Chapter Five
1 Worth more than $18 billion in modern currency.
2 Al Capone married Mae Coughlin, an Irish girl from a middle-class family, in 1918. Although he frequently consorted with mistresses and prostitutes, the couple remained married the remainder of Capone’s life. They had one child, Albert Francis Capone, who went by the nickname Sonny.
3 Bootlegging is a nineteenth-century term based upon the smugglers’ trick of concealing bottles in their boots.
4 The term refers to the practice of not speaking at all about the establishment, for fear of alerting the police.
5 John Scalise, Albert Anselmi, and Joseph Giunta did indeed plan to betray Al Capone. Because of Capone’s paranoia, he was able to pick up on the plot against him.
6 An interesting sidebar to Capone’s Alcatraz incarceration is that he shared space with Alvin Karpis, the public enemy arrested by J. Edgar Hoover. Karpis is Inmate #325 and will go on to serve the longest term of any convict in the prison’s history—twenty-seven years. Alcatraz will close for good on March 21, 1963, and Karpis will be relocated to another penitentiary. He will be released on parole in 1969 and die from an accidental overdose of pills and alcohol in 1979.