Al Capone did not invent organized crime in America. Al Capone didn’t create organized crime in 1920s Chicago, Illinois. Al Capone did not create organized crime in America. He just made it hard to look away
. He was the son of Italian immigrants, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1899 and raised in a tough neighborhood where following the rules was not necessarily the quickest way out of poverty. He was witty, endearing, and utterly unimpressed with the legislation that kept him from his goals. By his mid-twenties, he had moved to Chicago and taken over a criminal operation from a mobster named Johnny Torrio. He was twenty-six years old. He was now the master of the town. —
– All of that was possible because of Prohibition. Alcohol was banned statewide, and a huge and lucrative illicit market was created; someone always filled that market. That was Capone in Chicago. He built a network of speakeasies, breweries, and gambling dens all over the city, grossing an estimated sixty million dollars a year. He bought politicians, judges, and police. His wealth was such that he could move through the city as if he owned it. He did not keep quiet about any of it. Newspaper interviews, ringside seats at boxing matches, expensive suits, diamond jewelry. He was famous, a celebrity, and he seemed to enjoy every step of the way. — However, running Chicago required violence, and Capone engaged in that as well. His main rival was the North Side Gang led by Bugs Moran, and the two fought a series of murders that neither side could stop until the late 1920s. It was cut short early, on February 14, 1929, in a garage on the North Side of Chicago at 2122 North Clark Street. Gunmen posing as police officers lined up seven Moran gang members against a brick wall and shot them dead. Even in a town accustomed to violence, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre came as a shock. At the time, Capone was in Miami. No charges were ever filed. But that was known. –
— He was shot by a man who’d never fired a gun. Federal agents raided his breweries and took extensive notes, but nothing ever reached the courtroom. Taxes, he said. After years of trailing Capone’s money without a sound, the IRS indicted him in 1931 on twenty-two counts of tax evasion. Every day Capone appeared before the Chicago Federal Court looking confident and well-groomed because he was certain he would win the jury over. The judge changed the jury at the last minute. Capone was convicted and served eleven years in federal prison. He wound up as inmate number 85 on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. He was put on wash labour and slowly died of untreated syphilis. No media. It has no political class backing it. No city to escape to. In 1939, he was released, broken and confused, and retired quietly to his estate on Palm Island, Miami. There he died on 25 January 1947, aged 48, almost totally isolated from the world he had once ruled. — A real murderer who did real damage and corrupted a whole city. But he was also a product of poverty, of prohibition, of an America that made possible his ultimate development. The city made him. He was caught for unpaid taxes, and the murders remained unsolved. That’s how it goes. — Al Capone (1899-1947) The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, February 14, 1929 Convicted tax evader. Died 1931, Miami, Florida.
