Episode #222 - What's True About Al Capone? (Part I)

Travel insurance sounds boring.

Until you need it, Insure My Trip makes it easy.

Compare top-rated plans, get expert help, and travel with confidence.

Whether it's a last-minute trip or a bucket-listed venture, we've got your back with unbiased guidance and smart tech.

No pressure, just peace of mind.

And if you're not sure what you need, our licensed agents are here to help.

No bots, just real humans.

Be prepared, not paranoid.

Visit insuremytrip.com and travel like a pro.

InsuremyTrip.com.

1985 was a tough year for Geraldo Rivera.

The well-known presenter had been in the television news game for 15 years, but things had taken a turn.

His career had gotten off to a promising start.

In 1972, just two years after being hired at at Eyewitness News, the young journalist won a Peabody Award for a piece exposing the mistreatment of patients with intellectual disabilities at Staten Island's Willowbrook State School.

In fact, the piece was so impactful that after John Lennon saw Geraldo's reporting, he was inspired to organize a two-night benefit concert at Madison Square Garden.

But despite this auspicious start, Rivera's reputation for incisive, socially conscious reporting was soon overshadowed by a taste for the sensational.

In 1973, Geraldo taped the pilot for the short-lived evening news program, Good Night, America.

The show ended up running intermittently from 1974 to 1977.

and gained a certain level of notoriety for being the first television program to show the Zapruder film.

That's the amateur 8-millimeter home movie which accidentally captured the assassination of President John F.

Kennedy.

Good Night America specialized in these types of items, things that were certainly of public interest, but might be avoided by other news shows out of concerns for good taste.

While Geraldo insisted that he was a hard-hitting, fearless television journalist, a growing chorus of critics started to sniff at him him for being shameless and exploitative.

In a Washington Post opinion piece published in 1987, author Alex Hurd explained Geraldo's unique appeal like this: quote:

He will find the boundaries of taste and the point beyond which the semi-needless discussion of quasi-issues involving very odd people becomes almost mystical, and he'll head for that territory with a cam crew.

⁇ End quote.

But in 1985, Geraldo was having a go of it.

In October of that year, he was fired from ABC after a row with the executive Rune Arledge.

Geraldo publicly criticized Arledge for spiking a story that was supposed to air on ABC's 2020 program.

That story investigated the relationship between President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.

The story had been prepared by the broadcaster Sylvia Chase, but it really had the spirit of a Geraldo story, mixing as it did American politics, the doomed Kennedys, celebrity gossip, and sex.

Geraldo believed that Arledge had axed the story because of his personal relationship with the Kennedy family, and he said as much publicly.

ABC would deny that Rivera was ultimately fired for his remarks, but the fact remained that by October of 1985, he was out of a job.

It might be hard to imagine Geraldo dying on the hill of journalistic integrity today,

but haha, you know, times were different.

Always hungry for a good tagline, Geraldo would eventually dub himself the world's most famous unemployed person.

But despite the fancy title, Geraldo was at a low point.

In an attempt to find some peace, he decided he would take a year off and sail his boat around the world.

But before he left on this adventure, a surprising opportunity presented itself.

A building company in Chicago, Illinois had recently purchased the decaying remains of the Lexington Hotel.

Originally built in the 1890s, the Lexington was once a luxury establishment boasting 400 rooms.

But the Lexington was perhaps best known as the de facto headquarters of one of America's most storied gangsters.

From 1928 to 1931, Al Capone, the notorious Prohibition-era crime boss, had used the Lexington as a base of operations for his so-called Chicago outfit.

Capone kept a richly adorned suite in the hotel that essentially became his full-time residence in 1931 as federal investigators built a case that would eventually land him in prison.

After its early 30s heyday, the Lexington fell on hard times and by 1984 it had been closed for nearly four years and had become a haunt for local scavengers.

But that year, a group called the Sun Bow Foundation, one of the only female-owned construction companies in the United States, led by a woman named Pat Porter, picked up the Lexington for a meager $500,000.

Porter believed that the Lexington would be the perfect training ground for female workers looking to break into traditionally male-dominated trades.

She thought the decaying hotel could be a place where hundreds of women could learn demolition, wiring, and other construction skills.

But Porter quickly came to understand that the property's real value was its history, specifically its association with Al Capone.

In June of 1985, the Sumbo Foundation hosted a prohibition-themed $100 a plate jazz brunch fundraiser at the old hotel.

The event climaxed with the guests donning yellow hard hats and taking a tour of the building that highlighted its gangster past.

The Chicago Tribune reported, quote,

the tours concluded with a visit to the basement where a 120-foot-long vault of roughly poured concrete was discovered recently.

Money, bodies, or liquor could be in the vault, end quote.

Acting as the tour guide, Pat Porter also whimsically suggested to reporters that renovations might uncover hidden staircases and secret tunnels used by the notorious Al Capone.

Articles about the Lexington and Pat Porter's belief that treasure might be hidden in Al Capone's vault caught the attention of Doug Llewellyn.

Llewellyn was an announcer on the popular TV show The People's Court and the proprietor of a small production company.

When Llewellyn heard the story of Al Capone's vault, he knew that he could potentially make some great TV.

He met Pat Porter, took a tour of the Lexington, and a deal was struck whereby his production company would put together a live television event where the vault would be opened.

After shopping the idea around and being rejected by the major television networks, Llewellyn found a buyer in the Chicago-based Tribune Entertainment.

The television special, dubbed The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults, would be syndicated and sold to local stations around the United States and internationally.

They just needed a host.

And Geraldo Rivera needed exactly $50,000 to keep his boat well-stocked and in good repair while he sailed it around the world.

So it was that for a fee of $50,000 US, Geraldo was brought on to the project.

On April 21st, 1986, the two-hour television special aired live from Chicago.

The fanfare leading up to the broadcast had been enormous.

A huge advertising campaign, which promised blockbuster revelations, ran for a month leading up to the television event.

What could be in the vault?

Gold, liquor, stolen money, perhaps even human remains?

The campaign clearly worked because on April 21st, roughly 30 million American families tuned in to see what Geraldo could find in Al Capone's vault.

Bars even hosted special viewing parties with Prohibition themes.

The mystery of Al Capone's vaults still holds the record as the most viewed syndicated television special in history.

But despite the fanfare, the program would go down as one of the greatest televised fiascos of all time.

First, I wouldn't be doing my job here if I didn't point out that the special was filled with historical inaccuracies and gangster myths.

Geraldo does his best to ratchet up the drama by describing Capone in his empire in the most colorful terms possible.

Here, I'll give you a taste of it.

According to survivors of that era, he could be a genial, even charismatic guy, quick with a joke and generous with a buck, but dominant was his dark side, his attraction to physical violence, his quick, explosive temper, his ability to commit cold-blooded murder.

He was, of course, Scarface Al Capone, America's public enemy, number one.

As you may have gathered from that clip, Geraldo never misses an opportunity to call the gangster Scarface Al Capone.

He also leans into every salacious story, no matter how dubious ever told about the man.

In one particularly egregious section, Geraldo shows off the remains of the Lexington's old gymnasium and claims that Al Capone's henchmen used the room as a firing range for their Tommy guns.

Now, you don't have to be an expert in prohibition history to know that a fully equipped gymnasium may not be the best place for target practice.

The idea that outfit gunmen would be shooting up what was ostensibly a public gym is the kind of loose history you got on the mystery mystery of Al Capone's vaults.

But of course, this ridiculous claim was just meant to set up one of the special's more memorable moments, Geraldo firing off 50 rounds of live ammunition from an era-accurate Thompson submachine gun.

Apparently, the firearms expert for the show begged Geraldo to use blanks, but the host insisted on live bullets so he could have an authentically dangerous moment on TV.

During the filming, he even started rushing the wall for dramatic effect while firing the gun, a choice that the expert would later call, quote, unbelievably reckless, end quote.

But the main event, of course, was the opening of the vault.

which required the demolition of a series of concrete walls.

Realizing that the explosion was not going to be especially telegenic, the crew decided to add some special effects.

A series of flash bangs were rigged to the wall to give the demolition a little extra light and sound for the cameras.

On top of that, Geraldo was given an old-timey explosive plunger, which he insisted was from the Prohibition era, so it looked on camera like the host was actually triggering the explosion.

In reality, this wily coyote looking contraption wasn't actually wired to anything.

But it gave Geraldo this fun moment.

Take a good shot of that, Wayne.

This is a Capone-era plunger.

We thought it would be appropriate to

use something dating back to old Scarface Al's day.

We're about ready to

go.

This is a moment of some drama.

Got our hard hats on.

Okay, you guys set?

Are we all set?

Okay.

Clear!

Okay,

what's the classic phrase?

Fire in the hole!

Fire in the hole!

All that was left to do now was clear away the rubble and find the treasure.

But after two hours of hype, dubious historical context, and some needlessly dangerous gunplay, absolutely nothing was found.

Well, technically there were two glass bottles that Geraldo graspingly suggested might have once contained moonshine, but otherwise, Al Capone's vault was the subterranean equivalent of a big empty closet.

It was the nothing burger of all nothing burgers.

It was an anticlimax so enormous that it's remembered to this day as one of television's most embarrassing moments.

Rolling Stone even proclaimed it number 41 on their list of the 50 worst decisions in TV history.

Now, you would hope that the mystery of Al Capone's vaults would have taught us all a valuable lesson, that you can't have that much sizzle without any steak.

And yet, that is not at all what was learned.

As I mentioned earlier, the ratings for the program were off the charts.

The contents of the vault didn't matter as long as the people tuned in.

And they did, by the tens of millions.

The lesson was that in a world where attention was monetized, all that mattered was holding that attention.

A quick glance around our fractured media landscape these days, and all you see are empty vaults.

But if anything was exploited by 1986's The Mystery of Al Capone's vaults, it was our long-standing fascination with Al Capone.

As a historical figure, Capone sits in the middle of a Venn diagram of a number of perennial American interests, celebrity, true crime, fashion, outlaw culture, and wealth.

In many ways, he encompasses a number of key American archetypes in one colorful personality.

What if J.D.

Rockefeller was also Billy the Kid?

His life story could be understood as a particularly violent expression of the American dream.

A poor kid from Brooklyn, born to immigrant parents, uses his wits, fists, and a certain ruthless determination to build a commercial empire.

One of the earliest biographies of the gangster leaned into this idea with its title, Al Capone, The Biography of a Self-Made Man.

Many of these stories come from a rich oral tradition that's grown up around Capone's old stomping grounds of Chicago, Cicero, Illinois, Miami, and Brooklyn.

But another set of myths have their roots in the newspaper reporting of the Prohibition era.

Two images of Al Capone have ground against each other in the American media since the 1920s.

There's Scarface Al, the murderer, racketeer, and pimp, who epitomizes American corruption and the worst excesses of violent organized crime.

Then there's Big Al, the Robin Hood figure, the philanthropist who fed the hungry, was generous to the poor, and who took care of his community.

Capone would loudly claim that he was an upstanding citizen and a committed family man who had been unfairly blamed for Chicago's violence.

If he skirted the law, it was only to provide people with a little alcohol, a product they desired and had been part of their culture for centuries.

After all, when it came to bootleg liquor, who was worse, the buyer or the seller?

These two competing images of Al Capone have been wrestling in the public imagination for a century now.

In fact, the mystery of Al Capone's vaults was structured around that very tension.

Do we think Al Capone is cool?

Or are we righteously disgusted by his crimes?

Stay tuned to gawk at his treasure or perhaps the long dead bodies of his victims.

Was Capone a villain or an American anti-hero?

Or are both of these categories a bad fit for a very complicated fellow?

What do you say we blast this vault open today on our fake history?

Fire in the hole!

Fire in the hole!

One, two, three, five

Episode number 222: What's True About Al Capone, Part 1.

There's nothing better than a woman's life.

life.

Hello and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

Before we get going this week, I just want to remind everyone listening that an ad-free version of this podcast is available through Patreon.

Just go to patreon.com/slash our fake history and check out all the cool stuff we have on offer over there.

I keep the top tier of support at a very reasonable $5 a month.

I have not changed that in the 10 years since I started this show.

It may be the only thing that is unaffected by inflation.

And if you support at that level, not only do you get an ad-free feed, you get hours and hours of extra patrons-only Our Fake History goodness.

I just released my intelligent speech talk, Frauds, Imposters, and Humbug Artists for the patrons, and I've got some more new stuff coming soon.

If you like this show and you want to make sure it keeps coming, then the best thing you can do is support us through Patreon.

This week, we are headed to the United States in the early 20th century to talk about one of America's best-loved gangsters.

I'm, of course, talking about Alphonse Capone, leader of the so-called Chicago Outfit during its prohibition heyday.

Given Al Capone's place in the public imagination, it's amazing how relatively short his tenure as the boss of his particular Chicago crime group truly was.

He finally ascended to the top position in the outfit in 1925, and by 1932, he was in prison, serving an 11-year sentence for tax evasion.

That's a fairly short seven-year run as Chicago's most senior organized crime figure.

And even that distinction could be debated as most of Al Capone's tenure was characterized by fierce battles with rival gangs over control of Chicago's illegal trade in alcohol.

His time as the uncontested top gang leader in the city may have only been about two or three years, depending on how you count.

But those years were eventful.

The Harvard Business School has a famous case study that they use in one of their economics classes that analyzes how Al Capone ran the Chicago outfit as though it were a major corporation.

If nothing else, the research done by the Harvard Business School in the creation of the case study has provided some helpful statistics that give a good sense of the full scope scope of Al Capone's criminal empire.

The study examines the period from 1920 to 1933, which extends through Al's time as an important lieutenant in the operation into his time as the top boss.

The study explains that in those years, Capone controlled literally hundreds of, quote, brothels, speakeasies, and roadhouses, which served as venues for gang-administered gambling, prostitution, and illegal alcohol sales.

The Harvard Business School estimates that in those years the outfit brought in something on the order of a hundred million dollars a year, which is roughly $1.5 billion

a year today.

But they admit that that estimate could be off by many millions of dollars given the clandestine nature of the operations.

The authors of the study also point out that between 1920 and 1930, there were roughly 700 gang-related deaths in Chicago and the smaller towns surrounding the city, including Capone's base of Cicero, Illinois.

Of those 700 deaths, there's evidence that, quote, Al Capone was either directly or indirectly responsible for over 200, end quote.

Over 200 murders.

Now, some may quibble with that number, but there's no denying the extreme level of violence that was associated with the prohibition-era struggle, sometimes nicknamed the Beer Wars.

Now, Chicago was certainly not the only major city beset by organized crime in this era, but there was a certain flagrancy to the violence in the windy city that set it apart from the likes of New York, Boston, or Kansas City.

This was due in part to the alliances between the city's crime rackets, local politicians, and the Chicago police.

In fact, it's been guessed that as much as half of Chicago's police force was on the payroll of the outfit by the end of the 1920s.

Now, you might sometimes hear that Al Capone openly bragged about this, but that's not exactly true.

You see, for all his criminal doings, Capone seemed to like being a public figure.

He rarely shied away from interviews and was known to give reporters good copy.

He was wonderfully quotable, and as such, he's become one of those figures to whom fake quotes are constantly attributed.

Capone had the good sense not to openly tell the press that he had bought half the cops in Chicago, but he would sometimes playfully hint at it.

For instance, once he complained, quote, it's pretty tough when a citizen with an unblemished record must be hounded from his home by the very policemen whose salaries are paid, at least in part, from the victim's pocket.

You might say that every policeman in Chicago gets some of his bread and butter from the taxes I pay, end quote.

Now that quote is fun because he seems to be winking at his corruption of the Chicago police while also perpetuating a myth of his own creation.

One of the things that makes Al Capone somewhat unique in the annals of true crime were his attempts to manage his media image.

He seemed to have an innate understanding of public relations long before that term was coined.

He knew how to plant a favorable story, butter up journalists, and muddy the waters with misinformation when it seemed like public opinion was turning against him.

Capone has been remembered in some circles as the ultimate tough guy, but his public persona was always jovial, family-focused, and civic-minded.

He was constantly reminding anyone who asked that he was a devoted father of a sickly son, a charitable protector of the poor, and above all else, a taxpayer.

Now that last one is especially ironic given that Capone was eventually brought down in one of of the most high-profile tax evasion trials in American history.

So,

who was this guy?

Was the man connected to over 200 murders truly the teddy bear he claimed to be when questioned by reporters?

By the same token, how much stock should we put in the sociopathic image of Scarface Capone?

Thanks to a century's worth of books, films, and TV shows loosely based on the life of Capone, we have to reckon with a robust pop culture image that has shaped the popular historical understanding of the Chicago gangster.

Over the decades, Capone's story has been adapted dozens of times.

He's been played by the likes of Robert Steiger, Tom Hardy, F.

Murray Abraham, and Robert De Niro.

On top of that, Al Capone has served as the template for a rogues gallery of fictional gangsters.

Everyone from Tony Soprano to Dick Tracy's Big Boy to Tony Montana to Colin Farrell's recent turn as the penguin, all have in some way been shaped by Al Capone.

So, let's explore the life of Alphonse Capone and see if we can parse some truth from the legend.

You want your master's degree.

You know you can earn it, but life gets busy.

The packed schedule, the late nights, and then there's the unexpected.

American Public University was built for all of it.

With monthly starts and no set login times, APU's 40-plus flexible online master's programs are designed to move at the speed of life.

You bring the fire, we'll fuel the journey.

Get started today at apu.apus.edu.

Alphonse Capone was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1899, the fourth son of Gabriele and Teresa Capone.

Gabriele had packed up his wife and three young children four years earlier and had made the long crossing from Naples, Italy to New York City.

Now, right off the bat, there's a myth about the Capone family's arrival in America.

According to Al Capone biographer Deirdre Bear, there's a legend among some of Capone's descendants that the family was denied at New York's Ellis Island because Gabriele didn't have enough money to pay the entrance fee imposed on new immigrants.

This apparently inspired him to make his way to Canada.

From there, he sneaked across the border and made his way back to New York City.

Now, this story is almost certainly not true.

The holes in logic are enormous.

If Gabriele had no money at Ellis Island, then how did he pay to get to Canada?

How did he clear Canadian immigration?

Did he bring the whole family with him?

None of this makes sense.

And as Bayer points out, there's no evidence to substantiate the tale.

But I think I understand why this story has been preserved in family lore.

It makes a certain mythological sense.

It would be fitting if the family of America's most notorious criminal came to the United States illegally.

Gabrielli sneaking his family across the border from Canada is perfect foreshadowing for Al Capone's later bootlegging career when he would move untold amounts of Canadian booze across the same line.

What's clear is that the family eventually settled near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a bustling if impoverished immigrant neighborhood with large Italian, German, Slovak, and Croat communities.

After a few years finding his feet, Gabriele established himself as a barber and ran a reasonably successful shop.

As the years passed and the Capone barbershop became recognized as a reliably stable local business, Al Capone's parents were given the honorifics Don Gabriele and Donna Teresa by their Italian neighbors.

These titles meant that they were respected pillars of their community.

All of this is to say that any stories about Gabriele skirting the law are deeply at odds with the rest of his life in America.

He seems to have been scrupulously law-abiding and very invested in becoming respectable in the eyes of his community.

In 1899, Alphonse Capone was the first of his family to be born in the United States, followed by five more children born to Teresa over the next 12 years.

Now, the fact that Al was born in America was deeply important to him, and he would later become fiercely outspoken about his American identity.

He apparently hated being referred to as Italian, and was quoted on more than one occasion angrily clapping back that, quote, I'm no Italian.

I was born in Brooklyn, end quote.

There's certainly no denying that Al Capone was shaped by his early life in Brooklyn.

He came from a famously rough neighborhood filled with youth street gangs.

Al was always big for his age, which made him a target for neighborhood bullies.

Or, as one early Capone biographer put it, Al's, quote, mere existence presented a challenge, end quote.

There are tales of Al Capone fighting in the streets as young as eight years old.

He was apparently recruited early on by Frank Nitty, another Italian kid from the neighborhood, for a gang he called the Boys of Navy Street.

This was a ragtag group of kids who did battle with a rival Irish kid gang.

Interestingly, Niddy and Capone would remain close for their entire lives.

Niddy would eventually become a key man in the Chicago outfit as one of Al's most trusted enforcers.

In one oft-told tale about young Al coming up on the streets, he was said to have have tracked down a washtub that was stolen from a local Italian woman by a group of Irish kids.

After forcibly taking it back, Al then apparently used the tub to give the thieves a severe beating.

But this is likely another myth.

It provides an origin story for Al the Avenger.

a rough but ultimately righteous meter out of street justice and a protector of fellow Italians.

Deirdre Bear puts more stock in a different washtub story.

In this other tale, Frank Niddy and his gang took the washtub and strapped it to a big eight-year-old Al Capone as a kind of war drum.

He apparently beat the drum when his gang confronted the Irish kids in a street rumble.

This story probably has more truth to it, although it is a little on the nose that Al Capone, who would later get into one of the most famous gang wars in history with Irish-American gangsters in Chicago, has a story about fighting Irish gangs as a child.

But, you know, given the tension between the Irish and Italian communities at the turn of the century in Brooklyn, It's not that far-fetched.

Now, you'll sometimes read that the young Al Capone was a bad student who bucked against the structure of school life.

This is only partially true.

It seems like Al was actually a decent student in his early years.

He learned English quickly, made decent grades, and demonstrated a talent for mathematics.

However, like all of his older brothers before him, he left school at the age of 14 after having to repeat the sixth grade thanks to a persistent truancy issue.

Now, of course, because this is Al Capone, there's a dramatic story about his last day at school.

The story goes that on this particular day, one of Al's classmates made the mistake of stealing the big kid's lunch.

A righteously indignant Capone stood up and started yelling at the thief, disrupting the entire class.

Capone's teacher tried to get between the boys, but this only made things worse.

Al took a swing and knocked the teacher out cold.

Then he walked out of the class, never to return.

Now, this is another fun story, but it's likely also a myth.

In her research, biographer Deirdre Bear found three different versions of this story.

In one version, the teacher is a respectable older man who accidentally catches a stray punch in the fracas.

In another version, the teacher is a young woman who tries to make Al stand in the coat closet as punishment before the big kid sucker punches her in the face.

In a third version, Al doesn't hit anyone.

but is instead sent down to the principal's office after getting into a yelling match with the teacher.

Once there, it's the principal who deals out some corporal punishment with a cane.

Which is the real story?

Well, we really don't know.

The tale of Al Capone knocking out his grade six teacher has been pretty sticky.

Most biographers can't help but include it, with some of the more cautious using the helpful legend has it caveat.

Now, I will say it's sometimes tempting to gravitate to the most boring sounding story and assume that that has to be the true version of events.

But we should check ourselves.

That's not always the case.

Crazy stuff happens sometimes, and we should have room for that in our understanding of history.

But with this one, All we can say is that accounts vary as to what actually happened on Al Capone's last day of school.

We should remember that leaving school at the age of 14 was fairly common at the time, especially among lower-income families, where young men were expected to start working as early as they could.

By all accounts, that's exactly what young Al did.

He took jobs as a stockboy and a candy store attendant, and dutifully delivered his paycheck to his mother every two weeks.

But it wasn't long before Al graduated from getting into fights with gangs of kids to running with established adult gangsters.

His older brothers, Ralph and Frank Capone, had already found their way into the orbit of John Torreo.

Torreo was an Italian immigrant and a rising star in New York's criminal underworld.

His talent running illegal gambling operations and the black market lottery, sometimes called the numbers game, had allowed him to carve out his own quasi-independent criminal enterprise.

Torreo's early operations were based out of Italian men's social clubs.

Now, it should be said that most of these clubs were not controlled by organized crime, despite the unfair reputation that they gained thanks to the likes of John Torreo.

Most of these clubs bore the name of a specific Italian region or were goodwill societies meant to connect newly arrived Italians with their community in America.

But the so-called John Torreo Association was a front for gambling, protection rackets, and a burgeoning prostitution ring.

Now, John Torreo is an interesting figure to read about because rarely do you find a gangster who is more positively remembered.

Capone biographer Luciano Iorizzzo writes, quote, it would be difficult to find a criminal with more grudging respect from those on the right side of the law, end quote.

In 1928, Herbert Asbury, one of the early chroniclers of American crime, noted that John Torreo was, quote, the closest thing to a mastermind that this country has yet produced, end quote.

The crime author Virgil Peterson once called him a, quote, organizational genius, end quote.

The popular historian lawrence burgreen whose books have popped up on this podcast before wrote in his biography of capone that john toreo was responsible for quote the development of modern corporate crime casting traditional italian racketeering in the american corporate mold making its vices available to all not just italians eventually expanding its turf far beyond brooklyn to the entire nation

Part of the reason that Torreo is written about with so much admiration, begrudging or otherwise, is because he was the gang lord who kept his hands clean.

He believed that cooperation and negotiation between various criminal factions was always better than violence.

In this way, he pioneered an orderly and lucrative version of organized crime.

Now, this is not to say that the Torio organization was somehow non-violent, because that was certainly not the case.

When violence was deemed necessary, Torio struck with a certain ruthless efficiency.

But he was always very good at insulating himself from the dirty work.

Things were structured in a way so that nothing could be traced back to the boss.

By the end of Prohibition, this organizational model would be emulated by virtually every other criminal enterprise in the United States.

What we know is that by the time Al was 16 years old, he had been introduced to the Torio Association, likely by one of his older brothers.

He was given the job of running numbers for the illegal gambling operation.

along with a group of other teenagers.

But once again, we have a legend about how the young Al al earned the trust of John Torio.

Apparently Torio had a test that he used for any young man coming into his organization.

The kid would be invited up to Torio's office, given a chair, and would be told to wait for the boss.

On Torio's desk there would be a giant stack of money.

The kid would be left alone with the money for something like half an hour, long enough to be thoroughly tempted.

Then Torio would come in and have his men count the money.

If anything was missing, the kid would be roughed up and told not to come back.

If the stack was whole, Torio had a new man.

In every version of the story, Al Capone managed to sit with that money completely unfazed for an untold period of time.

earning him the deep and abiding trust of John Torio.

Is this story completely legendary?

Most biographers think so, as the source has never been properly established.

But it's an interesting tale that plays into the old trope of honor among thieves, which is a key part of the Al Capone myth.

He was a criminal with a code.

Within the first few years in the organization, Capone graduated from being a low-level numbers runner to being given more dangerous tasks like like transporting guns around the city in brown paper bags.

There's also a story that the young Al Capone helped move narcotics hidden inside cans of tomatoes.

But that is almost certainly another myth.

It's well known that John Torreo kept out of the drug trade, refusing to deal in anything harder than liquor.

By the time Al Capone was 19 years old, he stood around six feet tall and weighed well over 200 pounds.

This meant that he made for good muscle.

To this end, he was put to work under one of Torreo's associates, an allied crime boss named Frankie Yale.

Al Capone started shaking down gamblers who couldn't pay their debts and bouncing at a dinner and dancing joint called the Harvard Inn that Yale owned on Coney Island.

Now, the Harvard Inn is the setting of one of the best known stories about how Al Capone got the famous scars on his face.

These scars were the remnants of three deep gashes on Capone's left cheek and they would become his most commented on physical features.

This was much to the chagrin of the man himself who was deeply self-conscious about the wounds and usually insisted on being photographed in a way that showed off his good side.

Capone disliked being asked about the scars and apparently hated the nickname Scarface.

That name was used by newspapers looking for catchy headlines, but it was almost never used to Al Capone's face.

Those who Al was friendly with used the nicknames The Big Guy or Big Al for the boss, or my personal favorite, Snorky.

Snorky was jazz age slang for a well-dressed man, and Al Capone would eventually get a reputation for being a flashy dresser.

Now, I really wish the newspapers had caught on to that one.

I can see the headlines now.

Five dead on Snorky's orders.

Snorky kills again.

Now, this is one of those cases where Capone himself has muddied the waters by creating his own myth about the origin of the scars.

See, eventually the scars became an easy symbol for Al Capone's villainy, especially if you were a 1920s newspaper man looking for a cheap metaphor, an outward expression of his inner ugliness.

So Capone countered by creating a heroic origin story for the scars.

He claimed that he was a veteran of the the First World War and had been a member of America's storied Lost Battalion.

He told reporters that he got those scars in battle fighting for his country in the trenches of Europe.

Far from being a mark of evil, these scars were badges of courage.

They were reminders that he was an American hero.

But of course, Capone had never sniffed anything resembling military service in his life.

He certainly never fought in the First World War.

The claim that he was part of the Lost Battalion is such a brazen lie, it's amazing anyone ever printed it.

Still, Capone understood the power of having a narrative out there, even if it was hard to believe.

Who knows?

Maybe a few people will be convinced.

Maybe in a hundred years, some weirdo making a show about history will have to include the story just to cover all his bases.

It's funny how lies work.

But the tough thing here is that even the widely accepted story about the scars may not be true.

In 1938, a low-level New York gangster named Frank Galluccio gave an interview claiming that he had been the man who gave Scarface his scars.

According to Galluccio, it all happened one summer's night in 1917 while Capone was working at the Harvard Inn.

Galluccio was escorting his sister, Lena, and another female companion out for a night of dinner and dancing.

Capone took a liking to Galluccio's younger sister and made a vulgar comment that he insisted was a compliment about the shapeliness of her backside.

Galluccio, who was was drunk, angrily shot up to defend the honor of his insulted sister.

In his recollection, he pulled a knife and slashed Capone three times.

Although others say that he smashed a bottle and slashed him just once, leaving three gashes.

In Galluccio's version of events, Capone was then stitched up at Coney Island Hospital.

After the incident, Capone was personally ordered not to seek revenge against his attacker by his boss Frankie Yale, as Galluccio was connected, and it was determined that Al had been out of line making nasty remarks to Galluccio's sister.

The two men allegedly made peace at the urging of their various gang overlords.

This is the story that you will find repeated in most Al Capone biographies.

But the dedicated Capone researcher Mario Gomez has uncovered historical evidence that challenges Galluccio's story.

Gomez discovered a report from the December 8, 1918 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Times that read, quote,

Alphonse Capone, an Italian living at 38 Garfield Place, was approached by two men last night.

One of them slashed his right cheek with a knife.

The wound was dressed by a doctor from the Methodist Episcopal Hospital.

Capone was unable to give a description of the assailants.

End quote.

So, what should we make of this news report?

This article suggests that the attack that left Al Capone with scars happened a year later than Galluccio claimed.

Now, confusingly, the article says that Al was slashed on his right cheek when he was definitely cut on his left.

But it tells us that he was attacked by two men, and many of the other details suggest that the attack did not happen on Coney Island.

The hospital where Al was treated was not the nearby Coney Island Hospital, but was instead the Methodist Episcopal Hospital.

which is a solid 20-minute drive from the Harvard Inn.

Also, it's curious that this news report says that the attack occurred in December, a time when most places on Coney Island, including the Harvard Inn, would have been closed for the season.

So if we accept this news report, then Capone got his scars and some unexplained altercation with two men.

Now, it's possible that Galluccio may have still done the slashing, but mixed up the date and the location of the event when he gave his interview in 1938.

But all this contradictory information means that the scars are still a bit of a mystery.

And the fact that Al couldn't identify the attackers to police seems like a clue that he probably knew exactly who gave him his scars.

He may have been cut up, but he wasn't a snitch.

Acts of loyalty such as this would not go unnoticed.

And soon, John Torreo would call on Al to help him with a growing part of his business.

Torreo was moving into a new territory that looked like it was going to be lucrative.

America's second city, Chicago, Illinois.

So, let's take a break right here.

And when we come back, we'll explore exactly what prompted the move to the Windy City.

If Al Capone was indeed permanently scarred on December 8th, 1918, as the Brooklyn Daily Times reported,

then the attack coincided with a number of key moments in his life.

December 8th was just four days after the birth of his first and only child, Albert Francis Capone, known as Sonny.

This was also just three weeks before Al was set to marry the child's mother, the woman who would stay with him through the rest of his tumultuous life, May Cochlan, soon to be May Capone.

May was the daughter of middle-class Irish immigrants who had met Al sometime in late 1917.

At the time, it was still fairly rare for an Irish girl to marry an Italian man, thanks to the well-known tensions between the two immigrant groups.

But the bigger scandal was that May had become pregnant before the two were officially wed.

Al getting caught up in a street fight right before their hastily planned wedding,

wasn't a good look even for a gangster.

This might explain why it's so difficult to pin down the exact timeline of the attack.

Anyway, the birth of Al's son and his marriage to May inspired a brief flirtation with respectability.

Some biographers claim that around the time of the marriage, Al took a job as a bookkeeper in Baltimore.

But this was short-lived.

The death of Al's father in 1920 1920 brought the big guy back to Brooklyn, and before long he was once again working for Frankie Yale.

It was at this time that Capone really gained his reputation as one of Frankie Yale's most feared enforcers.

This also may have been when Al Capone killed for the first time.

Now,

none of these crimes were ever proven and are only rumored about, but it seems safe to assume that in the service of Frankie Yale, Al Capone killed at least one person,

and it's rumored that he may have been involved in the deaths of at least a dozen others.

But in 1919, things were changing fast, both for the Torio Crime Organization and for the United States at large.

On January 16th of that year, the requisite number of states ratified the 18th Amendment to the united states constitution this prohibited the manufacture sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors anywhere in the country a year later the volstead act came into effect an act of congress that allowed for the enforcement of the amendment

The 18th Amendment was the result of decades worth of political campaigning from an array of anti-alcohol groups known collectively as the temperance movement.

The movement was largely spearheaded by Protestant church groups and growing women's organizations.

In fact, temperance campaigning was one of the first ways that women could get involved in political life in the late 19th century.

Interestingly enough, the campaign against alcohol went hand in hand with women's suffrage and first-wave feminism.

These temperance groups believed that alcohol was the source of many of society's ills, ills that would not go away until alcohol was completely banned.

Women's temperance organizations usually pointed to alcohol's destructive influence on the home and the role drunkenness often played in domestic violence.

Their point that alcohol made life more dangerous for women and children was perhaps perhaps the most compelling case made for prohibition.

But it's one thing to pass more restrictive laws around alcohol, and it's another thing altogether to successfully ratify an amendment to the Constitution banning all booze.

If you know your civics, then you know amending a constitution is a famously difficult thing to do.

The supermajority needed to get an amendment through is a purposefully high bar to clear.

Before the 18th Amendment, no amendment to the American Constitution had ever been repealed.

On top of that, the legal manufacture of alcohol was one of America's largest industries.

At the turn of the century, before income tax was introduced by the American government, taxes on alcohol constituted at least 40% of the federal government's annual revenue.

The place of alcohol in the American economy seemed to guarantee that prohibition would never gain the support needed for a constitutional amendment.

But support for this truly extreme action against alcohol was ultimately solidified by the First World War.

The biggest brewers in the United States all happened to be German.

Anhauser, Busch, Miller, Pabst, Schlitz, these beer titans were all German Americans.

The wave of anti-German feeling that accompanied the First World War convinced many that kneecapping this major American industry was justifiable, especially considering that that industry was run by people of German extraction.

Ending brewing could even be framed as patriotic.

The Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act certainly crushed the business of legitimate brewers.

But it famously did not stop drinking in the United States.

The trade in alcohol just went underground.

Criminal organizations like the one headed by John Torreo had been around for decades running brothels and illegal gambling operations.

But now they were perfectly situated to take over the alcohol business.

As historian John Binder puts it, quote, prohibition was the single most important event in the history of organized crime in the United States.

As many pre-Prohibition vendors complied with the statute, gangland filled the void, end quote.

So let's say you were one of the hundreds of people who ran a small brewery or distillery in 1919 and you did not want to break the law.

Now you had this huge space and all this expensive equipment that you couldn't use and was illegal to own.

What were you to do?

Well, luckily, in many cities, there were buyers, guys like John Torreo, who were happy to compensate you for your still and your brewing operation at a discount, of course.

Just

don't worry what we're using it for.

The onset of Prohibition also coincided with John Torreo's move to Chicago and the expansion of his criminal empire in and around that city.

Now, I think it's worth asking why Chicago?

And not just why did John Torreo move to Chicago, but why did Chicago become such an essential hub for the trade in illegal alcohol?

Why was the Chicago territory so so prized by these competing gangs?

Well, there are a few reasons for this.

First, Chicago was a hard-drinking town.

This isn't just a stereotype.

The numbers bear this out.

According to historian John Binder, in 1906, the city was serviced by 7,300 licensed saloons and roughly 1,000 more unlicensed bars known as blind pigs.

That means that with a population of roughly 1.7 million people at the time, there was a bar for every 200 people in Chicago.

That is an exceptionally high bar per capita rate.

At the same time, the average Chicagoan drank three and a half times more beer than the national average and three times more hard liquor.

This local local appetite for booze went hand in hand with a long history of opposing any legislation meant to curtail drinking.

In 1855, the city's mostly German citizens rioted when a new bylaw came into effect raising the licensing fee for saloons.

Known as the beer riots, this demonstration turned violent and ended with a shootout between police and protesters.

That was Chicago's response just when they tried to make it more financially challenging to run a bar.

In 1919, on the eve of national prohibition, the people of Chicago voted on a local ordinance to close the saloons.

That ordinance failed by a margin of 3 to 1.

The vast majority of Chicagoans did not want prohibition.

So here we have Chicago, America's second largest city, with a population that liked to drink and was vocally opposed to the 18th Amendment.

This meant that there was little enthusiasm among local politicians and police for enforcing prohibition, a situation that would become much more acute once organized crime started paying bribes to keep things that way.

On top of that, Chicago was the world leader in the production of pure alcohol.

That is, alcohol that's usually not meant for human consumption.

We're talking rubbing alcohol and industrial alcohol.

Once prohibition came in, the legally produced pure alcohol started to be used to make strong but dangerous substitutes for old favorites.

For instance, legally produced near beer would have pure alcohol added to it in a process known as needling to produce the

effect.

So, if you were looking for pure alcohol, Chicago had the world's biggest supply.

Then, there was geography.

Chicago was on Lake Michigan and was reasonably close to the Canadian border.

Now, there was prohibition in Canada.

but it was very different than prohibition in the United States.

Every province in Canada did prohibition a little differently.

In Quebec, prohibition was a one-year experiment that was never popular among the Quebecois.

It was overturned there by the start of the 1920s.

You gotta love Quebec.

In Ontario and Manitoba, the two provinces closest to Chicago, it was illegal to buy alcohol, but paradoxically, the breweries and distilleries were allowed to keep producing alcohol for export.

The legislators in those provinces were moved by the moral arguments for prohibition, but they couldn't bring themselves to completely destroy the business of their largest brewers.

This created a situation where many of the customers for these legal Canadian vendors were American gangsters.

Canadian rye whiskey became a reliably high-quality alcohol in the the Prohibition era, and Chicago was well situated to receive large bootleg shipments.

So, all told, Chicago was primed to be the capital of the Prohibition underworld when the Volstadt Act finally came into effect.

John Torreo first got interested in the city about a decade earlier.

when a loosely aligned Chicago gangster named Big Jim Colosimo reached out to Torreo to see if he could provide some muscle to help with his struggle against other Chicago crime outfits.

As the years went on, Torreo became more interested in Chicago as being potentially ripe for expansion.

You see, Torreo seems like he was one of the few underworld figures who accurately predicted the success of Prohibition.

He saw Chicago as being better situated than Brooklyn for capitalizing on this new illegal trade in alcohol.

But apparently, Big Jim, whose criminal empire revolved around brothels, was hesitant to get into the world of alcohol bootlegging.

So, he wound up dead.

On May 11th, 1920, Big Jim Colosimo was shot in the back of the head after being lured into a meeting at his Chicago restaurant.

The murder is still technically unsolved, but the speed at which John Torreo moved to take over Colesimo's operations suggest that he was behind the hit.

Now, you'll sometimes read that the gunman who shot Big Jim Colesimo was none other than Al Capone.

But this is yet another historical myth.

All the evidence places Al in Brooklyn when Colesimo was was killed.

It's more likely that the hit was carried out by Al's immediate superior, Frankie Yale, who was likely brought in from New York specifically to take out Big Jim.

But even that has never been confirmed.

With Big Jim Coliseimo dead, Torreo was now focusing all his time and attention on shoring up his position in Chicago.

To that end, he needed muscle.

Al Capone, in the meantime, had gotten himself into a bit of hot water back in Brooklyn.

Apparently, Capone put a low-level hood from a rival Irish gang in the hospital after the young man enraged Capone by making a comment about Italian men marrying Irish women.

The beating was so severe that the man's boss put it out on the street that he was going to kill Capone for the offense.

So Al Capone needed to get out of Brooklyn until the heat died down.

Just so happened that John Torio needed guys in Chicago.

So arrangements were made and the entire Capone family relocated.

By 1921, Al Capone, May, and their young son had firmly landed in the windy city.

When Capone arrived, arrived, Chicago was just at the start of a wild ride that would not end until the repeal of the 18th Amendment.

And old Snorky was going to be right at the heart of it.

Chicago was about to make Al Capone.

But Al Capone may have thought that he was about to make Chicago.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will continue our look at Al Capone.

As always, before we go, I need to give some shout outs.

Big ups to Saucy Around the Edges, to Brenda, to EJ,

to Archit Chala, to Andreas,

to Francis,

to Tim Cromer,

to John Simpkins, to Paul,

to to Connor Kilbride, to Dave LeCompte, to Yvonne, to Sean Kennedy, to David Griffith, to Drew LaFollette, to Brandon Schroeder, and to Major, Major, Major.

All of these people have decided to pledge at $5

or more every month on Patreon.

So you know what that means.

They are beautiful human beings.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for your support.

Thank you to everyone that supports this podcast in all the ways that one can support this podcast.

Just writing nice reviews helps.

Telling your friends helps.

If you ever want to get in touch with me, I love to hear from you.

Send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

Hit me up on Facebook, facebook.com slash ourfake history.

Find me on Instagram at our fake history.

Find me on Blue Sky at Ourfake History.

Find me on TikTok at Ourfake History.

And please go to our YouTube page, like and subscribe there and watch our YouTube videos.

As always, the theme music for the show comes to us from Dirty Church.

Check out more from Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, five.

You want your master's degree.

You know you can earn it, but life gets busy.

The packed schedule, the late nights, and then there's the unexpected.

American Public University was built for all of it.

With monthly starts and no set login times, APU's 40-plus flexible online master's programs are designed to move at the speed of life.

You bring the fire, we'll fuel the journey.

Get started today at apu.apus.edu.