Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (64 page)

The first time Capone's mother came, accompanied by Mafalda, the buzzer sounded at the landing dock snitch box. The bewildered old woman was searched in vain. Only after the buzzer went off again, necessitating a second search, was the trouble traced. Mama Capone's old-fashioned corset had metal stays.

Wondering what message a letter contained before the censor got through with it or what a man's wife had been trying to tell him before the guards stopped her made for the sleepless "hell nights," as the prisoners called them. They were the harder to bear when, as happened almost every night, the guards could be heard practicing marksmanship in the yard. For targets they used man-shaped dummies, leaving them for the prisoners to see next day, a warning against trying to escape. Though Johnston forbade corporal punishment as a general rule, the guards did not hesitate, at a show of resistance, to knock a man senseless with water shot from a high-pressure hose, to break an arm or leg with their truncheons, or to truss him up for days in a straitjacket. The usual punishment, however, was solitary confinement, or the Hole, on a diet of bread and water with, twice a week, a "subsistence meal," such as a paper cup full of beets and potatoes mashed together. Nearly everybody committed to Alcatraz spent some time in the Hole. The limit of human endurance there was thought to be about nineteen days.

During Capone's years on Alcatraz several prisoners attempted suicide, and a few succeeded. Those who failed wound up in the Hole. A counterfeiter named John Standig made an attempt at suicide before he even got to Alcatraz by jumping from the train taking him there, but he suffered no mortal injury. On Alcatraz, where he later made another attempt, he told an inmate: "If you ever get out of here, tell them I wasn't trying to escape. I was trying to kill myself." A blood transfusion saved Jimmy Grove, an ex-GI imprisoned for raping an Army officer's daughter, after he cut the arteries in both arms. What amounted to suicide, the first successful one, was managed by Joe Bowers, a German-born criminal. In April, 1936, he was bandaged and taken to the Hole after he had broken his eyeglasses and slashed his throat with the jagged edges. Upon his release he scaled the steel fence surrounding the work area, knowing the guards would shoot him. The bullets dropped him 75 feet into the bay. The following year Ed Wutke, an ex-merchant marine, serving twenty-seven years for a murder at sea, was found dead in his cell, his jugular vein severed by a blade from a pencil sharpener.

Many prisoners went insane, fourteen of them violently so in 1937 alone, with innumerable others quietly "stir crazy." Mental illness was not a condition Johnston readily recognized. If capable of functioning physically, without disruption to the general routine, the madman was ignored; if uncontrollable, he was confined to the hospital ward. A consultant psychiatrist visited the island at irregular intervals, sometimes months apart. There was the prisoner from Leavenworth who screamed whenever a plane flew over the island, and the old prisoner who kept his head wrapped in towels as a defense against invisible tormentors. There was "Rabbit," a docile prisoner until he scooped up every movable object in his third-tier cell, wrapped his bedding around them, and the next time the door opened, hurled the bundle over the railing. Dragged away clawing and howling, he was never returned to the cell blocks. There was No. 284, Rube Persfal, assigned to the dock detail, who seized an ax, laid his left hand on a plank of wood and, laughing wildly, lopped off every finger. Still laughing, he laid his right hand next to it and begged a guard to chop it off. Though committed to the hospital, he was not officially declared insane.

Five men tried to escape during Capone's imprisonment. Before they could get off the island one was killed, one wounded, and one recaptured unhurt. Two others sawed through the bars of a workshop window, broke open a fence gate with a Stillson wrench, and dived into the water. They were never found dead or alive, but they could not have swum far against the riptide, with the dense fog then swathing the bay. Of the mutinies that erupted at the rate of about one a year, none lasted more than three days.

The laundry room, where Capone worked, was damp and badly ventilated, and when an Army transport anchored in the bay with an accumulation of wash, the work load became backbreaking. In Janu ary, 1935, Capone was at his usual station by the mangle when thirtysix of his co-workers walked out in protest. For every three prisoners Johnston employed one guard, a ratio two to three times higher than that maintained in most federal prisons. The strikers were quickly surrounded, separated, and removed to the Hole. Because Capone took no part, he aroused a good deal of enmity. A month later one of the strikers, Bill Collier, was catching laundry as Capone fed it into the mangle. He complained that it came through too fast and too wet. Capone paid no attention. So Collier picked up a sopping bundle and flung it into his face. Before the guards could stop the brawl, Capone blacked his attacker's eye. Both men spent eight days in the Hole.

Another strike, this time general, took place without Capone in January of the following year. The immediate provocation was the death of a prisoner with a stomach ulcer, whom Johnston had refused medical treatment because he thought him a malingerer. As Capone stuck to his post, the prison rang with cries of "Rat" and "Scab!" But it was not cowardice that kept him from joining the rebels. He knew the odds. "Those guys are crazy," he said. "They can't get anything out of this." He asked to be excused from work and allowed to remain in his cell until the strike ended. "I have to protect my skin, if I'm going to get out of here alive," he told the guards. He did not stand alone. Nearly all the prison "aristocrats"-the spectacular felons like Arthur "Doc" Barker, last surviving son of Ma Barker's murderous brood; the kidnappers George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Albert Bates and Harvey Bailey, who had collected a ransom of $200,000 for the Oklahoma oil magnate Charles Urschel; Roy Gardner, train bandit and escape artist-shared his prudence and likewise incurred the hatred of the mutineers.

Capone's request was granted. His first day back at work, the strikers having been starved into submission, an unknown hand hurled a sash weight at his head. Roy Gardner, seeing it coming, threw himself at Capone, shoving him aside. The missile struck Capone's arm, inflicting a deep cut. He was then shifted to the bathhouse cleaning squad.

The bathhouse adjoined the barbershop. On the morning of June 23, five months after the second strike, Jim Lucas, a Texas bank robber, reported for his monthly haircut. When he left, he seized a pair of scissors, crept up behind Capone, who was mopping the bath house floor, and drove the blades into his back. Capone recovered after a week in the hospital and Lucas went to the Hole.

A San Francisco lawyer, representing Mae Capone, appealed to the Attorney General to have Capone imprisoned elsewhere, but without result. Other attempts followed to kill or maim "the wop with the mop," as his enemies now referred to him. His friends exposed a plot to doctor his breakfast coffee with lye. On his way to the prison dentist one morning he was jumped and almost strangled before he broke his attacker's grip and floored him with a blow.

The chief medical officer who treated Capone's various injuries, Dr. George Hess, had formerly worked under Ossenfort at Atlanta and so knew the patient's aversion to a spinal puncture. He broached the subject again but did not press Capone when he recoiled. "Those sons of bitches!" Capone complained to Al Karpis, who had been transferred from Leavenworth in 1936 under a life sentence for kidnapping. "They told me they couldn't care less if that's what I wanted to die from." Yet he could not overcome his horror of the doctor's needle.

Perhaps more than anything except sexual relief, the prisoners craved news of their old haunts and associates. Their only hope lay in the newcomers, and they would maneuver tirelessly to get close to them and befriend them. The problem, if they succeeded, was to hold a conversation out of earshot of the guards. The first Sunday Karpis appeared in the recreation yard an inmate approached him quietly. "My name is Frank Del Bono," he said. "Al would like to talk to you. He knows a lot of people you know. He'd like to talk to you if it won't put any heat on you."

Karpis did not commit himself immediately. Before any involvement with Capone he wanted to find out how the Chicagoan stood in the eyes of other prisoners. He consulted those whom he considered the elite, a few of whom, like Doc Barker, had been his partners in bank robbery or kidnapping. "Everything I heard about Capone was good," he recalled after his release thirty-three years later. "The ones who hated him were mostly scum, white trash. I told Del Bono I'd talk to Al any time." During their initial encounter, sitting in the recreation yard, their backs to the cellhouse wall, Capone asked if he needed money. No, said Karpis, his people were taken care of. The kidnapper could play the guitar a little, and at Capone's suggestion he joined the band. They talked for the next few Sundays, as they bent their heads together over a music stand, pretending to study a score. Karpis was the first of several new arrivals who kept Capone abreast of developments in the underworld.

Capone learned that Machine Gun Jack McGurn was dead, killed in a bowling alley before a score of witnesses by two unidentified men. They killed him with machine guns on the eve of St. Valentine's Day, 1936, and left a comic valentine beside the body. It showed a couple who had literally lost their shirts, gazing dolefully at a signSALE OF HOUSEHOLD GOODS. The accompanying jingle described the state of McGurn's affairs at his death:

The organization that Capone built was still largely intact and moving into ever broader spheres. Jake Guzik, released from Leavenworth in 1935, and Ralph Capone had picked up where they left off as, respectively, general business manager and director of gambling and vice. Mitzi Capone was handling horse bets at a new Cicero dive, the Hi Ho Club, and also acting as contact man for loan sharks. Phil D'Andrea had succeeded to the presidency of the Italo-American National Union. With Guzik, Willie Bioff and others he had infiltrated the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Operators, through which they extorted millions of dollars from the Hollywood studios by threatening labor trouble. Tony Accardo and Paul Ricca, but yesterday lowly Capone foot soldiers, were forging ahead fast as important Mafiosi. A new Cook County sheriff, John Toman, admitted the resurgence of the Caponeites. "But what can I do with only thirty-two-and-a-third deputies [sic] on a shift, and more than 400 square miles to cover?"

The news that Capone was allowed to receive from his family in the fall of 1936 chiefly concerned his wife's struggles to retain the Palm Island house. After payment of the trial lawyers' fees and part of the fines, court costs and taxes owed, her capital was meager. "Ralph is taking care of Mae's case," Mafalda wrote on October 31, "so, please, dear, relax." Ralph himself wrote two days later, following a visit to Alcatraz by Mae and Matt Capone.

... of course they didn't bring very good news but they didn't bring bad. The bad that I am referring to is the sale of the house in Florida. We had them beat until they served notice on Mae as transferee and we would have beat them only for the fact that when Mae was originally assessed in 1931, she did not protest the assessments. The law provides that the assessment must be protested within ninety days or lose the right to a hearing . . . she spoke to Ahern about it and he said not to pay any attention to it, so when she was named as transferee and a lien was placed on the place, the attorneys . . . discovered the unprotested assignment of 1931, so in spite of our efforts the place was advertised for sale. .. . I am sorry this had to be the final outcome of everything, but we did our best and it is all due to another mistake on the part of your attorneys.

But it was not the final outcome. On the tenth Ralph wrote:

Well you need have no more worries about the Florida home. I paid the whole thing in Jacksonville, last Saturday, the total amount was $52,103.30. We have obtained a complete release and there is no further claims against the home by the Gov. I obtained a mortgage on the house for $35,000. . . . I managed to borrow enough to make up the difference.

... everything points to a big season in Miami, in fact there are several tourists here now and they built 37 new hotels in the past six months. . . . Mae just arrived from Chicago. . . .

Among the first duties James Bennett set himself, after he succeeded Bates, was a tour of the prisons as an ombudsman. Upon arrival he would announce his willingness to interview any prisoner with a complaint. At Alcatraz a resentful Warden Johnston had a desk placed for him in a chilly, dim-lit corner of the cell house. Throughout each interview a guard stood facing the prisoner, pointing a rifle at his chest. "When I protested . . . ," Bennett wrote, "he explained that these were the most desperate men in the world . . . and they might regard it as an accomplishment to assault the prison director."

One of the first prisoners brought to Bennett was Capone. "I'm getting along all right," he said. "Capone can take care of himself. But I shouldn't be here. I'm here because of my reputation, because there's such a misunderstanding about me. People don't know the things I've done to be helpful." And once again he recounted his services to Colonel McCormick as a peacemaker in the newsboys' strike. If Bennett would remain on the island for two weeks, Capone offered, he would reveal to him everything he knew about the underworld, "and I'll throw in the movie rights." Bennett declined with a twinge of regret.