Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (38 page)

JOINED shortly by his wife and son, he spent his first Miami winter in a furnished bungalow on the beach, renting at $2,500 for the season. The absent owner, a Mrs. Sterns, had listed the property with a real estate agent and was appalled to learn that her tenant, "Al Brown," was Al Capone. She passed anxious weeks, wondering how much damage her home would suffer. It suffered none. The Capones left the place not only in impeccable condition, but enhanced by extra sets of china and silverware they had bought for large parties. A letter from Mae Capone urged the owner to accept them as gifts. In the cellar Mrs. Sterns found several unopened cases of wine, to which she was also invited to help herself. The only disagreeable surprise was a telephone bill for $780 in calls to Chicago. Soon after Mrs. Sterns received it, a Cunningham 16-cylinder Cadillac pulled into her drive, and out stepped a slender young woman, quietly dressed, her blond hair falling below her shoulders, her pearly skin lightly tinted by the Florida sun. "I'm Mrs. Capone," she said in a soft, low voice. The telephone bill had slipped her mind, she apologized, and she wanted to pay it without further delay. When Mrs. Sterns mentioned the charges, she handed her a $1,000 note. "Never mind the difference," she said. "We may have broken a few little things, but this should cover it."

In addition to the beach bungalow, Capone retained a suite on the top floor of the nine-story Hotel Ponce de Leon in downtown Miami to use for both business and pleasure. A close rapport developed between him and the lessee, a rolypoly young rip of twenty-four named Parker Henderson, Jr., whose late father had been mayor of Miami. Henderson, Jr.'s tastes ran to prizefights, horse races, dog races and the company of celebrities, no matter what their title to fame. To slap a Capone familiarly on the back, call him Snorky, shoot craps and drink with him, perhaps to share some dark, professional secret, was deeply satisfying to the mayor's son. He could not do enough for his top-floor tenant, and Capone rewarded him, as he did many people who pleased him, with a diamond-studded belt buckle.

When Capone needed cash, Henderson would happily lend himself to a scheme devised to confuse any officials interested in the gang lord's finances. From Chicago one of the Capone associates would send a Western Union money transfer to "Albert Costa," an alias adopted for the purpose. Henderson would then trot down to the Miami Western Union office, sign for the transfer, disguising his handwriting, cash it, and deliver the money to Capone. Between January and April, 1928, he collected $31,000 for him.

Miami was in two minds about the prospect of Capone as a resident. Publicly, nearly everybody viewed it with alarm. Privately, many businessmen hated to see all that money spent elsewhere. The economy of southern Florida was still reeling from the collapse of its postwar land boom. Mortgages so heavily encumbered real estate that foreclosure proceedings could cost more than they yielded. In the Miami-Palm Beach sector, moreover, the hurricane of September, 1926, had destroyed $100,000,000 worth of property and left 50,000 people homeless. For Miami's mayor, John Newton Lummus, Jr., the conflict of interests created by Capone was acutely painful. In his official capacity he could hardly ignore the protests of his own City Council, not to mention the Miami Daily News, which kept clamoring for Capone's expulsion. At the same time, as vice-president of Lummus & Young, realtors, he hoped to sell him a house.

Capone, shrewdly counting on the profit motive to prevail, made a public show of candor. He requested a meeting with Miami's chief of police, Leslie Quigg, to be followed by a press conference. "Let's lay the cards on the table," he said. "You know who I am and where I come from. I just want to ask a question. Do I stay or must I get out?" He had, he hastened to add, no intention of operating a gambling house or any other illicit business.

"You can stay as long as you behave yourself," said Quigg.

"I'll stay as long as I'm treated like a human being," said Capone.

He turned to the newspapermen. "Gentlemen, I'm at your service. I've been hounded and pushed around for days. It began when somebody heard I was in town. All I have to say is that I'm orderly. Talk about Chicago gang stuff is just bunk."

He launched into a eulogy of Miami calculated to enrapture its Chamber of Commerce. ". . . the garden of America, the sunny Italy of the new world, where life is good and abundant, where happiness is to be had even by the poorest. I am going to build or buy a home here and I believe many of my friends will also join me. Furthermore, if I am permitted, I will open a restaurant and if I am invited, I will join the Rotary Club."

Two days later, under the combined pressure of the City Council and the Daily News, the mayor and the city manager, C. A. Henshaw, enacted a little comedy. After a talk with Capone at City Hall, Lummus told the press: "Mr. Capone was one of the fairest men I have ever been in conference with. He was not ordered to leave Miami Beach, but he decided it would be to the best interests of all concerned if he left. It was a mutual agreement."

The city manager chimed in: "There was no argument or threat. Our conference was made up simply of statements of fact on both sides and Mr. Capone announced he was leaving immediately."

Capone stayed, continuing to divide his time between the Sterns bungalow and the Ponce de Leon, between the racetrack at Hialeah and the nightclubs. He took up golfing and tennis. A duffer at both games, he hated to lose and occasionally, in a temper tantrum, would smash his club or racket.

Henderson testified later: "Some real estate agents wanted me to get in touch with Mr. Capone in regard to selling him some property. I was closely connected with Mr. Newton Lummus and I asked him what he thought about it. Lummus said that if anybody sold Capone any property, he and I should try. So I asked Al if he was interested in buying any property and he said he was, in buying a winter home. So we made an appointment with him and carried him out and showed him several places. This place on Palm Island he seemed to like very much. . . ."

Palm Island, a man-made sausage-shaped sliver of residential real estate, lies in Biscayne Bay about midway between the mainland and the beach. The house at 93 Palm Avenue was built in 1922 by the St. Louis brewer Clarence M. Busch. At the time of Capone's initial inspection it belonged to a Miamian named James Popham. Legend has endowed it with the magnificence of a doge's palace, but as Miami pleasances went, it was only middling splendid. A two-story neo-Spanish structure of white stucco with a flat green-tiled roof, shaded by twelve royal palm trees, it stood in the center of a plot 300 by 100 feet. There were fourteen rooms and a long, wide, glass-enclosed sun porch. A gatehouse spanning the graveled driveway contained three rooms. Mosaic patios and walks rimmed both buildings. A dock on the north side could accommodate three or four sizable craft.

The price was $40,000. Capone gave Henderson $2,000 to put down as a binder, and not long after, he added $8,000, making up the first of four annual payments, exclusive of 8 percent interest. Henderson took title to the property in his own name, then deeded it to Mae Capone. When the Daily News exposed the transaction, both Capone and Lummus came under heavy attack. A citizens' indignation meeting demanded the mayor's resignation. At the insistence of the City Council a five-man police detail followed Capone wherever he went.

Yet Capone did not wholly lack influential connections. It was an election year. A Republican campaign worker, James Sewell, later recalled in a talk with a federal investigator: "I don't believe there was a politician in town who didn't solicit Capone's aid, his financial aid."

"Did you ever hear Capone say that he gave any of these local politicians money?" the investigator asked.

"Yes."

"Do you think Capone was financially interested in any candidate for the office of Solicitor?"

"I think he was interested in all of them."

"Were you in Capone's hotel when any of the local politicians who were running for office came in and asked for him or went to his room?"

"I've seen a lot of them around the hotel. . . . There were all kinds of people up there, Catholic priests on down, all of them. . . ."

Capone had not yet taken possession of the Palm Island estate when political developments in Chicago urgently required his presence.

In a violent prelude to the Republican primary elections for state and county offices-the Pineapple Primary-the first victims were Thompsonites. On the evening of January 27, ten weeks before the elections, the homes of the Thompson-appointed city controller, Charles C. Fitzmorris, and of Dr. William H. Reid, the commissioner of public service, were bombed within half an hour of each other. "This is a direct challenge from the lawless," declared His Honor. "When the fight is over, the challengers will be sorry." The warning passed unheeded. On February 11 another bomb damaged the home of State's Attorney Crowe's brother-in-law and secretary, Lawrence Cuneo. A week later a fourth bomb exploded in the Sbarbaro funeral parlor, where the bullet-torn remains of so many gangsters had been prepared for the last journey. Thanks largely to Thompson's endorsement, Sbarbaro himself now sat on the Municipal Court.

Senator Deneen's choice to replace Crowe as state's attorney was Circuit Judge John A. Swanson, and the senator's great admirer, Joe Esposito, had promised to help by running again for Republican ward committeeman. On the morning of March 21, with the primary three weeks away, Diamond Joe received a threat by telephone: "Get out of town or get killed." Later in the morning two Capone lieutenants dropped into the Bella Napoli Cafe and repeated the message. Diamond Joe's associates begged him to yield, but he told them he must keep his word to the senator. Late that evening he left the Esposito National Republican Club and started for home, a short stroll, flanked by his bodyguards, the Varchetti brothers, Ralph and Joe. His wife, Carmela, and their three children were watching for him at a window. As he came within sight, an automobile carrying three men approached him from behind. Moving slowly abreast of their prey, they opened fire with two double-barreled shotguns and a revolver, tossed the weapons out of the car and, picking up speed, vanished around the corner. The Varchettis had dropped to the sidewalk in time, but Diamond Joe lay dying, blood gushing from many bullet holes. Carmela rushed to his side, shrieking, "Is it you, Giuseppe?" She turned to her horror-stricken neighbors. "I'll kill them for this!"

Despite their vows of vengeance, neither widow nor bodyguards identified any of the killers. They failed to furnish a single clue. Nobody was ever arrested for the murder of Diamond Joe Esposito.

The funeral was attended by a constellation of political nabobs, foremost among them Senator Deneen. The next day violence flared up anew. A charge of dynamite wrecked the front of the senator's three-story Chicago residence, and judge Swanson, turning his car into his drive late that night, narrowly escaped the full blast of a bomb hurled from a passing car.

A black-humored columnist lapsed into parody:

Deneen mouthed the obvious: "The criminal element is trying to dominate Chicago by setting up a dictatorship in politics." Said Judge Swanson: "The pineapple industry grew up under his administration." Fearing more bombings at the primary polls, a federal marshal asked the U.S. Attorney General to commission 500 more marshals for special guard duty. Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska urged President Coolidge to withdraw marines from Nicaragua, where they were fighting anti-American guerrillas, and transfer them to Chicago. Both requests were rejected.

Mayor Thompson seconded an accusation by Crowe so cynical as to alienate many of their own supporters. "I am satisfied," Crowe said, "that the bombings were done by leaders in the Deneen forces . . . to discredit Mayor Thompson and myself. They realize they are hopelessly defeated and in a desperate attempt to overcome their tide of defeat they are resorting to these dangerous tactics." The Chicago Crime Commission, until then partial to Crowe, issued an open letter to voters, denouncing him as "inefficient and unworthy of his great responsibility to maintain law and order in Cook County" and demanding his ouster.