October 21st, 2025

Al Capone Scarface, Alcatraz & Death

By this time, the Capones had moved out of the tenement to a better home in the outskirts of the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was here that Capone would meet both his future wife, Mary (Mae) Coughlin, and his mob mentor, numbers racketeer Johnny Torrio. In his Chicago heydayfrom 1925 to 1929, Capone was reputed to be the most notorious mobster in the United States. It was inevitable that Capone’s henchmen procured a list of jury members to bribe, but unbeknownst to Capone, the authorities had been aware of the plot. When Judge Wilkinson entered the courtroom, he suddenly demanded that the jury be exchanged with another in the same building.

In another incident, Capone brutally assaulted a low-level member of the rival White Hand gang and left him for dead. Since White Hand gang leaders promised retribution, Yale sent Capone, his wife, and his young child to Chicago to work for Torrio. A conflict with the North Side Gang was instrumental in Capone’s rise and fall. Torrio went into retirement after North Side gunmen almost killed him, handing control to Capone.

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 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. After an attempt on his life in 1925 by rival mobsters, Torrio decided to leave the business and return to Italy, turning over the entire operation to Capone.

Capone was once again a free man, having made a mockery of the police and justice system. After an attempted assassination of Capone’s friend and mentor Torrio, the frail man left his legacy of nightclubs, whorehouses, gambling dens, breweries and speakeasies to Capone. Capone kidnapped opponents’ election workers and threatened voters with violence. He eventually won office in Cicero, but not before his brother Frank had been killed in a shootout with Chicago’s police force.

Get fascinating history stories twice a week that connect the past with today’s world, plus an in-depth exploration every Friday. And those contrasting historical features are still part of the country’s culture to this day. More recently, the 2020 movie “Capone,” starring Tom Hardy in the lead role, also chronicled the life of the man who ruled an empire of crime. Capone appears in a segment of Mario Puzo’s crime novel “The Godfather” (1969), which was turned into a celebrated film by Francis Ford Coppola in 1972. He was the inspiration for Armitage Trail’s “Scarface” (1929), a novel that was also adapted into two movies over the years. Even though Al Capone was at his Florida home at the time, he was widely assumed to have been responsible for ordering the massacre.

• After serving six-and-a-half years, Capone was released in 1939 to a mental hospital in Baltimore, where he remained for three years.
• In 1918, Capone married middle-class Irish girl Mae Coughlin and settled down as a bookkeeper, taking a brief hiatus from his gangster role.
• His wife and son, along with his mother, younger brothers and sister all moved to Chicago, and Capone bought a modest house in the middle-class South Side.
• Capone also had to deal with rival gangster Bugs Moran and his North Siders gang, who had been a threat for years.

The police had no evidence for the murders, so instead they raided Capone’s businesses, where they gathered documentation that would later be used to bolster charges against him of income-tax evasion. In response, Capone called for a “Peace Conference” among the city’s criminals, and an agreement was reached to stop the violence. Al Capone was a gangster who served aspiring New York mobsters Frankie Yale and Johnny Torrio.

New York City

However, Capone’s sentence was eventually reduced to six and a half years for good behavior. Capone prided himself on keeping his temper under wraps, but when friend and fellow hood Jack Guzik was assaulted by a small-time thug, Capone tracked the assailant down and shot him dead in a bar. Due to a lack of witnesses, Capone got away with the murder, but the publicity surrounding the case gave him a notoriety that he never had before. A crackdown on racketeering in Chicago meant that Capone’s first mobster job was to move operations to Cicero, Illinois. With the assistance of his brothers Frank (Salvatore) and Ralph, Capone infiltrated the government and police departments.

Al Capone’s Secret City

January 17 marks 125 years since the birth of Al Capone — one of the most notorious gangsters of all time. He embodied organized crime and has been immortalized in films such as “Scarface” and “The Untouchables.” Elmer Irey undertook a cunning plan to use undercover agents posing as hoods to infiltrate Capone’s organization. Despite an informer ending up with a bullet in his head before he could testify, Elmer managed to amass enough evidence through his detectives, posing as gangsters, to try Capone in front of a jury. With two vital bookkeepers, Leslie Shumway and Fred Reis, who had once been in Capone’s employment, now safely under police protection, it was only a matter of time before Capone’s days as Public Enemy No. 1 were over. When leaving the cinema, he was arrested and imprisoned for carrying a concealed weapon.

Capone left for Miami with his wife and son and bought Palm Island estate, a property that he immediately started to renovate expensively. This gave Elmer Irey his chance to document Capone’s income and spending. The only exception was the tangible assets of the Palm Island estate, which was evidence of a major source of income. When McGurn’s men thought they saw Moran, they got into their police uniforms and drove over to the garage in a stolen police car. McGurn’s men took the bootleggers’ guns and opened fire with two machine guns. All the men except Frank Gusenberg were killed outright in cold blood.

At age 14, 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 the criminal enterprise, transforming a violently crude culture into a corporate empire. Capone joined Torrio’s James Street Boys gang, rising eventually to the Five Points Gang. Before Capone turned 21, he was involved in several violent incidents. Despite being questioned by the police, Capone was let go because no one had witnessed the murder.

With such a ruling, it wasn’t long before the small Special Intelligence Unit of the IRS under Elmer Irey was able to go after Capone. Chicago’s most infamous Prohibition-era crime boss, Al Capone is best known for his violence and ruthlessness in his elimination of his rivals. The most notorious of the bloodlettings is the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which seven members of Bugs Moran’s gang were machine-gunned in a garage on Chicago’s North Side on February 14, 1929.

A poor family that came to America seeking a better life, the Capones and their eight children lived a typical immigrant lifestyle in a New York tenement. There was nothing in Capone’s childhood or family life that could have predicted his rise to infamy as America’s most notorious gangster. The Brian De Palma-directed masterpiece “The Untouchables” is another notable drama inspired by Capone’s story. With Robert de Niro in the role of the gangster, the film is based on how Treasury agent Eliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner, brought down the notorious Chicago mobster. In August 1934, Capone was moved from a prison in Atlanta to the infamous Alcatraz prison in San Francisco. His days of privileges in jail were gone, and contact with the outside world, even through letters and newspapers, was minimal.

Al Capone, also known as “Scarface,” rose to infamy as the leader of the Chicago Outfit, an organized crime syndicate during the Prohibition era. The press followed Capone’s every move avidly, and he was able to gain public sympathy with his gregarious and generous personality. Some even considered him a kind of Robin Hood figure, or as anti-Prohibition resentment grew, a dissident who worked on the side of the people. However, in later years, as Capone’s name increasingly became connected with brutal violence, his popularity waned.

But he never went anywhere without at least two bodyguards and was even sandwiched between bodyguards when traveling by car. He preferred to travel under the cover of night, risking travel by day only when absolutely necessary. With his business acumen, Al became Torrio’s partner and took over as manager of the Four Deuces — Torrio’s headquarters in Chicago’s Levee area. The Four Deuces served as a speakeasy, gambling joint and whorehouse under one roof.

Between them, they took leading positions within Cicero city government in addition to running brothels, gambling clubs and racetracks. He attended school until the sixth grade, whence he dropped out at age 14 after striking a teacher. When Capone was 19, he married Mae Coughlin just weeks after the birth of their child, Albert Francis. Now a husband and a father, Capone wanted to do right by his family, so he moved to Baltimore where he took an honest job as a bookkeeper for a construction company.

On June 5, 1931 the U.S. government finally indicted Capone on 22 counts of income-tax evasion. He was never convicted of the murders but ultimately went to prison merely for the crime of tax evasion, ending his stint as a crime boss at the age of 33. Somewhat ironically, it was the pen pushers from the tax office who posed the greatest threat to the gangsters’ bootlegging empires. In May 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that a bootlegger had to pay income tax on his illegal bootlegging business.

The main effect of Capone’s conviction was that he ceased to be boss immediately on his imprisonment, but those involved in the jailing of Capone portrayed it as a considerable undermining of the city’s organized crime syndicate. In 1926, when two of Capone’s sworn enemies were spotted in Cicero, Capone ordered his men to gun them down. Unbeknownst to Capone, William McSwiggin, known as the “Hanging Prosecutor,” who had tried to prosecute him for a previous murder, was with the two marked men and all three were killed. Fed up with Chicago’s gang-dominated lawlessness, the public clamored for justice.

Born in 1899 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Neapolitan immigrants, Alphonse Gabriel Capone came into contact with organized crime at an early age. Mellon set out to get the necessary evidence both to prove income tax evasion and to amass enough evidence to prosecute Capone successfully for Prohibition violations. Al Capone was one of the most famous American gangsters who rose to infamy as the leader of the Chicago Outfit during the Prohibition era. Before being sent to Alcatraz Prison in 1934 for a tax evasion conviction, he had amassed a personal fortune estimated at $100 million as the head of the infamous crime syndicate.

On June 5, 1931, Capone yourpowermed.hu was indicted for 22 counts of federal income-tax evasion for the years 1925 through 1929. On June 12 Capone and others were charged with conspiracy to violate Prohibition laws for the years 1922 to 1931. In October Capone was tried, found guilty on three of the 23 counts, and sentenced to 11 years in prison and $50,000 in fines and court costs. He entered Atlanta penitentiary in May 1932 but was transferred to the new Alcatraz prison in August 1934. In November 1939, suffering from the general deterioration of paresis (a late stage of syphilis), he was released and entered a Baltimore hospital. Later he retired to his Florida estate, where he died from cardiac arrest in 1947, a powerless recluse.

The infamous gangster left his mark not only on the streets of 1920s Chicago but also on 20th-century Hollywood through multiple mafia movies inspired by his life and crimes. The image of a mobster adorned with a pinstriped suit and tilted fedora can be traced back to images of Capone. His accent and mannerisms have also inspired numerous gangster portrayals in comics, films, popular music and literature. But like many criminal figures from the past, the dastardly yet charismatic gangster divides opinion. Idolized by some, Capone was still responsible for “an empire of crime” in Chicago that was based on “gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, bribery, narcotics trafficking, robbery, and murder,” according to the FBI’s website.

After his transfer to Alcatraz prison—he was convicted of tax evasion in 1931—his mental and physical condition deteriorated from paresis (a late stage of syphilis). He was released in November 1939 and was sent to a Baltimore mental hospital before he retired to his Florida estate. Capone spent the first two years of his incarceration in a federal prison in Atlanta. After he was caught bribing guards, however, Capone was sent to the notorious island prison Alcatraz in 1934.

Isolated there from the outside world, he could no longer wield his still considerable influence. Capone had contracted syphilis as a young man, and he now 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 for three years. His health rapidly declining, Capone lived out his last days in Miami with his wife.

He served most of his time at the notorious Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary off the coast of San Francisco, before being released in 1939, by which time his mental capabilities had significantly deteriorated. With the 125th anniversary of Al Capone’s birth upon us on January 17, the legacy of the notorious American gangster remains a subject that intrigues both Hollywood producers and novelists to this day. When word got out, the press was outraged and campaigned against what they saw as a blatant whitewash. The overconfident Capone, who believed he would receive less than five years in prison, became less cocky when he realized that his plea bargain was now null and void.

Capone was sent to Chicago and helped Torrio rid the city of their underworld competition. After Torrio retired, Capone became Chicago’s de facto crime czar, running gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging rackets and expanding his territories by gunning down rivals. When Capone died, a New York Times headline trumpeted, “End of an Evil Dream.” Capone’s was at times both loved and hated by the media and the public. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, some in the public felt that Capone’s and others’ involvement in selling liquor had been vindicated. But Capone was a ruthless gangster responsible for murdering or ordering the assassinations of scores of people, and his contemptible acts of violence remain at the center of his legacy.

However the murder was followed by a big outcry against gangster violence, and public sentiment went against Capone. As Prohibition began in 1919 after the 18th amendment went into effect, new bootlegging operations opened up and drew in immense wealth. In 1925, Torrio retired, and Capone became the crime czar of Chicago, running gambling, prostitution and bootlegging rackets and expanding his territories by the gunning down of rivals and rival gangs. Al Capone died of cardiac arrest in 1947, but his decline began earlier.