"I am like any other man. All I do is supply a demand." — Al Capone "Capone was the first American to turn crime into big business. He was also the first American criminal to understand that public image mattered as much as the crime itself." — Historian Laurence Bergreen Al Capone turned twenty-one on January 17, 1920 — the day Prohibition began. He spent the next decade running the Chicago Outfit at approximately $100 million per year (~$1.8 billion today). He ran soup kitchens during the Depression. He gave press conferences. He posed for photographs. He called himself a businessman who was simply supplying a demand. He also had possibly 700 men killed. On February 14, 1929, four of his men — two dressed as police officers — entered a garage at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago and shot seven members of the rival Bugs Moran gang against the wall. Capone was in Florida. Moran, the intended target, was late. He survived. The businessman myth that Capone had carefully constructed was the most sophisticated piece of criminal self-promotion in American history — more strategic than Jesse James's press releases, more durable than Bonnie and Clyde's photographs. It worked because Prohibition was genuinely unpopular, because millions of Americans didn't believe alcohol should be illegal, because framing bootlegging as a market service had genuine popular resonance. It worked less well as a description of the prostitution empire, the systematic bribery of half of Chicago's police force, and the possibly 700 murders. The man who ended Capone's criminal career was not Eliot Ness. The 1987 Brian De Palma film starring Kevin Costner and Robert De Niro has convinced generations of viewers otherwise. The historical record is clear: Ness and his Untouchables built a bootlegging case that contributed to the overall legal pressure on Capone. The prosecution that put Capone in prison was built by IRS special agent Frank Wilson, who spent weeks reading through over a million documents until he found the paper trail that established Capone had received millions in income on which he had paid no federal taxes. Capone was convicted of tax evasion in October 1931 and sentenced to 11 years. He served 6.5 years at Alcatraz, where the syphilitic dementia that had been destroying his mind since early life worsened until prison doctors assessed his mental functioning as equivalent to a 12-year-old's. He was released in 1939, went to his Palm Island estate in Miami Beach, played cards and fished and talked about going back to Chicago. He never went back. He died January 25, 1947. He was 48 years old. Frank Wilson, the IRS agent who read a million documents and found the paper trail, outlived Capone and died in 1970. He was not the subject of a major motion picture. Al Capone is Book 4 of the Dead or Alive series: American outlaws whose public image was deliberately constructed — and how the myth diverged from the person.
