Review: Capone May Go Free: Book I, A Society of Power

Capone May Go Free: Book I, A Society of Power by Knowledge Network
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Donnie Parrillo was the alderman for Chicago’s First Ward for much of the 1960s. If you know your Chicago gangster history at all, you know that “First Ward” was, more or less, a synonym for “Outfit” or “mob,” so it figures he’d have a lot of insider stories to tell. Also, his father was a mob lawyer going back to the 1930s, so you figure on a fair number of second-hand stories too.

Instead, what we get here are the rambling reminiscences of a guy who grew up in Little Italy, a guy who sings the virtues of “Taylor Street justice” as the killing of guys who break one or another understood policies of the Old World ethics.

Parrillo has a handful of colorful stories. It’s something that, after his father got sent a Black Hand note threatening him and his mother, no less a personage than future Outfit boss Milwaukee Phil Alderisio came to “play” with him until the threat passed. It’s also something that he knew Sam Giancana as a kid and that Giancana handpicked him to run for alderman.

It’s also something, I suppose, to have written down the Taylor Street legend that Al Capone contracted syphilis from actress Jean Harlow, whose own early death – says this legend – was from syphilis as well. I don’t buy the story; Harlow, among other things, was the bombshell who distracted James Cagney in Public Enemy, so she was already associated in the public imagination with the gangster moll ideal. That doesn’t sound like Capone’s style from the various biographies out there. (Neither of the major recent ones mentions her.)

But, for too much of this we get a get-off-my-lawn series of complaints about the way contemporary standards have slipped. Like a lot of people who spend time reflecting on the gangster world, he starts to valorize some of them, complaining that the government is every bit as corrupt as the Outfit without the attendant hypocrisy.

I picked this up because I hoped there’d be an angle on the politics of the era that we have not yet heard. Sorry to say that, at least in this volume, there isn’t. I’d like to know what it was like on City Council when he was expected to vote the way Giancana told him, but we don’t hear about a single vote or motion. (OK, one. Mayor Daley once pissed him off by not notifying about an ordinance that would have affected the First Ward, but we don’t get any substance to the story, just a tough-guy account of his showdown with Daley.)

Parrillo is a raconteur, so the book has that going for it, but it’s misleading in its premise. Despite his claim to know more about the history of the mob than the assembled “Merry Gangsters Literary Society” (some of my old pals from Chicago), he comes across less as an insider from the “golden days” of the mob than as an old guy who simply grew up in the middle of a lot of stories from the neighborhood.


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