Al Capone never commented publicly on the work of Eliot Ness’s Untouchables, but he certainly knew about their raids, and probably approved the attempted bribes and threats. That was how he liked to deal with reformers and principled lawmen.
“I got nothing against the honest cop on the beat,” Capone said. “Most of them you can’t buy. So you just have them transferred someplace where they can’t do you any harm. But don’t even talk to me about the honor of police captains or judges. If they couldn’t be bought, they wouldn’t have the jobs.”
Capone and Ness had in common a hatred of corrupt officials, if for different reasons.
“A crook is a crook,” Capone said, “and there’s something healthy about his frankness in the matter. But a guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician, who gives about half his time to covering up so that no one will know he’s a thief.”
When he should’ve been focused on the federal men working to put him in jail, Capone instead became obsessively annoyed with his treatment by the media. Over the past two years, Capone had been the subject of numerous books, including narrative histories of Chicago gangland, a rambling biography by a local journalist, and magazines depicting the Beer Wars carnage. Then came the emerging medium of sound motion pictures.
Gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who encountered Capone more than once, witnessed his transformation into celluloid myth.
“It has always stayed vividly in my mind that there was something almost sleepy in Al Capone’s voice,” she wrote, “a hushed undertone, such as a man uses in a library or a sickroom…Later, on the screen, I am sure that all our top movie gangsters, Edward G. Robinson, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, et al., copied this vocal characteristic of Capone’s.”
Capone had offers to join them in the movies, but he always refused. “It’s foolish to talk about it,” he said.
He already got movie-star-sized bags of fan mail—up to two thousand letters each week—many asking for handouts. A good share came from overseas, in languages he could not read.
Capone showed one to a journalist, who translated a Berlin woman’s sob story, pleading for money. An English woman sought only a small favor—to have some quarrelsome neighbors killed. She even offered to pay his passage to London.
“Even over there I’m known as a gorilla,” Capone griped.
Any other gangster facing federal indictment would have known not to talk to the press. But Capone couldn’t help venting to a reporter from Variety, trade journal of the film industry, about “the flock of books, stories, articles and interviews written by guys, all of whom claim to know me personally. You can put me on record as saying I don’t know any of ’em. Furthermore, I’ve never authorized any book or story about me.”
Still, Capone professed a love for the movies, saying he enjoyed private screenings. Gangster films made him laugh.
Another reporter asked Capone about a Real Detective magazine article saying he was an imposter, the real Al Capone having been murdered. The gangster had a good laugh about it.
“So now I’m a ‘phoney,’ am I?” he said. “It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read…Wait until my wife finds out that someone switched husbands on her.”
Despite Capone’s openness with the press, he didn’t let reporters get too close—as Chicago Daily News literary editor Howard Vincent O’Brien found out. Seeking intimate access to Capone, O’Brien arranged through a Secret Six detective to have lunch with Jack Guzik at a Madison Street speakeasy.
After ordering tomato juice, the genial Guzik railed on about his unfair income-tax conviction. He spoke bitterly of the hypocrisy of reformers and “certain judges and prosecutors,” but offered a surprising appraisal of prosecutor George E. Q. Johnson.
“That guy sent me up for five years,” Guzik said, his voice high-pitched and squeaky. “But he’s a good, honest, sincere guy…a square shooter.”
“‘Square shooting,’” O’Brien reflected, “plays a big part in gangster psychology.”
After numerous meetings with Guzik, O’Brien—having been thoroughly checked out and sized up—was ushered into the Lexington. He found it an unlikely “gangster hangout,” a hotel like countless others in many small cities. His eye immediately found the bulletin board, where a sign announced: KIWANIS CLUB MEETS EVERY THURSDAY, 2nd FLOOR.
But O’Brien couldn’t ignore the “swarthy men” lazing about the lobby, hoodlum types “in pearl-gray spats and fawn-colored fedoras and tight-fitting jackets, with salmon-pink neckties and eyes like oysters.” Reaching the fourth floor without incident, the journalist was given “one last bath of inquiry” by various watchdogs, but, surprisingly, no one searched him.
Capone’s office might have been a bank president’s—file cabinets, adding machines, thick carpeting, framed paintings. At the big desk in a bay window sat Joe Fusco, the youthful head of Capone’s beer racket, his tall frame clad in brown tweed. With the entrance of Guzik and his guest, Fusco vacated the throne.
Guzik said a newspaper had referred to Capone as a “brothel-keeper,” but Al didn’t know what the word meant. “Then he looked it up and it made him kind of sore!”
Guzik also volunteered his opinion of the word “hoodlum.”
“I don’t know what they mean by that word. I’ve never been able to figure out where being a hoodlum stops and respectability begins. There’s a lot of good square guys in this racket; and I know lawyers and bankers I wouldn’t sit in the same room with without keeping my hands on my watch.”
Soon, “like a gust of wind, Capone himself blew in.”
The gangster cut an impressive figure, big but not fat, his movements “lithe and graceful.” Typically well dressed in a double-breasted blue serge, he was brusquely affable, greeting his guest with a firm handshake, black hair thinning at the temples but wavy above his thick neck. His expression seemed “Mephistophelian and droll.”
Behind his desk now, Capone ordered champagne from a waiter who seemed to materialize. Then a table was laid for supper, which at five o’clock was early for O’Brien, but the feast was hard to resist. Silver buckets of iced Piper-Heidsieck, 1915, began to appear, and then—“like something in the Arabian Nights”—came antipasto, platters of Parmesan-drenched spaghetti, squab, fennel, and more.
Capone went from gracious host to roaring beast, lambasting a waiter slow with service.
“It petrified me,” O’Brien admitted. “I should not have been in the least surprised to see him rend the wretched creature into pieces.”
Quickly Capone returned to smiles and hospitality, his mood swing reminding O’Brien of temperamental “artists and opera singers.” Guzik had said Capone was unfailingly generous—“He doesn’t spend two dollars a day on himself. He gives the rest away.”
Their conversation stayed casual, not a formal interview, though O’Brien would regret not asking for Capone’s advice to young men on “How to Succeed”—what wonderful guidance “this eminently successful young man might have given!”
Capone showed the journalist a letter offering $2 million for the ganglord’s memoirs. He had no interest in taking the offer, but longed to answer the fabrications written about him. Maybe O’Brien was interested in writing his real story…?
Apparently, the meetings with Guzik and the behind-the-scenes vetting had led to this. O’Brien was the man to write Capone’s story—a “square guy.”
Capone was called away—a senator was phoning from Washington, D.C.—leaving O’Brien to mull the possibility of such an exciting project. The autobiography of Al Capone, as told to Howard Vincent O’Brien! Such a book, he mused, might be “the most significant contribution to current history that could possibly be written.”
Upon his return, Capone signed a document before two witnesses: “This will authorize you (Howard Vincent O’Brien) to act as my agent in the sale of the manuscript of my autobiography, which will be the only one I ever consented to write.”
Capone made clear to his prospective coauthor how important family was to him. He gestured to Sonny’s framed photo on the desk and said pointedly, “I don’t want my boy to get mixed up in my business, either.” As he talked to his wife on the phone, Capone referred to himself as a “kid,” and when his mother came on the line, he spoke in Italian.
He truly seemed to want out of the rackets, yearning to be free of bodyguards and cops both bent and straight. He longed for a life of real family, not crime family, away from lawyers and courts and jail cells, with no reporters and photographers hounding him.
“Everybody seems to think I like Prohibition,” Capone told O’Brien. “I don’t…It’s a lousy racket for the retailer. He’s got to work twenty hours a day and spend everything he makes to keep the cops off him. No, I’m against Prohibition.”
The topic of murder came up—as a business practice.
Big corporations, O’Brien was told, forced out competitors till devastated men found a high window to crawl out of—that was murder, too.
“Everybody seems to think I like Prohibition,” Capone told O’Brien. “I don’t…It’s a lousy racket for the retailer. He’s got to work twenty hours a day and spend everything he makes to keep the cops off him. No, I’m against Prohibition.”The gangsters’ code of ethics, their sacred “standards of right and wrong,” fascinated O’Brien. A man was square or he wasn’t—they did business with dishonest cops, judges, and reporters but detested them. That their own business was outside the law was to them irrelevant. But they made “a sharp distinction between the honest, forthright crook; and venal respectability.”
More meetings followed, after O’Brien had a promising conference with the editor of Collier’s about running the autobiography as a serial. The editor hedged, however, fearing Capone would want only to talk about his soup kitchen and how often he called his mother on the phone.
Sure enough, as O’Brien began to question his prospective co-author, the response would inevitably be, “No, I couldn’t say that. It wouldn’t be fair to my people.” This became Capone’s standard refrain whenever O’Brien touched on a sensitive subject—such as the baseball bat banquet, for example.
O’Brien sensed he was learning more than was healthy. Capone said as much one day.
“You know,” the gangster reflected, “sometimes I lose my temper and I say, ‘Gee, I wish somebody would bump that guy off,’ and then one of these young punks who wants to make a name for himself goes ahead and does it. And then I have to pick up the pieces.”
An example would seem to be Mike “de Pike” Heitler, last seen April 29 playing cards with Capone mobsters Lawrence Mangano and Frankie Pope. The next morning, Heitler’s charred remains were found near Itasca, Illinois, in a burned icehouse fifteen miles from a torched car belonging to the big-time pimp’s longtime girlfriend. Unwisely, Mike de Pike had been in touch with Judge Lyle and State’s Attorney Swanson. Heitler, loosely affiliated with Capone, had significant West Side vice holdings but resented the Outfit’s cut.
Asked about Heitler, Capone said, “Well, you see, that fellow had a reputation of being a professional stool pigeon for many years.”
Collier’s interest in the autobiography eroded, and O’Brien abandoned the project as his welcome rapidly ran out. Important-looking hoodlums gave him disapproving stares from the sidelines. Occasionally a cold-eyed unknown would ask him a question with the authority of an executive. Their behavior made O’Brien wonder whether Capone was “merely a cog in the machine,” constantly evading questions as much to protect himself as his “people.”
For all his fame, Capone seemed not to be Public Enemy Number One, but somewhere “down the list”—in the Outfit, men were above him and perhaps above them, “shadowy figures whose names never appear in print.” Perhaps Capone was “a symbol,” and not “the potentate” he seemed to be—“titular head of a great corporation; but behind him is a board of directors; and behind them, stockholders.”
The identities of those stockholders, O’Brien felt, would come as a shock to the public.
For a man contemplating his autobiography when much larger, pressing matters needed attending, Capone seemed to know publicity was doing him no favors. O’Brien sensed this “board of directors who sit in the shadows” disapproved of the grandiose myth his host had generated.
“Their sordid but profitable affairs do not thrive in the bright white light of publicity,” O’Brien wrote. “In their own vernacular, Capone is providing too much ‘heat.’ ”Would those incorruptible government men be investigating the Outfit’s finances and knocking off their breweries if the papers had never heard of Scarface? A swaggering public figure like Capone was bad for business.
One day soon, O’Brien presciently wrote, Capone would disappear into private life, or prison, or perhaps the grave. The forces of public good would cheer, headlines announce a new day, arrests and deportations be made, but as Capone retreated into legend, the Outfit would roll on.
“And in faraway hideouts,” O’Brien wrote, “thin-lipped men will sit quietly…counting up the profits.”
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Excerpted from SCARFACE AND THE UNTOUCHABLE by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz. Copyright © 2018 by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
