Uncle Al Capone by Deirdre Marie Capone

in the newspapers as saying, “The murderers were not gangsters. They were Chicago policemen. I believe the killing was the aftermath to the hijacking of 500 cases of whiskey belonging to the Moran gang by five policemen six weeks ago…I expect to have the names of these five policemen in a short time. It is my theory that in trying to recover the liquor, the Moran gang threatened to expose the policemen and the massacre was to prevent the exposure.”
    When I read the newspaper accounts of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, I knew in my bones that they were not true. My uncle Al Capone was not a monster.
    In the recently published book, Get Capone by Jonathan Eig, the same evidence was uncovered.
    It took me about fifty years to fully convince myself that at least this one event—a shocking, unforgettable event to be sure—was not, regardless of what I may have read or heard, ordered by Uncle Al. By publishing the evidence I’ve gathered, maybe I can divest my subconscious of some of the guilt I’ve carried merely because I was born a Capone.
     
    There is another chapter in the story of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. During the time I spent with my grandfather in 1958, he—after much pressing—finally told me a little more about three men in Al’s gang who died mysteriously. I learned from Ralph that these men were double-crossing Al by working for both him and Bugs Moran at the same time. They were probably the ones who saved Bugs Moran’s life by telling him that the cops were out to kill him and that he shouldn’t go to the garage on the morning of February 14.
    The facts on record, which I knew long before asking for Ralph’s account, were these: Early on in the gang wars, in 1924, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi were accused of killing a man named Dion O’Banion. My uncle Al paid for their defense, and they got off. On May 8, 1929, the bodies of Scalise, Anselmi, and another man who worked for Al named John Gunita were found in a ditch in Indiana. They had been beaten on the head by blunt objects reported as baseball bats and shot. This became known as the “Baseball Bat Incident.”
    This was a subject that my grandfather really didn’t want to talk about. I kept pressing him, and he finally said, “Look, Deirdre, all I can tell you about that incident is that Al got a couple of tips from very reliable sources that those three guys, Anselmi, Scalise, and Gunita, who he had been a friend to many times, had planned to kill him so they could take over the Outfit. There was a man named Joe Aiello, an associate of Bugs Moran, who wanted to cut in on the alcohol rackets. He made an offer of $50,000 to anyone who ‘bumps off Capone.’
    To get that fifty grand, Anselmi, Scalise, and Gunita decided to use their high status in the Outfit to kill Al and then work with Aiello to take over Chicago. They offered Al’s chef, Peppe, $5,000 to poison Al. Peppe told Al about the threat and kept the money.”
    Ralph went on, “It was also reported that it was them that warned Bugs that the cops were out to get him and not to go to the garage that morning. They were clearly on Bugs’s payroll and only pretending to be loyal to Al. They were double-crossers.
    One of the reports said that they thought they had better take me out as well as the other brothers at the same time to avoid retaliation. So they were going to blow up the house on Prairie Avenue on a Sunday when we were all there having dinner. They felt they could pull it off because they were insiders and the bodyguards wouldn’t suspect them. Deirdre, if they had pulled it off, Grandma Capone, Aunt Maffie, your father…all of us would have been killed.
    When Al heard this, he went berserk. I have never seen him that mad. He was like a wild man. But a little while later, he suddenly calmed down. After a few minutes of silence he began to smile. I said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ He just lit up a cigar, grinned, and said, ‘I think it’s