Al “Scarface” Capone: The Original Gangster | Historical Documentary |
In the 1920s the sprawling, brawling, skyscraper-studded city of Chicago ruled the American heartland. And one man seemed to rule Chicago. A racketeer, pimp, bootlegger, and cold-blooded killer named Al Capone. Capone ran things with an iron fist. He had so much of the city locked up, you know, politicians, policemen, Capone once said, you know, to him, an honest politician was a politician that stayed bought once you bought him.
But running Chicago took more than bribes. Capone was a warrior. He had scars on his face to show his apprenticeship in that do or die environment. He had what it took to create an empire. Capone’s empire lasted just six blood-soaked years. But his image as the ultimate American mobster still survives, decades after his days of gangland glory.
With his larger than life persona, that hat, the cigar, the scar face, he is the single icon of the American gangster. He’s a role model to the criminal elements, even today. The young street gang guys, you know, view Capone as some sort of icon. They sort of view him as, quote, “the original gangster.
” “It’s finally come to pass – and here’s the proof: Mr. Alphonse Capone, alias Mr. Al Brown, alias the ‘Big Shot,’ has met the enemy and he is theirs. It won’t be long now before the world’s most notorious gangster will be only an offensive memory.” May 4, 1932.
Al Capone, on his way to serve an 11-year sentence in a federal penitentiary, makes his final exit from Chicago, the city he had once ruled as his own. Capone’s hectic departure marks a big change from his arrival just over a decade earlier. Back then, Capone had slipped silently into the city, unnoticed and unannounced. But back then, he wasn’t the most notorious criminal in America.
He was just a young mobster from Brooklyn who was on the lam. Capone’s troubles had started while he was working as a bouncer for a Coney Island crime boss named Frankie Yale. Capone began in a bar that Yale owned. It was called the Harvard Inn. That was a big joke, you see. Yale, Harvard. So this bar in Coney Island was a dime-a-dance kind of place.
Probably prostitution was being run out of there, although it was just a one-story sort of shabby building. Yale very early recognized a very unique combination in Capone of brains and brawn and Capone moved up quite quickly in the Yale organization. But Capone’s rise almost ended when he made a pass at a customer’s sister.
And at some point, what Capone supposedly said to her was, “Honey, you’ve got a really nice ass and I mean that as a compliment.” Now, what she thought about that is lost to history. We do know that her brother, seeing this big hulking bouncer, took out a knife and cut him three times – cut him bad. Capone was left with permanent scars across his cheek, and a nickname he would come to despise.
He became “Scarface” at that point, but I don’t believe that “Scarface” is a nickname that very many people ever used in front of him. His real nickname was “Snorky,” which apparently is Italian for elegant. But that elegance hid a vicious mean streak. By 1919, Capone had already killed at least one man in Brooklyn, and roughed up plenty of others.
Word on the street was that one of his victims was out for revenge. And supposedly Frankie Yale said to, Capone, “Look, if this guy’s coming after you, if you stay around, he’s gonna find you. Look, you know, for your own good, we’re gonna get you out of town.” And they made arrangements for Capone to pick up and move to Chicago.
In Chicago Capone settled his wife Mae and son Al Jr. in a respectable house on a quiet street. Then he went out to look up another gangster from Brooklyn, Johnny Torrio. Torrio had headed west years earlier to work for his uncle by marriage, Chicago Crime Lord Big Jim Colosimo. Now Torrio was Big Jim’s trusted right-hand man.
It was really Big Jim Colosimo’s organization but Torrio was pretty much running it even though Big Jim was the boss. Torrio soon became Capone’s role model. There’s no question that Al Capone’s serious life of crime begins with Johnny Torrio. But he was also a model in that he dressed well. He had good manners.
He was a businessman and that really appealed to Capone. Torrio and Capone would go on to form a partnership that would shape the future of organized crime. It all began on January 17, 1920, when a new constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages went into effect.
Prohibition promised huge profits to those willing to flout the law. Gangsters in Chicago and across the nation rushed to grab their share. But when Torrio and Capone urged Colosimo to join in, Big Jim said no. He was quite content with what he was doing with his vice operations of prostitution and gambling.
He enjoyed his club. He had recently divorced and married a singer named Dale Winter. He was quite happy in his life, very content. Jim Colosimo, who they loved and revered, was gonna pass up on the opportunity of making million of dollars for the group. So in the gangster world, Big Jim’s gotta go. On May 11, 1920, shortly after returning from his honeymoon, Colosimo was lured to his own speakeasy for a meeting.
As he walked in, a lone gunman stepped out of a phone booth and shot him twice in the head. Some think the triggerman may have been Capone. There is little doubt that Torrio ordered the hit. Now, with their former leader lying dead in a pool of his own blood, the most profitable criminal gang in Chicago was theirs to run as they pleased.
And no town in America offered more opportunities to ambitious young crooks during those years than Chicago. Chicago was a very corrupt place during Prohibition. So it was a wonderful breeding ground for organized crime and the bootlegging that went on at the time. The politicians were very corruptible, the police were very corruptible.
But you didn’t have to be a greedy politician or a crooked cop to find yourself rooting for the bootleggers. The real culprit here is Prohibition because it turned the average Joe into a lawbreaker. It made Capone and his cronies the conduit for a product that had been legal until yesterday. The city of Chicago, for example. It voted 5 to 1 against Prohibition.
It was doomed before it even went into law. All of the bootleggers, they were sort of viewed as public benefactors. They were giving the people what they wanted. Torrio and Capone were eager to do their part. And to do it with the least amount of bloodshed. So Torrio came up with a plan to organize Chicago’s rival gangs into a cooperative cartel.
He called the various major gang leaders together and said, “Guys, here’s what we need to do to make this as profitable as possible. We need to cooperate. We’ll all have our areas of the city. We’ll agree to stay in our areas and not go in the other guy’s area so that we can make maximum profit, and there’ll be minimum strife.
” Soon Torrio and Capone had most of Chicago’s crooks working together to arrange bribes and payoffs, share the expense of acquiring their booze, and coordinate their deliveries. But one local boy, Dean O’Banion, the North Side Gang’s volatile and charismatic leader, wasn’t too happy about sharing his business with two tough guys from Brooklyn.
A brewery he and Torrio owned together gave O’Banion his chance to get rid of them once and for all. In early 1924, O’Banion offered to sell his half of the brewery to Torrio. So Torrio, ever the diplomat, the statesman, sees this as a wonderful opportunity, says yes, arranges the purchase from O’Banion.
They agree to meet on a certain night. You know, sort of the transfer the possession, as you would do in the closing on a house or something. And that night the Chicago cops show up from the Northside and raid the Sebin Brewery and arrest everybody in sight. It was a set up. O’Bannion knew about the bust ahead of time, and had lured Torrio into a trap.
Torrio had one conviction over his head already. A second conviction carried a mandatory jail sentence. So there was no way Torrio could avoid jail. And O’Banion knew that. O’Banion also knew that as a first offender he would walk away from the bust with nothing more than a fine. But Torrio’s trial was delayed for months, giving him and Capone plenty of time to plot their revenge.
O’Banion’s front as a legitimate businessman made it surprisingly easy. In 1922, he bought a half interest in the William Scofield Flower Shop at 738 North State Street. O’Banion would be in that flower shop 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday, quite often preparing the flower arrangements, ringing up the sales himself.
O’Banion naturally became the florist of choice for every mob funeral in Chicago. So when a local gang boss died, Torrio and Capone knew their moment had arrived. It was a perfect opportunity for Torrio to strike, because O’Banion was expecting gangsters to be coming in and out of the shop during that interval between the death and the funeral, friends and enemies.
On November 10, 1924 , three of Torrio and Capone’s men arrived at O’Banion’s shop to pick up flowers for the funeral. By the time they left, O’Banion was ready for a funeral of his own. But the bullets that ended O’Banion’s life also put an end to the shaky peace between Chicago’s gangs. The City’s headline writers would dub the bloodshed that followed The Beer Wars.
The violence started and then it was always, you know, a killing, revenge, back and forth and it just continued it was actually a pretty sad state of affairs and earned Chicago that notorious reputation even though New York had far more organized crime. In fact Lucky Luciano, Capone’s old friend from New York, came to visit and his comment was, “This is a real God damn crazy place. Nobody’s safe in the streets.
” Not even Torrio or Capone. On January 12, 1925 Capone barely escaped death when his car was riddled with bullets. 12 days later two of O’Banion’s most loyal lieutenants caught up with Torrio on a street corner. They were Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran, Weiss carrying a shotgun, Moran with a pistol. They converged on Torrio and opened fire.
He ended up falling to the ground with half of his jaw blown away and his body torn by bullets. The story goes that they even ran up to him and tried to shoot a final round in his head but the gun jammed. Torrio survived and that was when he called Capone to his hospital bedside, and he said, “Al, it’s yours.
I don’t want it anymore.” The syndicate that Torrio had started in 1920, was now the Capone organization. But it’s during a hot gang war. So, it’s his, if he’s man enough or strong enough to hold it against the opposition. And it’s all about survival. To survive, Capone would have to win the Beer Wars. But if he wanted his business to thrive, he had to win the hearts of his potential customers at the same time.
He was a pretty crafty image builder. It’s no accident that when he was seen in public he always had the Borcelinno on at an angle. He always had the same kind of stylish topcoat, and he also had this charismatic larger than life persona. Capone certainly became a celebrity and even beloved. I mean you would see him at baseball games, almost throwing out the first pitch.
This is a pop culture figure already and he’s got a lot more story to write at that point. Much of that story was being written in blood. But Capone’s fans didn’t seem to mind the corpses piling up in their streets. And the cops didn’t seem to care either. I think it showed just how bad things had gotten and how brazen the gang elements were becoming.
But there was always somewhat of a feeling that while, you know, as long as it’s only gangsters being killed, who cares. Capone cared – if he didn’t watch out, the next corpse found on the city’s streets could very well be his. I think everybody sees Al Capone as he’s the big powerful boss. He’s got the beautiful, you know, Cadillac, it’s bulletproof.
He’s got the fancy clothes. The truth is he’s under constant threat. Friends of his are being killed. People are being killed all the time back and forth. So, it’s not like he was enjoying these times. Capone was shot at in restaurants. He was shot at on the street. There are rumors that someone tried to poison his food. He had to have a food taster.
He became a prisoner of his own fancy suite at the Hawthorne Hotel. Capone paid for that fancy suite with the vast profits rolling in from his illicit empire. But he knew his enemies were eager to get their hands on that money. And on him. And none of those enemies frightened Capone more than the men who had tried to kill Johnny Torrio: Bugs Moran and Hymie Weiss.
Hymie Weiss was a frightening sort of guy. You look at pictures of him even today, and I think you could be afraid of Hymie Weiss. Hymie Weiss, apparently, was terminally ill and knew it. So he wasn’t afraid of anything. He wasn’t afraid of dying. In September 1926, Weiss and his men pulled up in front of a café where Capone was having coffee and demolished the entire block with machine gun fire.
It was something that you’d see during wartime, and not in one of America’s biggest cities. Capone knew that Weiss would stop at nothing to kill him, so therefore Weiss had to go. He went on October 11, 1926. But ending Weiss’ life didn’t bring an end to Capone’s troubles. Not while Bugs Moran was still alive.
Capone recognized that Moran in his own way was just as adaptable, just as volatile, jus as determined as Capone was. There was no way that this could be resolved by a peace treaty, by talking to him, there was too much at stake. It was a conflict that only could be resolved by one of them being killed.
Capone decided to make his move in early 1929, when he learned that Moran was using a dingy north side garage to meet with his top lieutenants. But the timing had to be just right. They rented apartments across from the garage, one to the north of the garage, one to the south of the garage, where they could constantly see the front of that garage.
So they knew exactly who was coming and going at all times. The lookouts kept watch for weeks. Then, on the morning of February 14, 1929, the signal finally came. Bugs Moran had arrived for a meeting. Capone’s waiting hit men leapt into action. To catch their victims off-guard, the killers disguised themselves as Chicago cops.
The North-siders, who had nothing to fear from the city’s corrupt and ineffective police, were fooled completely. Moran’s guys just thought it was a routine bust, something they’d been through. They’d be out in no time. They were ordered up against the wall. They were frisked. They were relieved of their weapons.
And, you know, the rest is history. The famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The carefully planned operation had gone off without a hitch. Except for one thing: Bugs Moran wasn’t among the dead. The lookouts had fingered the wrong man. Moran was late for his appointment at the garage that morning because he had a barbershop appointment in the Parkway Hotel barbershop.
Yeah, and that haircut, however much he paid for it, it was worth his life. Moran was apparently frightened to death by this. One would think he might say, well, you missed me, but he also had, you know, a bunch of his men shot out from under him. And had had a demonstration of just what lengths Capone would go to.
So Moran becomes increasingly a minor figure after that. But intimidating Moran and eliminating his gang didn’t make the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre a success for the embattled Capone. Even though the gangsters were still killing gangsters, this had escalated to something that they couldn’t even imagine.
One of the newspapers ran a headline that said, “Gang land graduates from murder to massacre.” And it just shocked…even to this day when I look at those photos, it is shocking. It is shocking to see those photos. Capone had won the Beer Wars, but would lose his place as one of Chicago’s most beloved figures.
His organization flourished, but for Capone, we’re talking Capone personally, it was the end. He was booed at baseball games. He was reviled, whereas previously he’d been viewed as like a celebrity, like a monarch. The massacre really opened the public eyes and showed them the dark side of the whole bootleg industry.
That figuratively, if not literally, there was blood mixed with that alcohol that they were drinking. Capone tried to salvage his reputation by sponsoring a soup kitchen on Chicago’s skid row. And inviting newsreel cameras in to record the opening. I’ve been walking all around town, I’ve been seeing a good many places, to get the poorest soup they got, but this is the finest soup I’ve ever tasted in my life, and give my regards to this place.
If it weren’t for our friend Al Caponio, who opened this here house on 935 South State Street, we wouldn’t eat. But most of Capone’s fans wouldn’t be so easy to win back. The outrage over the massacre even drove a group of local reformers to brand Capone with a nickname he hated almost as much as scarface: public enemy number one.
Capone was the original public enemy number one. And it was an effort to embarrass him. And I think Capone, who saw himself as a very benign presence in Chicago, was greatly offended that you know, after all I’ve done for you people, you’re going to call me Public Enemy No. 1? But someone in Washington was about to do more than just call Capone names.
President Herbert Hoover was calling for his head. To deliver it the Feds devised a plan to attack Capone on two fronts at once – both as a bootlegger and a tax cheat. Prohibition agent Elliott Ness grabbed the headlines by busting up Capone’s bootlegging operations. But the IRS Agents working behind the scenes to get the goods on Capone for income tax evasion would have the greater impact.
One of probably history’s favorite ironies is that the only way Capone could be taken down was for not paying his taxes. And it is a sweet irony, but it should be mentioned that there were also close to a 120 indictments against him on prohibition charges. But by 1931 more and more Americans were demanding that prohibition be repealed.
Repeal was around the corner. So putting this guy away for something that’s going to be legal in a few months is so inherently hypocritical that they just said, well, we got to forget this. And so they went with the IRS charges. In 1931 the U.S. Government charged Al Capone, bootlegger, pimp, gambler and murderer, with tax evasion.
Capone’s lawyers struck a deal with the prosecutors for a light sentence. But the judge said no. And they have to roll right into a trial. So this is a disaster for the Capone forces. So what do they do? They do what they always did. They got a jury list of potential jurors and they started bribing them.
They started threatening them. They did all the good stuff that they would always do. But the day that the trial began, the judge said, “You know what, there’s another judge across the hall who’s starting a civil trial. And what we’re going to do today is we’re going to switch juries.” And all the bribed jurors went over to the civil case.
And now Capone is facing a judge who clearly isn’t sympathetic to him and a jury that they haven’t touched. That untouched jury found Capone guilty on October 18, 1931. He was sentenced to 11 years behind bars. This was an incredible victory. And, in fact, it effectively ended his reign because it took him out of the play for a good, long time.
“Al Capone’s train is arriving from Chicago and the crowd is rushing to get a glimpse of the ex-big shot. A sedan is waiting to take him to prison and here he is still sporting his big white hat, which will probably be all out of style by the time he gets a chance to wear it again. After a short stint in Atlanta, Capone became one of the first prisoners transferred to the new maximum-security penitentiary in San Francisco Bay: Alcatraz.
And then he remains in Alcatraz until 1939, at which point because of ill health, an advanced case of syphilis and everything that goes with that, he’s paroled early. He kinda came out of Alcatraz a fraction of what he was. He was no longer, you know…he was no longer Big Al Capone. Capone did not return to Chicago. And his wife, Mae, was very loyal to him.
This beautiful mansion they had in Florida, he lived there virtually as a patient. He had a little room where bodyguards watched over him. He would sit by the swimming pool. Some say he would fish in the swimming pool. Apparently he did have good days and bad days, and he was seen in public from time to time, might see him at the racetrack.
But mostly he was home and in the last few years he was essentially an invalid. Syphilis, not bullets, finally killed Capone on January 25, 1947. He was only 48 years old. But Hollywood, true crime books, and popular legends have kept alive Capone’s image as a cruel yet elegant gangster. That stamp is still on our culture. Tony Soprano is an extremely Capone-esque figure.
The Godfather as played by Marlon Brando was, in his way, a Capone-esque figure. But the Hollywood glamour can make viewers forget the grim reality behind Capone’s rise and fall. A lot of people sort of had this fascination where if you’re, like, an Al Capone, you can do whatever you want, you can get away with it.
And that’s just not true. They have to remember he was convicted. He did go to jail. He served hard time. He did suffer these effects of syphilis, which ravaged his brain. This is not a good story. This is a tragic story.
