Black Hats (13 page)

Hell, he wasn’t even Italian, not really. He was born here. He was American.

He’d started school at P.S. 7, near the Navy Yard, where he rubbed shoulders with the toughest Irish kids out of Red Hook and held his own, winning every fight and earning straight B’s. After the move, he found himself in a Gothic prison of a school, P.S. 133, and the teachers there, Irish women mostly, rubbed him the wrong way. Nuns had taught these young broads to use a ruler on unruly knuckles and Al did not go for such shit.

That was when he began running with kid gangs, and his truancy rate went up, his grades went down, and finally one of those Irish bitch teachers slapped him and he slapped her back.

What the hell—seventh grade was farther than most guys got.

Around then the family moved again, to an even nicer Brooklyn neighborhood, into an apartment on Garfield Place, a quiet residential area with shade trees and row houses. Best of all, a pool hall nearby allowed him and his Papa to spend some father-and-son time together, with the old man passing along his considerable skill at pool to a fourteen-year-old pupil who at the moment wasn’t studying much of anything else.

Those were the best hours he ever spent with his Papa, who he admired, though Al sure as hell had no desire to go into the nickel-a-haircut business. Anyway, he had another guy to look up to, another “father,” name of Johnny Torrio.

Moving to Garfield Place meant Al walked damn near every day by a restaurant on the busy corner of Union Street and Fourth Avenue; on the second floor a window glittered with gilt letters: john torrio association. Often the diminutive, dapper Italian leprechaun called Little John—with his pallid face and chipmunk cheeks and mild button eyes and tiny hands and feet—would reward neighborhood lads with trivial errands that paid a generous five dollars per.

The boys who proved trustworthy earned the right to perform more difficult, demanding tasks, such as making payoffs or deliveries. Occasionally a boy rose to Little John’s inner circle, as had Al, who had passed a test that few boys had.

Little John had left teenaged Al alone in the Association office, in full view of a pile of cash on the desk. Most boys presented with this temptation took it, and never did business with Johnny Torrio again. Al didn’t touch the money and won his mentor’s trust.

Al Capone was no fucking thief.

Little John was the father he wished he had—oh, sure, he respected Papa for making a living for the family, and a better one than most. But Torrio was wealthy and successful and fucking brilliant. Nothing in his growing-up years meant more to Al than the moments Torrio spent alone with him in that unpretentious office, teaching him the ways of business.

“Everybody wants to fight, Al,” Little John would say in a musical voice unusual for an Italian, an Irish brogue of a voice, really. “But the smart man makes alliances. He picks his fights carefully. He knows what ties to make, and when to make them—and when to cut ’em, if a tie starts in to binding.”

Such a reflective man, so calm, Little John was, to have come up through Manhattan’s Five Points Gang, that skull-cracking, eye-gouging bunch, available for hire to those needing a strike broken or votes discouraged (or encouraged) or anyone in the specific need of general mayhem.

“There is profit enough in the rackets,” Little John told him, “for all to share, in peace. You can’t enjoy the proceeds when you’ve been murdered, Al. Even injury is too high a price to pay.”

Not that the puny little guy was a pushover where it came to violence.

“I’ve never fired a gun in my life, Al,” he told his pupil. A dainty pink hand raised as if in benediction: Pope John Torrio. “But I have no practical objections to the use of force. I just consider it a poor solution to business problems…if sometimes necessary.”

Al already knew Little John approved of such tactics, “if necessary,” since by fifteen he was one of Torrio’s chief collectors of outstanding accounts, skilled in the use of fists, blackjacks and wooden clubs. But what about rubbing out a guy who’s in some way out of line?

“The execution of a business rival,” Little John would say, “is an unfortunate, occasional necessity in
la mala vita
.”

The evil life.

The life of crime. And Johnny Torrio, behind the gilt-lettered window of his association, was running the local Italian lottery, the so-called numbers racket—criminal but not hurting anybody. His other business interests included whorehouses and gambling joints, in the very Sands Street neighborhood Al had escaped. Johnny Torrio had helped make those sailors drunken.

“Little John,” fourteen-year-old Al had once asked, “
is
it evil?
Are
we evil, living this life?”

“Is your mother evil?”

“No! Hell, no!”

“Does she ask where the money you bring her comes from?”

“No.”

“Does money know where it comes from?”

“No.”

“Do we have anything in America without money?”

“No.”

A gentle, knowing nod. “Your mother knows that a man’s life at home is separate from the life he leads at work. We deal with whores in our business so that we can give a good, respectable life to the madonnas in our homes.”

“They’re…separate things? Work and home?”

“They have nothing to do with each other. Nothing. Does your mother praise you when you bring money home to her?”

“Yes! She says she’s proud of her good boy.”

“She is right to be proud of you, Al. I’m proud of you, too. No boy who has crossed the threshold of my association has ever had your aptitude. Can do sums in his head, calculate the odds so quick, so accurate. But it’s more than that—you calculate
people
, too. How much will a man pay for a bet? At poker? At craps? At numbers? How much is ten minutes with a woman worth? Good things to know. Important things to know.”

Al had been running with the South Brooklyn Rippers, but Little John paved the way for him to join the offshoot gang, the Five Points Juniors. But Al was disappointed by the piddling nature of the gang, limited as it was to petty vandalism and hanging out and smalltime theft, none of which was Al’s style.

His style, really, was having a good time, and loitering on street corners with the guys was not his idea of one. Thanks to his Papa, he was the best pool player in the neighborhood and, despite his size, a hell of a dancer. The girls liked him, liked his natty style of apparel (picked up from Little John), and were frequently won over by his confident, brash manner.

Mae Coughlin he met at a dance at a cellar club on Carroll Street. The “club” was just a rented storefront with the windows blacked out where its young members, Italian and Irish alike, drank and gambled and danced with girls. Mae was respectable, a sales clerk at a department store, but she was a little older than Al, and she liked to have fun, too. Nice girls often frequented the cellar clubs.

What a nice girl—an Irish girl—like Mae ever saw in a fat Italian slob like him, Al would never know; but he wasn’t knocking it. She was smart and slender and blonde and pretty, and though she lived just a short stroll from Garfield Place, hers was a world away from his.

The Coughlins lived on Third Place in a three-story house on a broad tree-lined lane in an upstanding middle-class Irish enclave. Her father worked construction and her mother was active in the church and neither was thrilled about the prospect of Alphonse Capone, trash blown over from the rough neighborhood a few blocks away, for a son-in-law.

The unlikely couple had been dating for a month when Al asked his mentor for an opinion on a possible Capone/Coughlin union.

“Ask the girl,” Little John said without hesitation. “I married an Irish girl from Kentucky, and it was the best thing I ever done. We Italians like to marry young and those mick men wait around till they’re thirty and miss the good opportunities. Don’t make their mistake.”

Still, Al couldn’t bring himself to pop the question. Finally, when Mae missed her period, he knew he could expect a positive response, even from her parents.

A year ago December, he and Mae had been married at the Coughlins’ family church, the impressive St. Mary Star of the Sea, near the Brooklyn docks. Mae hadn’t suffered the embarrassment of going to the altar fat and pregnant, because they’d already had their son earlier the same month—Albert Francis Capone, who Al called “Sonny Boy.”

The marriage came in very handy with the draft board, giving him a deferment from getting sent overseas, the war still going on at the time. And, as a new father, he did his best to make a living for his new family.

For the past several years, he’d tried the occasional straight job, sometimes to serve as a front, for example the pinsetter job Little John arranged at a bowling alley; but also real legit jobs, such as working as a clerk in a munitions factory, then as a paper cutter at a book bindery.

Clerking wasn’t so bad, he could exercise his brain; but that paper-cutter baloney was a big yawn, and tired his ass out, to boot.

Now that he was a married man, a father with responsibilities, Al needed real work. Good-paying work, legit or not…and probably not. But when he turned to Little John, his mentor gave him shocking news.

“My business interests in Chicago,” Torrio said, “require my full attention.”

For years Little John had been taking the train to Chicago two or three times a year; he had a cousin there, Victoria, married to Big Jim Colosimo, the cathouse czar of Chicago.

“Take me with you, Little John.”

“No, Al. I need you here.”

“What’s here with you gone?”

“Frankie Yale. He’s looking after my interests. You look after Frankie.”

“Don’t you trust him, Little John?”

“Sure I do. With you standing behind him watching.”

And Johnny Torrio took the train west, and Al went to work for Little John’s second-in-command, Frankie Yale.

Already Al knew Frankie well, and liked and respected him. The stocky, black-haired, pug-nosed, dimple-chinned Yale, only five or six years older than Al, was already a stunning success in business—owning a mortuary, a nightclub (the Sunrise Café), a laundry, racehorses, prizefighters, even distributing a line of his own cigars.

Al Capone was no fucking thief, and neither was Frankie Yale—he lent workmen money at twenty percent per week; he provided shopkeepers insurance policies; and organized unions, the local ice men, among others.

True, Frankie had a notoriously short fuse. In a heartbeat he could go from gracious don to brutal wacko. He could explode in a torrent of filthy talk and put his own brother in the hospital, for a minor perceived insult (as he did with Angelo Yale, ten years his junior).

Al had never faced Frankie’s wrath—whether because Al had never given him cause or maybe because Frankie was careful not to go bughouse with somebody Al’s size.

Yale maintained three headquarters—one in a Brooklyn garage that housed his booze business delivery trucks; another at the Adonis Club, Fury Argolia’s restaurant; and finally at the Harvard Inn at Coney Island, on Brooklyn’s south shore. The latter was where, at Little John’s request, Frankie Yale gave formal employment to Al Capone.

Al’s size had dictated the role—bouncer and bartender. The eighteen-year-old had the right heft and the necessary affability for that combined role—you didn’t want to throw a drunken bastard out so hard on his ass that the sobered-up bastard felt resentment and did not in future return with his trade.

“You got tact,” Yale would say, after Al escorted out a rowdy drunk who’d gone from problem to pal when the burly bartender slung an arm around his shoulder and walked him out, cooing threats.

“Tact,” Al said, savoring the compliment, because it sounded like one; later, when he’d looked the word up in a dictionary, it meant even more.

Though the Harvard Inn was rougher than a cob, Yale—a darkly handsome, compactly muscular guy—was himself an even bigger fashion plate than Johnny Torrio, replacing Little John’s crisply stylish business attire with tailored double-breasted suits whose startling colors were outdistanced by a big diamond belt buckle, not to mention pearl-gray spats over black patent-leather shoes and a wide-brimmed Borsalino, usually white, sometimes gray.

Soon Al was patterning his own attire after Yale’s, which might have rubbed the hot-headed Frankie wrong, only the boss took it as a compliment. In fact, Yale took to Al, in general.

Before long the bartender was a regular fixture at the Harvard Inn, doing everything from washing dishes to waiting tables under Frankie’s fatherly eye. Customers who nervously paid their respects to Frankie, or avoided Frankie’s bodyguard Little Augie altogether, would seek out Al, whose smiling way with serving up a foamy beer won almost as many friends as his turns on the dance floor doing the Castle Walk and Balling the Jack with the band’s girl singer.

People got a kick out of seeing a big man move gracefully, and he liked the attention, the applause.

Frankie Yale also liked the way Al handled other jobs.

Such as last year, when Al happened to be at a neighborhood crap game where Tony Perotta rolled his way to a cool $1,500.

When Perotta and his new bankroll left the game, Al followed the tall, thin dice player out into the hallway and cornered him, saying, “That’s a nice win, Tony.”

Perotta and Al knew each other a little.

Mustached, with a snappy green fedora, Perotta said, “Thanks, Al. And what the fuck’s it to you?”

“You owe Frankie Yale two thousand in markers for a game last week.”

“I repeat, what the fuck’s it to—”

“You know what it is to me, Tony. I work for Frankie.”

“Why don’t I should slip you a C-note and you work for yourself for a change.”

Al shook his head. “Hand over the wad, Tony.”

Tony shoved Al. “Go fuck yourself, fatso!”

The .45 automatic was in Capone’s hand and shoved in Tony’s belly faster than a blink.

“Hand it over,” Al said.

Perotta’s lip curled back like a pouty brat. “You oughta be ashamed of yourself!”

But he handed the money over.

Al put the gun back in his waistband.