“Come on,” he said, rising. “I want you to hear what Snorkey has to say….”
Cook County jail was on the West Side, not far from my old stomping grounds, in the midst of a Bohunk neighborhood where Mayor Cermak had relocated both the jail and the county courthouse. His Honor did this, he said, to “help real estate” in the area. That was about as straightforward a statement as any Chicago mayor ever made.
The assistant warden, John Dohmann, took us up five flights in a steel-and-wire elevator that opened onto a heavy iron-barred door, labeled Section D. Dohmann turned a heavy double key in the lock and revealed bars that enclosed the vast sunny concrete room that was Alphonse Capone’s cell, a cell that might have housed fifteen in this badly overcrowded facility. Outside the bars, facing the cell, sat a United States deputy marshal with a billy club on his belt.
I’d lived in Snorkey’s kingdom for many years, and it was unnerving approaching the monarch’s throne room, even if it was concrete and steel.
Capone-who wore not a jailhouse-gray uniform, but a blue flannel suit with a tan shirt and no tie-sat playing cards at a table with the only other prisoner in the cell, a small, pretty young man of perhaps nineteen. On the way up in the elevator Dohmann had mentioned that Capone had been allowed the cellmate to help him pass the time with handball and cards. Looking at this kid gave the term “handball” new implications.
“Ness!” Capone said, and stood, walking over with a huge paw thrust forward.
Eliot wore the faintest ironic smile as he accepted the hand through the bars and shook it.
“No hard feelings between us, right?” Capone said, with a disarming grin.
“None,” said Eliot.
Capone wasn’t as big a man as you might think, and-like his adversary Eliot Ness-was much younger than the public thought of him, perhaps thirty-two or-three. His shoulders were broader than any fullback’s, however, and his head was as round as a pumpkin. His full face was deceptive, as he was not fat.
What really struck me, though, were his eyes: greenish-gray, small and round and glittering, half-lidded under black bushy eyebrows that met between them like conspirators.
When he placed his big, veined hands on the bars, it was like a strong man about to bend them for a stunt; but his feet were small, almost dainty, in expensive black leather shoes with pointed toes.
“Is there any news?” Capone asked, earnestly.
“About what, Al?” Ness asked.
“The kid!”
“Nothing.”
Capone sighed sadly.
I stood by the seated guard, back a ways. Eliot never made a move to introduce me and Capone hardly gave me a glance; I was just another nameless Ness man, accompanying the chief. Why insinuate myself into this conversation between old friends?
Besides, I kind of savored the irony of having Capone mistake me for an Untouchable.
“Understand this, Mr. Ness-I don’t want no favors. If I ain’t able to do anything for that baby, lock me the hell back up.”
“Looks like you are locked up, Al.”
“Look. I know how you feel about me. But if they’ll only let me out of here, I’ll give ’em any bond they need. If they’re interested in getting that child back!”
Capone was trying to sound sincere in his concern for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., but what he conveyed was menace.
“You accompany me yourself, Ness. I will spend every hour of the night and day with you at my side, till we get that kid back.”
“Just the two of us, huh, Al?”
“And I’ll send my younger brother to stay here in the jail and take my place till I get back. You don’t think I’d double-cross my own brother and leave him in here, do you? Even if I could make my getaway from the great Eliot Ness! Hah?”
Ness said nothing; his faint ironic smile said it all.
Capone’s gray complexion began to redden. The lids had lifted off the gray-green eyes. In the jail cell, the pretty gunsel was playing solitaire, paying no attention to any of us. Sunlight through the barred windows made patterns on the floor.
Capone tried to channel his anger into earnestness. “Let me have a chance to show what I can do! I would know in twenty-four hours whether the child’s in the possession of any regular mob, or some single-o working his own racket. Anybody that knows anything in the underworld knows he can trust me. There is no mob going that wouldn’t count on me to make the payoff, if the family of the kid wants to go the ransom.”
“And what do you want from the federal government, Al, if you manage to pull off this trick?”
He cut the air with his hands, like an umpire calling somebody safe. “It’s no trick. If I can’t do any good for you, then I come back here, and let justice go on with her racket.”
“You didn’t answer my question, Al. What do you want if you succeed?”
His hands clenched into softball-size fists. A vein in his forehead began to throb; his scar turned white on his fleshy cheek. His expression was like a very pissed-off bull studying a red cape.
“What the hell do you think, Ness? I want out! I want this goddamn sentence set aside! What in fucking hell do you think I want? I was railroaded! I was double-crossed!”
Capone had worked out a plea bargain that would allow him to pay off his tax debt and get a two-and-a-half-year sentence, which with good behavior he could have done in a walk. But Judge Wilkerson had not been party to the deal, and sentenced him to eleven years in federal prison.
“You guys want me to cough up three hundred thirty-six thousand dollars! I don’t know where you get these figures, ’less it’s the moon! You never proved I ever received onedollar-maybe you proved I spent some money, but that don’t prove I have any income. What I spent might’ve been given me by admiring friends. And you guys can’t tax gifts!”
“Al, like the man says-tell it to the judge.”
“The judge! That son of a bitch won’t even let me out on bail! Other people convicted on income-tax raps get set free, till the highest court passes on their appeal. Not Capone! They leave me to rot in stir. They make me pay expenses of the trial-they don’t do that with no others. Fifty fuckin’ grand I paid!”
Ness stood with folded arms; his smile was gone. So, I gathered, was his patience.
Snorkey sensed that, too.
“I just don’t understand you guys,” he said, trying to sound reasonable, but damn near whining. “When I came to Chicago eleven years ago, I had only forty bucks in my pocket. I went in a business that didn’t do nobody no harm. They talk about the unemployed. Well, I give work to the unemployed. At least three hundred young men are getting from one hundred fifty dollars to two hundred dollars a week from me, in the harmless beer racket. Put me out of business, and all my men lose their jobs-they have families and little houses. What do you think they’ll do? Go on the streets and beg? No. These are men I’ve taken out of the holdup and bank-robbery business and worse and gave real jobs. Where will they go, and what will they do, when you put me out of business?”
“We’ll find cells for them, too, Al.”
His eyes blazed. “You’re so high and fuckin’ mighty! Sharing in a bootlegger’s profits by way of income tax, you’re aiding and abetting after the goddamn fact. It’s like the G was demanding its percentage of a bank burglar’s haul!”
“Old news, Snorkey. Very old news.”
The rage was bubbling in Capone, but he restrained himself.
“Look, look,” he said, patting the air in a peacemaking gesture, “never mind that. Never mind any of that. I just want to help, here. There isn’t a man in America that wouldn’t like to return that child to its folks, whatever it cost him personally.”
He pointed to a picture of his young son gilt-framed by his bed in the cell.
“I can imagine,” he said, gray-green eyes glistening in the sorrowful mask of his round face, “how Colonel Lindbergh feels. I weep for him and his lovely wife.”