Even without his supposed ties to one of America’s most
infamous gangsters, Auttie Shipman lived a pretty colorful 98 years.
He chauffeured the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bing
Crosby. He caught pitches from Babe Ruth. He was a farmer, a school bus driver
and a family man.
Oh, and one other part-time gig for this unassuming
gentleman from French Lick.
“He was Al Capone’s money runner,” says Vickie Dixon, who
helped care for Auttie in a nursing home in his later years.
No one possesses definitive proof whether Al Capone did or
didn’t hide out at French Lick and West Baden back in the day (we started exploring
it last week in our blog), but a few people with ties to Auttie Shipman are
certain that Capone was here — and that Auttie was a trusted associate in
Capone’s inner circle.
Auttie passed away 16 years ago, so these days, the tales of
his rumored connection to Capone come second-hand from people like Vickie Dixon
and Lori Moffatt. Vickie was a longtime associate at French Lick Springs Hotel
before retiring, and when she volunteered at the nursing home, she was the one
they called on to go talk to Auttie and make him laugh if he was having a bad
day. “And he would tell me all these firsthand stories about his personal
experience with Al Capone,” she says.
Lori recalls
some of the stories her grandfather told. He talked about the Clydesdales, as Auttie spent time caring
for the horses up at the hotel’s stables. And Lori recalls being a young girl
and hearing Auttie talk about his brush with Babe Ruth. While living in Iowa for a time, Auttie also played for the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad Eagles an elite semipro baseball team that was owned by the Chicago Cubs and sometimes practiced with big-leaguers. Auttie was a catcher. One day, he had a chance to catch pitches from The Babe himself — and learned a painful lesson about Ruth’s sheer power. “He broke my grandpa’s thumb” pitching to Auttie, Lori recalls her grandfather saying.
Over all those years, though, Lori can’t recall her
grandfather telling her any Al Capone tales. Lori’s sister does remember when
Auttie would talk about the underground tunnel to The Gorge Inn that Capone
supposedly used. And that’s a whole other local legend. The Gorge doubled as an
underground casino, and some say there used to be a network of underground
tunnels between The Gorge and the hotels at French Lick and West Baden, so
people could come and go in secret.
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| Auttie Shipman would sometimes use Thomas Taggart's 1929 Phantom I Rolls-Royce to transport celebrities from the hotel to parties here at the Taggart family mansion. The car and the mansion have both been restored today, as the Taggart home is now known as The Pete Dye Mansion. |
Lori and Vickie both described Auttie as a consummate
gentleman. He smoked a pipe sometimes, but Lori says he never drank alcohol. Or
said a cross word about someone. Maybe it was that stand-up character that
would make him a perfect money runner in Capone’s eyes?
“He was just a really nice guy. You couldn’t find a nicer
guy. And he was honest. And Al Capone met him here,” Vickie says. “He was a
real tender, nice gentleman that you would never think would be involved in
stuff like that. And it was more of a job than part of (Capone’s) gang, you
know?”
As the story goes, Capone wasn’t welcome at French Lick
Springs Hotel — he was classified as an “undesirable” — so instead he had a
house and a small cabin where he’d stay during his time here.
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| Auttie drove this shuttle back and forth between French Lick and West Baden Springs Hotels, taking guests for a spin and a mini-tour of both historic properties. |
And Capone wasn’t just coming here to escape when things
were getting too hot in Chicago. He also had a business purpose. Rumor was that
Capone was in the bootlegging business here, supplying booze to the dozens of
hotels that thrived in French Lick and West Baden back in that day.
“When he got his payoffs, he had to have a way to get his
money back to his establishment back in Chicago,” Vickie says. “They trusted
Auttie, and he was the only one who ever ran his money. He said he’d have
suitcases and satchels of money – wouldn’t even mention or guess how much was
in it, he didn’t count it. That wasn’t his responsibility. His job was to take
it back to Chicago.”
That’s got to be an unnerving, right? Transporting a
gangster’s dirty money a few hundred miles on a regular basis?
“He always talked about how (Capone) protected him, no
matter what,” Vickie says, explaining how Capone had some of his gangsters
follow Auttie’s car during the Chicago runs to make sure he wouldn’t get
stopped by authorities.
“He wasn’t the least bit nervous. He knew that those guys were
there to take care of him,” Vickie says. “(The gang members) feared him enough
not to mess with Auttie. Nobody messed with Auttie. Ever. He said they were all
so nice to him – every single one of them, the whole gang.”
Some of it sounds like it could be ripped from a movie
script. A genial guy from French Lick, Indiana running in secret with Al Capone?
“I believe him,” she says. When the two of them talked at
the nursing home, “it was like he was so glad to see me, he wanted to tell me
stories.”
And even though Lori didn’t hear the tales directly from her
grandpa, if Auttie told someone it was true, then she believes it’s true.
“He’s not somebody to lie and make up stuff.”
We can never know what Auttie saw with his own eyes. But if
the money-running tales are true, it’d certainly be an appropriate chapter in
the eventful life of Auttie Shipman.