On the trail (maybe) of Al Capone in Mexico
Rumours abound of gangster’s presence, but how much is true?
Many argue that the golden age of Tijuana was during Prohibition, when the city was mythologized as the premiere playground for the rich and thirsty. Hollywood stars with a taste for betting and boozing made it a favourite getaway, and the city came to represent the shadowy side of the American appetite — a place to do anything and everything they couldn’t do at home.
With its then-porous land border and miles of wild coastline, Tijuana and neighbouring northern Baja California proved too tempting to resist for many opportunistic rumrunners during those dry years. Ask any Tijuana local who ran things back then and you’ll hear one name repeated: Al Capone.
The Chicago gangster seems to have left his mark on everything, from an illegal card game at a secluded coastal hideaway to any number of local cantinas. It’s a compelling story. But is it true? I went to find out, heading for a place that’s synonymous with Prohibition-era Tijuana: the Agua Caliente casino.
The original Agua Caliente casino, resort and spa was built in 1928 atop a natural hot spring — hence the name, Spanish for “hot water.”
“Its only rival in the world is Monte Carlo,” declared the Los Angeles Times in 1929, so glamorous was the 655-acre (265-hectare) complex, which included an Olympic-size pool, Turkish baths, steam caves, a horse-racing track, guest bungalows and 500 hotel rooms with tortoiseshell toilet seats, not to mention an airstrip to accommodate the planes of the Hollywood elite. Signed photos of previous guests Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks adorned the walls, and rooms ranged from $5 to $12 US per night; bathing suits for use in the spa cost 50 cents. The turf for the 18-hole championship golf course was said to have been imported from Europe.
Unfortunately, that Agua Caliente went out of business in 1938, and the casino that bears its name today has little in common with its predecessor. Reopened in 2008 at a fraction of the size, the hulking beige building is as generic as anything on the Vegas strip, all dimly lit game rooms filled with glazed-eyed patrons feeding coins into chiming electronic gambling machines. A large picture window looks out on the racetrack, where a few hours from now a half-dozen greyhounds will chase a motorized white rabbit around the same track trod by Seabiscuit when he won the Agua Caliente Handicap in 1938.
The elegance seems to have gone out of the place, along with any evidence that gangsters like Capone ever hung around. José Gabriel Rivera Delgado, founder of the Tijuana Municipal Archive, points me toward one of the few testimonies that exist from the era, from a former Caliente coat check girl named Elena de La Paz de Barrón, who claimed to have met Capone. Her memory was recorded in a 1982 book, Panorama Histórico de Baja California.
“One day there was a big fuss,” she said. “Police, a big crowd and somebody’s bodyguards, like something out of a movie. Who could it be, we wondered, and somebody said, ‘Nobody special, just Al Capone.’ He wasn’t ugly, with a small scar on his face and a lovely beaver hat. I gave him the ticket, and he smiled at me, like a flirt. Everybody wanted to see the hat. And when it was time to give the hat back, bam! He tips me a $50 bill!”
The original spa and resort site, not far from the current casino, is now Lázaro Cárdenas High School. That’s where I waylay students David and Alejandro, on their way to class, to ask whether they know anything about their school’s checkered past.
“My dad used to go here, and he saw the tunnels,” says David, in Spanish. “Tunnels?” I ask. “Yeah,” he says. “That gringo built them to carry alcohol across during Prohibition. What’s his name? From Chicago?”
“Caponay,” says Alejandro, pronouncing it in Spanish.
“Yeah, Caponay. My dad saw the tunnels. But now they’re covered over.”
They tell me the tunnels ran to the airport and across the border to San Diego. The claim sounds dubious to me, but perhaps more convincing to kids who’ve grown up reading about the network of sophisticated tunnels built by today’s Caponays, the narco barons who use them to run drugs across the border. In truth, the tunnels were put there to house the resort’s underground water and electricity ducts, not to transport hooch, according to a recent book by the late historian Paul Vanderwood.
The next stop on my journey is the Rosarito Beach Hotel, which opened in 1925 and has as much classic- Hollywood history as Caliente. “Through this door pass the most beautiful women in the world,” reads a sign above the entrance to the lobby, a reference to the many stars who once graced these grounds: Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and Lana Turner, to name a few, as well as Orson Welles, Spencer Tracy and Anthony Quinn.
In its restaurant, fading brass plaques on the walls point out Gregory Peck’s and John Wayne’s favourite tables. No plaque for Capone, although a waiter offers to show me the Quijote ballroom, a supposed Prohibition-era party spot.
The room is decorated with blueand-white ceramic tiles painted with scenes from Don Quixote, and there’s a lofted area above the bar where mariachis would play. The centrepiece is a stained-glass dome on the ceiling, under which Capone allegedly ran a card game. Today the space is used mostly for weddings.
I’m beginning to feel as if my hunt for Capone is itself a little quixotic. His name is on everyone’s lips, but hard evidence is scarce.
In search of more clues, I leave the hotel and head south on the coast road, the Pacific just beyond my passenger-side window. If the day were clearer, the Coronados Islands would be visible in the distance, a grouping of weatherbeaten rocks in the middle of the ocean where the wreckage can still be seen of another failed Baja business venture: an offshore casino from the 1930s that people say was run by our friend Alphonse, who must’ve been a very busy bootlegger if all these stories are true.
In fact, the ill-fated scheme was the brainchild of a San Diego lumber seller named Fred Hamilton and Tijuana builder Mariano Escobedo. By the time construction on their casino-cum-yacht-club was finished, however, Prohibition had been repealed. When the Mexican government banned casino gambling a short time later, the club closed its doors for good.
I press southward, bound for the Castle Restaurant, whose website boasts that “the infamous Al Capone built this castle and a Romanesque arena to entertain his Hollywood friends in the late ’20s.” The small, two-storey building — tiny for a “castle” — features fauxmedieval turrets and arched windows. The Castle’s walls are made of volcanic rock more than a foot thick — Capone demanded bulletproofing, says the restaurant’s second-generation owner, David Perez Elfman.
The Castle looks like the kind of place a gangster might like to retire for a weekend debauch with famous pals (though now it’s open only for weddings and quinceañeras, parties for when a girl turns 15). But was it really Capone, or is this just spin to generate business?
“It’s a myth,” writes Mario Gomes curtly in an email. He runs the My Al Capone Museum, an online trove of Capone memorabilia. “I have never seen any proof of Capone in Baja.”
“I’m skeptical,” echoes author Richard Foss. Capone was “a big name in the illegal booze business, so all sorts of activities might be attributed to him.” Foss says there were hundreds, if not thousands, of small-time operators smuggling alcohol in from Mexico — too many small players, with no room for a big boss like Capone to run it all.
But I’m tired of chasing ghosts and whispers. I abandon my Capone hunt and turn down a country road, heading toward Guadalupe Valley wine country, where some friends from San Diego are having dinner. The valley is home to dozens of boutique wineries, a handful of chic hotels and world-renowned restaurants.
I pull up to the hip new winery where my friends are sipping sparkling rosé and it occurs to me that 82 years after the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol is still drawing Americans to Baja California. This time, though, Tempranillo and tapas have taken the place of the moonshine and ponies of Prohibition.
Maybe Baja California’s reputation as the handmaiden of American vice belongs in the mythic past, with all those wispy stories of Al Capone. Maybe its real golden age is now.