Gangster from Chicago. Al Capone - biography, facts from life, photos, background information
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The real name of the American gangster of Italian origin is Alfonse Gabriel Capone. The peak of his mafia activity falls on the 1920-1930s.
Gangster Al Capone
The future boss of the Chicago mafia was born on January 17, 1899 in Brooklyn, USA. His parents (a hairdresser and a seamstress) were Italian immigrants.
There were nine children in a poor family, and the parents were constantly preoccupied with the problem of food. Alphonse (Al) practically did not study. In the fifth grade, he got into a fight with his teacher, for which he was expelled from school. Almost as a child, Alfonso faced the problem of making money.
Given his age and incomplete education, only hard and low-paid work could be found. At the age of a sixth grader, he joined the underworld and traded with the rest of the gang in petty robbery on the streets of the city.
The future gangster had to work in completely different places. He was a bartender, and a bouncer, and ran errands in a candy store. The guy was very fond of billiards and played well, constantly winning in Brooklyn tournaments.
Alphonse was very strong physically, had a frenzied temperament and did not feel fear. While working as a bouncer in one of the nightclubs, he became a participant in a stabbing because of a girl. The cold-blooded killer Frank Galluccio inflicted on him in this fight a strong and deep cut with a knife on his face through the entire right cheek.
No one could even think then that in the future all criminal elements would recognize the gangster by this scar and call him “Scarface”.
Capone paid great attention to his physical training and was fluent in the art of fighting with knives. Thanks to this, Papa Torrio himself, the leader of a large criminal group, drew attention to him. There, Alfonso perfected his criminal skills and made a career in the mafia world.
Personal life
At the age of nineteen he married an Irish woman. May Josephine Coughlin was two years older than Capone. Soon the young couple became parents: they had a boy who was given the name Alberto.
During this time, Capone was under investigation on suspicion of two murders. However, he was released and the charges dropped. The evidence is gone, and the witness has lost his memory. But after that, Al Capone moved with his family to Chicago. He followed his boss Torrio there, who was having problems with criminal cases in New York.
Al Capone with his son
In Chicago, Alfonso began doing what he did best - he took up the duties of a bouncer in one of Torrio's clubs. During his work, he killed about twenty people with his bare hands. The corpses were taken out in stolen cars, and they were not found soon.
Torrio was very old, and Alfonso was his personal bodyguard and confidant. More than a thousand bandits worked under his leadership. Police officers and officials also fed from his hands. Even the city authorities did not dare to make laws and decisions without him.
One presumptuous mayor experienced the full power of the wrath of the famous gangster. For disobedience, he was beaten by Al Capone in front of his subordinates. Everyone knew and feared this mafia, and competitors made plans to destroy it.
The gangster's family suffered from such popularity, they were constantly threatened, and the mafiosi himself was repeatedly attacked. He was shot from a machine gun right at the windows of the hotel where he stayed. A marble table saved him from bullets. Al Capone is not one of those who could be shot with impunity, the offenders were destroyed.
Death of Al Capone
At the end of his career, Alfonse was convicted of tax evasion for eleven years. The infiltrated agent stole the criminal's account books and handed them over to the tax authorities. He never paid a single tax in his entire life.
He left the Alcatraz prison sick and infirm. Syphilitic defeats also affected the sanity of the former great gangster. The mafia empire collapsed, and he himself died on January 25, 1947.
The cause was a stroke and pneumonia. Before his death, as befits a Catholic, he managed to take communion. Al Capone is buried in Chicago. His height is 1.79 m, his zodiac sign is Capricorn.
Al Capone quotes
“You can get far more with a kind word and a gun than with just kind word».
"Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class."
"The organization I created is built on fear."
"I a common person. All I do is just meet the demand.”
"Nothing personal, it's just business."
"Everything you do will come back to you."
“All the corpses are dumped on me, except, perhaps, those who died on the fields of the First World War.”
Al Capone: biography (video)
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Gang names [ edit code ]
I have a question, how to write band names? Translate into Russian or leave the original? Andrushka (Kyiv) 14:32 June 17, 2006 (UTC)
I propose to leave the original, and in brackets to decipher what it means in Russian. -- ma XXI cum 14:35 June 17, 2006 (UTC)
Rather, then the other way around, and give the English name a link to the English Wikipedia ... if it exists, of course ... Andrushka (Kyiv) 15:41, June 18, 2006 (UTC)
Disagree. Do you still offer the names of musical groups and commercial companies to be translated into Russian too? This is not true. --ma XXI cum 16:01 June 18, 2006 (UTC) Agree with ma XXI cum, it is necessary to write in English, it often happens that when translating names, a bilibird is obtained. --Lourens 17:32, 18 June 2006 (UTC) Okay :) then the majority opinion is the law.
Andrushka (Kyiv) 09:38 June 19, 2006 (UTC)
Question to the author [ edit code ]
No doubt, the article is big. It can be seen that the author tried very hard. But the question is, is such a detailed article about a person in general unseemly, who spent his entire conscious life on breaking laws and making a profit, needed in Russian Wikipedia? Yes, and write in such detail about his relatives. What do we care about overseas gangsters?
Article title [ edit code ]
Better full: Capone, Alfonso
Al Capone is better than Al. He is not a Persian Shah after all.
92.62.57.16 21:13 January 12, 2010 (UTC) Ivan_Drago
Do you need an article?
Whether an article is needed. But how! After all, this is history, the history of organized crime, the history of the fight against it. Why an article about Chikatilo? And why articles about Harry Potter, etc. This is an encyclopedic reference, and if anyone urgently needs to find information, even on such a "freak" as Capone, he should go to Wikipedia, as the most authoritative and complete resource for information of any kind. Andrushka (Kyiv) 11:36, April 9, 2007 (UTC)
Capone in Chicago [ edit code ]
Capone was familiar with Chicago. He had previously been sent here by Yale to help Chicago crime boss James "Big Jim" Colosimo get rid of the Black Hand gang.
There is an error here. Colosimo was helped not by Capone, but by Torrio. And Capone came to Chicago for the first time. --Fred 18:27, August 10, 2007 (UTC)
How did Capone achieve these? How could he convince so many people to believe in himself?--82.195.23.235 10:59, September 12, 2008 (UTC) Dmitry
Kopivio [ edit code ]
Cleaning up the article from kopivio. I will save this phrase from the deleted text for history.
The drunken visitors often left the club with broken arms and ribs, sometimes with a concussion, and once even with blood poisoning, when Capone lost his temper so much that he bit the poor fellow's neck right up to the artery.
Saidaziz 12:22 2 December 2008 (UTC)
Place of birth and death...[ edit code ]
Absolutely do not correspond to the English version! Yaklit 07:42, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
impartiality [ edit code ]
The article was written with some kind of insane fanaticism and strong discrepancies with English-language sources. I tried to correct the most "fanatical" biased places by referring to the English-language article under IP 95.30.84.10
inaccuracies [ edit code ]
If the Capone family moved to the USA in 1894, then Al Capone could not have been born in Naples in 1899. Counting Al Capone, his father Gabriel had 8 sons (not 7). 91.76.0.107 20:13 January 19, 2011 (UTC)
- "... Along with everyone else, he patrolled the streets of his native district ..."
<Патрулирует стража,полиция или дружина... а то, чем занимаются банды на улицах, патрулированием называть неприлично>Replaced "everyone" with "gopniks", and "patrolled" with "looked around". 85.26.155.174 08:49, August 9, 2011 (UTC)
“Patrols are also called civilian groups that monitor any objects or territories in order to control, verify or protect them.” And it doesn't matter what kind of control is legal or not. In this case, patrolling in order to control the area by criminal groups. "gopnik" is a term common to post-Soviet space, therefore, in this situation, its application is incorrect. Karachun 09:05, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
Isn't it "El"? [ edit code ]
The subject is still a Pindos, not an Arab.
84.181.70.183 00:40, April 6, 2015 (UTC)Alphonse Fiorello Caponi is better known as Al Capone. He was born, according to his own statement, in Naples in 1899 (according to another version - in Castelamaro four years earlier). In 1909, the Caponi family, like many other Italians, moved to New York in search of happiness. Richard (Richard) Caponi, the eldest son, became a policeman. His brother Alfonso (Al Capone) chose the opposite path. But he started off rather harmlessly as a butcher's mate in Brooklyn. However, soon the criminal environment dragged him in.
To begin with, Al Capone worked in one of the local gangs as a pickup boy, but his abilities were soon noticed, and the guy was helped to retrain as a professional killer. His first "wet case" was the murder of an obstinate Chinese man who did not want to share the income from his restaurant.
Meanwhile, the struggle for the presidency of the "Sicilian Union" was unfolding in the country. In the course of the struggle, Frank Aiello destroyed the head of the Big Jim Colosimo union in order to put Johnny Torrio in his place. Frank Aiello and Johnny Torrio invited Canon to Chicago in the mid-1920s. Capone, having gone through the stages of working as a bartender and a bouncer, takes the nickname Al Brown and becomes Torrio's assistant. From now on, he is a bootlegger, that is, a person engaged in the illegal sale of alcohol (dry law was in force in the United States at that time). At the same time, Al Capone created a reliable combat cover group.
The "Sicilian Union" of gangsters that arose at the beginning of the century made the mass profession of a hired killer. Within the framework of the commonwealth of mafia clans in the 1930s, the so-called "Killer Corporation" was even created, which united full-time mafia executioners.
When the police succeeded in getting some of the arrested Mafiosi to speak in 1940, Mafia scholars write, "a picture of the existence of a genuine industry of death by order - a gigantic enterprise of assassins, which spread its tentacles throughout the country and functioned on an incredible scale with punctuality, accuracy and extraordinary efficiency of a well-oiled mechanism..."
The ground for the creation of a kind of community for the commission of murders was prepared during the meeting of the leaders of the underworld in Atlantic City in 1929. This meeting, in addition to Al Capone, was attended by Joe Torrio, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz. During the creation of the crime syndicate, the distribution of territories and sectors of activity, representatives of the top of the American underworld swore to strictly implement the secret code that they developed and which was supposed to regulate relations between various gangs from now on.
Each leader of a gang of bandits had the right to dispose of the life and death of his people within the established competence. Outside the gang he led, even on his own territory, he was forbidden to judge on his own. He had to necessarily submit the issue that had arisen for discussion by the supreme council of the crime syndicate, consisting of the most powerful leaders, designed to monitor the observance of order within the organization, consider all controversial issues that threatened to lead to bloody skirmishes, and resolutely suppress any undertakings that could harm the syndicate.
The Supreme Council made a decision by a simple majority of votes after a kind of trial, where the accused, who, as a rule, was absent, was defended by one of the members of the Areopagus. A verdict of not guilty was handed down very rarely, basically the highest council spoke in favor of the application of one measure of punishment - death.
Best of the day
The execution of sentences was entrusted to the "Corporation of Assassins". Executioners for these purposes were supplied by gangs from different regions of the United States. The most successful people were from a gang called the Brooklyn Union.
Becoming a leader organized crime in Chicago, Al Capone orders the elimination of his opponents in the gangster environment - both real and potential. To protect himself, Al Capone ordered a personal "Cadillac" weighing 3.5 tons. The car had powerful armor, bulletproof glass and a removable rear window for shooting at pursuers.
Al Capone waged war against his former benefactor - Frank Aiello - and his brothers. The Aiello family contained a whole army of hired killers, but Al Capone's guys were more agile in this battle of octopuses. Frank Aiello and several of his brothers and nephews were killed. The surviving members of the Aiello clan hired a brilliant professional killer, 22-year-old Giuseppe Giant, nicknamed the Jumping Toad, and also bribed two people from Al Capone's entourage - Albert Anselmi and John Scalise.
“The trio, of course, would have completed the task,” the journalists write, “if the suspicious Al Capone had not beaten his most faithful assistant, Frank Rio, in front of everyone, not without his consent, of course. The trick was a success, and Janta, not on reflection, he offered Rio his help, believing that he would want to avenge the wrong done.Frank Rio bargained for a long time about the price of his betrayal, and then went straight to the boss and told him everything.
Capone, in a rage, literally crushed the Havana cigar, which at that moment was in his hands, with his thick fingers in rings. And it certainly didn't stop there. As the head of the largest criminal organization, he invited all three, through the mediation of Rio, to the big Sicilian reception as especially honored guests. Dinner was to take place in a private room in the chic Auberge de Gammond restaurant. Capone, who never hesitated to spend, watched in disgust as the guests gorged themselves on the delicacies prepared especially for the farewell dinner. Raising his glass of red wine, Al Capone made another toast:
Long life to you, Giuseppe, to you, Albert, and to you too, John... And success to you in your endeavors.
The guests chorused:
And good luck in your endeavors...
From the abundance of food and wine, many began to take off their jackets and unfasten their belts. They sang old songs of their native land. By midnight, the satiated guests set aside their plates. At the end of the table where Capone was sitting, there was animation. The owner again raised his glass and made another toast in honor of the trinity sitting nearby, but instead of drinking, he splashed the contents of the glass in their faces, broke the glass on the floor and yelled:
You bastards, I'm going to make you puke with what you've swallowed because you betrayed the friend who feeds you...
With a swiftness surprising for a man of his build, he rushed at them. Frank Rio and Jack McGurn have already turned their weapons on the traitors. Frank walked around behind them, wrapped them in rope and tied them to the backs of chairs. He then made all three of them turn towards Capone. Those present remembered this scene for a long time.
Al Capone has a baseball bat in his hand. The first blow fell on Scalise's collarbone. As the bat went down, the madness of Satan from Chicago increased. Foam appeared on his thick lips, he moaned with excitement, while those subjected to barbaric beatings screamed, begged for mercy.
They weren't spared..."
On the orders of Al Capone, the famous massacre took place on St. Valentine's Day. In January 1929, the Bugs Moran gang (real name George Miller) stole Al Capone's trucks and blew up several of his bars. Capone's main gunman - Jack McGurn, nicknamed Machine Gun - was ambushed and barely escaped alive. This forced Capone to eliminate the Moran gang.
On February 14, 1929, one of Capone's men called Moran to report that he had stolen a truckload of smuggled liquor. Moran ordered the truck to be driven into the garage, which served as a secret warehouse for liquor. When Moran's gangsters gathered to receive the cargo, a car drove up to the garage, from which four people got out - two of them in police uniforms. The imaginary police officers ordered Moran's men to stand facing the wall, took out machine guns and opened fire. So six gangsters were shot, and another died of wounds in the hospital, having managed to declare before his death: "No one shot at me." Moran was late for the meeting and survived.
Capone himself had, of course, a strong alibi on the day of the massacre.
"Empire" Capone brought him $ 60 million a year, but he spent a lot. At the races alone, he lost up to a million a year. His homes in Florida and Chicago were guarded around the clock, and armed bodyguards accompanied the boss everywhere. He had his own secret entrance to Chicago hotels - first to the modest Metropol, where 50 rooms were booked for his retinue, and then to the luxurious Lexington. Capone's wife, Irish May, whom he married at a young age, as a rule, was in an honorable exile. He kept a bunch of mistresses and selected more and more girls from his brothels.
During the crash on Wall Street and economic crisis Al Capone, in order to win public favor, was one of the first to establish soup kitchens for the unemployed. He was one of the first to put on a grand scale the case of bribing the press. His public relations consultant, Chicago Tribune reporter Jack Lingle, organized almost weekly articles praising Al Capone. Officially, Lingle received $65 a week from the newspaper, but his secret salary was $60,000 a year. Lingle was shot dead on June 9, 1930, on the eve of a meeting with FBI agents who were looking for dirt on Capone.
During the 14 years of Al Capone's rule, there were 700 mafia murders in Chicago; of these, 400 - by order of Capone himself. 17 professional killers official charges were filed, but it was possible to put gangsters behind bars in rare cases.
In the 1930s, when Edward Hoover headed the FBI, American justice developed new methods to deal with the mafia. Since it was extremely difficult to prove the involvement of the mafiosi in the murders, they were sent to prison on charges of minor crimes. So, in 1929, Al Capone was convicted of carrying weapons without permission; he spent 10 months in prison. However, even while in prison, he accepted whoever he wanted and freely used the phone, running his empire around the clock.
For the second time, the boss of bosses received a term for non-payment of taxes in the amount of 388 thousand dollars. Al Capone's lawyers tried to bargain with the judge, but he was adamant. Then they took up the jury, but on the day of the meeting, the judge replaced the jurors with others. On October 22, 1931, the jury returned a guilty verdict, which allowed the judge to sentence the gangster to 11 years in prison.
While in a local prison, Al Capone continued to lead his people, but when he was transferred to a federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia, this became impossible. And in 1934, Al Capone completely cut off the air, sending him to the famous prison on Alcatraz Island. This meant the end of the gangster king's career.
In prison, Al Capone kept himself apart from others, but when he was stripped of his privileges and forced to work as a janitor, the prisoners began to call him "boss with a mop." Once, when he refused to take part in a prisoner's strike, someone stabbed him in the back with a pair of scissors.
Al Capone began to change memory; his health deteriorated. A medical examination revealed that he had advanced syphilis. In 1939, Al Capone became partially paralyzed and was released early.
For the last years of his life, he lived in his home in Florida. Al Capone died on January 25, 1947 from a heart attack and pneumonia. Before his death, as befits a Catholic, he managed to partake of the holy mysteries. It is not known whether he spoke in his dying confession about the hundreds of people killed on his orders, and about the forty whom he killed with his own hand.
The most famous American gangster Al Capone lived not the longest, but very eventful life. He managed to rise from the very bottom of the US criminal world and became the most influential mafia of his time. About how the fate of Al Capone, this post will tell.
The classic image of the American mafia of the 1920s and 1930s, with high-profile gunfights and ruthless hitmen, arose, in fact, thanks to one person. No one knows exactly how many people were killed on his orders, but Al Capone's name alone terrified even his most ferocious colleagues in the "criminal business."
The birthplace of Alfonso Gabriel Fiorello Capone, better known as Al Capone, is still being debated. The mafia boss himself said that he was born in Naples on January 17, 1899, but some of his biographers are sure that Alfonso was actually born in Castellammare del Golfo in 1895.
In 1909, Alfonso and his family followed a typical route for Italians of that time - to the USA.
The large Capone family (Alfonso's father had nine children) began to settle in a new place, in Williamsburg, a suburb of Brooklyn, and the grown-up Alfonso got a job as a butcher. However, his bad inclinations manifested themselves even at school - he could beat a classmate for no reason, even raised his hand to teachers.
It is not surprising that very soon he began to play the role of a boy in the wings in one of the local gangs. Mentor on the criminal path for Alfonso was the leader of the group, Johnny Torrio. The bandit saw great prospects in the recruit - excellent physical condition along with cruelty and ruthlessness.
Where is the scar from?
Officially, Alfonso began to play the role of a bouncer in a billiard club, which was the headquarters of the Torrio gang. Unofficially, he played the role of a killer, eliminating those who did not please the leader. However, at first Alfonso's victims were only minor figures, like the owner of a small Chinese restaurant who quarreled with bandits.
Al Capone with his son, 1931
Alfonso's criminal career could have ended in the Brooklyn suburb, as the impudent young bandit often quarreled with more serious "authorities". There was almost always a reason: experienced criminals were infuriated by Alfonso's skill while playing billiards, and he often accompanied his victories with bold comments.
Once Capone grappled with the gangster Frank Galluccio, and he slashed Alfonso with a knife in the face. From this cut came the later nickname of Capone - "Scarface". It should be noted that no one called the gangster that during his lifetime, and he himself, who had not served in the army for a day, said that he had been wounded at the front during the First World War.
Meanwhile, Johnny Torrio became an influential person in the criminal world of the United States and moved to Chicago, where he headed one of the local gangs. Capone first stayed in New York, but then followed the boss. Firstly, Torrio in Chicago needed a reliable killer, and secondly, the police came to grips with Capone's previous cases in New York.
Underworld reformer
The main occupation of the criminals in the United States at that time was the sale of alcohol. In a country where the "dry law" was in effect, this was extremely profitable business. However, the Torrio group in Chicago had many competitors in this market, and Capone, who received the nickname "Al Brown", took up the fight against them.
Al Capone on vacation, 1930
Before Capone, the mafiosi, of course, also did not stand on ceremony in the fight against each other, but more often knives, brass knuckles, and much less often pistols were used. Capone, who created a real “special forces of killers” in the Torrio gang, did not take into account conventions, and terrified his opponents with his cruelty.
The Torrio group was at war with the gang of the Irishman Dayon O'Banion. Her victims, in addition to ordinary fighters, were her younger brother Alfonso, who also became a bandit, and O'Banion himself. Johnny Torrio was seriously injured, as a result of which he retired, transferring control of the group to his " right hand- Al Capone, who by that time was 25 years old.
Desperate pensioners and swindlers-losers. How did the high-profile robberies of recent years end?
The Capone gang has changed the criminal world of America. The new boss, without abandoning the liquor trade, brought the proceeds of prostitution under the control of criminals and engaged in what is today understood as the word "racket", having achieved enormous profits.
Al Capone dealt with competitors ruthlessly - it was thanks to him that the criminal world was enriched by automatic weapons firefights and car bomb explosions. Competitors were eliminated in broad daylight, sometimes throwing grenades, often dealt with not only the hostile bandit himself, but also his family members.
Opponents, of course, tried to get to Al Capone himself, but they couldn’t do it - he had guards armed to the teeth, an armored car, and he dealt with those suspected of betrayal so cruelly that there were practically no people who wanted to go over to the side of competitors.
King of Chicago
The so-called "Massacre on Valentine's Day" on February 14, 1929, when Capone militants dressed in police uniforms broke into a rival group's underground liquor warehouse, lined up opponents against the wall and shot them with machine guns, entered the history of America. Competitors, until the last sure that they were detained by the police, did not even have time to be surprised. Seven people were killed in this massacre.
Aftermath of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, February 1929.
The income of Capone's empire at the peak of his power reached the astronomical sum of America in those years at 60 million dollars. The mob boss bought the loyalty of cops, politicians, journalists and was the uncrowned king of Chicago. During the Great Depression, he opened canteens for the poor at his own expense, which earned him popularity among the lower strata of society.
Historians estimate that at least 700 people died in the mafia wars waged by Al Capone, of which about 400 were killed on his personal orders.
However, the structure of the mafia was such that none of these crimes could be proven.
tax trap
To put an end to Capone, the new head of the FBI, Edgar Hoover, undertook. Realizing that it would not be possible to imprison the mafia leader for murders and racketeering, he went from the other side. First, in 1929, Al Capone was sentenced to 10 months in prison for illegal possession of weapons. But Capone did not even notice this period - he lived in comfort in prison, received visitors and continued to manage the group.
However, in 1931, Al Capone was sentenced to 11 years for tax evasion. It took a lot of effort for the authorities to get a guilty verdict, but in the end they succeeded.
At first, the story of managing a gang from prison repeated itself, but then Capone was transferred to a federal prison in Atlanta, and his ties were broken. It was finally possible to cut off the ringleader from his criminal empire in 1934, when he was transferred to the most legendary and harsh US prison - Alcatraz.
Alcatraz prison, where Al Capone was serving his sentence.
Here, a bloodthirsty gangster was brought down to his arrogance, forced to work as a janitor, which is why the rest of the prisoners began to call Capone "boss with a mop."
Over time, his health deteriorated, and doctors discovered that Capone had syphilis in an advanced stage. There was nothing surprising in this - the criminal in Chicago kept a whole "harem" of prostitutes, and did not bother himself with protective measures.
In 1939, Al Capone, stricken with partial paralysis, was released for health reasons. He lost his influence in the criminal world, and this sick and aged man, as before, could not manage a group of 1000 bandits with an iron fist.
Al Capone's grave.
Despite all this, Al Capone was lucky in a way. Unlike many of his colleagues, he died in his bed, last years having lived in own house in Florida. The bloodthirsty gangster died on January 25, 1947. The cause of death was poor health, the effects of a stroke and pneumonia.
