Al Capone: Biography, Mobster, Crime Boss, Scarface
Al Capone, also known as “Scarface,” rose to infamy as the leader of the Chicago Outfit, an organized crime syndicate during the Prohibition era. The press followed Capone’s every move avidly, and he was able to gain public sympathy with his gregarious and generous personality. Some even considered him a kind of Robin Hood figure, or as anti-Prohibition resentment grew, a dissident who worked on the side of the people. However, in later years, as Capone’s name increasingly became connected with brutal violence, his popularity waned.
Capone’s Early Years in New York
It was a tough place given over to the vices sought by sailor characters that frequented the surrounding bars. The family was a regular, law-abiding, albeit noisy Italian-American clan, and there were few indications that the young Capone would venture into a world of crime and become public enemy number one. Certainly, the family’s move to a more ethnically mixed area of the city exposed the young Capone to wider cultural influences, no doubt equipping him with the means to run a notorious criminal empire. After an attempt on his life in 1925 by rival mobsters, Torrio decided to leave the business and return to Italy, turning over the entire operation to Capone.
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- Agent Ness, angered by Capone for the murder of a friend, managed to enrage Capone by exposing Prohibition violations to ruin his bootlegging industry.
- Ironically, Capone took on the role of peacemaker, appealing to the other gangsters to tone down their violence.
- But Chicago was firmly in the grip of gangsters and Capone appeared beyond the reach of the law.
- The fresh jury was even sequestered at night so that the Capone mob couldn’t get to them.
- During a highly publicized case, the judge admitted as evidence Capone’s admissions of his income and unpaid taxes, made during prior and ultimately abortive negotiations to pay the government taxes he owed.
On June 5, 1931 the U.S. government finally indicted Capone on 22 counts of income-tax evasion. He was never convicted of the murders but ultimately went to prison merely for the crime of tax evasion, ending his stint as a crime boss at yourpowermed.hu the age of 33. Somewhat ironically, it was the pen pushers from the tax office who posed the greatest threat to the gangsters’ bootlegging empires. In May 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that a bootlegger had to pay income tax on his illegal bootlegging business.
However, Capone’s sentence was eventually reduced to six and a half years for good behavior. Capone prided himself on keeping his temper under wraps, but when friend and fellow hood Jack Guzik was assaulted by a small-time thug, Capone tracked the assailant down and shot him dead in a bar. Due to a lack of witnesses, Capone got away with the murder, but the publicity surrounding the case gave him a notoriety that he never had before. A crackdown on racketeering in Chicago meant that Capone’s first mobster job was to move operations to Cicero, Illinois. With the assistance of his brothers Frank (Salvatore) and Ralph, Capone infiltrated the government and police departments.
With such a ruling, it wasn’t long before the small Special Intelligence Unit of the IRS under Elmer Irey was able to go after Capone. Chicago’s most infamous Prohibition-era crime boss, Al Capone is best known for his violence and ruthlessness in his elimination of his rivals. The most notorious of the bloodlettings is the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which seven members of Bugs Moran’s gang were machine-gunned in a garage on Chicago’s North Side on February 14, 1929.
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