Al Capone - The Real Scarface & The Mob Documentary

September 1926 a hail of gunfire is heard on the street outside the headquarters of the Southside gang in Cicero Illinois the machine guns ring out and the Hawthorne Inn is peppered with 1,000 shots each with the same target infamous southside gangster Al Capone but the mob boss escapes once more that they're guided by luck security measures or by his informants Capone seems invincible at least for now [Music] the man known to history as Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born on the 17th of January 1899 in Brooklyn New York in the United States of America his father was Gabriel Capone a barber who emigrated from angery a small village just outside of Naples in southern Italy with his wife and Alphonse his mother Theresa Capone born Theresa Raiola a seamstress who will have nine children with Gabrielle the couple arrived in Brooklyn in 1893 having first emigrated to the port of rejection in austria-hungary present-day Croatia their first residence b95 Navy Street in the navy yard area of downtown Brooklyn before moving on to Park Slope in Brooklyn when Alphonse was 11 Alphonse Capone had eight brothers and sisters Vincenzo who became a prohibition agent changing his name to Richard Hart Raphael James known as bottles who had go on to control his brother's liquor empire Salvatori known as Frank we would also work for his brother al her sister Amina who died at the age of one amino known as John as well as Albert Matthew and a surviving sister Mafalda Capone when he started school Alphonse showed promise as a student bringing home excellent results to his proud parents but he struggled keeping the rules of his strict Catholic background and would be expelled from school at the age of 14 for striking a female teacher in the face and so after this incident his formal schooling stopped but his education into the criminal world was just beginning surrounded by criminal influences which seemed an everyday part of life in Brooklyn at the time it was no surprise when L then graduated to gang life joining small-time gangs such as the Bowery Boys and jr. 40 thieves after which he joined the Brooklyn rippers and eventually the five points gang the most powerful gang of the time which was based in lower Manhattan by 1917 Al's employer and mentor was Frankie Yale who was a bootlegger in pretension racketeer who demanded payments from local businesses in order to protect rather not harm them and from the funds from his protection operation he opened up a bar called the Harvard Inn in Coney Island where L worked for Frankie as a bartender and doorman but he was also learning knowledge insights and the workings of the criminal world from them at the same time but also the people who influenced him at this time were the more salubrious characters such as gangster Johnny Torrio who he came to admire saw as a mentor it was during this time that L would gain the nickname he hated Scarface when he was working as a doorman at the Harvard Inn and got into a fight with a local gangster one Frankie Galluccio after inadvertently upsetting his vivacious and beautiful sister Lina by insulting her with a misjudged compliment about her posterior and in the resulting drunken set to Galluccio slashed Capone with a knife which would leave a noticeable scar on the left side of his face for the rest of his life Capone was always conscious of this scar I would have photographs taken from the other side to avoid it being seen he also claimed it was a war wound gained from quote a German gunner in the trenches of World War one although this was not true as he had never served in the war however a more favored nickname for Al was one given to him by his closest friends which was smokey a name for a smart dresser and as well as this other nicknames he was given included big al big boy and public enemy number one following this incident with Frankie Galluccio Capone was aching for revenge although he was forced to reconcile with the local villain instead by other high-ranking gangsters which he did a Galluccio apologized for causing the scar and Capone promised not to seek retribution against him which he stuck to even when he became a mob boss himself one reason L decided to reconcile with Galluccio was that he recognized his own fault in the matter and so that Galluccio was merely respecting and protecting his own family and such a code would be a potent factor in how gangland families operated at the time as family respect and loyalty would be key to how these gangsters lived despite operating outside of the law in effect they had their own moral law or code which they saw as sacrosanct indeed family was everything to many italian-american gangsters of this time and so when Elle's girlfriend Mae Josephine Conklin birth to L son Albert Francis Sonny Capone in December 1918 the only thing to be done was for the pair to Marie which they did only a few weeks later on the 30th of December may had been working in a local department store when she met al and when he married this Irish Catholic girl he was only 19 and she was 21 and so because he was under the legal age required he had to obtain the consent of his parents in writing in order to marry but their marriage would be a very happy one right up until the end shortly after his marriage to Mae al was asked by Johnny Torrio to make the move to Chicago and Al was happy to oblige his friend as well as make a new start for him at his family in the Windy City and so in 1919 Capone left Brooklyn for Chicago and began working as a bouncer in a brothel where he contracted syphilis and it appears with hindsight the treatment with a newly introduced drug called salvarsan could probably have cured him but it seems that I'll never sought treatment until it was too late the reason for the now notorious surgeon organized crime across the United States in the 1920s was in large part due to the continued demand across the country for alcohol despite its sale and being mostly illegal under the 18th amendment to the United States Constitution of 1919 as well as the prohibition or Volstead Act that was ratified in January of 1919 there had been a growing clamor for the banning of alcohol across the United States since the 1800s especially amongst the more puritanical Protestant Christian members of the population whose campaigns against the sale of liquor became more and more vocal and forthright as the decades passed and was led by particularly ardent temperance supporters such as Carrie nation who became famous in 1900 for embarking on a divinely ordained rampage of violence across Kansas in which she smashed up numerous bars and saloons with rocks and hatchets claiming that God had told her to do so despite the more militant campaigners against alcohol many of whom were women who had suffered at the hands of drunken husbands a case for reform grew and grew until eventually 46 States most of whose politicians and officials were now under massive pressure to pass the 18th amendment eventually gave him meaning that by the beginning of the 1920s the sale and consumption of the vast majority of alcoholic beverages was illegal in America nonetheless many people especially those of Italian and Irish background or heritage had no intention of abstaining from alcohol consumption and so it wasn't long before a massive black market industry sprang up across America which played directly into the hands of the grateful underworld who increasingly made a fortune from shipping and selling liquor across the country in defiance of prohibition meanwhile life with a Capone family in Chicago was going well and in 1923 L purchased a small house at seven to four for South Prairie Avenue in Park Manor on the south side of the city for $5,500 and began making his name as a boxing promoter but this was merely a cover as in reality he was working for a crime organization headed by Johnny Torrio who in turn had taken over from Chicago crime boss James Big Jim Colosimo at that time at the height of the Prohibition era the Chicago Outfit or South Side gang as it was also known was a growing illicit organization consisting of illegal stills and breweries and a transport network that reached Canada protected through bribes by politicians as well as law enforcement agencies as well as this the racket was also grown through fear with businesses who refused to buy the illicit liquor being blown up and it is thought that as many as 100 people could have been killed in such bombings during the 1920s Capone had a push off for the high life wearing expensive bespoke suits smoking cigars are meeting only the best food he also had a liking for female company and was also known to wear expensive showy jewelry and he reveled in the attention he received such as being cheered at his arrival at ball games and felt he was a modern-day Robin Hood making charitable donations from his vast illicit wealth but when questioned about his activities and lifestyle his falsely humble response might be quote I am just a businessman giving the people what they want or all I do is satisfy a public demand it seems he had become a celebrity before celebrity had been invented nonetheless in 1923 a change had come about in the form of political reform as in Chicago the reformist William Emmett diva was appointed mayor and to avoid potential interference and investigation Capone and Torrio decided to move their base of operations to the Chicago suburbs and the town of Cicero Illinois and so Al Capone paced himself and the rest of the Southside gang there from where he grew the operation they set up illicit brothels speakeasies and gambling dens and expanded the liquor operation to supply all of Cicero saloons even using bribery and intimidation to take over local town elections such as the 1924 Cicero municipal elections and of this veneer of respectability made it difficult for the North Side gang to get to him and was an opportunity for Capone to not only protect himself from rival gangs who sought to take over his rum-running monopoly but also prevent the election of more reformist politicians the incumbent mayor of Cicero was the corrupt republican joseph zed planner who along with his bipartisan administration had received hardly any opposition in the elections running Cicero by then for three consecutive terms the corrupt administration had been controlled by the Southside gang with the help of elds brother Salvatore e Capone better known as Frank but in 1924 the Democratic Party decided it would mount a challenge and run its own candidates in the election mounting a serious challenge to the status quo with their threat to clean up the town the first of April 1924 was the date sent for the election but planner had decided he needed help to secure a win as Howie offered the Chicago Outfit an effective immunity from prosecution in Cicero Capone and his cronies were only too happy to oblige and brought in 200 men members of his own gang plus members from other allied gangs and the contingent gathered included Capone's brothers Frank and Ralph as well as his cousin Charles Fischetti the gang would begin a targeted campaign of stabbing shootings kidnappings and general intimidation to make sure that planner was elected mayor once again and to achieve that they started on the 31st of May the eve of the election with the Democratic nominee for town Clarke William K Palmer who had his face beaten and his offices ransacked as well as this his wife was thrown against a wall the terror continued the following day the first of April election day when the voters faced submachine guns and sawed-off shotguns at the polling booths to ensure that their votes were cast for Klenner when their votes were for him they were allowed to vote multiple times but those who dared to resist their persuasion breather prevented from voting or beaten as well as this cars were roaming the streets filled with gunmen and several individuals were targeted such as Democrat Rudolf hurt who was standing for mayor whose campaign headquarters was sprayed with gunfire and his fellow Democrat the Challenger for City Clark was pistol-whipped in front of his family as well as his supporters and then in the campaign headquarters of another opponent Frank Capone himself beat up several campaign officials and ransacked to the office the chaos continued with polling stations being raided and ballad snatched from voters hands other voters were even shot or stabbed or beaten by so-called sluggers in the street last one campaign official called Joseph price was tied up and gagged before being battered by the gangsters another Democratic official named Stanley Stein kovitch was taken to a Chicago basement blindfolded and kept there until after the polling stations had closed to prevent him from voting up to 20 others were chained to posts and pipes in the basement of a plumbing store to prevent them voting and a police officer was beaten after being disarmed of his gun one Democrat a campaigner named Michael Gavin was shot in both of his legs and kept with 8 other campaign workers in the basement of a mob owned Chicago hotel to prevent them voting and when a call from help from the campaigners finally reached Cook County Judge Edmund cage Araki later that afternoon he sent 70 Chicago police officers made up of five squads of detectives and nine squads of police in vehicles to help subdue the chaos and confusion in Cicero the police response included a squad car carrying both uniformed police and detectives who spotted al his brother Frank Capone as well as henchmen Dave headland and Charles Fischetti and straightaway the policeman jumped out of the car with drawn weapons and a gun battle ensued between the men in which Frank Capone was shot and killed and Hedlund was wounded but Al Capone escaped as did Fischetti later surrendered himself Capone gave his brother a funeral that was lavish and opulent the flowers provided by local bootlegger and florist Dean O'Banion cost $20,000 alone and the mourners wailed for the loss of one so young but observing from a distance were the very same police officers who had shot and killed Frank Capone there possibly to elicit a reaction from the mob boss but it didn't come at least not at the funeral an occupational hazard for Capone in his time as boss of the mob in Cicero was the many attempts on his own life from other gang members as well as the threat of arrest at any time his bribery and corruption of local politicians safeguarded him to an extent that he and his entourage was still vulnerable and so l was very security-conscious as a result indeed in the early 20s Capone's driver was found tortured and murdered at vice narrowly escaped from an attempt on his life in the Chicago Loop the business district of downtown Chicago Capone's friend Johnny Torrio had taken over from Colosimo after he was killed on the 11th of May 1920 Hays was a murder which many believed at the time Capone was involved with but in his new role Capone put his New York nouse to good use by negotiating in gang war disagreements and creating treaties between the various groups becoming known as an arbitrator of sorts furthermore the deals were made so that Torrio's Italian organized crime group would remain the biggest in the city and one of the most prominent of the deals that Capone brokered was a deal over the control of territory between the infamous North Side gang and the Genna brothers the Genna brothers were allied with Torrio as was Dean O'Banion head of the North Side gang who were a group of mixed ethnicity criminals and the brothers had begun selling cheap booze to bunions customers and not only did Torrio seem to ignore what was going on he also either sanctioned or arranged himself for the murder of O'Banion at his flower shop which was the legal front to his own illicit operations on the 10th of November 1924 where he was shot whilst flipping chrysanthemums by Brooklyn crime boss Frankie Yale and Genna gunman Albert Anselmi and John Scalise II O'Banion had been known for his bizarre behavior a childlike wide grin and banks laughing anyone knew he met he had gunned down a man in front of crowds for no good reason and killed a man he met at Al's club the four deuces bringing unwanted attention to the gangsters but when he tracked Torrio into being present at his brewery when he knew a raid was about to occur which ended in Torrio's arrest O'Banion's boasting of what he had done sealed his fate this resulted in a change of the hierarchy of the North Side gang and it was now headed by vice with the help of his second-in-command Vincent drew key and bugs Moran and as O'Banion had been a good friend of vice the northsiders had only one thing on their mind by this point and that was revenge for this was just the beginning of what would be a five-year gang war between the two factions I'm so in January 1925 it came as no surprise when first Capone was ambushed leaving him unharmed but shaken up by the experience and then only twelve days later Torrio himself was shot when returning from a shopping trip the experience leaving him deeply affected he decided to effectively resign and in control of the Chicago Outfit as it was known to Capone at the age of only 26 there was a further attack from the North Side gang on the 20th of September 1926 when they attempted to draw Capone to the window of his Hawthorne Inn headquarters several gunmen opened fire on the first floor of the restaurant with Thompson submachine guns firing over 1,000 shots but Capone was unharmed and called for a truce followed by negotiations which took place but achieved nothing only three weeks after this the head of the North Side gang I'm Eve ice was killed by the South Side gang outside the flower shop that had been owned by Dean O'Banion which now acted as the Northside headquarters of the gang and in January 1927 the owner of Hawthorne's restaurant was a good friend of Capone's was killed in retaliation by bugs Moran and drew Key after being kidnapped by them the continuation of the turf wars prompted a further security measure when Capone began spending more time away from Chicago and it was not unusual for the whole Capone entourage to turn up at a Chicago train station and hire a complete Pullman sleeper car to take them on various breaks to places such as Little Rock Hot Springs Kansas City Omaha or Cleveland for a week in a luxurious hotel which they booked using false names as a more permanent retreat Capone purchased a 14 room mansion in 1928 and it is said that Capone paid $40,000 to August Busch a beer magnate from Missouri for this retreat at 93 Palm Avenue on Palm Island in Biscayne Bay Miami Florida but the house would not be registered in his name neither would any other property in fact he didn't even have a bank account but instead he used Western Union for cash deliveries nonetheless he was a prolific contributor to charity and even helped set up a soup kitchen in Chicago during the Depression all moves intended to bolster his popularity with the common people during his life Capone used political alliances to his advantage for example he supported William Hale Thompson with a donation of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars when the Republican candidate for the 1927 mayoral election for Chicago hinted in his campaign that he would allow illegal drinking saloons to be reopened which would obviously be a major opportunity for Capone's illegal bootlegging business to thrive after this Thompson beat his reformist rival William Emma Deva and became mayor of Chicago in 1927 and continued to receive the support of Capone which allowed their mutually profitable relationship to continue right up until 1929 an event which later became known as the st. Valentine's Day Massacre was to crack Capone's thin veneer of legitimacy altogether and would also endanger the informal immunity from police prosecution he had enjoyed through his alliance with Thompson nevertheless bugs Moran was a thorn in the side of Capone and a hated enemy and now leader of the North Side gang following the death of Jaime Vice and there was no love lost between them from either side because as well as being competition for each other's bootlegging operations Moran disliked the fact that Capone was involved in prostitution rackets as it was against his Catholic principles and so the continuing tit-for-tat killings and violence came to a head on the morning of Thursday the 14th of February 1929 the day of the st. Valentine's Day Massacre Capone had hatched a plan against Moran by renting an apartment across the road from Moran's headquarters and watching the movements of his men Capone arranged for a phone call on the 13th which told bugs there was to be a delivery of whiskey from Detroit the following day at a bargain price so he agreed and asked for the delivery at 10:30 the next morning at the SMC cartage company on North Clark Street where his bootleg operation vehicles were kept but when the truck arrived Capone had arranged for a fake police raid to take place by two gunmen dressed in plain clothes and two dressed a Chicago police officers who lined up seven of bugs Moran's men against a wall supposedly to search them but when a signal was given the men were moaned down in cold blood by the accomplices machine guns and shotguns bugs himself escaped the attack having slept in that morning despite having been the main target of the hit but the fallout of the hit for Capone especially when the photographs of the slain victims were published was a decline in his image and standing with the public and it also earned him the new nickname public enemy number one and led to questions about the appropriateness of his close ties with Thompson the mayor of Chicago the emergency services did not arrive promptly at the scene due to neighbors thinking that the police were already in attendance because of the presence of two men dressed as police officers and once they did arrive six of the men were already dead the one surviving man Frank gusenberg was taken to hospital refusing to identify his killers so as to keep the gangsters code but he later died bugs Moran's reaction to the complete carnage of the attack was to break the gangsters code himself and informed the police that it was Capone who arranged the attack this resulted in a summons to court for Capone to answer charges but he denied all responsibility and claimed he was sick and so could not attend court this happened twice and eventually the charges were dropped it seems his tactics had worked Al Capone was known as someone who let others do his dirty work for him but one story persists which suggests that this wasn't always true this story starts with a dinner at a night of drinking for several of Capone's men including Scalise II and Selmy and Ginter three men who Capone believed had been conspiring against him with another gangster and the story goes to Capone himself beat the men about the head with a baseball bat before ordering his men to shoot them but some historians have questioned the veracity of this story although it was reported in the newspapers at the time and one associate of Capone's claimed to have witnessed both the planning of the attack and the incident itself during 1929 attempts to bring public enemy number one to justice were intensified and on the 27th of March 1929 FBI agents arrested Capone as he left a courtroom after testifying to a grand jury investigating prohibition law violations the charge they brought was the feigning of illness which he'd used to avoid earlier prosecution and then on the 16th of May 1929 Capone was arrested again when in Philadelphia on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon this time he was sent to trial and found guilty and received a sentence of one year in prison on the 8th of August 1929 Capone was sent to Eastern State Penitentiary in Philly Delphia and he was released in March 1930 but in April 1930 Capone was next arrested on vagrancy charges whilst visiting Miami Beach as the governor had ordered that he should be expelled from the state and during his arrest Capone claimed that the police had threatened his family with arrest and refused him food and water he was then further charged with perjury for making these claims but after a three-day trial in July he was found not guilty van in September a court judge issued a warrant for Capone's arrest on charges of vagrancy once again and the judge then stood against Thompson in the Republican primary election making good use of the publicity he had stirred up to foster votes and in February 1931 Capone faced another trial this time on the charge of contempt of court due to his illness claims and Judge James Herbert Wilkinson made a point of questioning further the testimony of Capone's doctor thus aiding the prosecutor and Capone was sentenced to six months in prison but remained free for the time being as he had appealed the decision the law was trying every which way to bring Capone to justice when assistant attorney general Mabel Walker willebrandt realized that there may be another way she saw that the luxurious lifestyles of the mobsters must be backed up by a substantial income yet she recognized that they never filed income tax returns and so Mabel came up with the idea of prosecuting the gangsters for tax evasion that way they could be convicted without the very difficult to acquire testimony there are other illegal deeds and violent crimes and so she tried out this approach in the case of United States versus Manley Sullivan an illegal bootlegger and the outcome of the case was that justice Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. found that illegally earned income should be subject to income tax and the plea of the Fifth Amendment to protect criminals from reporting illegal income was invalid after this the Internal Revenue Service or IRS chose Frank J Wilson to investigate Capone's tax matters but also his lawyers had been ordered by Capone to get his tanks position into good order and so they declared income that was taxable for 1928 and 1929 of $100,000 for each year and as he hadn't paid tax on that amount the Declaration was in effect an admission of guilt and so on the 13th of March 1931 Capone was charged with income tax of ancient for the year of 1924 and Vann on the 5th of June Capone was indicted by a federal grand jury to stand trial on 22 counts of income tax evasion from 1925 to 1929 and he was at that point released on bail of $50,000 a week after this Eliot Ness of his team would become involved with the court process and their evidence led to Capone's indictment on 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act the Act which detailed the prohibition laws indeed Eliot Ness is one of the names inextricably linked to Al Capone he was an American prohibition agent in Chicago leader of his team of reliable whiter than white law enforcement agents known as the untouchables and with a reputation as an incorruptible even zealous upholder of the law he seemed to be untempered by the bribes and unaffected by the intimidation that the Chicago Outfit attempted to buy him with and you could even say he was the exact opposite of Al Capone Ness was a member of the US Treasury Department which he joined in 1926 working within the Bureau of prohibition in Chicago and so Ness was part of the team whose job it was to take down Al Capone by investigating his illegal bootlegging activities and gathering evidence of conspiracy to violate the National prohibition of Alstead Act in addition Ness instigated raids of Capone's illegal stills and breweries destroying his supply chain and leading to an estimated loss of nine million dollars in income for Capone by the end of their investigations getting much of their information through wiretaps on phone lines the operation headed by ness caused a major financial and disruption to Capone's operation and collected evidence for the 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act that he would be tried on on the 16th of June 1931 Capone stood before Judge James Herbert Wilkinson the same judge who had convicted Capone's brother Ralph for tax evasion in 1930 and imprisoned him for three years this time Al Capone pled guilty to income tax evasion and also to the five thousand violations of the Volstead Act as part of a plea bargain deal in which he agreed to plead guilty he returned for a sentence of two and a half years however when it came to sentencing judge Wilkinson refused to honor the plea bargain and on the 30th of July in 1931 Capone's counsel retracted the guilty pleas and an argument was made that a lawyer could not confess for his client arguing that the lawyers admitted the income and not Capone but Judge Wilkinson overruled the objection on the grounds that any statement made to a government official was done at the person's own risk and so Judge Wilkinson ruled that the latter to federal authorities admitting income could be admitted into evidence by Capone's lawyer while Kherson subsequently tried Capone on the income tax evasion charges alone deeming them to take precedence over the Volstead Act prohibition based charges and the lawyers acting for Capone had only hours to prepare for the trial as they had been relying on the judge accepting the plea bargain deal and came up with the defense that all his income had been lost because of his gambling habit furthermore the defense was weak to say the least not only were gambling losses only admissible as a deduction from gambling winnings but Capone's expenses showed that money must have been available to pay for them and to an extent that was far greater than that which they claimed the extent of Capone spending was outlined in court in great detail and the charge was that two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars in taxes had been evaded on a gross income of 1 million thirty eight thousand six hundred and fifty-four dollars over a five year period and so on the 31st of October 1931 Al Capone was convicted on three counts of income tax evasion and a week later here is his sentence which was to be 11 years in federal prison and a fine of $50,000 plus seven thousand six hundred and ninety two dollars in costs as well as this he would also be liable for the two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars back taxes plus interest but the sentence for contempt of court would be served concurrently Capone's response was to hire a team of Tanks expert lawyers from Washington and they filed a writ of habeas corpus which meant that the detainee had to be brought to court to investigate if the detention was lawful the grounds they used for their argument was a supreme court ruling which had pronounced that tanks evasion was not fraud which would mean that the time limit for the prosecution of tax evasion might have expired on some of the tanks years he was convicted for but the judge decided that the time Capone had spent in Miami should be deducted from the age of the offenses making the argument invalid and thus denying the appeal for both the conviction and the sentence following the failed appeal Capone was sent to Atlanta US Penitentiary on the 3rd of May 1932 at the age of 33 moreover Eliot Ness was among the federal agents who accompanied Capone from the Cook County Jail to the penitentiary and this was the only time that the two men were known to have actually met in person and when Capone arrived there he weighed 250 pounds and at the medical he was diagnosed with both syphilis and gonorrhea as well as a perforated nasal septum due to excessive cocaine use in addition he was also suffering from withdrawal symptoms from cocaine to which he was addicted whilst in Atlanta Capone was competent in his job of stitching soles onto shoes but he was not popular with fellow inmates who felt he was both a weak personality unable to deal with the bullying the other inmates carried out and also was receiving special treatment this idea arose from the protection he was offered by his cellmate red radensky a seasoned criminal who was associated with the Southside gang and so with the hatred he was facing from other inmates the inka hearings of the latter's he was writing home as well as red rodents keys concerns that he would have a breakdown it was decided that Capone would be moved to the we opened Alcatraz federal penitentiary off the coast of San Francisco in August 1934 his new address was to be cell one eight one in Alcatraz on the 23rd of June 1936 Capone was attacked in the laundry area by fellow inmate James critter tan Lucas who was serving a life sentence for bank robbery Lucas stabbed Capone in the back with a pair of scissors stolen from the prison barber but Capone was only superficially wounded and so he was able to throw Lucas against a wall in retaliation after the attack Lucas was sent into solitary confinement as a punishment during his time at Alcatraz Capone syphilis worsened affecting his mental faculties until in February 1938 he was diagnosed formally with syphilis of the brain and so the final year of his Alcatraz sentence was spent in the hospital ward to the prison where he was both disorientated and confused and so when he was released from Alcatraz on the 6th of January 1939 he was immediately transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution on Terminal Island in California to fulfill his sentence for contempt of court and as well as this he was given parole on the 16th of November 1939 when his wife May appealed to the court on the grounds of his reduced mental capacity the effect of Capone's imprisonment was portrayed by those involved in it as reducing the operation of organized crime carried out by the Southside mob but in reality it only called for a temporary change of leader who was found in Frank Nitti at least when he was released from prison in March 1932 having served a sentence for tax evasion himself in reality the Chicago Outfit continued their crime business at a more discreet level than when Capone had been in charge they remained low-profile reducing the killings that have been a mark of Capone's time in charge of this low-profile continued once prohibition was abolished as the gangsters who replaced Capone were wary of going the same way he had the low profile meant that it was unclear to many who was actually in control of the organization and who was a mere figurehead or frontman but organized crime continued with prostitution gambling loans knocking at labor union racketeering without serious investigations and into the late 1950s FBI agents discovered an outfit run by Capone's former men operating in the Chicago underworld on the 16th of November 1939 Capone was released from prison due to the state of his health and was referred to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore however they refused to take him thanks to his reputation and so he was instead admitted to the Union Memorial Hospital for treatment of paresis which was caused by late-stage syphilis and as a mark of his thanks Capone donated to Japanese weeping cherry trees to the hospital Capone left the Baltimore Hospital on the 20th of March 1940 to return home to Palm Island and was lucky enough to be one of the first patients treated in America with the recently released drug penicillin but although it was too late to cure his condition and reverse the damage to his brain it did help to slow down the progression of the disease during the final years in 1946 Capone was examined by a Baltimore psychiatrist as well as his own physician who concluded that he had a mental age of a 12 year old and on the 21st of January 1947 Capone suffered a stroke from which he initially started to recover before contracting bronchopneumonia he then suffered a cardiac arrest on the 22nd of January and on the 25th of January 1947 Al Capone died of heart failure as a result of apoplexy he was in his home surrounded by his loved ones after this a private funeral was held in Chicago a week later and he was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Chicago but three years later in 1950 his remains along with the remains of his father gabrielle and his brother Salvatori were exhumed and re-entered at Mount Carmel cemetery in Hillside Illinois nevertheless Vitara he had spread may have stopped with his demise but the Chicago Outfit continued with wide-ranging criminal activities such as loan sharking gambling prostitution political corruption extortion and murder whilst they didn't have them an awfully on organized crime in Chicago it was the most violent nice and powerful criminal mob in the Midwest and its reach was as far as Florida and California even after his death Al Capone's legend would live on his image and characterization used to exemplify the American gangster to later generations he became an iconic figure and his image injures in films and publications to this day what do you think of Al Capone was he a modern-day Robin Hood giving the people a taste of what they wanted or was he a tax dodger cold-blooded killer and gangster extraordinaire whose taste with a high life eventually killed him please let us know in the comment section and in the mean time thank you very much for watching you

Channel: The People Profiles

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Id: 15sz-HTbs28

Length: 40min 3sec (2403 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020