Uncle Al Capone by Deirdre Marie Capone Page B

hurt by what the newspapers say about me. And I can’t tell you what it does to my twelve-year-old son when the other school children, cruel as they are, keep showing him newspaper stories that call me a killer or worse.”
    To make matters worse, Al’s success was a threat to other businessmen in Chicago. He wasn’t just hounded by the public and the law, but other businessmen—both legitimate and racketeers—were doing everything in their power to push him out. He was the biggest competition there was. At the end of the 1920s, he was at the pinnacle of his success. The Outfit brought in more than $100 million a year, all of it cash. Most of his business centered on selling beer, liquor, and prostitution, but he and his cronies also owned and operated gambling establishments, dog tracks, dance halls, roadhouses, and other resorts.
    A powerful, unofficial ruling party of businessmen in Chicago, called the Secret Six, began to feel they had to do away with the Al Capone competition at all costs. The Chicago World’s Fair was looming large. Scheduled for 1933, the city expected the fair to draw millions and be a major source of revenue. The Secret Six did not want Al Capone encroaching on their profits. But he would surely be in the spotlight throughout the event, and so he had to be eliminated before it opened.
    The Secret Six was led by the owner of the Chicago Tribune , Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick. In the Illinois Public Journal , Burton Cooke wrote of Colonel McCormick’s vendetta against Al: “McCormick was a person who followed his own conscience, whether right or wrong, and used his paper to shape public opinion. He aroused the public with numerous newspaper articles, most of them inaccurate, to put pressure on the police and politicians to break Al Capone’s hold on Chicago and put him in prison.”
    The trouble for the Secret Six was that they couldn’t make any aggressive moves against Al because they had to keep him quiet. He had the dirt to implicate three-quarters of the Chicago political and business establishment in his criminal activities—and no one doubted that if he went down, he’d take all other guilty parties down with him.
    Luckily for the Secret Six—and unluckily for Uncle Al—the perfect opportunity arose. Though he was squeezed from all sides by law enforcement, the media, and the public, and though he was being accused of heinous and innumerable monstrosities, it was actually a very minor offense that provided law enforcement with the right excuse to move in on Al.
    In 1928, Uncle Al—under the false name of Parker Anderson—purchased a home on Palm Island near Miami for $40,000. Members of the Outfit loved to go down there during the winter months and play. You can imagine the noise that went on late into the night at that house. Unbeknownst to Uncle Al and my grandfather, the next-door neighbor hated the partying and called the police a couple of times. Of course, the police did nothing because the chief of police was frequently one of the partiers. So, this neighbor, who worked for the federal government, took his complaint to the next level. He phoned a friend of his—who just happened to be President Herbert Hoover.
    President Hoover’s response was, “Get Capone!”
    “Get Capone!” became a battle cry throughout America. As Al described it, “Every time a boy falls off a tricycle, every time a black cat has gray kittens, every time someone stubs a toe, every time there’s a murder or a fire or the Marines land in Nicaragua, the police and the newspapers holler, ‘Get Capone!’”
    At that point, any excuse would do to put him away. President Hoover had a friend in the Treasury Department named Frank Wilson. He was the one who first came up with the idea of looking into Al’s tax files—and he found that Al owed some back taxes. In fact, Al had offered to pay up on a number of occasions, but could never get the IRS to give him a clear total of how much he