Al Capone biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Many New York gangsters in the early 20th Century came from impoverished backgrounds, but this was not the case for the legendary Al Capone. Far from being a poor immigrant from Italy who turned to crime to make a living, Capone was from a respectable, professional family. His father, Gabriele, was one of thousands of Italians who arrived in New York in 1894. He was thirty years old, educated and from Naples, where he had earned a living as a barber. His wife Teresina (Teresa) was pregnant and already bringing up two sons, two-year-old son Vincenzo and infant son Raffaele. The family moved to a poor Brooklyn tenement where Alphonse Capone was born on January 17, 1899.

The young Capone's home was far from salubrious. He lived in a squalid tenement, little more than a slum, near the Navy Yard. 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 Al 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.

But it was Capone's schooling, both inadequate and brutal at a Catholic institution beset with violence that marred the impressionable young man. Despite having been a promising student, he was expelled at fourteen for hitting a female teacher and never went back.

It was then that Capone met the gangster Johnny Torrio which would prove the greatest influence on the would-be gangland boss. Torrio taught Capone the importance of maintaining a respectable front, while running a racketeering business. The slightly built Torrio represented a new dawn in criminal enterprise, transforming a violently crude culture into a corporate empire. Capone joined Johnny Torrio's James Street Boys gang, rising eventually to the Five Points Gang. In a youthful scrape in a brothel-saloon, a young hoodlum slashed Capone with a knife or razor across his left cheek, prompting the later nickname "Scarface."

Torrio moved from New York to Chicago in 1909 to help run the giant brothel business there and, in 1919, sent for Capone. It was either Capone or Frankie Yale who allegedly assassinated Torrio's boss, Big Jim Colosimo, in 1920, making way for Torrio's rule. As Prohibition began, new bootlegging operations opened up and drew in immense wealth. In 1925 Torrio retired, and Capone became crime czar of Chicago, running gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging rackets and expanding his territories by the gunning down of rivals and rival gangs.