Al Capone
Alphonse Gabriel "Al" Capone, also known as Scarface, (January 17th, 1899 - January 25th, 1947) was a notorious Chicago gangster who was active throughout the 1920s.
|
| “ | You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. | „ |
| ~ Al Capone |
The son of Italian immigrants from New York City, Capone was expelled from school at age 14 and became involved with organized crime soon after, moving to Chicago in his early twenties. Al Capone rose to power in the crime–filled prohibition era, running a group known as the Chicago Outfit which specialized in smuggling and bootlegging alcohol as well as prostitution. To maintain a positive public image with the poor, who were the main consumers of his "business", Capone made many donations to charities with some of his illegitimately acquired money.
Capone was born in New York City in 1899 to Italian immigrant parents. He joined the Five Points Gang as a teenager, and became a bouncer in organized crime premises such as brothels. In his early twenties, he moved to Chicago and became a bodyguard and trusted factotum for Johnny Torrio, head of a criminal syndicate that illegally supplied alcohol—the forerunner of the Outfit—and was politically protected through the Unione Siciliana. A conflict with the North Side Gang was instrumental in Capone's rise and fall. Torrio went into retirement after North Side gunmen almost killed him, handing control to Capone. Capone expanded the bootlegging business through increasingly violent means, but his mutually profitable relationships with mayor William Hale Thompson and the city's police meant he seemed safe from law enforcement.
His image took significant damage in 1929 when he was exposed for involvement in the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre in which seven rival gang members were killed, and later he was convicted of tax evasion and sent to Alcatraz. He was paroled on November 16th, 1939. He died at his Florida home on January 25th, 1947 from complications from a stroke.
Years later in 1986, news celebrity Geraldo Rivera hosted a television special called "The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults" in which he uncovered a secret vault that used to be owned by Capone and supposedly contained treasure. However, to his embarrassment and the disappointment of everyone else, it was empty.
Biography edit
Alphonse "Al" Capone was born in the Brooklyn area of New York City in January 1899. He was the fourth of nine children born to parents who had immigrated to the United States from Italy. Capone's father was a barber and his mother a seamstress. They were a hardworking family with no apparent criminal connections or tendencies. The neighborhood, however, was tough, and Capone became involved at a very early age with several youth gangs, including the Brooklyn Rippers and the Forty Thieves Juniors.
When he was fourteen, Capone got into a fight with a teacher who had struck him. He dropped out of school and soon joined the Five Point Juniors, which was the youth branch of a well-known criminal organization called the Five Point Gang. Capone became a kind of apprentice to a racketeer (someone involved in illegal business activities) named Johnny Torrio (1882–1957). He ran errands for Torrio and learned from him about using cleverness, instead of violence, to get ahead.
Despite this early involvement in the city's criminal underworld, Capone also held a number of ordinary jobs, including work as a candy-store clerk and as a paper cutter in a bookbindery. He was employed as a bartender in a saloon when he received the facial marks that earned him the nickname "Scarface." He made a remark to a young woman that her brother, who was seated next to her, found insulting. The knife-wielding brother gave Capone three slashes on the left side of his face. For the rest of his life Capone was self-conscious about the scars and tried to cover them with powder.
While he was still a teenager, Capone met the young woman who would become his wife, Mary "Mae" Coughlin, who was a department-store clerk and two years older than Capone. She became pregnant and in early December 1919 gave birth to Albert Francis "Sonny" Capone. The couple married at the end of the month. Sonny, Capone's only child, later developed a serious hearing problem that may have been the result of syphilis (a sexually transmitted disease) inherited from his father. In any case, Capone loved Sonny dearly and always provided well for him.
Meanwhile, Torrio had moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1915. There he went to work for the thriving criminal operation of his uncle, James Colosimo (1877–1920), who ran saloons, gambling establishments, and houses of prostitution. In 1921 Torrio invited Capone to join him in Chicago. According to some sources, Capone was fleeing responsibility for several murders when he moved his family to Chicago and joined Colosimo's organization.
Capone arrived just as Prohibition was beginning. The Eighteenth Amendment, which made Prohibition official, had gone into effect in early 1920. The ban on alcohol had been brought about by reformers who wanted to protect society from the ill effects of drinking, which they felt damaged not only people's health but also their relationships and ability to work and support their families. Although some people had opposed Prohibition from the start, especially members of immigrant communities, for whom alcohol consumption had an important cultural role, most U.S. citizens supported the ban. Even Prohibition's supporters were surprised, however, when the Volstead Act (which spelled out the terms of the amendment) defined as illegal not only distilled beverages like whiskey but also fermented ones like beer and wine, which many had assumed would not be included.
Members of criminal organizations and gangsters (the popular term for this kind of criminal) quickly realized the moneymaking potential of Prohibition. They knew that people still wanted to drink alcohol and that they would pay for it. Thus bootlegging (the sale and distribution of illegal liquor) became an important focus of criminal activity, though gambling and prostitution operations still continued.
Not long after Capone's arrival in Chicago, Colosimo was assassinated by some unidentified rivals; a few commentators suspected Torrio and Capone of having something to do with the murder, but this was never proved. Torrio took over his uncle's operations, with Capone as his second-in-command. Capone demonstrated a shrewd business sense and steady nerves, both qualities that would serve him well in the years to come.
During the early 1920s, Torrio and Capone expanded their activities. They formed relationships with some criminal groups, such as the Purple Gang, with headquarters in Detroit, Michigan, while engaging in bitter and often brutal rivalry with others. Their main enemies were the members of the gang run by George Moran (1903–1959), which operated on the north side of Chicago, while Torrio and Capone controlled the south side. In January 1925 Moran's men made an unsuccessful attempt to kill Capone, and later in the month they attacked Torrio, seriously wounding him. Spooked, Torrio retired from his life of crime and moved to Italy. That left Capone in charge of one of the most prosperous criminal organizations in history.
During the second half of the 1920s Capone ran a sprawling criminal empire that included bootlegging operations, liquor distilleries and beer breweries, speakeasies (places where illegal liquor was sold and consumed), gambling establishments, prostitution rings, racetracks, and nightclubs. At the height of his success, his income was reportedly as high as one hundred million dollars per year. He protected his businesses by bribing police officers and political leaders, and he managed to rig elections so that the right people stayed in office. One of these was the mayor of Chicago, William "Big Bill" Thompson Jr.
Capone was a well-known public figure around Chicago, admired and respected by those who considered him more a businessman than a criminal. He appeared in flashy clothes and jewelry and often demonstrated generosity toward the needy. For example, he opened one of the first soup kitchens to serve the poor during the Great Depression, the period of economic hardship that began with the stock market crash in 1929 and lasted until the beginning of World War II in 1939. Capone boasted, with some justification, that he ran Chicago. As quoted in Thomas Pegram's Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933, Capone complained that "everybody calls me a racketeer. I call myself a businessman."
Capone's money, power, and glamour went hand in hand, however, with ruthlessness (showing no compassion), a hot temper, and a willingness to engage in whatever violence seemed necessary to accomplish his goals. Chicago had become a nearly lawless place, with corrupt police officers and politicians not only tolerating but even taking part in criminal activity, and gangsters frequently having shoot-outs on the streets. Capone was at the heart of the action. He was suspected of involvement in more than two hundred murders of enemies and rival gang members. Because people involved in organized crime would not talk to the police—out of fear, loyalty, or because of their own guilt—it was almost impossible to solve or prosecute these kinds of crimes.
The violence continued to escalate throughout the 1920s, lending fuel to the growing public resistance to Prohibition. Finally an event occurred that sent shock waves through the nation, as Chicago became the setting for one of the most horrifying episodes of the decade. For a long time Capone had had his eye on Moran's territory. In addition, Moran had recently tried to kill "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, one of Capone's closest associates. The double motives of greed and revenge led to what came to be called the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Members of Moran's gang were known to use a certain garage as a drop-off point for shipments of illegal liquor. On February 14, 1929, seven gang members were at the garage when several policemen suddenly burst in; these were actually Capone's men, dressed in stolen uniforms. Assuming this was a raid on their bootlegging operation, Moran's men stood facing a wall with their hands in the air.
At this point, more members of Capone's gang ran in and used machine guns and other weapons to shoot and kill the Moran gang members, pumping almost two hundred bullets into their bodies. By a stroke of luck, Moran himself (likely the intended target of the attack) was not among them. It was probably McGurn who was responsible for the execution of this attack, but Capone is thought to have been at the heart of its planning. At the time it occurred, however, Capone was in Florida, and neither he nor anyone else was ever charged.
News of this bloodbath shocked not only Chicago but the rest of the nation as well, including the top leaders of government. Calls for action led President Herbert Hoover (1874–1964; served 1929–33; see entry) to order a crackdown on organized crime, targeting Capone in particular. He was subsequently arrested on a weapons charge and jailed for a year. Capone seemed to view prison as a welcome refuge, however, since other gang leaders (especially Moran) were supposedly plotting against him.
When Capone emerged from prison, he faced more pressure from several government agencies determined to curb his illegal activities. One of these was the Justice Department, which set up a new squad of special agents headed by Eliot Ness (1902–1957), a twenty-six-year-old Chicago native who had already been working for the department's Prohibition Bureau. Ness was known for his honesty; in fact, Capone had tried unsuccessfully to bribe him and, failing that, made some attempts on his life. The young agent was authorized to choose nine other men to join him in battling bootleggers, racketeers, and corrupt police officers. Ness's hand-picked agents, all of them under thirty, and each specializing in a skill such as wiretapping or weapons handling, had such spotless records that the squad was known as the Untouchables. It was understood that they would never give in to either bribery or threats of violence.
The Untouchables did much to block Capone's business operations; for example, they conducted raids that shut down thirty breweries and netted more than one hundred arrests. They did not, however, put Capone in jail. That feat was managed through a different and somewhat unusual channel. When Capone was finally sent to prison, it was not for murder or for violating Prohibition, but for tax evasion (failing to pay income tax).
While Al Capone was known as the most successful of the organized crime leaders who made their fortunes during the Roaring Twenties, Eliot Ness is recognized as the decade's leading lawman. As head of the squad known as the "Untouchables," Ness hindered Capone's bootlegging operation and also contributed to his eventual arrest and conviction for tax evasion.
Ness was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1903, the son of a Norwegian immigrant. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1925, and, two years later, he passed a civil service examination, earning a position as a special agent with the Treasury Department. He was soon transferred to the Justice Department to join the new Prohibition Bureau, an agency established to fight the recent increase in organized crime related to the illegal liquor trade, based out of Chicago.
President Herbert Hoover's particular concern over Al Capone's activities in Chicago spurred the Prohibition Bureau to establish a special group of agents to focus on shutting down Capone and his bootlegging network. Ness led the group and handpicked the agents making up the team. By October 1929 he had hired nine men respected not only for their investigative skills but for their personal honesty and integrity.
Ness took aim at Capone's sizable income (estimated at $75 million per year), which gave the gangster the power to pay the bribes and buy the special privileges that kept his business thriving. While gathering evidence to use against Capone in court, the agents also sought to destroy Capone's manufacturing facilities. Within six months, the task force had shut down nineteen distilleries (where hard liquor was made) and six breweries (were beer was brewed), costing Capone about $1 million.
After one of Capone's men offered Ness $2,000, plus weekly payments of the same amount if Ness would lay off Capone's business, Ness angrily called a press conference. He announced that Capone would never succeed in paying off either Ness or his agents. The following day, an article in the Chicago Tribune referred to the squad as the "Untouchables," referring to their incorruptibility.
Capone fought back, ordering the murder of one of Ness's friends and three unsuccessful attempts on Ness's life. The Untouchables continued their work, however, shutting down several more of Capone's highly profitable breweries.
In June 1931 Ness brought five thousand different Prohibition-related charges against Capone before a grand jury. By that time, however, prosecutors had already decided to charge Capone with tax evasion, a case they felt had a better chance of winning. The trial began on October 6, 1931, and lasted two weeks, with Ness present in the courtroom every day. It ended, much to Capone's surprise and Ness's delight, with the gangster's conviction; he was sentenced to eleven years in a federal prison.
From 1935 to 1941 Ness served as Safety Director for the city of Cleveland, Ohio, where he was responsible not only for investigating crimes but for implementing traffic safety and control measures. Ness was credited with significantly reducing the city's traffic fatality rate. During World War II, he was director of the Division of Social Protection, part of the Federal Security Agency. Ness later served as chairman of the board of Diebold, a company that produces safes and security systems. He died in 1957.
During most of the 1920s, it had been assumed that income that came from illegal activities could not be taxed. But in 1927 the Supreme Court ruled that this kind of income was indeed subject to income tax. In June 1931 Capone was indicted (formally accused) on twenty-three counts (charges) of income tax evasion. He had never filed an income tax return (a statement of earnings that must be submitted to the federal government every year), and he owned nothing in his own name. A persistent agent of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), however, found a notebook that showed income recorded under Capone's name. Capone was charged with owing the government more than two hundred thousand dollars in unpaid taxes.
During the course of the trial, Capone tried to bribe the jury to find him innocent. The judge changed the jury at the last minute. To his surprise, Capone was convicted on four of the counts, which was enough to send him to jail for eleven years. He went first to Chicago's Cook County jail, where he could pay for privileges and comforts and even continue to conduct business from behind bars. After a year, though, he was transferred to a harsher environment at the federal penitentiary (prison) in Atlanta, Georgia. Two years later he was moved to the newly built prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.
Surrounded by icy, shark-infested waters, the prison was totally isolated from the outside world. During his imprisonment, Capone lost all his influence and power in the world of organized crime. Meanwhile, the syphilis he had contracted as a teenager had returned, this time in its final and worst form, leading to brain damage. By the time he was released in November 1939, Capone's mental capacity had greatly decreased. He spent his last years living quietly at his Palm Island, Florida, estate. He died in 1947, soon after his 48th birthday.