Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (55 page)

IN 1930 Chicago's Medill School of journalism polled its students as to whom they considered the year's ten "outstanding personages of the world . . . the characters that actually made history." The majority vote went to Benito Mussolini, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, George Bernard Shaw, Bobby Jones, President Hoover, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford and Alphonse Capone.

Professor Walter B. Pitkin of Columbia, publicizing his book The Psychology of Achievement, told a reporter: "Al Capone has achieved much more than Charles Evans Hughes simply because Hughes was so inherently brilliant that his rise to the heights in law was so much child's play to him. Of course, in measuring achievement morality is not being taken into consideration."

Neither the Secret Six nor the federal authorities, neither the Chicago Crime Commission's Public Enemy listing nor the philippics of Judge Lyle ("He deserves to die . . . a reptile") had eroded the popular image of Capone as folk hero. Ordinary citizens throughout the country tended to accept his own estimation of his activities. "I'm a public benefactor. . . . You can't cure thirst by law. They call Capone a bootlegger. Yes. It's bootleg while it's on the trucks, but when your host at the club, in the locker room or on the Gold Coast hands it to you on a silver platter, it's hospitality. What's Al done, then? He's supplied a legitimate demand. Some call it bootleg ging. Some call it racketeering. I call it a business. They say I violate the prohibition law. Who doesn't?"

At the Charlestown, Indiana, racetrack thousands stood and cheered Capone when he appeared with his bodyguards, waving his clasped hands above his head like a prizefighter entering the ring. U.S. Attorney Johnson was appalled during the American Derby at Washington Park to hear the band strike up "This Is a Lonesome Town When You're Not Around" as Capone, a sunburst in yellow suit and yellow tie, took his seat and to see droves of race fans rush forward, eager to shake his hand. Capone had reserved a box for himself, his family and guests and a second box adjoining it for his bodyguards. His guest of honor on this occasion was the widow of the British heavyweight champion Bob Fitzsimmons. On another occasion, a Cubs baseball game at Wrigley Field, it was State Senator (later U.S. Congressman) Roland V. Libonati. A news photographer snapped him in smiling converse with the gang lord and Jack McGurn. "I was very proud when he asked me to speak to his son," was Libonati's stock apologia in after years. "I would still be proud to speak to any man's son."

During a football game between Northwestern and Nebraska universities Evanston's Dyche Stadium resounded with cries of "Yea, Al!" They arose from a Boy Scout troop with which Capone had supplied a ticket for every member. Among the other spectators approbation was not unanimous. When Capone, wearing a purple suit, lavender shirt and white fedora, left with McGurn after the third quarter, a crowd of about 400 undergraduates followed him to the gate, booing. McGurn paused long enough to turn and snarl at them. Then triggerman and boss took to their heels. In the next issue of the student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, the editor wrote under the headline GET THIS, CAPONE: "You are not wanted at Dyche Stadium nor at Soldier Field when Northwestern is host. You are not getting away w;th anything and you are only impressing a moronic few who don't matter anyway."

It was to a Chicago reeling under the full impact of the Depression that Capone had returned from Florida in the fall of 1930. No major American city suffered more, for the nationwide economic disaster was here compounded by the prodigality of the third Thompson administration. That year it squandered $23,000,000 above what it could collect in taxes. Outraged citizens organized a tax strike. Fif teen hundred municipal employees, among them teachers, firemen and policemen, had to be dropped from the payrolls, and those kept on went weeks without pay. To make work for its unemployed members, the Chicago Typographical Union ordered those who had jobs to lay off two days a month. With state, county and city treasuries running dry, private groups passed the hat to keep the schools open. Teachers dug into their savings to feed their pupils. "For God's sake," the superintendent of schools implored Chicagoans, "help us feed these children during the summer!" A starving child died on admission to the Children's Memorial Hospital. "Why do we have to go naked and hungry?" cried a Negro mother, speaking for thousands in the Negro ghetto.

A Midwestern drought inflicted further hardship. Homeless families slept in underpasses and tunnels. Clusters of shacks called Hoovervilles made of packing cases, tin, tarpaper and cardboard dotted the outlying parts of town. The International Apple Shippers' Association was promoting the sale of surplus apples with the slogan "Buy an apple a day and send the Depression away," as men who had once held well-paid jobs stood on street corners, an upended crate for a counter, hawking the fruit at a nickel apiece. With exceptional luck an apple peddler might earn $6 in a day.

As public relief funds dwindled, bills were introduced in both the state legislature and Congress to raise taxes, a prospect that brought angry protests from the wealthy. For tax purposes Colonel McCormick reported his personal holdings as no more than $25,250.

"My brother," announced Ralph Capone, while at liberty pending the outcome of his appeal against his federal prison sentence, "is feeding 3,000 unemployed every day." A sign affixed to the front of a huge South Side building proclaimed FREE FOOD FOR THE WORKLESS, and there a soup kitchen, financed entirely by Al Capone, dispensed in six weeks 120,000 meals at a cost of $12,000. On Thanksgiving Day Capone donated 5,000 turkeys. At Christmas he gave a mammoth party for the poor of Little Italy. During those festivities an old woman knelt before him and kissed his hand.

The Capone legend was growing both at home and abroad, nourished by a multitude of journalists, radio commentators, preachers, novelists, playwrights, moviemakers. In the Bronx Dr. Jacob Katz, rabbi of Montefiore Synagogue, went through extraordinary intellec tual contortions in an effort to establish a case for the Capone gang, or "Chicago firm," to use his expression, as a potentially constructive force. "Severity of punishment is a policy of expediency, which may be good for a while," he told his congregation. "[The Chicago firm's] action is based on a policy that may be good for all time and should become a forerunner for what society as a whole ought to do with its maladjusted and anti-social. They will simply have to be drafted into the social system, and by that I do not mean that we should have to be adjusted to their low standards. A classic example is that of King David drafting into his army the outcasts of his people with which army, historians tell us, he built the nation of Israel. Far-seeing states and statesmen-like governments will learn from King David and the Chicago firm that to rebuild the nations of the world they will have to draft those men who, after all, are only the products of our way of living. Thus only should we be taking the first step for the solution of the age-old problem of crime."

The Hawthorne Inn became a fixed feature of guided bus tours around Chicago and its environs. "Capone Castle!" the conductor would bellow through his megaphone.

Beginning with Edward Dean Sullivan's Rattling the Cop on Chicago Crime, seven books devoted largely or entirely to Capone were published between 1929 and 1931. Fawcett Publications, then situated in Minneapolis' Sexton Building, brought out a profusely illustrated one-shot magazine, among the first of its kind to flood the newsstands, priced at 50 cents,.with the title The Inside Story of Chicago's Master Criminal. The title page carried one of judge Lyle's fulminations: "We will send Al Capone to the chair if it is possible to do so!" and the anonymous author attributed most of the murders described in the text to Capone, though in many cases there was no connection. The entire Fawcett executive staff then went into hiding for fear of reprisals. But evidently Capone was more flattered than offended by such lavish attention. He bought 100 copies. The total sales came to about 750,000.

In Howard Hughes' Hollywood studios work began on Scarface, screenplay by Ben Hecht, starring Paul Muni. (First National had released the first major gangster film, Little Caesar, with Edward G. Robinson, early in 1930, followed by Warner's Public Enemy, with James Cagney, in 1931.) One midnight (as Hecht told the story years later) there came a knocking at the door of his Los Angeles hotel room. He opened to two hard-eyed strangers. They had somehow obtained a copy of his screenplay.

"You the guy who wrote this?" said the man who was carrying the script.

Hecht admitted he was.

"We read it."

"How did you like it?" the author asked.

"Is this stuff about Al Capone?"

"God, no!" said Hecht. "I don't even know Al." He named a few gangsters he had known as a reporter in Chicago-Colosimo, O'Banion, Hymie Weiss. . . .

"OK, then. We'll tell Al this stuff you wrote is about them other guys." As they started to leave, one of the callers had an afterthought. "If this stuff isn't about Al Capone, why are you calling it Scarface? Everybody'll think it's him."

"That's the reason. Al is one of the most famous and fascinating men of our time. If you call the movie Scarf ace, everybody will want to see it, figuring it's about Al. That's part of the racket we call showmanship."

"I'll tell Al. Who's this fella Howard Hughes?"

"He's got nothing to do with it. He's the sucker with the money."

"OK. The hell with him." And they left, satisfied.

In the theater Capone was impersonated by Crane Wilbur as Tony Perelli, the protagonist of Edgar Wallace's gangster melodrama On the Spot. After a successful London run, it opened on Broadway on October 29, 1930, and lasted 167 performances.

An editorial in a Viennese newspaper, quoted by the Chicago press, called Capone "the real mayor of Chicago," and satirically wondered why the voters did not make him so in law, as well as in fact. The notion sent one of his underlings into paroxysms of mirth; but Capone found nothing laughable about it, and the fellow's levity so infuriated him that he knocked him down.

Le Journal de Paris dispatched its celebrated crime expert, Georges London, to Chicago to study gangsterism. He was charmed by Capone, who talked to him through an interpreter in his Prairie Avenue house. "On ne peut guere croire que c'est un monstre ayant a peu Ares cinquante crimes sur la conscience," London wrote, which the Chicago Daily News translated in a reprint of the interview as "One can barely believe that he is a monster having about fifty crimes on his conscience."

"Ajoutez," London went on, "qu'il ne manque pas d'esprit et de ruse." ("Add that he doesn't lack humor and cunning.")

"'Vous etes venu,' it dit, `voir celui qu'on appelle le gorille. Eh bien, regardez le gorille."' (" 'You came,' says he, 'to see the one who is called a gorilla. Well, look at the gorilla.' ") . . .

" `Est-ce tres indiscret de vous demandait de queues affaires vous vous occupez?' " (" 'Is it very indiscreet to ask you in what sort of business you are?' ")

"'Oh, gros malin! Vous le savez bien."' (" `Oh, you cute fellow! You know it well.' ") . . . He deplored his countrymen's hypocrisy. Too many Americans, he said, voted dry and lived wet; too many politicians were crooks behind their mask of respectability. " `Comment voulez-vous que je ne deteste pas ces personnel?' " (" 'How can you expect me not to despise these persons?' ")

He urged the Frenchman to visit him in Florida that winter. " `Yous verrez mes belles fleurs.' " (" `You'll see my beautiful flowers.' ")

"Et l'homme au cinquante cadavres, toujours souriant, me donne sa main, fine et tres blanche." ("And the man of fifty corpses, always smiling, gives me his hand, fine and very white.")

But few interviewers ever found Capone more captivating or found him more glamorous than Mrs. Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson, editor and later owner of the Washington Herald. "One of those prodigious Italians," she gushed after spending an hour or two with him on Palm Island. "Once I looked at his eyes. Ice-gray, ice-cold eyes. You can't anymore look into the eyes of Capone than you can look into the eyes of a tiger. . . ."

She listened sympathetically to his lament that neither society nor the law treated him fairly. "I don't interfere with big business," he told the multimillionaire editor. "None of the big business guys can say I ever took a dollar from 'em. . . . I only want to do business, you understand, with my own class. Why can't they let me alone? I don't interfere with them any. Get me? I don't interfere with their racket. They should let my racket be."

"Well, you're still-you're still czar of-" Mrs. Patterson faltered, groping for the tactful word.

"But they're forever after me. All the time trying to frame me....

Like Reporter London, the lady editor was impressed by Capone's hands. "Enormous. Powerful enough to tackle-well, almost anything, although superficially soft from lack of exposure." But the eyes disturbed her. "The stirring of the tiger. For just a second I went a little sick. I had to fight the impulse to jump up and run blindly away."

The unobtrusive efficiency of a servant responding to Capone's order for a round of lemonade fetched a sigh of envy from Mrs. Patterson. "My goodness," she said, "I wish I could get service like that at home."

On parting she wished Capone good luck "and I meant it sincerely."

"It has been said, with truth," she concluded, "that women have a special kind of sympathy for gangsters. If you don't understand why, consult Dr. Freud."

The prominent people wanting to meet Capone ranged widely from artistic celebrities to the castellans of Chicago's lakeshore manors, one of whom remarked: "Society would be a lot more fun if Al Capone would join in." When the Metropolitan Opera diva Lu- crezia Bori learned that George Jessel, who had been introduced to her in a New York restaurant, knew Capone, she asked him if he could arrange a meeting the next time she sang in Chicago. Jessel wrote to the opera-loving gang leader. Whether a meeting ever took place is. doubtful, but during one summer opera season in Ravinia Park she did receive a case of vintage champagne "with the compliments of Al Capone."