Frankie Yale: The Brooklyn Don Who Taught Capone the Game
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At about four o'clock on Sunday 1 July 1928, a brand new Lincoln came tearing down 44th Street in Borough Park, Brooklyn, with a black sedan right behind it. There was a burst of gunfire. The Lincoln swerved, mounted the kerb and smashed into the stone steps of number 923. The man at the wheel was already dead.
He was Frankie Yale, the best-dressed gangster in Brooklyn and the man who'd given a teenage Al Capone his first proper job. Almost everyone assumed Capone had ordered the hit. A lot of what gets written about Yale is legend, though, and some of the most repeated details don't survive a look at the records. Here's the version that does.
Quick Answers
Who was Frankie Yale? A Calabrian-born Brooklyn gang boss (real name Francesco Ioele) who ran bootlegging, protection and labour rackets in the 1920s.
How did he know Al Capone? Capone worked for him as a bouncer and barman at the Harvard Inn on Coney Island from about 1917, before moving to Chicago.
Who killed Frankie Yale? Nobody was ever convicted. Police and most historians blame gunmen sent by Capone after the two fell out over hijacked whisky.
Was he killed with a Tommy gun? Probably, but it's disputed. Early reports and the coroner said no machine gun was used. Later ballistics linked a Thompson to the killing.
Where is he buried? Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn.
From Calabria to Brooklyn
Francesco Ioele was born on 22 January 1893 in Longobucco, a mountain village in Calabria. Most accounts say the family came to New York around 1900. Mafia historian Thomas Hunt went back to the paperwork and found that his father Domenick came over first in 1898, and the rest of the family arrived on 4 September 1907 aboard the SS Nord America. Frank was 14. By 1910 they were living on 66th Street in Brooklyn, his father was selling wholesale produce and Frank had a job as a railway guard.
It didn't last. He fell in with Johnny Torrio and the Five Points Gang, learned extortion and enforcement, and at some point swapped Ioele for the smarter-sounding Yale (often spelled Uale at the time).
His early record is less dramatic than the legend. You'll often read that he was arrested for murder in 1912. Hunt found that his first arrest, in October 1912, was for disorderly conduct, and it cost him a $10 fine. A robbery and assault charge in 1913 collapsed when the victim changed his story. Then in February 1917 police caught him carrying revolvers at a coffeehouse in Bath Beach, and he did a stretch in the penitentiary on Blackwell's Island.
The Harvard Inn and a Kid Called Capone
Yale made his first real money from ice. In the days before fridges, every household and bar needed it delivered, and Yale took over the Brooklyn ice trade by leaning on the men who drove the carts. In 1917 he used the profits to open the Harvard Inn, a bar and dance hall on Seaside Walk in Coney Island. The name was a joke on his own. If he was Yale, his bar could be Harvard.
One of his staff was an 18-year-old from Brooklyn called Alphonse Capone, who worked the door and the bar. In early August 1917, during a heatwave, Capone made a crude remark to a young woman called Lena Galluccio. Her brother Frank demanded an apology, didn't get one and pulled a knife. He slashed Capone across the face three times, leaving the scars that gave him the nickname he hated.
What Yale did next says a lot about him. He didn't let Capone take revenge. He called a sit-down and settled it like a business dispute. Galluccio was reportedly told to pay Capone $1,500, and Yale lent him the money, which put Galluccio in his debt. Capone later joked that he'd had a Yale education. He stayed until around 1919, when Torrio called him out to Chicago, where his rise and eventual collapse are another story.
Brooklyn's Best-Dressed Racketeer
By the early 1920s Yale ran one of the biggest criminal outfits in Brooklyn. Prohibition made him one of the borough's main bootleggers, and he added brothels, protection money from restaurants and control of jobs on the docks. Unlike the older Sicilian gangs, he'd work with anyone. His crew included Neapolitans, Calabrians and Sicilians, among them Anthony "Little Augie" Carfano, Joe Adonis and a young Albert Anastasia.
He also had a string of legitimate businesses. There was a funeral home in Bath Beach, a restaurant on Flatbush Avenue, laundries, a taxi firm and a cigar factory. The cigars came in boxes with his own face on the lid and were said to be awful, and it's said that "a Frankie Yale" became local slang for a cheap smoke. When police asked what he did for a living, he liked to say he was an undertaker.
He looked the part of a successful businessman. The papers called him the Beau Brummell of Brooklyn and the Prince of Pals, and he wore diamonds on his fingers and his belt buckle.
He was generous too, in a way that bought a lot of loyalty. In December 1922 he handed out about 12 tons of coal to poor families. He gave regularly to St Rosalia's, his local Catholic church, and in May 1927 he put on a night of boxing to raise money for its new school. People in Bath Beach knew that if their shop got robbed, Yale might well replace the takings.
He even carried a gun legally for a while. When he was arrested in early 1922 for having an unlicensed pistol, he was let go because he held a permit signed by a state Supreme Court judge, which tells you how things worked in 1920s New York.
Chicago Calls: Colosimo and O'Banion
Yale's name turns up in two of the most important murders in Chicago history, though nothing was ever proved.
In May 1920, "Big Jim" Colosimo was shot dead in the lobby of his own restaurant. Colosimo was Torrio's boss and he didn't want to get into bootlegging. Yale was in Chicago at the time and police considered him a suspect. A witness who seemed ready to identify him abruptly changed his story.
In November 1924 he was back. Dean O'Banion, the leader of the North Side Gang, was shot in his flower shop on 10 November by three men who walked in as customers. Yale had come to town with an associate, Saverio "Sam" Pollaccia. When police picked him up he said he was only there for the funeral of Mike Merlo, the head of the Unione Siciliana, who'd died two days before O'Banion. His alibi held and he went home. The gang war that followed lasted five years.
Bullets in Brooklyn
Back home, plenty of people wanted Yale dead. The traditional story is that his big enemy was the Irish White Hand Gang on the docks. In practice most of the men who tried to kill him were Italian.
In February 1921 he was shot in the lung in a brawl on Park Row in Manhattan. That July he was arrested over the murder of a gangster called Ernesto Melchiorre, whose body had been found decapitated, and released for lack of evidence. Days later gunmen opened fire on his car, wounding his brother Angelo and another man. Then Melchiorre's brother Silvio was shot dead, and Yale was arrested and released again.
In 1923, gunmen killed his chauffeur by mistake while the man was driving Yale's family home from a christening.
The most famous shooting came in the early hours of 26 December 1925 at the Adonis Social Club on 20th Street. Richard "Peg Leg" Lonergan, boss of the White Hand, turned up with his men and started throwing insults around. When the lights came back on, Lonergan and two of his men were dead. Capone was in town visiting and was among those picked up by police. The New York City archives still hold the police file, and its summary is blunt: Capone and others were arrested but never charged. It was the end of the White Hand as a serious force.
The Falling Out With Capone
By now Capone was running Chicago and Yale was one of his suppliers. Whisky landed on the coast near New York, and Yale's job was to get it safely onto lorries heading west. Then the lorries started getting hijacked before they'd left Brooklyn.
Capone suspected Yale was stealing from him and selling the same whisky twice. He sent a man called James DeAmato to keep an eye on things. In July 1927 DeAmato was found shot in the head on a Brooklyn street. Hunt puts it simply: "The friendship between Yale and Capone ended at that moment".
1 July 1928
Yale spent that Sunday afternoon at his Sunrise Club at 14th Avenue and 65th Street. The usual story is that he took a phone call saying something was wrong at home. His second wife Lucita had given birth to a daughter only two months earlier, so it was exactly the sort of call that would get him moving. He turned down company and left alone in his new Lincoln.
A black sedan picked him up along New Utrecht Avenue and he tried to outrun it. The gunmen first fired through his back window. Then, between 9th and 10th Avenues on 44th Street, the two cars drew level and they let him have it with pistols and a sawn-off shotgun. The Lincoln ploughed into the front steps of number 923. Yale was 35.
Popular accounts say the car was armoured but the dealer hadn't bulletproofed the windows. It's a great detail and it's repeated everywhere, but it's hard to find in the original reports, so treat it with care.
Police found the killers' car abandoned a few blocks away with guns inside, and reportedly traced it back to Tennessee. They also learned that several Capone men had left Miami and reached New York hours before the shooting. Two local men were pulled in and quickly released. Nobody was ever charged.
Was It Really the First Tommy Gun Killing in New York?
This is the claim Yale is best known for, and it's messier than it looks.
In December 1929 a policeman called Charles Skelly was shot dead in St Joseph, Michigan. The killer was traced to a house nearby where a man calling himself Fred Dane was living. He was really Fred "Killer" Burke, a hired gun who worked with Capone's outfit, and in the house police found an arsenal that included two Thompson submachine guns. The ballistics pioneer Calvin Goddard tested both. He said they'd been used in the St Valentine's Day Massacre that February, and that one of them, a Colt Model 1921 with the serial number 2347, had also been fired at Frankie Yale.
That's where the "first Tommy gun murder in New York" line comes from. But Hunt points out a problem. The first reports of the shooting and the coroner's own findings said no machine gun had been used, only pistols and a shotgun. So either the men on the scene missed it, or Goddard's match was shakier than it's usually made out to be. Ballistics was a very young science in 1929. The honest answer is probably, but not certainly.
The Funeral and the Two Widows
Whatever killed him, Brooklyn gave Yale one of the biggest gangland funerals the city had seen. The service was at St Rosalia's, the church he'd bankrolled. He lay in a silver casket said to have cost $15,000. It took 38 cars to carry the flowers, around 200 more followed with mourners, and something like 15,000 people lined the route to Holy Cross Cemetery.
Then came the scene at the graveside, where two women each said they were Mrs Yale. For once the gossip was nearly true. Yale had married Mary DeLapere in 1917 and had two daughters with her, Isabella and Rose. They separated in the summer of 1926. A year later he married Lucita in a civil ceremony, and their daughter was born in May 1928. But the divorce from Mary wasn't finished. A court had only granted a provisional decree in June 1928, a few weeks before he died. So both women had a claim.
There wasn't much to fight over. For all the diamonds and the silver coffin, Yale's estate was valued two years later at just $3,000.
His grave is easy to miss. The lettering on the headstone is so faint you can barely read it, and the story goes that the cemetery wanted it that way, since a known gangster wouldn't normally have been allowed in consecrated ground.
What Happened Next
Yale's rackets were split up. Carfano took over a lot of the money-making operations, while much of his territory and many of his men in southern Brooklyn went to Giuseppe Profaci, whose family would become one of New York's Five Families. By the end of 1928 Joe Masseria was being called the boss of bosses, and the city was sliding towards the Castellammarese War.
There was a grim postscript in Red Hook too. Soon after the murder, gunmen looking for revenge drove up to the corner of Sackett and Van Brunt Streets and opened fire on a group of young Puerto Rican men. They'd got the wrong people.
Capone was questioned about Yale's death more than once and never charged. Seven months later his gunmen lined up seven men against a garage wall in Chicago, using at least one of the same weapons. Yale had taught him how to settle a dispute with a sit-down instead of a knife. By 1928 Capone had stopped bothering with the sit-down.
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Sources
Thomas Hunt, The American Mafia: What do we know about Frankie Yale?
Cosa Nostra News: What you didn't know about mobster Frankie Yale (2016)
Today I Found Out: How Al "Scarface" Capone got his scars (2015)
NYC Department of Records and Information Services: Prohibition (2019)
National Crime Syndicate: Who was Frankie Yale and how did he die?
Small Arms Review: Machine gun forensics and the St Valentine's Day Massacre
