He leaned forward on his hairy arms, eyes fastened on me. “What do you think, kid?” The words were more than a question, less than a threat.
I met his gaze. “I think a good feature story on you would get more readership than a Presidential assassination or another Lindbergh flight,” I said evenly. “You’re still big news in Chicago, and across the country for that matter. Even around the world. Everybody wants to know about you.”
“That right?” He was puffing himself up again, but struggling to not show his pleasure.
I decided to lay it on even thicker, as it seemed to be working. “Absolutely. I get asked about you all the time, damn near every day, because I spent all that time at the trial. People really want to know what life is like for you here.”
“Okay, then, let’s tell ’em, dammit,” he said with relish, shifting in his chair and leaning on the table with one elbow. “Start askin’ me stuff.”
I flipped open my reporter’s notebook and took out a pencil. “First off, do other inmates ever try to get tough with you?”
He guffawed and thumped his chest with a fist. “If they do, kid, it’s only once — Alphonse here can still take care of himself.”
“So this means fights? And if so, with knuckles, or knives? And...”
For almost two hours, I posed questions about every aspect of prison life that I could think of, including Capone’s work as a cobbler of shoes and his new-found interest in tennis, a sport he had taken up in prison. Capone answered most of them directly, except when I asked about special privileges. At least twice, he paused and either shook his head or tried to change the subject by giving me a colorful anecdote about some other inmate, such as Lefty Scaldo, the one-armed bank robber and former minor-league baseball player who pitched for the prison team and once hit a home run, so Capone claimed, that cleared the outer wall of the prison yard, a blast reckoned at 400 feet. “His only arm’s bigger’n a goddamn tree trunk,” he said, holding up his palm as if to give an oath.
Halfway through the session, lunch was brought in for both of us on metal trays — beef brisket, boiled potatoes, green peas, apple pie wedge, coffee. It was passable, although Capone muttered something about “lousy stir grub.” That attitude didn’t keep him from finishing everything, however.
Near the end of my allotted time, I got more pointed — and daring — with my queries. “So, do you keep in touch with any of your old associates?” I asked.
“What old associates?” Capone’s tone hardened.
I shrugged with what I hoped was nonchalance. “Oh, the guys you were in business with over the years — Nitti, Torrio, Luciano, Schultz.”
“Don’t know anything about ’em anymore, not a thing,” he snarled.
“You mean you don’t ever...”
“Goddamn it, I said I don’t know ’em anymore, are you deaf? That’s not what this interview was supposed to be about.” He rose, flexing his big shoulders, and nodded at the guard. “I’m done, got to get back to the cobbler shop,” he barked. “So long, kid.”
“So long. And good luck,” I told him, although a wall had formed between us, and he gave no indication that he had heard me. And at this point, I didn’t care.
I was escorted back to the deputy warden’s office. He looked up from his desk when I entered. “Ah, yes, Mr. Malek, how did your visit go?” he asked, expressionless.
“Okay. Before I go, I’d like to see Capone’s cell.”
He pursed his lips. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. Against regulations, you understand. Sorry.”
“Yeah, well at least I’d like to get a quote from you about what kind of prisoner he’s been.”
The deputy warden raised his eyebrows, which for him was an animated gesture. “Ah, now that I can help you with, yes I can, yes sir. The warden anticipated your desire in this matter, and he has prepared a statement solely for you. Yes he has.” He reached into a drawer and pulled out a sheet, handing it across. Typewritten and double-spaced on Atlanta Penitentiary letterhead, it was a single paragraph: “Since he has been in the Atlanta facility, Alphonse Capone has shown himself to be respectful and peaceable. He works diligently in the cobbler shop and gets along well with his fellow inmates. He obeys every order when it is given.”
Beneath the statement was the warden’s signature. “Do you have anything you want to add to this?” I asked his underling.
“Oh, no, no, the warden has very nicely summarized the situation,” he said, handing me a carbon copy of the agreement I had signed earlier. He rose to bid me goodbye.
On the way back into Atlanta in the chauffeured car, Mike Ahern tried to pump me about the interview, but my responses were noncommittal. He kept at me on the train home as well, until I finally closeted myself in my bedroom. Actually, I had planned to stay in my room on the trip north, anyway. I took out the portable Royal I’d brought, and as the train steamed north through the Appalachian night toward Chicago, I wrote the first draft of my article, then a second, and finally a third. When we pulled into Dearborn Station in the morning, I’d gotten only two hours’ sleep but had wrestled the article into the shape I wanted it.
The editors apparently agreed, because the piece ran at the bottom of Page One three days later under the headline EXCLUSIVE — OUR REPORTER VISITS CAPONE IN PRISON! And nobody messed much with what I wrote, either. My lead was a single sentence: “I had lunch with Al Capone last Friday.”
I went on from there to describe his physical condition and mannerisms, and to quote him on his daily routine (“I’m just an ordinary guy here”), his living conditions (“Hell, I’ve got seven cellmates, nothin’ special about me”), his fears (“I’m nobody’s prisoner when I’m asleep, sleeping is like escaping”), and his claims on unjust imprisonment.
Jack Stewart, another Tribune police reporter, had located a guy who’d just gotten out of Atlanta, and he wrote a sidebar to my piece anonymously quoting this ex-con, who painted a different picture of Capone’s life behind bars. “Ah, he’s livin’ like a king down there, and don’t let nobody tell you otherwise. Sure, he’s in an eight-man cell, that’s true enough, but he’s got everything there — two rugs, mirror, typewriter, tennis gear, alarm clock, and even a whole set of that Encyclopaedia Britannica. Let me tell you about the privileges he gets...”
Together, the articles got plenty of reaction — lots of letters to the paper, most of them angry that Capone was living so well, but others from people who actually felt sorry for him. About a week after the pieces ran, I got a call at my desk in the County Building pressroom from Bob Lee, telling me to come over to the office immediately.
“What for?” I asked. I set foot in Tribune Tower as little as possible — too much internal politics.
“Never mind what for!” Lee barked. “Just get over here now. Take a taxi and expense it.”
I was in Lee’s office fifteen minutes later. “I told you before that was a helluva job you did on the Capone thing,” the crusty city editor snarled. “Mr. Beck thought so too — called it the single best piece of writing the paper’s had all year. Don’t know that I’d go that far myself, but anyway the Colonel wants to see you right now.”
“Geez, why?”
“Malek, I don’t know why. I’m just the damned messenger here. But I do know that when the Colonel wants to see someone, he wants to see him right then. Better get your ass upstairs.”