Alphonse Gabriel Capone (January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947), also known by the nickname “Scarface”, was an American gangster and businessman who rose to prominence during the Prohibition era as co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit from 1925 to 1931. His seven-year reign as a crime boss ended when he went to prison at the age of 33.
Capone was born in New York City in 1899 to Italian immigrants. He joined the Five Points Gang as a teenager and became a bouncer in organized crime properties such as brothels. In his early 20s, Capone moved to Chicago and became a bodyguard and trusted factotum for Johnny Torrio, head of a criminal syndicate that illegally supplied alcohol—the precursor to the Outfit—and was politically protected through the Unione Siciliana. A conflict with the North Side Gang played a major role in Capone’s rise and fall. Torrio retired after North Side gunmen nearly killed him and handed control to Capone. Capone expanded the smuggling business through increasingly violent means, but his mutually profitable relationships with Mayor William Hale Thompson and the Chicago Police Department made him seem safe from law enforcement.
Capone apparently enjoyed the attention, such as the cheers from spectators when he appeared at baseball games. He made donations to various charities and was seen by many as a “modern Robin Hood”. However, the Valentine’s Day massacre, in which seven gang rivals were murdered in broad daylight, damaged Chicago and Capone’s public image, leading influential citizens to demand government action and newspapers Capone “Public Enemy No. 1”.
Federal authorities wanted to jail Capone and charged him with twenty-two counts of tax evasion. He was convicted of five charges in 1931. In a highly publicized case, the judge admitted into evidence that Capone had admitted his income and unpaid taxes during earlier (and ultimately failed) negotiations to pay the government taxes he owed. He was sentenced to eleven years in prison. After his conviction, he replaced his defense team with tax law experts, and his appeal was strengthened by a Supreme Court ruling, but his appeal ultimately failed. Capone showed signs of neurosyphilis early in his sentence and became increasingly debilitated before being released after nearly eight years of incarceration. In 1947 he died of cardiac arrest following a stroke.
Early life
Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born on January 17, 1899, in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City. His parents were Italian immigrants Gabriele Capone (1865–1920) and Teresa Capone (née Raiola; 1867–1952). His father was a hairdresser and his mother a seamstress, both born in Angri, a small municipality outside Naples in the province of Salerno. Capone’s family had emigrated to the United States by ship in 1893, first via Fiume (modern Rijeka). , Croatia), a port city in what was then Austria-Hungary. The family settled at 95 Navy Street, in the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn. When Al was 11 years old, he and his family moved to 38 Garfield Place in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Capone’s parents had eight other children: James Vincenzo Capone, who later changed his name to Richard Hart and became a Prohibition agent in Homer, Nebraska; Raffaele James Capone, also known as Ralph Capone or “Bottles,” who took control of his brother’s beverage industry; Salvatore “Frank” Capone; Ermina Capone, who died at the age of one year; Ermino “John” Capone; Albert Capone; Matthew Capone and Mafalda Capone. Ralph and Frank worked with Al Capone in his criminal empire. Frank did this until his death on April 1, 1924. Early on, Ralph ran Capone’s bottling plants (both legal and illegal) and was also the frontman of the Chicago Outfit until he was imprisoned for tax evasion in 1932.
Al Capone showed promise as a student, but struggled with the rules at his strict parochial Catholic school. His schooling ended at the age of 14 after he was expelled from school for punching a female teacher in the face. Capone worked odd jobs in Brooklyn, including a candy store and a bowling alley. From 1916 to 1918 he played semi-professional baseball. After this, Capone was influenced by gangster Johnny Torrio, whom he came to regard as a mentor.
Capone married Mae Josephine Coughlin on December 30, 1918 at the age of 19. She was Irish Catholic and had given birth to their son Albert Francis “Sonny” Capone (1918-2004) earlier that month. Albert lost most of his hearing in his left ear as a child. Capone was under 21 years old and his parents had to consent to the marriage in writing. By all accounts the two had a happy marriage.
Career: New York City
Capone initially became involved with small gangs, including the Junior Forty Thieves and the Bowery Boys. He subsequently joined the Brooklyn Rippers and then the powerful Five Points Gang in Lower Manhattan. During this time he was employed and mentored by fellow racketeer Frankie Yale, a bartender at a Coney Island dance hall and saloon called the Harvard Inn. Capone accidentally insulted a woman while working the door, and was cut three times with a knife on the left side of his face by her brother, Frank Galluccio; the wounds led to the nickname “Scarface,” which Capone hated. The date this occurred has been reported with inconsistencies. When Capone was photographed, he hid the scarred left side of his face and said the injuries were war wounds. He was called “Snorky” by his best friends, a term for a sharp dresser.
Move to Chicago
In 1919, Capone left New York City for Chicago at the invitation of Torrio, who was imported as an enforcer by crime boss James “Big Jim” Colosimo. Capone started out in Chicago as a bouncer at a brothel, which is thought to be the most likely way he contracted syphilis. Capone was aware early on that he was infected and timely use of Salvarsan probably could have cured the infection, but he apparently never sought treatment. In 1923, Capone purchased a small house at 7244 South Prairie Avenue in the Park Manor neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side for $5,500.
According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, privateer Joe Howard was murdered on May 7, 1923, after trying to interfere with Capone-Torrio’s smuggling business. In the early years of the decade, Capone’s name appeared in newspaper sports pages where he was described as a boxing promoter. Torrio took over Colosimo’s criminal empire after the latter’s assassination on May 11, 1920, in which Capone was suspected of being involved.
Torrio led a mainly Italian organized crime group that was the largest in Chicago, with Capone as his right-hand man. Torrio was wary of getting involved in gang wars and tried to make deals over territory between rival crime groups. The smaller North Side Gang, led by Dean O’Banion, came under pressure from the Genna brothers who were allied with Torrio. O’Banion found that Torrio was unhelpful to the Gennas’ advance, despite his pretenses to being a settler of disputes. In a fateful move, Torrio arranged the murder of O’Banion in his flower shop on November 10, 1924. This placed Hymie Weiss at the head of the gang, backed by Vincent Drucci and Bugs Moran. Weiss had been a close friend of O’Banion, and the North Siders made it a priority to get revenge on his killers.
During Prohibition, Capone was involved with Canadian bootleggers who helped him smuggle liquor into the US. When Capone was asked if he knew Rocco Perri, billed as Canada’s “King of the Bootleggers,” he replied: “Why, I don’t even know which one.” St Canada is on.” However, other sources claim that Capone certainly visited Canada, where he had some hideouts, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police states that there is no “evidence that he ever set foot on Canadian soil.”
Boss
An ambush in January 1925 left Capone shaken but unscathed. Twelve days later, Torrio was returning from a shopping trip when he was shot several times. After recovering, he essentially resigned and handed control over to Capone, 26 years old, who became the new boss of an organization that seized illegal breweries and a transportation network that reached as far as Canada, with political and law enforcement protection. In turn, he could use more violence to increase revenues. Any establishment that refused to buy liquor from Capone was often blown up, and such bombings in the 1920s killed as many as a hundred people. Rivals saw Capone as responsible for the proliferation of brothels in the city.
Capone often enlisted the help of local members of the black community in his operations; jazz musicians Milt Hinton and Lionel Hampton had uncles who worked for Capone on Chicago’s South Side. Capone, also a fan of jazz, once asked clarinetist Johnny Dodds to play a song Dodds did not know; Capone split a $100 bill in half and told Dodds he would get the other half when he heard it. Capone also sent two bodyguards to accompany jazz pianist Earl Hines on a road trip.
Capone indulged in custom suits, cigars, gourmet food and drink, and female companionship. He was best known for his flamboyant and precious jewelry. His favorite answers to questions about his activities were: “I’m just a businessman who gives the people what they want”; and: “All I’m doing is meeting a public demand.” Capone had become a national celebrity and talking point.
Capone settled in Cicero, Illinois, after using bribery and widespread intimidation to take over the city council elections, making it difficult for the North Siders to attack him. Capone’s driver was found tortured and murdered, and an attempt on Weiss’ life took place in the Chicago Loop. On September 20, 1926, the North Siders used a trick outside Capone’s headquarters at the Hawthorne Inn, the aim of which was to lure him to the windows. Gunmen in several cars then opened fire with Thompson submachine guns and shotguns at the restaurant’s first-floor windows. Capone was unscathed and called for a truce, but negotiations failed. Three weeks later, on October 11, Weiss was murdered outside the North Siders’ headquarters in the former O’Banion flower shop. The owner of Hawthorne’s restaurant was a friend of Capone, and he was kidnapped and murdered by Moran and Drucci in January 1927.
Capone became increasingly security-oriented and eager to get away from Chicago. As a precaution, he and his entourage would often appear suddenly at one of Chicago’s train depots and buy up an entire Pullman sleeping car on an overnight train to Cleveland, Omaha, Kansas City, Little Rock or Hot Springs, Arkansas, where they would spend a week in luxury hotel suites under assumed names.
In 1928, Capone paid $40,000 to Clarence Busch of the Anheuser-Busch brewing family for a 2,000-square-foot house at 93 Palm Avenue on Palm Island, Florida, between Miami and Miami Beach.
Feud with Aiello
In November 1925, Capone’s consigliere, Antonio Lombardo, was appointed head of the Unione Siciliana, a Sicilian-American benevolent society that had been corrupted by gangsters. An angry Joe Aiello, who had wanted the position himself, believed that Capone was responsible for Lombardo’s ascension and resented the non-Sicilian’s attempts to manipulate affairs within the Unione. Aiello severed all personal and business ties with Lombardo and entered into a feud with Capone.
Aiello joined several other Capone enemies, including Jack Zuta, who jointly ran vice and gambling houses. Aiello plotted to eliminate both Lombardo and Capone, and from the spring of 1927 he made several attempts to assassinate Capone. On one occasion, Aiello offered money to the chef at Joseph “Diamond Joe” Esposito’s Bella Napoli Café, Capone’s favorite restaurant, to put prussic acid in Capone and Lombardo’s soup; Reports indicated he offered between $10,000 and $35,000. Instead, the chef presented the plot to Capone, who responded by sending men to destroy Aiello’s bakery on West Division Street with machine gun fire. On May 28, 1927, more than 200 bullets were fired into the bakery, wounding Joe’s brother Antonio.
During the summer and fall of 1927, a number of assassins Aiello had hired to kill Capone were themselves killed. Among them were Anthony Russo and Vincent Spicuzza, who had each been paid $25,000 by Aiello to kill Capone and Lombardo. Aiello eventually offered a $50,000 bounty to anyone who took out Capone. At least ten gunmen tried to collect the bounty but were killed. Capone’s ally Ralph Sheldon attempted to kill both Capone and Lombardo for Aiello’s reward, but Capone henchman Frank Nitti’s intelligence network learned of the transaction and had Sheldon shot in front of a West Side hotel, although he survived the incident.
In November 1927, Aiello organized machine gun ambushes across from Lombardo’s home and a cigar shop where Capone frequented, but those plans were foiled after an anonymous tip led police to raid several addresses and arrest Milwaukee gunman Angelo La Mantio and four other Aiello gunmen. After police discovered receipts for the apartments in La Mantio’s pockets, he confessed that Aiello had hired him to kill Capone and Lombardo, prompting police to arrest Aiello themselves and take him to the South Clark Street police station . When Capone learned of the arrest, he sent nearly twenty gunmen to stand guard outside the station and wait for Aiello’s release. The men made no attempt to conceal their purpose there, and reporters and photographers rushed to the scene to observe Aiello’s expected murder. When he was released, Aiello was given a police escort to the station to safety. He later failed to appear in court after his lawyer claimed he had suffered a nervous breakdown. Aiello disappeared with some family members to Trenton, NJ, from where he continued his campaign against Capone and Lombardo.
Political Alliances
Chicago politicians have long been associated with questionable methods and even “wars” in newspaper circulation, but the need for smugglers to gain protection at City Hall created a much more serious level of violence and corruption. Capone is generally considered to have had a significant effect in engineering the victory of Republican mayoral candidate William Hale Thompson, who had campaigned on a platform of not enforcing Prohibition and once hinted that he would reopen illegal saloons . Thompson reportedly accepted a $250,000 contribution from Capone. Thompson defeated Democratic candidate William Emmett Dever in the 1927 mayoral race by a relatively narrow margin.
On the day of the so-called Pineapple Primary on April 10, 1928, voting booths were targeted by Capone’s bomber, James Belcastro, in wards where Thompson’s opponents would have support, killing at least fifteen people. Belcastro was charged with the murder of attorney Octavius Granady, an African American who challenged Thompson’s candidate for the black vote and was chased through the streets by gunmen’s cars on Election Day before being shot dead. Along with Belcastro, four police officers were also among those charged, but all charges were dropped after key witnesses withdrew their statements. An indication of local law enforcement’s attitude toward Capone’s organization came in 1931 when Belcastro was injured in a shooting; Police suggested to skeptical journalists that Belcastro was an independent operator.
A 1929 report by The New York Times linked Capone to the 1926 murder of Assistant State’s Attorney William H. McSwiggin, the 1928 murder of lead investigator Ben Newmark and former mentor Frankie Yale.
Valentine’s Day Massacre
It was widely believed that Capone was responsible for ordering the Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, despite being at his Florida home at the time of the massacre. The massacre was an attempt to take out Bugs Moran, the head of the North Side Gang, and the motivation for the plan may have been the fact that expensive whiskey illegally imported from Canada via the Detroit River had been hijacked while it was was transported to Cook. County, Illinois.
Moran was the last survivor of the North Side gunmen; his succession had come about because his equally aggressive predecessors, Weiss and Vincent Drucci, had died in the violence that followed the assassination of original leader Dean O’Banion.
To monitor the habits and movements of their targets, Capone’s men rented an apartment across from the truck warehouse and garage at 2122 North Clark Street, which served as Moran’s headquarters. On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929, Capone’s lookouts signaled four armed men disguised as police officers to initiate a “police raid.” The fake police lined the seven victims up against a wall and called out to accomplices, armed with machine guns and shotguns. Moran was not among the victims. Photos of the slain victims shocked the public and damaged Capone’s image. Within days, Capone received a summons to testify before a Chicago grand jury on charges of federal ban violations, but he claimed to be too unwell to attend. In an effort to clean up his image, Capone donated to charities and sponsored a soup kitchen in Chicago during the Depression.
The Valentine’s Day Massacre led to public unrest over Thompson’s alliance with Capone and played a role in Anton J. Cermak’s winning the mayoral election on April 6, 1931.
The feud with Aiello ends
Capone was best known for ordering other men to do the dirty work for him. In May 1929, one of Capone’s bodyguards, Frank Rio, uncovered a plot by three of his men, Albert Anselmi, John Scalise, and Joseph Giunta, who had been persuaded by Aiello to depose Capone and take over the Chicago Outfit. Capone later beat the men with a baseball bat and then ordered his bodyguards to shoot them, a scene that was included in the 1987 film The Untouchables. Deirdre Bair, along with writers and historians such as William Elliot Hazelgrove, has challenged the accuracy of questioned the claim. Bair wondered why “three trained killers could sit quietly and let this happen,” while Hazelgrove stated that Capone “would have been hard pressed to beat three men to death with a baseball bat” and that he would instead have an enforcer commit the murders have had carried out. . Despite claims that the story was first reported by author Walter Noble Burns in his 1931 book The One-way Ride: The red trail of Chicago gangland from prohibition to Jake Lingle, Capone biographers Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz have versions of the story found in press coverage shortly after the crime. Collins and Schwartz suggest that similarities between reported versions of the story indicate a basis in the truth and that the Outfit deliberately spread the story to enhance Capone’s fearsome reputation.: xvi, 209–213, 565 George Meyer, a associate of Capone, also claimed to have witnessed both the planning of the murders and the event itself.
When Capone learned of Aiello’s continued plots against him in 1930, he finally decided to eliminate him. In the weeks before Aiello’s death, Capone’s men tracked him to Rochester, New York, where he had connections through Buffalo crime family boss Stefano Magaddino, and plotted to kill him there, but Aiello returned to Chicago before the plot could be carried out. Aiello, plagued by the constant need to hide and the murders of several of his men, settled in Chicago in the apartment of Unione Siciliana treasurer Pasquale “Patsy Presto” Prestogiacomo at 205 N. Kolmar Ave. As he left the Prestogiacomo building to enter a taxi, a gunman in a second-floor window across the street began shooting at Aiello with a submachine gun. Aiello was said to have been shot at least thirteen times before falling down the building’s stairs and turning a corner in an attempt to get out of the line of fire. Instead, he moved directly into range of a second submachine gun placed on the third floor of another apartment building and was subsequently shot.
Federal Intervention
In the aftermath of the Valentine’s Day Massacre, Walter A. Strong, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, asked his friend President Herbert Hoover for federal intervention to stop Chicago’s lawlessness. He arranged a secret meeting at the White House just two weeks after Hoover’s inauguration. On March 19, 1929, Strong, along with Frank Loesch of the Chicago Crime Commission, and Laird Bell, presented their case to the President. In Hoover’s 1952 memoir, the former president reported that Strong argued that “Chicago was in the hands of the gangsters, that the police and magistrates were completely under their control, … that the federal government was the only force through which the city’s wealth to govern themselves could be restored. I immediately ordered that all federal agencies focus on Mr. Capone and his allies.”
That meeting launched a multi-agency attack on Capone. The Treasury and Justice Departments developed plans for income tax prosecutions against Chicago gangsters, and a small, elite team of Prohibition Bureau agents (which included Eliot Ness) was deployed against bootleggers. In a city accustomed to corruption, these police officers were incorruptible. Charles Schwarz, a writer for the Chicago Daily News, called them Untouchables. To support the federal effort, Strong secretly used his newspaper’s resources to gather and share information about the Capone outfit.
Trials
On March 27, 1929, Capone was arrested by FBI agents as he left a Chicago courtroom after testifying before a grand jury investigating violations of federal prohibition laws. He was charged with contempt of court for calling in sick to avoid an earlier appearance. On May 16, 1929, Capone was arrested in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for carrying a concealed weapon. On May 17, 1929, Capone was indicted by a grand jury and a trial was held before Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge John E Walsh. After his attorney entered a guilty plea, Capone was sentenced to one year in prison. On August 8, 1929, Capone was transferred to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. A week after his release in March 1930, Capone was listed as the number one “Public Enemy” on the unofficial Chicago Crime Commission’s much-discussed list.
In April 1930, Capone was arrested for vagrancy while visiting Miami Beach; the governor had ordered sheriffs to drive him out of the state. Capone claimed that Miami police denied him food and water and threatened to arrest his family. He was charged with perjury for making these statements, but was acquitted in July after a three-day trial. In September, a Chicago judge issued an arrest warrant for Capone on vagrancy charges and then used the publicity to run against Thompson in the Republican primary. In February 1931, Capone was tried for contempt of court. In court, Judge James Herbert Wilkerson intervened to enhance the prosecution’s questioning of Capone’s doctor. Wilkerson sentenced Capone to six months, but he remained free while he appealed the contempt conviction.
In February 1930, Capone’s organization was linked to the murder of Julius Rosenheim, who served as a police informant in the Chicago Outfit for twenty years.
Tax Evasion
Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt allegedly devised the tactic of charging obviously wealthy crime figures with federal tax evasion based on their lavish lifestyles. In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sullivan that the approach was legally sound: illegally earned income was subject to income tax.
The key to Capone’s tax conviction was not his expenses, but proving his income, and the most valuable evidence in that regard originated in his offer to pay taxes. Ralph, his brother and a gangster himself, was tried for tax evasion in 1930. Ralph spent the next 18 months in prison after being convicted in a two-week trial led by Wilkerson. In an attempt to avoid the same fate, Al Capone ordered his lawyer to regularize his tax position, and although this did not happen, his lawyer made crucial admissions when he stated the income on which Capone had been willing to pay taxes for years, reporting an income of $ 100,000 admitted. for example 1928 and 1929. Therefore, without any investigation, the government had obtained a letter from a lawyer acting on behalf of Capone admitting his large taxable income for certain years on which he had paid no taxes. On March 13, 1931, Capone was indicted by a secret grand jury for income tax evasion for 1924. On June 5, 1931, Capone was indicted by a federal grand jury on 22 counts of income tax evasion from 1925 to 1929; he was released on $50,000 bail. Capone was subsequently indicted for 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act: 385–421, 493–496
On June 16, 1931, at the Chicago Federal Building in Wilkerson’s courtroom, Capone pleaded guilty to income tax evasion and the 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act as part of a plea bargain of 2+1⁄2 years in prison. However, on July 30, 1931, Wilkerson refused to honor the plea, and Capone’s counsel withdrew the guilty pleas. On the second day of the trial, Wilkerson opined that the 1930 letter to federal authorities could be admitted into evidence, overruling objections that an attorney could not admit to his client. Wilkerson later tried Capone on the income tax evasion charges alone, determining that these took precedence over the Volstead Act charges.
Later, other evidence, such as witnesses and ledgers, was heavily used, but these strongly implied Capone’s control rather than stating it. Capone’s attorneys, who had relied on the plea deal that Wilkerson refused to honor and therefore had only hours to prepare for trial, mounted a weak defense, focusing on the claim that essentially all of his income had been lost through gambling. This would have been irrelevant anyway, as gambling losses can only be deducted from gambling winnings, but it was further undermined by Capone’s expenses, which far exceeded what his claimed income could support; Wilkerson allowed Capone’s expenses to be presented in great detail. The government accused Capone of evading $215,000 in taxes on a total income of $1,038,654, during the five-year period. Capone was convicted on five counts of income tax evasion on October 17, 1931, and a week later sentenced to 11 years in prison, fined $50,000 plus $7,692 for court costs, and found liable for $215,000 plus interest on his back taxes. . At the same time, the contempt of court sentence was served. New attorneys hired to represent Capone were Washington-based tax experts. They filed a writ of habeas corpus based on a Supreme Court ruling that tax evasion was not fraud, which apparently meant that Capone had been convicted on charges covering years that were actually outside the time limit for prosecution. However, a judge interpreted the law to deduct the time Capone had spent in Miami from the age of the offenses, dismissing the appeal of both Capone’s conviction and sentence.
Imprisonment
Capone was sent to the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta in May 1932 at the age of 33. Upon his arrival in Atlanta, Capone was officially diagnosed with syphilis and gonorrhea. He also experienced withdrawal symptoms from a cocaine addiction, the use of which had perforated his nasal septum. Capone was skilled at his prison job: sewing soles on shoes eight hours a day, but his letters were barely coherent. He was seen as having a weak personality, and so deep into dealing with bullying from fellow inmates that his cellmate, veteran convict Red Rudensky, feared Capone would have a breakdown. Formerly a petty criminal with ties to the Capone gang, Rudensky found himself becoming a protector for Capone. The conspicuous protection by Rudensky and other prisoners led to accusations from less friendly prisoners and fueled suspicions that Capone was receiving special treatment. No hard evidence ever emerged, but it was part of the reason for moving Capone to the newly opened Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary off the coast of San Francisco in August 1934. On June 23, 1936, Capone was stabbed and superficially wounded by a fellow Alcatraz inmate. James C. Lucas.
Because of his good behavior, Capone was allowed to play banjo in the Alcatraz prison band, the Rock Islanders, which regularly performed Sunday concerts for other inmates. Capone also transcribed the song “Madonna Mia” and created his own arrangement as a tribute to his wife Mae.
At Alcatraz, Capone’s decline became increasingly apparent as neurosyphilis gradually eroded his mental faculties; his formal diagnosis of syphilis of the brain was made in February 1938. He spent the last year of his sentence at Alcatraz confused and disoriented in the hospital ward. Capone completed his term at Alcatraz on January 6, 1939, and was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island in California to serve his sentence for contempt of court. He was released on parole on November 16, 1939, after his wife Mae appealed to the court due to his diminished mental faculties.
Chicago Aftermath
The main consequence of Capone’s conviction was that he was no longer in charge immediately after his imprisonment, but those involved in Capone’s capture portrayed it as a significant undermining of the city’s organized crime syndicate. Capone’s underboss, Frank Nitti, took over as boss of the Outfit after he was released from prison in March 1932, having also been convicted of tax evasion. Rather than being destroyed, the Outfit continued without trouble from the Chicago police, but at a reduced level and without the overt violence that had characterized Capone’s rule. Organized crime in the city took on a lower profile when Prohibition was repealed, already wary of the attention after seeing Capone’s fame bring him down, to the extent that there is a lack of consensus among writers about who was actually in control and who was a figurehead. front boss”.: 468–469, 517–518, 524–527, 538–541 Prostitution, union extortion, and gambling became money makers for organized crime in the city without being seriously investigated. In the late 1950s, FBI agents uncovered an organization led by Capone’s former lieutenants that reigned supreme over the Chicago underworld.
Some historians have speculated that Capone ordered the 1939 murder of Edward J. O’Hare a week before his release because he had helped federal prosecutors convict Capone of tax evasion, although there are other theories for O’Hare’s death .
Illness and death
Due to his poor health, Capone was released from prison on November 16, 1939 and referred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for treatment of syphilitic paresis. Because of his unsavory reputation, Johns Hopkins refused to treat him, but Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore did. Capone was grateful for the compassionate care he received and donated two Japanese weeping cherry trees to Union Memorial Hospital in 1939. After a few weeks of inpatient and outpatient care, a very sickly Capone left Baltimore on March 20, 1940, and traveled to his native country. mansion in Palm Island, Florida. In 1942, after mass production of penicillin began in the United States, Capone was one of the first American patients to be treated with the new drug. Although it was too late for him to reverse the damage to his brain, it did slow the progression of the disease.
In 1946, his doctor and a Baltimore psychiatrist examined him and concluded that Capone had the mentality of a 12-year-old child. He spent the last years of his life at his mansion on Palm Island, where he spent time with his wife and grandchildren. On January 21, 1947, Capone suffered a stroke. He regained consciousness and began to improve, but developed bronchopneumonia. He went into cardiac arrest on January 22 and died on January 25, surrounded by his family at his home, after his heart failed due to a stroke. His body was transported back to Chicago a week later and a private funeral was held. He was originally buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Chicago. In 1950, Capone’s remains, along with those of his father, Gabriele, and brother, Frank, were moved to Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois.
