Even now, hearing what Trixle may have done to us, my father is fair, thoughtful, and even-tempered. This is why he is the warden and Trixle is not.
29. Al Capone Drops the Ball
Saturday, February 29, 1936
Things will be changing tomorrow and we all know it. The cons have finally finished the work on #2E, so I will no longer be living half my life up top, the other half in 64 building. Natalie will be back at the Esther P. Marinoff during the week and Piper will be going to boarding school. It took a while for the warden to work out a deal with the FBI and then locate a school that would take Piper in the middle of the year, but it’s all settled now. After tomorrow, we won’t see her except for holidays and summers. We’ll all miss her, even if she is a pain in the butt a lot of the time.
Annie and Piper, Jimmy, Theresa, Natalie, and me are all at the Mattamans’ like always. We’re trying to hold on to the old life, even as it’s slipping away. It’s hard to believe things are changing this much.
“What’s the name of the school you’re going to?” Jimmy asks.
“St. Ignatius School for Girls,” Piper says.
“Is it a nunnery?” he asks.
“No,” she laughs.
“So whatever happened about the money?” Annie wants to know.
Piper shrugs. “I owe two hundred and eighty-five dollars. Gotta pay it all back.”
“Two hundred and eighty-five dollars . . . how are you going to get that kind of money?” Annie asks.
“Babysitting,” Piper says.
“You’re going to be a grandma by the time you make two hundred and eighty-five dollars babysitting,” Jimmy tells her.
I think Piper will get mad at this, but she just shrugs. “I had another idea, but it didn’t work out.”
“What was that?” I ask.
Piper leans down to her book bag, takes out a baseball, and hands it to me.
I turn it over. Carved into the leather in awkward hatch-mark strokes are the words Do your own time.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
“Thought I might get a little help from Capone. I threw the ball over the rec yard wall with a note asking him to sign it for me. Do you know how much a baseball signed by Al Capone is worth?”
“A lot,” I say.
“So wait, Al Capone wrote Do your own time?” Annie asks.
“Yeah,” Piper says.
“Funny guy,” I say.
“C’mon, all he had to do was sign one stupid baseball. His signature is worth more than FDR’s.”
“Why would a gangster’s signature be worth more than the president’s?” Annie asks.
“Same reason David Hughes isn’t as famous as Machine Gun Kelly,” Jimmy points out.
“Who is David Hughes?” I ask.
“He invented the radio,” Jimmy says.
“Never heard of him,” I say.
“That’s the point,” Jimmy says.
“Hey,” Piper says as she peers out the Mattamans’ front window. “Look who’s down at the dock . . . the devil himself.”
Sure enough, there is Donny Caconi in a gray pinstriped suit helping his mom carry suitcases and boxes from her apartment.
“Mrs. Caconi is moving out?” I ask.
“Going to live with her sister in Fort Bragg,” Annie says.
“Be the last time you’ll ever see Donny, that’s for sure. Unless of course they send him to prison here,” Piper says.
“Hey, you know, you’re right.” Jimmy dashes to his room and comes out with a small paper sack.
“He’s out on bail, isn’t he?” Piper asks.
“I thought he was broke. How’d he get the money together for bail?” I ask.
“He’s Donny Caconi, that’s how. I mean, how did he know the Count? How did the Count trust him with the locker number and combination? He has connections, that’s how,” Piper says.
“C’mon, Moose,” Jimmy says. “We got business with Donny.”
“We do?” I ask.
Jimmy turns and looks at me. “I never did think he beat you fair and square. Did you?”
Heat rises in my face. This is not the kind of thing I want to admit.
Jimmy smiles. “That’s what I figured. Now, c’mon.”
“If you think Donny Caconi will ever tell you the truth about anything, you’re wrong,” Piper says.
“Yeah, we know. C’mon, Natalie,” Jimmy says.
“One thing that doesn’t make sense is why the Count needs money,” I tell Jimmy as we head down the stairs with Natalie. “He’s in prison for life.”
“His daughter needed money. And he wanted to give her the real stuff. Besides, it’s pretty boring in prison. Conning people is like, you know, his hobby.”
• • •
Down at the dock, Jimmy pulls out a few bottle caps from his sack.
Donny ignores us as he carries a small trunk from his mom’s apartment to the dock.
Jimmy walks right up to Donny. “It’s the weight,” he tells Donny, holding out the bottle caps. “Makes all the difference. The light one here is harder to throw. The heavy one goes farther. But when you change the shape just slightly—make it more aerodynamic—that helps too.”
“But if they’re too heavy,” I take over, “that’s a problem too, isn’t it? You got to get it just right, don’t you?”
Donny gives us a lazy shrug. All of his attention is on Natalie. “She’s an interesting person, your sister,” he tells me. “People think she can’t do much, but she has a genius for numbers. Nobody expects her to understand much of anything . . . that’s the beauty of it. Could do a lot with a person like that.”
Natalie’s standing by herself. She takes her own air space with her everywhere she goes, but Donny breaks through. He’s talking to her now. I can tell from the careful way she’s tipping her toe that she likes what he says. I walk over there, ready to bust him in the chops. I don’t like Donny trying to charm her.
But Nat looks at Donny straight in the peepers. “Alcatraz three hundred and seventeen,” she says.
What’s she talking about? Nat is up to thirty-two in looking people in the eyes, not three hundred and seventeen.
Then it registers. This is the number of the next convict to arrive on Alcatraz.
“Gonna be your new prison number,” I tell him.
Donny’s eyes shift. He squirms like his clothes don’t fit so well anymore.
“Alcatraz three hundred and seventeen,” Nat repeats.
“Will you tell her to shut up?” Donny says.
But I don’t tell her to shut up. When it comes to numbers, Natalie never makes a mistake.
Author’s Note
“On the Island there is a man who keeps the outside in touch.”
In researching Alcatraz Island in the 1930s, I came across a letter addressed to the first warden on Alcatraz, James A. Johnston. The letter contained this sentence: “On the Island there is a man who keeps the outside in touch.” There was nothing in the files that revealed what exactly this letter was referring to, who this mysterious person might be, or if there was any truth to this allegation, but I could not get that unsettling phrase out of my mind. As a novelist, I know that obsession is a blessing, and four years later the phrase that burned a hole in my head became the book you have in your hands.
That one sentence may have triggered the writing, but many ideas and more than ten years of background research have come together to create this story. The second idea came from a comment I heard on Alcatraz Alumni Day, which is held every year on the second weekend of August. I have attended almost every Alcatraz Alumni Day since 1998, the year I worked on the island to research the book. I’ve had the good fortune to speak to many former guards, convicts, and kids who grew up
on the island. During one Alumni Day, I heard that in the thirties, fire escapes did not exist in 64 building, where many of the families of guards lived. Though there were no serious fires on the island, it made me wonder what could have happened if there had been.
Another idea came while researching a convict named Robert Miller, Alcatraz #300, who arrived on the island in 1936. Robert Miller, one of the world’s most infamous con men, had some forty-five aliases, the best-known of which was Count Victor Lustig. Most of the facts about his long and preposterous criminal history that Annie and Theresa placed on the convict card are true to the best of my knowledge. By posing as a French government official, he was able to sell the Eiffel Tower “repeatedly.”1 After stealing money from bankers, he did convince them that it was not in their best interest to press charges. And then he “insisted that they should give him $1,000 for the inconvenience the arrest had caused him.” 2
One of the Count’s favorite cons involved the sale of his money box. He had many of these wooden boxes made, complete with a false bottom and multiple impressive-looking dials. The box, he claimed, could reproduce money for you.3
Lustig would turn the cranks that would feed a real twenty-dollar bill and a piece of good paper into the box. He then claimed the bill would need to soak in a chemical bath for six hours in order to be imprinted with the correct image. At the end of that time, he would crank out two perfect twenty-dollar bills, both of which were real. One was the original bill, the other was a bill the Count had placed in the fake bottom. The Count then sold his money box for $4,000 to $46,000.4 By the time his victim had waited the requisite six hours and realized the box was a hoax, the Count had vanished.
What interests me most about this scheme is the fact that the mark was complicit. Of course, duplicating money in any form is against the law. That idea found its way into the fictional laundry caper. Piper knew it was wrong. Neither Annie Bomini nor Moose Flanagan would have fallen for this con. The best protection against being conned is common sense.
The Count was known to keep his counterfeiting materials in lockers.5 Prior to his time on Alcatraz, the Count was even successful at conning Al Capone, by using a double-your-money scam. Even though Capone knew Count Lustig was a con man, when the Count came to him offering to double his money, Capone took the offer and handed the Count $50,000. A few months later the Count returned to tell Capone he had been unsuccessful at doubling Capone’s money. Capone was furious. He was about to set his gorillas loose on the Count, sure he had run off with his $50,000, when the Count calmly returned all of his money. Capone was so relieved to see his beloved $50,000 that when the Count asked for $5,000 for his trouble, Capone was happy to hand it over. This was the Count’s plan all along.6
That’s a classic Count Lustig con. He would do an apparently nice thing, thus ingratiating himself to his victim. And then once he had secured the victim’s trust, he would ask for money.Count Lustig did not, to my knowledge, pull any cons on Alcatraz. According to his file at the National Archives in San Bruno, he spent his time on Alcatraz working in the laundry, taking correspondence courses, and writing a plan for world peace. It is true, however, that his real-life daughter, Mrs. Betty Jean Miller, was in desperate need of money7 and the Count was unable to provide her with the cash she needed. Lustig was broke. He died in prison in 1947.
One of the most intriguing parts of researching Alcatraz is just when you think you’ve heard it all, some new story surfaces. A new nonfiction book on Alcatraz totally makes my day. In former Alcatraz guard Jim Albright’s book he says that after lockdown at night some prisoners used cockroach messengers to trade cigarettes. “An inmate in one cell would catch a cockroach and tie a cigarette to its back with a piece of thread. The inmate a few cells down would place a piece of bread outside his cell knowing the cockroach would run for it.”8
Though the character Donny Caconi is entirely fictional, his cons were inspired by the handiwork of Titanic Thompson—a con man working during the 1930s. Titanic’s exploits included marking cards with his pinkie nail, using “dirty” dice, dealing from the bottom while misdirecting attention with a coughing attack. He often worked in tandem with supposed strangers “planted” in a situation but dressed to look like country bumpkins. During one con, he tried to hustle Al Capone by filling a lemon with buckshot and planting it in a vendor’s fruit cart. He then bet Capone $500 he could fling the lemon onto a nearby roof. But Capone was wise to him. He bought his own lemon, squashed it flat, then asked Ti to throw that one. Titanic was never on Alcatraz, but he probably should have been.
And of course it’s true the kids lived on Alcatraz because their fathers were guards or electricians or wardens on the island. The warden preferred having his guards live on Alcatraz, as a quick response to an escape or uprising would not have been possible had his guards lived across the bay. It’s also true that many people in San Francisco didn’t believe kids or teens lived on the island. The stories abound of reactions people had to this information. Certainly a driver’s license or a check with the address Alcatraz Island would get the attention of whoever saw it.
And yes, Al Capone was a prisoner and Warden Johnston did call him his “star boarder.”9 People thought Capone had his hand in everything. On Alcatraz “Capone retained star quality. The director of the Bureau of Prisons James Bennett called him ‘the most prominent gangster of all time.’”10 Capone loved the attention and fanned the flames of his celebrity. It’s also true that when Al got mad at another con on Alcatraz, his only recourse was to scratch his name off his magazine subscription circulation sheet.
As always, there are differing accounts of what happened on the island depending on who you talk to. I have heard numerous versions of the rules for the kids who lived in 64 building when the cons were working on the dock. There were,no doubt, different rules at different times in the twenty-nine years that Alcatraz was a working penitentiary. Each resident’s experience was also a little different. Some residents, for example, had more contact with the cons than others. “Although it was uncommon, there were some unavoidable instances when a resident would come in contact with an inmate. One former resident recalled an occasion when he had thrown a ball over a link fence, and an inmate passed it back a few days later. Another remembered an incident when an inmate was tending a garden, and left a small flower bouquet with a perfectly tied ribbon made from a vine on a cement step.”11 Other things seemed to be consistent. There is widespread agreement that there was just one phone for all of 64 building, for example. The fact that the cons did the laundry for everyone on the island is also settled history.
I do try to stick to the facts about Alcatraz as much as possible. That said, the books are clearly fiction. The Flanagans, the Mattamans, the Bominis are all made up. And though Al Capone and Count Lustig were on the island in 1936, the date of the Count’s arrival on Alcatraz is actually a few months later in 1936 than I have accounted for in this novel. And of course the Count and Capone could hardly have had conversations with fictional characters. Most of the other cons are also made up, although I did hear a story about a convict who ate a lizard, so that part may be true. The points game is fictional; however, the idea came from a convict named Jimmy Lucas, Alcatraz #224, who stabbed Al Capone in the basement of the cell house.12 Many think Jimmy’s goal was to earn bragging rights. He wanted to be known as the toughest guy on Alcatraz, the man who downed Al Capone.
The title Al Capone Does My Homework came from a student at Tenakill Middle School in Closter, New Jersey. His School Media Specialist, Brenda Kahn, sent me the title a number of years ago. I loved the title but had no intention of using it. The original title for this book was Al Capone Is My Librarian. After his stint in the laundry, Al worked as a janitor, mopping up the cell house, and then as the cell house librarian.13 Though I loved the idea of Librarian Capone, I could not get it to work in the book. Little did I know this student’s homework title idea would become a
big part of the novel. I wish I could thank him or her in person!
In early revisions of this manuscript, Moose’s homework assignment was a throwaway line. But one day I happened to be reading a biography of FDR when I came upon this paragraph: “In the end, he was so successful in shouldering aside his handicap and leading an active life, he gave the impression that he had no disability. Years later, when he became president, many Americans did not fully realize that Franklin Roosevelt could not use his legs. As Roosevelt struggled to walk, his wife and his mother were battling over his future. Sara [FDR’s mother] was sure she knew what was best for Franklin. She believed that his career was finished, that he should retire to the comfortable privacy of Hyde Park.”14 Those words resonated, as it seemed to me that FDR’s mother was trying to protect her son, just as Mrs. Flanagan tried to protect Natalie. And though FDR’s disability was not the least bit like Natalie’s, the battle to overcome was wholly the same.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my two favorite Alcatraz researchers: Chuck Stucker and Michael Esslinger. Both men have spent years carefully and lovingly preserving the history of the island. And both have been extraordinarily generous sharing their findings with me. Chuck has a unique perspective on Alcatraz, as he grew up on the island. Michael brings top-drawer research skills to bear on everything he does. A special thanks to Phyllis Twinney, a former resident of Alcatraz, who has been so encouraging to me in my work. Thanks goes to John Cantwell and Lori Brosnan and the many Alcatraz rangers who have dedicated their professional lives to researching the island and sharing that history with its visitors. Especially, I would like to thank Lori, who invited me to volunteer on the island in 1998 and 1999. I would also like to thank the Alcatraz Alumni Association and the Alcatraz Island Family group for welcoming me into the fold and sharing their many insights into life on the island.
This book owes a debt of gratitude to George DeVincenzi and Jim Albright, former Alcatraz guards, for sharing their experiences on the island, and Robert Luke, for speaking so eloquently on his time as a prisoner on Alcatraz.