Uncle Al Capone (4 page)

(I think putting this recipe here is appropriate but all the other family recipes will be in the back of the book along with more family pictures.)

Meat Balls ala Capone

1 pound chuck ground once

½ pound pork ground once

½ pound veal ground once

1 tsp salt

½ tsp freshly ground black pepper

½ loaf Italian bread

small head Italian or regular parsley stems removed and blossoms chopped coarse

6 cloves garlic chopped coarse

2 eggs beaten

small jar of pine nuts

lard

Mix the 3 meats thoroughly in a large bowl.

Soak the bread in water and squeeze it until no water remains.

Flake the bread into small pieces and add to the meat.

Add remaining ingredients.

Mix and form meatballs.

Fry in lard until brown.

Set on baking sheet in a warm (300º) oven until ready to serve.

Don’t let me in the kitchen because I will eat them as soon as they come out of the oven!

From Italy to Brooklyn, 1865 – 1922

Don’t call me an Italian. I am 100 percent American.

- Al Capone

On the southwestern coast of Italy, just above the toe of the boot, lies the province of Salerno in the Campania region. Salerno is a busy port region, and it was there that the Allies landed in 1943. If you visit today, you will still find much of the ruins and destruction left by World War II.

The little town of Angri, where the parents of Al Capone were born, is nestled in the heart of Salerno at the foot of the still-active volcano, Mount Vesuvius. Just to the west, tourists flock to the ruins of Pompeii, where thousands of people were petrified in twenty feet of lava and ash when Vesuvius famously erupted in 79 A.D.

Nearly two millennia later, the town of Angri, which has survived several eruptions itself, is much quieter than neighboring Pompeii. It boasts a few ruins and is not far from coastal resorts, but it is not a tourist destination. It is a place where Italians live quietly, and have for centuries. So it was when my great-grandfather Gabriele Capone was born there to Vincenzo Capone and Maria Calabrese in 1865. My great-grandmother Teresa Raiola was born in the same town five years later, to Raffaele Raiola and Cardino Alfani. The only records of their births are their baptisms—both were baptized in San Giovanni Batista Parish, Gabriele on December 12,
1865, and Teresa on December 27, 1870.

Teresa had three older sisters who were nuns and a brother who was a priest, and so, naturally, she went into a convent when she came of age. But she realized quickly that it wasn’t the life for her, and the nuns released her before she took her vows. She married Gabriele on May 25, 1891. As most marriages were in late nineteenth century Italy, theirs was an arranged marriage. At twenty-five and twenty, they were both well over the average age to marry, and I imagine their parents were relieved.

Their first son, Vincenzo, was born in Angri on March 28, 1892. At that time, Italians followed strict patterns for naming their children. The firstborn son or daughter was named for the father’s parents, while the second son or daughter was named for the mother’s parents. If one of the children with an important name died, the next child born of the same sex would be given his or her name. Even to this day, many Italian families still adhere to this practice. There are exceptions to the rules—but they are rare in southern Italy.

So, Vincenzo, Al Capone’s oldest brother, was named for his father’s father. Shortly after he was born, Gabriele moved the family to Castelammare (now called Castelammare di Stabia), not far from Salerno on the Gulf of Naples. Gabriele had trained as a barber, and he set up a shop there. To supplement the family income, Teresa baked and sold bread and took up sewing. Their second son, Raffaele or Ralph, my grandfather, was born in Castelammare two years after Vincenzo. Gabriele and Teresa eventually had nine children, but Vincenzo and Ralph were the only ones born in Italy.

By the time Ralph was born, Gabriele and Teresa had realized that life in southern Italy held little promise for them. They did not belong to the group of racketeers called the Camorra, a sort of precursor to the mafia, nor were they part of the aristocracy or church. They had little hope of advancing their station in life. And so they decided, like so many other Italians of their generation, to gamble on the American Dream.

In 1895, Gabriele entered the United States alone by way of Canada and found a job and an apartment in Brooklyn. Teresa followed shortly after with Vincenzo and Ralph in tow. They passed through Ellis Island, which automatically gave the three of them citizenship. Teresa was pregnant at the time with their third son, Salvatore or Frank, who was born in Brooklyn not long after she arrived there.

Because he had immigrated through Canada, Gabriele did not at first have citizenship papers. He took a government-run class in New York, and although he spoke no English, he passed, earning legal citizenship. My grandfather Ralph liked to tell me that his father was very proud of that accomplishment. Once he had settled the family and became a citizen, he also changed the spelling of his name to “Gabriel,” and Teresa changed the spelling of hers to “Theresa.” They started pronouncing their last name as “Cap-own” rather than “Cap-own-ee.” They wanted to assimilate in every way they could.

Gabriel tried opening a grocery store in Brooklyn but met with little success. He soon fell back on the training of his youth and opened a barbershop. The family was beginning to see a glimmer of possibility in their new life. In 1899, four years after they arrived in the United States, Theresa gave birth to Alphonse, who would become the famous Al Capone. He was the first of the Capone children to be conceived and born in the U.S., and my great-grandparents saw all of their hopes and dreams of becoming an American family in him.

But the family soon hit difficult times. In 1900, Theresa experienced a brutally difficult pregnancy. At the turn of the twentieth century, 90 percent of doctors were without a college education. They attended so-called “medical schools” that were condemned by the government and the press as being sub-standard. Perhaps if she had better care, the baby would have survived, but as it was, she gave birth to a stillborn son in 1900. They named him Ermino. He was followed by a baby girl in 1901, which they named Ermina in keeping with the Italian naming pattern. Ermina’s brief life came to an end from meningitis in 1902.

Theresa quickly found herself pregnant with their seventh child, a sixth son born in 1903 and named Ermino. He was followed in 1906 by Alberto, in 1908 by Amedeo, and, finally, in 1912 by Mafalda. By the time I knew them, all of my uncles used nicknames. Ermino was John or “Mimi,” Alberto was Bert or “Bites,” and Amedeo was “Matty.” Al and Ralph also each had a “mob” nickname; Al was called “Snorkey” and Ralph was “Bottles.” When my father was born, they even called him “Riskey.”

When the Capones settled in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century, Italians were the most recent ethnic group to start immigrating en masse, making them the lowest group on the totem pole. Last to be hired and the first to be fired, people called Italian immigrants “dagos,” an ethnic slur that came loosely from the Spanish name “Diego” and was a blanket term for anyone with dark hair and skin.

Gabriel and Theresa were very poor. Few apartments in New York City had indoor plumbing, and theirs, by the Navy Yard, certainly did not. They had to go down a flight of stairs into a shed in the backyard to relieve themselves and carry water up in buckets to wash themselves, the dishes, and their clothes.

The three oldest boys, Vincenzo (Jim), Ralph, and Frank, shared the same bed in the parlor, and Al slept in the bedroom with his mother and father. During the winter, they heated the apartment with a coal-fired potbelly stove in the parlor and turned the oven on in the kitchen, leaving its door open for heat. But the price of coal was very high, so they could only resort to the stove and oven heat sparingly. My grandfather Ralph would tell me stories about waking up with his eyes glued shut from ice in his lashes on bitter cold mornings.

As a barber, Gabriel was making $10 a week, considerably less than he was able to earn in Italy, and rent was as much as $4 a month. The family eventually saved enough money to move to the building on Park Avenue that also housed Gabriel’s barbershop, and there, they were able to take in boarders for extra income. One of the boarders was also a barber, so he cut hair for Gabriel in lieu of paying rent, which brought in more customers and more money.

Ralph told me a story of how his parents took in a boarder who was a musician. Music fascinated Vincenzo, or Jim as he was called in America, and he asked the boarder to teach him to play his violin. Soon enough, he was much more interested in playing the violin than in going to school.

Gabriel was a stern man, and though he loved music, he ranked it second to schoolwork. He graduated from high school in Italy, a high level of education for a common person in Salerno in the nineteenth century. One of his hopes for the family was that his children would get an American education. So on the day Gabriel came home and found Jimmy playing the violin when he should have been at school, he flew into a rage. He broke the violin over his knee.

Unfortunately, Ralph and Frank never finished school; in fact, my grandfather Ralph dropped out after sixth grade. This was partly due to the fact that the family needed the extra income from his work and partly due to the fact that school was a rough place for Italian immigrants. My uncles’ schoolteachers were mainly Irish, and they had no qualms about saying publicly that their “dago students” were greasy, smelly, slow learners who were not motivated to improve. None of my relatives ever had the hope of getting far enough in school to become a doctor, lawyer, or businessman. That simply was not part of the equation. They expected to be forced into finding ways to survive as best they could.

Al, however, did earn a high school diploma. Contrary to what many biographers have written, Al Capone was a high school graduate. I have a photo of Al—the earliest photo of him that I am aware of—on the day he graduated from high school, and his father is sitting proudly beside him.

The family continued to struggle to make ends meet. As her boys got older, Theresa would send them into the street to sell the bread she baked. The Capone boys did what they had to do to eat. They would sneak behind vendors and steal fruit off their carts to sell along with the bread. They would occasionally steal things out of stores, sell them, and use the money to buy milk to bring home to Theresa. They were typical scrappy boys growing up on the streets of Brooklyn in the early 1900s.

Over time, their troublemaking evolved into gang activity. The gangs were partly a way to survive and make a little income, and partly a way to feel a part of something in a rough community. As was portrayed in the book and film
Gangs of New York
, the gangs my grandfather and uncles ran within Brooklyn were vicious, and there were many fights. The one with the furthest-reaching consequences happened in 1908, when Jim was sixteen years old. He, Ralph, Frank, and Al all got into a big fight with some Irish boys, probably members of a rival gang. Jim pushed a boy through a glass window after he took a knife to Al’s throat, then ran away scared.

When the three other boys got home and found Jim there, Al told him, “You killed that Irish kid.” My uncle Jim was ashamed and afraid of what his mother and father would do. That very day, he ran away from home. The circus happened to be in New York at the time, and—just like the stuff of legend—he stole away with it.

It would be decades before the Capones ever saw or heard anything from him again. He traveled with the circus as an animal caretaker for several years, until he found a “Wild West Show” in the Midwest that seemed more interesting. He practiced his shooting skills endlessly, using milk cans and bottles as targets, until he was an expert enough marksman to become part of the show. Changing his name to Richard James Hart, after a silent movie star, he went by Jim and never revealed his Italian ancestry to anyone. As a matter of fact, most people thought he was an American Indian.

When World War I started, Jim joined the infantry, serving in France and rising to the rank of lieutenant. He even received a sharpshooter’s medal from General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force.

After the war ended, Jim returned to the United States, settled in Homer, Nebraska, and married in 1920. And then, his life took a truly ironic turn. He became a Prohibition agent, using clever disguises and a knack for investigation to uncover illegal bootlegging operations. He led countless raids and was the subject of local headlines throughout Nebraska. Eventually, his successes earned him the nickname “Two-Gun” Hart.

In 1926, because of his accomplishments in stemming the tide of bootlegging in Nebraska, Jim was invited to become a special agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He moved to a Cheyenne Indian reservation in South Dakota, and there, during the summer of 1927, he served as the bodyguard for President Calvin Coolidge when he vacationed in the Black Hills. Just imagine—the president of the United States, protected by Al Capone’s oldest brother!

And through all those years, my family knew nothing of what had become of the beloved first son. I am sure, though, that Jim kept himself informed about his famous brothers. I can imagine him reading the headlines about his outlaw family, and there he was, a celebrated law enforcer.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, the newspapers caught wind of the “missing” Capone brother. My aunt Maffie told me that on several occasions, strange men would come forward posing as Vincenzo, but Theresa always rejected them. She and Vincenzo shared a secret that no one else—including the other siblings—knew, and she wouldn’t let anyone past the front door who couldn’t prove he knew that long-ago story.