Free Uncle Al Capone by Deirdre Marie Capone Page B

until about six years later when Uncle Matty had dinner with Bob and me at our house shortly after we married. After we’d had dinner and the kids were put to bed, we sat down and relaxed in the living room with a drink. Matty smoked a cigar that really stunk, but, in those days, we tolerated smoking in the house.
    We were chatting away about the Cubs, the Bears, and boxing—Matty’s favorite sport—when I suddenly remembered what Ralph said about Matty being in the car with McGurn the day before the massacre. I asked him about it.
    At first his eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Who told you about that?” He asked.
    I told him how I had gone to visit my grandfather and spent a lot of time talking with him about the years before I was born.
    “Wow, you must have caught him in a weak moment,” Matty said. “He hardly ever talked about shit like that.” In those days, I never used profanity. My grandmother Theresa taught me that bad language is not something a lady stoops to. But I sure heard plenty of it from her sons, so it didn’t faze me to hear Matty use it in my house, as long as my kids weren’t listening.
    Matty went on to confirm everything my grandfather had told me—except that he added that he and McGurn were in his car on February 13, and he was driving.
    Matty was never heavily involved in the Outfit. He was weaker than and not as bright as Uncle Al and Ralph, but he liked being known as a Capone and a big shot, so he kind of bragged about working side-by-side with McGurn.
    Suddenly, Bob spoke up. “This reminds me of something my dad told me about what my uncle Tommy said about Valentine’s Day, 1929,” Bob said. Tommy May’s brother was one of the seven men killed that day: John May. John always insisted that he was just an auto mechanic for Moran and not a criminal. All the same, he had access to information, because he had been complaining just prior to the shooting that some crooked cops were hijacking Bugs Moran’s booze, and Moran was going to put a stop to it and get them kicked off the force. Based on those complaints, Tommy had told Bob’s dad on two or three occasions that he was sure it was cops and not Capone who did it.
    At that point, I was pretty sure I had the truth about the Saint Valentines Day Massacre. I heard pretty much the same story coming not only from the family of Al Capone, but also the family of one of the victims. And I had read in clippings from the Chicago newspapers that one of the seven slaughtered men, Frank Gusenberg, survived long enough to tell police Sergeant Thomas Loftus, “Cops did it.” Now, from what I heard about Frank Gusenberg, he had enough interaction with the police to know a cop when he saw one.
    But still, this account was one I never read in any book about Uncle Al and never saw in any movie or television show about him. I started to believe the massacre was an example of what Al was talking about when he said, “I’ve done a lot of bad things, things I wish I didn’t have to do to survive, but I haven’t done half of the rotten things that they say I’ve done.”
    After Matty left our house that night I told myself, “OK, maybe I’m easily convinced because I’m a Capone and would like to think that my family didn’t kill those seven men.” I heard my family’s story and Bob’s story, but I knew that others could and would say these were biased accounts. And as much as I wanted to believe Ralph and Matty, I couldn’t deny they had a vested interest in clearing their brother’s name. I needed more verification—something that came from outside the Capone sphere of influence.
    Just recently, I got that verification. A historian, David Ward, published an excellent and well-documented book called Alcatraz-The Gangster Years . It includes a section about the slaughter on N. Clark Street. In it, Ward disclosed an announcement made by Frederick D. Silloway, the local prohibition administrator, shortly after the massacre. He was quoted