Born: January 17, 1899, Brooklyn, New York
Died: January 25, 1947, Palm Island, Florida
Nicknames: Scarface, Snorky, the Big Guy, Big Al
Associations: Johnny Torrio, Jim Colosimo, Lucky Luciano, the Outfit, Bugs Moran
Alphonse Capone may be the most celebrated, or infamous, mobster in American history. His story has been told in dozens of fictionalized and true-to-life movies, television shows, books and other media. It’s an impressive collection for a man whose success and indeed whose life were relatively brief.
Growing up in New York City, Capone was active in the Five Points gang, a criminal enterprise of mostly younger Italian-Americans in Manhattan that also graduated such well-known mobsters as Charlie “Lucky” Luciano and Johnny Torrio. It was in New York that Capone suffered a facial wound in a fight at a brothel, earning him the nickname “Scarface.”
Torrio moved to Chicago in 1909 to work for syndicate boss “Big Jim” Colosimo, and in 1920 Torrio called upon Capone to join their growing enterprise in the Windy City. Colosimo operated hundreds of brothels and gambling rackets, but he reportedly refused to go into bootlegging, which, with the enactment of Prohibition in 1920, was a huge growth opportunity for organized crime groups.
Colosimo was shot to death the same year Capone came to Chicago. Although nobody was ever arrested for Colosimo’s murder, many believe Torrio ordered the hit, and that Capone was an accomplice in the killing.
Torrio inherited Colosimo’s organization and quickly capitalized on the illegal alcohol industry. His leadership was relatively short. In 1925, Torrio was shot and injured by a rival gang, and then he was sentenced to nine months in prison for operating an illegal distillery.
Torrio resigned as leader of the criminal organization that became known as the Outfit and, for three years, moved back to Italy. (He later returned to the United States and became something of an elder statement among mobsters, helping to found the national Commission of the American Mafia in 1934.) With Torrio’s resignation, Capone took control of the Outfit.
From 1925 through 1929, Capone was the most-visible mobster in America. Capone worked with local media and friendly politicians to cultivate an image of a businessman concerned with the welfare of his fellow Chicagoans. But Capone’s tenure was also a period of rising rivalries with other Chicago gangsters, conflicts that frequently turned violent.
The escalating Mob violence in Chicago culminated with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre on February 14, 1929. Seven members or associates of the Bugs Moran gang – rivals of Capone — were lined up against the wall of a garage by men posing as police and machine-gunned to death.
The brutality of the murders made headlines throughout the country. Although Capone was at his vacation house near Miami at the time of the massacre and never arrested for the crime, he was widely suspected of ordering the massacre. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre happened just a month before Capone was arrested by federal agents for contempt of court for his failure to answer a federal subpoena, and he would ultimately be sentenced to six months on that charge.
But before he served his time on the contempt charge, Capone and his bodyguard were arrested in Philadelphia for carrying concealed weapons. Capone was sentenced to one year in Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary. He served nine months, earning time off for good behavior, and was released in March 1930.
Capone’s troubles were just beginning. The U.S. Treasury’s Special Intelligence Unit had started compiling a tax evasion case against him. In contrast to the standard movie plot of tommy gun-firing G-Men bringing down the Mob, accountants and prosecutors assembled the most effective cases against people like Capone.
They did not have to prove Capone was orchestrating gambling, protection, prostitution and bootlegging rackets, simply that he wasn’t paying taxes on his income from those rackets. And it was clear that Capone had to have substantial income to support such a lavish lifestyle.
On October 18, 1931, Capone was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. He served his time in the Cook County Jail and the Atlanta and Alcatraz federal prisons. The prison time was severe – a longer term than most tax evasion cases yielded — but that wasn’t Capone’s biggest problem.
Capone was infected with syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease, which in advanced cases was then incurable. By the time he left Alcatraz in 1939, the disease had profoundly affected his mental and physical health. Doctors reported that Capone had, in 1939, the cognitive processes of a 12-year-old child. He essentially retired with his family to his Florida mansion, where he died in 1947 at age 48.
Capone essentially retired from the Mob after his imprisonment in 1931, but the Outfit he had built up through bootlegging and other rackets went on without him under the leadership of Capone disciples such as Frank Nitti, Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana.
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Al Capone was born in 1899 in Brooklyn, New York. After leaving school in sixth grade, he spent his time as a gang member in two gangs: the Brooklyn Rippers and the Forty Thieves Juniors. After working as a bouncer, he ended up working for a man named Johnny Torrio. When Torrio invited Capone to join him in Chicago in 1920, Capone accepted. Together, the two started working for Big Jim Colosimo’s gang, taking advantage of Prohibition by distributing illegal liquor.
Colosimo was assassinated, leaving the high-ranking Torrio in charge. However, this arrangement did not last long. In 1925, Torrio was the victim of another assassination attempt. Weakened by this, Torrio asked Capone to become the new boss. Capone, charismatic as he was, was liked among the men, who called him “The Big Fellow.”
With Capone’s help, they managed to expand their industry so far that Capone even ventured into legitimate investments, with a dye factory. He built a terrifying reputation for himself, and slowly but steadily, he and his gang eliminated their rivals.
On February 14, 1929, Al Capone’s gang was part of what is now known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which resulted in the deaths of seven men working for Capone’s rival, Bugs Moran.
On October 17, 1931, Capone received a sentence of 11 years for tax evasion. His sentence began in Atlanta, where he managed to manipulate those in power with a stash of cash. This behavior earned him a trip to Alcatraz, where he served more than four years. In 1939, he was released, and in 1947, he died from syphilis.
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Here, as the sixth season of the BBC gangster drama Peaky Blinders continues, in which Al Capone is expected to feature, we explore the life and legacy of the 1920s mob boss…
Al Capone biography: key facts about the American gangster
Name: Alphonse ‘Al’ CaponeBorn: 17 January 1899, in Brooklyn, New York
Died: 25 January 1947, on Palm Island, Miami Beach, Florida (aged 48)
Famous for: Being one of the most infamous gangsters in American history. Capone ran a Prohibition-era multi-million-dollar Chicago operation in gambling, bootlegging and prostitution from 1925 to 1931. He has been immortalised in numerous films and books, and inspired countless more, such as the 1983 film Scarface starring Al Pacino
Family: The fourth of nine children born to Italian immigrants Gabriele and Teresina Capone. Al Capone had six brothers and two sisters. Their mother worked as a seamstress and their father as a barber
Spouse: Mae Capone (née Coughlin), married 1918–47
Children: 1 – Albert Francis Capone, known as Sonny (born 4 December 1918; died 8 July 2004)
Who was Al Capone?
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in January 1899 to Italian immigrant parents, Al Capone (whose real name was Alphonse) went on to become one of America’s biggest mobsters. He established himself as the head of a criminal empire at the age of 26 and was responsible for many brutal acts of violence, including most famously the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, in which he ordered the assassination of seven rival gangsters.
The son of a barber and a seamstress, there was nothing in Alphonse Capone’s childhood that suggested he would fall into a life of crime. However, having started out as a diligent student, he began to fall behind with his schoolwork and left school at the age of 14 after assaulting his teacher.
Capone belonged to two New York street gangs as a boy and worked a number of odd jobs, including as a bowling alley pinboy and candy store clerk. As a member of a gang known as the James Street Boys, Capone struck up a friendship with its leader, Johnny Torrio, who would become his lifelong mentor.
Capone joined the Five Points Gang in Manhattan at the age of 16. He took up work as a bouncer and bartender at the Harvard Inn, a cheap bar and brothel off New York’s Coney Island boardwalk, that was owned by the mobster Frankie Yale. Yale, who was one of Brooklyn’s biggest bootleggers during the Prohibition era, took Capone under his wing.
Listen | Timothy Hickman answers listener questions about the ban on booze in 1920s America, from speakeasies and moonshine to Al Capone’s shady dealings, on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:
How did Al Capone get the nickname ‘Scarface’?
In 1917, while working at the Harvard Inn, Al Capone had his left cheek slashed by a man named Frank Galluccio, whose sister, Lena, Capone had reportedly insulted with a crude comment. Galluccio slashed Capone’s cheek three times using a penknife, leaving a trio of deep cuts which would require 30 stitches. Intensely self-conscious about his scars, Capone tried to hide them in photographs and often told people he sustained them while fighting with the “lost battalion” in France during the First World War (although in reality he never fought in combat).
Capone was dubbed ‘Scarface’ by the press when he rose to fame, but he despised the nickname. In 1932, the actor Paul Muni played a gangster loosely based on Capone in the film Scarface: The Shame of a Nation. The film was considered so amoral when it was released that it was banned in several parts of the United States. Capone reputedly obtained a copy of the film for private screenings.
How did Capone become a Chicago mob boss?
In 1918, at the age of 19, Al Capone married Mae Coughlin, who had recently given birth to their son, Albert Francis. Wanting to do right by his family and make an honest living, Capone moved them to Baltimore, Maryland, where he began working as a bookkeeper for a construction company. But an offer from his childhood mentor Johnny Torrio to join him as a member of the Colosimo mob in Chicago, which Torrio had recently taken charge of, proved impossible to resist, and in 1920 Capone joined the operation. He relocated his wife and son, along with his mother and several of his siblings, to the city shortly afterwards.
The Colosimo mob was a Prohibition-era gang that made its money in the illegal brewing, distilling and distribution of beer and liquor. The 18th Amendment to the constitution prohibiting the manufacture, sale or transportation of alcohol had been ratified in 1919 and enforced from January 1920.
- Read more about the impact of Prohibition
Torrio became head of the gang following the brutal murder of its founder, Big Jim Colosimo, in May 1920. Colosimo was gunned down in his restaurant on 11 May 1920 in an attack rumoured to have been orchestrated by Torrio himself.
In 1925, Torrio decided to flee the country and return to Italy following an attempt on his life. Just five years after joining the Colosimo mob, the 26-year-old Al Capone took charge of the operation. He quickly set to work expanding the Chicago outfit and building upon his fearsome reputation – newspapers at the time estimated his operations generated $100m in revenue annually, primarily from bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, and racketeering. Soon, Capone’s gang dominated the city.
What was the Valentine’s Day Massacre?
On 14 February 1929, seven members of the rival George “Bugs” Moran mob were machine-gunned to death while lined up against a garage wall in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighbourhood. At least two of the gunmen were posing as police officers. The massacre was ascribed to Capone’s mob, although he himself was in Florida at the time.
The incident shocked and appalled the nation, but the case remained unsolved, and Capone was never charged.
- Quiz | Prohibition: how much do you know about the US ban on booze?
What crimes did Al Capone commit? How did he end up in prison?
Somewhat surprisingly, the 1929 Valentine’s Day Massacre killings were not a federal offence at the time and so were not within the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s remit.
In fact, Al Capone was never convicted of murder. The FBI’s official interest in him began with a much more innocuous offence: just weeks after the Valentine’s Day Massacre, on 27 February 1929, Capone was subpoenaed at his winter home near Miami, Florida, to appear as a witness before a federal grand jury in Chicago on 12 March for a case involving a violation of prohibition laws. The day before he was due to appear before the jury, on 11 March, Capone’s lawyers filed for postponement of his appearance on the basis that he was bedridden with bronchial pneumonia in Miami.
His appearance date was re-set for 20 March, but it soon transpired that Capone had been lying about his supposed illness. On request of the US Attorney’s Office, FBI agents obtained statements that showed Capone had attended racetracks in Miami, made a plane trip to Bimini in the Bahamas, and even enjoyed a cruise to Nassau.
Capone appeared before the federal grand jury in Chicago as planned on 20 March 1929 and completed his testimony on 27 March. But as he left the courtroom, he was arrested by FBI agents for contempt of court – an offence which carried one year in prison. “He was released on bond, but from there on, it was downhill for the notorious gangster,” said the FBI in a 2005 article on Al Capone’s demise.
Capone was convicted of multiple crimes from 1929 onwards – first, in May 1929, he was arrested along with his bodyguard in Philadelphia by local police for carrying concealed weapons and served nine months in jail. Then, in February 1931, he was found guilty in federal court on the aforementioned contempt of court charge and was sentenced to six months in Cook County Jail in Chicago.
But the nail in Capone’s coffin came on 18 October 1931, when he was convicted after a trial of tax evasion. On 24 October, Capone was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. He was held in Cook County while awaiting the results of his appeals, but after they were denied he was sent to the US Penitentiary in Atlanta, serving his sentence there and at the recently opened federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.
Capone was also fined $50,000 and charged $7,692 for court costs, in addition to $215,000 plus interest due on back taxes. The six-month contempt of court sentence was to be served concurrently.
When was Al Capone released from prison?
Al Capone’s health deteriorated significantly while he was in jail – in 1938 he was diagnosed with neurosyphilis, an infection of the central nervous system caused by the sexually transmitted infection syphilis, which was not yet easily treatable. He spent the remainder of his sentence in Alcatraz’s hospital wing, with neurosyphilis eroding his mental faculties to the extent that he became certifiably insane. His wife’s appeal for parole was granted in 1939, on the grounds of good behaviour and on account of his medical condition.
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Al Capone was released from jail on 16 November 1939, having served seven years, six months, and 15 days. “Immediately on release he entered a Baltimore hospital for brain treatment and then went on to his Florida home, an estate on Palm Island in Biscayne Bay near Miami, which he had purchased in 1928,” according to the FBI.
In 1942, Al Capone became one of the first Americans to receive the antibiotic penicillin as treatment for syphilis. But although it helped to slow the progression of the disease, it was too late to save him, as the damage to his brain was irreversible.
When did Al Capone die?
On 21 January, at his Florida estate, Capone suffered a stroke and then contracted pneumonia. He died on 25 January 1947 after suffering a further cardiac arrest. His physician and a Baltimore psychiatrist both concluded that Capone by the time of his death, the former gangster had the mentality of a 12-year-old child.