One Summer: America, 1927

Sacco and Vanzetti supporters. Thayer spent the rest of his life living under police guard at his Boston club, though in fact he didn’t have a great deal of life left. He died a little over six months later, aged seventy-five. Alvan Fuller , the other principal figure in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, retired as governor of Massachusetts in 1929 but lived under police guard for some years. After Myron Herrick’s death, Fuller was considered for the position of ambassador to France, but was effectively vetoed by the French, who said they couldn’t guarantee his safety. Instead he devoted the remaining twenty-nine years of his life to business and philanthropy. He died of a heart attack at a Boston cinema in 1958.
     
    Jack Dempsey lost most of his fortune in the Wall Street crash. In 1935 he opened a restaurant on Broadway which was a New York institution for almost forty years before closing in 1974. Dempsey himself lived until 1983, dying at the age of eighty-seven.
    Gene Tunney married an heiress from the Carnegie family, Polly Lauder, in 1929. She had never seen him fight. They honeymooned on the Adriatic island of Brioni, where Tunney ‘walked, swam and talked’ with George Bernard Shaw. Presumably he spent a little time with his bride as well. Tunney wrote somereminiscences, served on the boards of several large companies, and became ‘a speaker of overwhelming authority and composure on any subject at all’, as John Lardner recorded just a touch acidly in a New Yorker profile in 1950. His son John served as US Senator for California from 1965 to 1971. Tunney died in 1978 aged eighty-one.
    The most successful of the 1920s boxers, however, was the wild bull Luis Firpo . Having arrived in America penniless, Firpo went home to Argentina $1 million richer after six years in the ring. He invested his fortune wisely and built up a business and ranching empire that eventually extended to an estate of over 200,000 acres. He was worth about $5 million when he died in 1960, aged sixty-five.
     
    The tennis star Bill Tilden won the Wimbledon men’s singles final for the last time in 1930 at the age of thirty-seven. After retiring from tennis, he pursued an acting career and toured successfully in the lead role in a revival of Dracula , the hit production of 1927. He also developed a tragic weakness for slim young boys. In 1947, he was sentenced to one year in jail in Los Angeles for interfering with a minor. Soon after his release, he was caught doing the same thing again and imprisoned a second time. He lost his few remaining friends and declined into a shabby, malodorous poverty. When he died in 1953 of a heart attack at the age of sixty, he had a net worth of $80.
     
    Chicago Mayor Big Bill Thompson turned on Al Capone shortly after the Tunney–Dempsey fight in the belief – clearly delusional – that Capone was hurting his prospects for national political success, possibly as a presidential candidate for the Republicans. Shorn of protection, Capone moved to Florida in early 1928 and took up residence in Miami Beach. The next year he was arrested while changing trains in Philadelphia and sentenced to a year in prison for carrying a concealed weapon. In 1931, he was convicted of income tax evasion and given eleven years in prison.
    Prison was not too tough for Capone. He had a bed with a sprung mattress and homemade meals were delivered to his cell. At Thanksgiving he was served a turkey dinner by a butler hired for the day. He was allowed to keep a stock of liquor and to use the warden’s office to receive guests. The warden vehemently denied that Capone received preferential treatment, then was caught using Capone’s car. In 1934, Capone’s situation became considerably less attractive when Alcatraz opened in San Francisco Bay and he was part of its first intake. Capone was released in late 1939, by which point he was suffering acutely from late-onset syphilis. He died in Florida in 1947.
     
    At just the time that Al Capone was entering Alcatraz, on the other side of the country Charles Ponzi was being deported to Italy. He moved to Brazil and died in poverty on a charity ward of a hospital in Buenos Aires in 1949.
     
    Mabel Walker Willebrandt , the lawyer who devised the idea of going after criminals like Al Capone on the grounds of tax evasion, lived until 1963, dying in California just before her seventy-fourth birthday. After leaving government in 1929, she took a high-paying job as chief counsel