Al Capone

American gangster

• Born: January 17, 1899
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: January 25, 1947
• Place of death: Palm Island, Florida

Through his modern business practices, cruel brutality, and self-promotion, Capone revolutionized organized crime in the United States during the Prohibition era.

Early Life

Al Capone (kah-POHN) was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Gabriele and Teresina Capone, recent immigrants from southern Italy. The Capones emigrated to the United States in 1895 with their two-year-old son Vincenzo and infant son Raffaele, while Teresina was pregnant with her third child, Salvatore. The Capone family lived near the Brooklyn Navy Yard in a neighborhood primarily made up of recent Italian and Irish immigrants. They were a typical hardworking and close-knit immigrant family.

As Gabriele’s barbershop prospered, the Capones moved to a more affluent Irish neighborhood, Garfield Place. Ironically, it was after moving away from the dingy neighborhood of the navy yard to Garfield Place that the young Capone began his life of crime. Because of disciplinary problems, Capone quit school during sixth grade and began to associate with gangster Johnny Torrio’s Five Pointers street gang. Its headquarters, the Johnny Torrio Association, was located near the Capone’s new apartment. Capone quickly became Torrio’s protégé, a relationship that greatly influenced the young Capone. Torrio was a highly innovative racketeer who took the disorganized crime elements of Italy and transformed them into a highly organized corporate structure. Under Torrio’s tutelage, Capone learned many valuable lessons that would aid him in creating his own criminal empire later in life. In 1909, Torrio left Brooklyn to manage mobster “Big Jim” Colosimo’s criminal enterprises in Chicago.

Without Torrio, Capone worked a series of legitimate jobs, including work at a munitions factory and as a paper cutter. His recent marriage to Mary Coughlin, an Irish neighbor, may have been the cause for such a career move. It was, however, a short-lived legitimate career. On Torrio’s recommendation, Capone became a bouncer for mobster Frank Yale at the Harvard Inn, a bar and brothel in Brooklyn. Whereas Capone learned the business end of racketeering from Torrio, Yale, whose influence in the underworld came from his brutality, taught the young gangster the power of violence.

As a bouncer at the Harvard Inn, Capone received what would become his most distinguishing physical trait: two deep scars on his left cheek from a stabbing that he received in a fight. The press began referring to Capone as Scarface, a nickname he hated. It was never used in his presence. Shortly after the incident, Capone left Brooklyn for an honest job as a bookkeeper in Baltimore for the Aiello Construction firm. It was at this point that Torrio called for his protégé to join him in Chicago.

Life’s Work

Torrio served as the foreman of Colosimo’s gambling and prostitution establishments in Chicago. When Colosimo was assassinated by Yale on May 11, 1921, it created a vacuum in the Chicago underworld that Torrio was quick to exploit. It is alleged that Colosimo’s death was a result of his reluctance to engage in bootlegging after Prohibition became law. As Torrio moved up in the Chicago underworld, so too did Capone. When Capone arrived in Chicago, he quickly made a name for himself, beginning as the manager of a number of brothels and quickly moving up to become the manager of the Four Deuces, a bar at 2222 Wabash Avenue that served as Torrio’s criminal headquarters.

Racketeering in Chicago, however, was becoming more and more difficult. In the city election of 1923, reform-minded William E. Dever succeeded the corrupt mayor “Big Bill” Thompson. It became apparent to Torrio and Capone that Chicago was a dangerous place to do business. They decided to move their operations to Cicero, a suburb of Chicago. It was at this point that Torrio left the country to help move his mother back to Italy. While he was gone, Capone set about taking over Cicero. He made a deal with Republican Party political candidates: He would ensure their election if they would not harm his criminal enterprises. Capone’s campaign to control the municipal government of Cicero was successful, although his brother Frank was killed by police in the attempt. The scandal surrounding Cicero’s municipal elections and the blatant intimidation and corruption surrounding it made Capone front-page news. Capone was moving away from the Torrio style of discreet, backroom criminality and was seeking out and encouraging media attention.

Capone, however, was only one of a number of large and powerful crime figures in Chicago. Capone worked to extend his operations outside Cicero and back into Chicago. When the flamboyant gangster Dion O’Banion killed a man he had met at the Four Deuces, Capone was brought into the criminal proceedings. O’Banion was already known as an impulsive, uncontrollable gangster. When he tricked Torrio into buying a brewery that was about to be raided, Torrio found himself in jail. In November of 1924, O’Banion was found gunned down in his florist shop by Torrio’s henchmen.

In fear of retaliation by O’Banion’s allies, the Weiss-Moran gang, Torrio fled Chicago and went to Arizona. In Chicago, Capone ran the criminal empire, escaping from over one dozen assassination attempts in the process. Torrio’s return to Chicago in January of 1925 was short lived: He was ambushed on a shopping trip with his wife by the Weiss-Moran gang. Torrio survived the attempt but decided that he would retire from a life of crime. The criminal empire that Torrio and Capone created together the brothels, speakeasies, casinos, breweries, and nightclubs would all go to Capone. Capone was now the most powerful criminal figure in Chicago, and his only rival “Bugsy” Moran. To flaunt his new power, Capone moved his headquarters to Chicago’s opulent Metropole Hotel. He became even more of a media figure by going to operas, balls, and political events, and cultivating the appearance of a modern, successful businessman.

In December of 1925, Capone returned to New York in triumph. The official reason for the visit was to seek medical care for his only son, Al Capone, Jr. More important, while in New York, Capone met with his old friend Yale. They agreed that Capone would buy bootleg Canadian whiskey from Yale and transport it from New York to Chicago. Soon a large fleet of trucks was moving whiskey across the nation as part of Capone’s criminal empire. Over the next several years, Capone continued to expand his empire, mainly by eliminating rivals. In October of 1926, “Hymie” Weiss was assassinated. After suspecting he was being cheated in their interstate liquor deal, Capone had Yale killed in the summer of 1928. The most infamous of these hits, however, was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929.

While Capone was staying in his mansion in Miami, Florida, an elaborate plan was launched by Jack McGurn under Capone’s direction to eliminate Moran, Capone’s largest rival in Chicago. Moran was to be led to a warehouse under the guise of an illicit liquor sale. While the sale went on, Capone’s men, posing as police officers, would raid the sale and kill Moran. At first, it seemed like the plan would go off without a hitch. The seven members of Moran’s gang, unsuspicious of the police officers, did not offer any resistance as they were gunned down. Six lay dead, and one more died in the hospital later that day. The assassins left as they had arrived, posing as police officers making a Prohibition arrest.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre turned out to be a failure for two main reasons. First, Moran never made it to the warehouse. Arriving a few minutes late, he saw the stolen police car arrive. Suspecting a raid, he kept walking and never entered the warehouse. Secondly, it marked the beginning of the end of Capone’s criminal empire. Rather than wresting control of bootlegging from the Moran gang, the massacre brought unwanted national attention to Capone’s criminal activities. President Herbert Hoover pressured Andrew Mellon, the secretary of the Treasury, to step up his efforts to bring down Capone. Mellon’s plan was to gather enough information on Capone’s parole violations to prosecute Capone and his associates. Aided by Elmer Irey of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Special Intelligence Unit, Eliot Ness was in charge of gathering information on Capone’s Prohibition violations.

Unaware of the forces allying against him, Capone left Chicago for Atlantic City, New Jersey. In a meeting with fellow gangsters from around the nation, the country was divided into “spheres of influence” to prevent further bloodshed and maximize profits. On the way home, Capone was arrested in Philadelphia for carrying a concealed weapon and placed in Eastern State Penitentiary.

Ness’s investigation continued. Agents infiltrated Capone’s organization. Record books from an earlier raid were used to prosecute Capone on income tax evasion. Facing a statute of limitations, in the spring of 1931 a grand jury indicted Capone and forced a trial. Failing in his attempt to bribe the jury, Capone was convicted on several counts of income tax evasion and was sentenced to eleven years in jail. He was first sent to Atlanta Penitentiary but ended up finishing his sentence at the newly opened Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.

While in Alcatraz, Capone went through fits of rage and confusion. Many thought he was going insane from his incarceration. Doctors diagnosed Capone with an advanced stage of neurosyphilis. He spent the last year of his sentence in the prison hospital combating the disease. Granted an early release because of good behavior, Capone was freed in the winter of 1939 and spent the remaining years of his life secluded in his Florida mansion. He died of cardiac arrest on January 25, 1947.

Significance

Capone created the modern practice of organized crime in the United States. By organizing the businesses of bootlegging, prostitution, and gambling in Chicago during the Prohibition era, Capone became one of the wealthiest men in the United States. In 1927 alone, it is alleged that Capone made $105 million. He also became one of the major American celebrities of the 1920’s, an outspoken crime figure who actively sought to mold himself into the image of a Robin Hood figure, a philanthropist for the common people.

To his admirers, Capone was the symbol of the American dream, a self-made man who rose up from the immigrant ranks to become one of the most powerful men in Chicago. To his detractors, Capone remained a cold-hearted killer whose exploits and fame could never overcome the brutality and violence of his regime. In the end, Capone’s significance lay in the way he combined modern business activities with extreme violence and brutality.

Bibliography

Abadinsky, Howard. Organized Crime. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1985. Contains an excellent chapter on organized crime in Chicago during the Prohibition era. Although Abadinsky does a good job evaluating Capone’s role in the history of organized crime, some of the book’s factual material is sketchy.

Allsop, Kenneth. The Bootleggers: The Story of Prohibition. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1968. A history of the Prohibition era and its effects on organized crime. Allsop does an adequate job of detailing the successes of Torrio and Capone in Chicago.

Bergreen, Laurence. Capone: The Man and the Era. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. At 701 pages, this is an exhaustive biography of Capone that also serves as a richly detailed history of the Prohibition era. Bergreen seeks to use Capone’s life as a starting point for a larger history of the United States in the early twentieth century.

Helmer, William J., and Arthur J. Bilek. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre: The Untold Story of the Gangland Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone. Nashville, Tenn.: Cumberland House, 2004. This account of the massacre refutes the assumption that Capone ordered the murders to gain control of the Chicago crime syndicate.

Hoffman, Dennis E. Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders: Chicago’s Private War Against Capone. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. This scholarly work concentrates on the attempts by honest Chicago merchants to clean up their city to increase their own profits. Hoffman offers an interesting survey of Capone’s business interests as competition for honest merchants.

Iorizzo, Luciano. Al Capone: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. In this comprehensive biography, Iorizzo aims to separate the myth of Capone from the reality of his life. He examines organized crime in America to describe how someone like Capone could rise to power and become a criminal legend.

Pasley, Fred D. Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man. 1930. Reprint. Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1984. This 355-page book is an adequate biography of Capone with numerous biographical details of his life. Unfortunately, it does not contain an index, which makes fact-checking somewhat difficult.