Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (3 page)

ON May 26, 1906, Gabriel Capone, a forty-one-year-old barber of Neapolitan origin, appeared before the Kings County Court in Brooklyn, New York, to claim his final citizenship papers. He could neither speak, write, nor read English, but the new law requiring literacy as a condition of naturalization would not become effective for another month, and he left the courthouse a full-fledged American, a status which the prevailing old law automatically conferred upon his wife and children.

With his wife Teresa, nee Riolia, who was eight months pregnant at the time, and their first child, Vincenzo, age six, Capone had emigrated in 1893 from the slums of Naples to the slums of Brooklyn's Navy Yard district. (The family name, pronounced in two syllables, "Cap-own," was an Americanization of the original Caponi.) They settled eventually in a flat on Navy Street in the strident, reeking chaos of the borough's biggest Italian colony. Rents in the area's twoto four-story red-brick or wooden frame tenements ran between $3 and $4.50 per room a month. None had central heating, running hot water, or bathrooms. The tenants heated water on potbellied coal stoves, which also provided their only protection against freezing weather.

After a brief, discouraging period as a grocer, Gabriel opened a barbershop at 69 Park Avenue, a few steps from his home. His progeny increased at the rate of a child about every three years to a total of nine, seven sons and two daughters. Besides Vincenzo (renamed James) and Ralph, born a month after the Capones reached America, there were, in the order of birth, Salvatore (later called Frank) , Alphonse, Amadeo Ermino (later John and nicknamed Mimi), Umberto (later Albert John), Matthew Nicholas, Rose and Mafalda (named after Italy's royal princess) .

The poor, uneducated Italians who had been pouring into America since the first mass migration from their country began during the 1880's proved the least assimilable ingredients of the melting pot. They were, especially the Southern Italian contadini and artigiani- the peasants and small craftsmen, who constituted the majority of the newcomers-clannish and wary of outsiders. Centuries of exploitation by both foreign invaders and rapacious domestic masters had taught them to mistrust authority. They considered politicians and police their natural enemies. The laws, they felt, had been made to protect the rich and enslave the poor. Appointment to government office seemed to them a license to steal. The early Italian immigrants tended to place loyalty to family and community above loyalty to their adopted country, and they did not necessarily condemn those who transgressed against the new society, even the hoodlum and the racketeer; sometimes, in fact, they invested the outlaw with heroic stature, as long as he kept faith with his community and, above all, remained a good family man.

The disillusionments, the hardships and brutal prejudice that the Italian immigrants endured in the promised "land of opportunity" confirmed them in their tribalism. With their lack of formal education, their language disabilities, and their past employment limited to agriculture, shopkeeping and humble crafts, they found, as city dwellers, all but the lowest-paid jobs closed to them. They became ditchdiggers, bricklayers, stonecutters; they laid pipes and railroad ties, hawked notions from street barrows and stands, ran small fruit and vegetable stores; like Gabriel Capone, they plied razor and scissors. The average male Italian in New York in 1910 earned between $9.71 and $11.28 a week, roughly $2 to $4 less than his native counterpart. Consequently, his wife and children had to work. Teresa Capone, a dour, silent, strong-jawed woman, turned her hand to dressmaking, and most of her children were doing odd jobs before they entered their teens.

Years of labor out of doors under sunny skies had endowed the typical Southern Italian immigrant with a physical stamina that could withstand the rigors of the city slums, but the health of his children suffered. Undernourished, overcrowded in foul cold-water tenements, lacking adequate sanitation and fresh air and sunlight, the first-generation Italians had the poorest health of any foreign group in New York. In Italy the percentage of youths eighteen to twenty years of age who were rejected for military service because of poor health ranged from 15 to 22 percent. In New York the percentage climbed to 35 percent. A block-by-block study of six Italian communities conducted before the First World War by Dr. Antonio Stella showed infant mortality to be almost double that of the rest of the city population. The great killers were the respiratory diseases, diarrhea and diphtheria.

Illiteracy among the Italian immigrants ran around 60 percent, by far the highest percentage of any foreign group, and because their children were obliged to work at so early an age fewer than 1 percent ever got to high school. According to a 1910 survey of fifteen nationalities in New York City schools, the Italo-Americans "led in retarda- tion"-that is, they advanced from grade to grade at ages older than the ages of pupils in the other national groups. But contrary to a widespread canard, no survey ascribed this failure to mental inferiority. "The Southern Italian," concluded the Reverend Antonio Mangano, a Protestant minister who had closely observed the transplanted stock, "is illiterate but not unintelligent." By the second generation compulsory education had largely eliminated the illiteracy. During the boyhood of the Capone brothers, however, it was, together with truancy, the rule. Except for Matt, the youngest brother, none of the Capone brothers finished high school.

The Italian immigrants were victims of a myth that continued to plague their descendants. According to this myth, they had criminal instincts. Yet considering the hardships they bore, it is remarkable how few offenses they actually committed. With resignation and dignity, they accepted the menial tasks available to them at wretched pay, and while, in 1910, they made up approximately 11 percent of the total foreign-born population, they produced only about 7 percent of the foreign-born convicts and juvenile delinquents. Nine years later a federal study covering seventeen nationalities in prisons placed the Italian twelfth in the ratio of commitments per 100,000.

Resignation, however, was not characteristic of the younger Ital ians. As they grew up poor in the world's richest nation, as educational, social and economic opportunities, purportedly accessible to all Americans, eluded them, they did not, like their elders, passively accept frustration. Without yet having established legitimate values of their own, they rejected their parents' old-country traditions as irrelevant to the challenge of America. To some of them, a small minority, it appeared that only crime could open the door to the good life, and they joined the ranks of professional gunmen and bombers, extortionists, vice peddlers, labor racketeers, gamblinghouse operators and bootleggers.

It was this lawless first- and second-generation minority who began to combine the methods of predatory Italian secret societies like the Neapolitan Camorra, the Carbonari and the Mafia with those of American big business. From their crude, undisciplined early forays evolved one of the most efficient enterprises in the history of organized crime.

At no stage in its evolution did it represent more than a minute fraction of the Italo-American population. Crime among the latter never exceeded the average for either foreign or native populations. But the criminal few reinforced the prejudices that immigrants from other countries had brought with them. They saw the "dago," the "ginzo," as not only criminal by nature, but physically unclean and of low mentality. The effect of such vilification was to draw its victims still closer together. They formed proud, tight enclaves which no outsider could penetrate. They were further divided among themselves along traditional lines of class and regional origin just as their forebears had been in the mother country, where the urban artigiano looked down on the contadino and the educated galantuomo derided them both. Regardless of station, the Sicilian viewed the Neapolitan with distrust; the Roman stepped warily when dealing with the Calabrian. This insularity existed to an even greater degree at the criminal level. Not until the thirties would the Mafia, Sicilian in origin, admit a non-Sicilian. Joseph Valachi, a Mafia "soldier" turned informer, whose parents came from Naples, testifying in 1963 about organized crime before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, explained why, thirty-three years before, he had at first hesitated to join a Mafia family: "I refused for the simple reason when I was in Sing Sing, I met an oldtimer . . . and he used to have trouble in his days and they had wars in his time, what he terms `Sicilians against Neapolitans,' and he was a Neapolitan, and his name was Alexander Senaro. So he was preaching to me and giving me the lowdown on this, like, for instance, he used the expression, 'If you hang out with a Sicilian for 20 years and you argue with one of his kind, well, this Sicilian will turn against you.' He made me have some fear in myself, and when they approached me, that was what I had in mind. That is the reason I sort of turned it down. . . . '

The sense of community ran so deep among some Italo-Americans that they were likely to keep in touch all their lives, no matter how widely their careers diverged; this partly explains why the pallbearers at a gangster's funeral have been known to include criminal court judges and state prosecutors, why, at testimonial dinners for a retiring city official, police inspectors have sat beside dope peddlers. Albert A. Vitale, for example, leader of the Italian-American Democratic Club, had been a New York City magistrate for ten years when, in 1930, the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court removed him from the bench. The offense was his association with racketeers. Three months earlier his political club had given a dinner in his honor. The guests numbered seven Italo-American racketeers, among them Ciro Terranova, the "Artichoke King," so called because he terrorized merchants selling artichokes into dealing exclusively with his wholesale produce company. Vitale's ouster scarcely diminished his prestige. The guests at another dinner which the Federation of Italian-American Democratic Clubs tendered him after he returned to private law practice included General Sessions Judge John J. Freschi, State Supreme Court Justices Salvatore A. Cotillo and Louis A. Valente, Magistrates Joseph Raimo, Thomas Aurelio and Michael Delagi.

Again, in 1952, the New York State Crime Commission, investigating alliances between politicians and racketeers, subpoenaed witnesses for questioning about a meeting that took place several years earlier at the Biltmore Hotel. The five men present were Generoso Pope, publisher of the newspaper Il Progresso Italo-Americano; a former General Sessions judge, Francis X. Mancuso; county Democratic boss Carmine De Sapio; Judge Valente; and the racketeer Francesco Saveria, alias Frank Costello. All except Valente, a Genoese by birth, were descended from Southern Italians. The object of the meeting, it appeared, had been entirely innocent. Publisher Pope had convoked it to plan a fund-raising campaign for Italian children orphaned by war. Without embarrassment, judge Mancuso admitted to having known Costello for about thirty-five years. "His people come from the same town my people come from," he noted. "I may say there is intermarriage in the family. My first cousin married his first cousin." Costello was also godfather to Generoso Pope, Jr. It was after dining with the publisher's son, one evening in 1957, that he was shot and wounded by an unknown assailant.

Al Capone was an atypical Italo-American in that he took scant pride in his foreign roots. "I'm no Italian," he would protest when the press gave his birthplace as Naples or Sicily. "I was born in Brooklyn." The date was January 17, 1899. On the corner of Tillary and Lawrence streets, a block from the Capone home, stood St. Michael's Church, an odd little white stucco building partly constructed below street level so that one had to descend a flight of steps to enter it. Like most of the neighborhood Italians, Gabriel and Teresa Capone worshiped at St. Michael's, and three months after Al's birth they had him baptized there by the Reverend Gioacchino Garofalo.

Life in the sector where Al lived his first ten years was harsh, but never drab, never stagnant. Hordes of ragged children gave the streets an explosive vitality as they played stickball, dodged traffic, brawled and bawled, while their mothers, dark, heavy-thighed women, bustled to and fro balancing on their heads baskets laden with supplies for the day's meals. Fruit and vegetable carts, standing wheel to wheel, made a bright, fragrant clutter along the curb. The fire escapes that formed an iron lacework across the faces of the squat tenements shook and shuddered as the El trains roared by close behind on Myrtle Avenue. The completion of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903-up to that time, the world's greatest suspension bridgeand its opening to trains, as well as vehicular traffic, had brought vast new masses to the area, seeking cheaper housing.

The patron saint of the Capones' neighborhood was St. Michael, and in addition to September 29 (Michaelmas), the parishioners devoted May 8 to his glorification. The daylong festivities began in front of the church as St. Michael's Society, about 200 strong, assembled for a parade. At their head, flanked by bevies of white-clad little girls, solemnly stepped the bearer of St. Michael's banner, which depicted the archangel, a flaming sword in his right hand, towering triumphant over the cringing Spirit of Darkness, his left hand clasp ing a shield inscribed Quis UT DEUS? ("Who is like God?"). Accompanied by Attanasio's Brass Band, they paraded down Tillary Street, past the docks on Navy Street, and circled back to their starting point via York Street. All along the line of march Italian and American flags fluttered from windows, cherry bombs burst in the gutter. (The explosions, heard afar in the surrounding foreign colonies, prompted the rumor on one occasion that a Black Hand gang was blowing up its victims' homes.) When the parade ended, Father Garofalo celebrated high mass. Attanasio and his fellow musicians then mounted the bandstand erected next to the church and shivered the air with clarion operatic overtures. The evening was given over to more music, dancing in the streets, feasting and fireworks. Hundreds of goblets containing Bengal lights dangled from telegraph poles, and as the grand finale they all went off with a mighty sizzle and hiss, casting long tongues of orange flame against the night sky.