The
impeachment of Donald Trump will probably be a fait accompli by the time I post
this essay. But the process has reminded me of the conviction of Al Capone.
Everyone
knew that Capone was responsible for many serious offenses beyond bootlegging.
He was clearly at the center of a web of extortion and murder. But the FBI and
local authorities felt they had no hope of pinning any of these crimes on him.
He existed behind a fog of contrived alibis and forced testimony. It’s been
widely acknowledged that Capone ordered the notorious 1929 St. Valentine’s Day
massacre in order to eliminate rival Bugs Moran whom he thought was encroaching
on his territory. But once again, Capone was like Macavity in the play Cats.
There’s a crash, a bang, a shattering of some prized possession. But when you
go and look, once again, “Macavity’s not there.” In the same way, Capone was in
Florida on that St. Valentine’s Day – nowhere near the scene of the crime.
However,
public opinion did turn against Capone after the gruesome violence of the massacre.
The FBI increased its push to depose Capone from his throne as kingpin of
Chicago crime. They hit on the idea of examining his income tax returns. He
could hardly report the millions he was raking in on a regular basis. He
couldn’t believably be earning that sort of money by selling second-hand
furniture, the profession he claimed on his business cards.
The
FBI was able to demonstrate how Capone’s spending, how his lavish lifestyle –
indeed couldn’t be accounted for by the returns he reported from his “furniture
business.” And so Capone was convicted for tax evasion and was finally
neutralized by being put away in federal prisons such as Alcatraz and serving
seven years.
It
seems to me that Al Capone’s tax evasion is Donald Trump’s Ukrainian bribe.
Trump’s withholding of funds from the Ukrainian President contingent on his
investigating Hunter Biden’s role on a Ukrainian gas company board is indeed
reprehensible. It had some obvious negative consequences in compromising the
Ukraine’s ability to combat Russian aggression. It could have had even
farther-reaching consequences. Capone’s withholding of tax funds from the
public was perhaps somewhat less consequential. Still, failure to pay such a
large amount of taxes is reprehensible. Whatever money Capone gave to soup
kitchens and to other charities was more than offset by the money he failed to
put into public coffers where those funds might have gone much farther to
support those in need.
But
in neither case were the infractions that the men were charged with the worst
of what they had done. In Capone’s case, there were all those intimidations, felonies,
and murders. In Trump’s case, there has been the total lack of knowledge about
geography, history, the U.S. Constitution, or what constitutes true
statesmanship. There has been the rain of random, irrelevant tweets, the
schoolyard name-calling, the inconsistency, the illogic, the arrogance, the
stupidity.
But
it was hard to convict a man of well-deflected crimes and hired hits. It would
be almost impossible to convict a man of utter inanity. So in each case, the
authorities had to focus on something smaller, something better defined. Your
total failure as a human being isn’t prosecutable. The long arm of the law has
to pick something graspable. And so the charges are reduced to tax evasion, and
the demand of a quid pro quo from the Ukrainian President – respectively.
Isn’t
that the way it is with life in general? You yell at your spouse for not
putting the cap back on the toothpaste. Well, it’s possible that transgression
can itself be a major annoyance. Paste can ooze out over your comb, down the
side of the sink, onto the bathmat – necessitating a massive, time-consuming
clean-up. But usually the toothpaste cap is just the tax evasion of each
individual household.
You
can’t yell at your spouse for never helping around the house, at least not with
any reasonable expectation of effecting any reform. Although what you’re really
angry about is your spouse’s lazy disregard, that’s too big a fault to
prosecute.
Similarly,
you burst out in grievance after your spouse absented himself and left you to
deal on your own with the burly, pugnacious handyman who failed to sand the
windowsill before slathering paint over its lumpiness. In that case, what has really
disappointed you about your spouse is his cowardice. But that’s too unwieldy a
charge to bring to court.
You
can reproach your spouse for forgetting your birthday, or for telling a
demeaning story about you at a party, or for cheating on you. But you can’t reasonably
convict him or her on the vast, intangible basis of being a bad person. You
have no recourse against your spouse for being incapable of love.
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