Al Capone Read online

  Although Gabriel had given up on his three older sons, he was trying to turn the next in line into a businessman who would see the wisdom of moving up in the world through honest labor. He told Al to park his box under the big clock that was the busiest spot on the street, where he would have the best chance of making the most money. It was also the location where some of Don Batista Balsamo’s men conducted much of his business. Don Balsamo, whose informal but always respectful title was “the ‘mayor’ of Union Street,” was also “the first godfather of Brooklyn.” Al observed the don’s minions as they made their weekly rounds to extort the local merchants into paying protection in exchange for doing business safely. Watching them gave Al the inspiration to go into the protection racket himself but on a much smaller scale that would escape Balsamo’s notice and therefore his punishment.

  Al’s target was the other shoe-shine boys who brought their boxes to Columbia Street as soon as they saw what a lucrative spot it was for him. The first employees who did his actual collecting were two of his cousins, Charlie Fischetti and Sylvester Agoglia, and two of their friends, Jimmy DeAmato and Tony Scrapisetti. Al had learned the fine art of delegation from watching Frank, who, like the don, chose other boys to be his enforcers and seldom did the dirty work himself. He also noticed that Frank usually chose boys who were sometimes older than he but not nearly as intelligent or innovative and who were therefore content to be followers and not try to usurp him as leader. It was a practice Al followed throughout his adult career.

  As this, his first business, grew, Al’s helpers expanded to include other boys eager to make easy money. Soon this fairly large group began to think of themselves as a gang and gave themselves a name, the South Brooklyn Rippers. Their protection racket was ultimately unsuccessful when the Balsamo organization simply booted them off the street, but only after smiling at the boys’ audacity and taking careful notice of who among them might become useful in the future. Eventually, it brought the boys, particularly Al, to the attention of two other rising stars in the criminal firmament, first Frankie Yale, né Ioele, and then Johnny Torrio. They watched as Al branched out from Brooklyn and strutted into Manhattan, where Ralph was now operating.

  Ralph Capone left Ralphie with his mother, Florence, when she returned to claim him briefly before giving him up entirely to be raised by his grandmother Teresa. Ralph moved from his parents’ home to Manhattan around 1917, where he had more opportunities to be with women, mostly the prostitutes and dance hall girls his mother would have frowned upon, and where he was doing deals that were just on the fringe of illegality. He was involved with the notorious adult gang called the Five Points, which specialized in selling stolen auto parts or sometimes actual cars, but more likely Ralph was just doing whatever odd jobs gang leaders assigned in order to pick up a quick buck. Al sometimes joined his brother in the city, where he became familiar with the streets of the Lower East Side, pulled pranks with other ruffians, and seized whatever opportunity he could to pick up a bit of change. Soon he was part of a loose affiliation who called themselves the Forty Thieves Juniors, and that brought him to the attention of his ultimate crime boss, Johnny Torrio.

  One of the reasons the very young Al Capone thought Torrio presented such an attractive role model was that he operated in the mold of his admired older brother Frank, when in actuality Frank probably learned this technique from Torrio. He, too, was a snappy dresser, a short and slight man who never sullied his hands and whose preferred way of doing business was to use the biggest thugs he could find as his enforcers. Torrio must have had a silver tongue to go along with his considerable intelligence, for he “dominated his swollen-muscled thugs with a large brain abetted by a colossal nerve and will.” This impressed young Al, as did Torrio’s one consistent expression, that there were spoils out there aplenty and therefore no need for violent conflict because there was more than enough to go around.

  Torrio and his gang gathered in one of the euphemistically titled “social clubs” that filled all the neighborhoods where they lived. The clubs had names that subtly identified which of two kinds they were: some bore the name of an Italian province, city, or hero, and law-abiding Italian men gathered there in the evenings to read newspapers, shoot pool, and talk among themselves; in others, such as the one bearing the name of the John Torrio Association, dangerous-looking men congregated all day long and stayed far into the night, not really doing very much of anything but always ready for whatever might arise. In pleasant weather, all the men hung out on the sidewalks in front of both kinds of clubs to watch the passing scene. Al was still in school when he had to walk past Torrio’s every day, where men who did his bidding noticed the big kid just as he noticed them. Around the time he turned sixteen, he was mounting the stairs to Torrio’s second-floor office and running numbers along with a host of other boys.

  Here again, legend steps in: Before entrusting them with bags of money, Torrio allegedly would not be in his office when the boys arrived for their first interview. They would be invited to wait for him in his inner sanctum, where a large pile of money would be sitting on his desk in clear view. Some of the boys could not resist the temptation and took all or part of it, and they were immediately dealt with and dismissed. This tale is told about Al Capone in a variety of versions, but in each he was always a paragon of virtue who left the money untouched, thus earning Torrio’s complete confidence in his trustworthiness.

  In recent years, Torrio’s importance in the annals of American crime has been diminished if not eclipsed because of Al Capone’s near-mythical stature. It would be unfair to relegate him to the sidelines when he was, in the words of Herbert Asbury, an early and astute scholar of crime, “probably the nearest thing to a mastermind this country has yet produced.” Torrio was active in Chicago criminal activity as early as 1909, going back and forth between there and New York until the late teen years, but by the 1930s, when he was an established figure and the word “crime” had become synonymous with the city of Chicago, the city’s crime commission called him “an organizational genius,” singularly responsible, as one of Capone’s many biographers put it, “for the development of modern corporate crime…casting traditional Italian racketeering in the American corporate mold, making its vices available to all, not just Italians, eventually extending its turf far beyond the streets of Brooklyn to the entire nation.”

  Johnny Torrio was indeed a formidable role model for a canny and intelligent boy looking to move up in the world, one who lived in a place where honest and upright role models were few and far between for the simple reason that their Italian surnames denied them so many opportunities within the American dream. In Al’s case, it was easy for the young boy to have tremendous respect for the man who paid him handsomely for running numbers and carrying messages, work that was so much easier than bending over a shoe-shine box all day long. However, there seems to have been a gap in his thinking, a disconnect between the chores he did for Torrio and the money he was paid, which he dutifully brought home to his mother: the money was good, and it was probably better not to think about what he had to do to earn it.

  There is no question that from the first he was unlike Torrio’s other boy collectors and messengers, for at the beginning, and for reasons still unknown, he was the one whom Torrio never sent into the brothels. So what if Al collected bags of betting money from the saloons? He was only there in the daylight hours, when there didn’t appear to be anything all that wrong with what he saw. He was not privy to beatings, shakedowns, and murders. He knew these things happened because everyone on the street talked about them, but they were done by men and boys so far down the Torrio organization’s ladder that it seemed they went on in another world, one that did not touch its dandified leader, whose hands (literally as well as metaphorically) were scrupulously clean and who kept the hands of a small coterie of his best workers clean as well.

  Al had a way with numbers and could add them up with such alacrity that he was soon one of the boys at the very
top of Torrio’s heap, often tapped to help the guys in the office who totted up the daily haul. He was still very young when he learned about Torrio’s other businesses, everything from extortion to brothels, and he observed how Torrio never dealt with any of them directly. Al watched as he worked and waited eagerly to assume the ever increasing responsibilities Torrio delegated to him. These eventually included visiting the brothels and perhaps enjoying the girls while collecting the bags of money they earned. When he went into bars, businesses, or homes to intimidate people into paying up, he used a frighteningly unflinching stare that he learned by practicing in front of a mirror. As an earlier biographer astutely stated, “What Torrio, with his brilliant, analytical mind was able to conceive, Al would eventually be able to execute.”

  However, between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, even though he was fast rising in Torrio’s organization in Brooklyn, not too many people would have thought of Al as much more than his brother Ralph’s sidekick, the one who liked to shoot pool and go dancing with other Italian men who frequented the dance halls that lined the streets of lower Manhattan. These dance halls, for men only and where men danced with other men, held to the customs of the old country; no women, especially single, would risk their reputations by appearing in such places. Al soon became such a good dancer that he branched out to the non-Italian dance halls frequented by certain classes of women, some of them from good working-class families like his own, who were “American” enough to go out and enjoy themselves, others who were just unfortunate girls out to make a buck any way they could.

  Al learned about women from Ralph, whose first reported bout with gonorrhea came around 1915, when Al was almost sixteen. His older brother was a good customer of the dance hall girls looking to pick up a quick trick or the prostitutes who worked openly on the streets, as well as those who worked in the many brothels. Ralph’s gonorrhea was one of the fortunate varieties of the disease: at a time when there were no cures, his was the strain that healed quickly and never manifested itself later in life. Al never admitted to having had gonorrhea as a youth or to seeking treatment for a venereal disease such as the syphilis that first infected him in his twenties, but sex was abundant and readily available, and he indulged in it from a very young age. However, not with nice Italian girls, who were watched so carefully by their families that boys like Al had little opportunity to seduce them. And besides, he really wasn’t interested in them.

  The Italian girls he knew clung to the ways of the old country, and those ways were not his. Often they were taken out of school as early as the third or fourth grade while they were still children, because their overburdened mothers needed them to help raise younger siblings who seemed to be born every year. For these girls, forced to take on adult responsibilities so early, their lives consisted of the hard, grueling work of washing clothes, doing piecework, and becoming expert at housework far before their time. They clung to the ways of their mothers because it was all they knew, and this included the refusal—or the fear—of learning English and going out into the world beyond the stoop of their building or the corner of their street. Al wasn’t interested in women like this, who, the minute they married, changed from willing sexual partners into the same Madonna-like beings as their mothers and had to be treated with the same kind of asexual respect. And neither was Frank.

  Al watched as his older brother evaded Italian girls, and indeed all women, and how he skillfully sidestepped any talk of marriage, whether from his mother in the home or his friends on the street. Frank loved to dance and enjoyed taking the floor with dance hall girls, but he was almost too fastidious for sex, which he didn’t even like to talk about and which gave rise to a few whispered rumors about his sexual orientation. This is where he and Al parted company: like Ralph, Al was entranced by women, and if they were prostitutes, it didn’t matter; he embraced every opportunity for sex that came his way.

  ___

  And so Al Capone reached adulthood like so many other boys in his neighborhood, with a future that seemed destined to consist of one violent scrape after another that would eventually bring him into conflict not only with others on the wrong side of the law but also with the law itself. Even though Torrio was spending so much time in Chicago that his move there was almost complete, stories still abound of how he increased Al’s duties in New York by entrusting him to carry guns in brown paper bags (this one probably true) or to transport narcotics disguised as cans of tomatoes (this one highly unlikely, for Torrio carefully avoided dealing in drugs). Al did carry out threats—or worse—on those who thought they could refuse to pay extortion, or those who simply did not have the money to do so, and he was probably present when a few hits were made on some of the small-time mobsters who ran afoul of Torrio’s organization. Whether he merely contributed to setting up the murders or actually carried them out depends on who is telling the tale, for if even some of the stories told by his many biographers are true, when they are added up, he was responsible for at least half a dozen killings before he was eighteen.

  Reading about his youthful exploits is like reading a bildungsroman, not the traditional one of an artist or writer coming of age, but one of a young criminal coming into his manhood. There is, however, a basic question that is difficult to answer: Where does the life of the boy end and the life as a legend begin? Most likely for Al Capone, it happened somewhere between working for Johnny Torrio and working for Frankie Yale, and his marriage to the pretty Irish girl who said to anyone who would listen that he broke her heart but she loved him anyway.

  Chapter 2

  MAE

  She was a pretty Irish girl, a green-eyed blonde who hid from the public spotlight he relished even as it probed relentlessly into her private life, searching to find out how she stayed so deeply in love with and loyal to a man like Al Capone. Because she revealed so little about herself, the media invented ways to describe her, and what they wrote often depended on their mood of the moment: either she had hair like sunlight and eyes like the deep blue sea, or she was a peroxide blonde with buckteeth and bad taste in home furnishings. Neither was true: Mary Josephine Coughlin had startling green eyes, fair skin, and lustrous brown hair. No matter what they said about her and Al Capone, theirs was a love story, albeit one quite unlike the usual romantic tale of boy meets girl and lives happily ever after.

  The circumstances of their courtship, marriage, and lifelong togetherness were entirely unorthodox, starting with the fact that they were actually able to marry at all; what remained constant was the lifelong devotion each partner brought to the marriage. The reality of their affection was almost storybook, despite his peccadilloes and predilections and the shame, embarrassment, and despair they repeatedly visited upon her. Strange as it might seem to outsiders, theirs was truly a love story, and they passed the love they showed each other on to their only son, who, in turn, showered it on his own four children.

  Al was smitten from the first moment he saw Mary Josephine Coughlin (always called Mae) at the end of 1917, when he was a laborer in a box factory and she worked in the office as a timekeeper. But why would a young woman two years his senior, and of her social station (proper lace curtain Irish), even look twice at a street punk who seemed to have no future? Even more puzzling is how this nice girl got herself pregnant by this same punk and how her deeply religious Catholic family let her live openly in the family home without marrying the baby’s father until after their child was born. Mae was a beautiful girl and later an elegant woman whose granddaughters remember as having the most radiant smile and a mellifluous laugh that brought her many admiring glances, even as an old woman. Although her teeth were large and white and straight, she had a pronounced overbite that her son and one of his four daughters inherited. It gave an interesting cast to her looks and one that made her son resemble her so much more than his father.

  She was the second of five daughters: Muriel Anne was older, and she was the sister who became Mae’s closest confidante; the younger girls were Veronica,
Claire, and Agnes. Of her brothers, Walter was born just after Mae, and Dennis (called Danny) was the youngest of them all. Mae was sixteen when her father, Michael Coughlin, died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack, but there was still enough money for her mother, Bridget Gorman Coughlin, to remain at home and send the older children out to work, and that was how the household survived. Despite the early passing of a beloved father, the Coughlin house was a happy one, with much laughter and music.

  After her father’s death, Mae was legally old enough to leave school. Her first (and only) job was the respectable one in the box factory that earned a decent salary, almost all of which she contributed to her family. She knew how to shop on a shoestring, and it helped that she had excellent taste; from her earliest days, she dressed with the style and verve of what was then called a classy dresser. When she met Al, he was eighteen, and he also had a legitimate job in the box factory, but most of his income came from working first for Johnny Torrio and then as Frankie Yale’s jack-of-all-trades. He did whatever he was asked to do, and before he married, it allowed him to surrender his entire paycheck to his mother and still have money on the side for his own use.

  Like Mae, Al was attentive to his dress, but there they parted company, for his taste was far flashier than hers. She dressed in muted pastels and neutrals, while he favored suits of brilliant colors, sometimes chartreuse or lemon yellow. He came under Frankie Yale’s influence when Johnny Torrio recommended him as a good worker to the mobster who controlled the area around Coney Island. Al saw how Yale festooned himself with diamond pinkie rings, tiepins, and belt buckles, and as soon as he had the money to do the same, he did. None of this flashiness would endear him to Mae’s mother, Bridget.