Al Capone

I am sure that there’s no one who haven’t heard about this notorious gangster. Alphonse Gabriel Capone well known as Al Capone was an Italian-American gangster who led a crime syndicate dedicated to smuggling liquor and other illegal activities during the Prohibition Era of the 1920s an 1930s. National prohibition of alcohol-the “noble experiment”-was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. The results of that experiment are well known to us all, they indicate that it was a miserable failure on all counts.

Capone was born in Brooklyn in 1899 to two Italian immigrants. Even as a child he never responded well to authority. He beat a female teacher in his sixth grade and left after the principal verbally chastised him. Facing a life of low playing jobs he joined the street gang led by Johny Torrio and Lucky Luciano. Late in December 1918 Capone killed a man in an argument, but since there were no one admitted to hearing or seeing a thing, Capone was never tried for the murder. He moved after this to on the invitation of Torrio to Chicago.

He carried a rough style on people in Chicago. It was not a strange thing for him to break legs, arms, even skulls, but Torrio haven’t brought him to Chicago for that, he wanted him for killing “Big Jim” Colosimo, who ran Chicago’s underground. Torrio became boss of Chicago, and Capone became the manager of alcohol for the city.

Al Capone became head of the Chicago mafia after Torrio was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt and stepped down from the head spot in 1925. Throughout his reign he ran the streets of Chicago with his mob. When his mob with at its prime, Capone had city aldermen, mayors, legislators, governors, congressmen, and over half the Chicago police force on his payroll. Capone was notorious during the Prohibition Era for his control of large portions of the Chicago underworld, which provided the Outfit with an estimated US $100 million per year in revenue. This drew the attention of Capone’s rivals, particularly his bitter rivalries with North Side gangsters such as Dion O’Banion, Bugs Moran and lieutenant Earl Weiss. Attempts to assassinate Capone were on regular basses. He was shot in the restaurant, and he had his car riddled with bullets more than once. It was hard to get him, since everything was in his control.

In 1929, Prohibition Bureau agent Eliot Ness began a successful investigation of Capone and his business. Shutting down many breweries and speakeasies Capone owned, Ness brought down his empire slowly. As much as all known about thing he was doing it was hard to connect him with it since everybody was on his payroll. Even after shooting and one of the biggest crimes of that era, the famous St. Valentine’s day, where he shot several people on the street, that bloodiest crime ever, they couldn’t convict him for that. At the end Capone was indicted for income tax invasion and various violations of the Volstead Act. All those crimes and he got arrested for cheating on taxes. He got a sentence of 11 years and moved to Alcatraz. There his condition went bad, since he caught syphilis, probably while interweaving prostitutes for his brothels, and at that time that was not a disease you can cure (there were no antibiotics). He had lost weight, and his physical and mental health had declined. After serving the sentence he went back home where he had an apoplectic stroke. He regained consciousness and started to improve but contracted pneumonia on January 24. This caused him to suffer a cardiac arrest the next day Capone died after the arrest.

Capone was then buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, in Chicago’s far South Side between the graves of his father, Gabriele, and brother, Frank. However, in March 1950, the remains of all three family members were moved to Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, west of Chicago.