EXCLUSIVE: 'Al Capone was a mobster but not a monster' insists great grand niece of mafia boss
He was regarded by many as the ultimate gangster, feared and respected in equal measure and the most famous inmate of Alcatraz. But what caused Al Capone to turn out the way he did?
He was a mobster - but not a monster - according to those who knew him best. Now new psychological research on Al Capone has thrown fresh light on the potential cause of his brutality.
And a psychologist argues that his childhood trauma and the terrible facial scars inflicted on him as a teenager may have fed into his later reign of terror.
“His early experiences would have been pivotal,” explains psychologist Serena Simmons, a contributor to a major new series narrated by Sean Bean, Original Gangsters which features the story of Al Capone.
“As a child he saw and suffered horrible racism. His later facial scars deeply affected him; he didn’t want to show his face. Transpose those experiences on to someone today and the compassion we have for the situation would feel very different.”
READ MORE: Massive theft of government bonds and interview with villain who went downCapone’s grandniece, Deirdre Capone, tells the four part documentary: “Was Al Capone a mobster? Yes, he was. Was Al Capone a monster? No, he was not.”
Capone was born in 1899 into an Italian immigrant family who had left Italy for the US five years earlier. One of nine children living in Brooklyn, he grew up to respectable but poor parents - his father was a barber. At a time of mass immigration to America, he would have witnessed first hand the vicious prejudice against the Italian community.
“They were the last to be hired and the first to be fired. There's signs that were out in the windows: if you’re Italian don't apply for a job here,” says Deidre Capone. Capone left school at 14 and began working at the Harvard Inn on Coney Island, a rough bar and a hangout for some of the toughest men in the neighbourhood. And at 5ft 11 tall and well built, he attracted attention.
“What happens when you see a tough little kid on the street? Gangsters begin to put them to work,” says Fred Gardaphé, Professor of Italian and American Studies at City University of New York who has also contributed to the series. It was at this bar, in a fight over a girl, he got his famous scars - three deep lacerations down the side of his face.
“The scars deeply affected him,” says Serena. "When a young person has been scarred it can go one of two ways. Either they’re going to take it inward and be very insular or you have someone who turns the rage into something else.” Coupled with where he lived and its deprivation, Serena says a life of crime for Al Capone was almost ‘a career option’. “That’s especially true if someone does feel downtrodden and hard done by. In many ways the bad path found him. It was the survival of the fittest - eat or be eaten.
“He wanted to get out of poverty so much that he would do anything at any cost.” Now married with a wife and son, Al Capone turned 21 just as Prohibition hit America. He had also by now been taken under the wing of local gangster Johnny Torrio. Despite still only being a hired thug, Torrio recognised his protege was intelligent and when he left New York and moved to Chicago to establish a bootlegging operation he took Capone with him.
It was here Capone met Jim Colossimo, uncle to Johnny, and the man at the top of the city’s criminal underworld, running brothels and gambling operations. “The problem was that Colosimo didn't want to change things while Torio rightly thinks prohibition will be the making of any criminal enterprise during the 1920s,” historian Kristopher Allerfeldt tells the documentary.
In May 1920 Colosimo was shot dead inside his own restaurant. Police suspected Capone - what better way to prove himself as the new kid in town - but never proved it. With the way now clear, opportunities for bootlegging grew by the day and money started to roll in. But opposing gangs had other ideas and turf wars broke out. Torrio was shot and almost died - Capone staying by his bedside night and day. He recovered but was imprisoned for selling illegal booze.
There was now a void at the top of Torrio’s criminal network. At just 26 Capone was handed the keys to an enterprise which today would be worth $1.5 billion. With his garish, pinstripe suits, grey Fedora and oversized personality Capone loved embraced the role of mobster and the limelight. His carefully cultivated an image meant he became the first media gangster, giving interviews to newspapers and magazines. Even Hollywood made movies with characters based on him.
“This would all feed into his ego. He had a compelling vision of himself and his clothes were his costume, it was part of the story he wanted to tell,” says Serena. His methods of dealing with business rivals were brutal - it’s estimated that at the height of his reign in the 1920s there were 700 gangland killings in Chicago of which 200 are associated with Capone's gang. Capone himself though never carried a gun and was never there at a murder. He was highly manipulative; he could get others to do his bidding,” says Serena.
And with money pouring in he could also afford to buy off both senior police officers and court officials, ensuring he always escaped any threat of arrest. But he was also a complex man. Apparently devoted to his mum - who he rang every day - and wife and child he was also a serial philanderer and battled syphilis for most of his adult life.
And while he ran brothels, guns, casinos and illegal liquor, he also gave to the poor, creating soup kitchens and jobs for the local Italian population. “He’s a type of Robin Hood character that came to life; he wanted to be adored and I think that really fed the facade, the character that he wanted to portray,” Serena adds.
The good times were about to run out, though. After images of a particularly gruesome bloodbath - for which Capone was blamed - were splashed across the newspapers the Federal Government decided to act to bring the Chicago lawlessness under control. Their method? Investigators got him not on murder, extortion or bootlegging but on tax evasion.
He was convicted on five counts of evading tax in 1931 and sentenced to 11 years in Alcatraz. "I'm not saying he was a good guy and I'm not saying he was innocent but he got a much stiffer sentence for income evasion than he should have done,” argues US journalist Jonathan Eig in the programme. He was released in 1939 due to his failing health and returned to his mansion in Florida, a shadow of his former tough guy and ravaged by venereal disease.
“The Al Capone that I knew was kind of like a big child. He would call me baby girl. ‘Baby girl, I love you, baby girl, “ recalls Deirdre Capone. He died on January the 25th 1947 at the age of 48. “I think underlying it all he was a very scared person,” says Serena. “I sense a lot of fear there; coming from the background he did to then become something very different - I suspect he never knew when it would all be taken away,” says Serena. “He wanted to be seen as a hero, he wanted recognition but my guess is nobody really knew him because he didn't know who he was himself.”
Original Gangsters starts on Tuesday 4th November at 9pm on Sky History and History Play. The series will also be available to stream on NOW.
