big-hearted killer, The

On the fiftieth anniversary of Al Capone's death, Michael Harrington pays tribute to the underworld's outstanding statesman

AL CAPONE, the most famous gangster of the 20th century, died 50 years ago this month. He was one of those people who reeked of myth and symbolism even when alive. Capone has been portrayed many times in films, by Rod Steiger, Jason Robards and Robert De Niro, among others. Capone's somewhat late-romantic character lent itself to over-acting. He was probably the most popular criminal in his time who has ever lived, barring the mythical Robin Hood. In the public mind, Capone will always stand for Chicago in the 1920s and Prohibition and the notorious St Valentine's Day Massacre. At the time of his death - and since - he was execrated in the press and newsreels as a monster of evil, yet this was far from being a fair assessment of the man.

Capone was without doubt a murderer and a pimp, yet he does not appear to have been a deeply malevolent character. On the contrary, he was big-hearted. He liked people, he liked everyone to have a good time, and there was no fakery involved in this. With young people whom he liked, he took enormous trouble to prevent them from going into a life of crime. When the Great Depression hit Chicago, he ran a miniature welfare state helping many thousands of destitute people. He only killed other gangsters, most of whom would have killed him if they could, and some of whom had tried to do so. His rackets -drinking, gambling and prostitution - catered to the traditional human vices.

We must distinguish between the kind of criminal who fundamentally steals from, or assaults, law-abiding citizens, and a man like Capone who was in the nature of an entrepreneur, providing illegal goods and services to the public. Criminals like that may not offer a very good deal - it is difficult to say when there is no legal market and there is a local illegal monopoly - but they are not inherently robbers. Nor is there any sense in which he could be said to have corrupted Chicago; the city was corrupt from top to bottom long before Capone ever got there. On the other hand, he did corrupt and debauch the adjacent small town of Cicero, which he used as a base and which he always maintained was named after a famous Greek philosopher.

Capone's golden age started in 1925, when peacefully and by agreement he took over from Johnny Torrio as the principal gang boss in Chicago. It ran until October 1931 when he was convicted on tax evasion charges as a result of a determined campaign by internal revenue officials, by which time he was the most famous gangster in the world. No one would ever give evidence against him on a murder charge. He lived flamboyantly, first in the Metropole and later in the Lexington hotel. Friends on the Chicago newspapers groomed him to be a media star. He went unarmed, as a mark of his superior status, but always had at least two bodyguards with him. Now and then he would take a personal lead in some piece of skulduggery in order to show his men that he still had the stomach for it. No one ever accused Capone of a lack of bottle. He ran brothels and gambling establishments, of course, but it was bootleg booze that was the foundation of a fortune estimated at well over $100 million at 1920s value.

Prohibition of alcohol had been promoted in America as 'a noble experiment', but it turned into a 12-year-long fiasco. It turned the majority of people into lawbreakers. When Churchill visited America during Prohibition, he had his brandy smuggled in via stone hot-water-bottles. After he was run over in New York in 1930, however, he obtained a doctor's letter saying: `As part of his recovery from his traffic accident, Mr Winston Churchill is in need of alcoholic refreshment at meal times and also at other times.' Fortunes made during Prohibition enabled criminal families to buy their way into legitimate business on a large scale.

Capone was born in Brooklyn, New York, of parents who had just immigrated from Naples. He was never part of the Sicilian Mafia, rather his background in criminal culture lay in the Neapolitan Camorra which was much less of a secret society. He went to Chicago in 1920 to work for Johnny Torrio, who was the deputy of the first of the grand and colourful crime bosses in the United States, Big Jim Colosimo, otherwise know as Diamond Jim.

Colosimo ran brothels and gambling joints and was always on excellent terms with the police, the judiciary and municipal officials. He was an opera buff and a great friend of Enrico Caruso. But as so often happens in criminal affairs, the old boss got fat and lazy and very much in the way of someone younger - in this case Johnny Torrio. Big Jim was shot dead in May 1920 by persons who were never legally identified. He received the first of the wonderful gangland funerals that have been a popular feature of American public life ever since.

Among the honorary pallbearers for Diamond Jim were three judges and a state congressman. Perhaps the greatest of these funerals was for Deanie O'Banion, murdered probably by Capone in November 1924. More than 20,000 people gathered by the graveside and among the floral tributes the biggest was a wreath `from Al'. These funerals in their almost joyful hypocrisy offered an underworld parody of those official funerals at which a dead monarch or statesman's bitter enemies march in solemn procession behind his hearse and offer eulogies to a sceptical congregation.

Torrio was Capone's mentor and they never quarrelled. If any real-life gangster could be said to have been the model for Don Corleone in Mario Puzo's sentimental novel, The Godfather, only Torrio fits the bill. He was a pitiless executioner when he had to be, but overwhelmingly favoured peaceful negotiation as a method of handling problems. More than any other individual he was the founder of organised, corporate crime in the United States.

In the 1890s Arthur Conan Doyle invented the idea of a `Napoleon of crime' in the person of Professor Moriarty. But the idea was never developed in any detail and Moriarty was not a persuasive character, since he seemed to be motivated only by a kind of pointless malevolence. In America in the 20th century came the real Napoleons, though Al Capone was more like Mussolini. They were motivated by greed rather than hate, and they were traders of a kind rather than pure predators. They built their empires on the successful model of American big business and some Marxist critics have maintained that there was no essential difference between them. However, the gangsters took the notion of cut-throat competition rather more literally than was originally intended.

Capone's downfall really started with the St Valentine's Day murders of seven rival gangsters in 1929. Eliot Ness, the famous 'Untouchable', had little to do with it. His legend was built up by journalists and filmmakers. Laurence Bergreen tells the story in his brilliant and compelling Capone: the Man and the Era (Macmillan, 1994), by far the most effective account of a gangster's life that has yet been published. Federal government tax lawyers and accountants finally put Capone away. After St Valentine's Day, Chicago became an international embarrassment to the United States. Neither the city nor the state authorities could do anything about Capone because they were hopelessly compromised. It was not the last time that Washington used the inland revenue to get at problematic people.

Capone was paroled in 1939. By this time he had mentally deteriorated because of tertiary syphilis and his last years were rather pitiful. According to Bergreen, syphilis had been working on his personality and behaviour for some years and this fact should certainly mitigate any judgment of him. Capone was not a good man, nor was he a monster; he was a 20th-century archetype.

Copyright Spectator Feb 1, 1997
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