Made In America

Quite a lot has been written and said about Al Capone in newspaper and magazine articles, books, and movies that is completely false. One of the most common fictions is that like many gangsters of that era, he was born in Italy. Absolutely not true. This amazing crime czar was strictly domestic -- taking the feudal Italian criminal society and fashioning it into a modern American criminal enterprise.

Certainly many Italian immigrants, like immigrants of all nationalities, frequently came to the New World with very few assets. Many of them were peasants escaping the lack of opportunity in rural Italy. When they came to the large American port cities they often ended up as laborers because of the inability to speak and write English and lack of professional skills. This was not the case with Al Capone's family.

Gabriele Capone (not Caponi as often claimed) was one of 43,000 Italians who arrived in the U.S. in 1894. He was a barber by trade and could read and write his native language. He was from the village of Castellmarre di Stabia, sixteen miles south of Naples.

Gabriele, who was thirty years old, brought with him his pregnant twenty-seven-year-old wife Teresina (called Teresa), his two-year-old son Vincenzo and his infant son Raffaele. Unlike many Italian immigrants he did not owe anyone for his passage over. His plan was to do whatever work was necessary until he could open his own barber shop.
Along with thousands of other Italians, the Capone family moved to Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was a stark beginning in the New World. 95 Navy Street was a cold-water tenement flat that had no indoor toilet or furnishings. The neighborhood was virtually a slum, given its proximity to the noisy Navy Yard, its many sailors and the vices that sailors seek when they're off duty.

Gabriele's ability to read and write allowed him to get a job in a grocery store until he was able to open his barber shop. Teresina, in spite of her duties as a mother of a growing brood of boys, took in sewing piecework to add to the family coffers. Her third child, Salvatore was born in 1895. Her fourth son and the first to be born and conceived in the New World was born January 17, 1899. His name was Alphonse.

What kind of people were these two, giving birth to one of the world's most notorious criminals? Did they pass on to him some virulent genetic strain of violence? Some subtly mutated chromosomes? Was Al Capone abused as a child? Did he spend his tender years in the company of murderers and thieves?

Definitely not. The Capones were a quiet, conventional family. Laurence Bergreen in his excellent biography Capone: The Man and the Era says "The mother...kept to herself. Her husband, Don Gabriele, made more of an impression, since he was, in the words of one family friend, 'tall and handsome -- very good-looking.' Like his wife, he was subdued, even when it came to discipline. He never hit the kids. He used to talk to them. He used to preach to them, and they listened to their father.

"...nothing about the Capone family was inherently disturbed, violent, or dishonest. The children and the parents were close; there was no apparent mental disability, no traumatic event that sent the boys hurtling into a life of crime. They did not display sociopathic or psychotic personalities; they were not crazy. Nor did they inherit a predilection for a criminal career or belong to a criminal society... They were a law-abiding, unremarkable Italian-American family with conventional patterns of behavior and frustrations; they displayed no special genius for crime, or anything else, for that matter."

In May of 1906, Gabriele became an American citizen. Within the family, his children would be always known by their Italian names, but in the outside world, the boys would be known by the American names they adopted. Vincenzo became James; Raffaele became Ralph; Salvatore became Frank; Alphonse became Al. Later children were Amadeo Ermino (later John and nicknamed Mimi), Umberto (later Albert John), Matthew Nicholas, Rose and Malfalda.

The Young Boy

About this time, his family moved from their house on Navy Street to 21 Garfield Place. This move would have a lasting impact on Al because in this new neighborhood he would meet the people who would have the most influence on his future: his wife Mae and the gangster Johnny Torrio.

A few blocks away from the Capone house on Garfield Place was a small unobtrusive building that was the headquarters of one of the most successful gangsters on the East Coast. Johnny Torrio was a new breed of gangster, a pioneer in the development of a modern criminal enterprise. Torrio's administrative and organizational talents transformed crude racketeering into a kind of corporate structure, allowing his businesses to expand as opportunities emerged. From Torrio, a young Capone learned invaluable lessons that were the foundation of the criminal empire he built later in Chicago.

Torrio was physically small, learning early in life on the street that brains, ingenuity and the ability to make alliances were critical to survival. Torrio was a gentleman gangster who was very visible as a numbers racketeer and almost invisible as a keeper of whores and brothels.
He was a role model for many boys in the community. Capone, like many other boys his age, earned pocket money by running errands for Johnny Torrio. Over time, Torrio came to trust the young Capone and gave him more to do. Meantime, young Al learned by observing the wealthy successful respected racketeer and the people in his organization. Bergreen explains that Al learned from Torrio "the importance of leading an outwardly respectable life, to segregate his career from his home life, as if maintaining a peaceful, conventional domestic setting somehow excused or legitimized the venality of working in the rackets. It was a form of hypocrisy that was second nature to Johnny Torrio and that he taught Capone to honor." In 1909, Torrio moved to Chicago and young Al fell under other influences.

Kids growing up in immigrant Brooklyn ran in gangs -- Italian gangs, Jewish gangs and Irish gangs. They were not the vicious urban street gangs of today, but rather groups of territorial neighborhood boys who hung out together. Capone was a tough, scrappy kid and belonged to the South Brooklyn Rippers and then later to the Forty Thieves Juniors and the Five Point Juniors. As John Kobler wrote, "the street gang was escape. The street gang was freedom. The street gang offered outlets for stifled young energies. The agencies that might have kept boys off the street, the schools and churches, lacked the means to do so. Few slum schools had a gym or playground or any kind of after-class recreation program...They formed their own street society, independent of the adult world and antagonistic to it. Led by some older, forceful boy, they pursued the thrills of shared adventure, of horseplay, exploration, gambling, pilfering, vandalism, sneaking a smoke or alcohol, secret ritual, smut sessions, fighting rival gangs."

Despite Al's relationship with the street gangs and Johnny Torrio, there was no indication that Al would choose someday to lead a life of crime. He still lived at home and did what he as expected to do when he quit school: go to work and help support the family. The family was actually doing quite well under Gabriele's guidance. He now owned his own barbershop. Teresa continued to produce children --several boys and then two girls, one of whom died in infancy. The only significant disruption in Al's tranquil family life was in 1908 when his oldest brother Vincenzo (James) left the family and went out west.

At this point in his life, nobody would ever have believed that Al would go on to be the criminal czar that he ultimately became. For approximately six years he worked faithfully at exceptionally boring jobs, first at a munitions factory and then as a paper cutter. He was a good boy, well behaved and sociable. Bergreen writes, "You didn't hear stories about Al Capone practicing with guns; you heard that he went home each night to his mother. Al was something of a nonentity, affable, soft of speech and even mediocre in everything but dancing."
How did the soft-spoken dutiful Al Capone metamorphose into the spectacularly successful and violent super gangster? One clear catalyst was the menacing presence of Frankie Yale. Originally from Calabria, Francesco Ioele (called "Yale") was a both feared and respected. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the peace-loving, "respectable" Johnny Torrio, Frankie Yale built his turf on muscle and aggression. Yale opened a bar on Coney Island called the Harvard Inn and hired, at the recommendation of Johnny Torrio, the eighteen-year-old Al Capone to be his bartender.

Scarface

Capone's job at the Harvard Inn was to be the bartender and bouncer and, when necessary, to wait on tables. In his first year, Capone became popular with his boss and the customers. Then his luck turned suddenly when he waited on the table of a young couple. The girl was beautiful and the young Capone was entranced. He leaned over her and said, "Honey, you have a nice ass and I mean that as a compliment."

The man with her was her brother Frank Gallucio. He jumped to his feet and punched the man who insulted his sister. Capone flew into a rage and Gallucio pulled out a knife to defend himself. He cut Capone's face three times before he grabbed his sister and ran out of the place. While the wounds healed well, the long ugly scars would haunt him forever.

Capone's insult caused a bit of an uproar. Gallucio went to Lucky Luciano with his grievance and Luciano went to Frankie Yale. When it came to Yale's attention, all four men came together and dispensed justice. Capone was forced to apologize to Gallucio. Capone learned something from the experience --to restrain his temper when it was necessary.

Yale took Capone under his wing and impressed upon the younger man how business can be built up through brutality. Yale was resourceful and violent man who prospered by strong-arm tactics. Schoenberg characterized Yale as specializing in extortion; loansharking, exacting tribute from pimps and bookmakers, and offering "protection" to local businesses. "Yale needed a stable of strongarms who could not only break arms and heads but would kill."

As powerful as Yale's influence would be on Capone's eventual development, other influences had a very moderating effect on Al. At the age of nineteen, he met a pretty blond Irish girl named Mae Coughlin, who was two years older than he was. Her family was comfortable and solidly middle class. It's hard to imagine that Mae's family embraced her relationship with Capone and it was not until after their baby was born that they married.

Albert Francis Capone was born December 4, 1918. His godfather was Johnny Torrio. While Sonny, as he was known all his life, seemed okay at birth, he was in fact a victim of congenital syphilis. Years later, Al confessed to doctors that he had been infected before he was married, but he believed that the infection had gone away.
With a beautiful respectable wife and a baby to support, Al focused on a legitimate career. He stopped working for Frankie Yale and moved to Baltimore where he worked as capable bookkeeper for Peter Aiello's construction firm. Al did very well. He was smart, had a good head for figures and was very reliable.

Quite suddenly, Al did another about face when his father died November 14, 1920, of heart disease at the age of fifty-five. Bergreen saw the event as marking the end of Capone's legitimate career. "It is possible that the sudden absence of parental authority made the young Capone feel free to abandon his bookkeeping job and his carefully acquired aura of respectability....

He resumed his relationship with Johnny Torrio, who had during the intervening years expanded his racketeering empire with the quiet cunning of a visionary. Torrio had abandoned the hotly contested streets of Brookyn for the comparatively open spaces of Chicago. The opportunities were enormous: gambling, brothels, and...illegal alcohol."

Torrio beckoned from Chicago and early in 1921 Al accepted. Armed with his knowledge of business and his experience with the brutal Frankie Yale, Capone had a good resume for a career in crime.

Chicago

Chicago was a perfect place to build a criminal empire. It was a rowdy, pugnacious, hard-drinking town that was open to anyone with enough money to buy it. In the words of one of her top journalists, "She was vibrant and violent, stimulating and ruthless, intolerant of smugness, impatient with those either physically or intellectually timid." It was a bloody and brutal city where tens of millions of cows, hogs and sheep were slaughtered by men wading through blood on the killing floor. It was strictly a commercial town with no appetite for snobbery or "old money."

Political corruption was a tradition in that vast prairie city, creating an atmosphere of two-fisted lawlessness in which crime flourished. The city became known for its wealth and sexual promiscuity. When Al Capone came to the city in 1920, the flesh trade was becoming the province of organized crime. The kingpin of this business was "Big Jim" Colosimo along with his wife and partner, Victoria Moresco, a highly successful madam. Together their brothels were earning an estimated $50,000 per month.
Big Jim owned the Colosimo Cafe, one of the most popular nightclubs in the city. Nobody cared that he was a pimp. It never stopped him from hobnobbing with the rich and famous. Enrico Caruso was a regular, as well as the distinguished lawyer Clarence Darrow. Big Jim, with huge diamonds glittering on every one of his fat fingers and diamond-studded belts and buckles, was a true product a Chicago society --handsome, generous, gaudy, larger than life.

As his family vice business grew, Big Jim brought in the discreet Johnny Torrio from Brooklyn to operate and grow their empire. It was the best decision he could have made because Torrio expanded their business without attracting attention. Torrio was a serious businessman with no interest in hanky-panky. In stark contrast to Big Jim, Torrio didn't drink, smoke, swear or cheat on his devoted wife Ann.

The downfall of Big Jim was Dale Winter, a pretty young singer who stole his heart. He foolishly divorced Victoria and married the young singer immediately afterward. Word of Colosimo's folly got back to Brooklyn where Frankie Yale took notice of opportunity and decided to muscle in on Colosimo's huge empire. On May 11, 1920, Yale assassinated Big Jim in his nightclub.

Bergreen describes the first of Chicago's great gangster funerals: "the last rites became a gaudy demonstration more appropriate to...a powerful political figure or popular entertainer...an event that priests and police captains alike attended to pay their last respects to the sort of man they were supposed to condemn. Colosimo was universally recognized as Chicago's premier pimp, yet his honorary pallbearers included three judges, a congressman, an assistant state attorney, and no less than nine Chicago aldermen."

Eventually the police figured out who the murderer was and they arrested him in New York. However, the only witness to the murder was a waiter, who refused to testify against Frankie Yale. While Yale was able to avoid prosecution, his attempt to take over Colosimo's empire failed. Torrio was able to maintain his grip on the vast multimillion-dollar-a-year business he had built for Big Jim. With a big boost to business from Prohibition, Torrio oversaw thousands of whorehouses, gambling joints and speakeasies.

At this time, Al became associated with a man that would be his friend for life, Jack Guzik. Incredibly enough, Guzik's large Jewish Orthodox family made their living through prostitution. Closer in lifestyle to Torrio, Guzik was a devoted family man who acted like an older brother to Al. Once again, Capone showed his ability to step outside the Italian community as he had in marrying his Irish wife. Now his closest friend was Jewish. Capone's lack of prejudice and ability to create alliances outside of the Italian gangster community would be invaluable in creating his destiny.

Al was doing quite well financially and bought a house for his family in a respectable neighborhood. To this modest home at 7244 Prairie Avenue, he brought not only Mae and Sonny, but his mother and other siblings. Al posed to his neighbors as a dealer in second-hand furniture and went out of his way to maintain a facade of respectability. Bergreen was convinced that the house on Prairie Avenue, Mae and Sonny represented Capone's striving for redemption. "Although he preyed on other people's weaknesses for a living, his reputation and standing in the community mattered deeply to him. The deeper he went into racketeering and all its associated sins, the more he idealized his family, as though they, in their innocence, were living proof that he was not the monster that the newspapers later insisted he was."

Capone Takes Over

For several years after Capone arrived in Chicago, things were comparatively quiet among the various gangs that had carved up Chicago's rackets. Nonetheless, reform-minded William E. Dever succeeded the spectacularly corrupt Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson. With city government nominally in the hands of an earnest reformer, the daily process of payoffs and corruption became more complicated. Torrio and Capone decided to put many operations out of the city into the suburb of Cicero, where they could purchase the entire city government and police department.

Shortly after opening up a brothel in Cicero, Torrio took his elderly mother back to live in Italy, leaving Capone in charge of the business in Cicero. Capone made it clear that he wanted an all-out conquest of the town. He installed his older brother Frank (Salvatore), a handsome and respectable-looking man of twenty-nine, as the front man with the Cicero city government. Ralph was tasked with opening up a working-class brothel called the Stockade for Cicero's heavily blue-collar population. Al focused on gambling and took an interest in a new gambling joint called the Ship. He also took control of the Hawthorne Race Track.

For the most part, the Capone conquest of Cicero was unopposed, with the exception of Robert St. John, the crusading young journalist at the Cicero Tribune. Every issue contained an expose on the Capone rackets in the city. The editorials were effective enough to threaten Capone-backed candidates in the 1924 primary election.

On election day, things got ugly as Capone's forces kidnapped opponents' election workers and threatened voters with violence. As reports of the violence spread, the Chicago chief of police rounded up seventy nine cops and provided them with shotguns. The cops, dressed in plain clothes, rode in unmarked cars to Cicero under the guise of protecting workers at the Western Electric plant there.

Frank Capone, who had just finished negotiating a lease, was walking down the street when the convoy of Chicago policemen approached him. Someone recognized him and the cars emptied out in front of him. In seconds, Frank's body was riddled with bullets. Technically, the police called it self defense, since Frank, seeing the police coming at him with guns drawn, had drawn his own revolver

Al was enraged and escalated the violence by kidnapping officials and stealing ballot boxes. One official was murdered. When it was all over, Capone had won his victory for Cicero, but at a price that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Capone threw his brother a funeral unmatched in opulence. The flowers alone, provided by racketeer florist Dion O'Banion, cost $20,000. Lavish though it was, Frank's funeral was different than Big Jim Colosimo's. Bergreen says that "the perfume of crushed blossoms, however sweet, did little to soothe the raw and sullen mood. There had been a festive air about "Big Jim's funeral, but Frank Capone's youth ensured that the tone of this last rites was entirely tragic; instead of singing, there was wailing...Chicago Police Chief Collins dispatched the same cops who had shot Frank to death to observe his funeral. Capone restrained himself from mounting a full-scale war against the Chicago Police Department."

Capone's temper stayed under control for about five weeks. But then, Joe Howard, a small-time thug, assaulted Capone's friend Jack Guzik when Guzik turned him down for a loan. Guzik told Capone and Capone tracked Howard down in a bar. Howard had the poor judgment to call Capone a dago pimp and Capone shot Howard dead.

William H. McSwiggin, called "the hanging prosecutor," decided to get Capone, but in spite of his diligence he wasn't able to win a conviction, mostly because eyewitnesses suddenly developed faulty memories. Capone got away with murder, but the publicity surrounding the case gave him a notoriety that he never had before. He had broken out of the Torrio model of discreet anonymity once and for all.

At the age of twenty five after only four years in Chicago, Capone was a force to be reckoned with. Wealthy, powerful, master of the city of Cicero, he became a target for lawmen and rival gangsters alike. He was keenly aware that the next lavish gangster funeral he attended could be his own. The fragile peace that Torrio had constructed with other gangs was blown apart by Prohibition. Gangland murders were reaching epidemic proportions.

While Capone's name was often linked with these murders, the fact was that there were many other gangsters responsible that Capone and Torrio had tried to keep in line. One flamboyant example was Dion O'Banion who had a burgeoning bootlegging and florist business. Schoenberg describes him as having a perennial-boy likability. Dion "never acted tough. His habit of calling even enemies 'swell fellow' mirrored an ingrained cheeriness and courtesy. He chronically beamed at the world; it amounted to a fixed grin, belied only by unblinkingly cold blue eyes. He was an indefatigable handshaker and backslapper, though never at the same time: at least one hand stayed free to go for one of the three gun pockets tailored into his clothes."

O'Banion was known for bizarre behavior which included gunning down a man in front of crowds of people for the flimsiest of reasons and then killing a man after meeting him at Capone's Four Deuces, which dragged Capone into a murder investigation needlessly. There was a growing sense of realization that something was going to have to be done about Dion O'Banion's irresponsible and childishly impulsive behavior.

The worst problem was the antagonism between two Torrio-Capone allies --Dion and the Genna brothers, who were close friends of Torrio. The dispute arose when the Gennas started selling cheap rotgut booze to O'Banion's customers. While it didn't really hurt O'Banion's vast beer income, it was the principle that mattered to Dion. Then Dion hijacked a truckload of the Genna's liquor and Torrio wondered how he was going to keep the peace this time.

O'Banion offered Torrio an out. Dion offered to retire to Colorado if Torrio bought out his interest in the Sieben Brewery. Knowing full well that there was going to be a raid, O'Banion arranged to close the deal with Torrio at the brewery. Not only did Torrio end up in jail, but O'Banion refused to return the money for a now padlocked brewery. Even worse, he bragged about how he had tricked Torrio. His fate was sealed.

Mike Merlo, the head of the Unione Sicilana in Chicago, a group that provided national cover to gangsters of that era, died of cancer. A huge funeral was planned in which Dion, florist to the gangs, naturally had a large role. Frankie Yale, head of the powerful New York branch, agreed with Torrio and Capone that Angelo Genna, who Dion had just humiliated over a gambling IOU, would take over the Chicago branch.
2 days after Merlo's death on November 10, 1924, Dion was in his flower shop fixing flowers for the Merlo funeral when 3 gangsters came into the shop. Dion's employee left the men alone to their business. O'Banion had expected the visit to pick up a wreath. He greeted the men and prepared to shake hands. One of the men pulled O'Banion's arm and knocked him off balance.

Dion's employee heard six gun shots and ran to help his boss who was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. The three men had vanished. It seems certain that two of the men were the vicious Silician assassins John Scalise and Albert Anselmi. There is some confusion as to whether the third man was Frankie Yale, who was in town for Merlo's funeral, or Mike Genna. None of the likely murderers ever came to trial.

Dion's funeral was stupendous. The Chicago Tribune loved every gaudy detail of it: "At the corners of the casket are solid silver posts, carved in wonderful designs. Modest is the dignified silver gray of the casket, content with the austere glory of the carved silver post at its corners....Silver angels stood at the head and feet with their heads bowed in the light of the ten candles that burned in the solid golden candlesticks they held in their hands...And over it all the perfume of flowers.

But vying with that perfume was the fragrance of the perfumed women, wrapped in furs from ears to ankles, who tiptoed down the aisle, escorted by soft stepping, tailored gentlemen with black, shining pompadours."
Some 10,000 people fell in before and after the funeral cortege, while another 5,000 people waited at the cemetery. Twenty-six cars and trucks carried the funeral flowers, three bands and the police escort.

Dion's funeral was a celebration for Torrio and Capone because they took over Dion's excellent bootlegging territory and they had finally rid themselves of a dangerously unpredictable colleague. What they didn't appreciate at the time was the aftermath of Dion's death and what it meant to them personally. While the police scratched their heads over who killed O'Banion, Dion's friend "Hymie" Weiss knew exactly who was responsible and he vowed revenge.

From that moment on, Capone and Torrio looked over their shoulders constantly for "Hymie" Weiss and another Dion associate, Bugs Moran. "Hymie" Weiss's real name was Earl Wajciechowski, which he shortened to Weiss. The nickname "Hymie" stuck somehow and everyone assumed he was a Jewish gangster, when he was in fact a very devout Catholic. George Moran was a violent and unstable man who got the nickname "Bugs" because everyone thought he was nuts or "buggy".

Torrio was so concerned for his life that he decided to leave Chicago for awhile and went to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Capone was just as worried and took every possible security measure. Still, over the next 2 years, the former colleagues of Dion O'Banion would make a dozen attempts to assassinate Capone.

Bergreen details the profound effect that the threats had on the way Capone did his business. "Although he himself was unarmed as a mark of his status, he never went anywhere without at least two bodyguards, one on either side. With the exception of his home on South Prairie Avenue, he was never alone. He traveled only by car, sandwiched between bodyguards, with a trusted, armed chauffeur named Sylvester Barton...he preferred to travel under cover of night, risking travel by day only when absolutely necessary."
In January of 1925, twelve days after the Weiss-Moran gang tried to assassinate Capone, Johnny Torrio came back to Chicago. He and his wife Ann were just returned from a shopping trip and got out of their car to walk to the door of their apartment building.

Torrio walked behind her carrying packages. Weiss and Bugs Moran jumped out of a car and, thinking that Torrio was still in his automobile, fired wildly, wounding the chauffeur. When they finally saw Torrio, they shot him in the chest and neck, then his right arm and his groin. Moran held a gun to Torrio's temple and pulled the trigger, but the firing chamber was empty and poor Johnny Torrio, the peacemaker, heard only a faint click.

At the hospital, Capone took over while surgeons removed the bullets in Torrio's raw body. The hospital was a dangerous place for a gangster. The security was rotten, so Capone arranged for Torrio's security on his own, which included Al sleeping in his room on a cot making sure that his beloved mentor was safe.

Four weeks later, Torrio shocked everyone by appearing in court to face the charges on the Sieben Brewery raid. The frail, shaken man pleaded guilty and was given a sentence of nine months. Things could have been much worse. He became close friends with the sheriff, who made sure that there were no more assassination attempts while he was in jail, and was treated like a privileged gentleman.
But things would never be the same for Torrio. He wanted out of this life of violence. He wanted to retire and live quietly on his substantial earnings. He called Al to the jail in Waukegan in March of 1925 and told him that he was retiring from the Chicago rackets and going to live abroad. Torrio was turning over his vast assets to Al and the rest of the Capone brothers. It was an amazing legacy: nightclubs, whorehouses, gambling joints, breweries and speakeasies. Capone's power increased immensely.

Power

Shortly after he took over Johnny Torrio's empire, it was clear that his new status had changed Al Capone. He was a major force now in the Chicago underworld. To underscore his rise in the world, he moved his headquarters to the Metropole Hotel. His luxurious suite of five rooms cost $1,500 per day. He went from near obscurity to cultivated visibility.

His friendship with newspaper editor Harry Read convinced Capone that he should behave like the prominent figure he was. "Quit hiding," Read told him. "Be nice to people." Capone became visible at the opera, at sporting events and charitable functions. He was an important member of the community: friendly, generous, successful, supplying a throng of thirsty customers. In an era where most of the adult population drank bootleg alcohol, the bootlegger seemed almost respectable.

According to Bergreen, "buying favorable publicity was only half the game. Political influence was the other...Almost every day he drove to the complex that served as both City Hall and the county building. He did all he could to make himself seem available, a man with nothing to fear. Always beautifully dressed, quiet, another political fixer going about his daily rounds. Capone's political flair, his urge to be seen in public, was unique among racketeers, who as a rule abhorred publicity."

In December of 1925, Al took his son to New York for surgery to relieve his chronic ear infections. Al was devoted to his only child and the boy's poor health constantly preyed on his mind. Capone used the visit to New York to transact some business with his old boss Frankie Yale. The subject was imported whiskey which was always in short supply since it had to be smuggled over the Canadian border. It was easier for Yale to get whiskey into New York than it was for Capone to get whiskey into Chicago, so Yale had an oversupply. They worked out a deal and Capone would figure out how to get the whiskey from New York to Chicago.

Yale invited Al to a Christmas Day party at the Adonis Social and Athletic Club, a fancy name for a Brooklyn speakeasy. Yale was tipped off that rival gangster Richard "Peg-Leg" Lonergan was going to crash the party with a bunch of his thugs. Yale wanted to cancel the party, but Capone insisted the celebration go forward.

Capone planned a surprise of his own. When Lonergan's men came to the club around 3 A.M. they were insulting and obnoxious. Capone gave the signal and all hell broke loose. Lonergan and his men didn't even have time to draw their guns they were so surprised at the well-orchestrated attack.

The Adonis Club Massacre was Al flexing his muscle in his old stamping ground. It was also a way of displaying Chicago's gangland superiority over New York. "Chicago is the imperial city of the gang world, and New York a remote provincial place," wrote Alva Johnston in the New Yorker. In Chicago," beer has lifted the gangster from a local leader of roughs and gunmen to a great executive controlling a big interstate and international organization. Beer, real beer, like water supply or the telephone, is a natural monopoly." He then created a written portrait of Al Capone, the "greatest gang leader in history."

Back in Chicago at the beginning of 1926, Capone was in excellent spirits. Not only had he made his mark in New York, but his whiskey deal would change the face of interstate transportation. Young men with a thirst for adventure and the need for money made a good living working as one of Capone's truckers.

In the spring of 1926, Capone's run of good luck hit a snag. On April 27, Billy McSwiggin, the young "hanging prosecutor" who had tried to pin the 1924 death of Joe Howard on Capone, met with an accident. He left the home of his father, a veteran Chicago police detective, and went with "Red" Duffy to play cards at one of Capone's gambling joints. A bootlegger named Jim Doherty picked them up in his car.

Doherty's car broke down and they hitched a ride with bootlegger "Klondike" O'Donnell, a bitter enemy of Capone. The four Irish lads went on a drinking binge in Cicero with O'Donnell and his brother Myles and ended up at a bar close to the Hawthorne Inn where Capone was having dinner. O'Donnell's cruising around in Cicero was a territorial insult.
Capone and his henchmen, not realizing that McSwiggin was in the bar with Myles O'Donnell, waited outside in a convoy of cars until the drunken men staggered out. Then out came the machine guns and McSwiggin and Doherty were dead.

Capone was blamed. Despite the blot on McSwiggin's integrity for keeping company with bootleggers, sympathy was with the dead young prosecutor. There was a big outcry against gangster violence and public sentiment went against Capone.

While everyone in Chicago just knew that Al Capone was responsible, there was not a shred of proof and the failure of this high-profile investigation to return an indictment was an embarrassment to local officials. Police took out their frustrations on Capone's whorehouses and speakeasies which endured a series of raids and fires.

Capone went into hiding for three months in the summer. Reputedly some 300 detectives looked for him all over the country, in Canada and even Italy. In fact, he initially found refuge in the home of a friend in Chicago Heights and then, for most of the time, with friends in Lansing, Michigan.

Those three months in hiding made an indelible mark on Al. He began to see himself as much more than a successful rackeeter. He started to think of himself as a source of pride to the Italian immigrant community, a generous benefactor and important fixer who could help people. His bootlegging operations employed thousands of people, many of whom were poor Italian immigrants. His generosity was becoming legendary in Lansing. While much of this was just his ego getting larger, Capone had real leadership abilities and was very capable of extending those talents into areas that were beneficial to the community. He seriously thought of retiring from his life of crime and violence.

He couldn't spend the rest of his life in hiding so he decided upon a calculated but risky course. He negotiated his surrender to the Chicago police. It was the first step in the new direction in which he wanted to take his life: exoneration in the death of McSwiggin, using his vast wealth to finance legitimate enterprises and set himself up as a hero to the Italian immigrant community.

On July 28, 1926, he returned to Chicago to face the accusations of murder. It turned out to be the right decision because the authorities did not have sufficient evidence to bring him to trial. For all the public uproar and efforts of the law enforcement groups, Al Capone was a free man. The authorities looked impotent.

Capone in his new role as the expansive peacemaker made a last ditch attempt to create an alliance with Hymie Weiss despite a recent attempt on his life. He offered Hymie a very profitable business deal in exchange for peace. Hymie turned him down. The next day, Hymie was gunned down at the ripe old age of twenty-eight.

The people of Chicago were tired of reading about gang violence and the newspapers fanned their anger. Capone held a highly publicized "peace conference" in which he appealed to the other bootleggers assembled there to tone down the violence. "There is enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the streets. I don't want to die in the street punctured by machine-gun fire." He made his point. At the end of the meeting, an "amnesty" had been negotiated which accomplished two key things: first, there would be no more murders or beatings and second, past murders would not be avenged. For more than two months thereafter, nobody connected with the bootlegging business was killed.

In January of 1927, one of Al's closest friends, Theodore Anton, known as "Tony the Greek," was found murdered. Capone was in tears over the loss of his friend and started to think more seriously about retirement. He invited a group of reporters over to his house and cooked them a spaghetti dinner, all to announce his retirement. Was he serious or just play acting? He probably was serious about retiring before someone put a bullet in his skull, but Al's need for power and excitement kept pushing real retirement into the future.

With the failure of Mayor Dever's reform program, the rise of Chicago as the imperial gangster city became the most significant campaign issue in the 1927 election. "Big Bill" Thompson, assisted by a small fortune in campaign funds from organized crime, came back into power. It looked as if the bad guys would have the city in their grip forever.
However, a few tiny blips on the radar screen showed some promise to eventually make a major impact on the city of Chicago, the bootlegging business and Al Capone. In May of 1927, the Supreme Court made a decision that Manny Sullivan, a bootlegger, had to report and pay income tax on his illegal bootlegging business. Just because reporting and paying tax on illegally-derived revenues was self-incrimination, it was not unconstitutional. With the Sullivan ruling, the small Special Intelligence Unit of the IRS under Elmer Irey was able to go after Al Capone.

Unaware and uninterested in Manny Sullivan or Elmer Irey, Capone became more compulsively extroverted and expansive. He indulged heavily in his two big passions, music and boxing. He became close pals with Jack Dempsey, but given the concern over fixed fights, the friendship had to be very discreet. Always an opera lover, Capone expanded his patronage to the jazz world. With the opening of the Cotton Club in Cicero, Al became a jazz impresario, attracting and cultivating some of the best black jazz musicians of the day. Unlike so many other Italian gangsters, Al did not seem to have the deep-seated racial prejudice and he gained the trust and respect of many of his musicians. Al extended his generosity and personal concerns to everybody who worked for him, black or white.

Bergreen describes the way Capone inserted himself into the lives of those he knew: "He came to dominate them not by shouting, overwhelming, or bullying, although the threat of physical violence always loomed, but by appealing to the inner man, his wants, his aspirations...by making them feel valued, they gave unstintingly of their loyalty, and loyalty was what Capone needed and demanded; in the volatile circles through which he moved it was the only protection he had from sudden death. The highest compliment other men could pay Capone was to call him a friend, which meant they were willing to overlook his scandalous reputation, that he had never been a pimp or a murderer."

"Public service is my motto," Al told reporters around Christmas. "Ninety percent of the people in Chicago drink and gamble. I've tried to serve them decent liquor and square games. But I'm not appreciated. I'm known all over the world as a millionaire gorilla." The exposure was becoming a real nuisance. When he left for a trip to the West Coast, he had police surrounding him at every station. Los Angeles' toughest detective said "We have no room here for Capone or any other visiting gangsters whether they are here on pleasure tours or not."

When Capone came back from the West Coast, he found himself surrounded by six Joliet policemen with their shotguns aimed at him. "Well, I'll be damned. You'd think I was Jesse James. What's the artillery for?" In Chicago, the police made things as uncomfortable as possible by surrounding his house and arresting him at the slightest provocation.

Capone left for Miami where the weather was much better than the Chicago winter, but the reception by the local community was chilly. He and Mae and Sonny rented a huge house for the season and started to look for a permanent residence. Through a middleman, he bought the 14-room Spanish style estate at 93 Palm Island which had been built by brewer Clarence Busch. Over the coming months, he would invest a small fortune in redecorating his new palace in Miami, securing it like a small fortress with concrete walls and heavy wooden doors.

The Palm Island estate came to the attention of IRS Intelligence Unit watchdog Elmer Irey. He chose Frank J. Wilson to head up the job of documenting Capone's income and spending. The job was monumental: despite Capone's lavish spending, everything was transacted through third parties; despite Capone's incredible wealth, every transaction was on a cash basis. The major exception was the very tangible assets of the Palm Island estate, which was evidence of a major source of income.

In parallel government move, George Emmerson Q. Johnson, a member of the Scandinavian "old boy's network" in the Midwest, was appointed U.S. attorney for Chicago. Johnson targeted Capone with unbridled passion. In the spring of 1928, the violence preceding the April primary election began to escalate out of control. Johnson himself was the target of bomb threats. It was not clear who was orchestrating all of this violence, but this time the targets were not gangsters but U.S. Senator Charles Deneen, a reformer, and a judge. The unabashedly corrupt Mayor Bill Thompson was presumed responsible since the victims were people who opposed him, but Al Capone, still in Florida, was the scapegoat.

While Mae Capone spent the spring of 1928 on an extravagant decorating spree, Al dedicated himself to establishing himself as a legitimate citizen of Miami. In spite of the outward show of respectability, Al quietly made plans to solve pressing problems caused by his old boss Frankie Yale. The liquor supply deal that Capone and Yale had negotiated was experiencing too many hijackings, which Capone believed Yale had initiated.

Al called six of his Chicago partners to Florida to figure out how to handle the problem with the powerful Yale:

"Toward midafternoon on July 1, a Sunday, Frank Yale, his jet-black hair and dark skin set off by a Panama hat and light-gray summer suit, was drinking in a Borough Park speakeasy when the bartender called him to the phone. What he heard sent him hurrying out to his car parked nearby. A few minutes later on Forty-fourth Street a black sedan crowded him to the curb; bullets from a variety of weapons -- revolvers, sawed-off shotguns, a tommy gun --nailed him to the seat. The tommy gun was the first ever used to kill a New York gangster." (Kobler)

In the summer of 1928, Capone made his headquarters in the once highly respected Lexington Hotel, occupying two floors of the large and imposing structure. He lived like a potentate in his six-room suite with a special kitchen for his catered meals. Secret doors were installed so that Capone could escape undetected if the need arose.

It was clear to Capone that Prohibition would not last forever, so he began to diversify into the rackets. A Chicago business newspaper explained that a "'racketeer' may be the boss of a supposedly legitimate business association...Whether he is a gunman who has imposed himself upon some union as its leader, or whether he is a business association organizer, his methods are the same; by throwing a few bricks into a few windows, an incidental and perhaps accidental murder, he succeeds in organizing a group of small businessmen into what he calls a protective association. He then proceeds to collect what fees and dues he likes, to impose what fines suit him, regulates prices and hours of work...Any merchant who doesn't come in or doesn't continue to pay tribute, is bombed, slugged or otherwise intimidated."

Like in the bootlegging business, Capone ran into the same old antagonist Bugs Moran. Moran had tried twice to murder Al's friend and colleague Jack McGurn. When Capone went to Palm Island for the winter, Jack McGurn went to visit him in early February to discuss the enduring problems with Bugs and his North Siders gang.

St. Valentine's Day

Neither McGurn nor Capone ever thought that the planned assassination of Bugs Moran would be an event that would be notorious for many decades to come. Capone was lolling so lavishly in Florida, so how could he be held responsible for the murder of a bootlegger. "Machine Gun" McGurn was given complete control of the hit.

McGurn put together a first rate team of out-of-towners. Fred "Killer" Burke was the leader and was assisted by a gunman named James Ray. Two other important members of the team were John Scalise and Albert Anselmi who had been used in the murder of Frankie Yale. Joseph Lolordo was another player, as were Harry and Phil Keywell from Detroit's Purple Gang.

McGurn's plan was a creative one. He had a bootlegger lure the Moran gang to a garage to buy some very good whiskey at an extremely attractive price. The delivery was to be made at 10:30 A.M. on Thursday, February 14. McGurn's men would be waiting for them, dressed in stolen police uniforms and trench coats as though they were staging a raid.

McGurn, like Capone, wanted to be far away from the scene of the crime so he took his girlfriend and checked into a hotel. Establishing an airtight alibi was uppermost in his mind.

At the garage, the Keywells spotted a man who looked like Bugs Moran . The assassination squad got into their police uniforms and drove over to the garage in their stolen police car. Playing their part as police raiders to the hilt, McGurn's men went into the garage and found seven men, including the Gusenberg brothers who had tried to murder McGurn.

The bootleggers, caught in the act, did what they were told: they lined up against the wall obediently. The four assassins took the bootleggers' guns, and opened fire with two machine guns, a sawed-off shotgun and a .45. The men slumped to the floor dead, except for Frank Gusenberg who was still breathing.

To further perpetuate this charade, the two "policemen" in trench coats put up their hands and marched out of the garage in front of the two uniformed policemen. Anyone who watched this show believed that two bootleggers in trench coats had been arrested by two policemen. The four assassins left in the stolen police car.

It was a brilliant plan and it was brilliantly executed except for one small detail --the target of the entire plan, Bugs Moran, was not among the men executed. Moran was late to the meeting, seeing the police car pulling up just as he neared the garage. Moran took off, not wanting to be caught up in the raid.

Soon, real policemen came to the garage and saw Frank Gusenberg, on the floor, dying from twenty-two bullet wounds.

"Who shot you?" Sergeant Sweeney asked him.

"No one --nobody shot me," whispered Gusenberg. His refusal to implicate his executioners continued until his death a short time later.
It didn't take a genius to figure out that the target of the very cleverly organized assassination attempt was Bugs Moran and the most obvious beneficiary, had the attempt been successful, was Al Capone. Even though Al Capone was conveniently in Florida and Jack McGurn had an airtight alibi, the police, the newspapers, and the people of Chicago knew who was responsible. The police could hardly arrest Capone with no evidence. McGurn was smart enough to marry his girlfriend Louise Rolfe, better known as the "blonde alibi," who could not testify against her new husband. All charges against him were dropped. No one was ever brought to justice for the spectacular assassination.

The publicity surrounding the St. Valentines Day Massacre was the most that any gang event had ever received. And it was not only local publicity. It was a national media event. Capone ballooned into the national conscious and writers all over the country began books and articles on him. Bergreen saw the massacre as endowing Capone with a grisly glamour: "There had never been an outlaw quite like Al Capone. He was elegant, high-class, the berries. He was remarkably brazen, continuing to live among the swells in Miami and to proclaim love for his family. Nor did he project the image of a misfit or a loner, he played the part of a self-made millionaire who could show those Wall Street big shots a thing or two about doing business in America. No one was indifferent to Capone; everyone had an opinion about him...."

Capone reveled in his new found celebrity status and used Damon Runyon as his press agent. But the damage of all that publicity had been done. He attracted the attention of President Herbert Hoover. "At once I directed that all of the Federal agencies concentrate upon Mr. Capone and his allies," Hoover wrote. In the beginning of March, 1929, Hoover asked Andrew Mellon, his secretary of the Treasury, "Have you got this fellow Capone yet? I want that man in jail." A few days later, Capone was called before a grand jury in Chicago, but did not seem to understand the seriousness of the powerful forces there were amassing against him.

Capone thought he had more pressing matters to resolve. Evidence was mounting that two of his Sicilian colleagues were causing Capone problems. Kobler describes the famous scene in which Capone met the problems head on:

"Seldom had the three guests of honor sat down to a feast so lavish. Their dark Sicilian faces were flushed as they gorged on the rich, pungent food, washing it down with liters of red wine. At the head of the table, Capone, his big white teeth flashing in an ear-to-ear smile, oozing affability, proposed toast after toast to the trio. Saluto, Scalise! Saluto, Anselmi! Saluto, Giunta!

"When, long after midnight, the last morsel had been devoured and the last drop drunk, Capone pushed back his chair. A glacial silence fell over the room. His smile had faded. Nobody was smiling now except the sated, mellow guests of honor, their belts and collars loosened to accommodate their Gargantuan intake. As the silence lengthened, they, too stopped smiling. Nervously, they glanced up and down the long table. Capone leaned toward them. The words dropped from his mouth like stones. So they thought he didn't know? They imagined they could hide the offense he never forgave -- disloyalty?

Capone had observed the old tradition. Hospitality before execution. The Sicilians were defenseless, having, like the other banqueters, left their guns in the checkroom. Capone's bodyguards fell upon them, lashing them to their chairs with wire and gagging them. Capone got up, holding a baseball bat. Slowly, he walked the length of the table and halted behind the first guest of honor. With both hands he lifted the bat and slammed it down full force. Slowly, methodically, he struck again and again, breaking bones in the man's shoulders, arms and chest. He moved to the next man and, when he had reduced him to mangled flesh and bone, to the third. One of the bodyguards then fetched his revolver from the checkroom and shot each man in the back of the head."

Public Enemy #1

Although Al didn't understand it at the time, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the subsequent ocean of publicity, some of which glamorized Capone and some of which demanded justice, catalyzed the government forces against him. After just a few days in office, Herbert Hoover pressured Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury, to spearhead the government's battle against Capone.
Mellon commissioned a two-pronged approach: to get the necessary evidence to prove income tax evasion and to amass enough evidence to prosecute Capone successfully for Prohibition violations. Once the evidence was collected, the Treasury agents were to work with the U.S. Attorney, George E. Q. Johnson to initiate prosecution of Capone and the key members of his organization.

The man charged with gathering the evidence of Prohibition violations --bootlegging --was Eliot Ness, who began to assemble a team of daring young agents like himself. The biggest effort was led by Elmer Irey of the IRS Special Intelligence Unit, who redoubled his ongoing efforts shortly after Hoover's mandate. While there was doubt that Capone could be successfully prosecuted for Prohibition violations in Chicago, regardless of the weight of evidence, Mellon felt sure that with the Sullivan ruling the government could get Capone on tax evasion.
Capone was, at least initially, unaware of the forces put in motion against him and generally did not let concerns about federal agents interfere with business. In mid-May, 1929, Capone went to a conference in Atlantic City where gangsters of all types from all over the country met to talk about cooperation rather than mutual destruction.

To keep violence and rivalry to a minimum, they divided up the country into "spheres of influence." Torrio became head of an executive committee which would arbitrate all disputes and punish renegades. The conferees had decided that Capone should surrender his Chicago criminal empire to Torrio to divvy up on his own terms. Capone had no intention of going along with carving up his empire or turning it over to Johnny Torrio.

After the conference, Capone went to a movie in Philadelphia. When the movie was over, two detectives were waiting for him. In less than 24 hours Capone was arrested and imprisoned for carrying a concealed weapon.

Taking off his 11 1/2 carat diamond pinkie ring, Capone gave it to his lawyer to pass on to Ralph and was packed off first to the Holmesburg County Jail and finally to the Eastern Penitentiary where he stayed until March 16, 1930. He left the running of the business to his brother Ralph, Jack Guzik and Frank Nitti "The Enforcer."

Another setback to Capone came when Ralph was indicted on tax evasion charges in October of that year. Wanting to send a message to other gangsters, federal agents led Ralph away from a boxing match in handcuffs. Persistent civil servant Elmer Irey had been investigating Ralph for years. Ralph was nowhere near as smart as his brother Al when it came to hiding his wealth and financial transactions. He was sloppy, greedy and dumb -- a natural target for an ambitious Treasury agent named Eliot Ness, who wiretapped his phones, and Nels Tessem, a highly-talented IRS agent, who scrutinized every financial transaction that Ralph made. Nitti and Guzik also had their days in tax court as a result of this determined and exhaustive investigation.

With Al in jail and Ralph, Guzik and Nitti running the business, Ness was given the mission of collecting enough evidence of Capone's bootlegging to convince a grand jury that Capone was violating Prohibition laws as well as evading income tax. Ness had his men tap Ralph's phones continuously. With the intelligence Ness gathered, he was able to ram the front door of Capone's South Wabash brewery with a truck outfitted with a snowplow on the front. Emboldened by this frontier lawman approach, Ness and his "Untouchables" continued to wiretap and shut down Capone breweries.
In mid-March of 1930, Capone was released from jail, a few months early because of good behavior. A week later, Frank J. Loesch, the head of the Chicago Crime Commission, put together a Public Enemies list which was headed by Alphonse Capone, Ralph Capone, Frank Rio, Jack McGurn, and Jack Guzick, all Capone colleagues. The list was publicized in the newspapers and quickly adapted by J. Edgar Hoover as the FBI's list of the "Most Wanted" criminals. So now, Al Capone, who wanted so much to legitimize himself as a contributing member of the community was Public Enemy Number One. He was enraged, humiliated and thoroughly insulted.

In that same month, Elmer Irey went to Chicago to meet with the agent-in-charge Arthur P. Madden to map out their battle strategy. It became clear to both of them that they needed an insider in the Capone organization if they were going to be successful in the short-term. Before he went back to Washington, Irey spent two days hanging around the lobby of the Lexington Hotel, posing as a salesman. Once he developed a feel for the kinds of thugs that lived there, he came up with a brilliant idea: he would find two undercover agents who could, posing as gangsters, infiltrate the Capone organization.

"The obvious choice was Michael J. Malone....He was a good actor, with an ability to blend into any background. He had nerves of steel and a sharp intelligence. His dark, almost Mediterranean looks and his ability to speak Italian made him an ideal candidate for infiltration into the Italian-dominated Capone empire" (Ludwig, Smyth). Another undercover agent was selected to be his partner in this venture.

Malone would take the name De Angelo and the other agent Graziano. Major efforts were made to create false identities for the two men as small-time Brooklyn racketeers. They knew that every single detail of the forged identities would be scrutinized and that their lives depended upon how well they studied for their parts.

Neither Graziano nor De Angelo could ever be seen or heard talking to Irey or Madden, so an intermediary had to be found. The third agent in this venture was Frank J. Wilson, a 43-year-old star in the agency. Wilson would not only be the contact man for Graziano and De Angelo, he was to coordinate intelligence and evidence and perform some of the investigations himself.

In June of 1930, Wilson got approval from the eccentric publisher of the Chicago Tribune to question one of his reporters. Jake Lingle was a friend of Al Capone's who flaunted the relationship. Bergreen believed that Lingle wanted more than the profitable connection he had to the mob. "His influence made him feel invulnerable when in fact his position was extremely vulnerable. Acting as a double agent or even a triple agent was too thrilling to resist. Not satisfied with playing this extremely tricky role, he agreed to inform on Capone for the federal government."
Lingle's appointment was June 10, but he got a bullet in the back of his skull the day before.

The uproar was deafening. Capone rode it all out at his home in Miami Beach. When asked about Lingle, Capone said, "newspapers and newspapermen should be busy suppressing rackets and not supporting them. It does not become me of all persons to say that, but I believe it."

Meanwhile, Irey's Mike "De Angelo" checked himself into the Lexington Hotel, dressed himself in flashy expensive clothing and hung around the hotel bar, quietly reading the newspapers. Eventually the Capone soldiers struck up a conversation with him and started to ask him questions about his background.

"We want the McCoy about you," one of the gangsters told him. "You look like maybe you're on the lam and might be open to a proposition --and how do you know, we might have something for you."

De Angelo played along: "matter of fact, I am open for something, but it's got to be good. If you want it straight, why I come out here in the first place is I didn't know but what maybe I could tie in with the Big Boy."

The gangster told him they had to do some checking first, but to hang around for a few days and they'd give him an answer. De Angelo hoped he hadn't screwed up any of his fabricated identity or he would be a dead man. A few days later, he was invited to meet with the mob and Capone himself at a big party. Fully aware that Capone would wine and dine a traitor and beat him to death with a baseball bat, De Angelo went to the party with trepidation. Fortunately, Irey's thoroughness in crafting his agent's background paid off handsomely. De Angelo was made a croupier in one of Capone's Cicero gambling joints.

Just before Ralph Capone's trial, De Angelo found out that the mob was going to focus on the government's witnesses. It was good intelligence because Irey arranged for extra protection of the government witnesses. The result was a guilty verdict for Ralph and no damage to government witnesses.

A few months later, De Angelo was joined by Graziano, who got a job checking on Capone's beer deliveries. Just before Christmas, they uncovered a plot on Wilson's life and caught it just in time. Now that the Capone organization knew about Wilson, Irey wanted to reassign him, but Wilson wouldn't have it. This attempt on his life made him all the more determined to get Capone.

The real intelligence paydirt came in a conversation between Graziano and one of Capone's employees. "The income tax dicks ain't so smart. They've had a record book of Al's for five years that could send him to jail, only they're too dumb to realize it."

It turned out that the mountain of records taken from a raid years earlier on the Hawthorne Hotel included a ledger that documented the financial operations of the Hawthorne Smoke Shop for the years 1924-1926. What Irey needed now was to figure out the identity of the two bookkeepers who made those entries. The handwriting didn't match up with any of Capone's men. Chances were that Capone had them disposed of when the ledgers were seized.

Graziano took a huge risk and asked the man who told him about the ledgers if the bookkeepers had been "taken care of." The gangster replied, "they weren't exactly taken care of because they were only a couple of dopes, but they left town five years ago when the smoke shop was raided." Incredibly enough, the gangster then told Graziano their names: Leslie Shumway and Fred Reis.

As 1930 drew to a close, Capone embarked on a major publicity campaign. He opened a free soup kitchen for the people who had been thrown out of work by the deepening Depression. During the last two months of the year, the soup kitchen served three free meals a day. "The soup kitchen was carefully calculated to rehabilitate his image and to ingratiate himself with the workingman, who, he realized, had come to regard him as another unimaginably wealthy and powerful tycoon"(Bergreen).

In the early months of 1931, Irey's men located Shumway in Miami, working ironically at Hialeah racetrack where Capone made almost daily visits when he was in residence. Frank Wilson went to Miami to have a conversation with Shumway and escaped from city with the bookkeeper in tow just a half hour before a car full of goons came looking for the Shumway. Fred Reis had gone to ground in Peoria, Illinois. Both men agreed to cooperate fully and were given maximum security and protection.

On another government front, Eliot Ness was becoming increasingly successful at finding and shutting down Capone's brewing business. He and his Untouchables had impressively documented thousands of Prohibition violations that would be used against Capone if the tax case failed.

Ness wanted very much to humiliate Capone publicly as well as to put him in jail. The murder of his one of his friends was the catalyst to a plan to openly embarrass Capone. From his many successful raids on Capone breweries and other liquor operations, Ness had accumulated some forty-five trucks of various types, most of which were new. The government had contracted for a new storage place for Ness's vehicle collection that would eventually be sold at public auction. Until then, it was necessary to move the trucks to the new garage.

Ness hit on an idea to strike a psychological blow to Al Capone pride, something few intelligent people ever attempted. Ness had all of the trucks polished to a fine shine. Then he arranged for a group of drivers to operate the convoy of trucks. When everything was ready, Ness made his boldest move.

He called Capone's headquarters at the Lexington Hotel and bullied his way into getting Capone himself on the phone.

"Well, Snorkey," Ness called him by the nickname only Capone's close friends used," I just wanted to tell you that if you look out your front windows down onto Michigan Avenue at exactly eleven o'clock you'll see something that should interest you.

"What's up?" Capone asked, curiosity in his tone.

"Just take a look and you'll see," Ness said just before he slammed down the phone.

The motorcade came to the Capone's Lexington Hotel headquarters at eleven o'clock in the morning. Moving very slowly, it passed a bunch of Capone's gangsters milling around outside the hotel. Ness could see the wild gesticulating and confusion on Capone's balcony.

This was a big day for Ness and his team. "What we had done this day," he told people later, "was enrage the bloodiest mob in criminal history� We had hurled the defiance of "The Untouchables" into their teeth; they surely knew by now that we were prepared to fight to the finish."

Ness had certainly succeeded in making Capone angry. Right after the parade, Capone stormed through his suite shrieking and breaking things up. Not only had Ness succeeded in enraging Capone, but, more importantly, he was making a significant dent in Capone's business. Millions of dollars of brewing equipment had been seized or destroyed, thousands of gallons of beer and alcohol had been dumped and the largest breweries were closed.

Wiretaps on Capone's lieutenants revealed how bad things were getting. The mob had to cut back its graft and payments to the policemen. Beer had to be imported from other areas to supply the speakeasies that used to buy Capone's beer. Things got even worse when they raided a gigantic operation that was supplying 20,000 gallons a day.

Finally, the government's mission was coming to closure in the early spring of 1931. Facing a six-year statute of limitations on some of the earlier evidence, the government had to prosecute the 1924 evidence before March 15, 1931. A few days before that deadline, on March 13, a federal grand jury met secretly on the government's claim that in 1924 Al Capone had a tax liability of $32,488.81. The jury returned an indictment against Capone that was kept secret until the investigation was complete for the years 1925 to 1929.

On June 5, 1931, the grand jury met again and returned an indictment against Capone with twenty-two counts of tax evasion totalling over $200,000. A week later, a third indictment was returned on the evidence provided by Ness and his team. Capone and sixty-eight members of his gang were charged with some 5,000 separate violations of the Volstead Act, some of them going back to 1922. The income tax cases took precedence over the Prohibition violations.

Capone was facing a possible 34 years in jail if the government completely won its case. Capone's lawyers presented U.S. Attorney Johnson with a deal. Capone would plead guilty for a relatively light sentence. Johnson, after discussing the offer with Irey and the new Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills, accepted the deal and agreed to recommend a sentence between 2 and 5 years.

Why would the government after all its efforts take accept such a light sentence? First of all, despite the government's extraordinary efforts to hide Shumway and Reis, there were very real concerns about them living to testify. Capone had put a bounty of $50,000 on each of the bookkeeper's heads. There was also some doubt that the six-year statute of limitations would be upheld by the Supreme Court. An appeals court had already ruled on a three-year statute of limitations for tax evasion. Then there was an enormous potential for jury tampering, both through bribery and intimidation.

When word of the deal leaked, the press was outraged that Capone would get off with such a light sentence.

Capone went into the courtroom on June 16 a fairly happy man. When Capone pleaded guilty, Judge Wilkerson adjourned the hearing until June 30. Capone told the press he was entertaining offers from the movie studios to make a film of his life. He was in excellent spirits when he appeared for sentencing in front of Wilkerson at the end of the month.

Judge Wilkerson had a little surprise for Al. "The parties to a criminal case may not stipulate as to the judgment to be entered," Wilkerson said firmly. He made it quite clear that while he would listen to Johnson's recommendation, he was not bound to go along with it. "It is time for somebody to impress upon the defendant that it is utterly impossible to bargain with a federal court." It was a shock to Capone. The deal, the plea bargain was kaput and Al was clearly worried. Capone was allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and a trial was scheduled for October 6.

Capone spent his summer of freedom in his old hideout in Lansing, Michigan, seemingly resigned to the trial. However, behind the scenes his organization had procured the list of prospective jurors and began bribing them by every means possible.

Wilson got word of the bribery and went with Johnson to Judge Wilkerson with the evidence that Capone's gang was bribing and threatening the potential jurors. Judge Wilkerson was neither surprised nor concerned. "Bring your case to court as planned, gentlemen," he told them confidently. "Leave the rest to me."

On October 6, 1931, fourteen detectives escorted Capone to the Federal Court Building. Security was very, very tight. Capone was brought in through a tunnel to a freight elevator.
The crime czar was well dressed in a conservative blue serge suit. No pinkie rings or any other gaudy gangster jewelry this time. Every major newspaper had dispatched its top talent. It was the "Who's Who" of newspaper journalism. The question was posed to Al repeatedly, "Are you worried?"

"Worried?" Capone answered with a smile, "Well, who wouldn't be?" As Bergreen notes: " At that moment, however, he was feeling quite confident. He assumed that his organization had gotten to the jury and all that was required of him was to show up in court each day, appearing polite and respectful, until his inevitable acquittal. And even then he would be sure to act magnanimous and tell the press that there were no hard feelings on his part, he knew the government boys were just doing their job."

The government team consisted of U.S. Attorney George E. Q. Johnson, a tall man with gold-rimmed glasses, and his prosecutors Samuel Clawson, Jacob Grossman, Dwight Green and William Froelich. One journalist compared Johnson and Capone: "Capone's thick-featured face, the roll of flesh at the back of his neck, presents a contrast to the attorney's lean face, his shock of gray hair, and his general appearance of wiriness."

Judge Wilkerson entered the courtroom. He wore no robes over his dark suit. "Judge Edwards has another trial commencing today," he announced. "Go to his courtroom and bring me the entire panel of jurors. Take my entire panel to Judge Edwards." Everyone was shocked, but no one more than Capone and his lawyer Michael Ahern. The new panel of jurors, most of whom were white men from rural areas, had never appeared on any list of Capone's and had never been approached for bribery. These jurors would be sequestered at night so that the Capone mob couldn't get to them.

On October 17, Johnson gave his final summation to a jury composed of men with farm backgrounds like his own. After his opening statement, he turned his attention to Capone himself. "I have been a little bewildered in this case at the manner in which the defense has attempted to weave a halo of mystery and romance around the head of this man. Who is he? Who is this man who during the years that we have considered here has so lavishly expended what he claims to be almost half a million dollars? Is he the little boy out of the Second Reader, who succeeded in finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, that he has been spending so lavishly, or maybe, as his counsel says, is he Robin Hood? But was it Robin Hood in this case who bought $8,000 worth of diamond belt buckles to give to the unemployed? No. Was it Robin Hood in this case who paid a meat bill of $6,500? Did that go to the unemployed? No, it went to the house on Palm Island. Did he buy these $27 shirts to protect the shivering men who sleep under Wacker Drive at night? No.

"At any time, at any place, has this defendant ever appeared in a reputable business? Has there appeared a single instance of contact with a reputable business? What a picture we have in this case: no income, but diamond belt buckles, twenty-seven- dollar shirts, furnishings for his home -- $116,000 that is not deductible from his income. And yet counsel comes here and argues to you that the man has no income!"

Late Saturday night, October 17, 1931, after nine hours of discussion, the jury completed its deliberation and found Capone guilty of some counts, but not all counts of tax evasion. The following Saturday, Judge Wilkerson sentenced Capone to eleven years, $50,000 in fines and court costs of another $30,000. Bail was denied and Capone would be led to the Cook County Jail to await eventual removal to a federal penitentiary.

"Capone tried to smile again," said the New York Times, "but the smile was bitter. He licked his fat lips. He jiggled on his feet. His tongue moved in his cheeks. He was trying to be nonchalant, but he looked as if he must have felt --ready to give way to an outburst of anger. It was a smashing blow to the massive gang chief. His clumsy fingers, tightly locked behind his back, twitched and twisted."

As Capone left the courtroom, an official of the Internal Revenue Service slapped liens on his property so that the government could satisfy its tax claims. Capone lost his temper and tried to attack the man, but was restrained by the marshals who had him in custody.

"Well, I'm on my way to do eleven years," he said, looking at Ness. "I've got to do it, that's all. I'm not sore at anybody. Some people are lucky. I wasn't. There was too much overhead in my business anyhow, paying off all the time and replacing trucks and breweries. They ought to make it legitimate."

"If it was legitimate, you certainly wouldn't want anything to do with it," he told Capone as he walked away, seeing him for the last time.

Two-Gun Hart

Al Capone's oldest brother, James Vincenzo Capone, left his home in Brooklyn at the age of 16 in 1908. Always a strong-minded and independent boy, he wanted to escape the crowded city and go west where the prospects were better.

Strong and muscular, anxious for adventure and wide open spaces, he joined the circus and traveled all over the Midwest. For the first time, he was exposed to American Indians and became fascinated with their culture.

He also became pretty good with a gun and when World War I broke out, he enlisted and was sent over to France with the American Expeditionary Force. He was an excellent marksman and a good soldier, who was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. He was the only one of that generation of Capone sons to fight in World War I.

His family back in Brooklyn had no idea about his military service at that time. He had pretty much lost contact with them.
After the war, he hopped a train to Nebraska and stayed in the small town of Homer where in 1919 he rescued a young woman named Kathleen Winch and her family in a flash flood. Shortly afterwards, Capone, who then called himself Richard Hart, and Kathleen were married. As his family grew, he tried to make an ordinary living in Homer, but the adventuresome Hart needed more excitement.

When Prohibition laws were enacted in 1920, Hart saw an opportunity to get a more interesting job where his expert marksmanship would be useful. He became a Prohibition enforcement officer.

Incredibly enough, while his baby brother Al was starting to make bootlegging history in Chicago, his big brother was making a name for himself aggressively busting up illegal stills in Nebraska. Nor was Hart just a prohibition agent, he kept the peace in that frontier area, regularly arresting horse thieves and other criminals.

As his fame as a lawman increased, he was hired by the U.S. Indian Service to try to keep alcohol off the Indian reservations. Hart and Kathleen and their four sons made their home among the various tribes, like the Sioux and Cheyenne. In the course of his work, Hart and his family learned several Indian languages and developed close relationships with the tribal leaders.
His terrific ability with guns, plus the pair of pearl-handed pistols he wore, earned him the name "Two Gun Hart." In one part of the Midwest, the headlines read," Two-Gun Hart Gets his Man," and "Two-Gun Hart Brings Booze Offenders In." At one point, Two Gun was a body guard for President Calvin Coolidge. Baby brothers Al and Ralph were making headlines of a different sort in another part of the Midwest.

Hart continued his distinguished career as a Prohibition agent until Prohibition was over. Afterwards, he became the town marshal in his wife's home town of Homer, Nebraska.

Hart was a dedicated family man and taught his sons and grandchildren a lot about hunting and outdoor sports, but for a long time, he kept his real name and background from everybody.

Eventually, in the early 1940's, he quietly contacted his brothers in Chicago and met with Ralph and John Capone in Sioux City, Iowa. Then he went to Chicago to see his mother, Theresa. When he went home, he told Kathleen and the boys that he was in fact Al Capone's brother. At various times, when financial difficulties beset Two-Gun's family, his brother Ralph helped out with a check.

In 1946, Two-Gun allowed his son Harry Hart to go with him to a Capone family cabin in Wisconsin where he had a chance to meet his famous uncle, Al Capone, who at that time was out of jail and suffering from tertiary syphilis. Two-Gun told Harry not to get too close to Al during this family visit. The two brothers came from two very different worlds. Hart probably did not want his son influenced unduly by one of the most famous characters of that other world.

In 1952, Two-Gun Hart suffered a fatal heart attack in Homer, Nebraska. Kathleen and Harry were at his side. His oldest son, Richard Hart Jr., had been killed in World War II, while his other two boys had settled in Wisconsin.

It seems unbelievable that the two brothers, Richard Hart and Al Capone, could have lived such remarkably different lives on opposite sides of the law. Yet when you look at the qualities that made each of the two brothers successful in their own milieu, fraternal similarities are visible: intelligence, initiative, risk taking, strength of will and purpose, persistence and conviction, and the ability to lead and persuade others. Strangely enough, it was the law of the land, Prohibition, that brought to the forefront these qualities in each brother.

The Final Chapter

Initially, Al was a prisoner at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta and quickly became its most famous prisoner. There were charges almost immediately that he was living "like a king." While that was certainly an exaggeration, he clearly lived better than the rest of the prisoners. He had more socks, underwear, sets of sheets, etc. than anyone else. He maintained these extravagances by virtue of a hollow handle in his tennis racket in which he secreted several thousand dollars in cash.

In 1934, Attorney General Homer Cummings took over the prison on Alcatraz Island to warehouse dangerous, intractable criminals. In a radio address, Cummings explained that "here may be isolated the criminals of the vicious and irredeemable type so that their evil influence may not be extended to other prisoners."
In August of 1934, Capone was sent to Alcatraz. His days of living like a king in prison were gone. "Capone would run nothing on or from Alcatraz; he wouldn't even know what was happening outside. There would be no smuggled letters or messages.

All incoming letters were censored, then retyped by guards with prohibited subjects omitted, which included the faintest whiff of business or the doings of former associates. Censors excised even mention of current events. No newspapers were allowed; magazines had to be more than seven months old. The only source of news was new arrivals. At best, prisoners could write one letter a week, rigorously censored, and only to their immediate family members. Only immediate family could visit, only two of them each month, and they had to write the warden for permission each time. Visitors and prisoners made no physical contact. They sat on opposite side of plate glass... No one could smuggle money into Capone, and he could not have spent it anyway." (Schoenberg).

How did Capone manage with the loss of popularity and status? He seemed to do reasonably well and got along better than most from the standpoint of adjustment. The same was not true of his health. The syphilis that he had contracted as a very young man was moving into the tertiary stage called neurosyphilis. By 1938, he was confused and disoriented.

Al spent the last year of his sentence, which had been reduced to six years and five months for a combination of good behavior and work credits, in the hospital section being treated for syphilis. He was released in November of 1939. Mae took him to a hospital in Baltimore where he was treated until March of 1940.

Sonny Capone seemed to be a remarkably friendly and well-adjusted young man, despite his very unusual background. In 1940, he married an Irish girl and settled in Miami. Sonny and Diana provided Al and Mae with four granddaughters, which were treated with lavish attention.

For his remaining years, Al slowly deteriorated in the quiet splendor of his Palm Island palace. Mae stuck by him until January 25, 1947 when he died of cardiac arrest, his grieving family surrounding him. A week before, Andrew Volstead, author of the Volstead Act that ushered in the era of Prohibition from 1920 to 1933, died at the age of 87.

"In his forty-eight years, Capone had left his mark on the rackets and on Chicago, and more than anyone else he had demonstrated the folly of Prohibition; in the process he also made a fortune. Beyond that, he captured and held the imagination of the American public as few public figures ever do. Capone's fame should have been fleeting, a passing sensation, but instead it lodged permanently in the consciousness of Americans, for whom he redefined the concept of crime into an organized endeavor modeled on corporate enterprise. As he was at pains to point out, many of his crimes were relative; bootlegging was criminal only because a certain set of laws decreed it, and then the laws were changed" (Bergreen).