Capone, Al

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CAPONE, AL

A child of Brooklyn, New York, Alphonse Capone (January 17, 1899–January 25, 1947) found notoriety and wealth in Chicago through organized crime. Capone was born to an Italian immigrant family in 1899. Though a promising student, he left school in the sixth grade, and from then it was a life in the streets. Capone was probably twenty when he killed his first victim. Three years later, he followed Johnny Torrio, his mentor in crime, to Chicago. Together, they built a model criminal organization.

Torrio was a modernizer who did for gambling, prostitution, and the Prohibition-era sale of liquor what John D. Rockefeller had for the oil business. The automobile and telephone—as well as the Thompson submachine gun—were some of the modern tools Torrio employed. When a 1925 assassination attempt left him wounded, Torrio retired and left the business to his protegé.

Like Torrio (and Rockefeller, Sr.), Capone rationalized the marketplace with a pool arrangement, where different gangs were allowed control of different sections of the city. Anyone dissatisfied with their share met a bloody end. The seven victims of the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre were but one example.

Perhaps Capone's true genius lay in his crafting a public image. "They call Capone a bootlegger," he once complained. "Yes. It's bootleg while it's on the trucks, but when your host at the club, in the locker room or on the Gold Coast hands it to you on a silver platter, it's hospitality" (Bergreen, p. 268). Such comments always served Capone well with the public. So did his reputation for generosity: When the Depression struck Chicago with nearly 50 percent unemployment, Capone opened up soup kitchens to feed the needy. The public did not care that Capone "encouraged" others to pay the cost of his project—Big Al lent a helping hand at a time when government did not. "Capone has become almost a mythical being in Chicago," (Bergreen, p. 402) one critic lamented in 1930. Hollywood gave the story form a year later with Edward G. Robinson as Little Caesar, who was Capone by any other name. The press had already made much of Capone as a kind of street philanthropist.

Capone was grossing some $100 million annually by the late 1920s. This wealth proved his undoing, or at least his failure to report it did—he was convicted of income tax evasion in 1931 and spent eight years in federal prisons, including Alcatraz. By then, Capone had fashioned a myth for the Depression and beyond. He was the gangster as antihero. Capone died from the ravages of syphilis in 1947.

See Also: CRIME; LAW ENFORCEMENT; PROHIBITION.