25th January 1947 was the day on which Al Capone
died at the age of 48, from a stroke complicated by pneumonia and syphilis.
He started his criminal career in New York, where an
encounter with the brother of a woman he had insulted led to the facial injury
that earned him the nickname of Scarface, but at the age of 20 he moved to
Chicago where he soon became the leading mobster in the city, with earnings
coming from gambling, prostitution and fixing horse races, although the era of
Prohibition was what really propelled him to the top.
It is believed that Capone’s industrial-scale activities
involving the manufacture and sale of illegal alcohol earned him around $100
million a year, and he took every step he could to protect that income by
eliminating his rivals.
The most notorious event in his catalogue of crime occurred
on 14th February 1929 (St Valentine’s Day) when four members of his
gang turned up at a Chicago garage that was the headquarters of a rival
bootlegger named Bugs Moran. Fortunately for Moran he was across the street
when Capone’s men arrived, but six of Moran’s men, plus a garage attendant who
had the misfortune to be there at the time, were not so lucky as they were
lined up against a wall and shot dead.
Capone’s ability to intimidate and bribe his way to wherever
he wanted meant that pinning any sort of criminal charge against him was
virtually impossible until somebody pointed out that he had never filed an
income tax return. The master criminal of Chicago therefore went to jail for
tax evasion.
Capone spent more than eight years in jail, firstly at
Atlanta where he bought special privileges for himself, but then at the much
tougher fortress prison of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.
He was a broken man when he was finally released in 1939 and
was able to retire to his estate in Florida. The effect of syphilis and his
time in jail was to bring on mid-life dementia, which meant that he was no
threat to anyone during his final years.
© John Welford
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