Al Capone
From Metapedia
Al Capone (January 17, 1899 - January 25, 1947) was an Italian-American gangster from New York City
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[edit] Early Life
Alphonse Capone was born in New York City to Italian parents, Gabriele Capone and Teresina who were originally from Castellmarre di Stabia Italy. His father moved the family to America in 1894 and was a barber by trade. 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.
At the age of five in 1904, he went to Public School 7 on Adams Street. Educational prospects for Italian children were very poor. The school system was deeply prejudiced against them and did little to encourage any interest in higher education, whilst the immigrant parents expected their children to leave school as soon as they were old enough to work.Al did quite well in school until the sixth grade when his steady record of B's deteriorated rapidly. At fourteen, he lost his temper at the teacher, she hit him and he hit her back. He was expelled and never went to school again.
It was around this time that the family moved 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 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.
Al learned a lot from Torrio but 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.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 and 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.
During these years 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."
When Capone was 18 he met his first, more aggressive Gangster,Frankie Yale who was from Calabria and started working for him in his club, The Harvard Inn as a bartender. 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.
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.
Their son,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 for he was smart, had a good head for figures and was very reliable. On November 14, 1920, his father died of heart disease at the age of fifty-five. Afterwards he resumed his working relationship with Johnny Torrio and moved to Chicago in 1921 and with his knowledge of numbers,business and strong arm tactics,Chicago was an fresh market for profit.
[edit] Chicago
When Al Capone came to the city in 1921, 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, which was quite of sum of money in the 1920's. 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 messing about. 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.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. Not surprising, 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.
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. 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 judgement to call Capone a daglo pimp and Capone shot Howard dead.
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.
[edit] St.Valentine's Day Massacre
Capone's involvement with the St. Valentines Day Massacre was a plan to assassinate fellow gangland boss, Bugs Moran. Capone never thought that the planned assassination of Bugs Moran would be an event that would be notorious for many decades to come. Capone by this time, was living 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.
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..."
[edit] 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.
[edit] Arrest and Conviction
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[edit] James Vincenzo Capone
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.
[edit] Final Years and Death
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 at age 48, 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.
