Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend - Softcover

Bair, Deirdre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345804511 ISBN 13: 9780345804518

Publisher: Anchor, 2017

Synopsis

At the height of Prohibition, Al Capone loomed large as Public Enemy Number One: his multimillion-dollar Chicago Outfit dominated organized crime, and law enforcement was powerless to stop him. But then came the fall: a legal noose tightened by the FBI, a conviction on tax evasion, a stint in Alcatraz. After his release, he returned to his family in Miami a much diminished man, living quietly until the ravages of his neurosyphilis took their final toll.
 
Our shared fascination with Capone endures in countless novels and movies, but the man behind the legend has remained a mystery. Now, through rigorous research and exclusive access to Capone’s family, National Book Award–winning biographer Deirdre Bair cuts through the mythology, uncovering a complex character who was flawed and cruel but also capable of nobility. At once intimate and iconoclastic, Al Capone gives us the definitive account of a quintessentially American figure.

About this title

About the Author

Deirdre Bair received the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Simone de Beauvoir biography was chosen by The New York Times as a Best Book of the Year. Her biography of Anaïs Nin and her most recent book, Saul Steinberg: A Biography, were both New York Times Notable Books.

www.deirdrebairauthor.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
 
This is the story of a ruthless killer, a scofflaw, a keeper of brothels and bordellos, a tax cheat and perpetrator of frauds, a convicted felon, and a mindless, blubbering invalid. This is also the story of a loving son, husband, and father who described himself as a businessman whose job was to serve the people what they wanted. Al Capone was all of these.
 
He died in 1947, and almost seven decades later it seems that anywhere one travels in the world, people still recognize his name and have something to say about who he was and what he did. Everyone has an opinion, and yet, within the deeply private world of his extended family, there is an ongoing quest to find definitive answers about its most famous member.
 
The saying goes that family history is often a mystery and that “all families are closed narratives, difficult to read from the outside.” Attempting to reconstruct their truth is much like trying to solve the most complicated puzzle imaginable. In the case of those who bear a name that is famous or, as in the case of Al Capone’s relatives and descendants, infamous, the task can be heavy indeed.
 
Some of his relatives found it easier to change their surname than to deal with its history, choosing to distance themselves and deny the relationship for a variety of reasons. Some merely wanted to lead ordinary private lives. Some said they feared reprisals from gangland Chicago, while still others who remained “connected” in varying degrees said they wanted to make their way in that world unencumbered by Al’s long shadow. Still, there were those who kept the Capone name but said it was the reason why they had to lead peripatetic lives, some moving as far away as they could get, while others only moved cautiously from one town to another throughout northern Illinois, never far from the security and familiar environment of Chicago.
 
In recent years, the question of who has the right to claim a legitimate place within the family of Al Capone has resulted in some interesting pieces that may or may not fit into the puzzle of its history. “You who only know him from newspaper stories will never realize the real man he is,” said his sister Mafalda in 1929, when he was in his prime. It is a remark echoed in so many other instances by his granddaughters, who have only recently become involved in sorting out what they call their “amazing family history.” All four granddaughters (three of whom survive in 2015) called Al Capone “Papa.” They loved him deeply as small children and still do as adults. With children and grandchildren of their own who ask about Papa, they now call him a “conundrum.”
 
One of the questions they ponder repeatedly is how one man could embody so many vastly different personality traits. They talk among themselves about their family history; they argue and debate about whose memory is the most correct and the closest to the truth. They always strive to assess their grandparents and parents with honesty, objectivity, distance, and detachment, and they admit the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of arriving at definitive conclusions.
 
When they talk about their papa, they first put “Al Capone” in air quotes as they ask themselves what gave rise to the myth and legend. How did the grandfather they adored fit into all these stories? Where was the real person within the grandiose and exaggerated public personality, whose exploits continue to grow more outrageous seven decades after his death? What was it that makes the name of a man who died sick, broke, and demented in 1947 so instantly recognizable a decade and a half into a brand-new century? Are we fascinated with him today because of the so-called Roaring Twenties, the colorful time in which he lived? Is it because we now seek to understand the many ethnic histories that formed our country, and therefore the circumstances of his birth and family life as an Italian-American that might shed light on our own assimilation as Americans? Or, is it simply Al Capone’s larger-than-life personality, the outsized figure who strutted across our historical stage for such a brief time that we did not have enough time while he was with us to assess him? After so many intervening years, can we figure him out? And after seven decades, is nothing left but the myth?
 
The members of his family agree with me that the enigma of Al Capone is a riddle to be solved and now is the time to try to do it. I was initially contacted by several members of the immediate family and the extended clan who were undertaking their own searches into the origins of their family and its subsequent history. I have been privileged to discuss my book with those people, and I have also benefited greatly from interviews and conversations with many other members of the extended Capone family whom I met throughout my research. Here, when I speak of the extended clan, I am including those who are definitely related, those who claim to be, and those who would just like to know whether or not they are.
 
While most prefer to keep their lives as private as possible and asked me not to reveal their true names or where they lived, they all agreed that everything they told me would be on the record. Those who asked me to keep their lives private often have children or grandchildren who don’t mind being identified at all; they tell me it’s “cool” to have a relative like Al Capone because he is far enough in their past that no onus is attached to their present circumstances. I have honored everyone’s wishes because they all insisted that everything they told me was the truth as they knew it.
 
Mine is a curious hybrid of a book, because I concentrate more on the private man than the public figure. I admit that it is impossible to write about Al Capone without taking notice of the major events of his public life, but my aim was not to give yet another version of such well-trod ground unless I could provide new insights into it. Rather, my intention was to look at his public behavior within the context of his personal life, to see how the two might possibly be interrelated, and how the one might have had influence or bearing on the other. This was not an easy task, and like his family members I still wonder if it is possible to arrive at that curious postmodern concept of “the real truth.” Starting in his lifetime, so many histories, biographies, articles, and profiles were written about Al Capone that even with today’s technology it is impossible to arrive at an accurate tally of the secondary documents. All of them purported to be the truth, and perhaps they were at the time they were written. But as we know, what is true for one generation is usually subject to new and different interpretations by the next.
 
Whenever I speak to any member of the Capone family, our conversations always seem to end on the same note: the enigma of Al Capone is a riddle that our efforts may help to solve, and we share the consensus that our contributions to the task are beginnings but certainly not the final endings.

 
Chapter 1: The Early Years
 
Gabriele Capone was twenty-nine years old when he boarded the ship Werra that brought him to the United States in June 1895. With him were his wife, Teresa Raiola Capone, twenty-seven, and their two sons, three-year-old Vincenzo and seventeen-month-old Raffaele. Although they traveled as most other Italian immigrants did, in second class or steerage, Gabriele was unlike the majority who had to indenture themselves to pay for passage, for he had a trade that paid his family’s way. He was a baker who had specialized in making pasta, which earned him a decent living in his native village of Castellammare di Stabia, just outside Naples. He was confident that his skills would easily lead to employment that would let him thrive in the New World. Gabriele was unlike his countrymen in another way: although Naples and its surrounding villages provided one of the largest contingents of Italian immigrants to America, and many bore the fairly common surname of Capone, none of his closest relatives had left their village, so no one was waiting on the dock to greet him and ease his way. A third distinction from most of the nearly fifty thousand other Italians who arrived that same year was probably most significant: he could read and write and had acquired a smattering of English that, coupled with a natural linguistic ability, he used from the beginning to navigate the teeming perils of life in New York.
 
A rumor surrounding his arrival has it that Gabriele did not enter the United States directly because he did not have enough money to pay the entrance fee imposed on immigrants at Ellis Island. Some of his descendants believe that he went instead to Canada and sneaked over the border, although they have no documentation to show how he would have found the money to go there if he did not have sufficient funds to leave Ellis Island. It is one of the earliest myths surrounding the origins of the Capone family in America; all that can be verified is that Gabriele Capone avoided New York’s largest Italian settlement in Manhattan’s crowded, crime-ridden Mulberry Bend on the Lower East Side and headed directly for Brooklyn. He had been forewarned of Mulberry Bend’s dangers by the letters written by others from his village who came before him, but the tenement apartment he found in the area near the New York Naval Shipyard was not much better. Known locally as the Brooklyn Navy Yard, it was another gang-infested area of vice and crime where local thugs took turns hassling and assaulting the sailors who poured out of the main gate at the end of Navy Street. It was cheaper to live there than in Manhattan, and Gabriele thought it a possibly better place for a pasta maker to find work as a baker. However, this was not to be, and to find a way to support his family, he re-created himself as a barber.
 
His initial plan was to find work in someone else’s shop until he could save enough money to set up one of his own, but he could find no one to hire him, so he had to take whatever work was offered. There is no mystery about why he abandoned baking, for it would have cost money he did not have to set up a shop of his own, which was the same reason he did not initially become a barber with his own shop. Other Italians who could not afford to set up a shop usually practiced their trades in their homes and made enough money to scrimp by, which Gabriele could have done as well. However, he was a cautious man, which was probably why he chose instead to find steady work alongside 90 percent of the city’s Italian population, doing day labor whenever he could find it.
 
Much of it was the “dirty work” done under the auspices of the city’s Public Works Department, the hard and dangerous physical labor building subways, sewers, and skyscrapers that no other ethnic group was desperate enough to take. Italians had replaced the Irish at the bottom of the ethnic influx by the 1890s, when an official in city government described the situation succinctly: “We can’t get along without the Italians; we want someone to do the dirty work and the Irish aren’t doing it any longer.”
 
Gabriele fared better than most when he was hired as a grocery store clerk because the job enabled him to read, write, and speak English a little better every day. It was different for Teresa, who was already pregnant with her third child before the boat landed and who gave birth in 1895 to another son, Salvatore, in the Navy Street tenement. From the time they arrived, she helped her husband save money for a barbershop by taking in piecework for various garment factories. Because she worked at home and because everyone in her small enclosed world only spoke Italian, she had little reason to improve her English and throughout her life spoke it hesitantly. She was like most other Italian-American women of her generation, who all used the expression of going “down to America” when they had to venture beyond their known worlds of local tenements and shops; Teresa was representative of all their hesitations and fears because she insisted that her only safety came from within the sanctity of the family, which she always gathered close about her.
 
Whether by accident or design, there were no more children until 1899, when Gabriele was finally able to set up his own shop in a slightly better neighborhood at No. 69 on Brooklyn’s elegantly named Park Avenue, a street whose quality of life was far removed from its Manhattan counterpart. He moved his growing family into an apartment above the shop where they were living when their first child conceived in the New World, Alphonse, was born on January 17, 1899. Teresa had hoped this pregnancy would result in a girl who would mark the end of her childbearing years, but neither was to be.
 
Alphonse was followed by five more children, the sons Erminio (1901), Umberto (1906), and Amadoe (1908) and the daughters Erminia (born and died 1910) and Mafalda (1912). At home, each child was called by the formal Italian baptismal name, but on the streets and at school the boys quickly adopted American versions. Vincenzo called himself Jimmy, and the others became (in the order of their birth) Ralph, Frank, Al, John (or sometimes Mimi), Albert, and Matthew (or Matty). Mafalda, who bore the pretentious name of King Victor Emmanuel’s coddled princess daughter, never had a childhood nickname, for she liked the status her name gave and would not have tolerated one. Only as an adult were some of her favored nieces and nephews permitted to call her Aunt Maffie, and if she was in one of her bad moods, she might not respond until they used her full name.
 
Brooklyn’s Park Avenue, unlike Manhattan’s WASP enclave, was a curious mix of ethnic identities. Al came of age in the decade between 1910 and 1920, when the metropolitan area swelled with an immigrant influx that amounted to—according to the lawyer and patron of the arts John Quinn—“seven or eight hundred thousand dagos, a couple of hundred thousand Slovaks, fifty or sixty thousand Croats and seven or eight hundred thousand sweating pissing Germans.” To Quinn, they were “nothing but walking appetites,” and as he thought of so many other earlier arrivals, he despised them as well.
 
The Capones lived among them, on the fringe of the Italian section where it gave way to a mix of Irish, German, and eastern Europeans. Unlike other Italian ghettos in the New York area, where buildings were occupied by compatriots from the same province, sometimes segregated by floor based on families who came from the same tiniest villages, the Italian residents of this particular part of Brooklyn came from a variety of Italian homelands and spoke different dialects. Here, only the Sicilians kept to themselves in buildings of their own, but on the streets Al’s playmates and school classmates traced their origins throughout the poorest parts of southern Italy, from Sicily to Campania and Calabria. They all spoke “broken” English as he did, a mix of the dialects they heard at home and the heavily accented English that was pounded into them at school. The children of the other ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Anchor
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0345804511
• ISBN 13: 9780345804518
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416