Uncle Al Capone (10 page)

President Hoover’s response was, “Get Capone!”

“Get Capone!” became a battle cry throughout America. As Al described it, “Every time a boy falls off a tricycle, every time a black cat has gray kittens, every time someone stubs a toe, every time there’s a murder or a fire or the Marines land in Nicaragua, the police and the newspapers holler, ‘Get Capone!’”

At that point, any excuse would do to put him away. President Hoover had a friend in the Treasury Department named Frank Wilson. He was the one who first came up with the idea of looking into Al’s tax files—and he found that Al owed some back taxes. In fact, Al had offered to pay up on a number of occasions, but could never get the IRS to give him a clear total of how much he owed.

Both the theory and practice of taxing income were significantly different in the early 1920s from what we know today. Today, just about everyone lives with the understanding that income taxes are a given and that willing tax evasion is a fairly serious offense. But income tax was still quite new when Al was operating the Outfit.

In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution made income tax a permanent fixture in the United States. This Amendment represented a significant ideological shift for most Americans. Since the Boston Tea Party more than a century earlier, taxation had been a hot-button issue in America, and many felt that any form of taxation was an infringement on their inalienable right to liberty. The income tax, therefore, was very difficult to institute, and it has taken a lot of time to evolve to the significance it now holds in our financial lives.

When Al Capone was charged with tax evasion, income tax laws were relatively unknown, misunderstood, and neglected by the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens. People were not even required to file if they earned less than $5,000 a year—an income bracket that represented more than 90 percent of the population. Al obviously was bringing in more than $5,000 a year, but there was a provision in the income tax law that stated that one did not have to declare any income made illegally—such as from gambling or bootlegging—because to do so would be self-incriminating.

The government was also not particularly diligent about pressing the issue of owed taxes. They did not send out personal income tax forms as they do today, and tax law was still obscure enough that most people who did file needed the help of an accountant or lawyer. Today, it’s hard to imagine being ignorant of one’s obligation to pay income taxes, but in 1931, most people actually were—and the government understood this.

So, when the federal government indicted Uncle Al in 1931 with twenty-one felony counts of tax evasion for the years 1924 to 1929 and two misdemeanor counts of failing to file a tax return for 1928 to 1929, everyone—from the government itself to the media to the public to Al and the family—understood this to be a strategic maneuver. At first, Al was not even particularly worried. Seriously punishing anyone for tax evasion was almost unheard of. Moreover, Al was still confident he had the judges in his pocket—and he paid off his jurors.

What he didn’t bank on was the vehemence of the public outcry against him—made all the more heated by persistent media accounts of his guilt. And he also underestimated the wiliness of the Secret Six. They hired witnesses to lie on the stand and falsified evidence to help the prosecution. They even went so far as to bribe Al’s lawyers to do a shoddy job. My grandfather Ralph told me that after Al’s trial and a series of appeals had concluded, the lawyers returned all of the money the Outfit had paid them for Al’s defense and admitted their corrupt dealing with the Secret Six.

Uncle Al didn’t stand a chance. On Saturday, October 10, 1931, my whole family gathered at the Prairie Avenue home to prepare a big feast. They were certain that when the jury returned its verdict, Al would come out on top. At best, he would be found not guilty on all counts, and at worst, he might have to serve two or three years.

But Al’s luck had run out. At the conclusion of his eleven-day trial—more a show than an honest inquiry into his guilt or innocence—he was convicted on three counts of tax evasion for the years 1925-1927, as well as two other misdemeanors. Only thirty-two years old at the time, he was sentenced to eleven years in prison—ten to be served in a federal prison and one in a county jail—and fined $80,000 in back taxes and court costs.

To give you a comparison, two years before, my grandfather Ralph was also convicted of income tax evasion for the same years, but was only sentenced to three years imprisonment. He served his time in the Federal Prison at McNeill Island in Washington. Frank Nitti, one of Al and Ralph’s associates, only received an eighteen-month sentence for his tax evasion conviction. And Jake Guzik, another member of the Outfit, received a five-year sentence—and it’s likely that even this comparatively short sentence was lengthened by the falsified testimony of Fred Ries, who probably was also paid by the Secret Six to lie in Al’s trial.

When he was convicted, Al said, “I’ll be made an issue in the next presidential campaign. ‘We sent Capone to the penitentiary,’ they’ll be saying. It wouldn’t seem so bad if they didn’t use the income tax for political purposes. There’s a lot of big men in Chicago who beat the government out of most of the taxes they ought to pay, and they get away with it. I don’t think that’s playing fair, but they’ve got me, and I’ll have to take the medicine.”

Al’s lawyers immediately filed an appeal, and while it was pending, Al was incarcerated in the Cook County jail. He continued to run the Outfit from prison, and my grandmother and aunt brought him meals almost daily. He spent eleven months in Cook County waiting for the results of his appeals—but those eleven months did not count toward the completion of his eleven-year sentence. Of course, according to my grandfather, because his lawyers had been paid off, the appeals ultimately concluded unsuccessfully in 1932, and he was then transferred to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

As soon as Al was processed in Atlanta, he filed for a writ of habeas corpus (statute of limitations). The writ of habeas corpus is a summons with the force of a court order sent to the warden of the prison, where the prisoner is residing, demanding that the warden bring the prisoner back into court with proof that the warden has lawful authority to hold the prisoner. It is a tool that has historically been an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action. Had it been successful it would have thrown out several conviction counts and required a new substantially reduced sentence. Uncle Al knew by then that the Secret Six had paid off his lawyers, and he wanted to appear in court with new lawyers to present this new evidence.

The authorities did not want to run the risk that Al’s petition might be successful. They nabbed him under tenuous enough circumstances, and if he got a re-trial with proper lawyers, there was a good chance he could get off. He’d be right back in Chicago again—and they wanted to avoid that at all costs.

The answer was to cut off his last legal recourse. He already exhausted the appeals process, making the writ of habeas corpus his last shot at freedom. If they could keep him from filing for the writ, they could keep him locked up. And that’s exactly what they did.

At that time, prisoners in certain maximum-security federal prisons were barred from petitioning for a writ of habeas corpus. The argument was that they were so dangerous that it was a risk to bring them out of prison and into court. So, the solution to Al’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus was to put him away where such a writ would be void. The solution was to send him to Alcatraz.

I leave with gratitude to my friends who have stood by me through this unjust ordeal, and with forgiveness for my enemies. I wish them all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

- Al Capone

In 1934, the facilities on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay were repurposed. The island had belonged to the U.S. military for nearly a century, and since the Civil War, its buildings had been used to incarcerate military personnel. In the summer of 1934, however, not long after Uncle Al’s last appeal failed, Alcatraz began serving as a federal maximum-security prison for civilian offenders.

The new warden of Alcatraz, James A. Johnston, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, wanted to create a mystique surrounding the prison. He wanted it to instill fear in the hearts of the lawless and a sense of security in the law-abiding. He wanted it to be “The Rock”—a place from which no man could escape.

What he needed was media attention. The island was already remote, the facilities well fortified. All that remained was to make sure people knew it. And, as the previous decade had proven, few men were as sure a draw for media interest as Al Capone. If the authorities tossed Al in Alcatraz and threw away the key, that would give Johnson a victory to boast about. He could claim that Alcatraz was responsible for keeping America safe from a menace. Warden Johnston’s interest in Al coincided neatly with my uncle’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, and so Alcatraz became the best solution for everyone—except, of course, Al.

Before Alcatraz opened, Director of Prisons James Bennett visited other prisons and told the warden at each prison to give him a list of their “worst offenders” and then he personally chose the convicts to be transferred. Everyone transferred from other federal prisons had reputations as troublemakers, men who had tried to escape, and men who did escape but were later caught—everyone except for my uncle. Al was only transferred to Alcatraz for the publicity. There was no other reason for such an extreme decision.

News of his transfer was published in newspapers around the world. Articles called Alcatraz the place where the most violent and dangerous criminals in the country were held. Al’s name appeared alongside those of serial killers, bank robbers, and escape artists. I personally believe that his transfer to Alcatraz marked the true beginning of my family’s reputation—real or imagined—for ruthlessness.

Warden Johnston spent much time studying the procedures of other prisons—both federal and state—in the United States. From his personal study and observations, he and his staff selected rules and regulations they deemed suitable to maintain order among the dangerous men incarcerated at Alcatraz.

When I learned of the conditions that the prisoners in Alcatraz were subjected to, I was appalled. These rules would almost certainly not stand today, but were commonplace in all prisons at that time. “Cruel and unusual” does not even begin to describe them. It’s no small wonder that some men took big risks to escape. In the magazine
American Mercury
, Anthony M. Turano published an article called “America’s Torture Chamber,” in which he wrote that Alcatraz existed solely to inflict a “special social vendetta on the gangsters” and stood as a “monument to human stupidity and pointless barbarity.”

Perhaps the most restrictive of the rules was the “Silent System,” which Johnston borrowed from the Stillwater Penitentiary in Minnesota. The Silent System, as it was enforced at Alcatraz, seemed to be the nucleus of all the unrest, trouble, and violence that happened there. Inmates were forbidden to speak while in their cells, the cell house, dining room, or wherever they gathered in the main buildings, whether in the shower room, clothing room, sick cell, or court call. New inmates in Alcatraz became functionally proficient in sign language within a few days. Mostly everyone communicated with his hands.

Upon entering Alcatraz, each man was given a number, and from that moment on, it became his identity. He was that number. He was addressed by it, he answered to it, and all papers concerning him were marked by it. His mail, clothes, shoes, cell, and place of work were associated with it. It was a number every prisoner would remember until the day of his death—everyone except for Uncle Al.

Only Al’s mother, wife, and son had permission to visit. My grandfather Ralph was barred entry because he was a convicted felon. The trip to San Francisco from Chicago by train took several days and was a significant expense, but Grandmother Theresa and Aunt Mae tried to coordinate their visits so that Al had as much time with them as possible.

The first visitors were Aunt Mae and Sonny. Sonny was still a boy at the time, and seeing his father in such horrendous conditions was a life-changing experience for him. He was a teenager raised in luxury by a very protective and kind mother and educated in a private school built with his father’s dollars. His father had once been king of Chicago and the social czar of Miami, and now Sonny had to see him reduced to a life unfit for any human being. Many years later, Sonny himself told me about his experience at Alcatraz with tears in his eyes.

The next visitor was my grandmother Theresa. She, first, had to write a letter to the warden, giving the desired date of the visit. At the age of sixty-six, she traveled by train alone across the country to the San Francisco dock and took the ferryboat across the cold waters to the island. When she wrote with her requested visit date, she could not have predicted how the weather would cooperate. Unfortunately, on that particular day, there were high winds across the Bay that rocked the ferry violently. She was frightened and intimidated, but she was also a woman who had endured much in her life and was determined to see her beloved son. When the ferry docked at last, she had to climb a long flight of steep stairs, check her coat and baggage, and go through a metal detector. The alarm went off in the detector, and she had to bear the humiliation of a body search. A metal stay in her corset set off the alarm.