Al Capone
- This article refers to the gangster "Capone". For the rapper, see Capone-N-Noreaga.
Alphonse Gabriel Capone (January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947), popularly known as Alfonso "Scarface" Capone, was an infamous Italian American gangster in the 1920s and 1930s, although his business card reportedly described him as a used furniture dealer. A Neapolitan born in New York City to Gabriele and Teresina Capone, he began his career in Brooklyn before moving to Chicago and becoming Chicago's most notorious crime figure. By the end of the 1920s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had placed Capone on its "Most Wanted" list. Capone's downfall occurred in 1931 when he was indicted and convicted by the federal government for income tax evasion.
Birth and early life
Alphonse Capone was born to Gabriel Capone (1865–1920) and his wife Teresina "T(h)eresa" Raiola (December 28, 1867–1952) in Brooklyn, New York, at the turn of the 20th century. Gabriel was a barber from Castellammare di Stabia, a village about twenty-five kilometers south of Naples, Italy. Teresina was a seamstress and the daughter of Angelo Raiola from Angri, a town in the province of Salerno. The Capones immigrated to the United States in 1894, and settled in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The couple had seven sons and two girls:
- Vincenzo Capone (1892–October 1, 1952). Called James Vincenzo Capone upon entering the United States. He left the family in 1908 to join a circus operating in the Midwest. Served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War I. Apparently changed his name to Richard Joseph Hart shortly after his discharge. He had a career as a law enforcement officer, served in the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs and later became Marshal in Homer, Nebraska.
- Raffaele Capone (1894–November 22, 1974). Called Ralph upon entering the United States. Later joined his younger brother in Chicago.
- Salvatore Capone (1895–April 1, 1924). Better known as Frank Capone, he was a representative of his brother in Cicero, Illinois. Killed by members of the local police reportedly for attempting to draw a gun as they approached him.
- Alphonse Gabriel Capone (January 17, 1899–January 25, 1947).
- Erminio Capone (1901–?). Called John or affectionately "Mimi." Served prison terms for minor offenses such as vagrancy. Changed his last name to "Martin." Reportedly still alive in 1994.
- Umberto Capone (1906–June, 1980). Called Albert. Employee of the newspaper Cicero Tribune under the ownership of his brother Al. Changed his last name to Raiola in 1942.
- Amedeo Capone (1908–January 31, 1967). Called Matthew. Tavern owner.
- Rose Capone.
- Mafalda Capone.
Alphonse's life of crime started early: as a teenager he joined two gangs, the Brooklyn Rippers and the Forty Thieves Juniors, and engaged in petty crime.
Capone quit high school at the age of 14 when he fought with a teacher. He then worked odd jobs around Brooklyn, 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 seedy Harvard Inn. It was there that Capone would engage in a knife fight with a thug named Frank Gallucio after Capone had made a bold move on Gallucio's sister. Gallucio had deeply slashed Capone's right cheek with a switchblade, earning him the nickname that he would bear for the rest of his life: "Scarface," a moniker he in fact detested. Capone had instead preferred the nickname "Snorky" which meant "well-dressed" in the slang of the 1920s.
In 1918 Capone married Mae Coughlin, an Irish girl, who gave him a son that year, Albert "Sonny" Francis Capone. The couple lived in Brooklyn for a year. In 1919 he lived in Amityville, Long Island, to be close to "Rum Row." Capone was still working for Frankie Yale and is thought to have committed at least two homicides before he was sent to Chicago in 1919. Yale sent his protégé to Chicago after Capone was involved in a fight with a rival gang. Yale's intention was for Capone to "cool off" there; the move primed one of the most notorious crime careers in modern American history.
Capone in Chicago
The Capone family moved to a small, unassuming house at 7244 South Prairie Avenue in the Chicago suburb of Cicero that would serve as Al Capone's first headquarters. Initially, 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 command, responsible for much of the gambling, alcohol, and prostitution rackets in the city of Chicago. One of his greatest triumphs was the seizure of the region of ciecero in 1924. It became known as one of the most crooked elections in Chicago's long history with voters threatened at the polling station by thugs. His mayoral candidate won by a huge majority but it was only weeks later he claimed he would run Capone out of town. In order to counter this Capone met with his puppet-mayor and personally knocked him down the town hall steps. It was a powerful assertion of gangster power and a huge victory for the Torrio-Capone alliance. The event was marred however by the murder of Frank Capone at the hands of the police. It broke his brother's heart. Unshaven (a gangster form of mourning), Capone cried openly at the funeral and ordered the closure of all the speakeasies in Cicero for a day as a mark of respect.
Severely injured in an assassination attempt in 1925, the shaken Torrio returned to Italy and gave the reins of the business to Capone. Capone was notorious during the Prohibition era 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. Capone was reputed to have several other retreats and hideouts including French Lick, Indiana, Dubuque, Iowa, Hot Springs, Arkansas, Johnson City, Tennessee, and Lansing, Michigan.
In 1928, Capone bought a retreat on Palm Island, Florida. It was shortly after this purchase that he orchestrated seven of the most notorious gangland killings of the century, the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Although details of 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 henchmen, especially Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn, who is thought to have led the operation. By staging the massacre, Capone was trying to dispose of his arch-rival Bugs Moran, who controlled gang operations on the North Side of Chicago. Moran himself was late for the meeting and escaped otherwise certain death.
Throughout the 1920s, Capone himself was often the target of attempted murders, being shot at once in a restaurant and having his car riddled with bullets from nose to tail on more than one occasion. However the assassins were normally amateurs and Capone was never himself wounded.
Fall of Capone
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Although Capone always did his business through front men and had no accounting records (which are receipts) (his mansion was in his wife's name), Al Alcini started 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. Part of the reason Capone was taken to task in this way was his status as a celebrity. On the advice of his publicist he did not hide from the media by the mid twenties and began to make public appearances. When Charles Lindenberg performed his famous trans-atlantic flight in 1927 Capone was among the first to push forward and shake his hand upon his arrival in Chicago. He gained a great deal of admiration from many of the poor in Chicago for his flagrant disregard of the prohibition law that they all despised. He was viewed for a time as a loveable outlaw, partially due to his extravagant generosity to strangers. His night club the Cotton Club became a hot-spot for hot new acts such as Charlie Parker and Bing Crosby. He was often cheered in the street and it was only the brutal murders of the St Valentines day massacre and the 1929 crash that made people view him once again as a killer and social parasite. This was despite Capone's opening of soup kitchens in Chicago's poorest suburbs. Pursuing Capone were Treasury agent Eliot Ness and his hand picked team of incorruptible U.S. Treasury agents "The 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 occurred in 1931. The Alcinis tried to help Capone but he pleaded guilty to the charges, hoping for a 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-two counts and sentenced to eleven 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 transferred 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. Capone entered Alcatraz with his usual confidence. However, when he attempted to bribe guards, he was sent to the "hole", or solitary confinement. Eventually Capone's mental state began to deteriorate. One example of his erratic behavior was that he would make his bed and then undo it, continuing this pattern for hours. Sometimes, Capone did not even want to leave his cell at all, crouching in a corner of his cell and talking to himself in gibberish. He began telling people that he was being haunted by the ghost of James Clark, a victim in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. It was apparent over time that Capone no longer posed any threat of resuming his previous gangster-related activities.
Death and aftermath
Sometime in the mid-1930s, while imprisoned at Alcatraz, Capone began showing signs of dementia, probably related to a case of untreated syphilis he had contracted as a young man. He spent the last year of his sentence in the prison hospital, and was released late in 1939. After spending a year in residential treatment at a hospital in Baltimore, he retired to his estate in Miami, Florida.
Capone became a broken man. He no longer controlled any mafia interests. On January 21, 1947, he had an apoplectic stroke. He regained consciousness and started to feel better until pneumonia set in on January 24. The next day he died from cardiac arrest. Capone was originally 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.
Popular culture
One of the most notorious American gangsters of the 20th century, Capone has been the subject of numerous articles, books, and films. He has been portrayed on screen by Nicholas Kokenes, Wallace Beery, Paul Muni, Barry Sullivan, Rod Steiger, Neville Brand, Jason Robards, Ben Gazzara, Robert De Niro, William Devane, and William Forsythe. Capone and his era were highlighted in the 1959 television film The Untouchables and its feature film and television series remakes which has created the popular myth of the personal war between the crime lord and Eliot Ness. He was also featured as an off-screen character (in a deleted scene that was added to the DVD release) in the 2002 film Road to Perdition, the comic book, Tintin in America as the only real person to ever appear in The Adventures of Tintin in character and as a Possesor in Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy science fiction novels. In The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd, Capone was toyed with in a very humorous episode. Capone is also the subject of the Prince Buster song Al Capone and is also the namesake of Rancid's Young Al Capone. On a recent album cover, artist Sufjan Stevens placed Capone alongside Superman and a Chicago cityscape as representative of Illinois. Capone also plays a role in the famous gangster novel "The Godfather," where he figures into Vito Corleone's past. In the Godfather he is portrayed as a ruthless man, but one without tact.
Tunnels found under the city of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan are said to have been another hideout of Capone's. The anfractuous tunnels are a very popular tourist attraction, due in part to the alleged link to Capone.