A TALK WITH AL CAPONE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17437, 8 April 1931, Page 12

A TALK WITH AL CAPONE

WOMAN’S ENTERPRISE COMPLAINT OF PERSECUTION NKW YORK, Jan. 17. Mrs. Eleanor Patterson, (alitor of (ho Washington Herald, wlio called upon Al Caiiont; at Ins Miami mansion in Florida, to day recounts an interview which .she lm:l with the gang leader. Describing his powerful physique site says: “lie is a. man with the neck and shoulders of a wrestler, one of. those prodigious Italians, thick-chested and close on six feet tall, very much of the same general type as Mussolini. “Ilia age is 31, but he looks more like t\b. He is very human in his love for Ins little son and for Christinas trees, I id his eyes when he is roused are those til a tiger ”

Capone, according to his interviewer, is absolutely convinced that he is not getting a square deal, either from the law or from society, and lie is fretting over it. “I don’t interfere with ‘big hvsiness’ ” he said. “None of the big business guys can say f ever look a dollar from ’em. Why, 1 done a favor tor one of the big newspapers when they was up against if- broke a strike lor 'em.” “LET MY RACKET RE” “And what do L get for doing ’em a favor?” he asked. “Here they’ve been ever since, damped on my back. I only want to do business, you understand, with my own class. \Yhv can t they let me alone? 1 don’t interfere with them, any, get me? I don't interfere with their 1 racket and they should let my racket be.” Capone almost broke down under tbe stress of his alleged persecution, whereupon Mrs. Patterson reminded him : “Well, you are still the Tsar of Slip had meant to say “gangdom,” but left the title incomplete. “Yes, yes,” resumed Capone, “but they’re for ever after me all the time, trying to frame me. Why, they’ve got me framed in Chicago now. If I don’t answer that income-tax charge they’re going to get me on a trumped un charge under the Vagrancy Act. It ain’t fair.”

Capone’s bodyguard of athletic voting men followed Mrs. Patterson and their

master through the trees and over the lawn of his estate, past the big swimming pool, to his expensively furnished home, where they chatted quietly on the porch. Domestic service at the gangster’s Miami home is described as perfect.

“They arrested me,” Capone continued, “11 times in three days last year, right hero in Miami. I gave £50,000 for this place, and I’ve got as much right to live here with my wife and kid as any man. 1 guess 11 times in three days was too much even for the’ crackers down here. It done me a lot of good. Why, I got sympathy for that."

He smibd Ids thick-lipped, boyish smile. You could see, comments Mrs. Patterson, that public sympathy, if and whenever he gets it, means a whole lot to Capone. As things exist in America to-day under the prohibition law, the gang leader feels that his racket is just as good as anybody else s racket, and he complains that society defeated two or three efforts he made to get into legitimate business.