The mass-grave mystery will probably remain unsolved forever.
People and politics do not change. Miami’s first police chief was charged with murder, acquitted and reinstated.
Then, of course, there was Scarface.
Feeling the need to escape the high stress of mob business and blustery Chicago winters for fun in the sun, Al Capone found himself a Miami Beach retreat. The house on Palm Island had been built by Clarence M. Busch, of the Anheuser-Busch brewing dynasty. Capone bought it for $40,000 in 1928 through a “dummy,” so residents would not know that their new neighbor was America’s most notorious mobster. He installed more than $200,000 in improvements. A wharf was built for his yacht and a tropical garden planted, with a dozen royal palms. He paid $85,000 for the swimming pool alone, the first in Miami Beach with a filtration system adaptable to fresh or salt water. His cabanas were two-story, Venetian style.
The owner’s name leaked out fast. Florida authorities and his wealthy neighbors were outraged.
The Capone story was written in bullets and booze.
Bullets cleared his way to the top. Mobsters dropped like flies, cut down from speeding cars. Saloons were sprayed by gunfire. A crusading prosecutor who dared to question Capone about a murder was machine-gunned from a passing car in Cicero, Illinois. Witnesses who saw Capone wield the weapon soon lost their memories. He was never charged.
His reputation grew, and he loved the power as much as he loved money. Arrested for violating the National Prohibition Act, Scarface was released the next day—with apologies. Arrested for a gangster’s murder, he had the charges dropped within the hour. When the mayor of Cicero questioned Capone’s authority, Scarface kicked His Honor down the front steps of City Hall.
Capone seemed to lead a charmed life. A dozen attempts to kill him failed; he seemed invincible. He wrote his own laws with a “Chicago typewriter”—a portable machine gun.
Florida Governor Doyle Carlton issued an edict to the sheriffs of all sixty-seven Florida counties: Send Capone a message. He is unwelcome. Arrest him on sight.
Summoned to the county solicitor’s office, Capone and his attorney were told he was to get out of Miami and stay out. Capone refused. He was in Miami to stay, he announced. If pushed, he would take his case to the Supreme Court of the United States.
A lavish spender and big tipper, Capone became a local celebrity. Despite anti-Capone crusades in newspaper editorials, Miamians not only accepted Scarface but applauded when he strutted into a courtroom. The same spectators hissed the mayor and other local officials who sought to banish him, a level of respect Miamians display for their leaders today.
Capone won a federal injunction halting action against him by Florida officials. He sent them a message: Even mobsters have constitutional rights.
“I have no interest in politics, neither in Chicago nor Miami,” he told a reporter, while puffing on a fat cigar. “I am here for a rest, which I think I deserve. I have done nothing in violation of the law in Miami and will not. All I wish is to be left alone and enjoy the home I have purchased here.”
Then he took his young son Alphonse for a speedboat tour of sparkling Biscayne Bay.
Scarface became a flashy habitué of Miami nightclubs, racetracks and prize fights. His houseguests included Chicago aldermen, mobsters and crime reporters.
Big Al often hired a local seaplane pilot to fly him and his entourage to Bimini for private beach parties. Former war ace Eddie Nirmaier charged $150 for the flight, and Capone always tipped another hundred. The picnickers would eat salami sandwiches, drink beer and then return, skimming low over the brilliant blue water.
One chilly night Capone and his cohorts visited a Miami theater, eager to see the new James Cagney gangster movie. High-kicking chorus cuties performed in a stage show first. In the finale, they tugged on a long rope. The end of the rope finally appeared, tied around the neck of a small monkey. The performing monkey wore a sign: AL CAPONE.
Scarface and five companions rose quietly from their balcony seats and strolled into the lobby. Capone introduced himself to the manager, then flattened the man with an old-fashioned haymaker that smashed his nose.
Capone and his friends returned to their seats to watch the movie mobster. The bloodied manager summoned police. The officers pondered the situation, then warned him to stop making trouble or they would shut down his theater.
Scarface was conspicuously in residence at Miami Beach on February 14, 1929. He hosted a huge party that night for politicians, members of the press and local businessmen. The butler wore a shoulder holster; so did the very burly waiters. Two men armed with rifles greeted the guests, who were scrutinized closely by gunmen who even trailed them to the bathroom and waited outside the door. Machine guns were stored neatly under tarpaulins by the pool.
Seated near a table laden with food, Capone waved to arriving guests, then instructed his gunsels, “Geddem champagne.”
None of the guests knew why he was celebrating—until later.
Men in police uniforms had raided a garage in wintry Chicago on that St. Valentine’s Day in 1929. Police often conducted such raids, mostly for appearances’ sake. Seven men who worked for Bugs Moran, Capone’s archrival, were lined up against the wall, expecting at worst a night in jail. Too late they realized the uniforms were a ruse. The phony cops opened fire with machine guns. The real cops arrived later to count the bodies. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre became America’s most publicized mass murder.
When a newsman who had attended Capone’s party returned to ask questions about the massacre, Al looked perplexed and shook his head, saying, “The only man who kills like that is Bugs Moran.”
Nobody believed him, but Capone did not let the bloody events in Chicago spoil his fun in the sun. He and his friends planned to attend the Sharkey-Stribling fight at Miami Beach on February 27. He had promised fight tickets to Eddie Nirmaier, but Big Al had other matters on his mind. The day before the fight the pilot had not received his tickets.
“I had a quantity of fireworks bombs,” Nirmaier told a Miami Herald writer years later. “So I flew over Capone’s house, triggered the fuse and tossed a bomb out of the plane. There was one hell of an explosion—in the air of course—and you’ve never seen so many mugs in your life. They all ran out of the house with their pistols in their hands. I thought for a moment they would start shooting at me.”
He buzzed the house again, to drop a paper parachute with a note asking where his fight tickets were. “By the time I got back to the dock and got out of my plane, Capone’s chauffeur was driving up with my tickets.”
The prank only served to further unnerve Capone’s swanky neighbors, already irate about gangsters conducting machinegun practice off the dock in the cool of the evening.
Refreshed from his Miami stay, Big Al returned to Chicago. During a lavish dinner party, he flew into a rage, ranted that three of his guests were disloyal, picked up a baseball bat and bashed in their skulls.
Still it seemed he could never be beaten. When Capone, loudmouthed and imperious, was finally toppled, it was not by bombs or bullets: Pencil pushers brought him down, government crime busters with adding machines, not machine guns. At first he failed to take the tax charges seriously, not even bothering to show up for court. He went to the racetrack instead.
Shortly before his 1931 trial, Capone summoned a tailor. He ordered two new lightweight suits for Miami’s subtropical climate. “You don’t need to be ordering fancy duds,” a cohort snorted. “Why don’t you have a suit made with stripes? You’re going to prison.”
“The hell I am,” Capone replied. “I’m going to Florida for a nice long rest, and I need some new clothes before I go.”
Capone was wrong. His nice long rest was for eight years—behind bars. By the time he saw Miami again, the suits no longer fit.
Expecting a slap on the wrist, Capone swaggered into court fat and smug. The judge socked him with an eleven-year sentence.
His twelve-year-old son, his mother, wife, brother and sister, all saw him off to federal prison in Atlanta. He posed cheerfully for photographers and boarded the train. That was May 1932. He was thirty-three years old.
The former crime czar was soon transferred to a new island home, Alcatraz, and served seven and a half years before being released on parole.
The news swept Miami Beach: Al Capone, the city’s most notorious snowbird, was coming home. His lavish island mansion was groomed and ready, newly painted and ablaze with lights that November of 1939. Reporters clustered at the barred gates and crowded sightseeing boats circled like sharks, hoping for a glimpse of the resident who made the city the least proud.
Rumors of Capone’s arrival in Miami Beach proved premature. Hours after his release, he was admitted to a Baltimore hospital.
Capone’s wife, Mae, pleaded with hospital personnel to “avoid publicity.” His brother blamed Big Al’s illness on “his confinement in prison.” Stories spread that the mobster had gone stir crazy. Gangland friends who visited called him “as crazy as a bedbug.” Truth was that the mobster was undergoing treatment for paresis, a brain-destroying disease caused by syphilis. The first symptoms, confusion and slurred speech, had surfaced in prison. His Maryland doctor was the nation’s foremost “syphilologist.”
Years earlier, a teenage mistress had been diagnosed as syphilitic, and Capone was advised to take a blood test, but the mobster hated needles.
Capone celebrated Christmas 1939 in his hospital room, with his family and a gaily decorated tree. The patient who spent his time playing dominoes scarcely resembled the Chicago liquor king who had enjoyed a million-dollar-a-year income and ruled a mob of seven hundred.
Capone remained in Baltimore for medical treatment and did not return to Miami Beach until March 20, 1940.
Several appearances that summer fueled rumors that he was recovering. He and a party of friends strolled into a Miami Beach nightclub one evening, took a remote table, listened to the orchestra and left quietly, well before midnight. A few nights later Capone and his wife dined at a bayfront restaurant as a bodyguard watched from the bar.
The outings were a test, his doctor said later. The patient was never alone. Scarface sometimes stepped out of his car, but only to walk into a corner drugstore. “He liked to go in and buy chewing gum and Sen-Sen,” his doctor said. “He likes to chew Sen-Sen.” Soon even those excursions ended, and Capone was confined to his estate, where he endlessly practiced his golf swing, swam in the pool, lolled on the patio in the sun and fished from a pier. Never mentioned were the days when he was the storm center of mob wars that had cost more than one thousand lives.
“He seems to have a blank memory about that phase of his life,” the doctor said. Soon Capone’s only physical activity was batting a tennis ball against a wall, and that was on his good days. On the days he attempted gin rummy, family members and servants always let him win. A visitor from Chicago, unaware that he was supposed to lose, bested Al at gin. Capone flew into a rage. “Get the boys!” he shouted. “I want them to take care of this wise guy.”
Other gangland friends dropped by, but Scarface barely recognized his old henchmen. His memory hazy at best, he was safe at last from mortal enemies. As far as the underworld was concerned, Al Capone had been dead a long time.
The public learned the truth when a Chicago man created a furor by accusing Capone of a plot to kill him and seize his business. With family permission, the mobster’s doctors revealed to the press that Capone now had the mind of a child.
“When he first came to my attention, a large part of his brain had been destroyed,” his Baltimore doctor said. “He hasn’t sufficient intelligence to run his own life, much less the affairs of a vast crime syndicate.”
In those days, much of Miami Beach shuttered in the summer. Even police officers were laid off during the slow season and called back to work in the fall.
Rookie cop Emery Zerick was a policeman without work that summer of 1946. He went to the Capone estate for a job. “They had lots of complaints about too many sightseeing boats and too many cars going by looking for Al Capone.”
Big Al’s brother Ralph paid off-duty cops good money: fifteen dollars for a twelve-hour day.
By then the world’s most notorious mobster drooled and babbled unintelligibly. “During the day they would wheel him to the end of the dock and put a fishing pole in his hand,” Zerick recalled. “When a sightseeing boat showed up, we had to rush him back inside. He weighed very little, he had shrunken.”
Zerick guarded the front gate, equipped with a telephone. He connected visitors to Ralph, then discreetly stepped away. Ralph would give authorized visitors a signal to give the young cop at the gate. The signal was changed daily.
Zerick learned to ask no names, but recognized Meyer Lansky, a “fast walker who used to bounce when he walked,” as well as Tony Accardo, Jimmy Doyle, Joe Fischetti and Joe Massei.
Capone’s health worsened and a death watch began, with reporters and underworld cronies on alert. Scarface would rally, then slip away. “A bunch of black cars would show up every time he had a relapse,” Zerick said. Gangland visitors always slipped twenty- and thirty-dollar tips to the young cop who admitted them. “Every time he had a relapse I would make three or four hundred dollars. There used to be a plaster statue of a saint in the yard, and as they went inside, they all used to bless themselves.”
By January 1947, the end was clearly near. Scarface observed his last birthday on Friday the seventeenth. He was forty-eight. Four days later he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. After fourteen hours in a coma, he rallied again. Capone’s doctor emerged with an update at ten P.M.: The patient, though critical, would probably survive the night. The mansion remained brightly lit.
The next day, Saturday, January 25, 1947, Zerick was at the Palm Island estate, moonlighting after being recalled to the police department. Capone seemed stronger, but pneumonia had set in. “Ralph said he was having a relapse. Everybody was in an uproar. He was barely breathing.” Two priests administered last rites.
Capone’s heart stopped at 7:25 P.M.
“They came downstairs and said he was dead,” Zerick recalled. “The wife took it hard. Ralph was blubbering. There was a leak in that place, there was a screech of cars, it seemed like a million reporters. They knew right away. I never figured out how.”
A block-long line of sleek black limousines parked outside. “The hoods, all of them, showed up, making the sign of the cross and paying respects to the widow.”
Tourists and curious spectators formed a promenade along the sidewalk, a regatta of rubbernecks, clustering in groups.
The Capone story did not end with his death. Hollywood has kept him alive. No hoodlum has fascinated filmmakers more. “Nobody thought this would happen,” Zerick said. “Nobody ever thought the Capone story would get bigger and bigger as time goes by.”
Al “Sonny” Capone, the sad little boy banished from a Miami Beach Boy Scout troop when outraged parents learned his name, saw his children shunned and tormented when The Untouchables became popular on television. He and his mother sued in 1959, for invasion of privacy; they lost. Sonny, a Miami dock worker, changed his name and moved to an undisclosed address.
A Delta Airlines pilot and his wife now live in the home on Palm Island. Neighbors still wince, generations later, as guides on sightseeing boats point out the house where Scarface died.
Nothing is new under the Miami sun, only the players.
8
Christmas In Miami
A Christmas card arrived at the Herald a week before the holiday: Santa and a reindeer. “We liked your book,” said the note inside, written in shaky ballpoint script.
We went to the book fair and liked the panel discussion … Also talked with some of the authors and got some autographs! T. D. Allman was wonderful, so sincere and honest when he autographed our copy of the book Miami. And David Rieff mentioned that it was
very tiresome writing Going to Miami. We stopped by the Herald for you to autograph our copy of your book, but you had not come in that morning, or afternoon. When the movie of your book comes out, we will see it.
The address was deep South Beach, south of Fifth Street.
I parked in front of their small condo on a Sunday afternoon, four days before Christmas. How surprised they will be, I thought, when I knock on their door and say I came to sign my book. I smiled, imagining their astonished faces.
Wrong again. They were not surprised.
It is not easy to surprise people who have seen everything.
No answer. I thought no one was home. I knocked again and was about to leave when a small blue-eyed man with graying hair and the stubble of a beard cracked open the door. He wore a T-shirt and wrinkled trousers. He regarded me thoughtfully. “You’re Edna Buchanan,” he announced, his voice matter-of-fact. “I’ll get your book.”
His wife stood behind him. Behind her I could see the small room, crowded with the possessions of a lifetime. They both stepped outside to chat.
He apologized for not shaving and explained. He had been robbed on the street, once at gunpoint. If he shaved and dressed neatly, his chances of being a target would be far greater. “When I dress like this, they leave me alone.” His wife wore a San Francisco T-shirt and simple slacks. She no longer carries a purse, for the same reasons. That is also why they have not had their old Volkswagen repainted. Their last car was stolen. They have learned that the only way to keep anything is to look like you have nothing. They have lived in Miami Beach since 1955, and they have learned to be survivors. He worked in a fashionable shop on Lincoln Road Mall, but the shop is no longer there, and Lincoln Road is no longer fashionable. They saw all the changes. I signed the book and handed it back to him.
Never Let Them See You Cry Page 13
