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        Prohibition, in its day, caused crime rates to soar to new levels. There was a new type of crime: Bootlegging and Rumrunning. A criminal was born in this era, arguably one of the most dangerous criminals of all time. His name? Al "Scarface" Capone. Alphonse Capone was born in the USA on January 17, 1899. As a child, Al was generally a happy person, and was treated well by his parents. His parents, Gabriel and Teresia Capone had originally emigrated from Italy to the USA in hopes of opening their own barbershop.

        Shortly after Al was born, Gabriel moved the family to better lodgings at 69 Park Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. Here, Al was exposed to new cultures, with many German, Swedes, and Chinese in the area. John Kobler wrote about Al's neighbourhood in his book, The Life And World Of Al Capone. He writes:

"Life in the sector where Al lived his first ten years was harsh, but never drab, never stagnant. Hordes of ragged children gave the streets an explosive vitality as they played stickball, dodged traffic, brawled and bawled, while their mothers, dark heavy-thighed women, bustled to and fro balancing on their heads baskets laden with supplies for the day's meals. Fruit and vegetable carts, standing wheel to wheel, made a bright, fragrant clutter along the curb. The fire escapes that formed an iron lacework across the faces of the squat tenements shook and shuddered as the El trains roared by close behind on Myrtle Avenue."

        Though Al Capone went to a fairly anti-Italian school, he remained a fairly good person, always coming home to his mother after school. Al did quite well in school until the sixth grade when his steady record of B's deteriorated rapidly. At fourteen, he lost his temper at his teacher, she hit him and he hit her back. He was expelled and never went to school again. About this time, his family moved from their house on Navy Street to 21 Garfield Place. This move would have a lasting impact on Al because in this new neighborhood he would meet the people who would have the most influence on his future. He would meet his wife Mae, and the gangster Johnny Torrio, who would become Al's role model and private tutor.

        A few blocks away from Al's new house lived Johnny Torrio, one of the most successful gangsters on the east coast. Torrio was a new breed of gangster, a pioneer in the development of a modern criminal enterprise. Torrio's administrative and organizational talents transformed crude racketeering into a kind of corporate structure, allowing his businesses to expand as opportunities emerged. From Torrio, a young Capone learned invaluable lessons that were the foundation of the criminal empire he built later in Chicago. Torrio wasn't much of a criminal, but was more of a businessmen dealing in topics, which were not quite legal. He was a role model for many boys in the community. Capone, like many other boys his age, earned pocket money by running errands for Johnny Torrio. Over time, Torrio came to trust the young Capone and gave him more to do. Johnny Torrio Meantime, young Al learned by observing the wealthy successful respected racketeer and the people in his organization. Al learned from Torrio the importance of leading an outwardly respectable life. Al was still ok, and not really corrupted into a life of crime.

        In 1909, Al Capone and his family moved to Chicago, and things began anew, as he fell under different influences.

        At this point in his life, nobody would ever have believed that Al would go on to be the criminal czar that he ultimately became. For approximately six years he worked faithfully at exceptionally boring jobs, first at a munitions factory and then as a paper cutter. He was a good boy, well behaved and sociable. People at the time had said, "You didn't hear stories about Al Capone practicing with guns; you heard that he went home each night to his mother. Al was something of a nonentity, affable, soft of speech and even mediocre in everything but dancing."

        So how did Al Capone become "Public Enemy #1"? Francis Yale A main reason was a person known as Francis Yale. Yale was a tough bar owner who opened a bar in Al's area. Under Torrio's recommendation, he hired now eighteen-year-old Al to be his barkeeper. Capone became quite popular in his first, pleasing both his boss and his customers. Unfortunately, all this turned around when he was serving the table of a young couple. The young girl was beautiful and Capone was entranced. He leaned over the table and said to her, "Honey, you have a nice ass and I mean that as a compliment." The man with her was her brother, Frank Gallucio. Unfortunately for Al, he jumped to his feet and punched the man who "insulted" his sister. Capone flew into a rage and Gallucio drew a knife to protect himself. Gallucio slashed Capone's face three times, and although the cuts healed well, the scars were to remain for life. This is how Al Capone got the nickname "Scarface."

        Capone's insult caused a bit of an uproar. Gallucio went to Frankie Yale. When it came to Yale's attention, Capone was forced to apologize to Gallucio. Capone learned something from the experience --to restrain his temper when it was necessary.

        As powerful as Yale's influence would be on Capone's eventual development, other influences had a very moderating effect on Al. At the age of nineteen, he met a pretty blond Irish girl named

A Teen Al Capone Mae Coughlin, who was two years older than he was. Her family was comfortable and solidly middle class. It's hard to imagine that Mae's family embraced her relationship with Capone and it was not until after their baby was born that they married. Al was around eighteen at the time.

        Their baby, Albert Francis Capone was born December 4, 1918. His godfather was Johnny Torrio. While Sonny, as he many people nicknamed him, hand a good health at birth, he was in fact a victim of congenital syphilis. Years later, Al Capone confessed to doctors that he had been infected before he was married, but he believed that the infection had gone away, but he was wrong.

        With a beautiful respectable wife and a baby to support, Al focused on a legitimate career. He stopped working for Frankie Yale and moved to Baltimore where he worked as capable bookkeeper for Peter Aiello's construction firm. Al did very well. He was smart, had a good head for figures and was very reliable.

        Quite suddenly, Alss father died November 14, 1920, of heart disease at the age of fifty-five. Many people believe that, "It is possible that the sudden absence of parental authority made the young Capone feel free to abandon his bookkeeping job and his carefully acquired aura of respectability..." Capone resumed his connection with Johnny Torrio, who had expanded and moved from Brooklyn to Chicago. The opportunities were enormous: gambling, brothels, and... illegal alcohol. Torrio asked for Al's help in 1921 and Al accepted and became his sidekick. Capone, armed with his knowledge of business and brutality under Frankie Yale, had a good resume to start a career of crime.

        Chicago was a perfect place to build a criminal empire. It was a rowdy, pugnacious, hard-drinking town that was open to anyone with enough money to buy it. In the words of one of her top journalists, "She was vibrant and violent, stimulating and ruthless, intolerant of smugness, impatient with those either physically or intellectually timid." It was a bloody and brutal city where tens of millions of cows, hogs and sheep were slaughtered by men wading through blood on the killing floor. It was strictly a commercial town with no appetite for snobbery or "old money."

        Political corruption was a tradition in that vast prairie city, creating an atmosphere of two-fisted lawlessness in which crime flourished. The city became known for its wealth and sexual promiscuity. When Al Capone came to the city in 1920, the flesh trade was becoming the province of organized crime. The kingpin of this business was "Big Jim" Colosimo along with his wife and partner, Victoria Moresco, a highly successful madam. Together their brothels were earning an estimated $50,000 per month.

        Big Jim owned the Colosimo Cafe, one of the most popular nightclubs in the city. Nobody cared that he was a pimp. It never stopped him from hobnobbing with the rich and famous. Enrico Caruso was a regular, as well as the distinguished lawyer Clarence Darrow. Big Jim, with huge diamonds glittering on every one of his fat fingers and diamond-studded belts and buckles, was a true product a Chicago society --handsome, generous, gaudy, and larger than life.

        As his family vice business grew, Big Jim brought in the discreet Johnny Torrio from Brooklyn to operate and grow their empire. It was the best decision he could have made because Torrio expanded their business without attracting attention. Torrio was a serious businessman with no interest in hanky-panky. In stark contrast to Big Jim, Torrio didn't drink, smoke, swear or cheat on his devoted wife Ann.

        The downfall of Big Jim was Dale Winter, a pretty young singer who stole his heart. He foolishly divorced Victoria and married the young singer immediately afterward. Word of Colosimo's folly got back to Brooklyn where Frankie Yale took notice of opportunity and decided to muscle in on Colosimo's huge empire. On May 11, 1920, Yale assassinated Big Jim in his nightclub.

        Eventually the police figured out who the murderer was and they arrested Yale in New York. However, the only witness to the murder was a waiter, who refused to testify against Frankie Yale. While Yale was able to avoid prosecution, his attempt to take over Colosimo's empire failed. Torrio was able to maintain his grip on the vast multimillion-dollar-a-year business he had built for Big Jim. With a big boost to business from Prohibition, Torrio oversaw thousands of whorehouses, gambling joints and speakeasies.

        It was into this vast criminal enterprise that Torrio brought twenty-two-year-old Al Capone from his honest bookkeeping job in Baltimore. The money and opportunity for advancement was an order of magnitude greater, but the disgrace of managing brothels bothered Al. It was 1921 and Capone had turned his back on respectability forever. With his business acumen, soon Al became Torrio's partner instead of his employee. Al took over as manager of the Four Deuces, Torrio's headquarters in the Levee area. The Four Deuces was a speakeasy, gambling joint and whorehouse all in one. Soon his brother Ralph would come to join him in Torrio's business.

        Jack Guzik At this time, Al became associated with a man that would be his friend for life, Jack Guzik. Incredibly enough, Guzik's large Jewish Orthodox family made their living through prostitution. Closer in lifestyle to Torrio, Guzik was a devoted family man who acted like an older brother to Al. Once again, Capone showed his ability to step outside the Italian community as he had in marrying his Irish wife. Now his closest friend was Jewish. Capone's lack of prejudice and ability to create alliances outside of the Italian gangster community would be invaluable in creating his destiny.

        Capone's house in Chicago Al was doing quite well financially and bought a house for his family in a respectable neighborhood. To this modest home at 7244 Prairie Avenue, he brought not only Mae and Sonny, but also his mother and other siblings. Al posed to his neighbors as a dealer in second-hand furniture and went out of his way to maintain a facade of respectability. People were convinced that the house on Prairie Avenue, Mae and Sonny represented Capone's striving for redemption. "Although he preyed on other people's weaknesses for a living, his reputation and standing in the community mattered deeply to him. The deeper he went into racketeering and all its associated sins, the more he idealized his family, as though they, in their innocence, were living proof that he was not the monster that the newspapers later insisted he was."

        For several years everything was relatively quite among Capone's gang and other gangs in Chicago. Soon though, Mayor "Big Bill" was elected. Big Bill was a spectacularly corrupt person, and this complicated things in the gang, as the city's government was put into the hands of an earnest reformer. So it was decided that Torrio and Capone would move from Chicago into the suburb of Cicero, where they were able to purchase the entire city's government and police department.

Shortly after opening up a brothel in Cicero, Torrio took his elderly mother back to live in Italy, leaving Capone in charge of the business in Cicero. Capone made it clear that he wanted an all-out conquest of the town. He installed his older brother Frank (Salvatore), a handsome and respectable-looking man of twenty-nine, as the front man with the Cicero city government. Ralph Capone, another sibling, was tasked with opening up a working-class brothel called the Stockade for Cicero's heavily blue-collar population. Al focused on gambling and took an interest in a new gambling joint called the Ship. He also took control of the Hawthorne Race Track.

        For the most part, the Capone conquest of Cicero was unopposed, with the exception of Robert St. John, the crusading young journalist at the Cicero Tribune. Every issue contained an expose on the Capone rackets in the city. The editorials were effective enough to threaten Capone-backed candidates in the 1924 primary election.

        On Election Day, things got ugly as Capone's forces kidnapped opponents' election workers and threatened voters with violence. As reports of the violence spread, the Chicago chief of police rounded up seventy-nine cops and provided them with shotguns. The cops, dressed in plain clothes, rode in unmarked cars to Cicero under the guise of protecting workers at the Western Electric plant there.

        Frank Capone murdered Frank Capone, who had just finished negotiating a lease, was walking down the street when the convoy of Chicago policemen approached him. Someone recognized him and the cars emptied out in front of him. In seconds, Frank's body was riddled with bullets. Technically, the police called it self defense, since Frank, seeing the police coming at him with guns drawn, had drawn his own revolver.

        Al was enraged and escalated the violence by kidnapping officials and stealing ballot boxes. One official was murdered. When it was all over, Capone had won his victory for Cicero, but at a price that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

        Capone threw his brother a funeral unmatched in opulence. The flowers alone, provided by racketeer florist Dixon Oblation, cost $20,000. Al Capone could barely restrain himself from a full-fledged war on the police in and around the city. At the age of 25, Capone became the most powerful man in Chicago. He became a target for lawmen and rival gangster alike. He was aware that the next expensive funeral he attended could be his own. The fragile peace that Torrio had constructed with other gangs was blown apart by Prohibition.

        In January 1925, twelve days after the Weiss-Moran gang had tried to assassinate Capone, but failed, Johnny Torrio came back to Chicago. He and his wife Ann were just returned from a shopping trip and got out of their car to walk to the door of their apartment building. Torrio walked behind her carrying packages. Weiss and Bugs Moran jumped out of a car and, thinking that Torrio was still in his automobile, fired wildly, wounding the chauffeur. When they finally saw Torrio, they shot him in the chest and neck, then his right arm and his groin. Moran held a gun to Torrio's temple and pulled the trigger, but the firing chamber was empty and poor Johnny Torrio, the peacemaker, heard only a faint click.

        Torrio after murder attempt At the hospital, Capone took over while surgeons removed the bullets in Torrio's raw body. The hospital was a dangerous place for a gangster. The security was rotten, so Capone arranged for Torrio's security on his own, which included Al sleeping in his room on a cot making sure that his beloved mentor, was safe.

        After this incident things would never be the same for Torrio. He wanted out of this life of violence. He wanted to retire and live quietly on his substantial earnings. He called Al to the jail in Waukegan in March of 1925 and told him that he was retiring from the Chicago rackets and going to live abroad. Torrio was turning over his vast assets to Al and the rest of the Capone brothers. It was an amazing legacy: nightclubs, whorehouses, gambling joints, breweries and speakeasies. Capone's power increased immensely.

        Shortly after Capone took over Johnny Torrio's empire, it was clear that his new status had changed Al Capone. He was a major force now in the Chicago underworld. To underscore his rise in the world, he moved his headquarters to the Metropole Hotel. His luxurious suite of five rooms cost $1,500 per day. He went from near obscurity to cultivated visibility.

        His friendship with newspaper editor Harry Read convinced Capone that he should behave like the prominent figure he was. "Quit hiding," Read told him. "Be nice to people." Capone became visible at the opera, at sporting events and charitable functions. He was an important member of the community: friendly, generous, successful, supplying a throng of thirsty customers. In an era where most of the adult population drank bootleg alcohol, the bootlegger seemed almost respectable.

        In December of 1925, Al took his son to New York for surgery to relieve his chronic ear infections. Al was devoted to his only child and the boy's poor health constantly preyed on his mind. Capone used the visit to New York to transact some business with his old boss Frankie Yale. The subject was imported whiskey, which was always in short supply since it had to be smuggled over the Canadian border. It was easier for Yale to get whiskey into New York than it was for Capone to get whiskey into Chicago, so Yale had an oversupply. They worked out a deal and Capone would figure out how to get the whiskey from New York to Chicago.

        Yale invited Al to a Christmas Day party at the Adonis Social and Athletic Club, a fancy name for a Brooklyn speakeasy. Yale was tipped off that rival gangster Richard "Peg-Leg" Lonergan was going to crash the party with a bunch of his thugs. Yale wanted to cancel the party, but Capone insisted the celebration go forward.

        Capone planned a surprise of his own. When Lonergan's men came to the club around 3 A.M. they were insulting and obnoxious. Capone gave the signal and all hell broke loose. Lonergan and his men didn't even have time to draw their guns they were so surprised at the well-orchestrated attack.

        The Adonis Club Massacre was Al flexing his muscle in his old stamping ground. It was also a way of displaying Chicago's gangland superiority over New York. "Chicago is the imperial city of the gang world, and New York a remote provincial place," wrote Alva Johnston in the New Yorker. In Chicago," beer has lifted the gangster from a local leader of roughs and gunmen to a great executive controlling a big interstate and international organization. Beer, real beer, like water supply or the telephone, is a natural monopoly." He then created a written portrait of Al Capone, the "greatest gang leader in history."

        Back in Chicago at the beginning of 1926, Capone was in excellent spirits. Not only had he made his mark in New York, but also his whiskey deal would change the face of interstate transportation. Young men with a thirst for adventure and the need for money made a good living working as one of Capone's truckers.

        Unfortunately, things got worse. Old rivals came together and Capone was forced into hiding. Many say that about 300 detectives searched for him all around in Chicago, Canada, and even Italy. Capone went to Lansing in Michigan and hid there. There, things went uphill again.

        His bootlegging operations employed thousands of people, many of who were poor Italian immigrants. His generosity was becoming legendary in Lansing. While much of this was just his ego getting larger, Capone had real leadership abilities and was very capable of extending those talents into areas that were beneficial to the community. He seriously thought of retiring from his life of crime and violence.

        Capone's fingerprints Al Capone couldn't spend the rest of his life in hiding so he decided upon a calculated but risky course. He negotiated his surrender to the Chicago police. It was the first step in the new direction in which he wanted to take his life. On July 28, 1926, he returned to Chicago to face the accusations of murder. It turned out to be the right decision because the authorities did not have sufficient evidence to bring him to trial. For all the public uproar and efforts of the law enforcement groups, Al Capone was a free man. The authorities looked impotent.

        The people of Chicago were tired of reading about gang violence and the newspapers fanned their anger. Capone held a highly publicized "peace conference" in which he appealed to the other bootleggers assembled there to tone down the violence. "There is enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the streets. I don't want to die in the street punctured by machine-gun fire." He made his point. At the end of the meeting, an "amnesty" had been negotiated which accomplished two key things: first, there would be no more murders or beatings and second, past murders would not be avenged. For more than two months thereafter, nobody connected with the bootlegging business was killed.

        In January of 1927, one of Al's closest friends, Theodore Anton, known as "Tony the Greek," was found murdered. Capone was in tears over the loss of his friend and started to think more seriously about retirement. He invited a group of reporters over to his house and cooked them a spaghetti dinner, all to announce his retirement. Was he serious or just play-acting? He probably was serious about retiring before someone put a bullet in his skull, but Al's need for power and excitement kept pushing real retirement into the future. Capone?s life went on for a while with more raids, and even though people knew it was Capone, they did not have substantial evidence to ever convict him.

        Eventually, new people were elected into Chicago's head offices. New people wanted action taken against Capone. After just a few days in office, Herbert Hoover pressured Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury, to spearhead the government's battle against Capone.

        Mellon commissioned a two-pronged approach: to get the necessary evidence to prove income tax evasion and to amass enough evidence to prosecute Capone successfully for Prohibition violations. Once the evidence was collected, the Treasury agents were to work with the U.S. Attorney, George E. Q. Johnson to initiate prosecution of Capone and the key members of his organization.

        The man charged with gathering the evidence of Prohibition violations --bootlegging --was Eliot Ness, who began to assemble a team of daring young agents like him. Elmer Irey of the IRS Special Intelligence Unit, who redoubled his ongoing efforts shortly after Hoover's mandate, led the biggest effort. While there was doubt that Capone could be successfully prosecuted for Prohibition violations in Chicago, regardless of the weight of evidence, Mellon felt sure that with the Sullivan ruling the government could get Capone on tax evasion.

        Capone was, at least initially, unaware of the forces put in motion against him and generally did not let concerns about federal agents interfere with business. In mid-May, 1929, Capone went to a conference in Atlantic City where gangsters of all types from all over the country met to talk about cooperation rather than mutual destruction.

        After the conference, Capone went to a movie in Philadelphia. When the movie was over, two detectives were waiting for him. In less than 24 hours Capone was arrested and imprisoned for carrying a concealed weapon.

        In mid-March of 1930, Capone was released from jail, a few months early because of good behavior. A week later, Frank J. Loesch, the head of the Chicago Crime Commission, put together a Public Enemies list, which was headed by Alphonse Capone, Ralph Capone, Frank Rio, Jack McGurn, and Jack Guzick, all Capone colleagues. The list was publicized in the newspapers and quickly adapted by J. Edgar Hoover as the FBI's list of the "Most Wanted" criminals. So now, Al Capone, who wanted so much to legitimize himself as a contributing member of the community was Public Enemy Number One. He was enraged, humiliated and thoroughly insulted.

        In that same month, Elmer Irey went to Chicago to meet with the agent-in-charge Arthur P. Madden to map out their battle strategy. It became clear to both of them that they needed an insider in the Capone organization if they were going to be successful in the short-term. Before he went back to Washington, Irey spent two days hanging around the lobby of the Lexington Hotel, posing as a salesman. Once he developed a feel for the kinds of thugs that lived there, he came up with a brilliant idea: he would find two undercover agents who could, posing as gangsters, infiltrate the Capone organization.

        "The obvious choice was Michael J. Malone.... He was a good actor, with an ability to blend into any background. He had nerves of steel and a sharp intelligence. His dark, almost Mediterranean looks and his ability to speak Italian made him an ideal candidate for infiltration into the Italian-dominated Capone Empire" (Ludwig, Smyth). Another undercover agent was selected to be his partner in this venture.

        Malone would take the name De Angelo and the other agent Graziano. Major efforts were made to create false identities for the two men as small-time Brooklyn racketeers. They knew that every single detail of the forged identities would be scrutinized and that their lives depended upon how well they studied for their parts.

        Neither Graziano nor De Angelo could ever be seen or heard talking to Irey or Madden, so an intermediary had to be found. The third agent in this venture was Frank J. Wilson, a 43-year-old star in the agency. Wilson would not only be the contact man for Graziano and De Angelo, he was to coordinate intelligence and evidence and perform some of the investigations himself.

        In June of 1930, Wilson got approval from the eccentric publisher of the Chicago Tribune to question one of his reporters. Jake Lingle was a friend of Al Capone's who flaunted the relationship. People believed that Lingle wanted more than the profitable connection he had to the mob. "His influence made him feel invulnerable when in fact his position was extremely vulnerable. Acting as a double agent or even a triple agent was too thrilling to resist. Not satisfied with playing this extremely tricky role, he agreed to inform on Capone for the federal government." Lingle's appointment was June 10, but he got a bullet in the back of his skull the day before.

        The uproar was deafening. Capone rode it all out at his home in Miami Beach. When asked about Lingle, Capone said, "newspapers and newspapermen should be busy suppressing rackets and not supporting them. It does not become me of all persons to say that, but I believe it."

        Meanwhile, Irey's Mike "De Angelo" checked himself into the Lexington Hotel, dressed himself in flashy expensive clothing and hung around the hotel bar, quietly reading the newspapers. Eventually the Capone soldiers struck up a conversation with him and started to ask him questions about his background.

        "We want the McCoy about you," one of the gangsters told him. "You look like maybe you're on the lam and might be open to a proposition --and how do you know, we might have something for you."

        De Angelo played along: "matter of fact, I am open for something, but it's got to be good. If you want it straight, why I come out here in the first place is I didn't know but what maybe I could tie in with the Big Boy."

        The gangster told him they had to do some checking first, but to hang around for a few days and they'd give him an answer. De Angelo hoped he hadn't screwed up any of his fabricated identity or he would be a dead man. A few days later, he was invited to meet with the mob and Capone himself at a big party. Fully aware that Capone would wine and dine a traitor and beat him to death with a baseball bat, De Angelo went to the party with trepidation.

        Fortunately, Irey's thoroughness in crafting his agent's background paid off handsomely. De Angelo was made a croupier in one of Capone's Cicero gambling joints.

        Just before Ralph Capone's trial, De Angelo found out that the mob was going to focus on the government's witnesses. It was good intelligence because Irey arranged for extra protection of the government witnesses. The result was a guilty verdict for Ralph and no damage to government witnesses.

        A few months later, Graziano, who got a job checking on Capone’s beer deliveries, joined De Angelo. Just before Christmas, they uncovered a plot on Wilson's life and caught it just in time. Now that the Capone organization knew about Wilson, Irey wanted to reassign him, but Wilson wouldn't have it. This attempt on his life made him all the more determined to get Capone.

        The real intelligence paydirt came in a conversation between Graziano and one of Capone's employees. "The income tax dicks ain't so smart. They've had a record book of Al's for five years that could send him to jail, only they're too dumb to realize it."

        It turned out that the mountain of records taken from a raid years earlier on the Hawthorne Hotel included a ledger that documented the financial operations of the Hawthorne Smoke Shop for the years 1924-1926. What Irey needed now was to figure out the identity of the two bookkeepers that made those entries. The handwriting didn't match up with any of Capone's men. Chances were that Capone had them disposed of when the ledgers were seized.

        Graziano took a huge risk and asked the man who told him about the ledgers if the bookkeepers had been "taken care of." The gangster replied, "they weren't exactly taken care of because they were only a couple of dopes, but they left town five years ago when the smoke shop was raided." Incredibly enough, the gangster then told Graziano their names: Leslie Shumway and Fred Reis.

        Capone's soup kitchen As 1930 drew to a close, Capone embarked on a major publicity campaign. He opened a free soup kitchen for the people who had been thrown out of work by the deepening Depression. During the last two months of the year, the soup kitchen served three free meals a day. "The soup kitchen was carefully calculated to rehabilitate his image and to ingratiate himself with the workingman, who, he realized, had come to regard him as another unimaginably wealthy and powerful tycoon.

        On another government front, Eliot Ness was becoming increasingly successful at finding and shutting down Capone's brewing business. He and his Untouchables had impressively documented thousands of Prohibition violations that would be used against Capone if the tax case failed.

        Ness wanted very much to humiliate Capone publicly as well as to put him in jail. The murder of his one of his friends was the catalyst to a plan to openly embarrass Capone. From his many successful raids on Capone breweries and other liquor operations, Ness had accumulated some forty-five trucks of various types, most of which were new. The government had contracted for a new storage place for Ness’s vehicle collection that would eventually be sold at public auction. Until then, it was necessary to move the trucks to the new garage.

        Ness hit on an idea to strike a psychological blow to Al Capone pride, something few intelligent people ever attempted. Ness had all of the trucks polished to a fine shine. Then he arranged for a group of drivers to operate the convoy of trucks. When everything was ready, Ness made his boldest move.

        He called Capone’s headquarters at the Lexington Hotel and bullied his way into getting Capone himself on the phone.

        "Well, Snorkey," Ness called him by the nickname only Capone’s close friends used," I just wanted to tell you that if you look out your front windows down onto Michigan Avenue at exactly eleven o’clock you’ll see something that should interest you.

        "What’s up?" Capone asked, curiosity in his tone.

        "Just take a look and you’ll see," Ness said just before he slammed down the phone.

        The motorcade came to the Capone’s Lexington Hotel headquarters at eleven o’clock in the morning. Moving very slowly, it passed a bunch of Capone’s gangsters milling around outside the hotel. Ness could see the wild gesticulating and confusion on Capone’s balcony.

        This was a big day for Ness and his team. "What we had done this day," he told people later, "was enrage the bloodiest mob in criminal history…We had hurled the defiance of "The Untouchables" into their teeth; they surely knew by now that we were prepared to fight to the finish."

        Ness had certainly succeeded in making Capone angry. Right after the parade, Capone stormed through his suite shrieking and breaking things up. Not only had Ness succeeded in enraging Capone, but also, more importantly, he was making a significant dent in Capone’s business. Millions of dollars of brewing equipment had been seized or destroyed, thousands of gallons of beer and alcohol had been dumped and the largest breweries were closed.

        Wiretaps on Capone’s lieutenants revealed how bad things were getting. The mob had to cut back its graft and payments to the policemen. Beer had to be imported from other areas to supply the speakeasies that used to buy Capone’s beer. Things got even worse when they raided a gigantic operation that was supplying 20,000 gallons a day.

        Finally, the government’s mission was coming to closure in the early spring of 1931. Facing a six-year statute of limitations on some of the earlier evidence, the government had to prosecute the 1924 evidence before March 15, 1931. A few days before that deadline, on March 13, a federal grand jury met secretly on the government’s claim that in 1924 Al Capone had a tax liability of $32,488.81. The jury returned an indictment against Capone that was kept secret until the investigation was complete for the years 1925 to 1929. On June 5, 1931, the grand jury met again and returned an indictment against Capone with twenty-two counts of tax evasion totaling over $200,000. A week later, a third indictment was returned on the evidence provided by Ness and his team. Capone and sixty-eight members of his gang were charged with some 5,000 separate violations of the Volstead Act, some of them going back to 1922. The income tax cases took precedence over the Prohibition violations. Capone was facing a possible 34 years in jail if the government completely won its case. Capone’s lawyers presented U.S. Attorney Johnson with a deal. Capone would plead guilty for a relatively light sentence. Johnson, after discussing the offer with Irey and the new Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills, accepted the deal and agreed to recommend a sentence between 2 and 5 years.

        Why would the government after all its efforts take accept such a light sentence? First of all, despite the government's extraordinary efforts to hide Shumway and Reis, there were very real concerns about them living to testify. Capone had put a bounty of $50,000 on each of the bookkeeper's heads. There was also some doubt that the six-year statute of limitations would be upheld by the Supreme Court. An appeals court had already ruled on a three-year statute of limitations for tax evasion. Then there was an enormous potential for jury tampering, both through bribery and intimidation.

        When word of the deal leaked, the press was outraged that Capone would get off with such a light sentence.

        Capone went into the courtroom on June 16 a fairly happy man. When Capone pleaded guilty, Judge Wilkerson adjourned the hearing until June 30. Capone told the press he was entertaining offers from the movie studios to make a film of his life. He was in excellent spirits when he appeared for sentencing in front of Wilkerson at the end of the month.

        Judge Wilkerson had a little surprise for Al. "The parties to a criminal case may not stipulate as to the judgment to be entered," Wilkerson said firmly. He made it quite clear that while he would listen to Johnson’s recommendation, he was not bound to go along with it. "It is time for somebody to impress upon the defendant that it is utterly impossible to bargain with a federal court." It was a shock to Capone. The deal, the plea bargain was kaput and Al was clearly worried. Capone was allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and a trial was scheduled for October 6.

        Capone spent his summer of freedom in his old hideout in Lansing, Michigan, seemingly resigned to the trial. However, behind the scenes his organization had procured the list of prospective jurors and began bribing them by every means possible.

        Wilson got word of the bribery and went with Johnson to Judge Wilkerson with the evidence that Capone’s gang was bribing and threatening the potential jurors. Judge Wilkerson was neither surprised nor concerned. "Bring your case to court as planned, gentlemen," he told them confidently. "Leave the rest to me."

        On October 6, 1931, fourteen detectives escorted Capone to the Federal Court Building. Security was very, very tight. Capone was brought in through a tunnel to a freight elevator. The crime czar was well dressed in a conservative blue serge suit. No pinkie rings or any other gaudy gangster jewelry this time. Every major newspaper had dispatched its top talent. It was the "Who's Who" of newspaper journalism. The question was posed to Al repeatedly, "Are you worried?"

        "Worried?" Capone answered with a smile, "Well, who wouldn't be?"

        Late Saturday night, October 17, 1931, after nine hours of discussion, the jury completed its deliberation and found Capone guilty of some counts, but not all counts of tax evasion. The following Saturday, Judge Wilkerson sentenced Capone to eleven years, $50,000 in fines and court costs of another $30,000. Bail was denied and Capone would be led to the Cook County Jail to await eventual removal to a federal penitentiary.

Illegal Bootlegging         "Capone tried to smile again," said the New York Times, "but the smile was bitter. He licked his fat lips. He jiggled on his feet. His tongue moved in his cheeks. He was trying to be nonchalant, but he looked as if he must have felt --ready to give way to an outburst of anger. It was a smashing blow to the massive gang chief. His clumsy fingers, tightly locked behind his back, twitched and twisted."

        As Capone left the courtroom, an official of the Internal Revenue Service slapped liens on his property so that the government could satisfy its tax claims. Capone lost his temper and tried to attack the man, but was restrained by the marshals who had him in custody.

        "Well, I’m on my way to do eleven years," he said, looking at Ness. "I’ve got to do it, that’s all. I’m not sore at anybody. Some people are lucky. I wasn’t. There was too much overhead in my business anyhow, paying off all the time and replacing trucks and breweries. They ought to make it legitimate."

        "If it was legitimate, you certainly wouldn’t want anything to do with it," he told Capone as he walked away, seeing him for the last time.

        Initially, Al was a prisoner at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta and quickly became its most famous prisoner. There were charges almost immediately that he was living "like a king." While that was certainly an exaggeration, he clearly lived better than the rest of the prisoners. He had more socks, underwear, sets of sheets, etc. than anyone else. He maintained these extravagances by virtue of a hollow handle in his tennis racket in which he secreted several thousand dollars in cash.

        In 1934, Attorney General Homer Cummings took over the prison on Alcatraz Island to warehouse dangerous, intractable criminals. In a radio address, Cummings explained that "here may be isolated the criminals of the vicious and irredeemable type so that their evil influence may not be extended to other prisoners."

Alcatraz Jail        In August of 1934, Capone was sent to Alcatraz. His days of living like a king in prison were gone. "Capone would run nothing on or from Alcatraz; he wouldn't even know what was happening outside. There would be no smuggled letters or messages. All incoming letters were censored, then retyped by guards with prohibited subjects omitted, which included the faintest whiff of business or the doings of former associates. Censors excised even mention of current events. No newspapers were allowed; magazines had to be more than seven months old. The only source of news was new arrivals. At best, prisoners could write one letter a week, rigorously censored, and only to their immediate family members. Only immediate family could visit, only two of them each month, and they had to write the warden for permission each time. Visitors and prisoners made no physical contact. They sat on opposite side of plate glass... No one could smuggle money into Capone, and he could not have spent it anyway." (Schoenberg). How did Capone manage with the loss of popularity and status? He seemed to do reasonably well and got along better than most from the standpoint of adjustment. The same was not true of his health. The syphilis that he had contracted as a very young man was moving into the tertiary stage called neurosyphilis. By 1938, he was confused and disoriented.

        Al spent the last year of his sentence, which had been reduced to six years and five months for a combination of good behavior and work credits, in the hospital section being treated for syphilis. He was released in November of 1939. Mae took him to a hospital in Baltimore where he was treated until March of 1940.

        Sonny Capone seemed to be a remarkably friendly and well-adjusted young man, despite his very unusual background. In 1940, he married an Irish girl and settled in Miami. Palm Island Paradise Sonny and Diana provided Al and Mae with four granddaughters, which were treated with lavish attention.

        For his remaining years, Al slowly deteriorated in the quiet splendor of his Palm Island palace. Mae stuck by him until January 25, 1947 when he died of cardiac arrest, his grieving family surrounding him. A week before, Andrew Volstead, author of the Volstead Act that ushered in the era of Prohibition from 1920 to 1933, died at the age of 87.