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Al Capone

Born in 1899 in Brooklyn, New York, to poor immigrant parents, Al Capone went on
to become the most infamous gangster in American history. In 1920 during the
height of Prohibition, Capones multi-million dollar Chicago operation in bootlegging,
prostitution and gambling dominated the organized crime scene. Capone was
responsible for many brutal acts of violence, mainly against other gangsters. The
most famous of these was the St. Valentines Day Massacre in 1929, in which he
ordered the assassination of seven rivals. Capone was never indicted for his
racketeering but was finally brought to justice for income-tax evasion in 1931. After
serving six-and-a-half years, Capone was released. He died in 1947 in Miami.
Capones life captured the public imagination, and his gangster persona has been
immortalized in the many movies and books inspired by his exploits.
CONTENTS
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Capones Early Years in New York

Capone Meets Johnny Torrio

Capone in Chicago

Capones Reputation

St. Valentines Day Massacre

Prison Time

Final Days

Capones Early Years in New York

Alphonse Capone (18991947) was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of recent
Italian immigrants Gabriele and Teresina Capone. A poor family that came to
America seeking a better life, the Capones and their eight children lived a typical
immigrant lifestyle in a New York tenement. Capones father was as a barber, and
his mother was a seamstress. There was nothing in Capones childhood or family life
that could have predicted his rise to infamy as Americas most notorious gangster.
Did You Know?
Capone earned $60 million annually selling illegal liquor.
Capone was a good student in his Brooklyn elementary school, but began falling
behind and had to repeat the sixth grade. It was around that time that he started
playing hooky and hanging out at the Brooklyn docks. One day, Capones teacher
hit him for insolence and he struck back. The principal gave him a beating, and
Capone never again returned to school. By this time, the Capones had moved out of
the tenement to a better home in the outskirts of the Park Slope neighborhood of
Brooklyn. It was here that Capone would meet both his future wife, Mary (Mae)
Coughlin, and his mob mentor, numbers racketeer Johnny Torrio.
Capone Meets Johnny Torrio
Torrio was running a numbers and gambling operation near Capones home when
Capone began running small errands for him. Although Torrio left Brooklyn for
Chicago in 1909, the two remained close. Early on, Capone stuck to legitimate
employment, working in a munitions factory and as a paper cutter. He did spend
some time among the street gangs in Brooklyn, but aside from occasional scrapes,
his gang activities were mostly uneventful.
In 1917, Torrio introduced Capone to the gangster Frankie Yale, who employed
Capone as bartender and bouncer at the Harvard Inn in Coney Island. It was there
that Capone earned his nickname Scarface. One night, he made an indecent
remark to a woman at the bar. Her brother punched Capone, then slashed him
across the face, leaving three indelible scars that inspired his enduring nickname.
Capone in Chicago
When Capone was 19, he married Mae Coughlin just weeks after the birth of their
child, Albert Francis. His former boss and friend Johnny Torrio was the boys
godfather. Now a husband and a father, Capone wanted to do right by his family, so
he moved to Baltimore where he took an honest job as a bookkeeper for a
construction company. But when Capones father died of a heart attack in 1920,
Torrio invited him to come to Chicago. Capone jumped at the opportunity.
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In Chicago, Torrio was presiding over a booming business in gambling and

prostitution, but with the enactment in 1920 of the 18th Amendment prohibiting the
sale and consumption of alcohol, Torrio focused on a new, more lucrative field:
bootlegging. As a former petty thug and bookkeeper, Capone brought both his
street smarts and his expertise with numbers to Torrios Chicago operations. Torrio
recognized Capones skills and quickly promoted him to partner. But unlike the lowprofile Torrio, Capone began to develop a reputation as a drinker and rabble-rouser.
After hitting a parked taxicab while driving drunk, he was arrested for the first time.
Torrio quickly used his city government connections to get him off.
Capone cleaned up his act when his family arrived from Brooklyn. His wife and son,
along with his mother, younger brothers and sister all moved to Chicago, and
Capone bought a modest house in the middle-class South Side.
In 1923, when Chicago elected a reformist mayor who announced that he planned
to rid the city of corruption, Torrio and Capone moved their base beyond the city
limits to suburban Cicero. But a 1924 mayoral election in Cicero threatened their
operations. To ensure they could continue doing business, Torrio and Capone
initiated an intimidation effort on the day of the election, March 31, 1924, to
guarantee their candidate would get elected. Some voters were even shot and
killed. Chicago sent in police to respond, and they brutally gunned down Capones
brother Frank in the street.
Capones Reputation
After an attempt on his life in 1925 by rival mobsters, Torrio decided to leave the
business and return to Italy, turning over the entire operation to Capone. Scarface
again ignored his mentors advice to maintain a low profile and instead, moved his
headquarters to a plush suite in the Metropole Hotel in downtown Chicago. From
there, he began living a luxurious and public lifestyle, spending money lavishly,
although always in cash to avoid a trail. Newspapers of the time estimated
Capones operations generated $100 million in revenue annually.
The press followed Capones every move avidly, and he was able to gain public
sympathy with his gregarious and generous personality. Some even considered him
a kind of Robin Hood figure, or as anti-Prohibition resentment grew, a dissident who
worked on the side of the people. However, in later years, as Capones name
increasingly became connected with brutal violence, his popularity waned.
In 1926, when two of Capones sworn enemies were spotted in Cicero, Capone
ordered his men to gun them down. Unbeknownst to Capone, William McSwiggin,
known as the Hanging Prosecutor, who had tried to prosecute him for a previous
murder, was with the two marked men and all three were killed. Fed up with
Chicagos gang-dominated lawlessness, the public clamored for justice. The police
had no evidence for the murders, so instead they raided Capones businesses,
where they gathered documentation that would later be used to bolster charges
against him of income-tax evasion. In response, Capone called for a Peace
Conference among the citys criminals, and an agreement was reached to stop the
violence. It lasted just two months.
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St. Valentines Day Massacre

By early 1929 Capone dominated the illegal liquor trade in Chicago. But other
racketeers vied for a piece of the profitable bootlegging business, and among them
was Capones long-time rival Bugs Moran. Moran had previously tried to
assassinate both Torrio and Capone, and now he was after Capones top hit man,
Machine Gun Jack McGurn. Capone and McGurn decided to kill Moran. On February
14, 1929, posing as police, McGurns gunmen assassinated seven of Morans men in
cold blood in a North Side garage. Alerted to the danger as he approached the
garage, Bugs Moran escaped the slaughter. Although Capone was staying at his
Miami home at the time, the public and the media immediately blamed him for the
massacre. He was dubbed Public Enemy Number One.
Prison Time
In response to the public outcry over the St. Valentines Day Massacre, President
Herbert Hoover ordered the federal government to step up its efforts to get Capone
on income-tax evasion. The Supreme Court had ruled in 1927 that income gained
on illegal activities was taxable, which gave the government a strong case for
prosecuting Capone. On June 5, 1931 the U.S. government finally indicted Capone
on 22 counts of income-tax evasion.
Although the government had solid evidence against him, Capone remained
confident that he would get off with a minimal sentence and struck a plea bargain in
return for a two-and-a-half year sentence. When the judge in the case declared that
he would not honor the agreement, Capone quickly withdrew his guilty plea, and the
case went to trial. During the trial Capone used the best weapon in his arsenal:
bribery and intimidation. But at the last moment, the judge switched to an entirely
new jury. Capone was found guilty and sent to prison for 11 years.
Final Days
Capone spent the first two years of his incarceration in a federal prison in Atlanta.
After he was caught bribing guards, however, Capone was sent to the notorious
island prison Alcatraz in 1934. Isolated there from the outside world, he could no
longer wield his still considerable influence. Moreover, he began suffering from poor
health. Capone had contracted syphilis as a young man, and he now suffered from
neurosyphilis, causing dementia. After serving six-and-a-half years, Capone was
released in 1939 to a mental hospital in Baltimore, where he remained for three
years. His health rapidly declining, Capone lived out his last days in Miami with his
wife. He died of cardiac arrest on January 25, 1947.
When Capone died, a New York Times headline trumpeted, End of an Evil Dream.
Capones was at times both loved and hated by the media and the public. When
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, some in the public felt that Capones and others
involvement in selling liquor had been vindicated. But Capone was a ruthless
gangster responsible for murdering or ordering the assassinations of scores of
people, and his contemptible acts of violence remain at the center of his legacy.
Capones image as a cold-blooded killer and quintessential mobster has lived on
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long beyond his death in the many films and books inspired by his life as the most
notorious gangster in American history.