I, Capone’s Former Amanuensis
In 1930, Claud Cockburn, a budding left-wing British journalist, interviewed Capone for the London Times. Capone’s rambling attempts to portray himself as a businessman like any other amused not only the Times’ readership, but caused an international sensation when the interview was reprinted in newspapers everywhere, raising Capone unto super celebrity status. • As I contemplated what became I, Capone, my first thought was to employ a character very like Cockburn to account for the existence of Capone’s memoirs. Eventually I discarded him for a more promising premise, but not before I had made a few notes toward an introduction in the voice of what my late father called a “shabby Englishman.” I never quite completed this initial introduction, but here are some portions, submitted just to show that sometimes, for the good of the narrative, writers must abandon what we may have once regarded as choice...
When I arrived in Miami, my publisher had just released my biography of Napoleon III, and I was kindly invited to speak before the local Ladies’ Literary Society. Their Executive Board had circulated a press release about my imminent appearance, my career as a journalist, and my English pedigree.
I apparently disappointed a large majority who had come in hopes I would be talking about the Napoleon of Waterloo, only to realize I was expostulating on his imperious, lecherous, conniving nephew. One man sat among the ladies, or more precisely behind them, with a look of such crushing boredom that I was afraid he might actually expire. But after I had completed my remarks and entertained a few questions, he was the first to greet and congratulate me. He said his name was Ralph Brown, and that his brother was a rich Midwestern entrepreneur who wanted someone to write his memoirs.
•••
As I sat down with Capone at his Palm Island seraglio, I had the sense that he was having difficulty crowning, in the words of Oliver Goldsmith, “a youth of labor with a life of ease.” Despite all the trimmings of a wealthy self-made man, he seemed agitated. He had rid himself of his Italian accent, but his Brooklynese was proving less disposable.
You will remark Mr. Capone’s vulgarity. He switches tenses in a single sentence, ignores the niceties of parallel construction, and employs obscenities for emphasis. This contrasts with the quotations that appeared when he was at the peak of his powers. In part this was a function of the bowdlerizing ethos of the times, but it also stemmed from the paucity of reporters brave enough or foolish enough to quote him verbatim.
I am told, however, that in his brief heyday, he was more conscientious about grammar and pronunciation. As the disciple of the sober, decorous, (and lethal) Johnny Torrio, Capone worked hard to file down his rough edges. He abjured his native campagniese and polished up his English. He took comportment and elocution lessons, and learned the lingo that prevailed among the bootstrap businessmen of the teens and twenties. Like many a second-generation immigrant before and after him, he read innumerable books on etiquette, self-improvement, and the surest road to prosperity. In his public pronouncements he rarely reverted to gangster jargon, but expressed himself with the bumptious boosterism of a typical American entrepreneur or second-rate politician.
•••
When I met him on Palm Island in 1944, a combination of syphilis and the drugs he was prescribed during the final years of his incarceration had coarsened and diminished him. Doctors declared he had a low IQ, and the mental faculties of a twelve year-old. But I was skeptical. I have encountered many a twelve year-old with mental faculties exceeding most of the adults I have encountered. As for his IQ, quite apart from whether a test grounded in white Protestant culture was a fair determinant of an immigrant son’s intelligence, it is useful to recall that Capone’s was tested at a time when he was doing all he could to foreshorten his incarceration. He may well have contrived, as many another convict contrived, to look as harmless and pathetic as possible.
It is my belief that it was the dubious and sometimes experimental drugs he was prescribed in prison that impaired him most, for according to his family, within a few months of his release he seemed to detoxify. Whatever it was, it had disinhibited him, returning his mode of expression to that of a younger — perhaps even twelve year-old — self that predated his brief finishing-school period. He had lost all trace of his campagniese accent but his Brooklyn accent had proven less disposable. However, the shrewd, ruthless, boastful, self-justifying Brooklyn urchin had survived, and it is his voice you will hear in the pages that follow.
•••
Why would Mr. Capone speak so freely to an Englishman? I have often asked myself the same question. After all, his pal Big Jim Thompson based his mayoral campaigns on his loathing of all things English. I warrant he found my slight physique unthreatening, and my English public school decorum commensurate with his eminence. Moreover, my interest, and the London Times’s was proof of his not merely national but international fame. For Capone, fame and notoriety were, if not identical, interdependent.
He proposed, on the most generous of terms, that I take dictation from him and edit it down into some chronological account of his life and times. I could certainly use the money, as I hardly had enough saved from my other assignments to pay my passage home. But I was hesitant.
“Look,” he said, “you think you’re my first choice? Don’t kid yourself. I already asked Ben Hecht, Damon Runyon, Charlie MacArthur (the writer, not the dummy.) But them boys is literary, and most men get literary cause they got no balls. So they all give me the brush-off. Now the quacks tell me my time is running out. So you’re all I got. You wanna do this or not?”
Needless to say, I did. We came to an agreement that I did not break, for beyond my policy of keeping my word, there was Mr. Capone’s warning that if I broke faith with him, one of his henchman would break me.
•••
Alphonse Capone differed from America’s current crop of gangsters in that he operated more or less in the open, and just as publicly hankered after respectability. He regarded himself as just another businessman, albeit one forced by the idiocy of the law and the savagery of his competition to expand and defend his territory by any means necessary.
I was quite familiar with this strategy, as it was how my country had attained world dominion: establishing suzerainty over big and little fiefdoms in the name of protecting its investments, restoring order, and keeping the peace. Then, with a singularity of purpose and the force of arms (wielded, in many cases, by its former enemies), pacified and neutralized each fiefdom’s frontiers until there were no frontiers left to conquer.
It may at the outset seem a farfetched analogy, but for the parochial Capone, who had to limit his empire building to those areas whose officials he could compromise with graft and intimidation, Cook County was the world in microcosm, and like Britain herself he was astonished by the ease with which he could establish his hegemony.
Excised from I, Capone: The Memoirs of Al Capone: A Novel by Andrew Ward. Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Ward. All rights reserved.
