Dan Snow's History Hit - Al Capone

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Born in Brooklyn, New York in January 1899, Alphonse Gabriel Capone would go on to become perhaps the most infamous gangster in American history. During the Roaring Twenties, Al Capone ruled an empire of crime in the Windy City of Chicago: gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, bribery, narcotics, robbery, and many brutal acts of violence.Jonathan Eig is a journalist, author and biographer dubbed by Ken Burns as a “master storyteller.” Jonathan joins Dan on the podcast to discuss Capone’s transition from young entrepreneur to notorious criminal, how the escalating Mob violence in Chicago culminated with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the events which led to the end of his ​​crime boss reign.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today we're talking Scarface, public enemy number one, Alphonse Capone. Finally, we get to Al Capone. Born in Brooklyn, the son of recent Italian immigrants in 1899. By the time he was a teenager, he was getting in trouble. In his 20s, he had gone on to become one of the most famous and recognisable celebrities, really, in America. A gangster who did not hide his nefarious activities, but boasted of them. It was cometh the hour, cometh the man. He was perfectly placed as a petty mobster when the US government banned alcohol. That drove one of the most lucrative industries in the country underground, and him and his buddies were there to exploit it. It is an astonishing story, and I've got one of the most lucrative industries in the country, underground, and him and his buddies were there to exploit it. It is an astonishing story. And I've got one of the best telling us about it. Jonathan Ige, he was described by Ken Burns as a master storyteller. Let me tell you,

that's good enough for me. If Ken Burns said that to me, and I was writing a CV, I'd write CV, Dan Snow, master storyteller by Ken Burns, end of CV, boom, email it to anyone who wants it. Dan Snow, last storyteller for Ken Burns, end of CV, boom, email it to anyone who wants it. So well done, Jonathan Icke, for that. He's written three New York Times bestselling books. He's an absolute legend. He's based in Chicago. So he's walking the mean streets that Al Capone walked. And he's ideally placed to talk to us all about this gangster. If you want to listen to more podcasts about the 1920s and Prohibition, if you want to watch a TV show, in fact, if you want to watch a history documentary about the aftermath of the first world war in america and europe you can go to history hit tv tell you what you head there by just clicking

on the link you don't have to type anything in isn't that amazing soon you'll just think about it you'll have an idle thought and you'll be taken to history hit tv and you'll be swept through the sign up process you'll discover that you get two weeks absolutely free, and after that, you pay such a small subscription, you won't even notice it leaving your bank account. That lies in the future. In the meantime, you've got to click on a few bits and bobs, but it's not very onerous. So head over there, click on the link in the notes of this podcast, join up at HistoryHitTV, and welcome to the team. But in the meantime, folks, here is Jonathan Eyge. Enjoy. Jonathan, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

Glad to join you. So who's this guy, Alphonse? Where does he start from? Al Capone, I think you're referring to, starts in Brooklyn, same as me. And he's the son of a barber, comes from a big family, lots of kids, not a lot of money, and drops out of school pretty early. Starts working the streets, looking for ways to make money, looking for ways to help out his family. But that's fairly common for immigrants back then. He was not marked as a bad guy quite yet. That's interesting. I mean, it's obviously problematic to talk about when he'd become bad as a teenager, but when does he start to step across the line between

entrepreneurialism and breaking the law? That's a great question. A lot of people growing up in those days, especially children of immigrants, would run the streets. They'd get into some gangs. They'd get into some trouble. They'd experiment with petty theft. And probably true for my grandparents, too. My grandparents were in Brooklyn around the same time as Capone. But after a while, you know, that youthful rebellion wears off. You realize you got to settle down. You don't like living dangerously. It was different for Capone. He started running with some very dangerous guys. He started working at a place on Coney Island called the Harvard Inn. And that place was run by a guy named Frankie Uwale or Frankie Yale as he went by in America

and there were some serious bad guys in that place. Frankie Yale ran the rackets. It was a place where you could go to order a hit on somebody and Capone worked there as a dishwasher and then later as a bartender and a bouncer. So that environment I think really opened up new opportunities for him and he found that you could have some fun, you could get into some dangerous business, and you could make money a lot faster if you were willing to operate in that kind of an environment, if you could handle it. Well, I guess that's the point, if you could handle it. Quite quickly, he's in some interesting fights and situations, right? Yeah, that's how he gets the scars. Capone's known as Scarface. That's the most famous nickname in all of gangsterdom, I suppose. And that happened

when he was just a teenager at the Harvard Inn. He asked some girl to dance, asked a few too many times. She said no. And then the girl's brother came after Capone with a knife and slashed him across the neck and the cheek. And that's how he acquired those scars on the side of his face. Is that a wake-up call for him or does he sit on a slippery slope, this guy? You know, it could have been a wake-up call, but it wasn't. He stayed around and kept hanging around with the same people in the same dangerous environment and may have been involved in a murder there in Brooklyn, which helps explain how he ended up in Chicago. So, you know, his whole family's in Brooklyn.

There's no reason for him to leave, but he's got a wife and a baby now, not necessarily in that order. And he gets into some serious trouble in Brooklyn and it's time to split town. And he leaves for Chicago where he knows one guy, a guy named Johnny Torrio, who he met in Brooklyn. And Johnny Torrio always said, if you ever need work, come see me. Torrio's in Chicago now. Capone takes off for Chicago. And that's where the Johnny Torrio, Al Capone relationship really blossoms. And that's where Al Capone becomes the man we know and still talk about today. That's when he starts to really make his name in Chicago. And I guess we associate him with prohibition, right? So the drinking and selling alcohol in

an era in which it's banned. So what are the dates here? When does he move to Chicago? Just around the time prohibition is introduced? Yeah, 1921, he moves, he turns 18, moves to Chicago just as prohibition's beginning. He's in on the ground floor and he doesn't know this yet. He doesn't know it's going to be lucrative. He's just looking to get out of Brooklyn and he moves to Chicago. Johnny Torrio is running some bars and some casinos and some brothels and Capone gets in with him there. And it starts to become clear that there's a big opportunity here. Once booze is banned and people obviously still want to drink, who is going to give it to them?

And Torrio is one of these guys who figures it out pretty quickly that there's a lot of money to be made. You know, one of the biggest industries in America is now illegal. It goes underground. If you want to keep making and supplying that beer and that gin,

you can make a fortune in a hurry. So Torrio sees this opportunity and brings Capone along on this journey. It's not really Capone's idea. He's just in the right place at the right time. I mean, we've all seen the movies with the drinking booze out of China teacups. I mean, what does it look like on the ground? Is it wholesale? Are they bringing crates across from Canada? Are they running speakeasies? This is a really mom and pop operation. It's really decentralized. So they're getting beer any way they can.

They go to the old brewers and they say, can we take over your breweries? Give us the keys to the place and show us how it works. They're also just hiring people to make gin in their bathtubs. They're bringing in some stuff across from Canada if they can, but it's really patchwork. They're really just struggling. And if you look at the wiretaps later on when Elliot Ness and his guys are wiretapping the Capone gang, you can see what a small-time operation this is. You've got Capone and his brothers answering orders for just like a few barrels of beer at a

time. This is not the Medellin drug cartel. This is really patchwork. So where do we get this image of Capone as a kind of modern-day drug lord living this extravagant lifestyle? Well, it does grow over time and he does get better at it and becomes more efficient. But the reason you have that image is really because Capone himself fostered that image. Capone wanted to be seen as a big businessman. So he dressed the part, he talked the part, he gave interviews to the media, things that criminals are not supposed to do. Most criminals would say, if you're engaged in criminal activity, don't talk about it. Don't brag about it. But Capone really liked the publicity. And some of this comes from the fact that, you know, the context of the 1920s, prohibition

is wildly unpopular. So it's not seen as such a great sin to break this law. He thinks that he might be perceived as a hero for it. As he says, when you serve it on a silver platter, you call it hospitality. But when I do it, they call it a crime. That's not fair. And he's constantly complaining to the press about being misunderstood. And that's why he wears these fancy suits.

That's why he even, he takes the look of the banker and he adds to it. He embellishes it. He goes with wider pinstripes, brighter colors, flashier jewelry, because he's trying to call attention to himself. And that's what makes Capone so fascinating. He's a criminal in an age when criminals feel like they should be treated with some respect because they're giving people what they want. So that's interesting. So Capone, his fame is not as much due to the size of his business empire, but the fact that he built a

legend in his own lifetime. But there could have been folks doing this in all 50 states. Oh, there were folks in all 50 states. And a lot of them were bigger than Capone. Guys in Cleveland and Cincinnati were just as big, if not bigger, than Capone. Certainly in New York, there were bootleggers making more money than Capone. It's just that Capone was the guy who the media picked up on, in part because Capone invited the media. He gave interviews. He gave interviews to Cosmopolitan magazine, to these women's magazines. He was trying to present himself as a legit businessman. And maybe it was smart. Maybe he thought that if he acted that way, the law would leave him alone, but it ended up backfiring on him spectacularly. What was his cover story? Did he say what his

business was? Well, in the beginning, he said he was a used furniture salesman. That was just when he was starting out. But once he was the head of the Chicago outfit, he didn't make any bones about it. He didn't try to hide it. He never said that he was selling stock or anything like that. No, he was upfront about it. He said he was giving the people the beer and the wine that they wanted. That's pretty weird. Why didn't he get arrested?

Well, he was very smart in one way. And that is that he recognized very early on that it was important to reinvest his profits in security. And that meant buying the cops, buying the courts, buying the politicians. So everybody in Chicago was greased. It was almost impossible for him to get arrested in this town because he had the system working for him. And in fact, one time when he was young and some young cop arrested him by mistake, he warned the police officer, you know, I'm going to be out before you know what happened. And another time when there was a murder of a state's attorney and people wondered if Capone was responsible for it, he said, why would I have the state's attorney killed? He was on my payroll. So he really was very smart in that respect.

Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about Al Capone. More coming up. Throughout June on Not Just the Tudors, we're honouring Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee by focusing on queenship in the 16th and 17th centuries. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and all this month with my guests, I'll be exploring the coronations of Tudor queens, queens in Shakespeare, queens regnant and queens consort, who wielded power in ways we haven't thought about. Then there's the queen who ruled over the Spanish Netherlands and the female Swedish king. You heard that right. So for a month of all things magisterial and monarchical, look no further than Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Talk to me about the violence. I mean, is this, has the violence been sort of almost romanticized,

glamorized as well, exaggerated? Or is there a constant low level enforcing and dealing with competitors? And is violence part of what's going on here as well? Yeah, there's definitely more violence throughout America, but it's certainly in Chicago. And the introduction of the Tommy gun, the submachine gun was a factor. But what happened is that everybody says, well, Capone's not so tough. I can do this in my neighborhood. He won't catch on. And these rivalries develop over turf, usually. Somebody decides that they're going to try this other bar across the street,

and it turns out that bar is already under the control of a rival gang. And that's when the shots start to fly, you know, get off of my turf. So Capone, especially early on when he's getting established, gets into these wars with the competition. And he gets to the point where he's actually able and strong enough to call for a truce and to say there's enough money for all of us to go around. And so throughout the 20s, Chicago's probably averaging about 60, 70 gangland murders a year, which is a lot and definitely enough to make headlines, although not as much as

we see today with the drug wars going on in Chicago. By the mid, late 20s, he's actually able to get everybody to calm down and to agree that there's enough money to be made and we can all stick to our turf and we've got the police butt off. It's a pretty good deal. If we just stop killing each other, life might be pretty sweet. And that works for a little while. And then you get the famous, I know you've got a different theory about this, but what is the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in February 1929? The Valentine's Day Massacre is really in many ways Capone's downfall. By then, the federal government is looking for a way to make an example of him. We've got a new

president, Herbert Hoover, and he wants to show that he's going to enforce the prohibition laws. He wants to show that he's not going to let this wave of criminality sweep across America, and he wants to get tough on crime. And when the Valentine's Day Massacre occurs, Hoover uses it as an excuse and says, I'm going to make an example of this. I'm going to make an example of Al Capone. I want to take him down. But I don't think Capone had anything to do with the Valentine's Day Massacre in all likelihood. You had a bunch of guys hanging out in a garage on North Clark Street.

Most of them are members of a rival gang, the Bugs Moran gang. And when these guys get gunned down, everybody assumes that it must have been Capone. But there's no evidence that it was Capone. It's just because the crime goes unsolved, people tend to think, well, Capone must have had something to do with it. But Capone was out of town. As I said before, he had done a pretty good job of establishing kind of a truce. There was no real reason for him to antagonize the Moran gang at this point, and no evidence has really ever emerged to link him to the crime. But it becomes a sort of point of no return, does it? It's just something that

forces the federal government to get involved. Yeah, a couple of reasons for that. One is that the tabloid age of newspapers has begun, and these newspapers are a lot bloodier than they used to be, and they've run pictures of the Valentine's Day massacre on the front page. Probably 10 years earlier, the newspapers would have been too polite to run those pictures. But now Americans are seeing the blood seeping from these brains on the concrete floor of the garage on Clark Street, and they're horrified. And this crime becomes a giant national issue. At the same time, as I mentioned, Herbert Hoover's trying to prove that he can be tough on crime. So it makes the federal government get involved,

redoubling their efforts to try to take down Capone. They can't prove that he had anything to do with the Valentine's Day massacre. They can't get him on any kind of violent crime in Chicago. They can't even really prove that he's selling booze, even though he's bragging about it. So they have the IRS get involved and the IRS begins looking at his taxes, trying to see if they can make a case. Capone obviously didn't pay his

taxes because, you know, if you were Al Capone, would you file a tax return? Give the government evidence of all the bootlegging that you've been doing? So that was their best case. That was their best shot at trying to take him down, the income tax evasion case. So he becomes the victim of his own publicist at this point. Who calls him public enemy number one? Is that coined for him, right? Yeah, some businessmen in Chicago were really trying to get the federal government to do more to try to stop Capone. They couldn't get the local government to do anything about it because the local government was all paid off. So they started this very smart marketing campaign and they created this concept of the public enemy number one. They

created a list of public enemies and put Capone at the top as a way of calling attention to the fact that this guy was a danger, a menace to society. And they used that to try to leverage the federal government to get more involved to come down on Capone. And the trial is amazing. He does stand trial for tax evasion, and he thinks he's got the town sewn up. He's going to bribe his way out of it. Yeah, it's great. The trial is kind of a farce in many ways. I mean, first of all, nobody's ever been sent away for income tax evasion for more than a very brief sentence. And Capone gets something like 11 years. It's ridiculous. You know, they're sent to the federal penitentiary, sent to Alcatraz for income tax evasion.

But even the trial itself is kind of a mockery. Capone admits that he made money, but he tried to pay his taxes. He tried to settle with the government. They wouldn't take the settlement. They insisted on going to trial with this thing. They bring in a bunch of jurors who are all people who have convicted bootleggers in the past. So the jury appears to be stacked against Capone. The judge really appears to have it out for Capone. At every turn, Capone's lawyers screw this thing up just royally. So, you know, you can make a case that the government was really smart in trying to take him down for

income tax evasion. Just get him off the streets. Just do whatever you have to do to get this guy out of operation. And that's what they do. But Capone never saw it coming. He never believed that he could really do serious time for something as trivial as income taxes. They switched the jury, right? Yeah, there was a rumor that Capone had bribed the jury. So the judge at the last minute brought in an all-new jury and they were pretty much custom chosen. Each member of the jury had served on another jury

that convicted bootleggers. They knew exactly what they were getting. Capone had almost no chance in this trial. He was sick by this stage, right? He was chronically ill. Yeah, he didn't get treatment for syphilis when he was a young man. And by the time he was in his 30s, it was starting to affect him neurologically. And by the time he goes to prison, that's when they do some medical tests and they can see that he's already suffering from advanced neurological syphilis and that it's starting to rot his brain. And within just a few years of his arrival, first he goes to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, and then he goes to Alcatraz. And by then it's clear that he's becoming really

seriously debilitated by the syphilis. It's an urban myth that he had a phobia of needles, right? He didn't want to get treatment. Is that right? Is that true? Yeah, I think that's an urban myth. He didn't want to get treatment. Is that right? Is that true? Yeah, I think that's an urban myth. He didn't want to get treatment. And the treatment for syphilis at the time was still fairly experimental. It wasn't clear. You know, they didn't have penicillin yet, but the treatment that they did have certainly would have helped him a great deal.

And he blew it on that one. How did he cope inside? You know, pretty well, actually. He managed to bribe his way into some better jobs inside the prison. He learned to play the ukulele and the mandola and learned to transcribe music. He wrote letters home to his family apologizing for all of the misery he had brought them and telling them about all his great new musical accomplishments and popular misconception about Capone's that he died in prison. He did not. He got out and lived another 10 years and was pretty

much addled by that point with the syphilis and almost childlike in his behavior. He didn't get to really enjoy his last years of freedom, but he got out. He seemed to have enough money to survive in those years. Nobody ever really figured out what happened to his money. If he had any of it stashed away, he hid it very well because the IRS never got it. So he never paid back those taxes? He never fully paid back his taxes. And this is shocking to me because he had a beautiful villa home on Miami Beach. It was in his wife's name and the IRS never took it. So he continued to live there until 1947. Man, his wife was long suffering. Yeah, she and their son put up with a lot, obviously. And his

wife was an incredibly shy private woman who didn't seem to want any part of the lifestyle that Capone lived, although I guess she was okay with taking the money that he generated. But she did a very good job of protecting their son and keeping him out of the rackets and raising him on the straight and narrow. And I think that that could not have been easy. You've interviewed many of his descendants and things. What's their view of being descended from Al Capone? Well, now in America, at least, he's seen as kind of this almost comic cartoon-like figure. And, you know, his name is on restaurants and he's got tourist attractions in Chicago. And I don't think it's a shame. Like, I think they were ashamed for a while. Certainly back in the

50s and 60s, there was still a lot of them changed their name because Capone was something that they didn't like to carry around. But now I think that they're okay. And I think they feel like he's gotten a bum rap. They feel like, I'm not sure how you could make that argument because there's no question about his criminality. There's no question about his violence. The only question really is whether, you know, he was treated fairly by the government, but his guilt was never in question. Yeah. Even if you accept that he was on the right side of history when it came to booze, his methods were still fully criminal. Yeah. You could be on the right side of history when it came to booze, his methods were still fully criminal. Yeah, you could be on the right side of booze and just keep drinking it.

You don't have to sell it and kill your rivals along the way. That's words to live by. That's been my view, buddy, so I'm happy doing that. Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on and telling us all about that. Tell us what your book is called. It's called Get Capone, And it's available in paperback, audiobook, all those good things. And yeah, you should say like Get Capone, like this was government kind of overreach, was it? I mean, they broke their own rules.

It was government overreach in many ways. First of all, prohibition was a disaster. We've learned in America, and I think in most freedom loving countries that freedom should be expanded, not restricted. Once you give people rights, it's very difficult to take them away. And we're about to find out in this country what happens when you take away the right to an abortion. But Capone's case and Prohibition's case proves that Americans and most freedom-loving people don't deal well with having their freedoms taken away from them. That was mistake number one. And then in trying to make an example of Capone, they overreached again. And instead of dealing with the failure of the law, instead of dealing with the enforcement problems, instead of

trying to convince Americans that they should observe the laws of prohibition, they just went for the good publicity of trying to take down public enemy number one. And it was empty and it was immoral in many ways. It was unethical in many ways. Well, thank you very much indeed. It's an amazing story that continues to grip people to the present day. So cinematic. People love it. Thank you very much, Jonathan, for coming on the pod. My pleasure. Anytime. Thank you for making it the end of this episode of our country, all work out and finish. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast.

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