Al Capone

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Al Capone

By: Joe Vollenweider

"Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class."

-Al Capone

"When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality."

-Al Capone

"You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."

-Al Capone

Al Capone was an Italian-American gangster who led a crime syndicate dedicated to smuggling and bootlegging of liquor and other illegal activities during the Prohibition Era of the 1920s and 1930s.

Childhood / Early Life

Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born in Garden City, New York to Gabriel (December 12, 1864 – November 14, 1920) and Teresina Capone (December 28, 1867 – November 29, 1952), on January 17, 1899. Gabriel was a barber from Castellammare di Stabia, a town about 15 miles (24 km) south of Naples, Italy. Teresina was a seamstress and the daughter of Angelo Raiola from Angri, a town in the province of Salerno.

Gabriele and Teresina had 8 children: Vincenzo Capone (1892 – October 1, 1952), Raffaele Capone (who was also known as Ralph Capone and later placed in charge of Al Capone's beverage industry; January 12, 1894 – November 22, 1974), Salvatore Capone (January 1895 – April 1 , 1924), Alphonse "Scarface Al" Capone (January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947), Umberto Capone (1906 – June 1980), Matthew Capone (1908 – January 31, 1967), Rose Capone (born and died 1910) and Mafalda Capone (later Mrs. John J. Maritote, January 28, 1912 – March 25, 1988).

The Capone family immigrated to the United States in 1893 and settled at 95 Navy Street, in the Navy Yard section of downtown Brooklyn, near the Barber Shop that employed Gabriele at 29 Park Avenue. When Al was 11, the Capone family moved to 38 Garfield Place in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Capone dropped out of the Brooklyn public school system at the age of 14, after being expelled from Catholic School 133. He then worked at odd jobs around Brooklyn, including in a candy store and a bowling alley. During this time, Capone was influenced by gangster Johnny Torrio, whom he came to regard as a mentor figure.

After his initial stint with small-time gangs, including The Junior Forty Thieves, Capone joined the Brooklyn Rippers and then the notorious Five Points Gang. He was mentored by and employed as a bouncer and bartender in a Coney Island dance hall and saloon called the Harvard Inn by racketeer Frankie Yale. It was in this field that Capone received the scars that gave him the nickname "Scarface"; he inadvertently insulted a woman while working the door at a Brooklyn night club, provoking a fight with her brother Frank Gallucio. Capone's face was slashed three times on the left side. Capone apologized to Gallucio at Yale's request and would hire his attacker as a bodyguard in later life. When photographed, Capone hid the scarred left side of his face and would misrepresent his injuries as war wounds. According to the 2002 magazine from Life called Mobsters and Gangsters: from Al Capone to Tony Soprano, Capone was called "Snorky" by his closest friends.

On December 30, 1918, Capone married Mae Josephine Coughlin, an Irish woman. Earlier that month she had given birth to their son, Albert Francis ("Sonny") Capone.

Capone's departure from New York, with his family, to Chicago is believed to have occurred in 1921. Capone purchased a modest house at 7244 South Prairie Ave. in the Park Manor neighborhood on the city's south side in 1923 for USD $5,500.

Capone came at the invitation of Torrio, who was seeking business opportunities in bootlegging following the onset of prohibition. Torrio had acquired the crime empire of James "Big Jim" Colosimo after the latter refused to enter this new area of business and was subsequently murdered (presumably by Frankie Yale, although legal proceedings against him had to be dropped due to a lack of evidence). Capone was also a suspect for two murders at the time, and was seeking a better job to provide for his new family.

Mob Wars

However, the violence that lead to this unprecedented level of criminal success drew the retaliation from Capone's rivals, particularly his bitter rivalries with North Side gangsters lead by Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran. He had his car riddled with bullets more than once.

In a particularly unnerving incident on September 20, 1926, the North Side gang shot into Capone's entourage as he was eating lunch in the restaurant of the Hawthorne Hotel. A motorcade of ten vehicles, using Thompson Submachine guns and shotguns riddled the outside of the Hotel and the restaurant on the first floor of the building. Capone's bodyguard (Frankie Rio) threw him to the ground at the first sound of gunfire and laid on top of "The Big Fellow", as the headquarters was riddled with bullet holes. Several bystanders were hurt from flying glass and bullet shrapnel in the raid, including a young boy and his mother who would have lost her eyesight had not Capone paid for top-dollar medical care. This event prompted Capone to call for a truce. Negotiations fell through.

These attacks prompted Capone to fit his Cadillac with armor plating, bullet-proof glass, run-flat tires, and a police siren. Every attempt on his life left him increasingly shaken by Moran, who was almost certainly involved in most of the attacks. This car was seized by the Treasury Department in 1932 and was later used as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s limousine.

The Lexington Hotel, Chicago. Capone's headquarters. Known as Capone's castle. Photographed in the early 1990s; it was demolished in 1995.

Capone placed armed bodyguards around the clock at his headquarters at the Lexington Hotel, at 22nd Street (later renamed Cermak Road) and Michigan Avenue. For his trips away from Chicago, Capone was reputed to have had several other retreats and hideouts located in Brookfield, Wisconsin; Saint Paul, Minnesota; Olean, New York; French Lick, as well as Terre Haute, Indiana; Dubuque, Iowa; Hot Springs, Arkansas; Johnson City, Tennessee; and Lansing, Michigan. As a further precaution, Capone and his entourage would often suddenly show up at one of Chicago's train depots and buy up an entire Pullman sleeper car on night trains to places like Cleveland, Omaha, Kansas City and Little Rock/Hot Springs in Arkansas, where they would spend a week in luxury hotel suites under assumed names with the apparent knowledge and connivance of local authorities. In 1928, Capone bought a 14-room retreat on Palm Island, Florida, close to Miami Beach.

Saint Valentine's Day Massacre

Capone arranged the most notorious gangland killing of the century, the 1929 Saint Valentine's Day Massacre in the Lincoln Park neighborhood on Chicago's North Side. Although details of the killing of the seven victims in a garage at 2122 North Clark Street (then the SMC Cartage Co.) are widely disputed and no one was ever brought to trial for the crime.

The massacre was The Outfit's effort to strike back at Bugs Moran's North Side gang, which had become increasingly bold in hijacking the Outfit's booze trucks, assassinating two presidents of the Outfit-controlled Unione Siciliane, and three assassination attempts on one of Capone's top enforcer's, Jack McGurn.

To monitor their targets' habits and movements, Capone’s men rented an apartment across from the the trucking warehouse that served as a Moran headquarters. On the morning of Thursday February 14th, 1929, Capone’s lookouts signaled gunmen disguised as police to start a 'raid'. The faux police lined the seven victims along a wall without a struggle then signaled for accomplices with machine guns. The seven victims were machine-gunned and shot-gunned, each with fifteen to twenty or more bullets.

Photos of the massacre shocked the public and greatly harmed Capone in the public opinion thereby prompting federal law enforcement to focus more closely on investigating his activities.

Capone's Conviction

In 1929, Prohibition Bureau agent Eliot Ness began a successful investigation of Capone and his business. Shutting down many breweries and speakeasies Capone owned, Ness brought down his empire slowly. To lie low, Capone arranged to have himself jailed in a comfortable cell at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary for nine months beginning August 1929. Upon his return to Chicago, he quickly found himself in the legal quagmire that effectively removed him from power.

In 1931 Capone was indicted for income tax evasion and various violations of the Volstead Act. Facing overwhelming evidence, his attorneys made a plea deal, but the presiding judge warned he might not follow the sentencing recommendation from the prosecution, so Capone withdrew his plea of guilty. Attempting to bribe and intimidate the potential jurors, his plan was discovered by Ness' men. The jury pool was then switched with one from another case, and Capone was stymied. Following a long trial, he was found guilty on some income tax evasion counts (the Volstead Act violations were dropped). The judge gave him an eleven-year sentence along with heavy fines, and liens were filed against his various properties. His appeal was denied. In May 1932, Capone was sent to Atlanta U.S. Penitentiary, a tough federal prison, but he was able to obtain special privileges. He was then transferred to Alcatraz, where tight security and an uncompromising warden ensured that Capone had no contact with the outside world. His isolation from his associates and the repeal of Prohibition in January 1933, precipitously diminished his power.

Capone earned the contempt of many inmates when he refused to take part in a prisoners' strike after a sick inmate was denied medical treatment and died. Continuing his work in the prison laundry, Capone was continually harassed by other prisoners and often called a "scab" or "rat."

When Capone attempted to bribe guards he was sent to solitary confinement. Capone suffered further harassment and unsuccessful attempts on his life throughout his prison sentence, including spiking his coffee with lye and an attack as he was walking to the dentist's office.

Though he adjusted relatively well to his new environment, his health declined as the syphilis he caught as a youth progressed. Antibiotics to cure the disease had not yet been discovered. He spent the last year of his sentence in the prison hospital, confused and disoriented. Capone completed his term in Alcatraz on January 6, 1939, and was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island in California, to serve his one-year misdemeanor sentence. He was paroled on November 16, 1939, spent a short time in a hospital, then returned to his home in Palm Island, Florida.

After Prison / Death

Capone's control and interests within organized crime diminished rapidly after his imprisonment, and he was no longer able to run the Outfit after his release. He had lost weight, and his physical and mental health had deteriorated under the effects of neurosyphilis. He often raved on about Communists, foreigners, and George Moran, who he was convinced was still plotting to kill him from his Ohio prison cell.

On January 21, 1947, Capone had an apoplectic stroke. He regained consciousness and started to improve but contracted pneumonia on January 24. He suffered a fatal cardiac arrest the next day.

Capone was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, in Chicago's far South Side between the graves of his father, Gabriele, and brother, Frank. However, in March 1950, the remains of all three family members were moved to Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, west of Chicago.