Uncle Al Capone (23 page)

I’m a business man. I’ve made my money supplying a popular demand. If I break the law, my customers are as guilty as I am.

- Al Capone

One last story.

After my uncle was jailed for tax evasion, Francesco Nitto, a.k.a. Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, assumed power of the “Outfit.” My grandfather told me that even though Nitti thought he was in control, as I mentioned before, the real boss was Felice DeLucia, better known as Paul “The Waiter” Ricca. Shortly before Uncle Al had his trouble with the IRS, a new organization formed called the National Crime Syndicate. My grandfather told me that after Uncle Al attended their first meeting in 1929, he made the decision that it was time for his people to move on. He did not like the direction the new syndicate favored. It was to be a loose affiliation of the major Italian and Jewish crime bosses of the day, men such as Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and, of course, my uncle Al. Its “enforcement arm” drew the nickname “Murder, Inc.”

While my uncle and grandfather were still in prison, Prohibition ended and the Outfit moved into gambling, loan sharking, labor, and racketeering. They also extended their operations into Milwaukee, Madison, Kansas City, and even into Hollywood, where they attempted to run their extortion tactics on the motion picture labor unions.

Nitti was accused of the extortion and refused to take the fall for the Outfit. He committed suicide in 1943. After serving time in jail for tax evasion years earlier, he decided to end his life rather than face jail again. Paul Ricca then became the boss and Tony (“Joe Batters,” “The Big Tuna”) Accardo was his enforcer. Later in 1943, Paul Ricca was convicted for his role in the Outfit’s plot to control Hollywood. He stood to serve ten years, but magically only served three due to the Outfit’s “fixer” Murray “The Camel” Humphreys. By the way, don’t you love the nicknames?

Tony Accardo became the boss when Ricca was in prison, but when he was paroled, they placed a condition on his release that he could not associate with “mobsters.” My grandfather said that Ricca did serve as a senior consultant to Accardo. He operated behind the scenes just as my grandfather had with his brother Al.

In 1956, my cousin Dolores Maritote married and I was a bridesmaid. All of the above mentioned people except Nitti were in attendance, along with Sam Giancana, who took over control of the Outfit in 1957. In the photo below, you will find all the above named people plus others of the day, but it is difficult to tell who is who. You will also find the African American athletes and entertainers that my family helped.

I never saw any of those individuals again until 1970 when Grandpa Ralph took Bob and me out to dinner at the Ivanhoe restaurant and night club in Chicago. It was a rare occasion. As we were being shown to our table, I heard a man say, “Ralph, what the hell are you doin’ here? I thought you were up in Wisconsin.”

Ralph glanced over to see who was speaking to him in this manner. A big grin sprang to his face and he responded, “Tony, what’s up?” I turned to see who it was but didn’t recognize the face right away.

Ralph said, “I came down for some business, nothin’ big, and I’m taking my granddaughter and her husband to dinner. You remember Deirdre? This is her husband Bob. Kids, this is Tony Accardo. We go way back together.” Tony shook hands with Bob and gave me a hug.

“Sure I remember Deirdre,” Tony said warmly. “Honey, you’re more beautiful than ever.”

I felt myself blushing as I said, “Thank you.”

Tony said, “Why don’t you join us?” gesturing to the man next to him. “Oh, this is Anthony Stuart.” We shook hands with Mr. Stuart as Tony kept insisting that we join them. “We’ve got plenty of room, and we’re boring the hell out of each other” Tony added, “and I’ll pick up the tab.”

Bob said, “If it’s OK with Ralph, it is OK with me.” Ralph resisted a little, then acquiesced.

We ordered some drinks, and while Ralph and Tony began speaking to each other in Italian, Mr. Stuart, a short dark-haired man whom I guessed to be about thirty or thirty-five years old, asked if we were both from Chicago. Bob said yes, that I had grown up on the South Side and he grew up on the Northwest Side.

Mr. Stuart said, “Yeah? Where on the Northwest Side?”

When Bob said around Irving and Austin, Mr. Stuart asked, “Where’d ya go to school?”

“Steinmetz,” Bob replied.

This information was greeted by Mr. Stuart with a big grin and a loud, “No shit! That’s where I went, but I quit after two years. I figured I didn’t need school to make money. The street was my school.”

During dinner, Mr. Stuart and Bob took turns telling jokes and seemed to be enjoying themselves. He even complimented Bob on his suit. When Bob told him where he bought it, he said that he used to buy his clothes there, but switched to buying wholesale. “In fact I’m opening my own men’s store at Circus, Circus in Las Vegas. I’ll be looking for someone to manage it for me. Think you’d be interested?” Bob told him Vegas was fun to visit, but he wouldn’t want to live there.

All through dinner Ralph and Tony drifted in and out of our conversations, but mostly had their own private gabfest going. While we were having dessert, I felt a foot gently rubbing against my leg. I knew it was Mr. Stuart’s, so I moved my legs a few inches away from him, but in a little while I felt it again. Something about this man made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. He was frightening. I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room.

When we said our goodbyes and left the restaurant, Ralph grabbed Bob’s arm and took him aside. Ralph knew that when Bob married me, he had kept his distance from the family, and had let it be known that he wanted nothing to do with the Outfit’s business, and that was fine with Ralph. That was smart.

“Now keep being smart,” Ralph said insistently. “Stay the hell away from ‘The Ant.’”

“The Ant?” Bob asked, puzzled.

“That guy’s name isn’t Stuart,” Ralph explained. “He’s Tony ‘The Ant’ Spilotro. He’s the meanest, craziest SOB I’ve ever seen. And that includes Jack McGurn and Hymie Weiss. He kills people just for the fun of it. And he likes to torture them first.”

Bob naturally assured Ralph that he’d have nothing to do with Spilotro. He told Ralph that he recognized the name, and had heard some bad things about him.

“Guys like him scare the hell out of me,” Bob said.

“There are no guys like him,” Ralph replied. “He’s the worst.”

Bob assured Ralph that there was no way in hell he would ever have anything to do with Spilotro, or Accardo, or any of them.

Many years later in the movie
Casino
with Robert DeNiro and Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci played the role of Nicky Santoro, a character based on Tony Spilotro. In 1986, Spilotro was found buried with his brother Michael in an Indiana cornfield just southeast of Chicago. They had been badly beaten and evidently had been buried alive.

Good thing Bob didn’t take that job in Vegas!

Chicago, Present Day

What do you want to do, get yourself killed before you are thirty? You’d better get some sense while a few of us are left alive.

- Al Capone

In 1991 the American Bar Associations Litigation Section, following a practice they have often used, decided to retry the 1931 Capone income tax case. The Capone case was chosen because the ABA Annual Meeting was in Chicago.

This was an actual trial and not merely a reading from the original transcript. The lawyers were limited to the facts in the original transcript and newspaper articles and books related to the trial or the facts of that time.

The judge was Chicago Federal District Court Judge Prentice Marshall, an outstanding jurist who had been a successful litigation partner in a top Chicago law firm and later a distinguished professor of trial advocacy at the University of Illinois Law School. He was also a founder of and major contributor to the National Institute of Trial Advocacy.

The jurors were from the actual venire of jurors from the Northern District of Illinois. They were volunteers who were paid by the federal jury rate but were not told the nature of the case they were to hear. Actually there were sixteen in all and they all sat on the weekend case.

To say the least the program was well received by the American Bar Association lawyers and judges. Over 1500 attended the trial in the grand ballroom of the Palmer House Hotel.

Catherine Crier supplied the audience with background information before the start of the actual trial.

Department of the Treasury senior staff acted as the prosecution witnesses. The prosecutory were personally selected top trial lawyers from the Department of Justice. All told they all did a wonderful job.

I wish my uncle could have been represented by the two defense attorneys Terence MacCarthy and Mike Tigar who represented him in this retrial. The record shows that my uncle was represented by two attorneys who did a very poor job.

MacCarthy, Tigar and the prosecutors obviously needed and wanted the transcript of the 1931trial. Surprisingly it was not in the files at either the District Court or the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (where the conviction was appealed). The Litigation Section found it in the archives of the Treasury Department. Parenthetically, that was how the Treasury Department people got involved in the trial.

MacCarthy and Tigar filed several appropriate and helpful pre-trial motions, (none of which were filed in the original trial) in the main aimed at keeping out illegal and improper information. They also carefully drafted their proposed jury instructions, including “theory of the case” instructions, which Judge Marshall gave. Again this was not done by the original trial lawyers.

During the trial Judge Marshall took a recess or as we non-lawyers would call it, a break. No doubt to keep some of the audience in their seats, he, the jury being excused for the recess, favorably commented on the trial. He suggested the lawyering was outstanding and in particular praised MacCarthy’s cross-examination of the snitch Fred Reis, as being the best he had ever seen.

MacCarthy and Tigar turned up and used interesting information that was not used in the 1931 trial.

A Palm Island Florida neighbor was upset with the noise at Capone’s parties. The neighbor happened to be a close friend of President Hoover, to whom he complained and from whom he asked that something be done. This prompted President Hoover to order the Treasury people to “get Capone”.

Also the defense, in particular MacCarthy on cross-examination, brought out the fact that Fred Reis, who had an exceptional and irrational fear of bugs, was purposely put in a bug infested downstate Illinois jail. After suffering for a week he made the statements the prosecutors wanted him to make.

The jury deliberated for over three hours. Their verdict was announced at a Litigation Section dance and cocktail party that evening. The jury found Al Capone not guilty on all counts. The verdict was met with thunderous applause. Within days major newspapers throughout Europe and even some in the states, carried lead articles about the acquittal.

I would love to know what the odds were on the day I was born that I would have the success I have had in my life, or that I would raise such a wonderful family. There I was, the firstborn child of a man whose father was a convicted felon who served time in a county jail in Chicago and federal prison in the Washington state for income tax evasion and then was dubbed Public Enemy #3. His partner, my uncle Al Capone, served seven-and-a-half years in Alcatraz and other prisons for income tax evasion, and was known world wide as Public Enemy #1. As if this weren’t enough, I was raised in the shadow of my father’s pain due to his family legacy, and my mother was never equipped to be a wife or a mother.

In the end, I survived the Capone legacy. I have been happily married to my best friend since 1963; I am a mother to four and a grandmother to fourteen; and I became a successful, legitimate businesswoman in Minnesota.

What I have shared with you here are many family stories, secrets, and photographs never known or seen by anyone outside of our family. I even threw in a few recipes for the favorite dishes Al asked his mother to prepare for him—meals I often shared with him.

This has been a difficult book for me to write for a number of reasons, the foremost being the pain these memories have awakened. I continued with it because no one else could. I did it for my children, grandchildren, and history.

It is my hope that you’ve seen from my story a glimpse of the heart of the Capones. Perhaps, too, you’ve seen courage and determination in my story and those of my family members. We had numerous setbacks and heartbreaks, but I truly believe I have a guardian angel that kept whispering in my ear. Fortunately, I listened.

My purpose for writing this book is not to try to change anyone’s opinion of my uncle Al Capone or gloss over any of the documented incidents related to him or the Outfit. My intent, instead, is three-fold: first, to educate the public on another side of my uncle, a man who had a family, a heart, and a sense of purpose; second, to correct some of the errors written about him, corrections that could only come from a family member’s point of view; and third, to show that there has not been a single person carrying Capone blood that has been a detriment to society. It is my hope that this last purpose will give some meaning to my father’s all-too-brief life but enduring legacy—a legacy that lives in me and my family.