Uncle Al Capone (9 page)

We were chatting away about the Cubs, the Bears, and boxing—Matty’s favorite sport—when I suddenly remembered what Ralph said about Matty being in the car with McGurn the day before the massacre. I asked him about it.

At first his eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Who told you about that?” He asked.

I told him how I had gone to visit my grandfather and spent a lot of time talking with him about the years before I was born.

“Wow, you must have caught him in a weak moment,” Matty said. “He hardly ever talked about shit like that.” In those days, I never used profanity. My grandmother Theresa taught me that bad language is not something a lady stoops to. But I sure heard plenty of it from her sons, so it didn’t faze me to hear Matty use it in my house, as long as my kids weren’t listening.

Matty went on to confirm everything my grandfather had told me—except that he added that he and McGurn were in his car on February 13, and he was driving.

Matty was never heavily involved in the Outfit. He was weaker than and not as bright as Uncle Al and Ralph, but he liked being known as a Capone and a big shot, so he kind of bragged about working side-by-side with McGurn.

Suddenly, Bob spoke up. “This reminds me of something my dad told me about what my uncle Tommy said about Valentine’s Day, 1929,” Bob said. Tommy May’s brother was one of the seven men killed that day: John May. John always insisted that he was just an auto mechanic for Moran and not a criminal. All the same, he had access to information, because he had been complaining just prior to the shooting that some crooked cops were hijacking Bugs Moran’s booze, and Moran was going to put a stop to it and get them kicked off the force. Based on those complaints, Tommy had told Bob’s dad on two or three occasions that he was sure it was cops and not Capone who did it.

At that point, I was pretty sure I had the truth about the Saint Valentines Day Massacre. I heard pretty much the same story coming not only from the family of Al Capone, but also the family of one of the victims. And I had read in clippings from the Chicago newspapers that one of the seven slaughtered men, Frank Gusenberg, survived long enough to tell police Sergeant Thomas Loftus, “Cops did it.” Now, from what I heard about Frank Gusenberg, he had enough interaction with the police to know a cop when he saw one.

But still, this account was one I never read in any book about Uncle Al and never saw in any movie or television show about him. I started to believe the massacre was an example of what Al was talking about when he said, “I’ve done a lot of bad things, things I wish I didn’t have to do to survive, but I haven’t done half of the rotten things that they say I’ve done.”

After Matty left our house that night I told myself, “OK, maybe I’m easily convinced because I’m a Capone and would like to think that my family didn’t kill those seven men.” I heard my family’s story and Bob’s story, but I knew that others could and would say these were biased accounts. And as much as I wanted to believe Ralph and Matty, I couldn’t deny they had a vested interest in clearing their brother’s name. I needed more verification—something that came from outside the Capone sphere of influence.

Just recently, I got that verification. A historian, David Ward, published an excellent and well-documented book called
Alcatraz-The Gangster Years
. It includes a section about the slaughter on N. Clark Street. In it, Ward disclosed an announcement made by Frederick D. Silloway, the local prohibition administrator, shortly after the massacre. He was quoted in the newspapers as saying, “The murderers were not gangsters. They were Chicago policemen. I believe the killing was the aftermath to the hijacking of 500 cases of whiskey belonging to the Moran gang by five policemen six weeks ago…I expect to have the names of these five policemen in a short time. It is my theory that in trying to recover the liquor, the Moran gang threatened to expose the policemen and the massacre was to prevent the exposure.”

When I read the newspaper accounts of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, I knew in my bones that they were not true. My uncle Al Capone was not a monster.

In the recently published book,
Get Capone
by Jonathan Eig, the same evidence was uncovered.

It took me about fifty years to fully convince myself that at least this one event—a shocking, unforgettable event to be sure—was not, regardless of what I may have read or heard, ordered by Uncle Al. By publishing the evidence I’ve gathered, maybe I can divest my subconscious of some of the guilt I’ve carried merely because I was born a Capone.

There is another chapter in the story of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. During the time I spent with my grandfather in 1958, he—after much pressing—finally told me a little more about three men in Al’s gang who died mysteriously. I learned from Ralph that these men were double-crossing Al by working for both him and Bugs Moran at the same time. They were probably the ones who saved Bugs Moran’s life by telling him that the cops were out to kill him and that he shouldn’t go to the garage on the morning of February 14.

The facts on record, which I knew long before asking for Ralph’s account, were these: Early on in the gang wars, in 1924, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi were accused of killing a man named Dion O’Banion. My uncle Al paid for their defense, and they got off. On May 8, 1929, the bodies of Scalise, Anselmi, and another man who worked for Al named John Gunita were found in a ditch in Indiana. They had been beaten on the head by blunt objects reported as baseball bats and shot. This became known as the “Baseball Bat Incident.”

This was a subject that my grandfather really didn’t want to talk about. I kept pressing him, and he finally said, “Look, Deirdre, all I can tell you about that incident is that Al got a couple of tips from very reliable sources that those three guys, Anselmi, Scalise, and Gunita, who he had been a friend to many times, had planned to kill him so they could take over the Outfit. There was a man named Joe Aiello, an associate of Bugs Moran, who wanted to cut in on the alcohol rackets. He made an offer of $50,000 to anyone who ‘bumps off Capone.’

To get that fifty grand, Anselmi, Scalise, and Gunita decided to use their high status in the Outfit to kill Al and then work with Aiello to take over Chicago. They offered Al’s chef, Peppe, $5,000 to poison Al. Peppe told Al about the threat and kept the money.”

Ralph went on, “It was also reported that it was them that warned Bugs that the cops were out to get him and not to go to the garage that morning. They were clearly on Bugs’s payroll and only pretending to be loyal to Al. They were double-crossers.

One of the reports said that they thought they had better take me out as well as the other brothers at the same time to avoid retaliation. So they were going to blow up the house on Prairie Avenue on a Sunday when we were all there having dinner. They felt they could pull it off because they were insiders and the bodyguards wouldn’t suspect them. Deirdre, if they had pulled it off, Grandma Capone, Aunt Maffie, your father…all of us would have been killed.

When Al heard this, he went berserk. I have never seen him that mad. He was like a wild man. But a little while later, he suddenly calmed down. After a few minutes of silence he began to smile. I said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ He just lit up a cigar, grinned, and said, ‘I think it’s time to throw a party for our friends.’

That’s all I’m going to say about this,” Ralph said, looking at me sternly. “There had always been a code of honor that Al and most of the other guys in the business lived by. And that was that no matter how pissed off you were at your enemies, the innocent members of their families were off limits. And nobody loved his family more than my brother Al. And you never double-cross your friends. Too bad some guys didn’t live by that code. If you ask me, those guys got what they deserved.”

I cannot pretend that my grandfather Ralph and my uncle Al had stainless hands. I cannot make them out to be heroes. But I am a Capone. Their blood runs through my veins. And I knew them. I heard the deep rumble of their voices; I felt their big arms around me; I smelled their skin.

That stay in Mercer and those conversations with my grandfather got me through a very tough time in my life. But what helped me even more than feeling close to my grandfather was feeling close to my father again—as I knew I would at the lodge. I had so many childhood memories of happy times with my father in Mercer, and being there again made me feel closer to him than I had ever felt since the day he took his life. To this day, I am encouraged by the feeling that his spirit lives with me, and he is giving me strength to go through life with dignity and honor—the strength that he couldn’t find for himself during his own life. This strength has helped me recognize both the bad and the good in my family’s legacy—the fact that while they may have been capable of terrible retribution against men like Scalise, Anselmi, and Gunita, they would never have been capable of killing innocent people, like on Saint Valentine’s Day. I believe that, in a way, my father’s spirit has helped me write this book.

I was willing to go to jail. I could have taken my stretch, come back to my wife and child, and lived my own life. But I’m being hounded by a public that won’t give me a fair chance. They want a full show, all the courtroom trappings, the hue and cry, and all the rest. It’s utterly impossible for a man my age to have done all the things I’m charged with. I’m a spook, born of a million minds.

- Al Capone

The tides changed for Al Capone after the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Before that day, Chicago had been willing to tolerate him—even smile upon him—because, whether it was illegal or not, the people wanted what he was selling.

As Al himself said, “Nobody wanted Prohibition. This town voted six to one against it. Somebody had to throw some liquor on that thirst. Why not me? I give the public what it wants. I never had to send out high-pressure salesmen. I could never meet the demand.”

But after February 14, 1929, all that seemed to change. The newspapers were full of accusations, and the public was quick to react. No one wants to live in a lawless town, and Al Capone had come to symbolize recklessness and an utter disregard for order that went unchecked by the authorities. Of course, the police, lawmakers, and judges would probably have been happy to continue turning a blind eye to the Outfit’s operations indefinitely because they benefited from the speakeasies in payouts, booze, and good times. But once the public, spurred on by the media, was in a furor, the leaders of Chicago sensed they had to put a stop to Capone—or risk losing their power.

Uncle Al was not slow to notice the cooling of temperature. And as much as this worried him for himself and his business, he was doubly worried for his family. Family was everything to him, and when he saw that his mother, wife, and son would suffer for his activities, he was deeply troubled.

Al said. “I’ve got a mother who never misses mass unless she’s too sick to get out of bed,” and “I’ve got a wife who loves me as dearly as any woman could love a man. They have feelings. They are hurt by what the newspapers say about me. And I can’t tell you what it does to my twelve-year-old son when the other school children, cruel as they are, keep showing him newspaper stories that call me a killer or worse.”

To make matters worse, Al’s success was a threat to other businessmen in Chicago. He wasn’t just hounded by the public and the law, but other businessmen—both legitimate and racketeers—were doing everything in their power to push him out. He was the biggest competition there was. At the end of the 1920s, he was at the pinnacle of his success. The Outfit brought in more than $100 million a year, all of it cash. Most of his business centered on selling beer, liquor, and prostitution, but he and his cronies also owned and operated gambling establishments, dog tracks, dance halls, roadhouses, and other resorts.

A powerful, unofficial ruling party of businessmen in Chicago, called the Secret Six, began to feel they had to do away with the Al Capone competition at all costs. The Chicago World’s Fair was looming large. Scheduled for 1933, the city expected the fair to draw millions and be a major source of revenue. The Secret Six did not want Al Capone encroaching on their profits. But he would surely be in the spotlight throughout the event, and so he had to be eliminated before it opened.

The Secret Six was led by the owner of the
Chicago Tribune
, Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick. In the
Illinois Public Journal
, Burton Cooke wrote of Colonel McCormick’s vendetta against Al: “McCormick was a person who followed his own conscience, whether right or wrong, and used his paper to shape public opinion. He aroused the public with numerous newspaper articles, most of them inaccurate, to put pressure on the police and politicians to break Al Capone’s hold on Chicago and put him in prison.”

The trouble for the Secret Six was that they couldn’t make any aggressive moves against Al because they had to keep him quiet. He had the dirt to implicate three-quarters of the Chicago political and business establishment in his criminal activities—and no one doubted that if he went down, he’d take all other guilty parties down with him.

Luckily for the Secret Six—and unluckily for Uncle Al—the perfect opportunity arose. Though he was squeezed from all sides by law enforcement, the media, and the public, and though he was being accused of heinous and innumerable monstrosities, it was actually a very minor offense that provided law enforcement with the right excuse to move in on Al.

In 1928, Uncle Al—under the false name of Parker Anderson—purchased a home on Palm Island near Miami for $40,000. Members of the Outfit loved to go down there during the winter months and play. You can imagine the noise that went on late into the night at that house. Unbeknownst to Uncle Al and my grandfather, the next-door neighbor hated the partying and called the police a couple of times. Of course, the police did nothing because the chief of police was frequently one of the partiers. So, this neighbor, who worked for the federal government, took his complaint to the next level. He phoned a friend of his—who just happened to be President Herbert Hoover.