A New Look at
Al Capone in St. Pete
Part 1
Will Michaels
Over the years there have been numerous rumors,
reports and stories about Al Capone in St. Petersburg. This article is an
exploration and new look at those stories.
“AL
CAPONE PAYS VIST TO THE CITY” reads the caption on the front page of the St. Petersburg Times on February 10,
1931.
The article reported, “Al
‘Scarface’ Capone, reputed king of Chicago’s gangland, paid a visit to Pinellas
county Monday, spending a few hours in St. Petersburg and later motoring to
Tarpon Springs, where he spent considerable time looking over the sponge
industry. Capone, with a party of five,
including one woman, was seen here by several persons. Later in the afternoon a large crowd gathered
at the Sponge Exchange in Tarpon Springs to see the famous baronial head of the
beer racket. Capone’s business on
Florida’s west coast could not be ascertained, but there was plenty of
speculation.”
The article continued, “Some said he came to visit his old but
retired henchman, John Torrio, who long ago settled down to a quiet life after
a reputed ‘break’ with ‘scarface.’
‘There’s nothing to that,’ a man at Torrio’s home in a fashionable
section here said Monday night. ‘Those two haven’t seen each other for four
years [1927?]. Besides, John’s in New
York.’….”
“Capone
was in St. Petersburg several years ago, stopping at a downtown hotel under the
name of Al Brown, a moniker he discarded when he began his spectacular rise
from a body guard for the late “Big Jim” Collissimio [sic] to his present
position. Later he went to Miami, where
he bought the big house on Palm island.
Last year he was harassed by police and arrested time and time again. The governor issued an order forbidding him
to enter the state, but this was staved off by a federal injunction. Capone and his party are making their trip
over the state by motor.”
Al Capone could well qualify as the
most notable gangster in American history.
Starting out in Brooklyn as a youth in a local gang, he graduated to
providing “muscle” in a protection racket operated by the Italian Five Points
gang led by Paul Kelly and Johnny Torrio.
Torrio had recruited Capone into the gang. Because of his smarts, Capone was promoted
to bartender and bouncer in one of the gang’s establishments. It was during this time that he was knifed
in the face for insulting the sister of a patron, receiving his nickname
“Scarface.” (Much later he apologized to
the knifer for insulting his sister and even hired him as an occasional bodyguard.) Subsequently he became involved in a fight
with a rival gang, and may have fled to Chicago to avoid retaliation. Accounts of the exact circumstances of his
relocation to Chicago differ. But Johnny
Torrio himself had previously relocated to Chicago to join the gang of “Big
Jim” Colosimo. Capone soon became a
trusted lieutenant of Torrio, and was a behind the scenes party to Torrio’s
subsequent murder of Colosimo. In 1925
Torrio himself was the subject of a murder attempt by a rival gang. He received gunshot wounds to the arm, jaw,
neck, chest, and belly and still managed to survive. Thereafter he was known as “The Immune.” It was then that he announced his retirement
and turned his gang enterprises over to his second in command, Al Capone. But he continued to receive a cut of gang
profits, perhaps as much as twenty-five percent, for ten years. He also was to be available for
“consultations.”
According to a 1925 Chicago Daily Tribune article Torrio visited St. Pete in late 1924,
perhaps trying to elude the would-be rival gang assassins who finally caught up
with him in early 1925. Records verify
that Torrio and his wife, Anna, traveled between Havana and Key West in
December 1924. They made the same trip
in November 1925 with Al Capone and his wife Mae. Capone’s biographer Robert Schoenberg stated
that after Torrio’s retirement he and his wife went to Italy for two years.
Assuming he stayed in Italy the whole time would have him returning to the
United States about 1928. However, there
are travel documents for John Torrio and his wife Anna, giving St. Petersburg as
their home address for the years 1926, 1927, and 1928. The documents were for travel between Hawaii
and the West Coast. In May 1929, he was
involved in organizing a loose cartel of Northeast bootleggers to prevent
further turf wars. This evolved into
what became known as the National Crime Syndicate. Chicago newspaperman Fred Pasley stated that
while Capone was in prison on a weapons possession charge in 1929, Torrio was
based in Brooklyn but commuted twice a month to Chicago, likely assisting with
running the Chicago operations in Capone’s absence. Otherwise he spent considerable time in real
estate investments. Beginning in 1939 he
served two years in prison for income tax evasion.
Torrio is identified as living in
various locations in St. Petersburg.
These include 2300 Lakeview Avenue South (now 22nd Avenue
South); possibly also the 1600 block of Lakeview Avenue South; the 100 block of
14th Avenue Northeast; possibly another location in the Old
Northeast neighborhood; and Pass-a-Grille.
Travel documents for the Torrios (ship manifests) give a 2300 Lakeview
Avenue South address. City directories for 1925- 1928 list George Jacobs, or
his mother, living at 2300 Lakeview.
Later Jacobs’ mother is listed as living at 14th Avenue
Northeast. George Jacobs was a known
Torrio associate and brother of Torrio’s wife.
There is an amusing story of Torrio
protecting a neighbor’s pecan orchard against a poacher with a pruning ax near
his residence on Lakeview Avenue. Torrio
also sold (some accounts say donated) property with a grove and large home
known as the “Green Cabin” at 2350 Lakeview in 1927 to the American Legion for
use as the original American Legion Hospital for Crippled Children, forerunner
of today’s All Children’s Hospital.
Today the site of the American Legion Hospital and Torrio’s 2300
Lakeview residence are the location of Sanderlin Middle School.
As Capone excelled in bootlegging, racketeering,
vice, gambling, and other organized crime he made enemies. One of these was Joseph Aiello, also in the
Chicago “alky” and bootleg trade. Capone
had engineered the elevation of Tony Lombardo to the presidency of L’ Unione Siciliana (a powerful Chicago
Italian welfare and political organization), a position to which Aiello
aspired. Aiello then went gunning for
Capone. Capone fought off Aiello’s
would-be assassins, killing one after another, ten in all. Police were tipped off about still another
effort being planned by Aiello to murder Capone, which resulted in Aiello being
taken into police custody. Capone then sent
six cabs full of gunmen to the police station where they waited for him to be
released. When the ambush was discovered
police escorted Aiello safely from the station.
Aiello, like Johnny Torrio, then decided it was best to get out of
town. But even though Aiello escaped
with his life the damage was done.
It just so happened that Chicago Mayor
Bill Thompson was running for President, and the assault on the police station,
combined with the rest of Chicago’s unsavory crime history, called the
attention of the country to his inability to control his own city. Though Mayor Thompson was on the take from
Capone, his presidential aspirations trumped, and he ordered Capone out of the
city. It was at this moment that Capone
made the only quote found mentioning St. Petersburg (December 5 1927). “I’m leaving for St. Petersburg tomorrow,” he
said, further explaining that he had some property there he wanted to
sell. As it turned out the reference to
St. Pete was a ruse, and instead he went to Tijuana, Mexico, and then Los
Angeles, where he was again asked to leave town. But his mention of St. Petersburg is telling,
a strange place to mention unless he had some connection to it.
Florida’s governor also added his voice
to the chorus declaring Capone unwelcome. Chicago
Tribune newspaperman Fred Pasley, in his 1930 biography of Capone, stated
that Capone did in fact go to St. Petersburg in early 1928 after his sojourn
out West. Pasley wrote “The police met
him at the [train] station and trailed him so assiduously that he stayed only
overnight.” No local documentation of
this has been found. Capone’s wife stated in a 1941 deposition that Capone was in
St. Pete for a “short visit…fourteen or fifteen years ago [1926 or 27].” If Capone in fact visited St. Pete in early
1928 it would have been ironic as the Southeast Regional Anti-Saloon Convention
was being held in the city at the First Baptist Church. After his possible brief stop in St.
Petersburg Capone went to Miami, and in March bought a 14 room estate on Palm
Island which he purchased from beer magnate August Anheuser Bush. He called Florida “the garden of America, the
sunny Italy of the new world, where life is good and abundant, where happiness
is to be had even by the poorest.”
February 14 1929 was the date of the
infamous Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
This involved the brutal execution of seven members of a rival Chicago
gang. Capone is widely assumed to have
been responsible for ordering the killings, although he personally had an
alibi. He was in Miami meeting with an
assistant district attorney from New York minutes after the slaughter
occurred. The massacre attracted
world-wide attention, and further motivated public officials and law
enforcement to bring Capone to justice.
In May 1929, Capone was convicted of
possession of a weapon in Philadelphia and was sentenced to a year in prison,
most of which he spent at Eastern Penitentiary in
Philadelphia. There Capone was allowed to furnish his cell, hire fellow
prisoners as servants, and receive many visitors and mail. The junk mail
was thoughtfully discarded for Capone by the warden. He was
released in March 1930, whereupon authorities in Chicago once more warned that
he was unwelcome and that he would be arrested on sight if he entered the
city. Florida’s new governor Doyle E.
Carlton followed suit. He sent an
identical telegram to the sheriffs of all sixty-seven Florida counties: “IT IS REPORTED THAT AL CAPONE IS ON HIS WAY
TO FLORIDA. ARREST IF HE COMES YOUR WAY
AND ESCORT TO STATE BORDER WITH INSTRUCTIONS NOT TO RETURN. IF YOU NEED ADDITIONAL ASSISTANCE CALL ME.” As if to help with Capone’s public
identification, Time Magazine ran his
photo on their cover for the March 24 1930, edition.
Capone at some point attracted the
active attention of President Hoover.
There are stories that Hoover was personally annoyed by Capone when in
January 1929, Capone got more attention than the president-elect upon entering
the lobby of a Miami hotel. But Hoover
denied any personal animosity towards Capone.
The more likely impetus was a meeting with a delegation of Chicago
citizens who demanded federal action to deal with the gang disaster in Chicago
in view of the city’s inability to do so.
Regardless of the circumstances, it is known that Hoover repeatedly
raised the issue of Capone’s prosecution with his closest advisors after
becoming president. Ultimately the only
charge the feds could get to stick against Capone was non-payment of income
tax, and even that was minimal. The
indictment identified a little over one million dollars in income between the
years 1924 and 1929, for which $215,080 in taxes were owed. There is speculation that Johnny Torrio may
have advised Capone to take the rap to get it over with, not expecting the long
prison sentence he would receive. In May
1932, at age 33, Capone was sent to the Atlanta Federal Prison. In 1934 the government converted Alcatraz from
a military to a federal maximum security prison for the most dangerous
criminals. Capone was among the first to
be transferred there. Contrary to the
experience a few years earlier in Philadelphia, Alcatraz was as grim as it got. There he occupied a
9 by 5 foot cell. Personal furnishing
was not permitted. Mail was heavily censured and newspapers not allowed.
Visitation was restricted to twice a month family visits. Use of personal funds
to purchase anything was forbidden. He
was paroled in 1939 and soon returned to his home in Palm Island where he died
of cardiac arrest in 1947.
