Uncle Al Capone (5 page)

Vincenzo was born a frail child, and when the family immigrated to Brooklyn, he became sickly. Disease was prevalent among Italian immigrants in New York City due to their crowded quarters and limited food, so Theresa worried about him. Every day, she would take him down to the stockyards and have him drink a pint of fresh cow’s blood, hoping it would strengthen him. She told him never to talk about this with anyone, not even his brothers, because they would think he was a vampire.

In 1945, Jim fell on hard times. He had no job or money, and finally, he called his mother in Chicago. Aunt Maffie, who was not even born yet when Vincent disappeared, answered the phone, and she told him to come by the house. I was there when Theresa opened the door. There was this man in his fifties, standing on the doorstep telling her in Italian that he was her long-lost son. But my grandmother didn’t recognize him—the image in her mind was of her sixteen-year-old boy. She spat at him and said, “You are not my son.”

Theresa walked to the parlor and sat down Jim bent down and whispered something in her ear—the secret of the cow’s blood. The moment she heard it, she passed out cold. He was her son. The revelation was just as much a surprise to Jim’s wife and children as well. They never knew he was a Capone. All along, they had known him as Jim Hart.

[By the way, Jim found out upon his return that he, in fact, had not killed anyone. Al had only told him he killed that young man to scare him. Do you know what Jim did when he saw Al—the legendary Al Capone, feared through all of Chicago—after all those years? He punched him in the face.]

When Jim ran away from home in 1908, my grandfather Ralph was suddenly thrust into the role of eldest son. In a turn-of-the-century immigrant family, this meant that he assumed responsibility for helping his parents provide for his younger brothers and sister. He was only fourteen years old.

Ralph managed to find different odd jobs here and there. He worked as a telegram messenger, a teller in a bank, and even at the Lifesaver Candy Company. Frank and Al, who were thirteen and nine when Jim disappeared, helped as much as they could by selling newspapers, but the real burden was Ralph’s. Many biographers have described Ralph as either being less intelligent than Al or less of a leader, but I know that was not true. He was the businessman behind the Capone success. Al was the flamboyant face of the Outfit, but Ralph made things run from behind the scenes. He kept the books, paid out salaries, and coordinated the liquor shipments. There was a reason the Chicago Crime Commission named Ralph Public Enemy #3 behind Al’s #1. Without Ralph, Al could not operate, and they knew it.

But his leadership skills didn’t only apply to his life in bootlegging. He developed them and exercised them when the Capone family was under duress in those early years in Brooklyn. He learned to take care of those he loved, and this was a trait that stayed with him for all of his life. At the end of his life, when he moved out of his lodge in Wisconsin, a cousin of mine helped him pack his things. My cousin told me, “Deirdre, I found all these little pieces of paper in his strong box.” They were all IOUs that people had given him, and he had never collected on. Some of them were years old. He would give this person $25, that person $500, and he didn’t expect anything in return. He took care of his own.

In June 1914, as World War I erupted, my grandfather Ralph enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Paris Island. But it was quickly discovered that he had flat feet, and they sent him home. Flat feet run in the family—all the Capone men, including Al, had them. So, Ralph returned safely to Gabriel and Theresa. He would not be among the one hundred million Americans who died in that war.

Back in Brooklyn, he met a beautiful young Italian girl named Filomina (Florence) Muscatto in 1916. He was twenty-two, and she was only sixteen. They married, and in April 1917, their first and only child, a son, was born. That son was my father, Ralph Gabriel Capone. His arrival could not have brought more joy to my grandmother Theresa. He was the first in a new generation of Capones, and he was a boy. Women of that era saw promise in their boys—girls were expected to help with the chores.

A second boy was born in the Capone family a little more than a year later, December 4, 1918 but under less joyful circumstances. My uncle Al, then nineteen years old, was sowing his wild oats, and he got a local girl pregnant. By then, Al had already contracted syphilis, which the girl caught from him. Probably because of the disease, she had a very difficult pregnancy and died in childbirth. The boy she bore was himself weakened by the ravages of syphilis and suffered from health problems all of his life.

When my grandmother Theresa found out that Al’s relationship with the girl had produced a son, she insisted that he stay with their family. He was named Albert Francis Capone, or “Sonny.” Theresa wanted him to have a mother, and even though the twentieth century was well under way, arranged marriages were still perfectly common. She found a devout Irish Catholic woman, Mary (Mae) Coughlin, in her parish who was twenty one years old, nearing spinsterhood in those days. Mae was sterile due to a birth defect, and so when my grandmother pleaded with her to marry Al and raise his son as her own, she agreed. She would be a devoted mother to Sonny and wife to Al for the rest of her life.

Without warning, life for the entire Capone family turned upside-down in 1920. My great-grandfather Gabriel died suddenly of a heart attack in November at the age of fifty-five. Without him, Theresa could not keep the barbershop open. The family’s means of survival was lost forever.

Although both Al and Ralph already had families of their own, they were the only ones capable of supporting their widowed mother and helping her feed her five children still at home. They needed a way to earn money—lots of money.

From Brooklyn to Chicago, 1920 – 1923

I came to Chicago with forty dollars in my pocket… My son is now twelve. I am still married, and I love my wife dearly. We had to make a living. I was younger than I am now, and I thought I needed more. I didn’t believe in prohibiting people from getting the things they wanted. I thought Prohibition was an unjust law, and I still do.

- Al Capone

Long before his father Gabriel died, Al Capone started developing a skill that would eventually secure him not only a fortune, but a place in history. He was becoming street wise—and he was learning how to lead a gang. It started innocently enough and I’m sure that as a teenager, Al never thought that his running with rough kids on the streets of Brooklyn would pave the way for his life’s work. But slowly, over time, crime defined more and more of his life.

The Capone family needed its young sons’ contributions to survive. Working six days a week at hard labor, a young man could hope to make around $900 a year in the early 1900s. But milk at that time was 33¢ a gallon. There were nine Capone mouths to feed. If the family drank only a gallon of milk a day—which is less than a glass for each person—fifteen percent of a paycheck could disappear just for milk. What about food, rent, clothing, coal, medicine…the endless list of expenses any family with young children incurs? Clearly, whatever menial labor the boys could secure wasn’t enough.

Gang activity was one answer. By the time Gabriel died in 1920, Al had already been involved in crime, some petty and some not so petty, for years. It started when he was very young, simply stealing fruit and vegetables from street vendors’ carts, and eventually he learned to loot trucks and warehouses. He was neither the first nor the last to resort to this solution—gangs have been in existence for as long as there have been inhabitants of this world. In fact, the word thug dates back to thirteenth century India and refers, loosely, to a member of a gang of criminals.

“We called him a ‘wharf rat,’” Ralph told me in one of our talks about his boyhood with Al. “And he gradually became a fast-thinking and hard-fighting young lad.” The first gang Al joined was a Brooklyn group called the James Street gang. But there were bigger fish to fry on the streets of New York City. In the early 1900s, an Italian immigrant and notorious criminal named Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli, a.k.a. Paul Kelly, formed the Italian Five Points gang. It was named for its home turf, situated in the Five Points section of Lower Manhattan, which is also called the Bowery. The gang evolved to become one of the largest and most structured street gangs in American history.

After Paul Kelly, the second in command of the Five Pointers was Johnny “the Fox” Torrio. He instituted a practice of recruiting street hoodlums into a “farm team” of young boys called the Five Pointers Juniors. At the age of twelve, Al left the James Street gang and joined the Five Pointers Juniors, where he met three other boys who would grow up to become infamous figures in American crime history: Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Bugsy Siegel.

Torrio, who was eighteen years older than Al, watched his new recruit with a keen interest. He saw that Al was bright and had a knack for leadership, and he began to groom him for more responsibility. When Al was still a young teenager, Torrio was confident that he had learned the ropes well, and he allowed him to graduate from being a Five Pointer Junior to a true Five Pointer.

Torrio believed in putting business first, but many other members of the Five Pointers were too accustomed to a life of petty crime and making rash, hasty decisions. Eventually, he got fed up, and with his buddy Frankie Yale, he left the Five Pointers and set up a new base of operations at the Harvard Inn in Brooklyn. Al followed them—in fact, he got the famous scar that gave rise to the nickname Scarface in a fight over a girl while working as a waiter at the Harvard Inn.

Torrio and Yale’s business included extortion and a string of brothels, and they brought a network of smaller gangs under their influence. Their organization became the first mafia-style “family.” Soon, they were large enough to attract the attention of corrupt politicians who saw the opportunity to control voters and elections by buying gang support—so marked the true inception of large-scale organized crime in the United States.

As Torrio’s power was increasing in Brooklyn, another gang leader had made a name for himself in Chicago: James “Big Jim” Colosimo. He was an Italian immigrant who came to Chicago in the 1890s and worked as a street sweeper. He eventually involved himself in politics, worked his way up, and became a successful owner of poolrooms, saloons, and “red-light” enterprises. Eventually, he opened the famous Colosimo’s Café on South Wabash Avenue.

Colosimo attained notoriety and wealth in the first decades of the twentieth century, when Italian and Sicilian immigrants were violently persecuted by the American mafia. After he opened his café, he started to receive “blackhanders,” extortion letters threatening him with torture and death if he did not pay a demanded ransom. These letters were called “blackhanders” because they were signed with a drawing of a black hand. Colosimo realized he needed a smart bodyguard. In 1915, he sent for Johnny Torrio to come to Chicago.

Just after Torrio arrived, Colosimo was visited in his café by two men who told him that if he did not hand over $25,000 by the next day, he would be killed. After conferring with Torrio, Colosimo agreed to meet them the next afternoon under the railroad viaduct on Archer Avenue. When the blackhanders arrived at the appointed place, they were met by four fellows with sawed-off shotguns who killed them at pointblank range.

Torrio’s method for dealing with the blackhanders was simple. He spoke to them in the only language they would understand: swift, overwhelming brute force. And they got the message. From that day on, they steered clear of Colosimo, Torrio, and, later, Al Capone.

In fact, I would learn from my grandfather Ralph that over the course of his life, many legitimate businessmen came to Uncle Al for help when they were being victimized by blackhanders. As soon as the word got out that these men were friends of Al, the extortionists would turn tail and disappear.

Colosimo was content with running his café and a few other joints, but with the advent of Prohibition in 1920, Torrio saw much broader potential. There were small-time bootleggers popping up all over Chicago, scrambling to get a foothold in this get-rich-quick business. Torrio moved quickly to shut them out and become the sole supplier of illegal alcohol in all of Cook County. He started opening “Torrio towns,” the first of which was Burnham, convenient to the workers in the steel mills and oil refineries in both northwestern Indiana and South Chicago. Burnham was successful enough that Torrio eventually gained more than 100,000 employees in gambling parlors and dance halls operating day and night all over Cook County. As the automobile began to replace the horse and buggy, he started opening roadhouses along the highways. People flocked to his establishments for the slot machines, roulette, music, girls, and, of course, liquor.

In 1920, when Torrio was thirty-nine, he could no longer handle his gigantic organization alone. That’s when he remembered his Five Pointer friend Al. He called my uncle and made him a proposition. At the time, he was making $100,000 a year, and he offered to pay Al $25,000, plus a 50/50 share in his bootlegging proceeds.

When Al got the call, he had a legitimate job as a bookkeeper in New Jersey. His employer liked him a lot, and when Al told him about the offer Torrio had pitched him, his boss thought it was a good deal. He gave Al $500 to enable him to make the trip. Al gave most of it to his wife Mae for rent and food. He used the rest to help defray his cost of moving to the Windy City. Years later, Al would pay back that $500—with significant interest—to show his appreciation.

When Al went to Chicago to join up with Torrio, he considered the job a trial run, and so he left Mae and Sonny in Brooklyn. But on May 11, 1920, Big Jim Colosimo was gunned down in his café, making Johnny Torrio the number one and Al, in turn, Torrio’s first lieutenant.

Right on the heels of this promotion, in November 1920, Al’s father died. Without warning, both he and his older brother Ralph were under tremendous financial pressure to support the family. The business, however, was starting to boom in Chicago, and so Al invited Ralph to join him in 1921. Ralph also left his wife and son behind, but both men made frequent trips back and forth to Brooklyn, bringing money to their families and to Theresa. Finally, in 1922, the brothers had saved enough money to move the entire family to Chicago.