Capone vs the Mafia

I have tagged a lot of my Capone stories with “Mafia,” in itself a controversial term among gangsters who prefer to refer to Sicilian crime families as members of Cosa Nostra: “Our Thing.” But I have tagged my entries with “Mafia” only because a lot of people interested in Organized Crime have confused Capone’s Chicago Outfit (or Organization,” as he called it) with the Mafia. • Capone was not a mafioso nor even a Sicilian but an American born of immigrants from Campania, in Italy’s boot. (Not that the campaniese were strangers to organized crime: the brutal criminal network known as the Camorra still exerts tremendous power over Naples.)

Capone was not a fan of Sicilians, whom he deemed treacherous and too bound by their traditions of xenophobia, honor, and vendetta to be pragmatic business associates he could trust. His alliance with the Sicilian Genna brothers ended badly, and two Sicilian torpedoes and an associate plotted against him with their countryman, the ambitious Joey Aiello, for which Capone reportedly beat the turncoats to death with a baseball bat and, upon his release from prison in Pennsylvania, had Aiello himself assassinated.

Capone‘s mentor, Johnny Torrio, who is regarded by some as the founding father of Organized Crime in this country, was also from the Boot, as was Capone’s Brooklyn boss, Frankie Yale (who came from a tradition of organized crime in his native Calabria known as Ndrangheta but who nonetheless regarded himself as national head of the Unione Siciliana), Calabrian Jim Colosimo, underlings Frank Nitto (or Nitti), Paul Ricca, even Murder Incorporated’s Albert Anastasia.

Capone warily respected Sicilian Lucky Luciano, but regarded him as less of a Sicilian and more like the pragmatic Jews he grew up among in New York. Two of Luciano’s closest allies were Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. (In the lineup below, Luciano is third from the left; Meyer Lansky is fourth. People have identified the figure on the far left as Paul Ricca, who would eventually run Chicago, and to Lansky’s immediate left is Rocco Fischetti, Capone’s cousin.)

Nevertheless, in the public mind, Capone, the Chicago Outfit, and Cosa Nostra (apparently it was J. Edgar Hoover himself who added a superfluous “La” to the term) are lumped together.

Here I have Capone dilating on Sicilians, or “ginzos,” as he called them, and setting us straight…

“I ain’t saying the Sicilians was stupid. Up to a point, they got their ways. But they couldn’t do like we did. You know why? Cause they couldn’t adapt theirselves. They put this ginzo code ahead of business. It weren’t written down, so it don’t cover more than a Sicilian can remember, and that ain’t much. But with them it was all unuri and vinnita: honor and revenge.

“I got a lot of respect for tradition. But killing some capo in Chicago cause back in Palermo his grandpa killed your cousin’s mother-in-law’s uncle? Get the fuck out of here.

“It’s bughouse. And more important, it’s bad for business. It’s like I kept trying to tell them ginzo sons of bitches: this ain’t Sicily. This is America, and America don’t put up with nothing that’s bad for business.”

Excerpted from I, Capone: The Memoirs of Al Capone: A Novel by Andrew Ward. Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Ward. All rights reserved.