Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (37 page)

With his brothers Tony and Dominic, Aiello left Chicago that night. They went to Trenton, New Jersey, and, except for a surreptitious return visit or two, stayed there almost two years. But they never wavered in their resolve to exterminate Capone.

After the Aiellos' departure Capone spoke expansively to reporters. With an air of kingly magnanimity, he said: "When I was told that Joey Aiello wanted to make peace, but that he wanted 14 days to settle his affairs, I was ready to agree. I'm willing to talk to anybody any place to bring about a settlement. I don't want no trouble. I don't want bloodshed. But I'm going to protect myself. When someone strikes at me, I will strike back."

He reminded his interviewers: "I'm the boss. I'm going to continue to run things. They've been putting the roscoe [revolver] on me now for a good many years and I'm still healthy and happy. Don't let any body kid you into thinking I can be run out of town. I haven't run yet and I'm not going to. When we get through with this mob, there won't be any opposition and I'll still be doing business."

What he failed to reckon with was Mayor Thompson's soaring ambition.

"I do not choose to run for President in 1928," said Calvin Coolidge, and the Republican candidacy was up for grabs. Thompson, emboldened by his phenomenal political resurgence, saw no reason why it should not carry him into the White House. With a noisy retinue of press agents, advisers and drinking companions, he set out in the fall of 1927 on a cross-country train tour ostensibly to enlist support for flood control through the Mississippi Valley, actually to test the national reaction to himself. At each station stop the press agents touted him as the founder of the America First movement and distributed chauvinist leaflets and buttons, while a quartet sang "America First and Last and Always." William Randolph Hearst welcomed Thompson at his California ranch. When the mayor got back to Chicago, State's Attorney Crowe, now firmly reestablished in the Thompson camp, delivered an encomium: "He is a great American. He has done more for Chicago than anything that has happened in my lifetime. And he has, by this trip, reduced the prejudice that has existed in some localities, created by unfair critics of Chicago."

As a Presidential aspirant, Thompson needed no adviser to tell him what a liability Capone's conspicuous, unfettered presence in Chicago would be. He passed the word to Chief of Police Hughes, and the treatment of the gang leader swiftly changed from indulgence to harassment. His henchmen were arrested on tenuous charges, his breweries, brothels and gambling houses were repeatedly raided, and he himself was kept under continuous surveillance.

On December 5 Capone held a press conference at the Hotel Metropole to announce his departure for St. Petersburg, Florida. Ensconced in his armor-backed chair, his massive head wreathed by cigar smoke, he said: "Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best way they can. I'm sick of the job. It's a thankless one and full of grief."

Misunderstanding and injustice, he complained, were forcing him into exile. "I'm known all over the world as a millionaire gorilla. The other day a man came in here and said that he had to have $3,000. If I'd give it to him, he said, he would make me a beneficiary in a $15,000 insurance policy he'd taken out and then kill himself. I had to have him pushed out. Today I got a letter from a woman in England. Even over there I'm known as a gorilla. She offered to pay my passage to London if I'd kill some neighbors she's been having a quarrel with. . . . That's what I have to put up with, just because I give the public what the public wants. I never had to send out high pressure salesmen. I could never meet the demand.

"I violate the prohibition law, sure. Who doesn't? The only difference is I take more chances than the man who drinks a cocktail before dinner and a flock of highballs after it. But he's just as much a violator as I am."

He digressed to express his contempt for dishonest politicians. "There's one thing worse than a crook and that's a crooked man in a big political job. A man who pretends he's enforcing the law and is really making dough out of somebody breaking it, a self-respecting hoodlum hasn't any use for that kind of fellow-he buys them like he'd buy any other article necessary to his trade, but he hates them in his heart.

"I could bear it all if it weren't for the hurt it brings to my mother and my family. They hear so much about what a terrible criminal I am. It's getting too much for them and I'm just sick of it all myself."

Concerning his police record, he said: "I have never been convicted of a crime nor have I ever directed anyone else to commit a crime. I have never had anything to do with a vice resort. I don't pose as a plaster saint, but I never killed anyone. I never stuck up a man in my life. Neither did any of my agents ever rob anybody or burglarize any homes while they worked for me. They might have pulled plenty of jobs before they came with me or after they left me, but not while they were in my outfit." He upheld Cicero as a model of civic virtue. "The cleanest burg in the U.S.A. There's only one gambling house in the whole town and not a single so-called vice den."

His own business, he claimed-and he undoubtedly believed itwas a boon to his fellow Chicagoans. "I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor. I've given people the light pleasures, shown them a good time. And all I get is abuse-the existence of a hunted man. I'm called a killer. Ninety percent of the people of Cook County drink and gamble and my offense has been to furnish them with those amusements. Whatever else they may say, my booze has been good and my games have been on the square. Public service is my motto. I've always regarded it as a public benefaction if people were given decent liquor and square games."

Asked what a gangster thought about when he killed another in a gang war, he replied: "Well, maybe he thinks that the law of self-defense, the way God looks at it, is a little broader than the lawbooks have it. Maybe it means killing a man who'd kill you if he saw you first. Maybe it means killing a man in defense of your business-the way you make the money to take care of your wife and child. I think it does. You can't blame me for thinking there's worse fellows in the world than me."

He said he did not know when he would return to Chicago, if ever, and he added with heavy sarcasm: "I guess murder will stop now. There won't be any more booze. You won't be able to find a crap game even, let alone a roulette wheel or a faro game. I guess Mike Hughes won't need his 3,000 extra cops, after all. Say, the coppers won't have to lay all the gang murders on me now. Maybe they'll find a new hero for the headlines. It would be a shame, wouldn't it, if while I was away they'd forget about me and find a new gangland chief? .. .

"I leave with gratitude to my friends who have stood by me through this unjust ordeal and forgiveness for my enemies. I wish them all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."

At the last minute he changed his itinerary. Instead of St. Petersburg, he took his wife, his son and two bodyguards to Los Angeles. Their reception was unfriendly. Though he registered at the Hotel Biltmore under his favorite alias, Al Brown, he was recognized and his visit blazoned in the newspapers, rousing a storm of public protest. Barely twenty-four hours after the Capones arrived, the Biltmore manager ordered them to leave. "We're tourists," Capone objected and refused to budge. "I thought you people liked tourists. We have a lot of money to spend that I made in Chicago. Whoever heard of anybody being run out of Los Angeles that had money?"

The Los Angeles chief of police personally confirmed the eviction and allowed Capone twelve hours to leave the city. In Chicago Chief Hughes had told the press: "The police drove Capone out of town. He cannot come back." Shortly before taking the eastbound Santa Fe Chief on December 13, Capone defiantly proclaimed: "I'm a property owner and a tax payer in Chicago. I can certainly return to my own home."

At Chillicothe, Illinois, a Herald-Examiner reporter boarded the train and rode in Capone's drawing room as far as Joliet. (The only other reporter so privileged was the ubiquitous Jake Lingle.) The gang boss was in melancholy mood. "It's pretty tough," he said, "when a citizen with an unblemished record must be hounded from his home by the very policemen whose salaries are paid, at least in part, from the victim's pocket. You might say that every policeman in Chicago gets some of his bread and butter from the taxes I pay. And yet they want to throw me in jail for nothing when I seek to visit my own home to see my wife and my little son. I am feeling very bad, very bad. I don't know what all this fuss is about. How would you feel if the police, paid to protect you, acted towards you like they do towards me? I'm going back to Chicago. Nobody can stop me. I've got a right to be there. I have property there and a family. They can't throw me out of Chicago unless they shoot me through the head. I've never done anything wrong. Nobody can say I ever did anything wrong. They arrest me. They search me. They lock me up. They charge me with all the crimes there are, when they get me into court. The only charge they can book against me is disorderly conduct, and the judge dismisses even that because there isn't any evidence to support it. The police know they haven't got one black mark against my name and yet they publicly announce that they won't let me live in my own home. What kind of justice is that? Well, I've been the goat for a long time. It's got to stop some time and it might as well be now. I've got my back to the wall. I'm going to fight."

Knowing the police would be waiting for him at the Chicago terminal, he had telephoned ahead to his brother Ralph to meet him in a car at Joliet. But the Joliet police were also waiting. Ralph and the three gunmen with him had been incautious. Reaching Joliet on the morning of the sixteenth, an hour before the Santa Fe Chief pulled in, they hung around the depot until a patrolman noticed the bulges in their pockets. He ran them into the station house, where they were charged with carrying concealed weapons. When Ralph's brother and his two bodyguards stepped off the train, Joliet's Chief of Police John Corcoran was on hand to greet them. "You're Al Capone," he said. "Pleased to meet you," said Capone, as Corcoran relieved him of two revolvers. "You may want some ammunition, too. These are no good to me now." And he handed him two cartridge clips. Mae Capone and Sonny were allowed to go on to Chicago.

Capone was lodged in a cell with two tattered derelicts. "Pay their fines and take them away," he told the warden. "They bother me." He authorized the warden to deduct the fines from the wad of cash, totaling almost $3,000, he had in his pocket when arrested.

The lawyers, Nash and Ahern, accompanied by about twenty-five Caponeites, arrived from Chicago in the afternoon and posted a bail bond of $2,400 for each prisoner. That evening Capone slipped quietly into Chicago, dined with Jake Guzik in a restaurant, and retired early to his Prairie Avenue home even as Chief Hughes was betting a reporter the price of a new hat that the gang leader would not dare show his face in the city. "My orders still stand," he said. "He's to be taken to jail every time he shows himself."

But the period of repression was just about over. The political considerations that had prompted it no longer obtained. Thompson saw that his Presidential chances were nil. "I don't want to be President," he declared in a face-saving speech. "I'm a peace-loving man and I'm afraid if I were President I'd plunge this country into war, for I'd say 'Go to Hell!' to any foreign nation which attempted to dictate the number of ships we could build or which tried to flood in propaganda as is being done now."

He reverted to his former lenity toward lawbreakers, and Capone emerged from disfavor stronger than ever. By the time he and his fellow defendants stood trial in Joliet, on December 22, he had fully recovered his customary brio. When Circuit Court Judge Fred A. Adams remarked, after imposing fines and costs aggregating $1,580.80, "I hope this will be a lesson to you not to carry deadly weapons," Capone retorted: "Yes, judge, it will teach me not to carry deadly weapons-in Joliet." Blithely, he waved aside the $10.20 change the court clerk tendered him. "Keep it," he said, "or give it to the Salvation Army Santa Claus on the corner and tell him it's a Christmas present from Al Capone."

Capone's humiliating experience on the West Coast had left him determined to establish a second home to which he could retreat whenever a change in the Chicago political climate might so require. What he wanted was both a sanctuary and a recreational winter haven in the sun. Feelers sent out to several resort communities produced no offers of hospitality. To set foot in St. Petersburg, New Orleans, the Bahamas or Cuba, he gathered, was to risk immediate arrest and expulsion. During the last days of 1927 he headed incognito for Miami.