Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (61 page)

Ten days after Bruno Richard Hauptmann kidnapped the Lindbergh baby from his home in Hopewell, New Jersey, the Hearst columnist Arthur Brisbane, to whom Capone had got word that he could "do as much as anybody alive in getting the baby back," was given special permission to interview him.

"I don't want any favors if I am able to do anything for that baby," Capone told Brisbane. "If they will let me out of here, I will give any bond they require." He offered to leave his brother Mitzi in his place as hostage. "You don't suppose I would doublecross my own brother?" What, exactly, did he claim he could accomplish? "I have a good many angles and anybody that knows anything would know that he could trust me. There isn't a mob that wouldn't trust me to pay that money, if the relations of the kidnapped child wanted me to pay it, and there isn't anybody would think I would tell where I got the child, or who had it. . . .

"I would soon know whether the child is in the possession of any regular mob that I can connect with or in the possession of any individual working his own racket that would have sense enough to know that he could trust me, and know that it might not be a bad idea to do me a good turn." In the event of failure, "I would come back here, take my brother's place, and let justice go on with her racket."

The screaming Hearst headlines, together with the credulous Brisbane's endorsement ("It is possible that Alphonse Capone could do that which could not be done by others. . . . His power in whatever he undertakes is known to many. . . . This writer believes that whether he succeeded or failed, he would return") touched off a public clamor to free Capone. Republican Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut fostered the notion that the Capone gang had planned the kidnapping "for this very purpose."

No federal court would even discuss Capone's proposition and Lindbergh himself said, "I wouldn't ask for Capone's release even if it would save a life."

If the U.S. Supreme Court consents to review the decision of a District Court of Appeals, it grants the convict's application for a writ of certiorari (meaning it wishes to be "made certain"). The Supreme Court rejected Capone's application on May 2, and on May 4 he left the county jail. But his destination was no longer Leavenworth, as originally intended. Jake Guzik and other convicted Caponeites had started to serve their terms there, and the federal authorities thought it prudent to keep them far away from their leader. Capone, they decided, should go to the Atlanta Penitentiary.

The last day the guard was doubled outside the hospital ward, and Capone was allowed to spend it with his family there instead of in the visitors' room, separated from them by a wire screen. They stayed until late afternoon, his mother, who brought an enormous dish of macaroni with cheese and tomato sauce, hot from her stove, speaking only Italian, Mae Capone and Sonny, all the brothers except Ralph (who had just been delivered to the McNeil Island Penitentiary) and the two sisters, by turns laughing, eating and weeping.

/I YOU'D think Mussolini was passing through," said Capone, as both the prisoners behind the jailyard fence and the crowd outside the gate hailed him. "Good-bye, Al . . . Good luck, Al . . . You got a bum break, Al...... He gazed around him with evident satisfaction. "I'll bet Mussolini never got a send-off like this."

It was 10 P.M. when the U.S. marshal's car, accompanied by fifteen police cars, pulled out of the yard in a blaze of light from the Very flares that were fired to provide extra visibility in case of trouble. Capone sat in the back seat between a Secret Service agent and an automobile thief named Vito Morici, to whom he was handcuffed. Laubenheimer and a deputy marshal sat facing them on jump seats. At the Dearborn Station, where another crowd had gathered, Capone, indicating Morici's topcoat, said to him: "Throw it over your arm so nobody sees the handcuffs." Dan Serritella, who was on trial for his defalcations, and Matt and Mimi Capone walked with the prisoners as far as the train gate.

The Dixie Flyer carried five day coaches and three Pullman cars behind them. In Car 48, the second to last, Drawing Room A and an upper berth had been reserved for Capone and Morici. The latter, a thin, runty youth in a threadbare suit and scuffed shoes, was going through to Tampa, Florida, to face a federal trial for transporting a stolen car across state lines. Five deputy marshals, in addition to Laubenheimer, rode the train. As soon as the manacled prisoners took their seat, they were locked into leg irons. The Dixie Flyer left on schedule at eleven thirty.

Capone talked volubly to the guards, but the youth shackled to him, barely half his size, sat mute, overawed, all but blotted out by the older man's bulk. Capone talked mostly about Chicago. His organization, he told Laubenheimer, had been a boon to the city, for it had given jobs to men who would otherwise have been committing crimes. The handcuffs and leg irons were removed while the prisoners prepared for bed, Capone slipping into monogrammed skyblue silk pajamas, but Laubenheimer then insisted on putting back the handcuffs, and so the two men had to occupy the same berth. The diminutive Morici lay awake all night, clinging fearfully to the edge lest Capone roll over and flatten him.

At every station stop next day a crowd of two to three hundred was waiting for a look at Capone through the train window. The sight never failed to lift his spirits. In the South the thermometer climbed to ninety, and he drank quarts of lemonade, ordered from the dining car. He bought soda pop for Morici.

The train steamed into Atlanta's Union Station at 7:46 P.M., only eleven minutes late. After Morici had been transferred to another car for the rest of his journey to Tampa, Car 48 was shunted to a siding to avoid reporters, and from there Laubenheimer and his prisoner were driven four miles to the penitentiary. The inmates, 3,000 of them packing cell blocks built to hold less than 2,000, somehow knew the instant the car entered the driveway and set up a tremendous clamor, banging the bars of their cells, some cheering the newcomer, others taunting him.

Warden Arthur C. Aderhold, a man devoted to ritual, called through the outer gate that was cut into a gray stone wall 30 feet high and 600 feet long: "Who are you?"

"Marshal Laubenheimer of Chicago," came the answer.

"Are you in charge of whoever is in your party?"

"I am."

The gate swung open. Stopping twenty paces farther on at an inner gate, the warden faced the prisoner. "What is your name?"

"Alphonse Capone."

"What is your sentence?"

"Eleven years."

Laubenheimer corrected him. "The sentence here is ten years. After that period has been served, the prisoner is to be returned to Chicago to serve a one-year sentence in the Cook County jail."

"Your number is 40,822," Aderhold informed Capone.

The marshal handed the warden a paper, which he signed and handed back: "Received from H. C. W. Laubenheimer, United States Marshal for the Northern District of Illinois, the body of the within named prisoner...

In the receiving cell Capone was ordered to strip to the skin. A prison guard took away his clothes, leaving in their place a blue denim uniform. Fingerprinted and photographed, his hair cropped close to his skull, Capone was then consigned to the hospital ward for three to four weeks while the penitentiary physician, Dr. William Ossenfort, determined whether he carried any communicable disease.

A Wassermann test, which Capone took under protest, proved negative. He admitted that probably, three years before, he had contracted syphilis, but considered himself cured. The technique of analyzing a Wassermann being still somewhat crude, Ossenfort wanted to investigate further by making a spinal puncture and applying the test to the spinal fluid, as well as to the blood. This Capone would not hear of, and Ossenfort could not legally compel him to submit to it. Capone worried nevertheless. When, in the sizzling temperatures of the southern summer, he developed prickly heat, he wondered whether it might not be a symptom of syphilis after all. Ossenfort calmed his anxiety by showing him that he, too, had prickly heat.

"When not aroused," Ossenfort said later, "Capone was quiet, pleasant and fairly well spoken. He would have made a good administrator and a forceful leader."

The overcrowded penitentiary had no single cells, only two-man and eight-man cells. Capone was assigned to an eight-man cell, whose occupants included a wildcat promoter, a former judge convicted of using the mails to defraud, an Ohio criminal notorious for the variety of his offenses, and four mail robbers serving twenty-five years. One of the mail robbers came in from the recreation yard shortly after the guards brought Capone. He had flame-red hair and the accent of a Jewish vaudeville comedian. Capone recognized Red Rudensky, or Rusty, as he had always called him, the ace "mechanic" of the early bootleg days. Rudensky, who had long hero-worshiped the gang leader, warmly clasped his hand. "He still had that inner radiation of somebody who's been through it all," he recalled.

Capone couldn't sleep the first night. He roused Rudensky and sat on his bed. "Imagine," he said, "some creep gets me on a damn tax rap. Ain't that a helluva deal?" He suffered frequently from nightmares in the months that followed, yelling "Nol Nol" in his sleep and swearing. Rudensky would pummel him awake.

The other prisoners, by and large, admired Capone. When Rudensky, who stage-managed the occasional prison entertainments, introduced him, they gave him a standing ovation. There were deadly exceptions, however. "The little shots who wanted a crack at the big ones," as Rudensky remembered them. "I sent out word to lay off Big Al, but while ninety-nine percent would go along with anything I asked, there was always the creepy twenty-five or thirty cons waiting for a chance to make trouble. They had a healthy respect for Al, and figured that between us anyone who gave him trouble would get it back fast. Still, two hillbillies, both in on a morals charge, decided to put our strength to a test. I got the neck chop and the knee one day in the yard. Al was roughed up at chow. But inside twenty-four hours I had a revenge team take it out in spades. The two jackasses were pounded into bloody pulps during work hours. One wound up with a broken cheekbone and a fractured skull. The other never used his right arm again for work."

Rudensky's fondness for Capone grew. He arranged the smuggling of cash to him from the gang through a trusty who drove a supply truck. With this money Capone bought privileges from certain guards and loyalty and protection from his fellow prisoners. A corps of bodyguards surrounded him at work and at recreation. He seldom handled the cash himself. Rudensky frequently kept thousands of dollars for him in the hollowed-out handle of a broom. "A nod from Al in the yard was all it took for me to take care of those he wished to bestow largesse upon."

Capone worked eight hours a day cobbling shoes. For exercise he first tried baseball but proved to be a poor batter and a worse fielder. He switched to tennis. Money talked for him on the tennis courts, too. He never had to wait for a free court. If he wanted to play singles, he would point to the opponent he preferred, and the other player would retire; if doubles, one member of a team would give up his place. In his rages, when he muffed a shot, he broke a good many rackets.

The prisoners' families were allowed a thirty-minute visit once a fortnight, and Capone's family rarely failed to appear in a body. They sat with other visitors at a long table, conversing through a steel-mesh screen. Foreign languages were taboo, and so Capone's mother could only gaze at him and mumble a few broken words, while her sons and daughters talked. Capone kept photographs of all of them on the wall above his cot. He once asked Rudensky, pointing to a snapshot of Sonny, "How the hell can a fat dago like me have\a son that good-looking?"

Not long after he entered the penitentiary, his brothers brought him bitter news. Torrio had formed a partnership with Dutch Schultz. Capone sent his lifelong friend a message, urging him to break up the partnership, return to Chicago, and resume leadership of the organization. There was no reply. Capone never forgave him. He ordered his wife to tear up the bonds Torrio had been buying for Sonny every birthday, now worth more than $80,000.