Read Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone for Free Online

Service traced sixty murders to members of the Unione Siciliane. Saietta himself maintained a "murder stable" in Harlem with meathooks from which he hung his victims and a furnace in which to burn them alive. According to one of the few Unione members whom the police ever persuaded to talk, the neophyte had to submit to a blood ritual. Led to an altar where a stiletto lay, the point toward him, he would prick his finger on it and swear eternal fidelity and secrecy.
    The more or less reputable officers of the Unione Siciliane, the businessmen, judges, state and city officials, professed to know nothing of how gangsters were exploiting it. They owed the association too great a debt to endanger it. The frequent fund-raising festivities, moreover, provided opportunities for politicians to meet and make deals with people in whose company they could not otherwise afford to be seen.
    The change of name to the Italo-American National Union effected no change of character, and the police greeted with skepticism the disclaimers issued by executive officers like Constantino Vitello, vice-president of the mother chapter in Chicago. "Crime?" Vitello protested in 1927. "It is heart sickening to us who for the sake of our Italian brothers and our American future spend our time without any remuneration, day after day, and then are told by those who know nothing about us that we are breeders of crime and disorder in Chicago. . . . Our president is former judge Bernard Barasa. Our officers are strong business and professional men. Our members are honest Americans. The constitution of the Unione, strictly enforced, declares that: No man who has a blot on his character may enter and those who are proved to have committed a felonious act while members will be expelled. . . ."
    For nearly a decade the national head of the Unione Siciliane had been Frank Yale.
    Yale hired Capone as a bouncer and bartender for his Harvard Inn, functions to which the younger Five Pointer brought excep tional endowments. When required to subdue obstreperous carousers, his huge fists, unarmed or clutching a club, struck with the impact of a pile driver. He was also fast and accurate with a gun, having perfected his marksmanship shooting at beer bottles in the basement of Brooklyn's ramshackle Adonis Social Club, a favorite Italian hangout.
    Capone did not emerge triumphant from every fracas that erupted at the Harvard Inn. He suffered a notable defeat there one night when Frank Galluccio, a Brooklynite and petty felon, dropped in with his sister. Capone made an offensive remark to her. Galluccio unclasped a pocket knife and went for the bartender's face. When the wounds healed, there remained (in the words of the Capone dossier compiled through the years by federal agents) an "oblique scar of 4" across cheek 2" in front left ear-vertical scar 21" on left jawoblique scar 21" under left ear on neck." Capone, normally vindictive, chose to forgive Galluccio. Some years after, in one of those magnanimous gestures which, he had learned, could win him quick, easy admiration, he hired him as a bodyguard at $100 a week. According to the story Capone later invented to explain his scars, he was wounded by shrapnel fighting in France with the famous "Lost Battalion" of the Seventy-seventh Division. But he got no closer to war than his draft board and was never called upon to serve in any capacity.
    It was the style among the young bucks of Capone's milieu to start a cellar club. This usually consisted of a rented storefront where, behind drawn blinds, the members gambled, drank and entertained girls. In 1918, during a party in a Carroll Street cellar club, Capone met a tall, slim girl named Mae Coughlin. She was twenty-one, two years older than Capone, and worked as a sales clerk in a neighborhood department store. Her parents, Michael Coughlin, a construction laborer, and Bridget Gorman Coughlin of 117 Third Place, were respected in the Irish community for their industry,