. Capone, wearing pajamas and dressing gown, would sit for hours on the dock, smoking cigars, chewing Sen-Sen, and holding a fishing rod. Occasionally he would bat a tennis ball over a net stretched across the lawn. He hated solitude and always wanted many people around him, provided he recognized them as trusty old friends. He had grown obese and partly bald. He enjoyed gin rummy and pinochle; but the mental effort often proved too much for him, and the friends he played with would let him win. Once when an opponent forgot himself and scored a victory, Capone cried: "Get the boys. I want this wise guy taken care of."

  In 1940 the family received astonishing news. They heard from the firstborn Capone brother, Jim, who had disappeared thirty-five years before. He was living in the town of Homer, Nebraska, under his legally adopted name of Richard James Hart. Broke, missing one eye, with a wife and children to support, he had written to Ralph, appealing for help. Ralph sent him $250 and had him come to Racap Lodge, his country place at Mercer, Wisconsin. Jim then stayed a month with Al in Miami. After he returned to Homer, Ralph sent him a check nearly every month.

  According to the account he gave of himself, the long-lost James Capone had devoted most of his career to law enforcement. "TwoGun Hart," he said the Nebraskans dubbed him because he carried a gun strapped to each hip and with either hand could shoot the cap off a beer bottle at a hundred feet. He lost an eye, he explained, in a gunfight with gangsters.

  It was a story the newspapers later found irresistible and published without reservations-the white sheep of a black herd. The truth, however, as uncovered by government agents, who had occasion to look into Hart-Capone's activities, differed.

  After running away from his boyhood home in Brooklyn, he had joined a circus as a roustabout and traveled with it all over the United States and Central America. In 1919 he dropped off a freight train passing through Homer and decided to settle there. He set up shop as a painter and paperhanger but proved too inexpert to prosper at it. He became friendly with a grocer named Winch and his daughter, Kathleen, whose lives he had saved in a flash flood. He told them he came from Oklahoma, left home in his early teens, worked on a railroad gang until he accidentally killed a man in a fight, and fled to Nebraska. During the World War, he said, he fought overseas. On the basis of this claim the local American Legion Post elected him commander. Toward the end of 1919 he married Kathleen Winch. They had four sons.

  For two years Hart served as Homer's town marshal, then for a year as a state sheriff. In 1922 he became a special officer for the Indian Service, investigating the sales of liquor to the Winnebago and Omaha tribes, among whom he earned a reputation for brutality. Transferred to Sioux City, Iowa, he was arrested for the murder of an Indian in a saloon brawl. The victim, it appeared, had been a bootlegger, and Hart went free. The victim's relatives waylaid him,
and it was in this melee that he lost an eye. Transferred to Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, he was charged with a second murder but never tried.

  Reappointed town marshal of Homer, he was entrusted with the keys to various stores so that he could enter them, if necessary, when patrolling the town at night. The owners began to miss all kinds of merchandise. The marshal's own father-in-law found his stocks of canned goods mysteriously depleted. Hart was eventually relieved of both keys and his marshal's badge. As an American Legion commander he had often traveled to conventions, but when the local legionnaires finally thought to ask him for proof of his war service and he could produce none, they expelled him. Evicted from one house after the other for nonpayment of rent, the family went on relief. Not until Richard Hart came back from Miami did he tell his wife that he was Al Capone's oldest brother.

  For once, on December 30, 1941, Capone overcame his reluctance to go to church. He went to St. Patrick's to witness his son's marriage to Diana Ruth Casey, a girl Sonny had first met in high school. The best man was his cousin, Ralph, Jr. After the honeymoon, the newly weds lived on Northeast Tenth Avenue. Sonny had opened a florist shop the preceding September. During World War II, he was classified 4-F because of his defective hearing. He volunteered for civilian employment with the War Department and was assigned to the Miami Air Depot as a mechanic's learner. His wife bore him four children, all girls, on whom their grandfather doted, constantly giving them expensive toys and playing with them inexhaustibly in the Palm Island swimming pool. Sonny once said, mixing up folk heroes: "I want my father to be remembered as a kind of Jesse James who took from the rich and gave to the poor."