CLE Myths: Al Capone's Tunnel

Ask Steven Pittman, front desk manager at the Tudor Arms Hotel (originally known as the Cleveland Club) and he’ll tell you — Al Capone’s influence is all over the place.

Shared with Pittman from a former employee who worked in the building from the 1930s to 1974, the rumor was that Capone, the head of the Chicago Mafia, invested in building a second swimming pool at the Cleveland Club. He also used a connecting underground tunnel that allowed him to travel the under 1 1/2 miles southwest undercover to Little Italy, headquarters of Cleveland’s own Mayfield Road Mob, when the club opened in 1930.

“It’s rumored, but it’s not a proven fact,” says Pittman, who gives tours of the long-since shuttered private pool and now-sealed underground tunnel.

According to The Plain Dealer, the Cleveland Club opened its doors in January 1930. Around the same time, Capone was under heavy surveillance. According to arrest records and local organized crime author Allan May, Capone was in and out of Miami and Philadelphia prisons and frequently on trial from 1929 to 1930 on a number of charges before serving his final prison sentence from May 1932 to January 1939 for tax evasion.

His only proven connection to Cleveland happened when he sent two of his men, Joseph Giunta and Pasquale Lolordo, to the first known national meeting of the Mafia at the Statler Arms in 1928. But, author Rick Porrello, whose grandfather and uncles were in the Mafia, says it’s plausible Capone could have slipped by at other times.

“Whether it was a three-year window or a three-month window, there’s nothing to prevent him from coming to Cleveland for pleasure, business or both,” he says. “Certainly the business connections were there.”

Status: Undecided

Read More: Click here to read the full list of 30 Myths That Define Cleveland