Al Capone Read online

  Teresa stayed healthy and became the rock-solid foundation of the family despite bearing so many children and living one step up from hardscrabble poverty in a small apartment with no heat and an outhouse down the stairs and out the back. They were even more crowded when they took in two boarders (one of whom worked as an assistant barber to Gabriele). Her word was law to her children, and it had to be, because, although she and Gabriele had a marriage based on love and mutual respect, his constitution was not as robust as hers. He would lay down family law, but she was the parent who enforced it. Whether he was weakened from the hard physical labor of the first grim years of their American life or whether he was simply prone to catch whatever illness came along, Gabriele was often not in the best of health. He did, however, work hard at his barbering, and he did have a steady enough clientele that allowed him to be the primary financial support for the family. It gave him great respect in the eyes of his children and the community.

  Gabriele and Teresa seized every opportunity to prosper in their new life, and the extra income brought by her sewing and the two boarders was a great help in making them relatively comfortable in comparison with many of their fellow Italian immigrants. Unlike most, they did not expect their sons to quit school and go to work at the earliest opportunity, for although it was not actually said to the children, the parents valued education as a way to get ahead. Gabriele was a quiet man who liked to spend his evenings reading Italian newspapers or going to his social club just next door, where he enjoyed playing cards and billiards, while Teresa usually busied herself at home with some sort of sewing. With the exception of shopping, the only time she left the house was to go to daily Mass, for she was deeply religious, or for the evening meetings of the church’s sodalities, as the women’s groups were called. Whether or not Gabriele shared her devotion, he was like most other Italian men, for he (and the boys shortly after they received their first Communion) did not attend Mass on Sundays, let alone weekdays.

  Both parents were highly respected within the Italian community, each known by the honorific titles of “Don Gabriele” and “Donna Teresa.” By comparison to many of their neighbors, this extra degree of respect added to the general impression that they were reasonably secure and therefore, in the eyes of their countrymen and other neighbors, better off than most of them. The Capone family had come up in the world after 1906, when Gabriele took the oath to become an American citizen. The following year, they moved to a slightly better neighborhood when Gabriel (as he wrote his name now that he was an American) found commercial space for a barbershop with an apartment above it on a street called Garfield Place. The neighborhood was solidly traditional Italian, but the Capones once again lived on a street that was on its fringe, on the downhill side of Park Slope where Brooklyn’s Little Italy abutted the solidly Irish Red Hook section. Italians were a minority in their building, which was mostly inhabited by Irish families or those relative rarities, native New Yorkers.

  This was a household of some culture; Gabriel tried to share with his sons the ideas and interests he gleaned mainly from Italian and American newspapers and conversations with his clients, but none of the older boys were much interested. Jimmy just wanted to go to the movies to watch the cowboys, particularly his hero William S. Hart. His secret ambition was to go to Hollywood to become a cowboy movie star, but until he could get there, he went to Coney Island to hang around the stables of ponies he could not afford to ride. Ralph, who had no interest in anything at home, took up with street gangs as soon as he was old enough to do so. Frank, the best looking and most intelligent among all the brothers and possessed of more street smarts than the two older ones, soon followed Ralph but in a much more subdued manner. While Ralph often used his brawn to intimidate others into giving him what he wanted, Frank preferred not to risk harming his pretty-boy features, instead using charm and intelligence to persuade others to do his bidding. Despite being the third son who was supposed to defer to his two older brothers, Frank had such a way about him that he often took the lead in deciding what Jimmy and Ralph should do, and young Al looked up to him as well.

  All the Capone boys respected their father and knew better than to oppose him in any way, for to do so would bring the wrath of Teresa down upon their heads—and their backsides. And yet, despite having parents who urged their sons to better themselves and rise to success through honest work and education, every one of the boys left school as early as he could and turned to crime in one form or another. Al was the only one who found extraordinary success through illegality and also the only son who, from the first, thought of himself as “American” rather than Italian or even Italian-American. His earliest memories were of the melting pot in which he grew up among different ethnic groups. As an adult, he grew angry when anyone called him Italian, saying repeatedly and angrily, “I’m no Italian, I was born in Brooklyn.”

  By the time they arrived on Garfield Place, the eight-year-old Alphonse had already established a reputation in both groups as a brawler to reckon with. As one of Al’s many biographers said of an Irish kid in the neighborhood who was much like him, Al’s mere “existence presented a challenge.”

  This reputation was cemented after a fight that has gone down in Capone lore as “the incident of the washtub,” or how Al rescued Mrs. Maria Adamo’s stolen washtub and used it as a weapon in a fight with an Irish gang that disrespected Italian women. Nothing in that version of the story was true. What is true is that whenever the Italian matrons ventured out onto the streets to do their daily marketing, the Irish boys liked to sneak behind them and pull up their voluminous long skirts and petticoats to reveal their bare legs and the bloomers they wore underneath. Because none of the Italian boys had yet been brave enough to stop them, the Irish were boldly escalating their attacks by invading Italian neighborhoods, doing damage to property, and occasionally stealing whatever they could easily haul away. However, they did not steal Mrs. Adamo’s washtub, because it was not something they needed or wanted. It was their arrogant demeanor that the Italian boys could not allow to go unchallenged.

  The Italian boys were led by Frank Nitto, later to be known as Al’s enforcer, Frank Nitti, who was then almost eighteen and a decade older than most of the others. Al was between the ages of eight and nine and already had a reputation for his fighting prowess, so Nitti made him the mascot of “the Boys of Navy Street,” as they called themselves. The older boys “borrowed” the washtub and strapped it to Al, upside down and in front. They found two sticks and told him to be the gang’s drummer who would lead their song as they marched to confront their Irish enemy, “We are the boys of Navy Street/touch us if you dare!” Once they engaged the other boys, the fight ensued, and throughout it Al stood in the midst of the fray, beating his drum and singing his song. After the fracas ended, the washtub was dutifully returned in time for Mrs. Adamo’s next day’s washing, and Al’s reputation as a foot soldier who could be counted on in a fight was assured.

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  Al’s school days were quite different. No matter their country of origin, all the recent immigrants found school a strange, dangerous, and often humiliating experience. Public school teachers were generally young and untrained, as harsh as most of the nuns who taught in the Catholic schools. Primary school was often a confusing experience for Italian children who were suddenly pushed from a warm and loving home, where mothers coddled their sons in the language they knew and understood, into the cold and clinical classroom, where they were treated rudely or ignored by teachers who did little to help them learn English. The general attitude was why bother, especially with Italians, who were considered the lowest of the low and who were only going to drop out at the earliest opportunity. In those days, Italians not only started out at the bottom; they stayed there.

  Al was different from most of the people around him, starting with his big brothers Jimmy and Ralph (but not Frank) and extending to most of his classmates. He was a quick learner who soon spoke fluent English and was a good student,
routinely earning the equivalent of B grades. He was especially quick with numbers and figures, but he was far more expert at playing hooky and seldom went to school long enough to demonstrate his natural ability. He always said he learned much more about life by being on the streets. He thrived there because he knew instinctively how to adapt to whatever he encountered, but in school there were so many rules and regulations that created frustrating situations in which he often found himself unable to control his behavior.

  He was always big for his age, and as he grew, he developed a temper that matched his size. Between the ages of ten and twelve, he passed for a youth of sixteen to eighteen. He (and his brothers) were taller than most Italians, and as an adult, depending on who reported his size, he was either five feet ten inches or just about six feet tall. He weighed well over 200 pounds in his prime, somewhere around 250, and because he was so well-muscled, he carried his weight easily. He was well coordinated and graceful, and his contemporaries said he could have been a boxer or a professional dancer. As a ten-year-old, he liked to hang out around the gates of the Navy Yard and taunt sailors when they came through on their way to the bars and brothels that lined the street. There are numerous tales of his exploits, with some having him itching for fistfights with sailors twice his age; others have him actually fighting them and winning; and still others have him throwing rocks and bottles with other young boys who formed free-floating gangs for spur-of-the-moment battles that always brought the police. Neither police nor sailors ever caught young Al because he was so swift at running away.

  In short, he was a brawler, and his propensity to fight culminated in his leaving school for good during the sixth grade—after the indignity of having to repeat it, thanks to extensive absences that led to frequent altercations with teachers who sometimes stopped at verbal abuse but more often allegedly hit him with sticks, rulers, or straps. He was a big kid going on fourteen when the sixth-grade teacher made the mistake of trying to punish him after another student stole his lunch and Al disrupted the classroom by demanding that it be returned. This particular story has come down through the years in two different versions: in one, the teacher (a very young woman) only wanted him to go into a coatroom and stand there with his face to the wall, which for Al was an unjust humiliation and the last straw; in another, the teacher (a highly respected older man) made the mistake of getting between Al and the boy who stole the sandwich and thus suffered a knockdown and knockout in the process.

  There are also various versions of what Al did to retaliate after the encounter with whichever teacher it was: in one, after the young woman hit him, he hit her back before he walked out of the classroom, never to return. In another, she was unable to discipline him, so she sent him to the principal, who either took a stick to him or gave him such a tongue-lashing that here again he walked out and never went back. And if the teacher was indeed the man Al knocked down, he was supposedly angry enough to send the truant officer off on several unsuccessful hunts to find and return the boy to the classroom. This last version seems least likely, for truant officers were noted for turning in reports of “actively pursuing” an Italian child who left school, when in reality they cared so little that they did nothing.

  No doubt there is a modicum of truth somewhere in all these stories, but when Al walked out, he was not doing anything different from what his older brothers had done before him: he was just quitting school, as they all did when they were around fourteen. Thus, to his parents, it seemed he was doing as his brothers did, and there was no conflict at home; they simply expected that because he was not going to school, he would go to work and contribute his wages to the family.

  At first, Al had legitimate jobs. Various sources have him working behind the counter in a candy store, setting pins in a bowling alley, and working alongside his brother Ralph in a printing plant. One story that is certainly legend rather than reality says he earned $23 a week in a munitions factory, but even if he worked there during World War I, when he was in his late teens and wages were high, in 2015 dollars that would have been approximately $525, an astronomical sum that was certainly not the weekly salary of an average laborer. Other stories have him living as far away from Brooklyn as Buffalo, where he was said to have gone in search of work and where he held a variety of jobs. This never happened, for he was one of the typical Italian boys who always found work where they lived and who didn’t leave the family home until they could marry and set up their own households. Although Al probably did work at many of the odd jobs that have come to be considered true parts of his life story, the only one that can be verified is that he did follow Ralph into a printing plant, where he worked as a box cutter alongside his brother between 1914 and 1916 and brought home $3 a week, approximately $68 in 2015 dollars and a good salary for a teenager with a sixth-grade education.

  Al’s paycheck became an important addition to the family’s finances, for they had already lost two wage-earning sons, Ralph and Jimmy. Ralph moved to Manhattan when he married for the first time in 1915. His first wife of two (or three, depending on the legal status of his last companion) was Filomena Moscato, called Florence. She was born in Salerno, a city close to Naples in the province of Campania, and was a small child when her parents brought her to the United States. Ralph and Florence had a common background that should have resulted in a marriage that, if not based on love, should certainly have respected the traditional roles of an Italian husband and wife. It might have evolved like that if they were in their native Italy, but life in America had given Florence the idea that marriage did not need to be based on the old country’s tradition of a wife’s submission to her husband. She was quite a fighter, physically as well as verbally, and their first two years together were fractious. She liked to “go out,” which most likely meant to bars and dance halls, so theirs was a household with broken crockery that often led to black-and-blue bruises on both of them. They did make peace long enough to have a son, their only child, Ralph junior, always called Ralphie, in 1917.

  Shortly after “little Ralphie” was born, Ralph came home from work one day to find that Florence had run away, deserting both him and the baby. Teresa took them in and set about caring for Ralphie, while Ralph worked steadily to provide for the household. He was a good, dependable worker with a genial personality that made him popular with others who also learned quickly not to cross him; like Al, he had a temper that could turn violent with the least provocation. Ralph held a variety of jobs for the next several years, doing everything from being the front man who dealt with customers in the printing plant to selling penny insurance policies door-to-door. When he landed a job with a soft drinks bottling firm, he acquired the nickname by which he was known for the rest of his life, Bottles. It became highly appropriate when Al began bootlegging and Ralph was his right-hand man.

  Jimmy contributed to the family by hanging around the farms and stables on Staten Island and bringing home what little money he could. He would have dressed as a cowboy had family finances permitted, and when he ran away from home sometime in 1905 at the age of thirteen, he intended to go to Hollywood and become a cowboy movie star. His whereabouts were unknown for the next three decades, and when he resurfaced years later, the family learned that he only got as far as Nebraska. He changed his name to Richard Hart, taking the surname of the silent movie star he most admired. Ironically, he became a well-known figure, Two Gun Hart, when he established a career as a sheriff in rural Nebraska who took delight in smashing bootleg stills and shipments of booze wherever he found them. Still, there was nothing to connect Two Gun Hart with Vincenzo Capone and his bootlegging brothers, and for many years the Capone family remained unaware of his existence.

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  Until Al was fourteen or fifteen, stories told by his contemporaries describe him as a nice boy who, after he quit school and went to work every day, always brought his entire paycheck home to his mother. He was well-known on the streets of his neighborhood because that was where everyone congregated for mo
st of the year to escape the overcrowded, squalid, and fetid tenement apartments in which they had to live. In good weather, family life, from the oldest patriarch to the newest baby, was lived outside, on the stoops and on the streets. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, so the memories of Al hanging around in pool halls or on the streets are true, but so too are the stories of how he had to be home every night at 10:30 or face the ire of his mother.

  The writer Daniel Fuchs, who portrayed Brooklyn life with unstinting reality in his novels, knew Al and remembered him as someone unlikely to become a flamboyant gangster because, as a boy, he was “something of a nonentity, affable, soft of speech and even mediocre—in everything but dancing.” Fuchs was most likely depicting Al before his first foray into criminality, which probably did not happen until after he quit school and was in his early teens, when his father set him up in what was meant to be an honest business.

  Gabriel was aware of the fights that the Navy Street Boys led Al into, and he worried that the petty thefts and bad stunts they pulled might escalate into something far more serious. Al had taken to hanging out at one of the ubiquitous social clubs that dotted the neighborhood, this one called the Adonis, with a basement outfitted for target practice where he is believed to have held a gun for the first time. He was fourteen and big for his age, so to steer the boy away from a place where he could get into real trouble, Gabriel gave him a shoe-shine box and told him to stake out a position on the busy intersection of Union and Columbia Streets, where pushcarts lined the sidewalks and vendors hawked their wares in competition with the shops. Gabriel had tried earlier to set Frank up in the shoe-shine business, but the enterprising Frank sold his box to another boy for a handsome profit, then used the money to gamble and, with his winnings, to buy the flashy clothes he had begun to fancy. In the vernacular of the time, Frank was becoming a snazzy dresser and a ladies’ man, and Al was eager to imitate him.