Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (66 page)

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."

The course of neurosyphilis is unpredictable, the victim now seemingly normal, now disoriented, his speech unintelligible, a prey to tremors and epilepsylike seizures. In even his best periods Capone lacked mental and physical coordination. He would skip abruptly from subject to unrelated subject, whistling, humming and singing as he chattered. Despite his gross overweight, he walked rapidly, with jerky, automatonlike motions. By 1942 penicillin had become available, but in extremely limited supply, the War Production Board having imposed a tight quota. Dr. Moore of Johns Hopkins managed to procure dosages for Capone, who was thus one of the first syphilitics to be treated with antibiotics. Though no therapy could reverse the extensive damage to his brain, his condition was apparently stabilized.

On March 19, 1944, after suffering a humiliating defeat in the Republican gubernatorial primary, Big Bill Thompson died of pneumonia in his suite at the Blackstone Hotel.

In April the Chicago police were hunting Matt Capone, the sometime university student for whom Al had once entertained such glowing expectations. Matt ran the Hall of Fame Tavern in Cicero. The night of the eighteenth his two bartenders, Walter Sanders and Jens Larrison, fell to squabbling over a $5 bill missing from the cash register. About twenty people saw Sanders shove Larrison into a back room, saw Matt fumble for something in a drawer behind the bar and follow them, heard two shots. None of the three men reappeared. Larrison's body was found in an alley two miles from the tavern. Matt hid for a year, then surrendered. But the murder charge against him was dismissed because Sanders, the state's vital witness, never reappeared.

Within two weeks of Matt's surrender, Capone's old, reliable "En forcer," Frank Nitti, faced with another term in Leavenworth for labor racketeering, put a bullet through his head.

It is doubtful that any of these events penetrated Capone's understanding. On January 19, 1947, at four o'clock in the morning, he collapsed with a brain hemorrhage. Dr. Kenneth Phillips arrived, followed by Monsignor Barry, who administered the last rites. The United Press reported Capone dead. But he rallied, and Phillips pronounced him out of danger. The following week he developed bronchial pneumonia. Reporters gathered in force outside the locked gate. As the hot day wore on, Ralph let them through and brought them iced beer. Saturday evening, the twenty-fifth, at the age of fortyeight, Capone died in the presence of his mother, his wife, his son, his brothers and sisters. Phillips tried without success to persuade the family to permit an autopsy "to make possible the study of the brain for medical history."

An icy wind shook the tent pitched on Plot 48 in Chicago's Mount Olivet Cemetery. Snow thickly covered the earth. The small band of mourners included, besides the immediate family, cousins Charlie and Rocco Fischetti, Jake Guzik, Sam Hunt, Murray Humphreys. Red Rudensky, a reformed character, had come from St. Paul. Torrio was not present. The archbishopric had forbidden a requiem mass or any elaborate ceremony but issued no injunction against burial in the same consecrated ground that held the remains of Capone's father and his brother Frank. Monsignor William Gorman explained to the reporters: "The Church never condones evil, nor the evil in any man's life. This very brief ceremony is to recognize his penitence and the fact he died fortified by the sacraments of the Church." The bronze casket was modest by gangster standards, as modest as the headstone later placed over it.

QUI RIPOSA Alphonse Capone Nato: Jan. 17, 1899 Morto: Jan. 25, 1947

The week before, Andrew Volstead had died at eighty-seven in Granite Falls, Minnesota, his belief unshaken to the end that "law does regulate morality."

RALPH CAPONE NOW OVERLORD IN VICE

... in his own right [Ralph Capone] is now one of the overlords of the national syndicate which controls gambling, vice and other rackets.

-United Press, July 28, 1950

From the report of the hearings, October, 1950, before the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, United States Senate (Chairman: Senator Estes Kefauver) :

The roots of the criminal group operating in Chicago today go back to the operations of the Torrio-Capone gang....

Since the last reorganization of the [racing] wire service in the Chicago area the city of Chicago has been serviced by the R. and H. wire service owned by the Capone mobsters, Ray Jones, Phil Katz, and Hymie Levin. .. .

The manufacture and distribution of slot machines has been a lucrative field of operation for a number of Capone mobsters. The Taylor Manufacturing Co. in Cicero, one of the largest manufacturers of gaming equipment in the country is partially owned by Claude Maddox, a Capone mobster ... and Joseph Aiuppa... .

Ed Vogel, old-time Capone henchman ... is believed to control the distribution of slot machines in the North Side of Chicago and in the northwest suburbs... .

Roland Libonati, Democratic State Senator from the West Side and a close associate of Capone's, spearheaded the opposition to the reform legislation proposed by the Chicago Crime Commission and Governor Stevenson and backed by the bar. . . .

[In his book Mafia, published two years later, Ed Reid, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, listed eighty-three Mafiosi by order of importance. He assigned forty-first place to Libonati.]

There is little doubt that members of the Capone syndicate use proceeds from their illegitimate activities to buy their way into hotels, restaurants, laundry services, dry-cleaning establishments, and wholesale and retail liquor businesses...

Paul Ricca . .. one of the two or three leading figures in the Capone mob; Louis "Little New York" Campagna and Charlie "Cherry Nose" Gioe . . . were prominent in the mulcting of the movie industry... .

The two major crime syndicates in this country are the AccardoGuzik-Fischetti syndicate, whose headquarters are in Chicago; and the Costello-Adonis-Lansky syndicate based in New York. Evidence of the Accardo-Guzik-Fischetti syndicate was found by the committee in such places as Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, Miami, Las Vegas, and the west coast... .

The Kefauver Committee questioned both Ralph and Matt Capone at great length. A month later Ralph, Jr., or Ralph Gabriel, as he preferred to call himself, drank half a quart of scotch in his Chicago apartment, swallowed a quantity of cold tablets from a bottle whose label warned against mixing them with alcohol, and began a letter to a girl he loved. The pills were his final solution to the problem of carrying the Capone name. Through school and college, marriage, fatherhood, and a long series of jobs, the name, always discovered sooner or later, had unfailingly brought him grief. It had tainted his relations with his girl, Jeanne Kerin, a nightclub singer. "Jeanie, my sweetheart," he wrote. "I love you. I love you. Jeanie only you I love. Only you. I'm gone-" He got no farther.

In 1952 James Capone died, totally blind, in Homer. The same year Teresa Capone died, aged eighty-five. She was buried not in Mount Olivet Cemetery, but in Mount Carmel, at the opposite end of the city. When the family realized how many tourists were coming to see the grave of Al Capone, they bought another plot in Mount Carmel and had the caskets reburied there. The marble shaft with the Capone names still stands in Mount Olivet, left behind to side track tourists. The real graves in Mount Carmel are marked by small black marble stones, clustered around a granite slab, each bearing the words "My Jesus Mercy."

The fifties carried off a good many Caponian charter membersSam Hunt, Terry Druggan, Claude Maddox, Phil D'Andrea, Jake Guzik, Louis Campagna, Frank Diamond-nearly all of them dying abed of a heart ailment. Diamond was an exception. He was killed by a shotgun blast. A coronary struck down Torrio in a Brooklyn barbershop on April 16, 1957, and he died soon after in the hospital. He was seventy-five. Bugs Moran, serving a ten-year sentence in Leavenworth for bank robbery, met the end he had often said he feared most: He died of lung cancer. Judge Lyle, who considered him the likeliest of all the gangsters he had ever observed to undergo a religious repentance, wrote to the Catholic prison chaplain, asking about Moran's last hours. "George Moran died a peaceful death," replied the chaplain, "and was strengthened with the full Last Rites (Penance-Extreme Unction-Holy Viaticum-Apostolic Blessing) of the Catholic Church while he was fully conscious. This happened some days before he died and was not a 'last ditch' stand. Your theory certainly proved out very satisfactory in his case. I am sure that God in his mercy was very kind to him in judgment."

From a tapped telephone conversation in November, 1957, between Sam Giancana, Capone-trained top boss of the Chicago syndicate, and Sam Magaddino, his Buffalo opposite number, concerning the arrest at Apalachin, New York, of sixty-three Mafia leaders:

MAGADDINO: It never would've happened in your place.

GIANCANA: You're fuckin' right it wouldn't. This is the safest territory in the world for a big meet. . . . We got three towns just outside of Chicago with the police chiefs in our pocket. We got this territory locked up tight.

Only once after Capone's death did his widow emerge from anonymity. This was in 1959 when the Columbia Broadcasting System televised The Untouchables, a two-part film, further sensationalizing Eliot Ness's sensational account of his gang-busting adventures. Mae Capone, Sonny and Mafalda jointly brought a $1,000,000 suit against the network, the producer of the film, Desilu Productions, and the sponsor, Westinghouse Electric, complaining that the dead man's name, likeness and personality were used for profit. They lost, and in the fall the American Broadcasting System launched The Untouchables as a weekly series.

Capone's last lawyer, Abraham Teitelbaum, probably did not overstate the case by much when he said: "I'm sure Al died penniless." Capone alone never owned the sources of his once vast wealth. He shared them with partners, with the organization, and when he could no longer function, the sources reverted to them. No doubt they provided the means for him to live his last years comfortably-Ralph and Jake Guzik would have seen to that-but his personal property was heavily mortgaged, and what cash the family could raise went chiefly to pay back taxes. Mae sold both the Palm Island and Prairie Avenue houses. For a time she and Sonny ran a restaurant in Miami Beach, the Grotto, she handling the cash register and Sonny working as headwaiter. The venture failed.

At last accounts Mae was dividing her time between Miami, Chicago and Ralph's Wisconsin retreat. Ralph himself was retired. Mafalda and her husband were operating a delicatessen-restaurant in Chicago. Their son was practicing law.

From Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics-Report of the hearings held in September and October, 1963, before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Chairman: Senator John L. McClellan) of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate:

Captain William J. Duffy, director of Intelligence for the Chicago Police Department ... estimated that there are 300 men in the Chicago area who devote their full efforts to organizing, directing, and controlling a far greater number of people involved in criminal activities like gambling, narcotics distribution, pandering, loan sharking, labor racketeering and terrorism....

Captain Duffy stated that his office believed that there are 26 men who lead 300 full-time gangsters in control of Chicago's organized crime. These men are divided by the Chicago police into two groups, one of which is known as the "Mafia" group. . . . The other group consists of the "Associates of the Italian Organization." .. .