Al Capone

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Al Capone always turned the left side of his face away from the camera. Three knife slashes had scarred that cheek, and he told people they were war wounds. The nickname they earned him, Scarface, was one he loathed. His closest friends preferred Snorky, a word for a sharp dresser. Born Alphonse Gabriel Capone in 1899, he co-founded the Chicago Outfit and ran it as boss from 1925 to 1931, in the Prohibition years. He became one of the most notorious American gangsters of the twentieth century. Books, newspaper articles and films have never stopped retelling his story. How did a young New Yorker with a scarred face come to rule Chicago's underworld? Why did the city's mayor and police leave him alone for so long? And what finally brought him down, when rival gunmen, with bounties on his head, never could?

  1436339480

• 2. From Brooklyn to Chicago

  ›

  Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born in Brooklyn on the 17th of January 1899. His parents, Gabriele and Teresa, both came from Angri, a small town outside Naples. Gabriele was a barber and Teresa was a seamstress. The family crossed the Atlantic in 1893 by way of the port of Fiume, then settled at 95 Navy Street in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When Al was eleven they moved to 38 Garfield Place in Park Slope. He had eight brothers and sisters, and their paths split in striking ways. James changed his name to Richard Hart and became a Prohibition agent in Homer, Nebraska. Raffaele, known as Ralph or "Bottles", ran the family's bottling companies, both legal and illegal. Frank also worked in Al's empire until his death on the 1st of April 1924.

  At a strict Catholic school, Capone showed promise but chafed at the rules. His schooling ended at fourteen, when he was expelled for hitting a female teacher in the face. He drifted through odd jobs at a candy store and a bowling alley, and played semi-professional baseball from 1916 to 1918. On the 30th of December 1918, aged nineteen, he married Mae Josephine Coughlin, an Irish Catholic. Earlier that month she had given birth to their son, Albert Francis, known as Sonny. His parents had to consent in writing, since he was under twenty-one. By all accounts the marriage was a happy one.

  Street gangs had already claimed him. He passed through the Junior Forty Thieves, the Bowery Boys and the Brooklyn Rippers before joining the powerful Five Points Gang in Lower Manhattan. His employer and mentor was the racketeer Frankie Yale, who tended bar at the Harvard Inn, a Coney Island saloon. While working the door there, Capone inadvertently insulted a woman. Her brother, Frank Galluccio, slashed him three times across the left cheek. Reports disagree about the date of the attack.

  In 1919 Capone left for Chicago at the invitation of Johnny Torrio, a man he came to regard as a mentor. Torrio had been brought to the city as an enforcer by the crime boss James "Big Jim" Colosimo. Capone started as a bouncer in a brothel, the place where he most likely caught syphilis. He knew of the infection early, and the drug Salvarsan probably could have cured it. He apparently never sought treatment.

  Colosimo was murdered on the 11th of May 1920, and Capone was suspected of involvement. Torrio then took over, with Capone as his right-hand man. Dean O'Banion's North Side Gang was squeezed by the Genna brothers, who were allied with Torrio. Torrio arranged O'Banion's murder at his flower shop on the 10th of November 1924. Hymie Weiss, a close friend of the dead man, took charge of the North Siders, backed by Vincent Drucci and Bugs Moran. They made revenge their priority. In January 1925 an ambush left Capone shaken but unhurt. Twelve days later Torrio was shot several times as he returned from shopping. After recovering, Torrio effectively resigned and handed everything to Capone, aged twenty-six.

  2351318

• 3. Celebrity and Violence

  ›

  As many as 100 people died in the 1920s in bombings of establishments that refused to buy Capone's liquor. His organization took in illegal breweries and a transport network reaching to Canada, and political and police protection let him push revenue higher through force. Rivals also blamed him for a spread of brothels across the city.

  His reputation reached into Chicago's music scene. The uncles of the jazz musicians Milt Hinton and Lionel Hampton worked for him on the South Side. Capone once asked the clarinetist Johnny Dodds to play a number Dodds did not know. He split a $100 bill in half and promised Dodds the other half once he had learned it. He also sent two bodyguards along with the pianist Earl Hines on a road trip.

  Capone lived loudly. He indulged in custom suits, cigars, gourmet food and drink, and female companionship, and he was known for flamboyant, expensive jewelry. Asked about his work, he liked to answer: "I am just a businessman, giving the people what they want." Another favorite reply was: "All I do is satisfy a public demand." Spectators cheered when he turned up at baseball games. He gave to charities, and many people saw him as a modern-day Robin Hood.

  Did he really reach across the border? When asked about Rocco Perri, billed as Canada's "King of the Bootleggers", Capone replied: "Why, I don't even know which street Canada is on." Some sources say he visited and kept hideaways there. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police says there is no evidence that he ever set foot on Canadian soil.

  Capone grew security-minded and eager to get away from Chicago. He and his entourage would turn up suddenly at a train depot and buy an entire Pullman sleeper car on a night train. Their destinations included Cleveland, Omaha, Kansas City, Little Rock and Hot Springs, Arkansas. There they spent a week in luxury hotel suites under assumed names. In 1928 he paid $40,000 to Clarence Busch, of the Anheuser-Busch brewing family, for a 10,000-square-foot house at 93 Palm Avenue on Palm Island, Florida, between Miami and Miami Beach.

  2245413889

• 4. Cicero and City Hall

  ›

  Cicero, Illinois, became Capone's base after he took over its town council elections through bribery and widespread intimidation. That made him harder for the North Siders to reach. They tried anyway. His driver was found tortured and murdered, and Weiss survived an attempt on his life in the Chicago Loop. On the 20th of September 1926, the North Siders used a ploy outside Capone's headquarters at the Hawthorne Inn to draw him toward the windows. Gunmen in several cars then raked the first-floor restaurant with Thompson submachine guns and shotguns. Capone was unhurt and called for a truce, but the talks fell flat. On the 11th of October, Weiss was killed outside the former O'Banion flower shop. In January 1927, Moran and Drucci kidnapped and killed the owner of the Hawthorne's restaurant, a friend of Capone.

  The need for bootleggers to have protection in city hall brought a more serious level of violence and graft to Chicago politics. William Hale Thompson, the Republican candidate for mayor, campaigned on not enforcing Prohibition. He allegedly accepted a $250,000 contribution from Capone. Capone is generally seen as having helped him beat the Democrat William Emmett Dever in 1927, by a relatively slim margin.

  The Pineapple Primary of the 10th of April 1928 showed the cost of that alliance. Capone's bomber, James Belcastro, targeted voting booths in wards where Thompson's opponents were thought to have support. At least fifteen people died. The lawyer Octavius C. Granady, an African-American who challenged Thompson's candidate for the Black vote, was chased through the streets by cars of gunmen on polling day and shot dead. Belcastro was accused of the murder. Four policemen were charged alongside him, but all charges were dropped after key witnesses recanted.

  A 1929 report by The New York Times tied Capone to three other killings. They were the 1926 murder of Assistant State Attorney William H. McSwiggin, the 1928 murder of chief investigator Ben Newmark, and the 1928 murder of his former mentor Frankie Yale. In 1931 Belcastro was wounded in a shooting, and police suggested to skeptical journalists that he had acted as an independent operator.

  4637585953

• 5. War With Aiello

  ›

  In November 1925, Antonio Lombardo, Capone's consigliere, was named head of the Unione Siciliana, a Sicilian-American benevolent society that gangsters had corrupted. Joe Aiello had wanted that post himself. He blamed Capone for Lombardo's rise, and he resented a non-Sicilian meddling in the society's affairs. He cut every tie with Lombardo and declared a feud on Capone. Allied with enemies of Capone such as Jack Zuta, who ran vice and gambling houses, Aiello began plotting assassinations in the spring of 1927.

  One scheme aimed at a bowl of soup. Aiello offered the chef at the Bella Napoli Café, Capone's favorite restaurant, money to put prussic acid in the soup of Capone and Lombardo. Reports put the offer between $10,000 and $35,000. The chef told Capone instead. Capone sent men to destroy Aiello's bakery on West Division Street with machine-gun fire. More than 200 bullets hit the building on the 28th of May 1927, wounding Aiello's brother Antonio.

  The bounty on Capone kept climbing. Aiello offered $25,000 each to Anthony Russo and Vincent Spicuzza, and both ended up dead. He eventually posted a $50,000 reward, and at least ten gunmen died trying to collect it. Even Ralph Sheldon, an ally of Capone, tried to claim it. Frank Nitti's intelligence network learned of the deal, and Sheldon was shot in front of a West Side hotel, though he survived.

  In November 1927 an anonymous tip led police to raid several addresses where Aiello's machine-gun ambushes were being prepared. They arrested Angelo La Mantio, a gunman from Milwaukee, and four others. Receipts in La Mantio's pockets led to a confession that Aiello had hired him, and Aiello was taken to the South Clark Street police station. Capone sent nearly two dozen gunmen to wait outside and made no effort to hide their purpose. Reporters and photographers rushed to watch the expected murder. Aiello walked out under police escort and later vanished to Trenton, New Jersey.

  In May 1929, the bodyguard Frank Rio uncovered a plot by Albert Anselmi, John Scalise and Joseph Giunta, whom Aiello had persuaded to depose Capone. In the best-known version, Capone beat the three men with a baseball bat and then had bodyguards shoot them. The 1987 film The Untouchables included the scene. The biographer Deirdre Bair and the historian William Elliot Hazelgrove doubt it. Hazelgrove said Capone would have been "hard pressed to beat three men to death with a baseball bat". Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz found versions of the story in press coverage soon after the crime. They suggest it has a basis in truth and that the Outfit spread it to enhance Capone's fearsome reputation.

  In 1930, Capone's men tracked Aiello to Rochester, New York, where he had ties to the Buffalo boss Stefano Magaddino, but Aiello returned to Chicago first. He hid in the apartment of Pasquale "Patsy Presto" Prestogiacomo at 205 N. Kolmar Ave. On the 23rd of October, as he left for a taxicab, a submachine gun opened up from a second-floor window across the street. Aiello was reportedly hit at least 13 times. He staggered around the corner, straight into the range of a second submachine gun on a third floor, and was killed.

  7576507314

• 6. Massacre and Federal Response

  ›

  On the morning of Thursday, the 14th of February 1929, four gunmen disguised as police officers walked into a trucking warehouse and garage at 2122 North Clark Street. This was the headquarters of Bugs Moran, now the last surviving North Side leader. Capone's men had rented an apartment across the street to watch the place, and lookouts signaled the gunmen to begin a fake raid. The disguised men lined seven victims against a wall, then signaled accomplices with machine guns and shotguns. Moran was not among the dead. One motive may have been the hijacking of expensive Canadian whisky, brought in over the Detroit River, on its way to Cook County. Capone was widely assumed to have ordered the killings, though he was at his Florida home that day.

  Photographs of the victims shocked the public and damaged Capone's image. Within days he was summoned before a Chicago grand jury on federal Prohibition charges, and he claimed to be too ill to attend. He tried to repair his reputation by giving to charities and sponsoring a soup kitchen in Chicago during the Depression. Public anger at Thompson's alliance with Capone helped Anton J. Cermak win the mayoral election on the 6th of April 1931.

  Walter A. Strong, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, took a different route. Just two weeks after Herbert Hoover's inauguration, he arranged a secret White House meeting. On the 19th of March 1929, Strong, Frank Loesch of the Chicago Crime Commission and Laird Bell told the president that Chicago was in the hands of gangsters. In his 1952 memoir, Hoover wrote that he directed all federal agencies to concentrate on Capone and his allies. The Treasury and Justice Departments drew up plans for income tax prosecutions. A small, elite squad of Prohibition Bureau agents, including Eliot Ness, went after bootleggers. In a city used to corruption, these men were incorruptible. The writer Charles Schwarz dubbed them the Untouchables, and Strong secretly shared his newspaper's intelligence on the Capone outfit.

  The arrests came quickly. On the 27th of March 1929, FBI agents seized Capone as he left a Chicago courtroom, on a contempt charge for feigning illness. In Philadelphia, on the 16th of May 1929, he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. His attorney entered a guilty plea, and a judge sentenced him to a year. He was moved to Eastern State Penitentiary on the 8th of August. A week after his release in March 1930, the unofficial Chicago Crime Commission listed him as "Public Enemy #1". That April, Miami Beach police arrested him for vagrancy, after the governor ordered sheriffs to run him out of Florida. Capone claimed Miami police had denied him food and water. A perjury charge followed, but a jury acquitted him in July.

  6064786980

• 7. The Tax Case

  ›

  Mabel Walker Willebrandt, a U.S. Assistant Attorney General, is said to have originated a tactic for catching conspicuously wealthy crime figures. She charged them with federal tax evasion on the evidence of their lavish lifestyles. In 1927 the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sullivan that illegally earned income was taxable. For Capone, the hard task was proving what he earned, not what he spent. The best evidence came from his own attempt to pay tax.

  Capone's brother Ralph was tried for tax evasion in 1930, in a two-week trial presided over by Judge James Herbert Wilkerson. He spent the next 18 months in prison. In February 1931 Wilkerson also tried Capone for contempt of court. He sentenced Capone to six months, but Capone stayed free while he appealed.

  To avoid his brother's fate, Capone told his lawyer to regularize his tax position. That was never done. Yet the lawyer, in stating what income Capone would pay tax on, made crucial admissions, such as $100,000 for each of 1928 and 1929. Without any investigation, the government held a lawyer's letter conceding large taxable income for years in which Capone had paid nothing.

  On the 13th of March 1931, a secret grand jury charged Capone with tax evasion for 1924. On the 5th of June 1931, a federal grand jury indicted him on 22 counts covering 1925 through 1929, and he was released on $50,000 bail. He was also indicted on 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act. On the 16th of June he pleaded guilty to everything as part of a plea bargain. On the 30th of July, Wilkerson refused to honor the bargain, and Capone's counsel withdrew the pleas. On the second day of trial, Wilkerson admitted the lawyer's letter as evidence, overruling objections that a lawyer could not confess for his client.

  Capone's lawyers had relied on the bargain and had only hours to prepare. Their defense claimed that nearly all his income had been lost to gambling. That argument was irrelevant anyway, since gambling losses can only offset gambling winnings. Capone's lavish spending, presented at great length, undercut it further. The government charged him with evading $215,000 in taxes on a total income of $1,038,654 over five years. On the 17th of October 1931, he was convicted on five counts. A week later he received eleven years in federal prison. He was fined $50,000 plus $7,692 in court costs, and owed $215,000 plus interest.

  New Washington tax experts took over his defense and filed a writ of habeas corpus. A Supreme Court ruling that tax evasion was not fraud apparently put the years in his case outside the time limit for prosecution. A judge rescued the conviction by subtracting the time Capone had spent in Miami from the age of the offences. The appeal failed.

  In July 1931, Capone gave the Chicago Herald and Examiner what he called his "swan song of a racketeer". He said: "I see nothing morally wrong in making a living out of prohibition." He credited the Secret Six, a vigilante group launched in 1930, for his downfall. It had reportedly sent one of his bookkeepers on a South American cruise so Capone could not kill him before he testified. Otherwise it played no part in the tax case or in Eliot Ness's raids on his breweries. Capone insisted: "The Secret Six has licked the rackets. They've licked me." He spoke of going into honest business when he came back from Leavenworth, yet his sentence would begin elsewhere.

  9291959772

• 8. Prison and Final Years

  ›

  Morris Rudensky, once a small-time criminal around the Capone gang, became his protector inside Atlanta U.S. Penitentiary. Capone had arrived in May 1932 and was diagnosed with syphilis and gonorrhea. The visible protection by Rudensky and other prisoners drew accusations from hostile inmates that Capone was getting special treatment. No solid evidence ever emerged, but it formed part of the rationale for moving him in August 1934 to the newly opened Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, off the coast of San Francisco. On the 23rd of June 1936, a fellow inmate, James C. Lucas, stabbed him, causing a superficial wound.

  Good behavior earned Capone a place on banjo in the Alcatraz prison band, the Rock Islanders, which gave regular Sunday concerts for other inmates. He also transcribed the song "Madonna Mia" and made his own arrangement as a tribute to his wife Mae. Meanwhile neurosyphilis was steadily eroding his mind. Doctors formally diagnosed syphilis of the brain in February 1938. He spent his last year at Alcatraz in the hospital section, confused and disoriented. He finished his Alcatraz term on the 6th of January 1939. He was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island in California to serve the contempt sentence, and was paroled on the 16th of November 1939 after Mae appealed to the court over his reduced mental capacity.

  Back in Chicago, Frank Nitti became boss of the Outfit after his own release from a tax evasion sentence in March 1932. Those who had jailed Capone portrayed it as a major blow to the syndicate. In practice the Outfit carried on without trouble from Chicago police, but at a lower level and without the open violence of Capone's rule. After Prohibition ended, organized crime kept a low profile, and writers disagree about who really led it and who was a figurehead. In the late 1950s, FBI agents found an organization led by Capone's former lieutenants reigning supreme over the Chicago underworld. Some historians speculate that Capone ordered the 1939 murder of Edward J. O'Hare, a week before his release, for helping federal prosecutors convict him. Other theories exist.

  Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore refused to treat him because of his unsavory reputation, but Union Memorial Hospital accepted him. Grateful for the compassionate care, Capone donated two Japanese weeping cherry trees to the hospital in 1939. On the 20th of March 1940, a very sickly Capone left Baltimore for his mansion on Palm Island. In 1942, once mass production of penicillin began in the United States, he became one of the first American patients treated with it. It was too late to reverse the damage to his brain, but it slowed the disease. In 1946, his physician and a Baltimore psychiatrist concluded that he had the mentality of a twelve-year-old.

  On the 21st of January 1947, Capone had a stroke. He regained consciousness and began to improve, then contracted bronchopneumonia. He suffered a cardiac arrest on the 22nd, and on the 25th of January 1947 he died at home, surrounded by his family, after his heart failed. His body went back to Chicago a week later for a private funeral, and he was first buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery. In 1950, his remains were moved, with those of his father Gabriele and his brother Frank, to Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois.

  941480743