Eliot Ness wrote in his autobiography that ?a guy they call Tony Napoli [sic] hanged himself in his cell with his necktie??
?They want a full show, all the courtroom trappings, the hue and cry, and all the rest. It?s utterly impossible for a man of my age to have done all the things with which I?m charged. I?m a spook, born of a million minds.??Al Capone
After the lunch at Sarabella, I did some research on Jimmy Nap. My knowledge of the mob coincided with my interest in the mob, which was nonexistent, so I decided to fill in the blanks.
In Five Familes: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America?s Most Powerful Mafia Empires, Selwyn Rabb wrote, ?Jimmy Nap was no small-time bookie or amateur gambler. A big-time Genovese earner, he had a lengthy yellow sheet for trying to fix boxing matches, for murder conspiracy, for felonious assault, for loan-sharking, and for heading a $35-million-a-year-policy and horse-race-betting network in Manhattan.?
According to Jerry Capechi and Tom Robbins, authors of Mob Boss: The Life of Little Al D?Arco, the Man Who Brought Down the Mafia, Jimmy Nap was a ?Genovese crime family stalwart?a dapper capo in the family serving a sentence for running a $35 million betting ring? Napoli was cut from somewhat different Mafia cloth. He lived in an east side town house with his wife Jeanne, a songwriter and theatrical producer. While he was in prison, a musical about Marilyn Monroe, written by Jeanne Napoli and financed by her husband, was playing on Broadway.?
In The Count in Monte Carlo: An Insider?s Look at Casino Life, Barry Sinkow?s story of his rise ?from an unknown comic to casino host,? Jimmy Napoli also makes an appearance: ?I was at the airport with a car and driver when Jimmy ?Nap? Napoli arrived. I introduced myself and we picked up his luggage. On the drive back to the hotel, I couldn?t help noticing that Napoli was a handsome man, movie star material. Quiet and well dressed, he chatted with me pleasantly making a big impression. I thought him the most personal and likeable guy? I knew before I left the hotel that our new guest was the comptroller for the Vito Genovese mob. Genovese had been in a war to become the time top crime man in the States. In making conversation with my passenger I stayed away from a cheery, ?And how is Mister Genovese?? because Napoli?s boss was serving time after being ratted on. So, we just talked small talk.?
I needed no more convincing.
Tony Napoli invited me to his home. He said he wanted me to see how he lived. He also said he had something important to show me.
I didn?t know Forest Hills from Forest Lawn and imagined him living in a mansion, like something out of The Godfather, or failing that, a nouveau pile like the monstrosity in Growing Up Gotti, but without the tantrums, hair gel, and plastic surgery.
Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth.
He lived modestly, extremely modestly. Tony Napoli lived in a conventional house on a conventional street in a conventional neighborhood. Each house was identical to the house next to it. There was one thing, however, that distinguished Tony Napoli?s house from those of his neighbors. A municipal flagpole was planted in the front yard, topped by a municipal flag, like something one would see in front of a post office or community college.
I found it a bit odd, even a bit disappointing, that he wasn?t living in the lap of luxury. I found it equally odd, if somewhat less disappointing, that a man who was presumably at war with the state, or the law enforcement arm of the state, would flaunt his patriotism by brazenly flying the stars and stripes.
I followed Tony Napoli into his house. The door wasn?t locked. I didn?t ask why. The front room was originally a porch that had been turned into his office. There was a desk, chair, and computer. There was a small table covered with Ring 8 paperwork. There was an empty bookcase. A large studio photograph of Jimmy Nap dominated the office. Framed in wood and bathed in sepia, he looked stern, serious, and formidable.
Tony Napoli suggested I follow him. We left his office, passed through the living room, into the dining room, where he suggested I have a seat. Then he went to prepare some tea.
There were several stacks of Dunkin? Donuts napkins on the dining room table. I must have been staring at the napkins when Tony Napoli reappeared.
?Why buy napkins,? he said, ?when I can get them for free down the street??
We chatted for a few minutes. Then Tony Napoli stood and walked to the big screen TV in the living room. He got to one knee, selected a video, and put into the VCR.
?This is what I wanted to show you,? he said. ?It?s from The Untouchables.?
The Emmy Award winning The Untouchables, starring Robert Stack as Eliot Ness, agent deluxe of the Treasury?s Bureau of Prohibition, graced America?s TV screens in the 1960s. Agent Ness was a single-minded, two-fisted crusader and his crusade in the Roaring Twenties was to nail Al Capone.
?I don?t know if it was my father who told Al to leave Brooklyn,? Tony Napoli said. ?Because he was a fugitive, they had to throw him in the back of a truck to go to Chicago. But I don?t know if my father was involved in that. We?re talking about a young Jimmy Nap. I don?t know that man. I wasn?t born then. You can?t get much information from me, except that my family watched TV and heard his name and read the newspapers. We never confronted him. We never said, ?Dad, look at what they said about you in the Daily News.? We were controlled. We were disciplined. He never opened the door to conversation of what he did when he was young with his immediate family.?
Tony Napoli pushed the PLAY button and sat on the sofa to my left.
The staccato voice of Walter Winchell, aka Mr. Broadway, the archetypal gossip columnist of his day, establishes the tone.
?On the night of November 7, 1929, a meeting took place in the office of Frank Nitti above the Montmartre Caf?. The reason for the meeting: What to do about the special squad? What to do about Eliot Ness??
Frank Nitti looks at his swarthy crew and says, ?We?re going to take a vote right now to see if we?re willing to take a chance on killing this Eliot Ness.? The men vote by flicking their fingers. It?s unanimous. Ness has to go.
?Eliot Ness and his squad were succeeding in their job of choking off the most important of all Capone?s revenues. But time was working against Eliot Ness, time that had been measured by days, weeks and months by a man a thousand miles away. Finally on March 19, 1930, having served ten months in a Philadelphia jail for carrying a gun, Al Capone returned to Chicago and a very critical situation.?
Capone, played by Neville Brand, makes his appearance in The Untouchables. He steps from a black sedan with a cigar in his mouth. There?s a scar on his face and a fedora on his head. Music in a minor key accompanies Al?s entrance into a crowded speakeasy, before giving way to the frothy strains of dozens of well-wishers singing, ?For he?s a jolly good fellow/ for he?s a jolly good fellow/ for he?s a jolly good fellow/ that nobody can deny.?
?Capone went first to the organization headquarters in the Caf? Montmartre where his offices were on the second floor. Here Capone presided over a meeting of the heads of his organization.?
With Capone seated at the head of a conference table, the organization?s private accountant, Jake ?Greasy Thumb? Guzik, approaches the boss and hands him a piece of paper.
?I?ve got some bad news, Al,? he says. ?We?ve had some breweries knocked off. Eight to be exact. Three on the South Side, including two new ones we set up while you were away. One in the Heights. Two on the North Side. One of them we took over from Moran?s. A big one out on Diversity. And another new one we set up on the county line.?
Capone stares straight ahead. ?What does that add up?? he asks.
?We lost 3850 barrels a day,? says Guzik. ?But we?re setting up big new one by the stockyards, big enough to replace the loss.?
?How ?bout the equipment? How much we lost there??
?I?m carrying that loss at $3,500,000.?
Capone is thinking about the crooked cops on his payroll when he asks, ?What about our protection??
?Well,? says the accountant, ?Frank can tell you about that.?
Capone looks over his left shoulder at Guzik and snarls, ?You tell me!?
The accountant looks worried. ?Our operating loss is going to make us have to cut down on the local graft,? he says. ?But we ought to be able to keep ?em looking the other way. It?s these other guys.?
?What other guys??
?The Feds have gotten up this special squad.?
Capone turns to Frank Nitti, his chief lieutenant, and aims an index figure at his face.
?You tell me.?
?It?s a special squad,? says Nitti, ?like Jake says. From all over the country, just to knock off all our stuff.?
?How big is that squad??
Nitti nervously adjusts his necktie.
Capone raises his voice and repeats, ?How big??
Nitti says, ?Seven, eight guys.?
?Seven, eight guys,? mimics Capone disdainfully. ?Seven, eight guys.?
Al Capone looks at his men like he wants them dead.
?Ponz!? barks the crime boss. ?You two-bit ponz. You lousy, stupid, yellow, stinking ponz. I?m away for ten months, ten months,? Capone pounds the table for emphasis, ?and we gotta problem with this Ness. Well I?ve had plenty of problems and I took care of them. So now I?m back and I?ll take care of Ness.?
Capone?s men look terrified. But he smiles and laughs psychotically. His men looked relieved. Capone laughs again, louder this time, and his men laugh as well. Then he suddenly stops laughing, catching his men short. Capone looks at them and says, ?Io, Io Al Capone. I took care of O?Banion, and Weiss, and Drucci, and Genna and all the rest.?
He stands, grabs a bottle of bootleg whiskey with his right hand and smashes it on the table. Broken glass flies everywhere.
?And that?s what?s a-gonna happen to Ness.?
Capone and his boys have a good laugh.
?Just seven, eight guys. While the mob heads met, Eliot Ness and his squad gave Capone their own welcome to Chicago. These men, specially selected from thousands in the Prohibition Bureau, were preparing to wreck still another Capone brewery. This effect of this raid would soon be felt by the mob and by Eliot Ness.?
After a few scenes establishing the ruthlessness of the mob toward whoever stands in their way, The Untouchables segues into a segment featuring The Stranger, played by Frank De Kova. Accompanied by portentous music, we get a close-up, ground level shot of The Stranger?s feet stepping in a puddle of water. The Stranger shakes his cuffs dry, steps from the camera, and heads toward a building in the distance.
Inside the building, we see The Stranger stride into a bar. He is wearing a dark shirt, white tie, light suit and matching fedora. He is dressed to kill. A clumsy old waiter carrying a tray of glasses accidentally bangs into The Stranger. The Stranger grabs the old man by the shirt and is brimming with menace. If looks could kill, the waiter would be dead.
?Scusate,? pleads the waiter. ?Scusate.? The Stranger pushes him aside, smooths the lapels of his jacket and disappears into a backroom.
The old waiter stoops to pick up the glasses and tray which The Stranger knocked from his hands, but the bar owner tells him, ?Never mind that. Take this in,? and gives him another tray. The old man follows instructions and enters the backroom. As kettledrums boom ominously on the soundtrack, the old man looks up and sees Al Capone and three of his men?as well as The Stranger?engaged in something important.
Capone is seated. He looks to his three men and nods his head. Frank Nitti walks to The Stranger and kisses him on the lips. The others follow suit. Walter Winchell explains: ?The mafia ritual known as the Kiss of Death. The man being ceremoniously kissed by the others in this room is the man who has been chosen to commit a murder.? The man chosen to commit murder, aka The Stranger, walks toward Al Capone and looks him in the eye. Capone stands, removes the cigar from his mouth, and gives The Stranger the Kiss of Death.
The Kiss of Death was real. It foretold violence. It sanctioned murder. The mafia custom of men kissing on the lips was banned by Lucky Luciano in 1931. ?After all,? he said, ?we would stick out kissing each other in restaurants and places like that.?
In the next scene of The Untouchables we see Eliot Ness and his partner, Joe Fuselli, played by Keenan Wynn, talking in a car in front of Ness? home after a long day at the office. Their banter is interrupted by the sound of screeching tires. A black sedan is coursing down on the agents. A machine gun spits a volley of bullets in the direction of Eliot Ness. Fuselli shouts, ?Watch out!? and throws Ness to the side. Bullets shatter glass and thud into Joe Fuselli. Eliot Ness can?t believe it. Joe Fuselli, his best friend, is dead.
?While Joe Fuselli was dying on a Chicago street, Al Capone was dining, visible to scores of people in a Chicago nightclub.?
Living it up in a world of his own creation, Capone has an ironclad alibi.
Cut to the waiter. He is on his knees, looking toward heaven, making the sign of the cross and praying. ?Joe was my friend,? he says. ?Never laugh at me. Never push me around.? The old man is heartbroken.
Eliot Ness and his boys are in the room. Ness asks, ?What did you see, Picco??
Picco is delirious. ?I ain?t going to let them get away with the killing, Joe. If I?d a knowed they were going to kill Joe, I?d have grabbed the knife and ripped it myself.?
?Who were they?? asks Ness.
?It was Nitti, Frank Nitti, and Volpe and D?Andrea. And the big fellow was there.?
?What did they do??
?Bacio di Morte. You know what that is?? Without waiting for a reply, Picco says: ?Kiss of Death.?
?Which one did they kiss??
Picco pauses. ?Jimmy Napoli was the one,? he says. ?They send Jimmy Napoli.?
I glanced at Tony Napoli. He was bursting with pride. He looked pleased as punch.
One of the agents steps from the shadows and asks, ?Who?s Jimmy Napoli??
?From Brooklyn,? says Picco, ?The Torpedo.?
This was before the dawn of a witness protection program, but this was one witness the Feds were programmed to protect. ?Picco, we?re going to take you somewhere where you?ll be safe,? Ness says. ?C?mon,? says another agent. ?We?ll take good care of you.?
Medium shot of a dark bedroom. Door flies open, light bathes the room, and Jimmy Napoli fires a shot from his bed. Ness grabs Jimmy Nap and try to restrain him. Ness stares at Jimmy Nap and says, ?Joe Fuselli.?
?Who? Say, who are you guys, anyway??
Ness asks Napoli, ?Where were you all night??
?You ruin my life,? says Jimmy Nap.
Ness slaps Jimmy Napoli across the face.
Another agent examines the bed and reports, ?Hasn?t been slept in.?
?C?mon, Napoli,? says Ness.
?What?s the rap??
?C?mon.? Eliot Ness and his boys drag Jimmy Nap to the door.
Napoli says, ?Wait a minute. I gotta get dressed.?
?Just get your coat on.?
?You got nothing on me,? says Jimmy Nap. ?I was playing poker with six other guys until an hour ago. I was playing poker with my friends an hour ago. I?m telling you. They?ll back me up. You can?t touch me.?
?C?mon.?
Jimmy Napoli says, ?Say, who is this Joe Fuselli??
Ness is enraged at the remark and lands a hard right to Jimmy Nap?s unprotected mug.
Long shot of Picco being led to jail for his own protection. Walter Winchell, edgy as always, provides the narration: ?To safeguard the only witness who could link Capone to the murder of Joe Fuselli, Ness made arrangements to keep Angelo Picco under guard in a cell in Chicago City Jail.?
As Ness places his star witness in a cell, he tells him, ?I don?t want to lock you up, but this is the best place. Later we?ll take you somewhere else out of town.?
?Please, don?t keep me too long.?
?Just until you testify against Napoli and Capone.?
The steel door clangs shut. Picco falls to his knees and starts to pray.
?Within two hours of the arrest of Jimmy Napoli, Al Capone forestalled his own arrest by appearing at the office of Deputy Police Commissioner Howard. With him was the mob?s attorneys.?
Deputy Police Commissioner Howard has two plainclothes detectives by his side.
?Well, Commissioner,? says Capone genially. ?I heard you was looking for me.?
?That?s right, Al. We have a few things to ask you.?
?That?s why I?m here.?
The two men are chummy.
?Before you ask any questions,? says one of Capone?s lawyers, ?it?s understood that Mr. Capone is here of his own free will. Just what is the charge in connection with which you want to question Mr. Capone??
?About the murder of a federal agent,? one of the detectives says.
?When did this alleged homicide occur??
?One-fifteen this morning.?
?At that hour Mr. Capone was dining at the 318 Club.?
?How do you know??
?We can produce a number of reliable witnesses to attest to that.?
?We got a witness too,? the first detective says. Then the second detective adds, ?You didn?t kiss Jimmy Napoli for fun, did you, Al??
Capone laughs and asks, ?Who?s this Jimmy Napoli?? He looks amused, indifferent, above the fray, a mobster without a care in the world.
Segue back to jail. The turnkeys open the cell door for Eliot Ness. Picco lies motionless. He was stabbed through the heart to keep him from talking.
?Once again,? says Walter Winchell, ?a man who could have testified for the state had been silenced. There now could be no way to prove that Capone hired Jimmy Napoli to commit murder.?
It was curtains for Picco. It was curtains for Mr. Broadway. It was curtains for The Untouchables. But it was not curtains for Eliot Ness.
Eliot Ness? memoir The Untouchables was written with Oscar Fraley and published in 1957. According to Ness, Joe Fuselli was in reality his chauffeur Frank Basile. Basile in the book, like Fuselli in the TV show, died in a volley of gunshots. But his body was dumped in a ditch where it was found several days later. If Ness can be believed, he was nowhere near the chauffeur at the time of his death. Agent Ness did, however, see his driver in the morgue.
?Lying there was a lifeless husk which had been Frank Basile!? wrote Ness. ?I had expected it, I suppose, and in the course of my career I had often witnessed the ravages of violent death. You think, eventually, that nothing can disturb you and that your nerves are impregnable. Yet, looking down at that familiar face, different somehow in its final repose, I realized that death is something to which we never become calloused if that person is someone close? Carefully I drew the clammy rubber sheet up over his immobile face and thought of how much I owed this big man lying there on a slab meant for me.?
Eliot Ness searched for an eyewitness to the shooting who was known around town as the Clown. ?Eventually we traced him to a grubby little room in the basement of a tenement apartment.?
?Did you hear about Frank Basile?? asked Ness.
?Yeah, I heard,? the Clown said.
?Well, what do you know about it??
The Clown?s response sounds familiar: ?That Basile was my friend. He never laughed at me cus I was ugly?or pushed me around. He even buy me a drink and sit with me. He was my friend, Frank was. Sure I?ll tell you something.?
The Clown saw what Picco saw, give or take a few details.
?Yesterday,? wrote Ness in the voice of the Clown, ?I?m walkin? past Pete?s poolroom, y?know, the one where the Unione meets. So I looks in the window and I sees three or four guys kissin? each other. Y?now what that means, Mr. Ness??
Eliot Ness said ?the kiss of death!? Then he explained, ?That expression later was to lose its original meaning through popular usage. But it evolved from the fact that when a Maffia killer was selected, by tradition he was given a ceremonial ?kiss of death? by all those at the enclave.?
The Clown had something to add: ?When they pick somebody to knock somebody off, they always go through that rigmarole. Well, right off I figure some bird has had it. But natcherly I don?t know who.?
Ness bored in. ?Did you see the man they were kissing?? he asked.
?Yeah,? said the Clown. ?It was a guy they call Tony Napoli [sic].? On the next page Ness wrote, ?Napoli hanged himself in his cell with his necktie.?
Tony Napoli, Jimmy Nap?s son, smirked at the agent?s errors. ?Maybe I should sue him,? he said.
Eliot Ness may have played fast and loose with the truth, but I wondered if Hollywood did it any better.
?The Torpedo, so-called, from Brooklyn,? Tony Napoli said. ?That?s the way I talk about it. It was before I was born. I was born in 1935. My father met Al in a speakeasy in Coney Island. That?s where he met a youngster named Jimmy Nap. That?s where Capone stabbed a guy, the guy died evidently, and they got him out of Brooklyn and sent him to Chicago where he belonged. Frankie Yale was the boss of Coney Island bootlegging and Yale wanted him out of town, because he was drawing heat to the speakeasy that Yale was supplying with booze. And he got rid of him. But my father got to know Al in Coney Island.?
Capone went to Chicago, made his move, and the rest is history. He also, according to The Untouchables, gave Jimmy Nap the Kiss of Death, the go-ahead to clip Eliot Ness.
?That?s what they said. Not from anything Jimmy Nap told me. He never spoke about things like that. I never said to him, Was that you or everything? We were respectful in that way and well-mannered?as far as that goes.?
But it must have been a shock to see Jimmy Nap portrayed in such a fashion.
?Some of the kids, my younger brothers and sisters, his grandchildren, were shocked. They figured it was someone else with the same name from the same area. I wasn?t shocked about anything of what could have happened before I was born, because in that lifestyle I?m not shocked about anything. Because, to be honest, I?m not shocked about how a guy gets to the top. It?s not by being nice.
?Jimmy Napoli came along the way somehow, had to defend himself, had to do favors, what they call favors, because he had a trained mind?and he accepted the responsibilities that went with it. Any time they was a problem in the streets, any time anyone had a problem with their landlords, any time they had a problem with a marriage, any time they had a problem with one of their daughters dating the wrong guy, Jimmy Nap interceded. He wasn?t elected in a vote. He was just appointed by certain people and he accepted it as that. The mature Jimmy Nap was selected by the family. The young Jimmy Nap nobody knew him, because he was never home. He was always traveling around, going someplace.
?That?s what I have to say about that particular Jimmy Nap I never knew. But if you hear stories about Jimmy Nap or anybody also before my time, it wasn?t for publication among family, cousins, relatives. That was a no-no to talk about things like that if you read something in the newspaper about someone in the family or a close friend. It was closemouthed. Don?t talk about it. In other words, they didn?t have to say don?t believe everything you read and don?t believe everything you see on TV. When names are mentioned, we didn?t have to take that route, because we knew enough to not even talk about it, even in conversation.?
Others were less sanguine than Tony Napoli when it came to certain shows on TV. According to The Last Mafiosi, Jimmy Fratianno?s tell-all to Ovid Demaris, the following conversation took place between Johnny Roselli, Chicago boss Sam Giancana?s rep in Las Vegas, and Jimmy the Weasel, godfather of the California mob turned stool pigeon, regarding The Untouchables.
Roselli asked, ?Have you seen that TV show, The Untouchables??
Jimmy the Weasel shook his head. ?A couple of times but I don?t have time to watch that shit.?
?Let me tell you something, Jimmy. Millions of people all over the world see this show every fucking week. It?s even popular in Italy. And what they see is a bunch of Italian lunatics running around with machine guns, talking out of the corner of their mouths, slopping up spaghetti like a bunch of fucking pigs. They make Capone and Nitti look like bloodthirsty maniacs. The guys that write that shit don?t know the first thing about what things were in those days. Eliot Ness, my ass. The tax boys got Al, not Ness. And what did he ever have to do with Frank Nitti??
?Ness was in Cleveland for a while and did nothing,? Jimmy said, wondering what Roselli had in mind.
?You know, Mae Capone brought a two-million dollar lawsuit against CBS when they came out with a two-part film on Ness?s book. She lost the suit and then Desilu Productions went to ABC to do a series, and since then it?s gone from bad to worse.?
?Nobody pays attention to that shit,? Jimmy said. ?It?s like a comic book, a joke. Who cares??
?I?ll tell you, Jimmy. Sam cares, Joe Batters cares, Paul Ricca cares, and I care.?
?Oh, I understand that, but the public don?t care. Besides, you know, it?s not putting nobody in jail.?
?Jimmy, what I?m about to tell you has been decided by own family. The top guys have voted a hit. I?ve already talked to Bomp about it. We?re going to clip Desi Arnaz, the producer of this show.?
Jimmy whistled through his teeth.
Not long after that conversation, Sam Giancana pulled the contract on Desi Arnaz. Lucille Ball?s husband, the titular producer of The Untouchables, never knew how close he came to dying.
