Alcatraz (66 page)

In May Director Bennett made an exception to the rule prohibiting ex-convicts from visiting prisoners and gave permission for Ralph Capone to visit his brother, mainly so that Ralph could see Al’s mental condition for himself. After another experiment in which he was allowed to live in a dormitory, Capone got into a fight with several other prisoners and was returned to his room in the hospital. In August he went back to his job cleaning up the prison yard but was removed again after he became agitated during a wrestling match when he thought that one man was biting the other. On September 2, after seeing one inmate knock another down and start to go after him with a fork, Al intervened, striking the aggressor in the face with his fist and throwing him up against a table.

Five days later, he assaulted an inmate attendant in the hospital with no apparent provocation. When the attendant tried to rise from the floor while asking what was wrong, Capone struck him several more times, knocking him down again. When the staff told Capone that he was going to punitive segregation for this assault, he became enraged and shouted that they did not want him to go home and he might as well commit suicide. He then picked up a comb from his bed and scratched both sides of his throat. He forcibly resisted being taken to disciplinary segregation; after he was placed in a cell, he struck his head against the wall and threatened to gouge out his eyes. He was then stripped and given a blanket for warmth. After raving for some fifteen minutes, he finally quieted down and allowed the medical staff to swab his neck wounds.

The investigation into his conduct in the hospital revealed yet another incident ten days before his attack on the attendant. On the evening of September 8, a cardiac patient under strict bed rest in the hospital had reportedly asked Capone to get him a slice of bread when he saw Capone
passing by his room. According to the patient, Al responded by telling him, “Go fuck yourself” and then spit in his face. But the following day Capone came into the cardiac patient’s room and began tickling his toes. When the patient told him to stop and reminded Capone of how he behaved just the previous night, Capone allegedly “slapped him [in] the face and hit him a severe blow in the abdomen, causing him to vomit up his supper.” The patient confided that he had been afraid to give this information as long as Capone was still on the ward but was willing to talk once he knew Al had been sent to isolation.
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In punitive segregation, Capone had an altercation with the inmate in an adjoining isolation cell over the noise each man created by flushing his toilet; both men tried to throw water from their toilets into the other’s cell, and Capone tried to strike the other man’s arms. After thirteen days, Capone promised to behave himself and to stay out of fights and arguments and was returned to his room in the hospital. He agreed to eat his meals in his room and come out only for general yard recreation each day from 1 to 3
P.M
. He was not, however, able to stay in his room, so his door was locked except for the exercise period.

As the days passed and the November 16 release date drew closer, Capone became more and more cheerful, often holding forth at length with stories of how he had been poisoned at Alcatraz by inmate James Audett and how his present illness was related to the poisoning of his food. When the prison doctors urged him to seek hospitalization after his release, Capone denied that anything was wrong with him. He stated that Chicago was “too hot” for him and that he planned to live at his Palm Island estate in Florida.

In September 1939 the Bureau of Prisons contacted members of Capone’s family, advising them to seek treatment for him on release. When Al’s wife, Mae, and brother John visited him that month, they were alarmed at his appearance because he had some twenty cuts on his face that had been painted with mercurochrome. Warden Lloyd admitted to Bureau headquarters that Al did “look kind of wild at the time of the visit” but pointed out that the cuts and nicks were due to Capone’s using a razor improperly when he tried to shave himself before the visit.

John Capone, anticipating the crush of newspaper reporters who would want to interview his brother on his release, suggested that Al and the family should stay for several weeks in the Los Angeles area to get the press coverage out of the way before they went on to Florida. The Bureau of Prisons, having no difficulty in imagining what Al would have to say about his unfair treatment in the courts, his troubles at Atlanta,
the attempts on his life at Alcatraz, and the treatment applied to a disease he claimed not to have, intended to avoid any such scenario.

During the onset of his illness, FBI agents sought at various times to question Capone about both his own and the criminal activities of others, perhaps hoping that his impaired mental faculties might induce revelations that would not have come forth under normal conditions. For example, shortly before his release from Terminal Island, an agent visited Capone to seek information about certain individuals involved with the Chicago Motion Picture Operators Union and the escape from Alcatraz of Ralph Roe and Theodore Cole. Capone was described by the agent as “in high spirits during the course of the interview.” When questioned about one individual in the union, he responded that the man had been one of his [Capone’s] men but “got out of line and subsequently was killed in an automobile accident, giving agent a confidential wink of his left eye while making the statement.” Capone went on to tell the agent that he had tried to keep Johnny Torrio from becoming involved in the prostitution racket. He admitted that he had made $10,000,000 during Prohibition, but he had never been interested in any of the rackets pertaining to vice. He expressed his contempt for newspaperman Randolph Hearst; he described a visit he had made with Jack Dempsey to Hearst’s beach home in Santa Monica, California, where he claimed “to have witnessed various sexual activities which disgusted him.” Capone then rambled on, periodically asking the agent, “What are we talking about?”

When asked what happened to Roe and Cole, Capone replied that in his opinion Roe had successfully escaped but not Cole, although he could not explain why one man made it and the other did not. Capone advised the agent that on his release he was going to establish four furniture and automobile factories in Florida that would provide employment for thousands of people. At the end of the interview Capone claimed that he was in charge of recreation at the Terminal Island Prison. This interview convinced federal agents that the accuracy of any revelations offered by the Big Boy could never again be known and that he would never make a credible witness in a courtroom.
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In October Ralph Capone notified Bureau of Prisons headquarters that he accepted the Bureau’s strong recommendation that his brother be hospitalized on his release; he reported that he had arranged to have his brother admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital to be treated by Dr. Joseph Moore, a specialist in the treatment of general paresis.
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Director Bennett then instructed Warden Lloyd to transfer Capone to the penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, just before his release from federal custody.

Capone arrived at Lewisburg on November 16. He was picked up by Mae and his brother Ralph, driven to Baltimore, and placed in the care of Dr. Moore. The medical staff at Terminal Island was pessimistic about Capone’s future:

This patient has been given every opportunity to adjust to this institution and has remained poorly cooperative and viciously assaultive. He presents neurological, psychological, and psychiatric evidence of general paresis, expansive-grandiose type. He is in need of continued hospitalization and treatment upon the termination of his present sentence, and such is recommended. The prognosis is poor.
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In spring 1940 Capone was taken to his home in Palm Island, Florida. The Capone family compound consisted of some fifteen to eighteen rooms surrounded by high concrete walls on three sides and open to a canal on the fourth side. There Al and Mae had dinner several nights a week with their son Albert “Sonny,” who was married and lived a completely law-abiding life. Al was said to be a doting grandfather to Sonny’s two children. Five years later, when Al’s youngest brother, Matthew Capone, was wanted for “unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for murder,” the Palm Island residence was put under continuous surveillance.

This intense coverage was the basis of an “information” report to FBI headquarters that described daily life for the Big Boy and his family. Neighbors interviewed by federal agents could not recall a single instance of a disturbance or any suspicious activity involving the Capone residence since Al’s release five years earlier. He had been seen making trips to grocery stores, to a dentist’s office, and to visit his son who lived in Hollywood, Florida. Mae Capone was a regular churchgoer, but the local priest’s only contact with Al was one visit to their home during the previous summer. Capone told the priest that he did not attend Mass because he felt his presence would arouse curiosity and be disruptive to the priest and regular members of the congregation.

Because Capone was said to be nervous about his safety and that of the family, no automobiles other than Al’s and Sonny’s were ever allowed to drive through the heavy gates into the compound. Also living in the house were Mae’s sister and her husband, a former female friend of Mae’s, and Mae’s brother and his wife. The family employed two black servants; one was a houseman who did some of the cooking and most of the shopping, and the other was a housekeeper; both were present only during daytime hours.

The entire household worked around Al’s fitful sleeping schedule,
which called for going to bed at 10:00
P.M
. and getting up at 3:00
A.M
. The family spent considerable time sitting around the swimming pool, Al dressed in pajamas and a dressing gown. They watched movies on their own projector and screen. Visitors to the home, said to be limited by Ralph and John Capone, included a small number of old-time Chicago friends, including Jake Guzik. Al eagerly looked forward to these visits, and to playing gin rummy and pinochle with family members and old friends. Income for the family was reported to be provided in the form of weekly checks sent by Ralph, who had become the de facto head of the family. Al’s main function became telling stories about “the good old days.”
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According to Capone biographer John Kobler, Guzik had been asked after Al’s release from prison if his old boss was likely to return to Chicago to take charge of the rackets; Guzik had replied in the negative, noting “Al is nutty as a fruitcake.”
¹⁹

Capone was treated by Dr. Moore with antibiotics, which became available during World War II, but they could not reverse the damage already done. His speech became slurred, and on January 19, 1947, he suffered a brain hemorrhage. Last rites were administered; he rallied but then developed bronchial pneumonia. On January 25, with his mother, his wife, his son, his brothers, and his sisters at his side, Alphonse Capone was pronounced dead; he was forty-eight. His family refused to allow the attending physician to conduct an autopsy on his brain. He was the Big Boy, the Big Shot, and Big Al on the streets of Chicago, Cicero, and other cities, but at Alcatraz he was just convict no. 85.

For George “Machine Gun” Kelly, the transfer to Alcatraz represented a marked improvement over the conditions under which he had been held at Leavenworth. On the island he was back in the general population, where he could talk to Bailey, Bates, and other friends and bank-robbing partners; he began to play bridge during yard periods. Compared to his quarters in the Memphis and Oklahoma City jails and at Leavenworth, he had some freedom of movement at Alcatraz despite the limited confines of the cell house, yard, and work area. The prison surgeon/psychiatrist observed that Kelly adapted well to his situation and accepted his circumstances:

He accepts the blame for his actions . . . has good insight . . . realized the risks involved in his manner of living . . . is not resentful . . . shows a fairly
normal reaction to a difficult situation . . . does not appear to worry too much . . . and [is] not considered psychotic in any way.
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Kelly received only minor disciplinary reports (talking in the dining hall and improper use of clothing) until he participated in the general strike in January 1936. He told the associate warden that he was not sure what the protest was all about but felt he should “stick with the boys a few days.” He was placed in an open-front (barred) cell in A block, used during the 1930s as a disciplinary segregation unit. On the second day of his lockup, Kelly yelled to the other strikers that he was through with them, was ready to return to work, and that from that point on he would “do his own time.” He was released from A block and returned to work with no loss of privileges.

In September 1937, however, his own frustrations with the regimen on the island prompted Kelly to join another work strike. He told the associate warden: “I just want some different tobacco, shows, and some diversions. I do not go in the yard because it is so inconvenient and uncomfortable. Also Mr. Bixby [assistant director] promised me that I would be able to correspond with my wife and he has not yet kept his promise.” He was locked up in isolation on a restricted diet (one full meal every three days, bread and water on the other days) and remained there for eight days.

Over the years, Kelly was characterized in staff evaluations as having a “big shot complex,” but it was also noted that “he does not become involved in any conniving or scheming and tries to hold himself aloof from the general population. He has only a few friends with whom he associates, he spends time playing dominoes and bridge.” Kelly, whose IQ measured 118 on the Stanford–Binet test, enrolled in several correspondence courses available through the University of California, all of which he completed successfully. Like many other inmates, he spent most of his cell time reading. In February 1936 he wrote to the attorney general, offering to stay at one of the remote locations owned by the U.S. government in the Pacific, Alaska, or the South Pole to “make a meteorology survey” that “would be of benefit to science and the government”: