American History Hit - The Rise & Fall of Al Capone

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Al Capone is one of the most notorious gangsters in US history. His story of rags to riches, set against the backdrop of the prohibition era, is worthy of the many movies that it has inspired.Violent mobster, genius businessman or semi-professional baseball player, who was the real Al Capone? To find out, Don speaks to Claire White, Director of Education at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas.Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. North Clark Street in Chicago is an average thoroughfare of businesses and homes. Quiet on this Thursday morning in early 1929.

It is February 14th, St. Valentine's Day. A group of men convenes inside the usually empty garage at 2122 North Clark. Well-dressed fellows in suits, ties, polished leather shoes. One of them wears a carnation in his lapel. At 10.30 a.m., a black Cadillac sedan arrives out of the same. Outside the garage, its tire tracks embedding in the light snow. Under gray skies, four passengers, two of whom wear police uniforms, climb out of the car carrying weapons and enter.

Witnesses later describe hearing gunshots and a dog howling. The four men left the garage, apparently in a hurry. Their Cadillac nearly collided with a trolley car and sped south out of view. It was someone from the neighborhood who poked inside and decided. discovered the horrific sight. Under the light of a single bulb suspended from the ceiling, seven men lie sprawled at the foot of the wall they've been lined up against. It is a scene of bloody mayhem, the worst of the gang violence that has recently played Chicago. It will also mark the beginning of the end of kingly power for the man most believe ordered the hit.

Al Capone. I'm so happy you're listening to this next episode of American History Hit. I'm your host, Don Wilbin, nice to be with you. Alphonse Gabriel Capone was, in 1890, the newborn baby of law-abiding Italian immigrant Brooklynites, Gabriella and Theresa Capone, who had immigrated from a small village outside of Naples in southern Italy. Alphonse was a third of nine children and their first born in the United States. While he lived, he would become one of the most famous and notorious American citizens ever. We're still talking about him after he's been dead. for more than 75 years. Al Capone, Scarface.

And today's conversation about this icon of criminality is with Claire White, director of education at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. Greetings, Claire, nice to be with you. Hi, Don. Thank you so much for having me. I'm going to start this interview by plugging your museum, which I love. The Mob Museum in Las Vegas is one of the most surprising places you'll ever visit. We've shot several television shows in this landmark building where it's located.

I was there before its renovation. and then after the museum opened. And it's really cool. I mean, very unexpected in the midst of all that Vegas glitz and glamour. But the structure itself has a legacy, right? Yes. The Mob Museum is located in the original federal courthouse and post office for downtown Las Vegas. The building opened in 1933.

And it served as, you know, the community's primary federal building until the 60s. And now it is home to the story of the history of organized crime and law. enforcement in our country. Wasn't it the location of the Keefeffer hearings? It was. Yeah. So our federal courthouse was one of the courthouses around the country that housed the Keefebvre committee, which was used to investigate the impact of organized crime on interstate commerce in the 1950s. Yeah, which comes after our subject today, but nonetheless, really central to the story of law enforcement fighting organized crime in America. It's right there. And I'm not. That's like the first stop on your Vegas trip because it's really that fascinating and that sophisticated a museum.

I was really, really amazed by it. Okay, Al Capone, let's take him from the beginning to the end, which is a shorter journey than you think. Capone was born 1899 in America. This is a son of Italian immigrants growing up on the streets of Brooklyn. Tell me about his childhood. So Al Capone's an interesting story because his father is a business owner. His father's a barber, and, you know, these are working class people. I want to be very clear.

These are not well-off people. He is in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century. This is a hard scrabble existence. But for him compared to many of his neighbors, he does have a stable home. Both of his parents are still alive because he has older brothers. They are already contributing to the family, even when he's still in school. And, you know, by the time his father has been. established in the United States for 10 or so years, he has his own barbershop. He has his own

employees. So this is not the immigrant story that some mobsters faced. He's a barber and his mother's seamsters. Quit school, though, after sixth grade, gets mixed up in a bad crowd. This is the story of so many, unfortunately, back then, but certainly within his own family. Was he, did he come up with this idea himself or how did this even happen? Well, Capone was definitely influenced by his older brothers. And I think he was also influenced by culture at large. The reality was that the United States at the turn of the century, they were starting to establish compulsory education laws, but no one really cared about whether the Italian

immigrant children were in school or not. So there's this dichotomy that technically he's true and technically he is dropping out of school, but none of the police care. No one's looking. There's no truant officers. And so his brothers also don't make it through their full education. And he's struggling through his sixth grade year. And not for lack of intelligence. Al Capone, for best we can tell, was actually quite intelligent, but struggled culturally is, you know, even though he's American born and very much considers himself and American, he is in an Italian-speaking home. So there's a lot of challenges there.

And his brothers start running with the wrong crowd. And Al Capone, like any little brother, you know, you got two routes. Either you're going to do the opposite or you're going to do exactly what big bro does. And that's the path that he went down. You know, I just recently recorded an episode about the Irish in America and how the struggles are with every immigrant class to America that they have this incredible. block, you know, this obstacle of acceptance. And you can imagine how young kids react to that, you know, like if you're not going to be nice to me, I won't be nice to you, breaking it down very simply. But exactly. He ends up in a gang called the James Street Boys. And then very soon

afterwards joins the Five Points Gang in Manhattan vis-a-vis a guy named Johnny Torio. I've seen this name of several different times. Who was Torio? He must have been like a first-generation Italian crook in America, right? Yeah. So Johnny Torio is. a really early turn of the century Italian American mobster. And he is sort of the precursor to what becomes the five families, to what becomes the Chicago outfit. He's sort of seen the writing on the wall that these guys need to be a little more corporate minded. They need to be a little more business minded. And Johnny Torrio is one of Al Capone's tours really in crime and, frankly, I think in life. And Torio winds up moving to Chicago, and that's how Al Capone comes to live in Chicago as well.

Before we go there, a very fundamental biographical detail. He is working as a bouncer down there in Coney Island at a place called the Harvard Inn, which is where he gets his name. Describe that incident. So his infamous facial scar, what gives him the moniker of Scarface, happens in a bar fight at the Harvard Inn on Coney Island. And the reality is it's always sad because I think when you're in mob history, you have to dismantle a lot of myths. We don't know exactly what happened. There are stories that he disrespected a woman and her boyfriend or her brother hit him with a beer bottle. There's a lot of different stories as far as how the bar fight happened, but he is slashed across the face with a broken glass and has that scar to tell the tale the rest of his life.

Yeah, which he didn't like at all. He resented the nickname, didn't he? Yes, very much so. And, you know, that's frankly the reality with a lot of these mob guys, you know, and something we know that, you know, for instance, Al Capone's known as Scarface. Benjamin Siegel is known as Bugsy, but I think it is also important to acknowledge, even though these guys are criminals and we shouldn't be glamorizing them, that they're also people, And these guys did not like these names. These are not particularly names you're calling someone to their face. Yeah, I was Donnie Rockets for the longest time, but I finally outlived that name.

So he makes his way to Chicago vis-a-vis Johnny Torio. That was interesting because there's a bit of a political dynamic there. Johnny Torio is being brought out. This is also to do with the expansion of the West, really. I mean, Chicago is becoming a bigger and bigger metropolis. And so crime is following in its wake. Definitely. You know, the story of organized crime is truly an American history.

story. And it's not something that you hear a lot about or read a lot about in traditional textbooks, but organized crime is moving west. It's filling in the frontier. It's operating, frankly, in a lot of these vice industries that thrive in the frontier. And for a lot of these mobsters in New York, yeah, New York's a big city, so there's a huge market. But the ability to move out into Chicago and Kansas City in L.A. is, frankly, a larger opportunity for a lot of them. We associate the mob in that time frame with prohibition and alcohol. What was really their stock and trade before all that comes along? So before the 1920s, organized crime is very much involved in gambling and casinos, illegal gambling, lotteries around most of the major cities. And it's

important to keep in mind this isn't just Italian-American. So a lot of the numbers rackets, a lot of the casinos are run still by Irish mobsters, by Jewish mobsters, by black mobsters. There's all of that. It runs the gamut. There's also a lot of prostitution. And that actually is one of the things that pushes Torrio out to Chicago. He becomes one of the top guys for Big Jim Colisemo, who's operating out of Chicago and runs the prostitution racket there. Two other details about Capone that people find surprising is that he was actually a very important. very talented baseball player. He spent a little bit of time as a semi-professional baseball player and a very stable family man, right? The baseball story is complicated because I do think that a little

bit of that is Al Capone exaggerating some of his talent. No. Exaggerating. But yes. I will say, though, on the flip side, as far as whether he was a staunch family man, he was very devoted to his wife and child, May and his son, Albert Francis, Sunny, they called him Sunny Capone. May became pregnant with Sunny before they were married. She was born from an Irish immigrant family. She was also American born. And her mother hated Capone. Just, I mean, frankly, I think she saw Al Capone for what he was.

She saw that, sure, he's a smart guy. Sure, he can be a charming guy. He could be a very funny guy. But he's also clearly not going down the wrong. right path. And so in fact, what I think is so fascinated about Capone's marriage, May was not allowed to marry him until she'd already given birth, which if you think about, this is, you know, 1918, if you think about 1918 Catholic families, the idea that the mother would say no wait until there's a viable child before getting married, this is progressive stuff. And it is tough to

talk about Al Capone's family life because we do know that he had affairs and things happened outside of his marriage. But ultimately, he and May were very committed to each other for his, frankly, relatively short life. And he loved Sonny. He wanted to do everything to keep Sunny out of the life and on a good path. So we're just prior to the 1920s, the rise of prohibition. How much did organized crimes see this opportunity coming in Al Capone with it? So prohibition is the best thing that ever happened to organize crime in the United States. But I do think that there were very mixed reactions. Some people just couldn't see the opportunity in front of them.

The thing about prohibition is it bans the manufacture sale and transport of alcohol, but it never bans drinking, which means that you just need someone willing to sell it to you illegally. And so a lot of mobsters really, do build their career on this, but some of the old guard, like Colisemo in Chicago, don't really have the stomach or the vision for this. So Torio and Capone, in Chicago at least, are sort of responsible for getting the mob involved in Prohibition. It's fascinating. It's just a sidebar. The difference between Prohibition and then the later the drug war of the 70s. That's exactly right. In Prohibition, you were going after the manufacturers and not the users, the other way around, with a lot of

the 70s drug wars, they went after the users, and that creates a whole different dynamic. That is exactly correct. And, you know, in fact, some of the precursors to the drug wars, some of the laws that are enacted in the 1930s, 40s, 50s regarding both narcotics and marijuana, they're directly responses to how poorly prohibition worked and how hard it was to enforce. The reality, though, is that going after the users really doesn't solve that problem. Like, that's not what the issue is. Yeah, it gives you a different kind of tool. Exactly.

So once Prohibition is installed nationally, we end up in what has become very famously, the mafia years, all those shoot-em-up days in Chicago and so forth. How much of that was sensationalized by the movies or was some of it really true? Unfortunately, some of that was true. of the things that are sensationalized in the movies is how easy it is to shoot a Tommy gun. You definitely can't do that one-handed outside of a moving vehicle. It's a very heavy submachine gun. But in terms of the amount of bloodshed that was happening on the streets, frankly, it was not exaggerated in movies. The Beer Wars were an incredibly violent time in Chicago and all the way from the top bosses

down to soldiers and sort of loosely affiliated bootleggers and moonshiner's ran a great risk of loss of life, particularly in Chicago where there really were a lot of these small gangs at first who wanted to fight for dominance. It wouldn't be until the late 1920s that Al Capone's Southside Gang and their primary rivals, the Northside Gang, were really able to corner the market. And it took a lot of bloodshed to get there. It was really a matter of territory. At some point, Torio, his original, his mentor, steps aside. He's caught in the gunfire himself. He gets shot. And he steps aside and retires. Boy, Johnny Torio emerges in this as a really smart guy. He's like, he's pretty sophisticated about this thing, isn't he? He pulls in Al Capone, who he knows can handle this stuff. By the age of 26, Capone is in charge of the gang. So this is a young guy that he's handing this off to. But that's how good he was at casting. He knew who would take. over for him. So he steps aside and Capone becomes in charge. At this point, it becomes a family affair, doesn't it? Yeah. Yes. So I think first of all, it's important to know that, you know,

Capone, he goes all in to Chicago. I mean, he literally moves his whole family. His father passes away in 1919. And so he at the age of 20 essentially becomes the head of his family. His older brothers, of course, are still there and still a part of the picture. But he moves his. his family out to Chicago. He is moving guys who he worked with in New York out to Chicago. And, yeah, he's all in. Tell me about Frank Nitty, really another sensationalized figure, especially from the Untouchables movie, but they knew each other in their childhood. Yes. And that's such a common story. I mean, not to pull focus from Nitty specifically, but all of these guys meet each other as young boys. And the one benefit to this, the one benefit of pulling crews that you've known since you were

eight or nine years old is the loyalty. It's really difficult, I think, to capture that same loyalty if you've only known someone for a few years. But if you're in your early 20s and this is someone you've known since you were eight, they have a really outsized impact on you. And the trust that you have for them is hard to replicate. His original name was Frank Nitto. I didn't realize that. And then he changes it to Nitty, right? You know, so many of them changed their names very slightly just so that it was either

less immediately Italian or easier for Americans to pronounce. So that doesn't surprise me. Yeah. Claire, tell me about the strictly business side of this. I mean, we see from the movies, all the murder, all the mayhem. But really, this doesn't grow, certainly throughout. the 20th century to the extent that it does without really smart minds at work. Capone was one of the first of that variety, right? Yes. So Al Capone takes over as the boss in 1926 and by 1927, his gang is

bringing in $105 million annually, about 60 million of which is from bootlegging alone. Just for context in the United States in the 1920s, the average American, depending on where you are in the country, making between about $2,000 and $5,000 annually. And Al Capone, this 20-something, on the other hand, is netting for himself individually over a million dollars. And to sort of step back from the money and talk about how they get there, they get there by being shrewd businessmen. I mean, they literally corner the market.

They have control over the production of alcohol, The breweries, they own breweries in Chicago and throughout Illinois and Indiana. They own distilleries. They have shares in these distilleries that are not supposed to be operating, but are still operating across the south and the lower Midwest. And they're also operating the trucking companies. They have shares in the bottling. They have shares in the cask making for transporting this alcohol. They also develop political connections.

One of the places where Capone sort of operates out of is the suburb of Cicero. And the reason that he sort of moves his operations from Southside Chicago into Cicero is because Cicero was the easiest suburb for him to buy. Those were the politicians who were willing to be sold to the highest bidder. And so he moves a lot of his business into Cicero. He is shrewd an honest. to literally set aside a budget for paying off law enforcement, paying off politicians. You know, some of this seems obvious.

But again, this is a 20-something-year-old guy who dropped out of the sixth grade. It's not, like, knowing how to diversify and scale up is not something he was taught in school. Sure. And for all the ruthlessness of it all, you can't really do that without building relationships and trust. You know, you have to have a lot of, there's a lot of humanity involved in this and you can't be a scary psychopath every moment of your life and get people to work with you like that. So that's the very revealing part of this. Just as you were talking, I took $1 million on my phone and converted it to modern time. One million dollars in 1925 is worth $17,623,000

today. That's an income, man. Yeah. I mean, that's amazing. He's one of the big, rich people in the country at this point. So everything's going very well for Capone Industries around about 1929, and things start to change. There is a very, very famous incident that is very well captured in the museum called the St. Valentine's Massacre. Everybody knows about it, but nobody really understands it. So let's talk about this in some detail. What were the stakes at hand, and why did this occur? So between about 1925 and 1929, it is a constant transfer. of power as leaders in the gangs across Chicago are picked off one by one. And so in late 1928, early 1929, the two main guys are now Al Capone of the South Side Gang and his primary rival,

George Bugs Moran of the North Side Gang. And there's definitely bad blood between them individually, but more than anything, there's bad blood between their organizations. Moran is the fourth or fifth leader of the Northside gang over the last four years. And everyone before him has been murdered. He doesn't have a lot of job security. And frankly, Al Capone's not doing really that much better. And there is also bad blood from a business sense. So at one point, the Northside and the Southside gang had sort of called a loose truce. They actually both own shares in a brewery. This goes all the way back to when Torio was still in charge and he and his rival, Dino Banyan, had worked together. There's a double crossing there. So Al Capone in the back of his mind is

certain that if he doesn't take out Moran, that something is going to happen to him, whether it's death or whether it's more dirty business dealings, he doesn't trust the Northside gang. So this is a preemptive measure he's going to take? Yes. So he starts planning the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Of course, at that time, he doesn't know that it's going to happen on Valentine's Day, but he starts planning a hit on Moran. And the big thing that he knows is that everyone in Chicago who works in this world is recognizable. And he knows that if he's going to carry out this hit, that he's got to pull some hitmen from somewhere else. And so he actually does. He gets some guys who are better known in St. Louis, who sort of operate around the Midwest and work as contract killers.

And he gets them involved. And the opportunity presents itself on February 14th, 1929. That morning, the Northside Gang is set to meet in one of their garages on the North Side. This is one of the places they ran their bootlegging operations. And so that morning, there are seven members of the North Side Gang, technically six members and a hangar-off. who are there in the garage, they're still waiting for Moran. And while they're waiting for Moran, their boss to arrive, they instead hear a knock on the door. And from here, I'll be honest, we don't know exactly what happened. There's no eyewitnesses of what happened in the garage. But best we know, the members of the Northside gang answer the door, find two men dressed as police officers, let them in.

and instead of these actually being police officers, they wind up being the hitmen. The seven members of the gang who are in the garage are lined up against a brick wall, a brick wall that we now have on display at the mob museum. And they are gunned down execution style using two Tommy guns and a shotgun. And there are no survivors.

There is one man who lives for a few hours is taken to the hospital, but there are no survivors of the massacre. But Moran does survive. He never makes it to that garage. He somehow, whether it's that he sees the car out front or whatever it is, he doesn't make it to the meeting, he survives the attack, but the seven members of the Northside gang that were there do not. All this while, Capone is not in the state, conveniently.

He is down there in Florida. Is it certain that he actually did plan this? Was that proven later? So the short answer is it's never been proven. This is technically an unsolved crime. And Al Capone went to his grave saying that he was not involved. In fact, there's some great newspaper coverage. And Al Capone, we didn't talk about this earlier when we were talking about what a good businessman he was.

But he was also a master of PR. I mean, he could have owned a PR firm for himself. So he would actually call his own press conferences. And when the press would come, he'd be fully prepared, fully off book, ready to tell whatever story suited him. And in the case of the massacre, you know, he even said, like, what doesn't sound like something I would do? Southsiders don't do that. But Moran might do that. That sounds like something crazy old bugs Moran might do, implying that, you know, maybe it was some infighting within their group.

But here's why the Mob Museum is very confident that this was Al Capone who planned this. First of all, the Southside gang is who benefits the most, and Al Capone's in charge of the Southside gang. So that's a pretty clear motive. The hitmen that were used, and there is pretty clear evidence, even though no one was convicted of the crime, there is pretty clear evidence based on firearms, examination and bullet analysis of who was there. Later on, other stories and other testimony from individuals is able to sort of place some of these guys at the scene of the crime. And these were men who Capone worked with. Like these were not, even though they weren't Chicago guys, they were people who Capone

had a preexisting relationship with. And then, you know, the other reason that we feel quite confident that Capone is at least the one who planned it and called for it, even if he had no role in orchestrating it, is frankly, because he is in Florida. Look, this guy's got the perfect alibi. And not only does he have the perfect alibi, but over the next few months, there's all these machinations that are almost like if you're looking for it, they're obvious that they're happening because of the massacre. Frank Costello and Charles Lucky Luciano, New York mobsters,

come down to Florida about a month later and have a private meeting with Capone and his home. And then by April and May, these mobsters from across the country are meeting in Atlantic City. They're meeting in New York. They're talking about sort of how they're going to deal with continued gang violence across the United States. These things aren't happening before the massacre, but they're happening after the massacre and Al Capone's at the center of them. So, you know, at least for the Mob Museum, that's pretty clear evidence that he's the mastermind behind this. I have to ask you, how did you guys get the St. Valentine's Day wall? How did that land you and what's the providence of it? So it's a fascinating story to sort of go back as far as possible in the 1960.

the owner of the garage where the St. Valentine's Day Massacre occurred, decided to tear down the garage. They really struggled to rent it out. You know, no one wanted to rent out a garage where seven men were murdered for good reason. And so as they are dismantling this garage, they decide to auction off the bricks as well as a few other things that were sort of from the 1920s very much there while. the garage was operating under the Northside gangs management. And the man who purchases the bricks where the massacre occurred is a man named George Pady. He's a Vancouver, Canada businessman. He's a Canadian businessman. He owns nightclubs.

And his plan is to create this traveling mobster gangster exhibit. Idea was little before its time. There just wasn't the same interest in traveling exhibits related to the mob in the 1860s. But he has this idea. When he can't really get the exhibit off the ground, he instead puts the bricks. He letters and numbers them so that he's able to sort of put them back together in the correct formation wherever he goes.

He actually puts them in the men's restroom of his nightclub of one of his nightclubs in Vancouver. And it stays there for a long time. It stays in his possession. And then he passes away and it transfers into the hands of his niece who just so happens to live in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson here in southern Nevada. And around 2007, 2008 is when people in Las Vegas start hearing about the idea to build the mob museum. The museum wouldn't open until 2012, but it was initially spearheaded by our mayor at the time, former mayor, Oscar Goodman.

And he had this idea for a museum dedicated to organized crime in the city. and it's in the news and people are talking about it. It's very polarizing here in Las Vegas at the time. And this man's niece hears about it on the local news and calls up and says, I have the bricks where the St. Valentine's Day massacre occurred in Chicago. Do you want them? And I mean, yes, it's so morbid. A red-letter day for the mob museum.

Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. We still consider that, you know, there are premier artifacts. than the building itself, it is probably the single most exciting historical artifact that we have on display. Well, it's an extraordinary museum. I really do encourage people to see it. It raises your eyebrows as to how sophisticated the history really is. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. It's important to understand this event, the St. Valentine's Day massacre, not only for the sensational aspect of it, but also for the fact that it really divides Capone's career, doesn't it? The rise of Capone all the way through the 20s peaks at 1929.

And then ironically, the St. Valentine's Day massacre, while a success, I suppose, in some regards, triggers, no pun intended, the problems that follow, right? It's the beginning of his legal troubles as a result of this massacre. How so? That's exactly correct. The massacre, you know, frankly, I do think that the massacre was a miscalculation on Capone's part. I think that the Southside gang was under the impression that Chicago had put. up with so much violence that they were almost immune to it. And that's simply not the case.

In March of 1929, so less than a month after the massacre, a group of citizens in Chicago travel to meet the new president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, and essentially say, we need federal assistance in Chicago to fight rampant crime, to fight the beer wars, to fight bootleggers, to fight a dramatic increase in homicides within not just the city of Chicago, but the state of Illinois. And this is in a lot of ways Capone's undoing. President Hoover, he goes to his attorney general, William Mitchell, and says, we got to get Compone. He turns to the IRS.

He turns to the Prohibition Bureau, the Untouchables. He turns to the FBI. And all of these federal organizations now have an eye on Capone. I also think it is important to know that, you know, the larger story of 1920, in the United States. When the massacre happens, we haven't hit the Great Depression yet, but we are very close. And prohibition is unraveling rapidly as we move into the Great Depression. And so people were sort of willing to turn a blind eye to a little bit of violence and a little bit of lawbreaking if it meant that that was the only way they could get whiskey and wine.

but as it looks like we're about to repeal the amendment, people are, they do not have the stomach for this anymore. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I think is untold is the rise of media to this point, visual media, in capturing this part of the underbelly of America. I mean, I come along in the 60s, so, but you visited one of those news agency magazine stamps and they have all these detective magazines and all this stuff

and these really horrendous photographs, which were a pornographic as far as showing things you never were supposed to see as a young person. And that becomes a much more common thing in America through the 30s and into the 40s, as the society just loosens up and gets more used to this. And people start becoming aware of how horrendous these acts of violence really were. And you can't really build a city based on that. You can't attract new tenants and so forth. So people start getting much more aware of this along with the rise of federal forces,

You know, either law enforcement or economic forces, which comes along with the Depression. It's all part of the same thing. And Capone is this figure in the middle of it all trying to carry on with business, but suddenly the law has a lot more power. He is in Philadelphia, May 17, 1929, and arrested for carrying concealed deadly weapons. Within 16 hours, they are sentenced to a term of one year each. That's a remarkable fact. He went through the entire trial process in one day and ends up going to jail in Philadelphia. You can go to a cell. I remember doing this for TV.

There is a cell at the Eastern State Penitentiary very much dressed up as Al Capone would have had it. It's a really remarkable thing to see. So this is the beginning of a whole bunch of legal entanglements. Yeah. So Al Capone, like you said, he does wind up serving time at Eastern State Penn in Philadelphia. And he is released after nine months for good behavior. He was sentenced to a year. And many people do think of this as sort of his.

hiding out. Cooling off. If he's in jail, he can't get picked up for anything else. You know, a relatively safe place for him to be at the time. And, I mean, this isn't just in hindsight that historians think this. There's literally a Time magazine, the month that he gets out of jail, that puts him on the cover. He's Al Capone crime boss on the cover of Time magazine. And he is accused by Time Magazine of hiding out.

in jail, hiding out in Philadelphia where no one can get to him. Oh, wow. He does wind up going back to Chicago and winds up serving time in Cook County as well. This really is the unraveling. I mean, it sounds wild, but he turns 30 and it's just all downhill from there. How much of that was a result of his impending health crisis, which he has been carrying along him for a while? You know, it is hard for us to determine. And I know historians have different levels of certainty about this, but I feel unsure personally about how much he knew that his mental faculties were declining and how much, you know, his undiagnosed latent syphilis was going to affect him. He certainly knew that he had it. We know that he knew that he had it. And there are a lot of discussions about how much. how even in the late 1920s, 1928, 1929, he's starting to have some personality shifts being a

little more aggressive, which is often a sign of dementia, whether from syphilis or otherwise. But I will say, and this is a very personal thing, but anyone who's lived with a loved one who has dementia, it's so easy to miss those early signs. It's so easy to just say, oh, well, he's angrier and he flies off the handle more because he's been in jail or because he's so stressed out because he's running a multi-million dollar illegal operation. It's really hard to say. Worried about getting shot. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, is he turning into a maniac because of the stress that he's under or is he turning into a maniac because of untreated syphilitic dementia? We don't know. So I'm counting two

arrests so far, concealed weapons, perhaps on purpose, who knows? Then 31, he's on contemplative of court six months in Cook County. The big story is how the coming FBI finally figures out how to start prosecuting these guys through tax evasion. It's a big long subject. I don't want to get in weeds here, but this is how they finally capture, or at least nail Al Capone to a multi-year sentence. Was it really, as we saw in the movies, obviously that's oversimplified, but it was kind of an accountant's figuring it out? Yes. So I'll try not to get too much in the weeds, but I do want to backtrack a little But in 1927, the Supreme Court of the United States establishes that bootleggers, along with any other criminals, have to file taxes even on illegally gained income. And so you are essentially in a sort of double jeopardy situation.

Either you file your illegally gained income and then the IRS knows you're a criminal or you fail to disclose your illegally gained. income and you're committing tax evasion and you are still a criminal. And so as we get into the late 1920s, as we get into 1929 and President Hoover is saying let's focus specifically on Capone. He's got a couple different routes. The FBI, frankly, even though there are, you know, investigations into organized crime, it's just not Jay Edgar Hoover's focus. And the Prohibition Bureau has literally thousands upon thousands of charges against Capone that they could take to court. But best case scenario, he's in prison for like three years max, even though he's got 6,000 or so potential prohibition violations.

So instead, they really task the IRS with focusing on his financial situation. And the IRS does a couple of pretty interesting things. So first of all, they do have this team of accountants that are combing through every single record of Capone's that they can get a hold of to try to figure out how much money he has, as well as how he received that money and where that money is coming from. While they're doing that, they also put undercover agents in Capone's outfit. So specifically, an IRS investigative agent named Mike Malone. goes undercover, pretends that he's this Italian-American member of the outfit. And there's actually this incredible story that when Capone does later go to court for tax evasion, he sees Mike in an elevator and in far more colorful language is like,

I should have known, I should have known you weren't an Italian guy, I should have known you were just an Irish interloper. Right. That's the Sean Connery role, right? In the Untouchables? Yeah. It is. Yeah. I remember those words they use. He at first pleads guilty on a plea deal, thinking he's going to get a slap on the wrist, two and a half your sentence. But somehow this always confused me, the presiding judge, Wilkerson, I believe, changes it up, right?

How does he do that? So Al Capone is frankly a little misinformed. He is told that his attorneys have struck a deal with the lead prosecutor of the U.S. attorney. office. And his attorneys, for what it's worth, Al Fink and Michael Ahern, they believe this to be true. They believe in good faith that they have made a deal with the lead prosecutor. But the way that it goes with federal tax court is that a presiding judge is under no duty to accept a tentative agreement. Like, until they've gotten the judge's permission, they're not allowed to make these sort of deals. And, you know, I think to that point, as far as the misunderstanding of Capone's attorneys as well as Capone himself, he's used to criminal proceedings.

And certainly this is still criminal in nature, but he's not used to sort of the machinations of tax court and how different those things are treated than other offenses in the United States. So probably if Capone had just kept his mouth shut, the judge might have gone along with this. But Capone's attorneys say that they've cut this deal with the lead prosecutor, and Capone immediately does a press conference at the courthouse bragging about this to the press, and the judge is like, not in my courtroom. That's not happening. Let this be a lesson to all of us not to proclaim our innocence on the courts of the step before you've proven it. October 18, 1931, Capone is convicted after a trial, and on November 24th, sentenced to, 11 years in federal prison. Boy did that backfire. Find $50,000 charged $7,000 for court costs. In addition to $215,000 plus interest to him back taxes. Boy, he gets whacked. November 16, 1939, that's the day. He goes away, serves seven years in Alcatraz, plus six months and 15 days. And this is where he really deteriorates due to the health conditions from whatever source it was.

And the big days of Al Capone are over. Yeah. So he serves two years. years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta before he's transferred to Alcatraz. He is just 35 when he arrives in Alcatraz. And, you know, one thing that I think is so fascinated about this time in Alcatraz is the conditions were brutal. I mean, they purposely sent him there to sort of get him on all sides. So not only is the prison not as comfortable in Alcatraz as it was in Atlanta, but on top of that, In Atlanta, his family is in the same time zone. They're just a state away. You know, the difference between Miami and Atlanta is very different than the difference

between Miami and San Francisco. So they've really made it pretty much impossible for his family to visit him in a consistent regular basis. They know that, you know, at this point, his son is in high school and then in college. He's not going to be able to just take time off and come see his father in Alcatraz. But even at Alcatraz, we, where the guards were notorious for not letting prisoners even speak to each other. They were very specific about recreation privileges.

Capone actually forms his own band. He literally gets permission to form a band known as the Rock Islanders. There are other gangsters and mobsters who sort of rotate in and out. He's like really into this and he sort of has to get guys on board. But he really does, even in Alcatraz, he's able. to talk himself into extraordinary privileges. And I do think that that speaks to his personality, even in his later years where there is a real mental and emotional decline.

That's something to be able to talk Alcatraz prison guards into letting you form a band. To stay even remotely positive at Alcatraz is a remarkable thing. Oh, God, yeah. The place is bleak, especially in those days. but even now when you visit it as a tourist, it's bleak. Yeah. One can only imagine what it was like. He, interestingly, becomes one of the first Americans to receive the antibiotic penicillin as a treatment for syphilis.

Does he die on Alcatraz? I've never understood that. He doesn't. So he's actually released early on November 16, 1939, for medical reasons after serving, like you said, the seven years and six months. So he is becoming increasingly difficult from a medical perspective. He is suffering both from mental and physical decline, and they decide that it is warranted for him to be released for a brain treatment. So he actually goes to Baltimore for a little while before he then is moved into his Palm Beach home in Florida. And following his release, he essentially is homebound in Florida.

He never publicly returns to Chicago. he's mentally incapable of returning to gangland politics. And in 1946, his own personal physician is concluding that he essentially is the emotional capacity, if not the mental capacity of about a 12-year-old, that he has really declined. And in a letter dated actually in 1941, a couple years after his release, his doctor is suggesting even that May that his wife is probably no longer capable of caring for him on her own. The doctor suggests that what they should do is actually hire a male nurse and tell Capone that this is his chauffeur. So that then if they are out in public, because he's mostly at home, but he's not on house arrest.

He is able to move around Florida, certainly not very easily, but he is able to. He does, you know, spend time out in the public in Florida in the 1940s. And, you know, the doctor says, you need a male who can help. If he's provoked in public, if something happens, you're not going to be able to physically restrain him and help him. If he gets violent or if he gets ill in public. And so he's there in his home. He passes away on January 25, 1947. he suffers a stroke in pneumonia.

He had been sick, and he sort of goes through about a week or two of prolonged illness before succumbing. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. He's the rule of that, I guess. Let's talk about his legacy, and you would know, since you're the director of education at the Mob Museum. Do people still come in and ask about him? Is he still the star he once was? And can we expect that to sustain itself? He definitely is still the star.

For American organized crime, I would stay to this day, even among young people, he is the guy that people know. I will say, though, that it is fascinating. I've been here for eight and a half years. And even in that time period, you know, there is less, I think, of a fascination with the original old school mob bosses. The OGs, yeah. He's been replaced by Tony Soprano. Yeah, there's definitely that, definitely that. But, you know, even, I mean, I think he will always hold a sway,

and particularly because in American history, he really is a unique character, a criminal, yes, but truly an American history story. But, you know, every year there's new people that come up and we get as many questions about Whitey Bouldra and El Chapo as we do about Al Capone some days. This is a mountain of a man, culturally speaking, and Capone really hits his summit at the age of about 30. I mean, really, about 1929.

And by that time, he's been making gobs of money throughout his younger years, throughout his 20s. And the rest of his life is this precipitous downfall, either do from health concerns or the government suddenly, you know, arming up against him and all the combination thereof. It's just a remarkable line graph to look at. But he also sort of mirrors the nation itself in terms of its rise through the roaring 20s and then the depression on the other side. It's really an amazing. He is a metaphor in a way, a mafioso metaphor. Thank you so much, Claire.

Nice to meet you and continue your good work. We'll talk to you again. I'm sure when there's another gangster story to talk about. Yeah, please. Thank you so much. Bye now. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes.

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