“Some call it bootlegging. Some call it racketeering. I call it a business.”
Even the most trenchant anthropologists would admit that successful gangsters are both daring and cunning. What motivates such men to a life of crime? The love of a good life, a thirst for power, a desire to earn the respect of their peers? Or is it sheer criminality in their veins?
Al Capone is one of the most infamous gangsters history has seen. Born in 1899 to Italian immigrant parents in a New York slum, Alphonse Gabriel Capone was to have violence cut short his education. At the age of 12, he ran away from a Brooklyn school after mercilessly beating a teacher and never subsequently ventured in the arena of learning. Drifting through his early years, he eventually became a bouncer and a bartender at a bar in Coney Island, an avocation that he seriously pursued. It gave his fertile, though perverse, mind ideas of an unusual and abnormal complexion and sowed the seeds of his extraordinary future.
In addition to helping him understand the more animalistic side of human behavior, he observed greed, lust, and desperation firsthand and saw its immense potential for profit. It also allowed a vent to his cruel nature and now almost pathological penchant for violence. But it came at a price – one intoxicated evening, a supposed insult to a female customer brought brutal retribution from her brother, who slashed his face with a sharp razor. The deep gash on his face earned him the nickname ‘Scarface’, an appellation he hated but allowed to linger.
Capone made a fortune because the government of the day decided to enforce ‘Prohibition’, or a total ban on the production and sale of alcohol. Knowing by his years spent in bars the human necessity of consuming alcohol and aided by his ruthless nature and animal cunning, Capone was to capitalize on the opportunity and start a network of ‘speakeasies’ and distilleries selling both ‘moonshine’ and premium alcohol, his outfit soon earning as much as $100 million a year, or about $1.5 billion today.
Capone also saw nothing wrong in his illicit doings, thinking of it more as public service. He purportedly said, “ninety percent of the people drink and gamble and my offence has been to furnish them with these amusements.” But Capone was no saint. On Valentine’s Day of 1929, six members of a rival gang, that of George ‘Bugs’ Moran, an upcoming bootlegger and potential rival, along with a garage attendant were lined up against a wall and shot dead by two gunmen dressed as police officers. They were part of Capone’s crew, deliberately carrying out his orders on a day he was cooling his heels in Florida, giving him a perfect alibi. And there is no complete record of all the beatings, stick-ups, extortions, killings and other nefarious crimes he masterminded.
It is not clear if Capone ever regretted what he did in his lifetime, and if he did, he sought no witnesses to confess. He had sarcastically observed “they’ve hung everything on me except the Chicago fire.” His life was shorter than average even for medieval Europe, dying eight days after his forty-eighth birthday in his own mansion in Palm Island, Florida. He had spent six and half years in prisons, including four years in the notorious Alcatraz, and another three years in a mental hospital. While he had the luxury of dying in freedom, he was unable to enjoy his last days. Karma had finally caught up to Capone in the form of disease, giving from paresis (a late stage of syphilis), a stroke, and complications by pneumonia to call curtains on his life.
That was on January 25, 1947, seventy-five years ago to the day.
Riches, influence, opulence, power could not buy him a normal life. But was Capone born a bad egg? Or did poverty and early abuse force him to walk over the edge? His violence and sadism appeared evident early in life. So perhaps it was nature over nurture. But despite paeans of psychological and sociological analysis, many histories and endless cinematic references, no one is truly sure if Capone ever had a chance at living a normal, non-violent life.
Rest in peace, Scarface.
scribo ad LX 