Uncle Al Capone (12 page)

I can’t say it was easy for Al to behave like a model prisoner. Here was a man in his thirties, who had lived a life of splendor and could get just about anything he wanted. Now he was in a cell where his only thoughts and prayers were to get out and go home to his family. The prison officials did all they could to make him angry, but he wouldn’t break. He would pray with Father Clark for strength.

On December 18, 1938, Uncle Al wrote in a letter to Aunt Mae, “I just came back from church. Father Clark had another priest here who just came back from Italy, and he gave us a good sermon all about Italy and Germany. In the meantime, dear heart of mine, please do not worry about me as I am improving every day. I get two treatments a week, and they do not hurt me at all. I work out in the recreation yard five days a week and Saturday and Sunday. I catch up on my music and read a number of monthly and weekly magazines and a hot bath every day and three good meals each day. I hope to see you and Sonny again before I leave here next January the 18th. I have quite a number of songs written for him to sing them to you, and I will play them on the piano or Mandola. Get in touch with my dear brother Ralph, and for him to arrange to pay that $37,000 fine and costs I have to pay here, and then I can go to the Cook County jail. I will have to pay another fine there of $10,000. But when I come there I can see you and all of our dear family every week and I’m through with that sentence. Never again will I do anything to keep me away from you.”

A short time later, in early January 1939, the prison officials told my family that Al started to exhibit unusual behaviors and had to be transferred to Terminal Island, a federal institution in Long Beach, California, where he was provided with medical care until he was released on November 16, 1939.

Just before his parole, Father Clark called my family and said, “They are destroying Al. They are giving him drugs in the infirmary, and he has lost his memory. He can’t even remember my name.”

By the time Al was released from prison at the age of forty, he was a shell of his former self. He spoke in a whisper as a result of the years of silence he endured in Alcatraz. He had trouble moving due to the prison stabbing. And he had suffered severe memory loss. He had no memory of Alcatraz and could not remember his number, a simple # 85. I have to wonder what kind of “medical care” he had on Terminal Island.

Contrary to what has been written, Al’s health did not fail solely as a result of syphilis. I believe that his rapid decline was due to the torture he was subjected to in Alcatraz. Our family knows this because we have the word of Father Clark, the priest who visited him there. Father Clark told Mae and other family members, “They tried to destroy his mind in prison, and they succeeded.”

One of the guards’ favorite techniques was to put my uncle in a cell called “the hole” and alternate the temperature every half hour from very cold to very hot. This was accomplished by opening a window that was located behind the radiator until his cell was very cold and then closing it again to heat up the cell once more. He was also injected with chemicals on Terminal Island, under the guise of syphilis treatment. The business and political leaders of Chicago did not want Al Capone to return to power. Locking him up for nearly a decade was not enough—they had to make sure that all traces of his former self were gone.

Even despite this harrowing treatment, Uncle Al continued to be a model prisoner. He was released after serving only seven and a half years.

When Uncle Al was released from prison in 1939, he came back to Chicago before retiring to his home in Miami. My grandfather Ralph arranged a coming home party for him in his beautiful two-flat. The entire family went to church together that day, and then went back to the house where tables were laden with wine, liquor, breads, cold meats, cheeses, and cookies.

Al’s mind was gone. He could not appreciate his own freedom or his family’s joy. He acted very inappropriately. He wandered around, not recognizing people, passing gas at will, and when he went to the bathroom, he left the door open.

He had no memory. He could not remember even the closest members of his family. In fact, he would go up to them over and over again asking who they were.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Maffie, Al.”

“Who are you?”

“Maffie.”

His deep, thick, resounding voice was reduced to a whisper, and he winced as if in constant pain.

Stunned and grief-stricken to see his brother in this state, my grandfather called a friend who suggested they take Al to the Psych Lab at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. Aunt Mae and my grandmother Theresa took him there together, and he spent over four months in the care of doctors who worked tirelessly to rid his body of all the poisons that were in him.

Over the years, I have tried repeatedly to obtain the medical records from Al’s stay at Johns Hopkins. I was able to obtain the name of the psychiatrist who treated Al, but by that time, he had already passed away. I spoke instead with his wife, who is also a psychiatrist. She told me that both she and her husband respected doctor/patient confidentiality, even within their marriage. They did not discuss their cases in depth. But she did tell me that her husband was very concerned about Al’s mental health and about the treatment he received on Terminal Island. As she put it, “Something was wrong. His condition was not typical of syphilis.” She also knew that her husband and other doctors were administering treatments meant to “leach poisons from his body.” That is how she described it.

The Al Capone who emerged from prison was different from the Al Capone who emerged from Johns Hopkins. They were able, to some extent, to reverse the effects of his mistreatment in prison. If his brain had really been ravaged by syphilis, no treatment could have reversed it.

Theresa, Mae, and Al were all still at Johns Hopkins on the day I was born in 1940. Uncle Al was designated to be my godfather, but because he was in the hospital Sonny stood in for him. Aunt Mae and Uncle Al did send my parents a beautiful layette and crib. I have the signed gift card in my baby book. Below are the two telegrams they sent to the hospital on the day of my birth.

Aunt Mae took Al back to Florida to continue his recovery. With time, he recovered and was able to hold a conversation, but he always acted like a big kid. Even on the last day of his life, he couldn’t remember being in Alcatraz or # 85.

At the time of Al’s release, there was a newly-appointed U.S. attorney, Judge William Campbell, at the federal courthouse in Chicago. He wanted to make a name for himself, and Al Capone’s crimes were still noteworthy and fascinating to the public. So he looked into whether Uncle Al ever paid his fine and court costs after his trial and conviction. Back in those days, if someone stood trial for anything and it resulted in a fine and costs, the courts usually sent a bill and then forgot about it—not unlike the federal government’s laxity about collecting income taxes.

Judge Campbell saw that Uncle Al still owed the government money, so he filed to have Al stand trial again in Chicago.

When Uncle Al got the notice that he was to appear in court for a hearing, he called his brother, saying, “Ralph, take care of this, will ya?”

Ralph made a call to the Judge.

“Judge, this is Ralph Capone, Al’s brother. Al wants me to come down there and give you the money he owes. Will it be alright if I come down there on Saturday at ten in the morning?”

Saturday at 10 a.m., two delivery vans pulled up in front of the courthouse. My grandfather went in the door and asked the deskman to get Judge Campbell. The judge instructed the deskman to send my grandfather up with the money.

The desk man replied, “I don’t think that’s possible, Judge. I think you better come down here.”

Judge Campbell went down, and my grandfather took him outside where he opened the back of each delivery truck. It was filled with bags of pennies.

In 1939, people didn’t put coins in paper rolls; all coins were loose. My uncle owed $47,000—or four million, seven hundred thousand pennies. Judge Campbell could not mark Uncle Al’s debt paid until the pennies were counted. He himself said that he spent the next two days counting, then finally got fed up and hired people for the sole purpose of counting those pennies.

All the money was there, and the debt was paid. But because of this experience, Judge William Campbell, U. S. attorney for the federal government, attempted to get a statute passed that would make it impossible to pay taxes with coins. Although this was a popular belief, no such law was ever passed.

Upon Al’s release, my family soon discovered that his memory loss would take more than just an emotional toll—there would also be serious financial consequences. Before going to prison, Al had hidden his money, which he kept in cash. And now, he could not remember where it was.

Many years after Al’s death, I was asked to appear on Geraldo Rivera’s television program when he famously opened the “Capone vault” on live television. I declined because I already knew the vault would be empty. Long before, in one of our many conversations about our family history, my grandfather Ralph had told me definitively that the money was lost forever.

“The worst part of [Al’s incarceration] was what it did to his memory,” Ralph told me. “That was catastrophic. It changed his life, my life, your life…. It changed all of our lives.

Your uncle Al had an incredible amount of money, money he couldn’t put into a bank account or openly invest. He didn’t trust the stock market; he called it a ‘game.’ And he didn’t trust anyone enough, even me, to help take care of the money. So the main thing he did was get safe deposit boxes in various banks around the country and in Cuba, using assumed names.

After he was convicted of income tax evasion and was in Cook County jail, he confided to me that he had safely tucked away about $100 million, but he wouldn’t tell me where he stashed it.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Mae and Mom have enough to get by until I get out, and the Outfit is paying for my appeal. I will be out soon and then we’ll all be in great financial shape.’

I had enough to take care of myself, so I didn’t worry about it,” Ralph continued. “But about a year or so after Al got out of prison, I was running short of cash, so I asked Al to lay some on me. You know what he said? He said he couldn’t give me any right then.

‘How come?’ I asked.

‘I’m a little low on funds, too.’

‘What are you talking about? What about the $100 million you had stashed?’

He just looked at me. He had this pathetic helpless look on his face and said, ‘Ralph, I don’t know where it is.’

‘What do you mean you don’t know where it is?’

He looked down and shook his head. ‘I don’t know where the fuck it is.’

‘Well, what happened? Why don’t you know where it is?’

‘I put it in a bunch of different banks and had the safety deposit box keys and the names I used in a strong box. I buried the box, but when I went to dig it up after I got out, I couldn’t find it. Then I thought I had buried it in another place but when I looked, it wasn’t there either.’

I noticed that there were tears rolling down his cheeks. Al was crying. I hadn’t seen him cry since the cops killed our brother Frank on the street in Cicero. I tried to comfort him, but I was very upset myself.

Deirdre, we’re talking about a fortune here. That was enough to take care of all of us for our entire lives. And suddenly, it was gone. There went our financial security. There went your college tuition. Poof! Just like that.

I did everything I could do to help him remember. I hired a hypnotist to see if he could pull it out of his subconscious. Nothing! I got Mimi, Bites, and Matty to help me dig up the yard on Prairie and his estate on Palm Island in Miami—again, nothing.

I don’t know if this loss of memory was due to the syphilis. I don’t think it was. I think it was because of what those prison docs did to him in Alcatraz. But either way, we’re out a hundred million bucks. We used to make more than that in a year, but those days are gone forever.”