Left: Alphonse Gabriel Capone Right: Charles Lindbergh
Al Capone: The Infamous Gangster
Alphonse Gabriel Capone, otherwise known as Al Capone, was one of the most notorious gangsters ever recorded in American history. During the act of Prohibition [of liquor] in the 1920’s, Capone ran his business through illegal means of alcohol and prostitution. He was a millionaire through acts of bootlegging. Al Capone was responsible and present in many acts of ruthless gang violence and crime, mainly against rival gangs. Due to lack of evidence, Al never was indicted for his cruel and furtive criminal acts. The most famous event being the St. Valentine’s Massacre, which terminated seven rival gang members- which was an unsuspecting and doleful fate. In 1931, the gangster was finally reeled in, and his business was brought down due to income-tax evasion. He served a six and a half year sentence in prison. When he was released, he lived several modest years before he died in 1941 in Miami.
The Capones
Alphonse Capone was born in 1899 in the urban area of Brooklyn, New York. He was the son of newly arrived Italian immigrants Gabriele and Teresina Capone. The Capones and previously lived in a rather poor environment and traveled to America in search of a more promising life. Like the vast majority of immigrants in New York, Mr. and Mrs. Capone, with their eight children, dwelled in a plain, brick tenement. Al’s father worked as a barber while his mother worked as a seamstress, working day by day to earn enough money to feed their children.
Growing Up in New York
Al had always been a good student since elementary school but began falling behind in his studies. As a result, he failed and had to repeat sixth grade. It was around those times that he started hanging near the Brooklyn docks and skipping school for unacceptable and unclarified reasons.
On a quite unfortunate day, Capone’s teacher had struck Al for being insolent, and he suddenly battered back. Al was sent to the office, and the principal gave him a stern beating and he never once returned to school again.
His family eventually moved out of the tenement and into a better home, located on the outskirts of Slope Park in Brooklyn.
Meeting Johnny Torrio
Johnny Torrio was the owner of a numbers and gambling operation near Al’s home. Al began running small errands for Johnny, and the two become good friends. Later on, in 1909, Torrio moved to Chicago. Despite the fact that they were about 790 miles apart, the two remained closely intact with each other.
Capone then stuck to legitimate employment, working in a munitions factory and as a paper cutter. Although he was occasionally involved with street gangs in New York, he did not participate in any extreme gang activities.
Scarface
Later on, Torrio introduced Al to Frankie Yale, a gangster. Later on, Frankie employed Capone as a bartender and bouncer at the Harvard Inn, located in Coney Island. While working at the bar one late night, Al made a rather foul mark to a woman that was at the bar. The woman’s brother, enraged, punched Capone and slashed him across the face, leaving three ingrained scars that gave birth to his nickname, “Scarface”.
Old Friends Reunite
Capone married Mae Coughlin just weeks after the birth of their new baby boy, Albert Francis. His former boss and friend Johnny Torrio was the boy’s godfather. Now that Capone was titled as the head of his new family, Capone wanted to play a well-rounded role as a good father and husband, so he moved to Baltimore where he took an honest job as a bookkeeper for a construction company. However in 1920, Capone’s father, Gabriele Capone, passed away due to heart failure. With Al’s father gone, Torrio invited his old pal to come to Chicago. Almost instantaneously, Capone jumped at the opportunity and headed for Chicago.
Al in Chicago
In Chicago, Torrio was presiding over a booming business specializing in gambling and prostitution. However, Torrio took his business to a whole other level. With the enactment in 1920 of the 18th Amendment enforced, it prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol.Torrio focused on a new, more remunerative field: bootlegging. As a former petty thug and bookkeeper, Capone applied both his street smarts and his expertise with numbers to Torrio’s Chicago operations. With a new recognition of Capone’s skills, Torrio quickly promoted him to partner. Unlike the low-profile Torrio, Capone began to develop a reputation as a drinker and a troublemaker. After hitting a parked taxicab due to drunk driving, he was arrested for the first time. Torrio quickly used his connections to the city government to get Al off the hook.
Cleaning Up the Act
Capone cleaned up his act when his family arrived from Brooklyn. His wife and his son, along with his mother, younger brothers, and sister all moved to Chicago, and they were once again reunited. Capone bought a modest house in the middle-class South Side of Chicago.
Let’s Make a Change of Plans
In 1923, Chicago elected a reformist mayor who claimed that he would do everything in his power to rid the city of corruption. Torrio and Capone decided to move their base beyond the city limits to the suburban area of Cicero. But a 1924 mayoral election in Cicero threatened their operations.Torrio and Capone initiated a threat intimidation effort on the day of the election, March 31, 1924, to guarantee their candidate would get elected and to ensure the functioning of their bootlegging business. Some citizens who voted for the opposing candidate were shot and even killed. Police immediately took action, and they savagely gunned down Capone’s brother, Frank, in the street.
Capone’s Reputation
After several rival mobsters attempted to take his life in 1925, Torrio decided to leave his business and return to Italy, leaving the entire operation into Capone’s hands. Al again ignored his mentor’s advice to maintain a low profile. He moved his headquarters to a plush suite in the Metropole Hotel in downtown Chicago. Capone began to change, and he began living a luxurious and public lifestyle; spending money extravagantly, although always in cash to avoid newfound suspicion. According to newspapers, the estimated amounts of profit Capone’s operations generated annually was one hundred million dollars.
The press followed Capone’s every move avidly, and he was able to gain public sympathy with his gregarious and generous personality. Some people even considered him a kind of Robin Hood figure. As anti-Prohibition resentment grew, he was though as an important figure who worked on the side of the people. However, in later years, as Capone’s name increasingly became connected in several brutal, unsettling cases involving violence, his popularity dwindled.
In 1926, when two of Capone’s sworn rivals were spotted in Cicero, Capone ordered his men to gun them down as soon as possible. Among those men was William McSwiggin, known as the “Hanging Prosecutor,” who had tried to prosecute Al for a previous murder. All three men were murdered later on. Infuriated with Chicago’s inability to control gang-dominated lawlessness, the public clamored for justice. The police had no evidence for the murders, so instead they raided Capone’s businesses. Though they could not prove Capone guilty for the incident, they were able to gather documentation that would later be used to bolster charges against him of income-tax evasion. In response to the public outcry, Capone reached out and called for a “Peace Conference” among the city’s criminals. An agreement amongst them was settled to stop the violence. It lasted just only two months until violence broke out among the streets again.
St.Valentine's Day Massacre
By early 1929, Capone dominated the illegal liquor trade in Chicago. Other racketeers strived to mooch off on the profitable bootlegging business, and among them was Capone’s long-time rival “Bugs” Moran. Moran had previously tried to assassinate both Torrio and Capone, and now he was after Capone’s top hit man, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn. Capone and McGurn decided to kill Moran. On February 14, 1929 (also known as St.Valentine’s Day) McGurn’s men posed as the police and assassinated seven of Moran’s men in a North Side garage. Informed about the danger as he approached the garage, Bugs Moran fled the slaughter. Although Capone was staying at his Miami home at the time, the public and the media immediately blamed and accused him of the massacre. He was dubbed “Public Enemy Number One.”
Justice Prevails
In response to the public outcry over the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, President Herbert Hoover ordered the federal government to improve its efforts to get Capone on income-tax evasion. In 1927, the Supreme Court had ruled that income gained through illegal activities were taxable, which gave the government a strong purpose for prosecuting Capone. The U.S. government finally indicted Capone on 22 counts of income-tax evasion on June 5, 1931.
Although the government had solid evidence against him, Capone remained confident that he would get off the case with a minimal sentence. He plead the government for only a two-year sentence. The judge in the case opposed the idea and declared that he would not honor the agreement. Capone quickly withdrew his guilty plea, and the case went to trial. During the trial, Capone bribed and intimidated members of the jury to give him an upper hand of the situation. At the final moments, the judge switched to an entirely new jury. Capone was found guilty and sent to prison for 11 years.
Prison Time
Capone spent the first two years of his prison sentence in a federal prison in Atlanta. After he had been caught bribing several guards within the prison walls, Capone was sent to the notorious island prison, Alcatraz, in 1934. Isolated from the outside world, he could no longer wield nor influence his liquor authority in his previous business operations. Crucially, he began suffering from poor health. Capone had contracted syphilis when he was still young. After spending several years in prison, he then suffered from neurosyphilis, causing dementia. After serving six-and-a-half years, Capone was released in 1939 to a mental hospital in Baltimore, where he remained there for three years.
Capone’s Final Days
His health rapidly declined as he grew older. Capone was able to live his last days in Miami with his wife. On January 25, 1947, the infamous gangster finally died of cardiac arrest.
In general, Capone was a ruthless gangster responsible for countless acts of murder and assassination of scores of people, and his sinister acts of violence remain at the center of his legacy. Capone was often pictured as a cold-blooded gangster, but there was no doubt that he was one of the most cunning and influential gangsters in history.
The Capones
Alphonse Capone was born in 1899 in the urban area of Brooklyn, New York. He was the son of newly arrived Italian immigrants Gabriele and Teresina Capone. The Capones and previously lived in a rather poor environment and traveled to America in search of a more promising life. Like the vast majority of immigrants in New York, Mr. and Mrs. Capone, with their eight children, dwelled in a plain, brick tenement. Al’s father worked as a barber while his mother worked as a seamstress, working day by day to earn enough money to feed their children.
Growing Up in New York
Al had always been a good student since elementary school but began falling behind in his studies. As a result, he failed and had to repeat sixth grade. It was around those times that he started hanging near the Brooklyn docks and skipping school for unacceptable and unclarified reasons.
On a quite unfortunate day, Capone’s teacher had struck Al for being insolent, and he suddenly battered back. Al was sent to the office, and the principal gave him a stern beating and he never once returned to school again.
His family eventually moved out of the tenement and into a better home, located on the outskirts of Slope Park in Brooklyn.
Meeting Johnny Torrio
Johnny Torrio was the owner of a numbers and gambling operation near Al’s home. Al began running small errands for Johnny, and the two become good friends. Later on, in 1909, Torrio moved to Chicago. Despite the fact that they were about 790 miles apart, the two remained closely intact with each other.
Capone then stuck to legitimate employment, working in a munitions factory and as a paper cutter. Although he was occasionally involved with street gangs in New York, he did not participate in any extreme gang activities.
Scarface
Later on, Torrio introduced Al to Frankie Yale, a gangster. Later on, Frankie employed Capone as a bartender and bouncer at the Harvard Inn, located in Coney Island. While working at the bar one late night, Al made a rather foul mark to a woman that was at the bar. The woman’s brother, enraged, punched Capone and slashed him across the face, leaving three ingrained scars that gave birth to his nickname, “Scarface”.
Old Friends Reunite
Capone married Mae Coughlin just weeks after the birth of their new baby boy, Albert Francis. His former boss and friend Johnny Torrio was the boy’s godfather. Now that Capone was titled as the head of his new family, Capone wanted to play a well-rounded role as a good father and husband, so he moved to Baltimore where he took an honest job as a bookkeeper for a construction company. However in 1920, Capone’s father, Gabriele Capone, passed away due to heart failure. With Al’s father gone, Torrio invited his old pal to come to Chicago. Almost instantaneously, Capone jumped at the opportunity and headed for Chicago.
Al in Chicago
In Chicago, Torrio was presiding over a booming business specializing in gambling and prostitution. However, Torrio took his business to a whole other level. With the enactment in 1920 of the 18th Amendment enforced, it prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol.Torrio focused on a new, more remunerative field: bootlegging. As a former petty thug and bookkeeper, Capone applied both his street smarts and his expertise with numbers to Torrio’s Chicago operations. With a new recognition of Capone’s skills, Torrio quickly promoted him to partner. Unlike the low-profile Torrio, Capone began to develop a reputation as a drinker and a troublemaker. After hitting a parked taxicab due to drunk driving, he was arrested for the first time. Torrio quickly used his connections to the city government to get Al off the hook.
Cleaning Up the Act
Capone cleaned up his act when his family arrived from Brooklyn. His wife and his son, along with his mother, younger brothers, and sister all moved to Chicago, and they were once again reunited. Capone bought a modest house in the middle-class South Side of Chicago.
Let’s Make a Change of Plans
In 1923, Chicago elected a reformist mayor who claimed that he would do everything in his power to rid the city of corruption. Torrio and Capone decided to move their base beyond the city limits to the suburban area of Cicero. But a 1924 mayoral election in Cicero threatened their operations.Torrio and Capone initiated a threat intimidation effort on the day of the election, March 31, 1924, to guarantee their candidate would get elected and to ensure the functioning of their bootlegging business. Some citizens who voted for the opposing candidate were shot and even killed. Police immediately took action, and they savagely gunned down Capone’s brother, Frank, in the street.
Capone’s Reputation
After several rival mobsters attempted to take his life in 1925, Torrio decided to leave his business and return to Italy, leaving the entire operation into Capone’s hands. Al again ignored his mentor’s advice to maintain a low profile. He moved his headquarters to a plush suite in the Metropole Hotel in downtown Chicago. Capone began to change, and he began living a luxurious and public lifestyle; spending money extravagantly, although always in cash to avoid newfound suspicion. According to newspapers, the estimated amounts of profit Capone’s operations generated annually was one hundred million dollars.
The press followed Capone’s every move avidly, and he was able to gain public sympathy with his gregarious and generous personality. Some people even considered him a kind of Robin Hood figure. As anti-Prohibition resentment grew, he was though as an important figure who worked on the side of the people. However, in later years, as Capone’s name increasingly became connected in several brutal, unsettling cases involving violence, his popularity dwindled.
In 1926, when two of Capone’s sworn rivals were spotted in Cicero, Capone ordered his men to gun them down as soon as possible. Among those men was William McSwiggin, known as the “Hanging Prosecutor,” who had tried to prosecute Al for a previous murder. All three men were murdered later on. Infuriated with Chicago’s inability to control gang-dominated lawlessness, the public clamored for justice. The police had no evidence for the murders, so instead they raided Capone’s businesses. Though they could not prove Capone guilty for the incident, they were able to gather documentation that would later be used to bolster charges against him of income-tax evasion. In response to the public outcry, Capone reached out and called for a “Peace Conference” among the city’s criminals. An agreement amongst them was settled to stop the violence. It lasted just only two months until violence broke out among the streets again.
St.Valentine's Day Massacre
By early 1929, Capone dominated the illegal liquor trade in Chicago. Other racketeers strived to mooch off on the profitable bootlegging business, and among them was Capone’s long-time rival “Bugs” Moran. Moran had previously tried to assassinate both Torrio and Capone, and now he was after Capone’s top hit man, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn. Capone and McGurn decided to kill Moran. On February 14, 1929 (also known as St.Valentine’s Day) McGurn’s men posed as the police and assassinated seven of Moran’s men in a North Side garage. Informed about the danger as he approached the garage, Bugs Moran fled the slaughter. Although Capone was staying at his Miami home at the time, the public and the media immediately blamed and accused him of the massacre. He was dubbed “Public Enemy Number One.”
Justice Prevails
In response to the public outcry over the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, President Herbert Hoover ordered the federal government to improve its efforts to get Capone on income-tax evasion. In 1927, the Supreme Court had ruled that income gained through illegal activities were taxable, which gave the government a strong purpose for prosecuting Capone. The U.S. government finally indicted Capone on 22 counts of income-tax evasion on June 5, 1931.
Although the government had solid evidence against him, Capone remained confident that he would get off the case with a minimal sentence. He plead the government for only a two-year sentence. The judge in the case opposed the idea and declared that he would not honor the agreement. Capone quickly withdrew his guilty plea, and the case went to trial. During the trial, Capone bribed and intimidated members of the jury to give him an upper hand of the situation. At the final moments, the judge switched to an entirely new jury. Capone was found guilty and sent to prison for 11 years.
Prison Time
Capone spent the first two years of his prison sentence in a federal prison in Atlanta. After he had been caught bribing several guards within the prison walls, Capone was sent to the notorious island prison, Alcatraz, in 1934. Isolated from the outside world, he could no longer wield nor influence his liquor authority in his previous business operations. Crucially, he began suffering from poor health. Capone had contracted syphilis when he was still young. After spending several years in prison, he then suffered from neurosyphilis, causing dementia. After serving six-and-a-half years, Capone was released in 1939 to a mental hospital in Baltimore, where he remained there for three years.
Capone’s Final Days
His health rapidly declined as he grew older. Capone was able to live his last days in Miami with his wife. On January 25, 1947, the infamous gangster finally died of cardiac arrest.
In general, Capone was a ruthless gangster responsible for countless acts of murder and assassination of scores of people, and his sinister acts of violence remain at the center of his legacy. Capone was often pictured as a cold-blooded gangster, but there was no doubt that he was one of the most cunning and influential gangsters in history.
Charles Lindbergh: The Wounded Bird
Charles Lindbergh was the most famous of aviators in 1920. His most known accomplishment(s) was when he flew from New York of the United States to Paris in France, without ever stopping. Many thought it an impossible feat and the prize for ever accomplishing it was $25,000, which back then was equivalent to winning the lottery. Due to his rise to fame, Charles Lindbergh was a big target for criminals. On March 1st, 1932, Lindbergh's son was abducted from his home, and the body of his baby son was found dead in Hopewell Township, near Lindbergh's home. Numerous actions were taken to prevent crimes such as kidnapping, which was not common in the 1900's, from ever happening again. About ten weeks later his son's body was found. Later on, in 1935 his wife and their three-year-old son, Jon, moved to Europe in hopes of more privacy and safety. While Lindbergh was in Europe, he was invited by the government to France and Germany to take a tour of their aircraft industries; he was mostly impressed with the highly advanced industry of Nazi, Germany. In 1939 he and his family made their way back to the United States and in 1941 he joined the America First Committee, a group that opposed voluntary American entry into World War II.