Uncle Al Capone (3 page)

But, unfortunately for Maffie, the wedding was the best part of her marriage. After that gorgeous ceremony, her union with Johnny never brought her joy. I never heard them say a single affectionate word to each other. Johnny was a brooding man who gave me the creeps. Once when I was thirteen and stayed overnight at their house, I noticed him spying on me as I undressed. That same summer, at the Capone compound in Wisconsin, he offered to give me a driving lesson and insisted I sit on his lap. He began making inappropriate comments and movements. After that, I tried to stay as far away from him as possible.

In 1975, after I had been out of touch with all of the Capones for almost a decade, I called Aunt Maffie to say hello. Uncle Johnny answered the phone and gave me an enthusiastic, “Deirdre, where have you been? We’ve missed you!” I told him honestly that that was hard to believe—I didn’t think he loved me. His response was: “If I didn’t love you so much, I would have raped you when you were thirteen.” What kind of a man would say something like that? If I had had any doubts before, those words confirmed that my aunt Maffie had gotten a bad deal in that arranged marriage.

However, it was Johnny who finally drove home to me how much my aunt had cared about me. After she passed away in 1988, my husband Bob, our youngest son Jeff, and I all paid our respects to Johnny at his home in Michigan, where he and Maffie had moved to be closer to their daughter and granddaughter. He was happy to see us, and said over and over how much Aunt Maffie loved me and always called me “Little Mafalda.” He showed us a baby picture of me, which Maffie had displayed on her bedroom dresser for half a century. Seeing that photo sent a little wave of pain through me. Maffie’s later years coincided with the time when I needed to separate myself from being a Capone, and I had fallen out of touch with her. But, still, nothing could diminish the tremendous role Maffie played in my life—and how, on that day in 1957 when I lost my job, she instilled in me a new sense of pride in our family.

When she opened the door to me that afternoon, the first thing she did was give me a fierce, tight hug of sympathy. Then, she unleashed a slew of choice words about my boss. But I was only seventeen and felt scared and sorry for myself. In my sorrow, I blurted, “Aunt Maffie, why did Uncle Al do so many bad things? Why was he such a terrible person?”

Aunt Maffie’s face crumpled. I could tell by the look in her eyes that I had broken her heart. She stared at me with a mixture of surprise and pain, as if my words were a dagger that I had shoved in her heart. Her face seemed to say, “I thought I would never hear those words come from your mouth.”

For a brief moment, tears actually sprang to her eyes. But then she rallied. Her teeth came together, and her fists clenched at her sides. This was the Maffie we were all in awe of—this was the Maffie who could pierce anyone with her eyes. She grabbed me by the arms and sat me on the sofa. Sitting down next to me, she said in a firm voice, through her teeth, “Look, if you want to be mad at someone, be mad at the idiot who fired you.”

Her eyes left mine briefly and she seemed to be searching her memory, trying to find the words to make me understand her fierce loyalty to the family. Then, that stare locked onto me once again.

“My big brother, Al, was the man who kept our family together when my father died,” she told me. “I was only eight years old. We had no means, and Al became the chief breadwinner. He moved the whole family—including your dad, who was just a baby—from Brooklyn to Chicago. If it hadn’t been for him, we would all have starved.”

Aunt Maffie went on to try to get me to understand what the culture had been like in the 20s and 30s, when Prohibition was an almost universally unpopular law. “Deirdre, it was a business,” she said matter-of-factly. “The government was telling people they couldn’t drink, but people wanted to drink. So, the businessmen who supplied alcohol were filling a need. The Kennedys did it. The Rockefellers did too. And Al and your grandfather…they were supplying high quality stuff; it wasn’t rotgut. They were giving the people what they wanted, and the people loved them for it. Al’s speakeasies were full of politicians, police officers, judges—I saw them there myself. They were his best customers, and half of them were on his payroll! He wasn’t some ruthless person, committing crimes for sport. He was a businessman. And then, Prohibition was overturned, and the ‘crimes’ people wanted to hang him for became perfectly legal and honorable.”

Maffie went on to tell me that she knew Al as well as anyone, and she would lay down her life on the fact that he never peddled drugs or intentionally harmed a single innocent person.

For a moment, I hesitated. “What about the people the Outfit killed?” I asked quietly.

Maffie nodded. “I knew you’d wonder about that,” she said. “But you remember what we’ve always taught you. Family is everything. There were people out there who were trying to kill Al for their own gain—because he was the biggest competition there was. And they were willing to go so far as to threaten his family. When you were just a little girl, some of them were willing to threaten you. That’s where Al drew the line. He didn’t tolerate backstabbing, and he didn’t tolerate people who wanted to hurt us.”

She paused and held my gaze. I knew if there were ever a time to listen up, this was it. “No one in our family was ever involved in any cold-blooded killing,” she said. “If somebody is trying to hurt you, aren’t you permitted to protect yourself?”

Then she told me that she never knew a “gangster” who helped other people as much as Uncle Al. After the 1929 stock market crash, he set up soup kitchens all over Chicago and fed thousands of men, women, and children who otherwise would have starved. His speakeasies created jobs for people out of work and supported the careers of dozens of minority jazz musicians who perfected their craft performing for his customers.

“And my brother’s word was his bond,” Aunt Maffie finished. “Everyone knew that. He would have given his life to save your life or mine. So don’t be so hard on him. He loved his family. He loved you. Don’t you ever forget that, OK? Capish?”

That evening was a turning point in my life. Being a Capone had already influenced so much of who I was, but most of that influence centered on shame. Now, I wanted to understand my uncle Al and his partner, my grandfather Ralph, as human beings and not as “public enemies.”

But much of their story took place before I was born. I was born in 1940, but Al and Ralph were at the height of their power during the 1920s. When I knew Al, he had already suffered through the seven-year imprisonment—most of it in Alcatraz—that changed him forever. And he died in 1947, when I was just a little girl.

So, to understand my family, I had to develop a strategy. From the day I was fired, I began to ask each member of my family—Aunt Maffie; my grandfather Ralph; Al’s other brothers, Mimi, Bites, and Matty; Uncle Al’s wife Mae, and their son Sonny—to tell me everything they would or could about Al and the family business. I wanted to know how things really were. What was the secret behind Al’s business success? What was the true story of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre? What happened to Al in prison? And, of course, the question people have asked me all my life: Where did all the money go?

Some of my family members were more open than others, but all of them had stories to tell. And all of them were concerned that I might be writing a book. They made me promise that if I wrote anything, it would not be published until long after they were dead and buried.

At the end of his life, my father was in the process of writing a book about the family, which he called
Sins of the Father
. Just before he was found dead, Hedda Hopper mentioned in her gossip column that he was working on a manuscript. So, there was a lot of speculation in the years after his death that perhaps it wasn’t suicide. Perhaps he had been murdered—not by any member of our family, but by some other member of either the Outfit or politics who was worried about being implicated with the Capones. I will tell the full story of the questions surrounding my father’s death later in this book.

People have often asked me, “Why has no other member of the family ever written a book? Why didn’t Sonny ever write a book?” I think it’s because of the mystery that my dad’s aborted manuscript created. In this book, I will tell what actually happened at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—and who I believe were the real perpetrators—as well as many other, as of yet untold, stories about the inner workings of Capone’s Outfit. Revealing these secrets is no small matter when you’re a member of a family that had such ruthless and unscrupulous enemies. Even if my father wasn’t murdered for working on a book, the fact that everyone believed he might have been is telling.

But now those unscrupulous enemies are long dead. And so, too, are all the members of my family who can remember Al Capone personally. Uncle Mimi, the last of Al’s siblings, died in 1984. Sonny, Al’s only child and my godfather, died in 2004. As far as I can tell, I am the last member of my family to be born with the Capone name. So now, finally, it is time for the story from inside the family to come to light.

I will not pretend to be able to paint a rosy picture of my uncle Al. I cannot make him out to be a perfect man, or even a good man. But what I want people to know is that he was a complex man. He was human—and he had a heart. He was a son, a brother, a father, and an uncle. There were two Al Capones. There was the Al Capone that strutted, wore fancy suits and big hats, and loved the limelight. There was the leader of the Outfit, who sat straight in his chair, stiff and rigid. The man who often wore a smile on his face that could instantly turn into an intimidating glare when he felt challenged.

And then there was the Al I knew—the man who would get on the floor and play with me like a big teddy bear; the man who would put on an apron and make spaghetti sauce, roaring with laughter the whole while; The man who would sing operettas in Italian at the top of his lungs and taught me to play the mandolin. This was the private Al Capone that no one ever saw. And this is the Al Capone who does not appear in the dozens of books you’ll find about him. Professional biographers can tell you about the legend, the businessman, and the leader—which they do by researching old newspapers and police blotters—but only a member of his family can tell you about the man within.

And that’s what I will do. I’ll start at the beginning—in Italy in the late nineteenth century, when Al’s parents were starting a family and deciding to come to America. And I’ll tell you the family history from before I was born, the stories of Al and Ralph’s bootlegging operation, and Al’s imprisonment. Then I’ll move forward in Al’s life to tell you about the uncle I knew personally for seven years. And finally, I’ll tell you about the legacy that Al left behind, what happened to me and the rest of the family after his death, and how we lived with both his memory and his legend. It is my hope that you will come to know Al as something more than an icon of an era. It is my hope that you will get a sense of him as a man.

Perhaps my most important reason for writing this book, however, is that I hope it will give my father’s short life some meaning. It will finish the project of telling the Capone story that he began so many decades ago and was never able to complete. And it will, I hope, absolve him of the guilt he suffered from being the inheritor of the sins of his father. It will show that he came from a good family and produced a good family—mine.

If you read the biographies, you’ll find no difference between the Capone boys and men like John Gotti. But I know that there was a difference—and I will share it with you in this book. I am a patriot because of the Capones. My love of this country—and my eagerness to contribute back to it—was instilled in me by the Capones. And I learned from the Capones what it means to have a warm, generous heart.

Have you ever wondered how two people can carefully follow the directions for a recipe, using the exact same ingredients and measurements, and achieve entirely different results? What happened? How could it be? It’s a mystery. But I propose to solve that mystery. The solution can be reduced to one word: Love.

When the Capones taught me to cook, they taught me that cooking is a labor of love. My grandma Theresa used to say to me, with a little translation from Aunt Maffie, “When you cook for someone, you must do it with love in your heart. That makes everything taste better.” How we think influences the outcome of what we do. Cook with love in your heart, and those you cook for will love the results.

On the evening after I was fired, Aunt Maffie brought me into her kitchen and taught me her famous meatball recipe. First, we ground the different meats—beef, veal, and pork—kneading them together with breadcrumbs, pine nuts, and Italian parsley. After molding them into balls, we fried them in lard, and once they were brown on all sides, we baked them in the oven, giving us plenty of time to talk.

That night, I asked her the questions I had always been afraid to ask—about Uncle Al’s business, about his relationship with my father, and about the things he did and did not do. That evening was the beginning of this book.