Forbidden History - Al Capone: America’s Most Notorious Gangster

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

In this episode of Forbidden History, we are joined by historian Tracy Borman. Tracy heads to Chicago to discover how Al Capone rose to infamy, from club bouncer to the most notorious gangster in history, uncovering the two sides to his personality. Cast List: Tracy Borman - Historian Tony McMahon - Historian and Author Dominic Selwood - Historian and Author Eric Meyers – Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. We're an independent podcast, and advertisements help keep us going. Ads are automatically placed and not specifically chosen or endorsed by us, unless read by me the host. Thanks for supporting the show. Al Capone, the most notorious gangster in history. Throughout most of the 1920s, he had a near total grip on the city of Chicago. His criminal empire encompassed gambling, prostitution, and, and, and, he had a near-total grip on the city of Chicago. and bootlegging, fueling a campaign of violence.

In this episode, we're joined by Tracy Borman as she travels to Chicago to reveal the real Al Capone. She'll cover his unlikely pathway to crime, discover how his wife and son coped with having a gangster boss in the family, and reveal how he successfully created his public image until one single event changed everything. He provided soup kitchens for the home

He bought milk for all the school children in Chicago, but ultimately it doesn't detract from the way Capone made his money. Was he really a one-dimensional, ruthless criminal? Did the lavish public personality mask a man with far more unexpected interests? And how did his bootlegging fuel Chicago's jazz age? This is the private life of Al Capone. Alphonse Capone was born in New York City in 1880s. New York City in 1899 to Italian immigrants, Gabriel and Teresa. His father was a barber and his mother a seamstress. They brought up their son to better himself through hard work and education,

and he did prove to be a fast learner. But he was also a brawler, and during sixth grade, a fight with his teacher led to him leaving school for good. Al Capone was undoubtedly a very clever child and apparently very good with numbers but he preferred life on the streets to life in the classroom and he seems to have balked at rules and any attempt by teachers to control him and on one occasion a female teacher struck him

and he struck her back and that was basically the end of his education his father tried to put him back on the straight and narrow by setting him up with the shoe shine business but despite his best intentions, this proved to be the young Capone's gateway into the world of crime. It was while shining shoes that he observed a gang extorting protection payments from local businesses, and it inspired him to try the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale. He took protection money from the other shoe shine boys and employed two of his older cousins as heavies.

His cousins were bigger than him, but crucially, not particularly intelligent. Employing people heavier, but not smarter than himself, turned out to be a model that he followed for the rest of his life. These very efforts brought him to the attention of Frankie Yale and Johnny Torio. Johnny Torrio, Frankie Yale were two Italian immigrants who settled in New York City, and Torio was a racketeer. basically engaged in extortion, and Yale was basically a gangster and a hitman. And these two individuals were going to play a key role in the rise of Al Capone.

Torrio, in particular, saw potential in the young Al Capone and started using him to run money. Capone's natural ability when it came to numbers saw him rise to the top of the pile, and Torio soon gave him an insight into more of his other businesses. from prostitution to extortion. Copone's responsibilities included visiting Torio's brothels and collecting the money they earned.

Being thrown into this environment, he began to indulge from a young age. Al Capone had a huge appetite for women and a huge appetite for sex. He wasn't especially particular about whether these women were prostitutes or not. It was just really any woman, any time, anywhere, Al was game.

But towards the end of 1917, while working as a laborer in a box factory, he met a young woman who was working in the timekeeping department. Mary Josephine Coughlin, better known as May, would go on to become

one of the most important women in Al Capone's life. Tracy Borman tells us more. On the face of it, May and Al had nothing in common. She was a cool, calm, collected woman, two years Capone's senior. He, a young tearaway, who was always getting into one scrape or another. She lived in a lovely terraced house on a nice street. He lived above

his father's barber shop in an area little better than a slum. She was of an Irish background, he of Italian descent. So it shouldn't have worked. But despite their obvious differences, they became very close. Al and May's relationship very early on was quite scandalously sexual. And the best place that they could go was back to the box factory. So they would find somewhere in the deepest, darkest recesses of the box factory and go to it. He would take May to dances and do everything he could to impress her. But he had an additional reason for turning on the charm.

While working his side job at the Harvard Inn on Coney Island, he had an altercation with a gangster, Frank Galuccio, something Capone would never forget. One made rather a crude comment to Frank about his sister, and Frank didn't take it well. He responded by slashing Al across the face with a blade. This left Al with permanent scars that earned him the nickname Scarface. Despite his tough man image,

Al Capone absolutely hated the scars on his face. And he'd give the unscarred profile when he was being photographed and even resorted to having his face powdered in order to hide these kind of unsightly evidence of his previous street fights. But whatever his own insecurities, May fell very much in love with Al, scars and all. Much to the disdain of her mother,

who thought he was totally unsuitable due to his Italian background. Despite this, May became pregnant, and on the 4th of December, 1918, gave birth to Albert, nicknamed Sonny. Almost a month later, Al and May got married. May's mother regarded Italians, as she put it, quote-unquote, colored. You know, Italian people often call things like garlic eaters, and that's kind of at the milder end. I mean, they're called a lot worse than that. But eventually Al Capone gets his way.

He married May, but May's mother never really accepted it. Capone had a legitimate job, a loving wife, and a new baby. But on the other hand, he was a small-time crook in the criminal underworld of Torio and Yale. So which way was he going to go? In November 1920, his father died. And so he found himself, the man of the house, with a family to provide for. Crime simply paid better. Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale took Capone on full time.

But Torio then moved to Chicago because it was larger than Brooklyn, so there was more chance to make money. And a new source of illegal income was just opening up. In January 1920, the 18th Amendment came into force, which made the production, transportation, and sale of alcohol illegal, ushering in the era of prohibition. But of course, people still wanted a drink, and all that was needed was for someone to supply.

the heavy hitters of organized crime stepped in. It's ironic that Prohibition, with all its moral motives, that it was going to improve American people. What it actually did was gave a huge opportunity to organize crime, because as the name organized crime suggests they could organize criminal activities better than anybody else, so you ended up with floating warehouses, these ships that were essentially liquor stores,

giant liquor stores, off the coast, you know, beyond three miles, beyond three miles so they could operate legally. And the distribution of the liquor and the production was all run by organized crimes. So the result of prohibition was it put a lot of money into a lot of bad people's pocket. Capone worked for Frankie Yale in New York until an incident forced him to relocate to the city of Chicago and work for Torrio. Capone's rise in Chicago would become meteoric. To find out more about his early years, Tracy Borman is meeting Craig Alford who runs Capone-themed tours of the city.

So Al was forced to move here to Chicago. He got into a little trouble in Brooklyn, New York. The Italian mob had asked him to rough up an Irish guy who'd been reneging on paying back a betting debt. Al beats the guy almost to death. And now the Irish mob wants the Italian mob to hand Al over for vengeance. Unfortunately, he had no choice.

He had a new wife and a baby. He had to get out of Dodge. And the only person that he did he do. knew outside of New York was Johnny the Fox Torio, Papa Johnny. And Johnny was working at Colisemo's Cafe for his uncle, Big Jim Colisemo. This was the classiest nightclub in Chicago. Enrico Caruso, Zazu Pitts, Charlie Chaplin, Sophie Tucker, Mae West, all the big names of the 20s would come to Colisemo's Cafe to be seen by all the other big names.

Gosh, what a break for Al. This is, this is the place to be, isn't it? It was a classy place. Yeah. And he, of course, came here to be bodyguard for Colisemo himself. He was having problems with a group called the Black Hand. This was a Sicilian extortion ring. He would pay him off.

They would want more. Pay him off, want more. And finally, Colosimo asked Johnny Torrio, his nephew, to go ahead and just pay him off once and be done. Johnny goes there and kills all of them. And now he needs a bodyguard. Colisemo needs a steady bodyguard. So this was a good first job for Al in Chicago.

It was a great first job, you know. He was a fancy dresser, and this was the part. On the other hand, in his spare time, he also worked at a bartender and a bouncer at one of Colisemos clubs called the Four Deuces. So as well as being a bodyguard, Al takes another job? Yes, he can make a few extra bucks to work at the Four Deuses Club. This was a great place.

He had bar on the first floor, gambling on the second, and girls on the third and the fourth floor. So Al would stand out in front. He was always a fancy dresser. He had a big gravely voice, and he would rope guys into the place. Come on in, come on in, hey, the first drink is on me. Come on and come on in, and sure enough, you know, they'd slip you a drink with a couple of drops of knockout drops, you know. You get a few belts in you.

They take anything of value from you and then throw your body underneath the L tracks right behind the four juices club. It was the fastest way to get their money and make room for the next sucker coming through the door. Despite being married to May, he proved unable to resist. the charms of the women he encountered. Al Capone was not faithful to May, and he even had an affair with a 15-year-old prostitutor of Greek descent and made her dye her hair blonde, because he had a thing about blonde women.

May found out about this, and to make a point, she turned up a Sunday lunch at Al Capone's mother's house with her hair dyed blonde, and Capone just seems to have said, oh, that looks nice, kind of nonchalant response. But May, curiously, kept her hair die blonde for the rest of her life. Despite what was going on for Capone at work,

he was a family man, and providing for them drove everything he did. Prohibition era Chicago was proving incredibly fruitful as the gangs came up with more and more novel ways to smuggle booze to the people who wanted it. So of course, one of the questions that everyone wants to know, how do you get beer during prohibition? You know, big, heavy commodity.

heavy commodities that were hard to get around easily recognizable. You put a barrel of beer in the back of a model T-Ford and the whole thing would go down the street like this. So here's how they got away with it. Beautiful places here like the old Schoenhofen Brewery, when Prohibition goes into effect, 1,700 workers were out of a job. This was a huge complex, the sixth largest brewery in the nation at the time. During Prohibition, they got a permit from the U.S. government to produce a new beer beer. Technically, it was beer made the old-fashioned way. They simply boiled off the alcohol until it was less than one-half of one percent. Capone would have them put it into barrels and then take those barrels and ship them to all of his speakeasies across Chicago. Get it inside

the speakeasy, and then once all the doors were locked, his guys had come by later in the day, usually with veterinarian syringes, for horse or for cattle. They would fill that up with 180-proof pure alcohol, and then right through the bung, they would inject it to give it the punch that the guys were buying it for. And literally, he used this method all the way through the 1920s because it was never illegal until it was inside and already locked up. There's a perfect way to get around it. That's very clever. You've got to hand it to it. It's a good easy way to do it. Copone eventually made enough money to move his family to join him in Chicago, and in 1923, he purchased a property on Prairie Avenue, registered under May and his mother's

names. Al's mother had the entire top floor to herself, and then the second floor was Al and his wife May. Al spent very little time here, to be honest with you. And eventually, he would end up living in the hotels downtown. Did Al Capone's family ever see anything other than this very closeted existence here, very separate from his other world? I would have to imagine that everyone knew. Even Sonny, the young child, would have realized that every time he left the house with his father, an entire entourage of men protected them everywhere they went. When they would come over on Sunday dinner, him, his brother Ralph, Frank, in the early days, they'd all come, and originally there was two sets of stanchions there were Vaz's sack.

There was a bodyguard at each one of those places throughout the entire time that Al was here. After they were finished eating, those bodyguards would go in, they'd have their meal at the same table, and other guys would take their place keeping an eye off. But, you know, you would have to know something was up by the fact that just to have dinner at your own house, you had bodyguards out in front protecting it. As the speakeasies were being targeted by Chicago's mayor, William Deaver, Johnny Torio ordered Capone and his brothers

to move all their brothels, speak-easies, and gambling dens to the Chicago suburb of Cicero. Here, he paid off the local Republican council members and let his brother Frank handle the lake. In 1924, at the primary elections, the Democrats mounted a serious challenge. So Frank unleashed a wave of terror on the city, even placing gangsters with shotguns at polling stations to make sure people voted correctly. The Chicago Police Department decided to intervene and sent 70 plain-clothed officers

to Cicero in order to stem the violence. Although this had little effect on the election, it had a massive one on Capone. At one polling station, a patrol car spotted one of his known associates, Charlie Fischetti, a man they didn't recognize, and Copone's brother, Frank, what was to unfold would turn Al Capone's world upside down. Franco, Fischetti, and the other fella are standing here in front of the hotel when a big car pulls up. It's an unmarked squad car.

days, they didn't really look too different than anybody else's. Four guys step out, and sure enough, shots are fired. Frank was the first one killed. Frank Capone was killed, and when he went down, he had three shots out of his pistol that had fire. Charles Foshetti ran down this block into an open field, eventually dropped his gun and surrendered. The other fellow was wounded and picked up at the hospital later on. This was huge. You know, being Al's younger brother, they were very close. They were very close. The funeral was held at the home on South Prairie Avenue. Al's mother, you could just imagine, you know, she was absolutely a wreck. 150 cars were in, uh, in front of the casket at the funeral. $20,000 in flowers. And all these people, of course, in the old days, always circled by

your house. You can just imagine a car after car after car after car after car for 15, 20, 30, 40 minutes, as the whole neighborhood watched in front of the Capone mansion there. Al Capone's political puppets had won the election, but victory had come at a terrible price. Frank's death was unexpected and devastating. It made headlines in the city of Chicago. But Capone himself was not really in the public eye. All that was about to change. Tracy tells us more.

Towards the end of 1925, Johnny Torio retired and left control of the outfell of the outfurt. to his protégé, Al Capone. Al moved his headquarters back to the heart of Chicago and set about building his empire. And he was building on fertile ground. Prohibition hadn't lessened people's desire for a drink. It had turned it into an exciting form of rebellion. And drinking was coupled with an equally rebellious form of music, jazz.

As the world's foremost jazz musicians gravitated towards the speak-easies and clubs of Chicago, Al Capone found himself one of the country's principal patrons of the jazz scene. Jazz's predominantly African-American musicians didn't sit well with some in racially segregated America. But perhaps due to his own immigrant background, he couldn't care less. Black or white, he simply wanted the best entertainment for the visitors to his clubs. Prohibitioner America was still heavily segregated, but Capone was above all a businessman. Artists like Louis Armstrong were active in Chicago at the time, and Capone was very happy to have them in his clubs because it made good business sense for him.

Capone seems to have had something of a progressive streak. He seems to have treated African-American musicians on equal terms, and so much so that he was even known apparently as Robin Hood by some in the black community and was regarded as. as something of a patron of the jazz age. Capone had really hit the big time and began to pay great attention to the way he was perceived by the public. Working with friend and journalist Harry Reid,

the pair fashioned Capone's public image so that he was seen not as a gangster, but as a businessman. Harry Reid gave Al Capone PR tips. He was like a kind of a spin doctor to the gangster. And Capone took the advice. You know, he talked to the press, but avoided politics.

He went to baseball games and stood there taking the evasion of the crowd. And he'd turn up at City Hall, you know, acting as if he was an elected politician, even though he was nothing of the sort. And on his way, he'd be giving racing tips to people in the streets and, of course, even giving them advice on fights he knew were rigged. And the sort of commutative result of this was that Capone was regarded by people in Chicago as something of a working-class hero. You know, that he was one of them, that he'd made it.

And so they liked him. Al became something of a celebrity, and the whole world talked about him. He would flaunt his wealth by festooning himself with diamonds and jewelry and would order a dozen custom-made suits at a time, costing nearly $70,000. When it came to the colour of his clothing,

he would wear lime green, yellow, lavender, Nothing seemed beyond the boundaries of taste. He was a gift to the eager newspaper paparazzi. Capone was a real showman, and he loved to flaunt his wealth. He was really attracted, for example, to diamonds. He had an extraordinarily large diamond pinky ring. He also had diamonds on his belt buckle. Even in his house, his billiard table and pool cues were diamond-studded.

Clothes were not the only thing Capone spent money on. His gambling became the stuff of legend. He would bet on the usual things like horse racing, but there were stories that he would even drop $100,000 on a single throw of the dice. His gambling extended to golf, a sport that became a real passion of his. He nearly always won. But that could have been more to do with the fact that people were fearful of what would happen if they beat him.

Al Capone shows us that playing golf carrying a gun and drinking heavily is not necessarily a good combination. I mean, on one occasion, he slammed his golf equipment down angrily, managed to have the gun fire, and it hit him in the scrotum, which, according to laser government records, and I think we can say that that's not the whole in one he was planning that day. He was a guy who wanted people to like him. Even as a child, people did like him.

He would go out of his way that you'd like him. On the other hand, as we say in Chicago, if that liked you, he took care you. If he didn't like you, he took care of you. So he was that kind of a person. In private, Al Capone had some more unexpected passions. He was a great lover of jazz, but what he really loved was the opera. He would attend performances flanked by his bodyguards and follow along on the score. He also bought an expensive grand piano and tried to teach himself to play

before giving up and sticking with the mandolin. You might not expect this for somebody who was involved in organized crime, who was thought to be quite a kind of brutal, brutish type of man. But Al Capone had a real interest in music, and he was really interested in opera. He was really, really dedicated to this art form, to the point that he would actually attend the opera with copies of of the score, following studiously along surrounded by his bodyguards. Copone was a hit with the public, and his organization was growing rapidly.

By 1926, the outfit's gross income was nearly one and a half billion dollars per year in today's money. But in his private life, things weren't so simple. May was diagnosed with syphilis, which she probably caught from her husband, who refused to be tested. On top of that, their child Sonny, a rather frail boy with poor hearing, who always seemed to have one illness or another, was being bullied at school. Capone, the man who could order deaths on a whim, found himself powerless to help. So here was a man who, you know, murdered people the drop of a hat, didn't think anything of it. And yet he had this very

intense, loving relationship with his son, who he wanted to protect sort of from the truth of what he was doing, but also from the world because he saw Sonny as very vulnerable. He was hard of hearing. He was partially deaf. And Al, it was like Al channeled all of the love that he had

into this boy and into his relationship with this child. But because his professional life was one encounter after another with rival gangs, he didn't see much of him. In fact, he spent much of the second half of the 1920s in one hotel or another, and as with his family home, security was at the forefront of his mind. We'll be right back after a quick break. The Metropole Hotel was famous for being Capone's headquarters. It said that he took so much of the building that his daily rental bill exceeded $20,000. His eight bodyguards, known as a double-walled fortress of meat, were always by his side,

whether at the hotel or driving through the streets of Chicago. Al had a vast car collection, and many of them had been modified to suit his lifestyle. Most famously, his 1928 Cadillac had been completely redone. It had been fully lead-lined to make it bulletproof, and it had glass that was an inch and a half thick, Overall, it weighed three and a half tons. Nevertheless, the engine had been souped up so he could do 110 miles an hour to get away from people. Inside, he'd even had the first police radio installed in a car so he could monitor anyone chasing him.

And other modifications included a strengthened bumper in case he needed to mow anyone over on making his escapes. In 1928, he moved his HQ to the Lexington Hotel, where his security turned it into Chicago's answer to Fort Knox. Capone's real headquarters was on the fourth and fifth floor of the Lexington Hotel, which he'd had completely kitted out just for him and his crew. There was a special lift to take people up to his private area. He'd had chairs specially built with bulletproof reinforced backs.

There were traps, there were escape tunnels. This was the Command HQ for the Capone crime syndicate. It's no exaggeration to say that Capone murdered his way to the top. You know, murder was part of his business strategy. And so when you murder people, people want to murder you too. And the sort of people he murdered were definitely going to come after him. So he was constantly aware of his security, constantly knowing that he could never drop his guard.

So he was always surrounded by this entourage of heavies. While he lived under constant fear of his safety, the rewards were certainly worth it. By 1929, when Capone was 30, his personal net worth was over $150 million in today's money. To find out why he was so successful, Tracy Borman is meeting his biographer, Jonathan Aig, at one of Capone's old haunts, The Green Mill. Al Capone, by this stage, he's something of a folk hero because he'd given the people what they wanted. This is prohibition, and the alcohol's flowing thanks to us. Capone was a legend in his own time to use the cliché.

He was celebrated and he fascinated people because he broke the law. And because the law was so unpopular, all of the morals were kind of tossed on their heads. Here's a guy who says, I'm breaking the law, but I'm giving the people what they want. The law banning alcohol was incredibly unpopular. So somebody who breaks that law can be popular. For all his faults, Al Capone built up a huge business empire. empire. Was he there for quite a clever man? I think he was very smart about certain things. He was, I think his great brilliance was actually in marketing and publicity. He knew how to sell

himself and that's why he's the most famous criminal of his time and maybe the most famous criminal in American history because he understood that celebrity was a powerful tool for a businessman, something we all understand today, something even politicians are recognizing our, you know, our president is a former television celebrity. understood in the same way that someone like Donald Trump does, that fame can help make you bulletproof. And fame can help sell whatever products you're trying to sell. In his case, he was trying to sell booze,

but he was also trying to improve his image. He wanted to be seen as a legitimate businessman. So he was likable. He was able to survive in this business a long time, keep it going because he was smart about bribing public officials. He was smart about delegating the violent acts. He was definitely no dummy. But in February 1929, he took things too far.

One hit, designed to take out rival gangster Bugs Moran, would undo all that good publicity and expose him for what he really was. That event would become known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Capone now wanted to seize control of his bootlegging activities. And the way he conceived of doing that was to launch a fake police raid where Capone's operatives dressed as police officers and lined up some of Moran's people against a war notionally to search them.

But at a signal, machine gun fire was released, they were all killed. Chicago and Prohibition era America were used to a degree of gangster violence associated with prohibition and the illegal trade around it. But the St. Valentine's Day massacre plumbed a new depth and to a large degree started to turn the American public against Capone and his like.

It played out on the front page of newspapers with these horrible shots of blood spilling from these men's heads. And the government began to really push to try to do something about this violence that was sweeping the cities of our country. That's when Capone's image began to change. And the government played a big part in changing that image. What was the turning point? How did they finally get him? Well, the Valentine's Day massacre raised the stakes. The government really felt like they had to make an example of Al Capone.

to send a message that this kind of violence was not going to be accepted anymore. And President Herbert Hoover decided that the best way to do that was to use Capone, to go after Capone, send a message because he was the most famous criminal in America, maybe in the world, if you can take down Capone, you send a message to all Americans that Prohibition is going to be enforced. The laws are the laws, and nobody is going to get away with crime anymore. So he became obsessed with getting Capone. But pinning Al Capone was not going to be easy.

He kept his hands carefully clean from his crimes, and people feared the consequences of testifying against him. He failed to take this new threat seriously, but one woman was determined to find a way. Mabel Walker-Willi Brand was a truly extraordinary lady. She started life as a schoolteacher, but through studying in night school, she taught herself law, got qualified as a lawyer, became a prosecutor, and ended up as the assistant attorney general. She was the one who realized that it was never going to be possible to prosecute Capone for his bootlegging and his prohibition crimes because nobody would testify against him. So instead she turned to the fact that he was always flashing his money. This was something he clearly had a lot of.

So she went against him for income tax evasion and that's how she got him. Coppon had always used a mixture of terror and charm in order to get his way and also had judges, politicians, police. on his payroll. And I don't think he fully appreciated that the tide was starting to turn. There was a determination to get rid of Capone. I just don't think he saw that happening. And we can see that in 1930,

when the charges around his tax affairs begin to arise. He goes off to Palm Island. He has a banquet for high society, Miamians. He has a kid's party for his son's friends. And the whole mood music suggests Capone just didn't see the disaster that was coming his way.

Capone's lawyer, Mattingly, made a very serious tactical mistake, which is that he admitted how much money Capone owed in tax and offered to pay it back. But once the sum was out there, it was a noose around Capone's neck. At the trial in October 1931, Copone was only convicted of five counts, but it was enough to see him handed an 11-year sentence. By the end of the month, he was shipped off to Cook County Jail. From there, he went to the Atlanta Penitentiary, but he was suspected of continuing to run the outfit from prison.

And so in August 1934, Capone was transferred to the recently opened federal facility of Alcatraz. Capone didn't lose sleep about investigations against him, and nor trials because he knew he could close them down. So when Mabel's trial against him finally succeeded, he was in deep shock and bewildered. that somebody had managed to bring him down. I think it's fair to say Al Capone had a miserable four and a half years on the rock, as it was called Alcatraz.

I mean, visiting hours were very short. He was a very sociable man. He wanted to see his family, didn't get to see them very much, and he didn't exactly hit it off with the other prisoners. I mean, there's an incident where he's stabbed with a pair of barbershears, and the only thing he's got to defend himself with is his own banjo from his band. And to cap it all, he's going down with syphilis, and it's eating into him. and it's reducing him really to the sad, pathetic individual

that he'd become at the end of his life. As fools from Grace go, this was a pretty spectacular one. The man who had ruled Chicago now found himself living in a nine by five feet concrete cell. As he admitted to his prison warden, it looks like Alcatraz has finally got me licked. In 1936, he was stabbed by a third, fellow inmate. And while the incident left him with only minor wounds, it served as a grim

reminder of just how far he'd fallen. Two years later, he had a serious mental breakdown. In January 1939, he completed his term at Alcatraz. And after 11 months at the Federal Correction Institution at Terminal Island, he was paroled, after which he retreated to his Palm Island Villa in Miami Beach. While there, he was visited by family and old associates under the watchful eye of the FBI. But due to his syphilis, he was not particularly lucid and would ramble at length about communists and his old rival, Bugs Moran. Capone was eventually released from Alcatraz into hospital, and from there he was sent home to die. He had very serious syphilitic dementia. Doctors examining him at the time

said he had the mental age of a 12-year-old. In 1945, Al Capone became one of the first civilians to be treated for syphilis with penicillin. But it was too late. His health declined further. And on January 25, 1947, a week after his 48th birthday, he suffered a stroke and cardiac arrest and died. But in death, a legend was born. He would become immortalized in film and television, which would, to an extent, glamorize him and the times in which he lived. You get the impression really that Chicago is rather conflicted about the legacy of Capone.

I mean, a former mayor, Richard Daly, went out of his way to demolish buildings that had anything to do with Capone, and you won't find a plaque commemorating the St. Valentine's Day massacre for obvious reasons. But nevertheless, the gangster tours continue. the memorabilia is for sale, so no matter how much the city would like to cut its link with Capone, he's there omnipresent. One can still imagine being in Chicago in the 1920s, as the musicians tune up in the city's speakeasies. The illegal liquor started to flow, and another evening of the jazz age started to swing. Perhaps there were also more mob killings, as another wave of violence hit the streets in a city that had two sides to it in the 1920. The same could be said of the man who really ruled this city at that time, Al Capone.

On one hand, there was the ruthless gangster who held Chicago in his grip and ordered deaths on a whim. On the other, he was the charming, gracious Robin Hood figure who supported black musicians and was a loving husband and father. When you look at that side of him, it's easy to forget that while he adored his own son, There were other sons whose fathers didn't come home because of Al Capone. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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