Al Capone

His parents came out of Angri, a town outside Naples, in 1893, sailing by way of Fiume and landing in a Brooklyn where his father cut hair and his mother sewed. Alphonse was born on Navy Street in 1899 and grew up at 38 Garfield Place in Park Slope, one of nine children. He did well at the parochial school until he was 14, when he hit a teacher in the face and was expelled. He played semi-professional baseball for two years, then worked the door of Frankie Yale's Harvard Inn in Coney Island, where he insulted a woman and her brother Frank Galluccio opened his left cheek with a knife. He hated the nickname. In December 1918, at 19, he married Mae Coughlin, whose child he already had.

Johnny Torrio brought him to Chicago in 1919 to work the door of a brothel. When Big Jim Colosimo was shot on May 11, 1920, Torrio took the business, and when North Side gunmen nearly killed Torrio in January 1925, Capone took it from him at 26. He ran breweries, brothels, gambling houses and a liquor route reaching to Canada, protected by Mayor William Hale Thompson and a police force on his payroll. On February 14, 1929, four disguised men lined seven of Bugs Moran's people against a garage wall and machine-gunned them. Moran was not among them. Capone was in Florida, was never charged, and was universally assumed to have ordered it. The photographs damaged him badly, so he opened a soup kitchen and let himself be photographed at that instead.

The thing that convicted him was a letter from his own lawyer. After his brother Ralph went down for tax evasion in 1930, Capone told counsel to regularize his position, and counsel put in writing an income of 100,000 dollars for 1928 and the same for 1929. Without investigating anything, the government now held a signed admission of large taxable income on which no tax had been paid. A federal jury convicted him on five counts on October 17, 1931. Eleven years, a 50,000-dollar fine and 215,000 dollars in back taxes. He entered the Atlanta penitentiary in May 1932 at 33 and was diagnosed on arrival with syphilis. By the time Alcatraz had finished with him the disease was in his brain, formally diagnosed in February 1938, and he served his last year there in the hospital wing.

Johns Hopkins refused to treat him. Baltimore's Union Memorial did, and he thanked it with two Japanese cherry trees. He went home to Palm Island in March 1940 and in 1942 became one of the first Americans given penicillin, far too late to undo what the disease had done. A stroke on January 21, 1947 was followed by pneumonia and then heart failure, and he died at home on January 25, at 47. His physician asked to autopsy the brain for the benefit of science and the family refused. He was buried at Mount Olivet and moved to Mount Carmel in 1950. The Outfit outlasted him by decades, and so has the character he handed to every gangster picture since.

Al Capone's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Chicago Outfit company
  Taken over from Johnny Torrio at 26 and run for six years 1925
• 93 Palm Avenue, Palm Island, Florida building
  Bought for 40,000 dollars from the Anheuser-Busch family. He died in it. 1928
• The Capone soup kitchen, Chicago company
  Opened during the Depression while his public image was collapsing 1931
• Swan song of a racketeer article
  His self-defence to the Chicago Herald and Examiner between plea and sentence 1931
• Madonna Mia song
  His own arrangement, written for his wife Mae while he played banjo in the Alcatraz prison band —

• January 17, 1899 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn to immigrants from Angri, near Naples
• 1913 aged ~14 Expelled at 14 for hitting a teacher in the face He had been a promising student who could not take the rules.
• December 30, 1918 aged 19 Marries Mae Coughlin at 19 He was under 21, so his parents had to consent in writing.
• 1919 aged ~20 Leaves New York for Chicago at Johnny Torrio's invitation
• 1925 aged ~26 Takes over the Outfit at 26 after Torrio is shot and retires
• February 14, 1929 aged 30 The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre Seven of Bugs Moran's men were shot against a garage wall. Capone was in Florida and was never charged.
• October 17, 1931 aged 32 Convicted on five counts of income tax evasion Sentenced a week later to 11 years, a 50,000-dollar fine and 215,000 dollars in back taxes.
• August 1934 aged 35 Transferred to Alcatraz Federal officials said the isolation was designed specifically to cut him off from Chicago.
• January 25, 1947 aged 48 Dies at Palm Island at 47

• Herbert Hoover 1874–1964
  Engineer and relief administrator whose presidency was consumed by the onset of the Great Depression. ordered the federal attack on him
• Andrew W. Mellon 1855–1937
  Banker and art collector whose foundation built the National Gallery of Art. ran the Treasury that built the tax case
• William Jennings Bryan 1860–1925
  Three-time Democratic nominee and orator who made monetary reform, popular democracy, and moral politics central national issues. campaigned for the Prohibition that made him
• Robert De Niro b. 1943
  Academy Award-winning actor whose method performances in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull defined a generation. played him on screen