Uncle Al Capone (8 page)

As Ralph recalled, “He was really enthused about that idea. He kept pacing back and forth, puffing on his cigar while telling me about it.”

But Al’s schemes got grander still. His biggest idea was to buy the Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Field and all.

When he pitched the idea to his brother, Ralph said, “You must be crazy. The commissioner of baseball would never approve the sale to you with your background.”

But Al had already thought of that. He had decided he wouldn’t be the owner of record—instead, he’d ask a friend in sports to front for him. He felt pretty confident that he could convince his pal Jack Dempsey, or maybe Gabby Hartnett. If not, there were always his friends in show business—he and Ralph discussed putting the idea to Al Jolson, George Jessel, or Harry Richman.

But at that time, my grandfather Ralph still needed convincing. He told me about the back and forth he and Al went through over the idea.

“Why the Cubs?” Ralph wanted to know. “Why not the White Sox?”

“For lots of reasons!” was Al’s response. “For one thing, I love Wrigley Field. It’s my favorite ballpark. Besides, I’ve been associated with the South Side too much. Chicago’s my town, and that includes the North Side, which I think will one day become bigger than the South Side.

Anyway, Wrigley doesn’t know baseball,” Al continued. “He knows gum.” This was, at the heart of it, his most important reason for wanting to buy the Cubs. He loved baseball. All the Capone boys did. Baseball was America’s favorite pastime, and these boys were Americans, through and through.

“I could run the organization better than Wrigley can,” Al boasted. “If I don’t take it off his hands, he’ll run that team into the ground before long.”

Al did know baseball well. And he already had a number of ideas for making the Cubs the next great American team. He had devised a plan to trade for Babe Ruth by paying Yankees owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert—who wasn’t really a colonel but was a former brewer—$500,000 in cash. According to Al, he had already talked to the Babe about using him as both a player and manager. The Babe was very excited about the idea; he had always wanted to be a manager, but Colonel Rupert wouldn’t give him the chance.

Al had also talked with Gus Greenlee, a bootlegger friend of his who owned the negro team, the Crawfords, about buying the contracts of Satchel Paige and another of his stars. They would have been the first blacks to play in the major leagues. Ralph told Al he was crazy, but once Al made up his mind to do something, there was no talking him out of it.

Ralph’s biggest question, though, was still unanswered. “What if Wrigley doesn’t want to sell?”

“Don’t worry, he’ll sell.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve got something on the Wrigleys. Shit, I’ve got something on all the big shots in Chicago. Everyone, even the fine upstanding citizens, the pillars of the community—especially them—has something to hide. Something they don’t want the public, the law, or their wives to know. Don’t worry—he’ll sell!”

“So you’ll rat on him if he doesn’t?” Ralph pressed.

“No, I wouldn’t do that. I won’t have to! We just let him know that we know, and he’ll listen to reason. Of course, I’ll pay him a fair price. I’ll give him the going rate for a major league team. Maybe even better than the going rate. I’m not hard to do business with.”

“What would you offer him for it?” Ralph finally asked.

And then, as he told me the story, Ralph broke into a big grin. “I swear, Deirdre,” he said. “Al said to me, ‘I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.’”

Ralph let out a low laugh. “When I heard that line used in
The Godfather
, I nearly fell out of my seat. The same words Al used forty years before! Just a coincidence, I guess, but it made me laugh.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Deirdre,” he said, “when Al first told me about his plans for the Cubs and the Babe, I was very skeptical, especially about bringing black players into major league baseball. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to believe he could pull it off. He had a great imagination, tons of money, a lotta balls, and he had a way of making things happen. What would have been a pipe dream for me or anybody else was a real possibility for Al, my kid brother. They broke the mold when he was born. If he could have pulled this off, he would have changed the history of baseball, big time.”

Chicago, February 14, 1929

They’ve hung everything on me but the Chicago fire.

- Al Capone

In 1958, with my world turned upside-down, I turned—as I always did—to the Capones. As it turned out, my own heartache became a path into the heart of my family which I had been trying to understand since my father’s death.

When I went to my aunt Maffie for advice, she suggested I go to Wisconsin to spend some time with my grandfather at his lodge.

“Do you really think he’d want me up there?” I asked. My grandfather had built the lodge as a sort of man’s retreat. It was where he and Al often went to escape the business of Chicago, and though I had loved my summers there as a little girl, I didn’t want to intrude on Ralph’s solitude.

But Aunt Maffie responded with one loud, “Ha!”

“Are you kidding?” She asked me. “He adores you. He’d love to have you visit.”

She called him up right in that moment, and by the next morning, I was on a bus to one of my favorite places in the world, the lodge in Mercer, Wisconsin.

So many good childhood memories ran through my head as the bus pulled out of Chicago—the fresh air, the starry nights, the winter-time rides in a reindeer-pulled sleigh, fishing and swimming in the lake in the summer, and being with my dad. I felt a tear roll down my cheek, but wiped it away quickly, saying to myself, “Snap out of it, Deirdre. You can’t bring him back, but he lives in your heart. And you’ll feel closer to him at the lodge.”

I could hardly wait to get there and be with my grandfather. I not only wanted to see him, I wanted to ask him a lot of questions. I had already embarked on my project of unearthing all the information I could about my family, and I kept running up against a persistent question, the darkest of the blots on the Capone name: the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. I knew that if anyone could help me understand how my uncle Al could possibly have been involved in such a senseless crime, it would be my grandfather Ralph.

Late one night at Recap Lodge I sat with my grandfather in his kitchen. He ate a salami sandwich, had a couple of drinks, and I guessed that meant he would be more willing than usual to talk about the old days.

Without my prompting, he suddenly murmured that he was sorry he had not been a better father to my father, and that I had born the consequences of it after my dad’s suicide. He told me that since his son didn’t have a mother, he thought it would be better for him to let his grandmother Theresa raise him. And he also thought it would be safer.

“Al and I had to work hard all the time not to get ourselves killed,” Ralph said, “we had a business to run, and the whole family—including your dad—depended on the money from that business. There were many people who were trying to take our business away from us, and there were many people who wanted to see us dead.”

I took a deep breath. “Ralph,” I said—he insisted that I call him Ralph and not grandpa—“was that what happened at the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre? Was Al trying to protect the family?”

The story I knew was this: The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre happened on the morning of February 14, 1929. Seven men sat in a garage at 2122 N. Clark Street waiting for George “Bugs” Moran, chief of the North Side gang. They also waited for a delivery of booze “hijacked off a boat,” and, later that afternoon, they all planned to go to Detroit to pick up some whisky.

Ralph shook his head pointedly. “Al did not plan it,” he said firmly. “In fact, that’s the last thing he would have wanted. He was furious when he heard about it. He phoned me and was really steaming. He said, ‘That crazy bastard McGurn! What’s he trying to do, crucify me?’” Al was in Florida at the time of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre and left one of his partners, Jack “machine gun” McGurn, in charge.

Ralph explained to me that before he left, Al had been particularly worried about the activities of a rival bootlegger and head of the North Side gang, Bugs Moran. McGurn had told Al he could handle Moran.

“OK, then handle him,” Al had said. “Put the fear of God in him. Run him out of town…whatever. Just do it in a way that won’t bring us a lot of heat. I’ve got enough problems as it is.”

And McGurn came back with, “Nothing to worry, boss. Leave it to me. I’ll take care of him.”

Then, after the massacre hit the papers, Al exploded to Ralph over the phone. “So what does the asshole do?” He ranted. “He mows down seven people at once! This kind of thing can ruin us. The
Tribune
and the rest of the press will never get off this. Sure as hell they’re already blaming me for it, even though I’m over a thousand miles away in Florida. And the guys back east aren’t gonna be happy about this either. They’ll never believe I didn’t plan the whole fuckin’ mess. And to top it off, he didn’t even get Moran. That son of a bitch is still walkin’ around Chicago. Ralph, this a fuckin’ nightmare. Wake me up, will ya?”

It seemed to me that Al was clearly not directly involved, but hearing about this rant from Ralph still didn’t clear him entirely in my mind. If McGurn was responsible and McGurn worked for Al…it would be tough to say that Al was innocent. So far, Ralph hadn’t yet told me anything that contradicted the account I’d already read in countless newspaper clippings and that was popularly accepted as immutable fact.

The men were Pete Gusenberg and his brother Frank, who were both payroll robbers; James Clark, a stickup man; Johnny May, a safe-blower as well as the Moran gang’s auto mechanic; Al Weinshank, a speakeasy operator; Adam Heyer, the owner of the garage; Dr. Reinhardt Schwimmer, an optometrist. Oh, and a German shepherd was chained to one of the trucks in the garage.

The garage door opened, and two men dressed as policemen entered the garage followed by three other men. The intruders lined all seven occupants up against the wall and machine-gunned them down instantly. Only the dog was left unharmed.

An inquiry by police and the state’s attorney identified three of the five men: Fred Burke, Jack McGurn, and John Scalise. Gus Winkler was one of the men not identified.

Although this description of what happened on that gruesome Valentine’s Day is the commonly accepted version offered in books and movies, my grandfather told me an entirely different story that evening in Wisconsin. His version of the story has never been printed anywhere before.

This is what he told me.

“Deirdre, the day after I talked with Al, I confronted McGurn and told him how pissed Al was with him. You know what he said? He said, ‘God damn it, Ralph, I swear I didn’t do it. Hell, if I’d had done it I would have done it right. Gimme some credit. I’m a professional. I know Moran like I know the back of my hand. If he wasn’t there do you think I would have mowed down those other assholes? Shit, they weren’t even his key men.

Let me tell you what I think happened. In fact, I’m sure it went down this way. The day before Valentine’s Day, I was parked on Clark Street a few doors down and across the street from Moran’s garage. I had been doing that and watching the Parkway Hotel where Moran lives for about a week. Your kid brother Matty was with me most of the time. I was trying to establish a pattern of behavior so I could take him down,
like that
.’ McGurn snapped his fingers. ‘No muss, no fuss, no loose ends. You know I’ve been getting smarter in my old age.

Anyway on the thirteenth, Matty and I notice a car—a caddy—full of cops, driving slowly past the garage headed south. Then a couple of minutes later it comes back in the other direction. This time, I caught a glimpse of the driver and he looked familiar. I don’t mind tellin’ ya, I was getting nervous. I’m thinkin’, did they recognize me? Do they have another warrant for my arrest?

When they drove by the third time, I said,
That’s it, Matty, we’re gettin’ the hell out of here.
I swear to God that’s the last time I was near that garage. If you don’t believe me, ask Matty.

‘Listen Ralph,’ McGurn went on. ‘Here’s the way I got it figured. Those cops were out to get Moran. I heard rumors that some cops were hijackin’ his booze and Moran was gonna rat them out to his captain friends on the force. I can’t prove it, but I think those cops did the shooting. Hell, they probably thought Moran was one of the guys they blasted, the assholes.’”

My grandfather poured himself another scotch, lit a cigar, and took a big puff. “Deirdre,” he said, “I checked with your Uncle Matty, and he backed up what McGurn told me. But it didn’t really make any difference. The newspapers and just about everyone was blaming Al for it.”

As you can imagine, I wanted to believe my grandfather Ralph more than anything. But I took my time. I had no corroboration of my grandfather’s account of the Saint Valentines Day Massacre until about six years later when Uncle Matty had dinner with Bob and me at our house shortly after we married. After we’d had dinner and the kids were put to bed, we sat down and relaxed in the living room with a drink. Matty smoked a cigar that really stunk, but, in those days, we tolerated smoking in the house.