Never Let Them See You Cry (14 page)

The outings were a test, his doctor said later. The patient was never alone. Scarface sometimes stepped out of his car, but only to walk into a corner drugstore. “He liked to go in and buy chewing gum and Sen-Sen,” his doctor said. “He likes to chew Sen-Sen.” Soon even those excursions ended, and Capone was confined to his estate, where he endlessly practiced his golf swing, swam in the pool, lolled on the patio in the sun and fished from a pier. Never mentioned were the days when he was the storm center of mob wars that had cost more than one thousand lives.

“He seems to have a blank memory about that phase of his life,” the doctor said. Soon Capone's only physical activity was batting a tennis ball against a wall, and that was on his good days. On the days he attempted gin rummy, family members and servants always let him win. A visitor from Chicago, unaware that he was supposed to lose, bested Al at gin. Capone flew into a rage. “Get the boys!” he shouted. “I want them to take care of this wise guy.”

Other gangland friends dropped by, but Scarface barely recognized his old henchmen. His memory hazy at best, he was safe at last from mortal enemies. As far as the underworld was concerned, Al Capone had been dead a long time.

The public learned the truth when a Chicago man created a furor by accusing Capone of a plot to kill him and seize his business. With family permission, the mobster's doctors revealed to the press that Capone now had the mind of a child.

“When he first came to my attention, a large part of his brain had been destroyed,” his Baltimore doctor said. “He hasn't sufficient intelligence to run his own life, much less the affairs of a vast crime syndicate.”

In those days, much of Miami Beach shuttered in the summer. Even police officers were laid off during the slow season and called back to work in the fall.

Rookie cop Emery Zerick was a policeman without work that summer of 1946. He went to the Capone estate for a job. “They had lots of complaints about too many sightseeing boats and too many cars going by looking for Al Capone.”

Big Al's brother Ralph paid off-duty cops good money: fifteen dollars for a twelve-hour day.

By then the world's most notorious mobster drooled and babbled unintelligibly. “During the day they would wheel him to the end of the dock and put a fishing pole in his hand,” Zerick recalled. “When a sightseeing boat showed up, we had to rush him back inside. He weighed very little, he had shrunken.”

Zerick guarded the front gate, equipped with a telephone. He connected visitors to Ralph, then discreetly stepped away. Ralph would give authorized visitors a signal to give the young cop at the gate. The signal was changed daily.

Zerick learned to ask no names, but recognized Meyer Lansky, a “fast walker who used to bounce when he walked,” as well as Tony Accardo, Jimmy Doyle, Joe Fischetti and Joe Massei.

Capone's health worsened and a death watch began, with reporters and underworld cronies on alert. Scarface would rally, then slip away. “A bunch of black cars would show up every time he had a relapse,” Zerick said. Gangland visitors always slipped twenty- and thirty-dollar tips to the young cop who admitted them. “Every time he had a relapse I would make three or four hundred dollars. There used to be a plaster statue of a saint in the yard, and as they went inside, they all used to bless themselves.”

By January 1947, the end was clearly near. Scarface observed his last birthday on Friday the seventeenth. He was forty-eight. Four days later he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. After fourteen hours in a coma, he rallied again. Capone's doctor emerged with an update at ten
P.M
.: The patient, though critical, would probably survive the night. The mansion remained brightly lit.

The next day, Saturday, January 25, 1947, Zerick was at the Palm Island estate, moonlighting after being recalled to the police department. Capone seemed stronger, but pneumonia had set in. “Ralph said he was having a relapse. Everybody was in an uproar. He was barely breathing.” Two priests administered last rites.

Capone's heart stopped at 7:25
P.M
.

“They came downstairs and said he was dead,” Zerick recalled. “The wife took it hard. Ralph was blubbering. There was a leak in that place, there was a screech of cars, it seemed like a million reporters. They knew right away. I never figured out how.”

A block-long line of sleek black limousines parked outside. “The hoods, all of them, showed up, making the sign of the cross and paying respects to the widow.”

Tourists and curious spectators formed a promenade along the sidewalk, a regatta of rubbernecks, clustering in groups.

The Capone story did not end with his death. Hollywood has kept him alive. No hoodlum has fascinated filmmakers more. “Nobody thought this would happen,” Zerick said. “Nobody ever thought the Capone story would get bigger and bigger as time goes by.”

Al “Sonny” Capone, the sad little boy banished from a Miami Beach Boy Scout troop when outraged parents learned his name, saw his children shunned and tormented when
The Untouchables
became popular on television. He and his mother sued in 1959, for invasion of privacy; they lost. Sonny, a Miami dock worker, changed his name and moved to an undisclosed address.

A Delta Airlines pilot and his wife now live in the home on Palm Island. Neighbors still wince, generations later, as guides on sightseeing boats point out the house where Scarface died.

Nothing is new under the Miami sun, only the players.

A Christmas card arrived at the
Herald
a week before the holiday: Santa and a reindeer. “We liked your book,” said the note inside, written in shaky ballpoint script.

We went to the book fair and liked the panel discussion … Also talked with some of the authors and got some autographs! T. D. Allman was wonderful, so sincere and honest when he autographed our copy of the book
Miami
. And David Rieff mentioned that it was very tiresome writing
Going to Miami
. We stopped by the
Herald
for you to autograph our copy of your book, but you had not come in that morning, or afternoon. When the movie of your book comes out, we will see it.

The address was deep South Beach, south of Fifth Street.

I parked in front of their small condo on a Sunday afternoon, four days before Christmas. How surprised they will be, I thought, when I knock on their door and say I came to sign my book. I smiled, imagining their astonished faces.

Wrong again. They were not surprised.

It is not easy to surprise people who have seen everything.

No answer. I thought no one was home. I knocked again and was about to leave when a small blue-eyed man with graying hair and the stubble of a beard cracked open the door. He wore a T-shirt and wrinkled trousers. He regarded me thoughtfully. “You're Edna Buchanan,” he announced, his voice matter-of-fact. “I'll get your book.”

His wife stood behind him. Behind her I could see the small room, crowded with the possessions of a lifetime. They both stepped outside to chat.

He apologized for not shaving and explained. He had been robbed on the street, once at gunpoint. If he shaved and dressed neatly, his chances of being a target would be far greater. “When I dress like this, they leave me alone.” His wife wore a San Francisco T-shirt and simple slacks. She no longer carries a purse, for the same reasons. That is also why they have not had their old Volkswagen repainted. Their last car was stolen. They have learned that the only way to keep anything is to look like you have nothing. They have lived in Miami Beach since 1955, and they have learned to be survivors. He worked in a fashionable shop on Lincoln Road Mall, but the shop is no longer there, and Lincoln Road is no longer fashionable. They saw all the changes. I signed the book and handed it back to him.

“You and this book are like part of our family,” he said. They remembered stories I wrote for the Miami Beach
Daily Sun
, before joining the
Herald
twenty years ago.

I wished them a merry Christmas, and they told me about their first taste of roast suckling pig, years ago. A Cuban shopkeeper on Fourth Street had become their friend. One Christmas he brought them the delicacy and insisted they try some. Not long after, they returned home and saw police lines around a covered corpse in front of his shop. They recognized the pink sneakers and the yellow socks.

Police caught the killer. “He's probably out by now,” the man with the blue eyes said. His wife always liked to sit outdoors. Last time she did, her chair was almost knocked over by a running man and the police who were chasing him. When they complained about crack cocaine dealers conducting business in the burned shell of a nearby building, an impatient cop asked, “Are you willing to be a material witness?”

Of course he was not. “I'd have to sell my condo and move,” he said. How could he sell an apartment in this changed neighborhood?

When they do venture out, he said, his wife walks one way and he the other. They depart at different times and use different routes. “You can't leave at the same time every day,” he explained. “You can't establish a pattern. If they know when you will be gone, they break in.”

I said I was glad they liked the book, and they walked me to my car. They circled my 1984 Mercury Cougar, admiring it and asking questions about the alarm.

They are good people, survivors.

I locked the doors and drove away. Holiday carols played on the car radio. Christmas in Miami.

I work on holidays. I don't mind. Married colleagues with families deserve those special times off. Fewer of my editors and top police brass work, and a reporter can accomplish more without them. I like to write holiday stories, reporting on how the rest of Miami celebrates. There is always news: Big families get together. Some turn on each other, and the shooting starts. On the Fourth of July and New Year's Eve they play with guns and fireworks, and somebody always gets hurt. On Memorial Day and Labor Day they get drunk and careen around in high-powered speedboats. Kids race out of the house early on Christmas morning to try out new skates and bicycles. Still shaky on their new wheels, some encounter motorists hung over from the night before.

Some people never make it home from Christmas parties.

Holidays bring despair to some, rage to others.

Sometimes there are stories of hope and renewal.

Sometimes, but not often.

Even though I work on those special days, I am old-fashioned and cling to tradition. I like turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve candlelight services, but one year I missed both. The day before Thanksgiving I checked the
Herald
employee cafeteria. They were already serving turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie—the works, but I waited. They would obviously have turkey on Thanksgiving, even if it was just leftovers.

Wrong again. The
Herald
cafeteria was open, as promised, on Thanksgiving Day, but all they served was leftover macaroni and cheese, scorched in the reheating. The joke was on me. So I ate burned leftover macaroni and cheese for Thanksgiving.

That was festive compared to Christmas Eve.

John Patrick O'Neill could live with his secret no longer. Alone and jobless, O'Neill, fifty, shared his home with four stray cats, his only friends. They all lived together under the east bridge of the MacArthur Causeway. From the gloom under the bridge, as traffic rumbled by overhead, they could see the city skyline, the holiday lights and the million-dollar Star Island homes of the rich and famous. On Christmas Eve, the animals lost their friend and protector.

At dark, as motorists whizzed past, O'Neill trudged more than a mile to Miami Beach police headquarters. It was Christmas Eve, and he wanted to confess. He had killed a man, he said, and buried the corpse beneath the bridge where he lived.

O'Neill had a reason. The man he killed, who was also homeless, had hurled his beloved cats, all four of them, into Biscayne Bay to drown. The thrashing, panicky animals were unable to climb the sheer concrete embankment, but O'Neill had jumped into the water after them. He rescued them, then turned to confront the man who tried to drown them.

The man, Daniel Francis Kelly, fifty-eight, pulled a knife and lunged at him, O'Neill said. O'Neill punched and stomped Kelly until he was dead, then dug a shallow grave with his hands and a piece of board.

That was on Friday, December 19. Now, on Christmas Eve, he wanted to clear his conscience.

Police were doubtful, but detectives Nick Lluy and Robert Hanlon listened. “He wasn't drunk,” Hanlon said later. “It sounded plausible.”

Everybody hoped it was not true. Everybody wanted to go home. The detectives went out to the east bridge and descended into the darkness. They scanned with flashlights, probed the ground under the bridge, and found a suspicious mound, emitting an even more suspicious odor.

A fire truck with high-intensity lights arrived to illuminate the area, directly across from the Miami Beach Coast Guard base. The detectives sent for shovels and generators and began to dig.

About to leave the
Herald
for Christmas Eve services, I heard something was afoot and called police headquarters. Detective Anthony Sabatino had just bought O'Neill a double hamburger, microwaved at a 7-Eleven. “This is a heckuva way to spend Christmas,” the detective said.

He was right.

I went out to the scene to see what they would find. The underside of the bridge is a haven to street people. A number of urban bedouins had camped there from time to time. There were couches and chaise longues, even a little Christmas tree with tinsel.

Police spokesman Howard Zeifman cautioned that it might be a hoax. “People have lived under here for years,” he said. “It smells of rotten food, human waste and cats.”

It did.

But the story was no hoax. Cops, a prosecutor, a medical examiner and firefighters labored through the night, watched by a cautious full-grown calico and a curious, half-grown black cat with a white bib. By Christmas morning the shallow grave had yielded the remains of a dead man and O'Neill was charged with second-degree murder.

“I feel kind of sad for the guy,” said Hanlon, a veteran detective. “If he didn't come in and tell us about it, there's a very good chance that we never would have found it. I guess it was bothering him.”

Identified through fingerprints, the dead man had an arrest record nineteen pages long, mostly for drunkenness, vagrancy and disorderly conduct. He was remembered by police as a “nasty drunk.” Hanlon himself had arrested Kelly once. A Christmas Day autopsy confirmed that death was caused by blows to the head.

In his jail cell, O'Neill worried about his friends. He called the calico the Bandit. The black with the bib was Smokey. Satchmo was a striped gray, and the Tiger was white with golden stripes. O'Neill was served a Christmas Day dinner of roast beef, but nobody fed them.

“I'm just sorry about my cats,” he told Hanlon. The detective tried to catch them, to take to the Humane Society, but they scampered away, and he had no time to spend in their pursuit.

My story appeared, and
Herald
readers who care about animals created a minor traffic jam on the causeway. One woman rescued three of the cats and took them home. She never found Satchmo. “They were well, well taken care of,” she said. “These were not stray cats.”

John O'Neill pleaded not guilty, and I talked to him after his arraignment. He said he was not a killer. “It was self-defense. I had five lives to protect. Four of them were my cats.” The fifth, he said, was his own.

He said the cats were better friends than some people. He had found each of them on Miami Beach, lost, abandoned and hungry. He had rescued them, one by one, and taken them home, to his place under the bridge. It was home to him.

“I sure love the water,” he said. “I feel free there. I like it, it's outside, no rent, no nothing. I always had cat food for them. I fed them seven o'clock in the morning. When I left in the morning, I always left a big bowl of water. I also had vitamins for them. When I came home at five or six o'clock, I would feed them again and give them fresh water.”

His days were busy in Miami Beach, “picking up and recycling aluminum cans, so I could feed them and myself. I also got my beer and my smokes out of it. That was my daily routine, going to get cans and feeding my cats.”

Kelly disrupted the routine the week before Christmas. Other homeless men often shared the space under the bridge, and he was one of them. He snatched up O'Neill's friends—the Bandit, the Tiger, Smokey and Satchmo—and threw them into the bay.

“They were clinging to the sea wall,” O'Neill said. He saved them, then faced their attacker. “If you ever do that again, I'll break your jaw!” Kelly pulled a butcher knife, he said, and rushed him. O'Neill punched, kicked and stomped the man.

“What I did was for them. I just went on hitting him.” This was the first time such a thing had ever happened to him. He did like to drink and admitted his share of trouble, “but never violence.”

He had lived with the burden of his secret five days and nights, then could stand the guilt no more. A practicing Catholic, “on and off,” he said, “I had to get it off my chest.” Jailed without bond, he would stand trial in the spring.

I asked if he wanted me to contact anyone. His mother still lived in Port Chester, New York, where he grew up along the coast of Long Island Sound, fourteen hundred miles north of Miami. She was unaware of his trouble.

“I haven't written her,” he told me. “If it was something else, it would be easy, but I don't know how to tell her this.”

At the office I heard from a shocked reader, a man who had grown up with O'Neill in Port Chester, where he was known as Teedy O'Neill.

“He was a leader, the one you always chose first for a baseball team,” said the boyhood friend. “He was a tough, athletic kid, but never a bully.” Teedy O'Neill was a drifter and a loner even then, “an outdoorsy type guy who would just drift in and out of school. He was a hero, a good guy. He wouldn't hurt anybody. He wouldn't pick on anybody. Is he a bum? No, he is not a bum. It takes quite a man to confess when his conscience bothers him.”

Stories went out on the newswire, and letters of support came from animal lovers all over the country.

A jury deliberated for an hour that spring before returning a not-guilty verdict. They believed it was self-defense. The woman who cared for Smokey, the Bandit and the Tiger found O'Neill a place to stay and work at an auto dealership.

The temperature was eighty. It was April in Miami.

But it finally felt like Christmas.