The gangster kingpin of Chicago, Al Capone (1899–1947) has passed into legend as one of the most colorful mobsters of the Roaring Twenties. He controlled a huge network of smugglers, crooked cops, and speakeasies and supplied booze to much of the Midwest. Until his downfall in 1931, Capone was also known for his own outsize appetites for food, cigars, liquor, and women.
Inadvertently, Capone may also have contributed to the eventual demise of Prohibition. A ban on alcohol enacted in 1919, Prohibition was repealed in 1933 amid widespread revulsion at the huge increase in violence associated with bootleggers. The gruesome Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, which Capone unleashed against a rival outfit, was one of the most famous of the wave of gangland slayings.
The child of Italian immigrants, Capone was born in Brooklyn and joined a street gang as a teenager. He received the famous scar on the side of his face while working as a bouncer at a mob-controlled nightclub. After marrying in 1918, Capone moved to the South Side of Chicago, where he began building his illicit empire.
Within a few years, Capone was one of the dominant forces in the Chicago underworld. His only significant source of local opposition was a rival North Side gang run by George “Bugs” Moran (1893–1957), who organized failed attempts to assassinate Capone in the 1920s.
The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was designed to eliminate Capone’s competition once and for all. On Valentine’s Day, a group of gunmen disguised as police officers raided a garage that was a hangout of the Moran gang. Pretending they were arresting the seven men inside the garage, Capone’s henchmen ordered them to line up against a wall—and then mowed them down with submachine guns.
But the massacre failed. Not only was Moran out of the garage that day, but the killings galvanized public opposition to mob rule in Chicago. Federal agent Eliot Ness (1903–1957) was dispatched to put Capone behind bars. Ness eventually won a conviction against Capone for tax evasion—the gangster had not paid income tax on any of his illegal businesses. Capone spent the 1930s in prison and was released in poor health in 1939. Mentally unstable, he was unable to resume his role in the mob and died after a stroke in 1947.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- In 1932, the Treasury Department seized Capone’s bullet-proofed Cadillac to pay his back taxes. The vehicle later served as the first armored presidential limousine, carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) during World War II.
- In 1986, construction workers discovered a locked vault in a hotel on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue that had once belonged to Capone. Mafia buffs speculated that it might contain cash, liquor, or even bodies. But when it was opened on live, national television by reporter Geraldo Rivera (1943–), the vault was found to contain only a whiskey bottle. (The bottle was empty, no less.)
- Capone is one of only two Mafia kingpins to make the cover of Time magazine. The other was John Gotti (1940–2002).
