The American public has always had a bizarre fascination with gangsters. While much of their allure comes from sensationalized media stories, there is something unique about Al Capone. Unlike other criminals of his day, Capone desired celebrity status. He understood the power of public opinion, using it to create a myth about him. With his humble beginnings and immigrant background, Al Capone’s life became the epitome of the American dream, and yet it was a very twisted version of that dream: a version in which the ends justified the means. Prohibition also enhanced his image. To many Americans, Capone was a hero. The government had passed a tyrannical law, and Capone was a man willing to flout it. He had a reputation as the defender of the poor immigrant against bigoted, aristocratic America. However, behind this American Robin Hood lay a far more sinister figure: a criminal mastermind who terrorized Chicago for a decade and a half.
The most legendary outlaw in modern American history is Al Capone. Born in Brooklyn to Italian immigrants, Capone spent his early years working in gambling and prostitution rings until Prohibition gave him the chance to make a fortune bootlegging illegal beer and liquor. He stood as a symbol of defiance to the unpopular law, but also gained notoriety for the corruption and violence of his criminal operation. (Library of Congress)
Alphonse Capone’s life began much like that of any other of the millions of Italian immigrants who lived in New York. Born on January 17, 1899, in Brooklyn, Alphonse (or “Al” as he was known) Capone grew up in a world in which no means were impermissible to rise out of poverty. It was a tough kind of individualism reminiscent of the nineteenth-century American frontier. At the age of fourteen, Capone dropped out of school to join his first gang in Five Points, Long Island. There he soon came to the attention of the gang’s leader, an older cousin of Capone’s named Johnny Torrio. Torrio was a “vice lord”—a racketeer dealing in gambling and prostitution. Capone became a bouncer at one of Torrio’s establishments. It was during this time that he received the two deep gouges in his face from a straight-blade razor that earned him the nickname “Scarface Al.” By the time he left New York, at the age of twenty-one, he was already suspected of murdering two men.
Capone’s rise from an impoverished immigrant in New York City to the pinnacle of luxury in Chicago was largely a consequence of Prohibition. Organized crime had been around long before the advent of Prohibition, but the constitutional ban on the sale of alcohol in 1920 brought these groups out of the shadows and into the public’s awareness. Any time an item for which there is consumer demand is outlawed, criminal syndicates will emerge to meet that need. Considering that the liquor industry had been the fifth largest in America prior to Prohibition, there was an enormous demand for these now illicit goods.
Capone’s mentor, Johnny Torrio, was among the first to realize the potential fortune that could be made by bootlegging alcohol. In 1920 he invited Capone to join him in Chicago in what was innocently named “the beer business.” Capone began as the manager of one of Torrio’s gambling dens, the Four Deuces. However, by 1923 he was effectively Torrio’s number-two man—his enforcer. The gang world that he joined was about to make that city infamous across the nation as the capital of lawlessness, murder, and corruption.
Capone rose to national prominence as Torrio’s lieutenant during the so-called Beer Wars. Early on Torrio had negotiated an agreement between the numerous ethnic gangs known as the “Chicago Outfit.” The rules were simple: Chicago was divided into zones; each zone was the exclusive territory of a mob; each mob was to stay on its own turf. Complicit in the system was Chicago’s mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, but when Thompson lost his reelection bid to a progressive Democrat reformer in 1923, the “Pax Torrio” ended abruptly. Prohibition laws were now enforced and profits began declining for all gangs. With the decline in profits, the temptation to target one another increased. The Beer Wars had begun.
The Italians’ main rivals were the Sicilian Genna Brothers of the West Side, Joe Saltis’s Polish gang on the Southwest, and the Irish mob of Dion O’Banion’s Northsiders. As the violence escalated, Capone cemented his power over the Italian mob. In 1924 the Irish mob fired numerous rounds of machine gun fire into Johnny Torrio’s home in retaliation for a suspected Capone hit on their mob leader, Dion O’Banion. Torrio was severely wounded and fled to New York, leaving his Chicago operation to Capone.
Al Capone organized Torrio’s former syndicate along the lines of a modern corporation. Capone was in essence the president of the board of directors, which was in charge of creating strategy. He had three high-ranking assistants: one to maintain labor relations with the men on the street, a second to organize the distribution of police bribes, and a third to order hits on competitors. Beneath the administration, the mob was organized into departments, each handing the various aspects of the syndicate’s business: the alcohol division, the brewery division, the collections division, the vice division, and the enforcement division. The last of these was especially infamous. While Torrio had been known for his moderation, Capone’s enforcers were characterized by their ruthlessness.
The organization was highly lucrative. During most years, Capone earned roughly $50 million. With his newfound wealth, Capone lived the life of a celebrity. He built a mansion in Miami where he went on long retreats. He owned a bulletproof limousine and employed a large bodyguard. He also used his wealth to finance campaign bids. In 1927 he contributed $250,000 to help his old friend Thompson return to the mayor’s office. Most of the aldermen in Chicago were also on his payroll, and if they ever voted in a way that inconvenienced him, he would have them threatened.
St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
No single Mafia hit evokes the legendary gangland of the Prohibition era like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of February 14, 1929, during which seven associates of George “Bugs” Moran were executed against the wall of a garage, ostensibly by assassins masquerading as police. Although no one was ever convicted of the slayings, the massacre has long been thought to have been orchestrated by Moran’s nemesis, Al “Scarface” Capone, the archetypal gangster of the American imagination.
C. Fee
By 1931, Capone began diversifying his investments, diverting more and more money into legal enterprises. He directed labor unions of plumbers, chauffeurs, and city employees. He owned motion picture theaters, soda manufacturing plants, meat processing plants, and drycleaners. All of these helped him maintain a more respectable image. Capone claimed that all of his businesses helped rehabilitate criminals. If he closed down his liquor business, they would all go back to robberies, kidnappings, and murders.
Capone did nothing to deescalate the violence of the Beer Wars. He was determined to monopolize the liquor business in Chicago. His first targets were the Gennas. He quickly eliminated the Westside mob, leaving only the Northside Irish as competitors.
After O’Banion’s murder, Earl “Hymie” Weiss and George “Bugs” Moran took over. These two declared a gang war against Capone to preempt any move the Italians might be planning to make. In September 1926, several carloads of Irish mobsters stormed through Capone’s neighborhood. They attacked his headquarters at the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero with more than 1,000 rounds of machine gun fire. Astonishingly, the police made no arrests. Capone responded by having Weiss targeted as he left church Sunday morning. In 1926 the Beer Wars claimed seventy-six mobsters, followed in 1927 by fifty-four more.
The most famous crime attributed to Al Capone was the Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929. Seven men from the Northside were lured into an abandoned warehouse and gunned down in broad daylight. While Capone had an alibi (he was in Florida at the time), no one had any doubts that he had been in contact with his enforcers in Chicago. When the police made no convictions, many private citizens of Chicago decided that they could no longer tolerate Capone.
The newly formed Chicago Crime Association led a crusade to turn public opinion against him. They published a “Public Enemies List” of the most notorious mobsters with Capone at the top. Capone was officially branded “Public Enemy Number One.”
After several failed attempts to tie Capone to murders, racketeering, and bootlegging, another anticrime association, known as the Secret Six, settled on investigating Capone for tax evasion. This was extremely difficult since Capone owned no property in his own name nor did he have any bank accounts. Colonel Robert Isham Randolph, the leader of this vigilante group, persuaded the U.S. Justice Department to wiretap Capone’s phone and conduct raids on his warehouses to find ledgers of the mob’s transactions. The Justice Department official in charge of these dubious operations was Eliot Ness. Ness was able to produce the ledgers and put Capone under arrest in 1931. After a ten-day trial in which the jury pool had to be switched due to allegations of corruption, Capone was sentenced to eleven years in prison and an $80,000 fine.
Capone served the early part of his sentence in the Atlanta Penitentiary, but when it was learned that he was bribing guards and inmates to gain special privileges, he was transferred to Alcatraz Island. During his time in prison, Capone began showing signs of early dementia. By the time he was released in 1939, his mind had deteriorated so much that his mob refused to let him return. He retired to his mansion in Florida where he died from a brain hemorrhage at the age of forty-eight in 1947.
Al Capone has captivated Americans ever since his first splashy headline appearances in the 1920s. While many historians argue that Capone was really no different from any of the other mob bosses of the era, what distinguished him was his popularity with the press. Capone loved being in the spotlight and went out of his way to ingratiate himself with reporters. He tried to build an image of respectability, unlike most of the other criminals of his day. “If I break the law,” he once said, “my customers, who number hundreds of the best people in Chicago, are as guilty as I am. … Everybody calls me a racketeer. I call myself a businessman. When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging. When my patron serves it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality” (Hill 2004, 69).
Capone was especially popular in the immigrant community for his generosity. He gave out Christmas presents every year. He opened soup kitchens and charities during the early years of the Great Depression. Beyond a doubt Capone saw himself as a philanthropist, but in actuality his name epitomized murder and violence during one of the most lawless eras of American history.
Andrew Wickersham
See also Barker, Ma; Bass, Sam; Boles, Charles E. “Black Bart”; Bonney, William “Billy the Kid”; Bonnie and Clyde; Floyd, Charles “Pretty Boy”; James, Jesse
Further Reading
Hill, Jeff. 2004. Defining Moments: Prohibition. Detroit: Omnigraphics.
Hoffman, Dennis Earl. 1993. Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders: Chicago’s Private War against Capone. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Winkeler, Georgette. 2011. Al Capone and His American Boys: Memoirs of a Mobster’s Wife. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.