Al Capone was America’s most famous gangster. He was also known as Scarface though his real name was Alphonse Capone. He was to dominate crime in Chicago for more than half a decade, from 1925 to 1931.
His parents had emigrated to America from Naples in 1893, and he was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1899 where he grew up. He left school at the age of fourteen after having hit a teacher! He did odd jobs, all of them unskilled and at the same time was a member of two different juvenile gangs before he became a member of the James Street Boys gang which was run by Johnny Torrio who would become his lifelong mentor (Lucky Luciano was also a member).
Before Capone was twenty-one, he was involved in several violent incidents. In one such incident he was slashed with a knife or razor across his left cheek, prompting the nickname “Scarface.” He also shot and killed the winner of a neighbourhood craps game, robbing him of his winnings. He was questioned by the police, but without a witness to the murder, he was let go. In another incident, in 1919 Capone brutally assaulted a member of the rival White Hand gang and left him for dead. Since White Hand gang leaders swore revenge, Capone, was invited by Torrio to join him in Chicago, and that is where Capone and his young family went.
Capone was soon at the heart of a very murky world in Chicago. Torrio had moved there from New York in 1909 to help run the giant brothel business which was headed by Big Jim Colosimo. Shortly after Capone’s arrival in Chicago, Colosimo was assassinated by either Yale or Capone himself in order to make way for Torrio taking over the racket. Capone became a key lieutenant in the Colosimo mob, his strong right arm. He took over as manager of the Four Deuces, Torrio’s headquarters in Chicago which served as a speakeasy, gambling joint and whorehouse, a kind of ‘one-stop shop’.
There were also the bootlegging operations – illegal brewing, distilling and distribution of beer and liquor – all of which made huge money. Colismo’s mob had to contend with a rival mob, the North Side gang, and in 1924 Capone was responsible for the murder of one its members, Joe Howard, in retribution for Howard’s earlier assault on one of Capone’s friends. An attempt to indict Capone failed when the eyewitnesses to the killing lost their nerve. Later the same year, Torrio and Capone ordered the murder of the gang’s leader Dion O’Bannion in his flower shop.
Capone escaped an attempted retribution unscathed but Torrio was less lucky and was seriously wounded in a revenge attack. Torrio decided to retire, handing control of his gang over to Capone who quickly established himself as the crime tsar of Chicago, running gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging rackets and expanding his territories by gunning down rivals and their gangs. He wasn’t untouchable though. In 1926 Capone was forced to go into hiding for three months after a rival mobster was killed and police were on his case. He didn’t move anywhere without at least two bodyguards and when traveling by car, which he preferred to do at night, would have one either side of him.
The inter-gang warfare reached a climax on February 14th 1929 with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in which seven members of Bugs Moran’s gang were machine-gunned against a garage wall on Chicago’s North Side. The attack was of such notoriety that it is worth briefly retelling. Moran and his gang were lured by a bootlegger into a garage to buy whiskey. With the trap set, Capone’s men dressed in stolen police uniforms and using a stolen police car staged a raid. The bootleggers were lined up against the wall and machine-gunned in cold blood. Moran, however, having seen the police car, had already fled the scene. Capone was behind the attack though he himself wasn’t in Chicago at the time.
The notoriety of the St Valentine’s Day massacre made Capone famous far beyond Chicago, far beyond America, even giving him celebrity status and a sense of glamour (if a perverted sense). But any “glamour” that there might have been evaporated with the truly brutal killing of two Sicilian fellow gang members whom he believed had betrayed him. Capone invited his victims to a banquet where he brutally battered them to death with a baseball bat. Capone had observed the old tradition of wining and dining traitors before executing them. But he also showed a lack of any compassion, any sense of morality.
At the height of his powers, Capone was estimated to have close to $100 million. Cautious in other ways, Capone was different from many gangsters who avoided publicity. He courted publicity wanting to be seen as a respectable businessman and a pillar of the community.
Capone served time in prison in 1929 going into 1930, but only ten months, for possessing a concealed handgun. In 1931 he spent another six months in jail on an earlier contempt of court charge 1931. He would eventually serve a much longer sentence, however, but not for any of the murders he was responsible for. In May 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that bootleggers had to pay income tax on their illegal businesses. So it was that the small Special Intelligence Unit of the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) under Elmer Irey went after Capone. At the same time, an initiative led by Eliot Ness, a young agent with the U.S. Prohibition Bureau, was gathering evidence of Prohibition violations. He made extensive use of wiretapping technology. He also undertook a daring plan to use undercover agents posing as gangsters to infiltrate Capone’s organisation Millions of dollars of brewing equipment was seized or destroyed and thousands of gallons of alcohol had been dumped.
On March 13th, 1931, a federal grand jury met secretly and returned an indictment against Capone for his 1924 tax liability. This was kept secret until the investigation was completed for the years 1925 to 1929. The grand jury later returned an indictment against Capone with 22 counts of tax evasion and Capone and 68 members of his gang were charged with 5,000 separate Prohibition violations. But it was the income tax cases that took precedence over the Prohibition violations.
However, fearing that witnesses would be tampered with, as well as having doubts that the six-year statute of limitations would be upheld by the Supreme Court, a deal was secretly struck between Capone’s lawyers and government prosecutors. Capone was to plead guilty to a lighter charge and would receive a sentence of between two and five years.
But when the press got wind of the deal, it campaigned against what was seen as a blatant whitewash. Capone’s mob, having obtained a list of jury members, had bribed them but their efforts came to nothing as the authorities had been aware of the plot. So, when Judge Wilkinson entered the courtroom, he suddenly demanded that the jury be exchanged with another in the same building. Capone and his lawyer were shocked. The fresh jury was even sequestered at night so that Capone’s mob couldn’t get to them.
During the trial, Attorney George E. Q. Johnson made a mockery of Capone’s claim to be a “Robin Hood” figure and man of the people. He stressed the hypocrisy of a man who loved to show off his wealth.
The jury found Capone guilty of several counts of tax evasion. Judge Wilkinson sentenced him to 11 years in prison as well as fines.
He first went to Atlanta penitentiary in May 1932 but was transferred to Alcatraz prison in August, 1934. In November, 1939, suffering from the results of syphilis he was released after serving six and a half years on good behaviour and entered a Baltimorehospital. Later he retired to his Florida estate where he died from heart failure in 1947.