The Mafia Encyclopedia (27 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 66
big vote he got the vote; when he wanted to control the election returns, he unleashed his gangster-animals to intimidate and terrorize voters by the thousand. Politicians Capone put in power were expected to deliver upon demand. Once the mayor of Cicero, in an inexplicable exercise of independence, actually took an action without first clearing it with Scarface. Capone seized His Honor on the steps of City Hall and proceeded to kick and punch him to a pulp. All the while a very embarrassed police officer worked very hard at averting his gaze.
The fourth of nine children of immigrant parents from Naples, Al Capone was born in 1899 in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He attended school through the sixth grade when he proceeded to beat up his teacher, was in turn beaten by the principal and then quit school for good. After that, he learned "street smarts," especially through a tough outfit of teenagers called the James Street Gang. Run by an older criminal, Johnny Torrio, James Street was a youthful subsidiary of the notorious Five Points Gang to which Capone later graduated. Among his closest friends, in school and in the gang, was a kid who was to become a major crime figure, Lucky Luciano, and the two would remain dear friends the rest of their lives.
In his late teens, Capone was hired by Torrio and his partner, Frankie Yale, as a bouncer in a saloon-brothel they ran in Brooklyn. It was here that Capone picked up his moniker of "Scarface Al," after his left cheek was slashed in an altercation over a girl with a hoodlum named Frank Galluccio. Later Capone would tell acquaintances and reporters that he got the wound serving in the "Lost Battalion" in France in the Great War, but he was never even in the service.
In 1919 Capone was in trouble over a murder or two the law was trying to pin on him. He relocated in Chicago to take on new duties for Torrio, who had been summoned there to help his uncle, Big Jim Colosimo, the city's leading whoremaster, run his empire. By the time Capone arrived Torrio was deeply in dispute with Big Jim. Seeing the huge financial opportunities that came with Prohibition, Torrio wanted Colosimo to shift his organization's main thrust to bootlegging. Big Jim was not interested. He had become rich and fat in the whoring trade and saw no need to expand. He forebade Torrio to get into the new racket. Torrio now realized that Colosimo had to be eradicated so that he could use Big Jim's organization for his criminal plans. Together he and Capone planned Colosimo's murder and sent to New York for the talent to carry out the job. Capone and Torrio meantime would act out airtight alibis.
The Torrio-Capone duo soon was on the move, taking over mobs that bowed to their entreaties or threats and going to war with those that wouldn't cooperate. Their most impressive coup was arranging the killing in 1924 of Dion O'Banion, the head of the largely Irish North Side Gang. Utilizing the murderous abilities of Frankie Yale of Brooklyn, the same man who carried out the Colosimo assassination, O'Banion's death ultimately failed to rout the North Siders who, instead, waged war off and on for several years. Torrio himself was badly shot in an ambush but, after lingering on the edge of death for days, recovered. When he got out of the hospital in February 1925, Torrio told Capone after considerable soul-searching: "Al, it's all yours." Torrio took the $30 million he had squirreled away and retired back to Brooklyn, thereafter to function as a sort of elder statesman and adviser to the leaders of organized crime and the national crime syndicate that would emerge in the 1930s.
In a sense it was a dirty trick to play on the 26-year-old Capone who cold turkey found himself in a position calling for a premium on brains rather than on his strong suit, muscle. He suddenly had to become a major business executive, heading up a workforce of over 1,000 persons and with a payroll running over $300,000 a week. And he had to demonstrate that he could work with other ethnics, including Jews, Irish, Poles and blacks. Here Capone excelled, appreciating any man, provided he was a hustler, crook or killer; and there was never an intimation that he discriminated against any of them because of their religion, race or national origin.
Capone was perhaps the underworld's first equal opportunity employer. Of course, he killed a number of ethnics if they did not bend to his will, but he did the same to many of Chicago's mafiosi, including the Gennas and the Aiellos, for the same reason. Capone did a thorough job of purging his city of Mafia Mustache Peres long before Luciano succeeded in doing so in New York.
Although he was a murderer and continued to order wholesale butchery as head of the outfit, Capone nevertheless changed in public image, mixing well with political, business and even social figures. He took on the character of a "public utility" by limiting his mob's activities mainly to rackets that enjoyed strong public support, such as booze, gambling and prostitution. If you give people what they want, inevitably you gain a certain respectability and popularity; thus Al Capone was cheered when he went to the ballpark. After 1929 Herbert Hoover was not.
Capone surrounded himself with gangsters he could trust, and this trust was, in turn, returned to him by his men. As long as a gangster didn't try to double-deal him, Capone backed him to the limit. Capone was shrewd enough even to hire Galluccio, the hood who
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had scarred him, as a bodyguard, an act that demonstrated to his men his capacity for magnanimity. It also caused some rival gangs to hook up with Capone, now believing his promises that they would prosper under his wing. He thus gained the loyalty of the Valley Gang under Frankie Lake and Terry Druggan and the machine-gun-happy Saltis-McErlane mob.
Not that Capone could ever relax his guard, as he was constantly under threat of assassination. He was shot at numerous times and once almost had his soup poisoned. In 1926 the O'Banions sent an entire machine-gun motorcade past the Hawthorne Inn, Capone's Cicero headquarters, and poured in 1,000 rounds, but Capone escaped injury when his bodyguard shoved him to the dining room floor and fell on top of him.
One by one Capone did eliminate his enemies, especially the North Siders. His most famous personal killings involved treachery within his own mob. Hop Toad Giunta and two of Capone's most lethal gunners, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, were not only showing signs of going independent but were cooperating with other Capone enemies to kill him. Capone invited them to a banquet in their honor and, at the climax of the evening, produced a gift-wrapped Indian club with which he bashed their brains out.
This occurred in 1929, a fatal year for Capone, although it hardly seemed so. Just shortly before the Indian-club caper, he committed a monumental blunder in ordering the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in an effort to kill Bugs Moran, the last major leader of the old O'Banion gang. Seven men were lined up against a garage wall and machine-gunned to death by Capone hit men dressed as police officers. The victims thought they were being subjected to a routine bust and had offered no resistance. Unfortunately, Moran was not present at the time. Even worse, the public attitude started to change about the savage bootleg wars. Washington began applying heat. While Capone could not be convicted of murder, he was eventually nailed for income tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years at the federal prison in Atlanta.
In 1934 he was transferred to Alcatraz and within a few years his health started to deteriorate. Released in 1939, he was a helpless paretic, a condition brought on by the ravages of untreated syphilis contracted in his early whorehouse days. In Alcatraz Capone also exhibited signs of going ''stir crazy," not uncommon with prisoners on "The Rock."
Capone's family took him to his mansion in Florida where he was to live out the next eight years, alternating between periods of lucidity and mental inertia. His boys from Chicago visited him from time to time but there was no way he could be involved in mob activities. He died on January 25, 1947.
See also: "
Wop with the Mop, The
."
Further reading:
Capone
by John Kobler;
The Legacy of Al Capone
by George Murray.
Capone, Frank (18951924): Brother of Al Capone
Frank Capone, elder brother of Alphonse "Scarface Al" Capone, was, some experts say, a man who could have written an even bloodier chapter in American crime than his infamous brother. While still in his 20s, he died in a pool of blood, riddled with slugs from a police shotgun. Another great Capone legend was nipped in the bud.
Frank Capone had a dedication to bloodletting and more savage instincts than Al, a man who is conservatively estimated to have ordered the deaths of at least 500 victims. Despite this bloody record, Al always exercised a certain patience. His credo, absorbed from the teachings of Johnny Torrio, was "always try to deal before you have to kill." To Frank Capone, this was an alien philosophy. His favorite observation was, "You never get no back talk from no corpse." And when spoken by Frank, the words, uttered with quiet, almost bankerlike reserve, bore an ominous quality unrivaled by Hollywood-inspired villains.
It was hardly surprising that, when the Chicagobased Torrio-Capone plans shifted from persuasion to force, Frank's labors had their shining moment. In the 1924 city election in Cicero, Illinois, the Democratic Party had the temerity to actually try to unseat the Torrio/Capone puppet regime of Joseph Z. Klenha. On the eve of the April I election campaigner Frank Capone took over. He led an assault on the Democratic candidate for town clerk, William K. Pflaum, besieging him in his office, roughing him up and finally ripping his office apart.
During the actual polling the following day, thugs invaded the polling places and screened out voters. They were asked how they were voting and if they gave the incorrect answer, a hoodlum grabbed the ballot from their hand and marked it "properly." They then waited, fingering a revolver, until the voter exercised his or her civic responsibility by dropping the ballot into the box. There were some voters who protested such cavalier treatment, and the thugs stilled their complaints by simply slugging them and carting them from the polling place.
Most honest election officials and poll watchers were frozen into inaction, and those who objected were slugged, kidnapped and held captive until the voting was concluded. The early toll included three men shot dead and another who had his throat slashed. A policeman, operating under the assumption that laws should be enforced, was blackjacked into submission. A
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Democratic campaign worker, Michael Gavin, was shot in both legs and thoughtfully carried off to imprisonment in the basement of a mob-owned hotel in Chicago. To make sure he was ministered to properly, eight other balky Democrats were sent along with him.
By late afternoon on election day the honest citizenry of Cicero rallied their forces and sought relief from the courts. In answer to their pleas, County Judge Edmund K. Jarecki deputized 70 Chicago police officers who were rushed to Cicero to fight a series of battles with Capone thugs. A police squad under Detective Sergeant William Cusick responded to an emergency call from a polling place near the Hawthorne works of the Western Electric Co. where Al and Frank Capone, their cousin Charles Fischetti and Dave Hedlin were soliciting votes with drawn revolvers.
At that time police rode about in unmarked cars, often long limousines similar in appearance to the vehicles mobsters preferred. Al Capone, Fischetti and Hedlin hesitated for a moment, unsure whether the intruders were rival gangsters or police. Frank Capone suffered no such restraints and immediately opened fire, igniting a general gunfight. Frank moved up on a patrolman and took aim at point-blank range. Whether he missed or the gun misfired is unclear, but before he could press the trigger again, the patrolman and a companion cut loose with both barrels of their shotguns. The elder Capone slumped to the gutter, dead. Al Capone fled the scene, as did Hedlin. Fischetti was seized but soon released by the police.
The boys gave Frank Capone the biggest underworld funeral seen in Chicago up to that time. It was said Al personally selected the silver-plated coffin, festooned with $20,000 worth of flowers. The
Chicago Tribune
noted with some irony that the affair was fitting enough for a "distinguished statesman." It was an understatement. After all, what statesman could bring about the ultimate period of mourning whereby all the gambling joints and whorehouses in Cicero ceased operations for two entire hours in tribute to Frank Capone? And it must be noted, in the final measurement of Frank Capone's contribution to the American dream, that his efforts in behalf of democracy had not been in vain. The Klenha ticket, from top to bottom, was swept back into office in a landslide.
Capone, Ralph "Bottles" (18931974): Brother of Al Capone
In 1950 the United Press reported: "... in his own right [Ralph Capone] is now one of the overlords of the national syndicate which controls gambling, vice and other rackets." It was hardly so. Ralph Capone was never very high on the list of leaders of the Chicago mob, although he did relay orders given by his younger brother, Al.
Scarface Al's trusted brother, Bottles
Capone, later was called "one of the
overlords of the national crime
syndicate," which he was not
As much in tribute to his brother as to himself, Ralph was always accorded a position of honor and trust within the syndicate, both before and after Al's death. His nickname, Bottles, came about because of the soft drink bottling plants Al had set him up in. (Al wanted to develop a monopoly on the soda water and ginger ale used in mixed drinks, an activity he figured would continue after the end of Prohibition. As a tactic, it proved very profitable.) During the World's Fair of 19331934, Ralph's bottled waters, flavored and plain, were just about the only soft drinks available on the premises except for Coca-Cola, which, thanks to Chicago syndicate tolerance, was permitted entrance. Since Coca-Cola was even then known as the Democratic Party's drink, the mob tolerated this political accommodation to a new national administration.
But Bottles, who received a handsome mobsubsidized income, was responsible for more than soda pop operations. Among other things, he maintained Al's Palm Island estate in Biscayne Bay off Miami Beach while Al was in Alcatraz. Ralph dutifully opened the estate to the mob for meeting purposes and the like

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