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• childhood and personal life
• crime analysis
• investigation and resolution
• impact and relevance
• opinion and refletion

Index

childhood and personal life

Alphonse Capone, was born on January 17, 1899 in New York. He is a son of Italian immigrants. At the age of 14, after being kicked out from school for fighting, he began working as a shoeshine boy. There, inspired by local thugs, he formed a small gang to extort money from other shoeshine boys. This first step led him to join gangsters such as Johnny Torrio and Frank Yale in the 1910s, where he became involved in illegal activities such as prostitution and extortion. Capone married Mary Josephine, known as Mae, and, although their relationship was complicated by his criminal life, he was always loving towards his family. Moving to Chicago under Torrio's direction, Capone quickly rose in the world of crime, leading the mafia and becoming a powerful gangster after the assassination of his boss in 1925. During his reign, he was responsible for numerous crimes, including the infamous Saint Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929. Despite his violent figure in the underworld, at home he was a loving husband and son, showing a more human side that contrasted with his criminal reputation.

Crime analysis

The Saint Valentine's Massacre hapenned on February 14th, 1929 in Chicago. It was part of the war between the gangs of Al Capone and Bugs Moran for control of alcohol during prohibition. Seven men of Moran's gang were put against a wall in a garage and killed with submashine guns by killers dressed as polices. It was a trap well planned. Even if Al Capone was in Florida when this happened, people think he order it to weaken Moran. The violence of the attack shocked the society, showing how much violence and corruption there was in that times. However, nobody was arrested for the crime, showing that the police was not strong enough to fight organized crime.

INVESTIGATION AND RESOLUTION

Al Capone was convicted by a tax court. Despite all the crimes committed by Al Capone, it was a tax law that ended up putting him in prison, following the model of the sentence of Sullivan, the first bootlegger tried for tax crimes. The group of "The Untouchables" eleven agents of the tax agency led by Eliot Ness were responsible for hunting Al Capone.

Al Capone was sentenced to eleven years in prison and fined 50,000 Euros. He ended up serving his sentence in 1932 in an Atlanta prison, but the inability of the authorities to stop Capone's activities led to his transfer to Alcatraz Island prison in 1934, where he spent the last years of his sentence, without communication.

He did not serve the full term of his sentence due to his poor health and was eventually released on parole in 1939 and spent his final years at his residence in Florida. There, broke and with a failing memory, he suffered a stroke on January 21, 1947 which turned into pneumonia and he died four days later.

Impact and relevance

Al Capone was a super famous gangster in the 1920s and 1930s, when selling alcohol was prohibited in the US (Prohibition). Capone made a lot of money trafficking alcohol and doing super illegal things like murder and extortion, but he was so smart that he always escaped getting caught for those crimes. So the government said "how do we catch him?" and he did. What they did was focus on something more "simple" but very effective: taxes. What happened was, instead of trying to prove that he was a violent criminal, they accused him of not paying taxes on the money he earned. And guess what? It worked! They used a type of law that was like a trap to catch him and in the end, in 1931, they put him in jail for tax evasion. Although he was never caught for his most violent crimes

Opinion and reflexion

We believe that even though he was a criminal, he wasn't the worst of them all. With the money he obtained from his crimes, he donated a large part to charitable organizations, helping the most vulnerable. In fact, at that time, he was known as the Robin Hood of gangsters.

References

• https://www.history.com/search?q=st+valentine+day+massacre
• https://www.history.com/topics/crime/saint-valentines-day-massacre
• http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1191.html