Over the years, many would claim (falsely) that Al Capone had been an immigrant, as if they wanted to disown one of America’s most notorious native-born sons. But Capone himself insisted on setting the record straight.
“I’m no foreigner,” he would say. “I’m as good an American as any man. My parents were American-born and so was I.”
In this, as he so often did, Capone specialized in half-truths.
When Gabriele Capone moved his family from Italy to a better life in America, he chose a place called Brooklyn. Perhaps he’d been warned of New York’s overcrowded ghettoes with their rotten wooden firetraps, where cholera or typhus drove the rich from the city while corpses of the poor littered the Lower East Side. A father relocating his brood might well want to avoid crime-ridden streets where an immigrant’s meager daily wage could wind up in a mugger’s grasp.
But in 1895, Brooklyn was rife with opportunity. The Brooklyn Bridge, an engineering marvel known worldwide, had been finished in 1883. The ever-growing City of Brooklyn was annexing other towns and cities in Kings County, with talk in the air of one great emerging metropolitan area. Clearly opportunities existed in Brooklyn that did not in Gabriele’s home region.
Gabriele was born in 1865 in small-town Angri, southwest of Naples, on the edge of Salerno province in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Unlike many of his countrymen, he was literate, training outside the oral traditions of his village, working as a baker (pasta-making a specialty) and a lithographer. He married Theresa Raiola in 1891, their son Vincenzo (James) arriving the next year. And in 1895—with second son Raffaele (Ralph) also in tow and Theresa pregnant with Salvatore (Frank)—the family made its way across the Atlantic.
At first, they continued to pronounce their surname phonetically—Caponi—though that would soon change. Classified at Ellis Island as Italian, the Capones were more rudely branded as “dagos” or “wops”—low-class, unintelligent southern Italians, disposed to crime.
Thousands of Italians came to Brooklyn before the Great War, a world bordered by factories on the north and warehouses on the south, its streets mingling neighbors and kin from Campanian and Calabrian villages among bright flowers and holy imagery and sublime cooking smells. On front stoops, mothers with babies at their bosoms would oversee armies of kids in the street, while neighbors sat in sunshine and shared gossip and letters from home.
However poor the inhabitants of a tenement, a certain joy and exuberance might be found—in the Union Street marionette theater, perhaps, or a festival like the feast of the patron saint or the Assumption of Our Lady, electric-bulb-lined arches lighting up the night as statues of saints were paraded, until fireworks and explosions pronounced the proceedings at a joyful end.
But those who had known Italy were soon confronted by a generation not so tied to heritage, who studied English and spoke in the language of the streets. America, even Brooklyn itself, was their world, a world that bred restlessness in its youth.
In the neighborhoods near the Navy Yard, from Red Hook to Greenpoint, Old and New World ways came together and sometimes clashed. Here the Capone family settled, an area dominated by defense spending, relatively immune to economic recessions.
Seagulls soared above, offering a constant, cawing reminder of the nearby Atlantic. But the fresh sea air was tainted by a caustic bouquet of oil, fumes, and rot. Sailors and shipbuilders came in droves, bringing with them a wealth of gambling, prostitution, and saloons—on Sands Street, chippies prowled and dancehall girls pranced, while tattoo parlors thrived on drunken bad decisions, and cheap whiskey was often laced by the Mickey Finn that led to a mugging.
A summer’s day might bring the stench rolling in from the Gowanus Canal, a nasty gash in the marsh-like landscape, its murky green-brown waters hungry for rusty vessels, dead machinery covered in funereal snarls of green, nature in a particularly ironic mood. The canal attracted a legion of lawbreakers, who often made it home to a special kind of swimmer—a floating corpse, bloated and ripe.
The Capone family’s two-room flat had a single potbelly stove and no running water, with access to an outhouse. Theresa now had three little children to care for—cooking, warmth, and bathing required hauling up water, coal, or wood. A fourth child came on January 17, 1899. Baptized without a godfather, he was given the Latin name Alphonsus, though he would be known by its English equivalent: Alphonse Capone.
To support his growing family while saving to start his own business, Gabriel (his name Americanized now) toiled as a manual laborer, baker, and grocery clerk before taking up barbering. The shipyards made a ready market for Gabriel’s scissors and razors, with many workers and sailors passing through—the same clientele who frequented brothels, gambling joints, and saloons. While less congested and safer than New York’s East Side slums, the Navy Yard soon revealed itself as a dicey place to raise a family.
Tall, handsome Gabriel Capone made friends with ease. His literacy helped him stand out among his countrymen, who often addressed him as “Don.” Theresa soon had nine children: Erminio (Mimi) came along in 1901; Umberto (Albert) in 1906; Amadoe (Matthew) in 1908; Erminia in 1910 (dying the same year); and, finally, in 1912, dark-haired Mafalda, who developed a particularly close relationship with Al. The Don’s children, however, were not free from discrimination and ethnic conflict.
The active young Capone boys fled their two-room flat, making the street their major playground. On the street and in school, name-calling could escalate into violence, teachers thrashing students and debasing them racially. Children united along ethnic lines, often with older kids, forming surrogate families that taught survival.
Smoking started in primary school, crap games under a street-corner gaslight around age eight or nine. Sex had to wait for high school and a mature twelve. Childhood pursuits like flying a kite off a rooftop had their place, as did swimming in the East River, though a kid got no more than three lessons before he drowned. The Fourth of July meant single-shot pistols, a bargain at a quarter, and Election Day was about nicking barrels and boxes for the big fire—didn’t matter who won, if the fire burned high and bright.
An older youth, Francesco (Frank) Nitto, his family also from Angri, lived near the Capones at two Navy Street addresses within half a mile of Al’s family. Typically, Nitto dropped out during the seventh grade, age fourteen. The close proximity of their homes suggests the short, feisty Nitto knew the Capone boys—at least the older ones, James, Frank, and Ralph.
The whole family needed to work not only to survive but to improve their lot, one economic unit with everyone pitching in. Theresa would bake bread and the older boys would sell it on the street. The brothers hawked newspapers and shined shoes—low-income kids following their honest father’s lead. Of course, dishonesty could also help support the family—stealing food, clothing, and other necessities from pushcarts or stores.
Gabriel became a citizen in 1906, making his wife and children citizens as well. He moved the family to Garfield Place in Park Slope, and opened his own shop in the building where they lived. Young Nitto, working as a barber years later in Chicago, listed Brooklyn as the site of his professional training. He and his family moved from Navy Street to Garfield Place, even closer to the Capones, where Frank likely learned barbering from Gabriel.
The oldest Capone boy—Vincenzo, called James—became fascinated with the romanticized dime-novel West and the lure of wide-open spaces away from crowded, crime-ridden streets. Gabriel arranged a job for his oldest son caring for horses in rural Staten Island, a world and a ferry ride away. Finally, in 1907, an opportunity arose for James to work with horses, traveling with a touring circus.
James bid his little brother good-bye at the Staten Island Ferry, not to return for decades, his exit saving him from the life of crime consuming many of his brothers. Influenced by movie idol William S. Hart—whose last name he assumed—James came to work in various law enforcement capacities out west, including Prohibition agent. The oldest son leaving home, however, meant more than just family heartache, but a loss of income.
The family’s new, more predominantly Italian neighborhood bordered Irish Red Hook and a Sicilian enclave, where turf wars among youth gangs often broke out. The corner of Broadway and Flushing, near a saloon, became young Capone’s territory, shared with racetrack touts, bookies, and drug dealers. From there and other such notorious corners, kid gangs cheerfully terrorized Jewish neighborhoods, turning over pushcarts and milk cans, yanking on the beards of old men, and busting out random windows.
Frank Nitto, more than a decade Al’s senior, emerged as a leader among the young toughs. He adopted Capone as a mascot for his gang—the Boys of Navy Street. Even as an eight-year-old, Capone had proven himself a born fighter, and the teenaged Nitto trusted him enough to have him join the group in battle.
For some time, local Irish roughnecks had been harassing the Italian women of Capone’s neighborhood—first by coming up behind them and lifting up their skirts, and later graduating to property destruction and theft. These brazen assaults demanded a response, and Nitto took it upon himself to deliver it.
The task of broadcasting Nitto’s message fell to young Capone, then about eight. Nitto’s boys lifted a washtub from one of the women they were planning to defend—they would get it back to her before her next batch of laundry—and strapped it to Al’s chest. With stick in hand, he became the group’s drummer boy, leading their march into enemy territory. As they arrived outside an Irish bar, they drew their rivals out with a mocking chant: “We are the Boys of Navy Street—Touch us if you dare!”
The Irish emerged to do battle, but they proved no match for Nitto’s crew. Capone, probably younger than any other combatant, stayed right in the thick of it—urging his allies on by rapping the washtub and keeping up the chant. When police arrived to break up the scuffle, the Irish had been walloped—and the Boys of Navy Street had vanished, scurrying away over the rooftops.
For Nitto, this was a rare instance of fighting in the open. In later years, he would prefer to do battle in the shadows, catching his targets off guard. For Capone, on the other hand, this scrap set the tone for his future criminal career. He couldn’t help but announce himself by breaking the law loud and proud, and he always liked to be seen fighting for something larger than himself—whether for his family, his business, or the neighborhood women.
Perception mattered to Al Capone. He would soon meet a mentor whose lifestyle proved what Capone always seemed desperate to believe—that one didn’t have to be a thug in order to be a gangster.
Near the Capone home, the John Torrio Association, from its second-floor window, wielded great influence over the Italian gangs. Torrio, perhaps New York’s most improbable criminal leader, was among its most prosperous.
In a field where size, strength, and brute force ruled, Torrio was short, soft, and nonviolent. An elementary school dropout, he was one smart crook, who—in a world where gang leaders battled to the top—boasted he never fired a gun. Others fought his wars, his strategic expertise making young toughs rich by ghetto standards.
As a teen on New York City’s Lower East Side, Torrio didn’t join gangs; instead, he organized them, moving them into grown-up criminal activities. His James Street Boys committed the usual petty larceny but also worked with Tammany Hall, the New York City political machine, to help steal elections. Torrio’s political influence expanded his criminal activities into gambling and prostitution, as he formed relationships with the likes of budding gangsters Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Ciro Terranova, and Frankie Uale. Soon Torrio joined Uale across the river in Brooklyn, where racketeering flourished.
Born Frank Ioele (Yo-A-Lee) in Calabria, Italy, plump and of medium height, Uale was a tough street fighter who rose fast in the Five Points ranks. Like Torrio, he moved from traditional gang activities into new areas, including prostitution and unionism. Unlike Torrio, Uale was known for violence, ready to kill an opponent or beat an underling, even his own brother.
At age eight, Al Capone moved into the neighborhood near Torrio’s office. The avuncular little gangster regularly used local boys to run errands, at first innocuous ones, then—if they proved trustworthy—making payoffs and delivering contraband. It’s likely Al ran such errands, beginning a relationship with Torrio that lasted for decades.
To navigate the turbulent world into which he had been born, young Al had little choice but to join a street gang. For those hardcore street kids, such gangs served “as a training school,” one resident remembered, prepping them for more serious forms of crime. While the Irish were scrappy kids up for any fight, and tough Jewish youths worked hard at defending themselves, the Italians earned a reputation for preferring blades and bullets over fisticuffs and street-corner diplomacy. Still, most kid gang members would come to be solid citizens, going into business or on to higher education. The others would graduate from crap games, stealing, and truancy into organized crime, armed robbery, and incarceration.
At his father’s suggestion, the teenaged Al set up a shoeshine box under a large clock on a busy street. By chance, the spot proved the perfect place to observe the workings of a protection racket run by local godfather Don Batista Balsamo.
After watching Balsamo’s men extort money from neighborhood businessmen, Capone decided to try it himself. He built a small crew of youths who could serve as muscle—among them his cousin Charlie Fischetti—and had them shake down his fellow shoeshine boys. The racket started small but grew to such an extent Balsamo’s men took notice and put a stop to it.
Yet at home, Al Capone was a polite, dutiful son, bringing money and food to his family, thanks to his secret life as a thief and errand boy for gangsters. The praise from his family, especially his mother, inadvertently propelled him toward a life of crime.
In the sixth grade, when a teacher at P.S. 133 struck him for insubordination, the fourteen-year-old Al supposedly struck her right back. He never set foot inside the school again, or perhaps he just dropped out to work and help support his family.
Bigger and stronger now, on his way to a burly but nimble five foot ten, Al developed into an outstanding pool player; he was also capable of knocking a man out with a single blow. By his midteens, he was affiliated with the South Brooklyn Rippers and later the Forty Thieves Juniors, the latter with ties to Torrio’s friend Uale, who by now was diversifying into loan-sharking, the protection racket, and even a line of cigars.
Uale decided to mimic the profitable College Inn near Coney Island with his own Harvard Inn, which he operated under the assumed last name Yale. For this, Yale needed men who were more than simple street-gang thugs—young Al Capone, six years Frank’s junior, had the necessary skills. Tough and strong, capable of violence but affable and well liked, Al would matriculate as a bouncer-cum-bartender at the Harvard Inn.
The Harvard Inn was no nightclub for college students—its customers were dockworkers and low-life criminals, and sometimes their families and friends. Capone kept busy maintaining order and keeping the clientele’s glasses brimming; a show-off pastime of the young bartender, when business was slow, was shooting at beer bottles and shearing off their necks. But much as he admired and imitated the superficially slick Yale, he still had plenty to learn.
On a sultry evening in 1917, Frank Galluccio drifted into the Harvard Inn with his girl on one arm and his sister on the other. Pretty little sis in her clingy dress caught Al’s attention, and he brushed near her when she was swaying by, but his sly comments got no response.
Capone tried something more direct: “You got a nice ass, honey, and I mean it as a compliment. Believe me.”
The grinning gorilla broadcasting this crass remark was too much. Galluccio demanded an apology. Capone, realizing he’d overstepped, approached the table, ready to calm things down.
Galluccio was slight—five feet six and under 150 pounds—but a street tough, a small-time criminal, and already drunk. Capone towered over him, bigger, wider, obviously stronger. But Galluccio leapt forward with a knife, cutting three quick slashes down Capone’s left cheek—a long one four inches down, two smaller ones along his left jaw and on his throat.
As Capone reeled, Galluccio hurriedly collected the girls and bolted. No one bothered taking pursuit; everyone’s attention was on stopping Al’s bleeding and getting him to a hospital. Thirty stitches closed his wounds but left scars that would become his unwanted calling card.
Later, Yale settled both Capone and Galluccio down, and no follow-up mayhem occurred. Eventually, on occasional New York trips, Capone would hire as a bodyguard the man who disfigured him. Maybe Al learned playing it cool only got you killed—better to take out the other guy first.
Why get killed over some skirt, anyway? Sex was readily available in the streets, and at the Harvard Inn and the Brooklyn brothels where he collected for Yale. In the process, Capone contracted the disease he dealt with the rest of his life.
* * *
Even as he was consorting with prostitutes and loose women, young Al was on the lookout for a life’s partner. Mary Josephine Coughlin was a lovely dark-haired Irish girl from Red Hook, a nicer part of Brooklyn where rows of well-tended houses sported windows with lace curtains. Two years older, Mae (as everyone called her) lived with her sisters and widowed mother; a breadwinner now, she held a clerical post at the box factory where Al worked days while helping Yale out nights.
Mae’s apple cheeks, arresting green eyes, and wavy brown hair immediately seized Al’s attention. Her musical laugh and broad, winsome smile—made all the more prominent by a marked overbite—gave her a singular beauty, and her personality seemed remarkably in tune with his. Like Al, Mae enjoyed having a good time, going out dancing and drinking with friends.
She possessed a definite independence, her burgeoning romance with Capone crossing several cultural boundaries. Irish girls traditionally married older men, while Italian boys usually chose younger brides, making the twenty-year-old Mae an unusual partner for the eighteen-year-old Capone.
Perhaps the love affair began at the factory, or at one of the dance halls where young people socialized across ethnic lines. The pair dressed stylishly, though Mae was tasteful and Al gaudy. While Al’s second job might have been a mystery to her, he was clearly striving to be more than a box- or paper-cutter.
Dancing became a favorite pastime for the couple, and Al was surprisingly graceful. Daniel Fuchs, Capone’s Navy Yard contemporary, reported Al was “something of a nonentity, affable, soft of speech and even mediocre in everything but dancing.” Yet Al and Mae shared a strong physical attraction, and the couple wound up after hours in back at the box factory. Soon Mae got pregnant.
Al wanted to marry this smiling, plucky Irish girl, but Mae’s mother rejected him. To the Irish, Italians were “colored”—this despite both groups being Catholic and often spurned by white Protestants.
As Mae’s pregnancy progressed, Al made frequent visits when her mother wasn’t around. When Mae could no longer work, Al helped her family out, gradually building relationships with Mae’s brothers and sisters. But her mother remained unmoved.
Mae gave birth December 4, 1918, to a sickly, two months premature boy, Albert Francis Capone—“Sonny” would deal with the side effects of congenital syphilis all his life. With Mae insisting on keeping the baby, her mother gave in, and on December 30, 1918, at the bride’s neighborhood church, Alphonse Capone and Mary “Mae” Coughlin were married.
After the devastation of the 1871 fire, Chicago reinvented itself as it rebuilt. City leaders made sure the new technology of the railroads converged with the ships that moved among the Great Lakes. Already a major slaughterhouse for the cattle that grazed in the plains to the west and south, the center of the Near South Side was one large barnyard of animals waiting for the knife. Here the urban east met the Wild West. Unlike New York, Chicago had miles of adjacent prairies, and its leaders were expanding the city at an amazing rate by the end of the 1800s.
As a gateway to the west, Chicago’s downtown in the prefire days always had a large transient male population of pioneers, cowhands, and prospectors passing through to make their fortunes farther west. A major industry developed downtown to profit off these visitors by offering gambling, drink, and women, as well as outright theft. The grafters who ran the downtown gambling joints, saloons, and brothels had a lot of votes, resulting in Chicago being underpoliced for all of the nineteenth century. Crime became one of the city’s major industries.
As the manager of several boxers, Johnny Torrio visited Chicago many times. He almost certainly met James “Diamond Jim” Colosimo, a major political player in Chicago’s First Ward, home to a sprawling red-light district just outside the Loop, Chicago’s downtown business district. By 1909, with gang wars heating up in Brooklyn, Torrio had made the move to Chicago, and by 1914 he was Colosimo’s right-hand man.
For all his wealth and influence, Colosimo yearned for respectability and recognition as a successful man of business. He opened a posh café called Colosimo’s at Twenty-First Street and Wabash, while a short block away at 2222 South Wabash, the Four Deuces, his four-story house of gambling and prostitution, ran wide-open under Torrio’s watch.
That left Diamond Jim to focus his energies on his restaurant, including its entertainment, particularly Dale Winter, an attractive, blue-eyed thrush who wore an air of virtue despite a figure-hugging white gown, its bosom bedecked with a red rose. Even as he paid her top dollar, Colosimo lavished Dale with furs and jewelry, seeing in her the respectable good girl of his dreams. He decided in 1919 to divorce his wife, a brothel madam. But while Colosimo busied himself with his new love and the diamonds that studded his clothes and filled his pockets, outside events began to reshape his fate.
For more than a century, a growing coalition of moralists and progressives had worked to abolish alcohol from American life. Their reasons varied greatly, from the misguided to the pernicious. Advocates for women’s rights, who knew all too well the damage liquor could do to a family, found themselves allied with immigrant-hating nativists, who sought to exterminate the saloon not so much because it might gobble up a breadwinner’s paycheck but because it represented an outpost of a foreign culture.
Yet they all agreed alcohol was inherently a vile and treacherous substance, which inevitably dragged all drinkers down the road to debauchery and despair. Take away the opportunity to drink, and Americans would become healthier in body and soul, morally upright and mentally sound.
In 1919—after decades of lobbying and grassroots organizing, of rewriting textbooks and federal law—the drys finally won the chance to put their ideas to the test. That year saw the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, making illegal “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” inside the borders of the United States. Consumption and purchase of alcoholic beverages, however, remained legal. The new law gave Americans exactly one year to bid farewell to the bottle; it would go into effect at midnight on January 17, 1920.
Prohibitionists heralded this new dry era as a day of salvation, the moment when Americans would exchange freedom to imbibe for liberty from crime and vice. In Norfolk, Virginia, the evangelist Billy Sunday presided over an elaborate funeral for booze, attended by a crowd of ten thousand. “Heaven rejoices,” Sunday told the Demon Rum. “The devil is your only mourner.”
Most Chicagoans gave that notion a Bronx cheer. The city, which later voted five to one to stay wet, wasted little time in defying the dry law. Less than an hour after Prohibition took effect, six masked men stole a shipment of “medicinal” liquor from a Chicago rail yard. Within minutes, four barrels of booze were looted from a warehouse in another part of town, while a group of bandits hijacked a truckload of whiskey elsewhere in the city.
That same day Al Capone turned twenty-one.
Alcohol was a key component of the Colosimo operation—which comprised not only the precious café but his suburban roadhouses, where prostitution was on the menu. Pop-eyed pimp Jack Guzik, a Torrio crony, learned of a brewery at Twentieth and Wabash available for sale, cheap, and hit Colosimo up for a loan. The jowly Guzik had a head for business—he saw a rich future in bootlegging and left his brothers to run the family brothel business.
Torrio also saw the kind of money to be made from Prohibition—like prostitution, something was now illegal that large numbers of people desired. Police payoffs could easily be expanded to booze—Torrio just needed the means to brew and store the stuff.
Brewers who wanted to sell out, or go into business with bootleggers willing to distribute the banned product, were eager to talk. That Colosimo’s restaurant was no First Ward dive, but a high-hat nightclub attracting both upper-class society and the better-behaved denizens of the underworld, helped facilitate negotiations.
But Diamond Jim Colosimo had no interest in across-the-board bootlegging. All he wanted from Torrio was a supply for their operations, while other Chicago gangs were entering the racket, servicing a whole new market, more lucrative even than brothels. Neighborhoods often railed against the latter, but what Chicago neighborhood didn’t want its saloons back?
On March 31, 1920, Colosimo was granted a divorce from his wife, Victoria, who netted $50,000. Johnny Torrio frowned on this. During the day, Torrio traded in corruption and sins of the flesh; but by night he was the faithful husband of his loving wife, Anna. The couple maintained a quiet middle-class life at home, listening to the Victrola and playing card games. Divorce just wasn’t done.
On April 17, Colosimo and Dale Winter wed in Southern Indiana at a hotel-casino. Victoria took her generous divorce settlement and married a Neapolitan grocer-cum-bartender in California. Back in Chicago, Colosimo nestled Dale in his mansion on nearby Vernon Avenue, and returned to his happy life. He had everything—money, a lovely, gifted new wife, and an ever-growing prominence in high society.
On May 11, Torrio called Colosimo with word two trucks loaded down with fine whiskey would roll up at 4:00 P.M.—Colosimo himself had to be there to seal the deal. Diamond Jim left before four to go to the café, a .38-caliber revolver in his pocket. He took his standard tour of the facility, checking on various staff members, then went out to the lobby to wait for the delivery.
Two shots exploded the silence.
Colosimo dropped facedown on the floor, blood spilling from his skull, dead long before the doctor and police came. The murder was close-up, a bullet in the head, leaving powder burns. With his diamond ring, loaded revolver, and $120 on him, the motive could hardly be robbery.
Suspicion settled on spurned ex-spouse Victoria, though she was across the country at the time; still, she had underworld contacts—by divorcing his wife, Colosimo had provided the perfect smoke-screen motive for his own murder.
A funny fact emerged: Torrio’s old pal Frankie Yale was in the city that day. A stranger in Chicago, he made the ideal torpedo to remove Colosimo and do Torrio a favor, while laying the groundwork for a lucrative trade in alcohol between the East Coast and the Midwest. Yet despite matching a witness description, Yale was never charged.
Colosimo’s passing established the pattern for lavish gangster funerals to come, with judges, elected officials, and criminals marching in procession behind a hearse festooned with thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers.
But Diamond Jim was soon forgotten, even if the café bearing his name continued for decades. A $10,000 payment to Frankie Yale bought Torrio a criminal operation worth millions, clearing the way for expansion into large-scale bootlegging.
In 1919, the Italians in Brooklyn were battling the Irish for control over the docks. Al Capone stepped into a poor choice of waterfront tavern, running into a profanely insulting Mick, whom he promptly beat to a pulp.
The cops could be bought, but the Irish mobsters wanted blood—Al’s. The throttled victim worked for mobster Dinny Meehan, whose minions were on the lookout for a burly young brawler with some distinctive scars. Frankie Yale likely arranged a job in Chicago for young Capone with Torrio, who needed trustworthy men, expanding his influence after Colosimo’s murder—perhaps Johnny even remembered a plump kid who ran errands back in the day.
Avoiding an accelerating gang war in Brooklyn, young Capone headed west. He could hardly imagine that even more violence awaited him.
He would already be in Chicago when, on November 14, 1920, his father died of heart failure at the pool hall where Gabriel and his son had so often played. With the family losing its main source of income, Al now had his mother and siblings to support halfway back across the country.
Money needed to be made.