In 1895, 27-year-old Gabriele Capone, his wife Teresa and their two children disembarked at Ellis Island, the point of entry for emigrants coming from Europe. He was just one of the 50,000 Italian emigrants who arrived in America that year. He was a baker by profession and his speciality was making the popular ‘paste’. It was important that he could read and write, and that he had already learned a few English words. The family settled in a suburb of New York dominated by Italian settlers. After a while, Gabriele saved some money and opened a small shop.
Over the years, the family grew and six more children were born in America, including Alphonse – Al in American – on 17 January 1899. The parents did everything to integrate the family into the New World as soon as possible. Unlike most emigrants, they did not want their children to drop out of school and start earning money right away, because they valued education, which they did not have themselves. They failed, because all the boys dropped out as soon as possible and entered the world of crime in one way or another.
Al was the first in his family to feel like a real American, neither Italian nor Italian-American, and when he grew up he got very angry with anyone who told him he was Italian. “I’m not Italian, I was born in Brooklyn,” he would tell them. He was considered a bully from a young age.
No matter what country they came from, the children of emigrants had a reluctance to go to school. It seemed to them a dangerous, unnecessary and alien experience. There, for the first time, they were separated from their native language and familiar surroundings and sent to cold classrooms where they spoke a language they did not understand. Al was different. He picked up English quickly and was very solid in his learning. He was particularly good at maths. Nevertheless, at the age of 14, he got into a fight with his teacher, hit her and left the school, never to return.
He found work in a confectionery shop, later in a small printing shop, and then his father bought him shoeshine equipment and sent him to a busy street to earn money. At that time, Don Balsamo was Brooklyn’s first “godfather”, extorting small street traders in exchange for “protection”. Al, who at 14 looked like a grown-up young man, was convinced that he too could demand protection money from other underage shoeshine boys. He immediately recruited two of his cousins and two of his friends so that he would not have to do it alone. He maintained this way of working throughout his career and never did the dirty work himself, but always left it to the helpers.
But his protection efforts were largely unsuccessful, as the minors were chased off the streets by groups of older criminals. Nevertheless, Al attracted the attention of other rising stars of the criminal underworld, notably Johnny Torrio, who soon entrusted him with minor tasks such as delivering messages and collecting protection money. Al Capone thus spent his time well into his teenage years, and somewhere along the way fell in love with a pretty Irish girl with green eyes.
When they met, Al was 18 years old, both were employed, although Al made most of his money from the business he did for Johnny Torrio. He also used to work as a “redneck” in nightclubs run by the Mafia. Once, when he told an Italian girl in a club that she had a nice bottom, her brother, who was watching her, went berserk, pulled out a knife and slashed his cheek with it. The brother was also one of the employees of Torrio’s group, so it all ended with the two men apologising to each other. But the scar remained visible throughout his life, which is why Al Capone was later called Scarface.
But the story between Al and Mae was a true love story, despite the subsequent embarrassment, shame, fears and despair that were a regular part of their lives. They came from different social backgrounds. Her father was a railway clerk and English was spoken at home, Al’s father was a barber whose customers were poor Italians, and his mother never spoke English. His sisters looked down on the “foreign” blonde who had stolen Al’s heart, and Mae and his mother Teresa Capone never got along either, as Al’s mother spoke only Italian to her future daughter-in-law – if she spoke at all.
Even though the end of the First World War was approaching, Al had to register as a male at the recruitment office. Marriage would have meant postponing his enlistment, but Mae’s mother still wanted to wait until the baby was born, and he was on his way. They married at the end of December 1918, when little Sonny was already a month old.
When Al’s father Gabriele died of a heart attack, Al hurried home, knowing that supporting his large family would now be his job. He could not count on his brothers to bring home a regular income, and his sisters were still at school. He was aware that he would not be able to provide financial stability for a large family, either by working in a factory behind a conveyor belt or by working as an orderly in a nightclub. In Brooklyn, he worked for Johnny Torrio, which meant he was away all night and all day, sometimes for weeks. Mae accepted this life, knowing that her husband loved her.
Around 1909, Torrio made frequent trips to Chicago, where he built a reputation as a mediator and arbitrator in disputes, and eventually took over the running of various businesses for local gangster “Big Jim” Colosimo. He soon decided to move there for good.
Colosimo and his wife controlled at least 100 brothels in the city, earning him a handsome income. When he was murdered in a restaurant in broad daylight in 1920, Torrio took over all his business. There were no witnesses to the murder and no one knew that it was Torrio who had taken out his rival. Al saw this as a great opportunity for him and moved to Chicago with his family, followed a short time later by his two brothers.
He settled in Chicago and began to climb the gangster ladder. He became the most powerful and richest of the mob leaders in just six years. His rise was phenomenal, his rise to the top sensational and his fall meteoric. Why did Al Capone capture people’s imaginations so much, attracting almost worldwide attention and interest and fuelling speculation?
Al Capone struggled for power
At the beginning of his stay in Chicago, Al managed a few brothels that Torrio inherited after Colosimo got married. Later, rumours spread that he had a 15-year-old Greek girl as his mistress at the time, whom he provided with a special apartment. By 1921, he had risen through the ranks to take over the management of the best restaurant in the city and the Four Aces brothel, showing a remarkable bookkeeping ability to evade taxes. By now he had made enough money to move his mother Teresa, and later slowly other relatives, to Chicago. He was wealthy, but for security reasons he had to install bars on the windows of his house and steel protection plates on his car.
Although he could have moved to a more upscale neighbourhood, he stayed in a modest neighbourhood at 7244 Prairie for the whole time he was in Chicago. When asked what he did for a living, he always replied modestly: “I’m a landlord and a taxpayer.” And indeed, he always paid his taxes regularly and paid his house taxes.
Johnny Torrio slowly let him take more important decisions and Al soon brought his brothers Frank and Ralph on board. But for him, it was crucial to gain influence in the local environment of the suburban area of Cicero, where Torrio had relocated his headquarters. The list of candidates for the city council included many of the people Capone had on his payroll.
Cicero was a factory suburb with a large number of European immigrants. Even before the elections started, the newspapers were saying that they would not be fair and that there would be bloodshed. So the mayor of Chicago, upset by rumours of Al’s smearing of opposing candidates, decided to send a squad of police to Cicero to restore order. The police did not wear uniforms, but civilian clothes, and they drove around in black limousines just like the gangsters.
The vehicles were moving in goose order along the main street, which was being crossed by Al’s brother Frank at that very moment. The police cars came to a screeching halt, and Frank Capone turned around in surprise, thinking that a hostile gang of gangsters was trying to liquidate him. He reached for his revolver, but before he could use it, a hail of bullets rained down on him. Al Capone, who was nearby, went mad, came up with a revolver in each hand and opened fire. Before the police realised what had happened, he had disappeared into the darkness.
This is the first time he has been the subject of a police investigation. He posed as an old furniture dealer, carrying a revolver for his own safety. The investigation ended with the conclusion that the police were justified in shooting him because Frank Capone was the first to draw his revolver.
But Johnny Torrio had other rival gangster groups breathing down his neck as he became too powerful and invaded their territories. Since he was often absent from Chicago, they decided to get rid of his assistant, Al Capone.
In January 1925, as Capone was entering a restaurant, a hail of bullets rained down on him. He quickly threw himself to the ground, saving his life, and his vehicle was completely destroyed. This was the first time that a Thompson machine gun with a round magazine was used by gangsters in a shoot-out.
Torrio returned to Chicago a few days later and, as he was driving home, he failed to notice a limousine approaching in the opposite direction and blocking his path. Three men jumped out, killed his chauffeur and fired several bullets into his chest. Torrio was lying on the ground covered in blood when one of the assailants approached him and tried to kill him with a shot to the head. He fired, but nothing happened as he ran out of ammunition.
The street was heavily trafficked and the attackers quickly fled, hoping Torrio would not survive. But they did not get their wish, as they managed to save his life with a series of operations. He stayed in hospital for a month, during which time Capone’s men stood guard outside, while Capone himself prepared an emergency bed at his boss’s bedside and stood guard with a pistol in his hand.
After his recovery, Torrio decided to retire, move to New York and leave his business to Al Capone. He went on to secure power in Cicero and then in Chicago itself, where he ruled for six years almost without constraint.
His rise to power in the city did not go unnoticed and he suddenly found himself the centre of attention. Even in the remotest hamlets of America, people were listening to radio reports or reading local newspapers linking them to world events. At twenty-seven, Al Capone was more than suited to newspaper reports. By a modest estimate, his criminal group, known as the Organisation, generated an annual turnover of $105 million from illegal activities, which in today’s terms would be well over $1 billion.
But despite the money, Al behaved the same way. His wife Mae stayed at home most of the time and didn’t go anywhere except to Sunday mass. His mother Teresa, “Mama Capone”, in the tradition of the Italian matriarchy, expected everyone to respect her every request, and so they did. Sister Mafalda enjoyed the status of a princess who never forgot to say that she was a true American and not an Italian. Sometime in 1925, Mae found out that she had syphilis. On the advice of her doctors, she decided to seek treatment at the Mayo Clinic. Al Capone did not want to hear of her being treated himself. There is no information on whether or not he was treated in Chicago.
Al’s son Sonny was his mother’s pet, in poor health and with a bad hearing. His mother kept his father’s activities from him as long as possible. But when he was sent to school after being home-schooled, and his classmates started showing him newspapers that said what a thug and murderer his father was, Al couldn’t do anything either. There were hundreds of rumours about him, mostly told by those who were not around at the time. Thus, people said that one winter evening he came to a restaurant in front of which a shivering child was selling newspapers. He offered him a newspaper and asked him to buy it so that he could go home. Capone bought all the newspapers, gave him as much money as a worker earned for several weeks and told him to go home, give the money to his mother and go to school regularly.
Al Capone’s first time in prison
Al’s professional life was a constant battle with rival mafia groups trying to kill him. He therefore spent much of his time in one of his hotels, which he had fortified as a fortress, or in one of the many hideouts he had in the city. But wherever he was, he phoned home every day. Hundreds of books have been written by various authors about how he lived during this period, and almost all of them agree that he was able to run his brothels, speakeasies and casinos unhindered because of his connections with politicians, but above all because a good half of the Chicago police were on his payroll.
One of the most unusual findings was that the town of Cicero, an appendage of Chicago with a population of around 60,000 in 1921, had no brothel or illegal casino until then. Three years later, there were already 123 speakeasies, 22 brothels and 161 illegal casinos. Capone had to work hard to reign in Cicero, having to get rid of no fewer than five ethnic criminal gangs that controlled the city. As a result of this power struggle, 215 people lost their lives between 1921 and 1930.
Capone was lusted after by many, and if they couldn’t get him, they went after others in his group. His chauffeur suddenly disappeared and his body was found mutilated in a well. He refused to tell his attackers where his boss was hiding and paid with his life. In November 1926, Capone was having dinner with his friend Tony “The Greek” in a restaurant that had been closed especially for them when someone rang the doorbell. Tony went to answer it for Capone and never returned.
In 1926, Al set up his headquarters at the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero. Bullet-proof shutters were fitted to the windows and a group of armed men always stood guard in the lobby. The hotel staff knew they were working for Capone and few of the townspeople dared to enter the day bar for a drink, never knowing what would happen or who they would bump into. There were no hotel guests, as all the rooms were occupied by Capone’s people. The tour guides who took the tourists on the buses to the sightseeing tours pointed out ‘Capone’s castle’ to them in awe.
But Capone had no privacy here, so he secretly bought a small apartment building close to the hotel, where only his closest colleagues could see him. He lined the front door with steel panels, walled the garage and dug a tunnel between the building and the garage. The bedroom was furnished in the style of a brothel, where he received his mistresses and snorted so much cocaine that he injured his nasal cavity.
He was always accompanied by eight security guards, some in an armoured car, others in cars in front or behind him. In 1928 he moved his headquarters to the larger Lexington Hotel nearby. He also equipped it properly and dug several tunnels that could be used as emergency exits. He rarely stayed overnight in his house on Prairie Avenue, for fear of being shot through the window. He was melancholy about his situation: “I’ve been in this business long enough to realise that a man needs rest. I haven’t had a quiet mind for years. I’ve had no peace of mind. I don’t want to end up in a ditch riddled with bullets.” He began to think about leaving the city and not telling anyone where he was going.
His brother Ralph had bought an estate in northern Wisconsin and Al Capone instructed his “house” lawyer, O’ Harra, to buy a 400-acre property near Couderay hamlet, so that he would not formally own it. He had the property properly landscaped and fortified and was confident that he would be able to spend a few peaceful days there. The citizens of Couderay just looked on in amazement when they saw large lorries with Chicago licence plates unloading furniture in the streets.
But the road from Chicago to there was long and winding, and suitable for ambushes. In recent years alone, Capone has been shot at at least ten times by various mafia groups, who wanted to poison his food and pursued him at every turn. Al Capone soon realised that he would not find peace in his new refuge. Then an incident occurred that Capone later regretted.
In April 1926, a young Assistant Prosecutor McSwiggin drove through the centre of Cicero in a black limousine with acquaintances. They were heading for a drunken revel. The black limousine was immediately recognised by Capone’s men as that of the hated O’ Donell Mafia family. For them, this was a provocation they could not allow. They set off in five cars in pursuit of the limousine. They stopped it and showered it with a hail of bullets, wounding some of the passengers and killing McSwiggin. The question of what an assistant prosecutor was doing in the company of O’ Donnell’s gangsters was forever unanswered.
The murder of an assistant prosecutor was a serious matter and, as always when a victim has fallen in a mafia showdown, the murder was blamed on Al Capone. They could not find him because he was successfully hiding with friends. But in mid-July, he had had enough of hiding and decided to turn himself in to the police, convinced that they had no evidence against him. “Boys, I think you’re looking for me”, he told the police somewhere in the countryside, and they immediately took him to a Chicago jail.
There he immediately claimed that he had nothing to do with the murder and that he saw McSwiggin as a friend. He concluded his speech with the spiteful words, “I paid him, and I paid him a lot, and I got what I paid for.” He expected to be released immediately, but the judge was stubborn and Capone, much to his anger, had to spend the night in a drunken cell.
He was released from prison the next day and instead of going home to Avenue Prairie, where his wife had not seen him for months, he immediately went to his headquarters in Cicero and called a working meeting. While he had been in hiding, he had of course been kept informed of how business was going, but now he wanted to show his colleagues that he was still the one who decided everything.
Structure of the organisation
“I am the boss and I will continue to manage things. Don’t let anyone think they’re going to run me out of town. I have not run away and I will not run away in the future,” Capone told a journalist. He turned his Organisation into such a well-functioning business that the Harvard Business School began to study its structure and organisation chart. The Organisation’s network structure had Capone at the top as “union president”.
The network was spiderweb-like, with each window having a number of people in charge of specific operations. As such, Capone needed and had in the left-hand window “personal assistants”, servants, chauffeurs, barbers, doctors and others. The right-hand box was that of “personal security guards”, and among them were well-known names such as Antonio Leocardo, Frankie Rio and Jack McGurn, and others – all excellent marksmen themselves. This was to satisfy his personal needs.
The large box vertically down below him was known as the Board of Directors of the Twelve, with his brother Ralph in charge of alcohol, prostitution and gambling. Among the directors was Frank Nitti, who was in charge of relations with Unione Siciliana, Jack Buzik was business manager and in charge of statistics, and Edward O’ Hara was in charge of legal affairs. In a separate box at the end was the “Revenue and Protection” department.
This was the rough mapping of responsibilities that the Harvard Business School did for Capone’s Organisation, knowing that it did not cover everything, as Capone had hundreds of people on his payroll. Among them were such notorious names as Charlie Fischetti, who was involved in alcohol distribution, Frank Pope, in charge of illegal bookmakers, Hymie Levine, who collected protection money, and Louis Cowen, who posted bail in the courts for imprisoned members of the Organisation and took care of real estate purchases. These few hundred people worked night and day, formally employed by the “Dr Brown” company.
Jack Guzik and a team of 20 employees were in charge of the police chiefs on the Capone payroll and their payments. The organisation also owned three large breweries and had around 500 “gorillas” on its payroll to ensure that the beer and smuggled alcohol reached their customers safely.
Although Capone did not directly employ African-Americans in his organisation, some of his colleagues were convinced that the Organisation was so successful because it was staffed by people of different origins and nationalities. Although they were mostly white, not all of them were of Italian origin and thus not tied to the old Sicilian Mafia ways. In the areas of Chicago and Cicero controlled by the Organisation, whites and blacks mixed freely, and in the black-owned nightclubs, white patrons were led safely to reserved tables by waiters, and everyone danced together to the sounds of jazz, even though the Chicago newspapers wrote of the dangers of racial rapprochement.
Al Capone loved opera, especially Verdi, and had a valuable collection of Caruso records. He was so knowledgeable that he could discuss the musical abilities of opera singers. Nevertheless, he also went to clubs where jazz was played, and he was particularly fond of listening to Louis Armstrong.
By 1927, it was so strong that the Vice-President of the United States, Charles Dawes, had to admit that the country was no longer in control of the situation in Chicago and that all legal and non-legal measures to change it had failed. Al Capone was so powerful that all the other mafia gang leaders, insofar as he had not had them murdered before, submitted to him and acknowledged his superiority. He gathered the rest of them in a meeting at the Hawthorne Hotel, assigned them areas where they could still operate, and told them, “We are unnecessarily making a shooting gallery out of a big deal, and none of us is benefiting from it.”
During this year, territorial disputes between mafia groups subsided, although Capone’s opponents watched his every move, hoping he would make a mistake and they could kill him. It was then that Capone decided to devote himself to his family, but it was not easy. He decided to take a short trip to California, some for business, some for pleasure. He travelled by train, of course, and at every station he was met by a crowd of journalists. Everything he said was immediately on the front pages of the newspapers, and he became a goldmine for the journalists.
When he returned to Chicago and was about to enter his house on Prairie Avenue, he saw that the house was surrounded by police. He had become public enemy No 1, and in Chicago they simply wanted to get rid of him, to force him to move to another city and let others deal with him. The police hoped to get on his nerves with constant surveillance. The newspapers also began to publish mostly unpleasant things about him and his family.
Capone still wanted a place where he could enjoy his free hours, and he chose Miami. He knew that no one would want to be his neighbour, so he chose his property carefully. He never signed any document, never opened a bank account in his own name, always working through intermediaries who did what he wanted and in the way he wanted. That is how he bought his Miami property.
He bought the villa through a real estate agent, the money was brought home, he bought it in his own name, and Mr and Mrs Capone only became the owners of the property after complicated procedures. The property was in Biscayne Bay, part of Miami Beach, so not exactly in the city, so the angry neighbours could not complain about their new neighbour. But even in Miami, he had no peace. His wife Mae was losing her nerve as brothers, relatives and wives and mistresses kept arriving expecting to be served.
The purchase of a villa and estate in Florida had consequences that no one could have foreseen at the time. In 1927, the US Supreme Court upheld an obscure law that required taxes to be paid even on illegal income. This was the first time that the US judiciary was able to indict Capone in a concrete way; he was accused of tax evasion.
The authorities knew that Capone was living lavishly in Florida and that he owned an estate that had cost a lot to restore. The law stipulated that anyone legally earning more than $5000 had to pay taxes, but Capone never did, because he never earned anything honestly. His lawyers cleverly hid his income and distributed it so that he did not even have an official illegal income. The tax authorities therefore rightly wondered where he got the money for his Florida estate.
The beginning of the decline
Al Capone’s criminal empire began to slowly crumble in 1927, some argue that it started with the unnecessary murder of the brutal gangster Frankie Yale in July 1928, with whom he had outstanding scores from his youth, which Capone should not have allowed to happen, as it attracted unnecessary attention. Others say it all started two years later, in June 1930, with the murder of reporter Jake Lingle, who knew too much and was willing to say so. More likely, however, Capone’s decline can be linked to an event at which he was not even present.
In December 1928, 27 Sicilian-Americans gathered in Cleveland to organise crime on a national scale. Neither Al Capone nor the retired Johnny Torrio were invited to the meeting. Not because they were not Sicilian, but because Capone was already a public figure and enjoyed that status, and the Sicilians wanted to operate in secret and in the dark. Those present at the Cleveland meeting wanted to divide the territory of the United States between the “families” and exclude any other competition.
Meanwhile, Capone had other things to worry about in Florida. His wife Mae and son Sonny were being examined by doctors on suspicion of syphilis. The suspicion was unjustified, and Capone steadfastly refused to undergo a similar medical examination. He loved Mae very much. She was the Madonna of the house, almost a saint to him, but he preferred to seek physical pleasures from prostitutes and prostitutes’ maids. He never wanted to be involved with other women for long, the only exception being the blonde Janette DeMarco, whom he never brought to Florida, but who was present at all his other parties. Mae probably knew about her, but never mentioned her, because she had no choice but to keep quiet.
One day, Capone received an invitation to meet with an assistant prosecutor who had come to Miami from Brooklyn for the meeting. He was sure that the meeting would be short and formal, as he was in Florida at the time Frankie Yale was killed. He was therefore all the more surprised to see that the local district attorney, the sheriff and the stenographer were accompanied by an assistant public prosecutor. No one asked him about the murder of Frankie Yale, only about where he got the money to buy the Florida property and how the transaction went.
He answered that he did not remember anything. But when they were such that he could not answer that he did not remember, he simply lied. This questioning about his finances was just one of those that led to his downfall, and it was only accelerated by an event that happened in Chicago on the same day.
While Capone was being interrogated in Miami, on 14 February 1929, seven members of the Bugs Moran gang were killed in a garage on North Clark Street in Chicago. It was a bloody crime that was covered by the world press. It happened on the day of love and everyone called it the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. People wondered what role Capone played in this massacre. They were convinced that he had ordered the massacre because Bugs Moran had begun to encroach on his lucrative liquor business. Few at the time dared to express the belief that this was the final nail in Al Capone’s coffin.
The public was outraged and demanded that law and order reign in the city. The massacre was the subject of five separate investigations, all of which ended in fiasco. Investigators were constantly replaced and sent on other errands, and much evidence was stolen, destroyed or deliberately lost. A reward of $50,000 was offered for the arrest of the perpetrators. But still nothing has been found to indicate Al Capone’s involvement. Suspicions and theories abounded, but no arrests were made.
The massacre was carefully planned and the killers were four in number, two of them in police uniform and the other two in plain clothes and armed with Thompson submachine guns. Members of the Bugs Moran gang were lured into the garage on the pretext of picking up cases of stolen Canadian whisky. When they saw the police officer, they were convinced that it was a routine raid and calmly handed over their weapons. They were lined up against the garage wall and searched with machine guns.
When police arrived at the scene, one of the victims was still alive. He was quickly rushed to hospital, where doctors stabilised him and police asked him who had shot him. He replied, “Nobody shot but me”. He died a few hours later.
The killers wanted to kill Bugs Moran in particular, but he was not in the garage at the time. When he found out what had happened to his men, he went mad with rage and immediately accused Capone of organising the massacre. The St Valentine’s Day massacre also destroyed the last opposition of the gangster families to the domination of Al Capone.
He was soon summoned to appear before a grand jury in Chicago on alcohol smuggling charges. He just laughed, knowing that the prosecution had been unsuccessfully proving him guilty of such offences for ten years. Nevertheless, he resisted the summons and sent medical certificates to prove it, only to turn up in Chicago on 10 March. J. Edgar Hoover, who became Director of the FBI in 1924, was rather lukewarm in pursuing bootleggers and liquor dealers throughout Prohibition, knowing he could not win this battle. But he became wary of Capone when he saw that he could catch him in the act of tax evasion.
Why did criminals who broke the Prohibition Act live on such a high wage, even though they never paid taxes? Edward Hoover could not avoid this question. Capone’s arrival was a big day for the press and he was followed every step of the way. It was clear that the police wanted to get rid of him, just as they wanted to get rid of the heads of the other crime families. It seemed that everyone in America wanted to get rid of Al Capone. So he had to take dramatic steps to prove that he was still in charge in Chicago.
One of his main remaining competitors was Joe Aiello. With the promise of better earnings, he lured the two main enforcers of Capone’s murderous orders, Scalise and Anselmo, to his side. Although they lived well under Capone, they were lured by Aiello’s better pay. Their defection to a rival was discovered by Frankie Rio, Capone’s bodyguard and one of his closest confidants. Shortly afterwards, their bodies were found in a burning car, beaten, mutilated beyond recognition and riddled with bullets.
This was a bad sign for Capone, as his most loyal people started to leave him. No one knew where he was after the assassination, but in April he was back in Miami, meeting his most loyal associates before going to Atlantic City to meet other mafia leaders coming from the big American cities. In addition to the Sicilian mafia leaders, there were also Irish, Jewish and Slavic mafia leaders. The meeting was to bring about an agreement on new ways of doing business, as until then the individual families had only worked together to maximise their profits and avoid unnecessary bloodshed among themselves.
The Atlantic City deal was loose enough to satisfy everyone and not bind anyone too much. They agreed on a loose confederation of mafia families, which would allow everyone to operate in mutually agreed territories. For Capone, this meant that the other mafia families in Chicago would stick to their own territories and not encroach on his. If rumours are to be believed, this meeting was the meeting where Chicago was divided between Al Capone and Aiello, which was a gross insult to Capone. He knew that others were after his life and that he had to stay alive.
He was convinced that the best thing to do was to allow himself to be imprisoned for a few weeks or a month until things calmed down, and he had even already chosen a prison. In Philadelphia, the city authorities were still quite sympathetic to him, and even their jail, if he had equipped it properly, could have been quite decent. Frankie Rio was to be imprisoned with him, to guard him. But all was not as he had planned.
First time in prison
Capone and Rio stopped in Filadefia and allowed themselves to be arrested by a police officer who was on Capone’s payroll. He arrested them for carrying revolvers in public. The judge ordered bail to be set at $35,000 each, and since they had no money with them, they spent the night in jail. Capone was even more surprised when the judge sentenced them to a year in prison and sent them to the notorious Holmesburg Prison. This sentence came as a complete surprise to him.
They were transferred to a more comfortable prison in Philadelphia only later. There, he could buy an expensive radio, walk around his cell with precious carpets on the floor, eat the food of his choice, his wife could visit and stay with him, and the guards were as respectful as possible. Of course, he had many visitors, so he managed his business successfully even from prison.
Due to his good behaviour, he was released two months before his sentence was due to expire on 17 March 1930. But in Chicago, he still had a summons to appear before a grand jury on tax evasion charges, and the police commissioner also wanted to question him about the St Valentine’s Day massacre. The police had already surrounded his house on Prairie Avenue, with orders to arrest him as soon as they saw him.
At that time, the name Eliot Ness was not yet known. He was a federal agent who had been given permission to eavesdrop on Capone’s conversations, so listening devices were installed in almost ten places. Capone finally appeared before the police commissioner and, since the police commissioner could prove nothing, he went home a free man.
While Al Capone was in prison, his brother Ralph did the biggest stupid thing of his life. The tax authorities found several bank accounts in someone else’s name and proved that Ralph Capone was the beneficiary. Instead of paying a small fine for tax evasion and getting the matter sorted out, he demanded a trial in court, which sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment. To make matters worse, the great economic crisis hit America in full force and revenues from pubs and brothels plummeted. The following year, Capone’s closest aides Frank Nitti and Jake Guzik were jailed for tax evasion. Capone was severely weakened by this, as his business was now run by people he could not fully trust.
So Johnny Torrio temporarily said goodbye to his comfortable retirement in New York and started running the day-to-day operations of the Capone Organisation. He flew to Chicago once a month, listening to reports and issuing orders. Above all, he advised Capone, who suspected that the noose was closing around him, to hire the best tax adviser America had to offer. And Capone listened.
He has always been very cautious, so his name has not appeared in the Organisation’s business reports, nor has there been any written evidence of how he spends his money. He did not have bank accounts in his own name and used only intermediaries for all financial transactions. He always carried a lot of money and always paid in cash. The house in Chicago was registered in his mother’s name and he signed over his share of the Florida estate to his wife Mae.
The Organisation’s financial reports were produced in duplicates and were never kept together. The tax adviser was naturally faced with the dilemma of whether it would not have been better to admit that Capone had a few small assets, pay the penalty and thus avoid legal proceedings.
Capone appeared with his tax adviser for questioning in April 1930, where he was asked about his income, banking connections and brokerage business. He answered most of the questions with a “no” or “my agent will talk to you about that”, and all the indications were that the two sides would come to an agreement. After this hearing, Capone was convinced that he deserved some rest in Florida.
But even there, the authorities did not leave him alone. He was arrested four times and charged with vagrancy, as the law allowed this charge to be brought against anyone suspected of having obtained his livelihood illegally. Each time, he was thrown in jail for a day, left without food and water, stripped of his personal belongings and ridiculed. Capone’s lawyers appealed against this procedure and succeeded.
So Capone was able to enjoy the warm Florida sun in peace for at least a few months. Meanwhile, the US Justice Department was tirelessly gathering evidence against him for tax evasion, and in June 1931 he was charged with 24 counts of tax evasion. The IRS began to put pressure on those it suspected of keeping his books, threatening them with imprisonment. Some of them started to give in, but they feared for their lives so much that they had to be admitted to the witness protection programme.
During this period, the police regularly raided nightclubs owned by the Capone Organisation, and these raids were like the best Hollywood movies; guests screamed and ran, bottles of alcohol were broken, employees were arrested, cash registers were opened with acetylene torches in search of evidence, and soon the investigators had thousands of documents that were more or less incriminating for Capone.
His lawyers were worried and did everything they could to get the case into the hands of judges who were on the payroll of the Organisation, or at least partly sympathetic to it. Capone behaved carelessly during this time, so much so that some were later convinced that syphilis had already invaded his brain and influenced his behaviour. But then US President Herbert Hoover was in a hurry, as he wanted Capone in jail before 1933, when he would launch his presidential re-election campaign and the World’s Fair would open in Chicago in 1933. It was necessary to prove to the world that Chicago was a safe city and its uncrowned king behind bars. The public was convinced that Capone would go to jail for two years and pay only a small fine.
By the time the trial against Capone began in October 1931, Capone was convinced that he had things under control. But someone spoke up, or at least hinted that most of the jurors had been bribed, and the jurors had to be replaced before the trial even started. The whole first week of the trial was spent questioning numerous witnesses who were supposed to prove that Capone, although without some income, lived lavishly. Capone’s lawyers were confused by the amount of evidence, convinced that the trial would end in their client’s acquittal due to the lack of evidence, and reacted nervously.
The jury decided quickly, finding Capone not guilty on 17 of the 22 charges and guilty on only five. The jury’s decision was puzzling. How is it possible that, using the same evidence, it decided that he was guilty in one case and innocent in another? The prosecutors stood together and tried to understand how to understand the jury’s decision, and then demanded that each juror be asked personally whether that was indeed the jury’s decision and whether he understood it that way.
The judge also sighed and closed the trial, saying he would deliver his verdict within a week. If he had taken into account the maximum penalties provided by law for each offence, Capone could have been sentenced to a total of 17 years in prison and a fine.
A week later, the judge announced that Capone would serve 11 years in prison for various offences. His lawyers demanded that he be released pending the appeal, but the judge refused and Capone was immediately taken to prison.
Capone in Alcatraz
Although most of the public were satisfied that the No 1 enemy of the state was in prison, some had the good sense to wonder how it was that the state had to resort to such side-trackers as tax evasion when he was a notorious murderer and it was right, for the public’s sake alone, that he should be tried and convicted for his many murders.
Al Capone finds himself in the Cook County Jail, surrounded by a crowd of journalists and photographers. He was placed in cell D-5. The jail had VIP cells, so his wife Mae was allowed to furnish his cell. Of course, they also brought him food from the best restaurants. The newspapers reported that a black limousine was parked outside the prison with his guards, that couriers were entering the prison with parcels and holding telegrams, and that secretaries were coming in to take notes of his replies to the many letters. Johnny Torrio, accompanied by Lucky Luciano, also visits him in prison.
Meanwhile, all the courts rejected his lawyers’ appeal against the sentence and sent him to serve his sentence in a federal prison in Atlanta, known for its strict discipline. He was taken there by train from Chicago, chained together with a 26-year-old car thief and a large group of other prisoners who were being taken to the same prison. His mother Teresa, his wife Mae and his sister Mafalda were not allowed near.
Al Capone arrived in prison on 5 May 1932 and was diagnosed with neurosyphilis during a routine medical examination. The prison doctor started treating him, but with an inappropriate drug, so that the disease continued to develop unhindered. He paced up and down in his cell, waving his fist excitedly and saying that he was Chicago’s greatest benefactor, because without him, crime would be rampant in the city and many families would starve.
His presence in prison was, of course, a problem, as he received a lot of mail. People asked for photos, autographs, souvenirs and money, and journalists asked for interviews, which he refused on principle. In prison, however, he was not completely without work. First he had to work in a shoemaker’s shop, then he had to clean the floors with a rag. In principle, during the two years he spent in Atlanta, he was considered a model prisoner who respected the rules.
Then the public prosecutor came up with the idea of a special prison where the worst prisoners could no longer communicate with the outside world, or with each other, almost unhindered, and they soon found such a place. Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay had been under military control since 1850, and the army wanted to get rid of any property that was no use to it. The island had once been a military prison, and in August 1934 the Federal Bureau of Prisons took possession of the island. That same month, the first group of 53 prisoners left the Atlanta prison and took a train across the country to San Francisco. Among them was Al Capone, the country’s number one enemy. But the worst was yet to come.
They were greeted by the director of the prison, S. Johnston, who has become known as the most brutal enforcer of the prison system in America. Capone knew the prison system in America well and knew that to survive he had to behave well. All the other prisoners were sentenced to 25 years or more, but he, who spent two years in Atlanta, had less than ten years left in prison and could hope for early release for good behaviour.
But Alcatraz robbed Capone of the authority he had in Atlanta. He was just a frail, ageing man, bowing down to the lowest guard. He refused to take part in the frequent fights between the inmates and was considered a coward. The other prisoners soon noticed this, laughed at him, teased him and pushed him this way and that. Once, he had a quarrel with a prisoner, who then stabbed him in the chest and back with a pair of scissors. The wounds were not life-threatening, but the broken scissor blade was stuck in his chest and he had to undergo surgery.
He was able to receive visits on a limited basis, but after 1936 his behaviour began to change as syphilis began to affect his brain. He began to pray and talk to the prison priest. Prison discipline was extremely strict and many prisoners resorted to murder, suicide and other forms of violence in desperation. Al Capone, who did not take part in this, was left alone.
One day he started behaving strangely, barely staying on his feet and trying to vomit. The doctor sent him to the prison hospital and called a specialist from San Francisco. The newspapers immediately reported that Capone had suffered a nervous breakdown in prison and had gone completely mad. He remained in the prison hospital for most of 1938, before being transferred to the Terminal Prison south of Los Angeles, where he continued to be treated with various injections.
Instead of being imprisoned until 1942, he was released from prison in November 1939 for good behaviour and ordered to be treated in a hospital in Baltimore. Here he had a special room connected to the adjoining apartment rented by his wife Mae. At that time, his health was already very fragile and the doctor assessed him as being mentally at the level of a ten-year-old child.
In mid-March 1940, his wife was allowed to take him home to Miami. The following year he was calmer, occasionally rather lucid and even began to entertain the idea of going to Chicago. Mae also thought that it would be better financially, especially if they went back to Chicago. Capone’s brother Ralph only sent her $600 a week for maintenance, which was not enough as the whole family was moving to Miami. Of course, the FBI would not leave him alone in Miami. Its agents would stop outside the house and write reports about everything that was going on in the house as long as Capone was alive, and the IRS still expected Capone to pay back the back taxes.
The injections and drugs Capone received had no effect, and it was not until 1945 that enough penicillin became available for Capone to be one of the first patients to receive it. This gave him some relief, but the disease was too advanced for the effects to be lasting.
The end came suddenly and unexpectedly. In the early hours of 21 January, Mae heard Capone gasping for air, spastic, his pupils dilated. The doctor who came gave him a sedative, but two days later his heart began to race, he started to lose consciousness and then to come back again. The priest gave him the last sacraments, and on 25 January 1947 he breathed his last.
He was buried in Chicago at Mount Olive Cemetery, next to the grave of his father and other family members. The funeral was relatively modest and attended only by those with whom he had worked closely. He died without a penny in his pocket and totally dependent on the help of his brothers. Long after his death, the Organisation was to pay his arrears.
