Al Capone Does My Shirts (22 page)

Al Capone (AZ 85) was an inmate on Alcatraz for four and a half years, from 1934 to 1939. Warden Johnston described the intense interest in Capone this way: “The newspaper reporters telephoned me almost every day—‘How is Capone? Is he still there? Is he going to be transferred? Where is he working?’ ” Very little information came out of Alcatraz and erroneous reporting was rampant. “At times,” Warden Johnston said, “I became fed up with the gossip about him that had no foundation in fact. . . . A story was featured that though Al Capone was in Alcatraz, he was sending orders to a London haberdasher for silk underwear . . . I assured the Director of the Bureau of Prisons that there was no truth in such a report . . . that I had seen Capone wearing the regulation underwear and I had noticed it particularly because he had the waist of his drawers fastened with a safety pin.”
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The residents of the island were as interested in Capone as the rest of the world. One boy described watching Capone’s first footsteps on Alcatraz: “Our apartment overlooked the island’s docks, and my mother’s old Kodak box camera took a photo of the first convicts’ arrival. We lived along the building’s upper gallery, but we went down a level to be closer to the action that we had waited months to see. Our binoculars located Al Capone, his face was familiar in those days. No others stood out.”
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Another woman said: “The first prisoners arrived, among them Al Capone.” She laughed. “And women and children were requested to stay indoors until the prisoners were locked in their cells. . . . Well, we kind’a snuck a look before the boat docked.”
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Capone’s first job on Alcatraz was working the mangle in the laundry facility
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—thought to be an undesirable post often offered as a first job because it was boring, backbreaking work. The facility handled the laundry for everyone who lived on the island and for some of the local army bases, like the one on Angel Island.

The laundry scheme is fiction. No record of kids selling the opportunity to have a shirt laundered by Capone has ever been found. However, there is documentation of at least one army officer—a private stationed on Angel Island—writing home that “his laundryman was Al Capone.”
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In fact, after completing
Al Capone Does My Shirts,
I discovered that World War II GIs sometimes used the phrase “Al Capone does my shorts”
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to indicate they were stationed in San Francisco. Capone was no longer on Alcatraz then, but the “Capone mythology”
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was as powerful as ever.

In 1935, the convicts played handball and softball in the walled-off recreation yard on the island, and Capone was thought to have played first base.
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Capone liked baseball. As a kid, he “pitched sandlot baseball well enough to cherish dreams of turning pro.”
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The convicts were quite serious about their games and kept careful records of their leagues. “They played as avidly as any big league team out to win the pennant.”
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But the rules differed from those of a regular game in one important way. On Alcatraz “If you knocked the ball over the wall, you’re out. (It was not a home run and you couldn’t get out and get it, either.) We usually had an inmate that worked outside the wall—the gardener. He would throw them back.”
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The kids who lived on the island did, in fact, collect convict handballs and baseballs. “Once when I was eight, a prisoner found a hard rubber ball in the weeds and beckoned to me. I shyly approached, as the guard stood there, and the man pushed the ball through the fence to me. It was a proud moment; I had in my hand
the
most valuable item on Alcatraz—the coveted black handball that had rolled down the hill from over the prison yard wall.”
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Many of the other details of Capone’s time on Alcatraz are also true. There was, for example, a snitch box, which visitors and residents alike were required to walk through when entering the island. And when Capone’s mother, Teresina Capone, came to visit him on the island, her corset did indeed set the snitch box off. “Mrs. Capone, who barely spoke English, was visibly embarrassed at having to strip down to her corset, revealing the metal stays that had tripped the metal detector.”
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Capone was horribly ruthless, authorizing and sometimes performing the slaying of hundreds of people, but he could also be surprisingly generous. “When the crash came in 1929, he (Al Capone) was first to open soup kitchens.”
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Some people considered him a Robin Hood kind of character
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—or, as one fellow Alcatraz convict described him, “Outside of losing his head so easily and bragging about what he has done, Capone has a heart as big as a house.”
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The accounts of children who grew up on Alcatraz differ according to the time they lived on the island and their own individual experiences. A doctor who worked on the island in 1937 said, “During their play, the children often came into close contact with the prisoners working on the outdoor details.”
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On the other hand, one former Alcatraz island resident whom I heard speak clearly stated she had no interaction with convicts whatsoever during her stay on the island. And a third said she formed a friendship with one convict based on the exchange of flowers. She called this inmate her “boyfriend.”
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The convicts’ mail was routinely censored and wives of the guards were occasionally asked to help out with this task. As one convict described it: “It took a letter from ten days to two weeks to get to you after it reached the institution. You see, all the incoming letters are censored and then given to different guards to type in duplicate when they have time. Nothing was personal. Every officer could take your letters and read them and then discuss your personal affairs with each other. The prisoners’ personal mail was taken home by different officers to let their wives read.”
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Incredible though it seems, residents of the island sang Christmas carols outside of the cell house with the express purpose of entertaining the convicts. As one woman who lived on the island during the early ’40s told me, caroling was a very big thing. And only the children who were the best singers were given the privilege of caroling to the cons.
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And it is certainly true that convicts were sometimes seen in the residential areas of the island. They were on the dock handling the laundry. They acted as garbagemen, gardeners, and sometimes movers and house painters for the guards who lived on the island. And while it is true that convicts were always supposed to be escorted by guards, it is certainly conceivable that in some cases that rule would have been bent or broken.

Meeting Capone was a big thrill to kids who lived on the island. One ten-year-old boy described the day he met Capone.

 

Though every attempt was made to make
Al Capone Does My Shirts
historically accurate, some details were changed to suit the story. For example, the weather—while true to the San Francisco Bay area in general—does not reflect the exact weather of 1935. Also, the island was run in “rigid military style,”
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with orders working their way down the chain of command. Talking to a kid about the rules of the island would probably be something the warden would have delegated. And though the concept of separate schools for children with problems was certainly in existence,
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everything else about the Esther P. Marinoff School is completely fictional.

 

 

The character Natalie Flanagan would probably be diagnosed with autism. Autism is a disease that affects the way your brain and sensory system work. It usually becomes evident in the first three years of a child’s life.
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While there is a whole range of behaviors of people with autism, typically a child with autism has an extremely difficult time making eye contact, playing with other kids and sometimes even speaking. Children with autism are often prone to tantrums, repetitive behaviors and intense physical sensitivities and desensitivities, “some sensations being heightened and even intolerable, others (which may include pain perception) being diminished or apparently absent.”
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Temple Grandin, perhaps the most famous person with autism in the world today, says autism is “A near normal brain trapped inside a sensory system that does not work.”
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Noted autism experts Theodore and Judith Mitrani describe autism as “Extreme aloneness from the beginnings of life.”

Autism wasn’t identified until 1943, a full eight years after this book takes place. Children with what we now call autism received many different diagnoses during the 1930s and were sometimes institutionalized. Up until quite recently there was little hope for children with autism. As Oliver Sacks put it, “We almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet.”
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But in the last few years a lot of progress has been made in the treatment of autism. The most encouraging statistics show that intense early intervention with applied behavioral analysis can help as many as half the children diagnosed with autism to achieve normal functioning.
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Natalie is a wholly fictional character. She is not meant to symbolize or represent autism in any way. She was inspired by my own sister, Gina Johnson, who had a severe form of autism.