Al Capone

FBI mugshot of Capone, 1931

Birth and early life

Alphonse Capone was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, at the turn of the 20th century. His life of crime started early: as a teenager he joined two gangs, the Brooklyn Ripppers and the Forty Thieves Juniors, and engaged in petty crime.

Capone quit high school at the age of fourteen and worked odd jobs aroung the New York burrough, including a candy store and a bowling alley. After his initial stint with small-time gangs, Capone joined the notorious Five Points gang headed by Frankie Yale. It was at this time he began working as a bartender and bouncer at Yale's establishment the Harvard Inn. It was here, at the Harvard Inn, that Capone would engage in a knife fight with a customer who slashed Capone's face, earning him the nickname that he would bear for the rest of his life: Scarface.

In 1918 Capone married Mary Coughlin, an Irish girl, who gave him a son that year, Albert 'Sonny' Francis Capone. The couple lived in Brooklyn for a year, Al Capone still working for Frankie Yale and thought to have committed at least two murders, until being sent to Chicago in 1919. Yale sent his protege to the midwest city after Capone was involved in a fight with a rival gang. Yale's intention was for Capone to 'cool off' there; little did he know that this would be the impetus for one of the most notorious crime careers in modern US history.

Capone in Chicago

The Capone family moved to a small, unassuming house at 7244 South Prairie Avenue in a Chicago suburb that would serve as Al Capone's first headquarters. Inially, Capone took up grunt work with Johnny Torrio's outfit, but the elder Torrio immediately recognized Capone's talents and by 1922 Capone was Torrio's second in charge, responsible for much of the gambling, alchohol, and prostitution rackets in the city of Chicago.

Only a few years later, Torrio's rivals in the North Side gangs made an attempt on his life. Severly injured, the shaken Torrio returned to Italy and gave the reins of the business to Capone. Capone was notorious during Prohibition for his control of the Chicago underworld and his bitter rivalries with gangsters such as Bugs Moran and Hymie Weiss. Raking in vast amounts of money from illegal gambling, prostitution and alcohol (some estimates were that between 1925 and 1930 Capone was making $100 million a year), the Chicago kingpin was largely immune to prosecution due to witness intimidation and the bribing of city officials, such as Chicago mayor William 'Big Bill' Hale Thompson

In 1928, Capone bought a retreat on Palm Island, Florida. It was shortly after this purchase that he orchestrated one of the most notorious gangland killings of the century, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Although details for the massacre are still in dispute, and no person has ever been charged or prosecuted for the crime, the killings are generally linked to Capone and his henchman, especially Jack 'Machine Gun' McGurn who is thought to have been the triggerman. By staging the massacre, Capone was trying to dispose of his arch-rival Bugs Moran. Ironically, Moran himself was late for the meeting and escaped certain death.

Capone himself, throughout the 1920's, was often the target of attempted murders.

Fall of Capone

Although Capone always did his business through front men and had no accounting records linking him to his earnings, new laws enacted in 1927 allowed the federal government to pursue Capone on tax evasion, their best chance of finally convicting him. He was harassed by Prohibition Bureau agent Eliot Ness and his 'Untouchables' and IRS agent Frank Wilson, who was able to find receipts linking Capone to illegal gambling income and evasion of taxes on that income.

The trial and indictment occured in 1931. Initially, Capone plead guilty to the charges, hoping to plea bargain. But, after the judge refused his lawyer's offers and Capone's associates failed to bribe or tamper with the jury, Al Capone was found guilty on five of twenty three counts and sentenced to ten years in a federal prison.

Capone was first sent to an Atlanta prison in 1932. However, the mobster was still able to control most of his interests from this facility and he was ordered to be transfered to the infamous California island prison of Alcatraz in August of 1934. Here, Capone was strictly guarded and prohibited from any contact with the outside world. With the repeal of prohibition and the arrest and confinement of its leader, the Capone empire soon began to wither.

Death and aftermath

Sometime in the mid-1930's, and at Alcatraz, Capone began showing signs of dementia, probably related to a case of untreated syphilis he contracted as a young man. He spent much of the last few years of his sentence in the prison hospital and was finally released on November 16, 1939.

Capone was now a broken man. Physically weak and with a deteriorating mind, he retired to his Florida retreat where he largely withdrew from the outside world and from events in Chicago. He no longer controlled any mafia interests. On January 21, 1947, Capone suffered a stroke. He began to recover but died three days later from pneumonia. He is buried at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Chicago's West Side, next to the graves of his father and brother.

Al Capone was perhaps the most notorious, and popular, gangster of the twentieth century, the subject of numerous articles, books, and movies. He has been portrayed in film by Wallace Beery, Paul Muni, Barry Sullivan, Rod Steiger, Neville Brand, Jason Robards, Ben Gazzara and Robert De Niro. Capone and his era were highlighted in the 1980's film The Untouchables.

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