Chapter 1Navy Street

Foreword

National Prohibition took effect on Al Capone's twenty-first birthday.

I came across that coincidence early, treated it as a coincidence, and then spent four years discovering that it is the entire book.

The Volstead Act came into force on January 17, 1920. Alphonse Gabriel Capone, born at 95 Navy Street in Brooklyn on January 17, 1899, turned twenty-one that day. He was in Baltimore at the time, keeping books for a construction firm, and by every account doing it competently.

What the statute had just done was create the largest consumer market in the United States and remove every lawful supplier from it. What Chicago had already done, over the preceding thirty years, was arrange its municipal government so that the franchise to serve such a market could be purchased from named men at published prices.

He organized the supply better than his competitors for about six years. That is the whole of his career.

I want to set out the argument plainly at the start, because it is unfashionable in two directions at once.

The most famous individual criminal in American history was not, in the ways that mattered, an individual. He was a distribution manager in an industry that a legislature had accidentally created, operating in a city whose institutions were already for sale, and the thing that distinguished him from a dozen contemporaries was not violence — the North Side and the Gennas were at least as violent — but organization, and a genius for publicity that he exercised personally and continuously from 1927.

That is not a defense of him. Chapter 12 is seven men shot against a garage wall on North Clark Street, one of whom was an optician who liked the company and one of whom was a mechanic with seven children. Chapter 9 is a prosecutor machine-gunned outside a Cicero saloon. The business killed people, and the book counts them where they can be counted and says so where they cannot.

It is an argument about causation. Remove the man and the market is unchanged. Remove the law and the business relocates. Both of those propositions are tested in these pages against what actually happened, and both hold.

Chapter 4 has no Capone in it at all.

It is the Volstead Act: the Anti-Saloon League and Wayne Wheeler, a bill Andrew Volstead did not write and had his name put on, what the law actually banned and the very large amount it left standing — sacramental wine, medicinal whiskey, industrial alcohol, home fruit production — and how small the enforcement service was against how universal the thirst. It also carries Lisa McGirr's finding, which changed how I read everything after it: that enforcement fell hardest on immigrants, Black Americans and the poor, while the customers were everybody.

A reader who skips that chapter to get to the machine guns will have skipped the protagonist of the first half.

Now the second thing, which is where this book departs furthest from its predecessors.

Four chapters out of twenty-two — 16 through 19 — are the prosecution and the prison. Three more follow the verdict. That is a third of the book spent on a tax case and a disease, and the proportion is deliberate, because that is where the evidence is.

The federal case file exists. The Bureau of Prisons medical record exists. The best-documented stretch of Al Capone's life by a very wide margin is the part beginning in 1930, and the part he is famous for — a garage on a February morning in 1929 — has no conviction attached to it and never will.

Chapter 16 is the one no popular book about him has written.

Mabel Walker Willebrandt was Assistant Attorney General of the United States from 1921 to 1929. She was personally opposed to Prohibition and responsible for enforcing it, and she worked out that prosecuting speakeasies one at a time was hopeless and that the money was reachable where the liquor was not. The doctrine she pursued — that income from any source whatever is taxable, and that the Fifth Amendment does not excuse a man from filing — was validated by the Supreme Court in United States v. Sullivan in 1927, with Holmes writing.

She left office in 1929, two years before the indictment. She appears in no film. In the popular literature she is a footnote, and in the actual causal chain she is the author of the ending.

The men who executed it were Treasury accountants: Elmer Irey's Intelligence Unit, and Frank J. Wilson working through two million documents to prove that a man with no declared income was spending like a man with a great deal of it. What convicted Al Capone was a gambling ledger seized in a 1926 raid and filed away by people who did not know what they had, two terrified bookkeepers named Leslie Shumway and Fred Ries, and a letter his own tax attorney wrote to the government conceding income.

He went to prison for filing.

Eliot Ness is in this book, and he is in it at his actual size, which is a live argument rather than a settled question. Jonathan Eig has written that Ness was irrelevant to the conviction. Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz have written that the brewery raids destroyed capacity and manufactured leverage. Chapter 17 states the disagreement as a disagreement between named researchers and then takes a position with its reasons showing.

The third force in this life was inside him from about nineteen, and the popular literature throws it away in a sentence.

He contracted syphilis, on the best available reading, in the Brooklyn brothels where he worked the door, and did not treat it. In 1932 the intake examination at Atlanta returned a positive Wassermann test and he declined the spinal tap that would have staged the disease. In February 1938 he collapsed at Alcatraz and was moved to the hospital wing with a diagnosis of paresis. By 1946 an examination reported his mental capacity as that of a child. He died on January 25, 1947, at forty-eight.

Three chapters cover that, because it is the third act, and because a life that ends in an untreated infection acquired at nineteen is a different shape from the one the films use.

What this book will not do.

It will not print the celebrated lines. Al Capone gave interviews freely between 1927 and 1931 and produced several of the most quoted sentences in American criminal history, and they survive in mutually inconsistent printings. Where the wording cannot be established against a located contemporaneous source, the remark is described and the quotation marks are left off. That rule cost me most of the best material in the book.

It will not print the big numbers. The hundred-million-dollars-a-year figure appears in these pages only as an example of what was claimed. Where John Binder's counted figures conflict with the traditional press arithmetic, Binder wins and this book prints the smaller number, which will make it look thinner than its predecessors. It is not thinner. It is counted.

And it will not name an unconvicted man as a killer without attaching, in the same sentence, the name of whoever named him.

One last thing, and it is the finding I did not expect.

John Landesco spent the late 1920s conducting a sociological study of organized crime in this exact city, and published it in 1929. What he found was not a criminal conspiracy operating against the government of Chicago.

He found the government.

Chapter 1 · Navy Street

The first thing the record establishes about Alphonse Gabriel Capone is an address. He was born on January 17, 1899, at 95 Navy Street, in Brooklyn, in the tenement district that had grown up around the Navy Yard. His father was Gabriele Capone, a barber from Angri, in the province of Salerno, who landed in 1894. His mother was Teresina Raiola, a seamstress. There were nine children. Those are the facts, and they are very nearly all of the facts, and a reader who has arrived at this book by way of the films will notice at once how few of them there are.

The documentary spine of the Brooklyn years is census, baptismal and school records. Records of that kind are excellent at certain questions and useless at others. They will tell you who was living at an address, and what trade a man gave when a clerk asked him for one, and when a child was received into a church, and how far that child got in school. They will not tell you what was said in the rooms behind the address. They establish an outline. The interior is thin, and every biographer who has worked this life has filled it differently — which is itself a result, and this chapter intends to report it rather than repair it.

Take the father first, because the father is the part of this story that the century did most to distort. Gabriele Capone came from Angri, in the province of Salerno, and he was a barber, and he landed in 1894. That is what the record fixes: a town, a province, a trade, a year. It does not fix why he left. The evidence assembled for this book does not establish which ship he took, or which rooms the family occupied before Navy Street, or whether Teresina Raiola crossed with him or followed him. It does not establish what language was spoken at the table, or whether the barbering was done in a shop with a lease or in a chair set up wherever a chair could be set up. Those are the questions a novelist would need answered and a biographer would like answered, and the honest position is that they are not answered here.

What the record does establish about the household is a pair of trades. A barber and a seamstress are both people with a skill that converts directly into money, on their own hours, in a neighborhood where most of the money came out of the waterfront. That is not the immigrant destitution of the standard telling, and it is not comfort either. The evidence does not support a picture of a family in crisis, and it does not support a picture of a family with anything to spare. There were nine children in a tenement district, which is a fact about square footage and about noise and about how much attention any one child could expect, and it is the same fact that was true of a great many families on that street, none of whom produced the most famous individual criminal in American history.

The neighborhood matters, and it matters for a reason that will run under the whole book. The Navy Yard district was a working waterfront: Irish, Italian and Scandinavian dockworkers, living alongside one another and alongside the yard that employed them. It was mixed. That plain topographical fact sits awkwardly against a century of explanation, because for a hundred years the Capone story has been used to attach criminality to Italian-Americans, and the block he was born on will not carry the weight. He did not grow up sealed inside an ethnic enclave that could be pointed to afterward as a cause. He grew up among the sons of Irish and Italian and Scandinavian dockworkers, in a district organized by the waterfront rather than by the parish, and this book will say now, at the beginning, that it does not treat national origin as an explanation for anything anybody in it did. The scholarship that has actually counted, rather than assumed, points the same way. John Landesco, working as a trained sociologist inside Chicago while the events were happening, published his findings in 1929 as part of the Illinois Crime Survey and described the syndicates there as an ordinary feature of ward politics rather than as a foreign intrusion. John J. Binder's quantitative reconstruction of Prohibition-era Chicago, published in 2017, describes an underworld that was Irish, Jewish, Polish and Italian and thoroughly entangled with Anglo ward politics and Anglo money. Lisa McGirr's The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, published in 2015, adds the piece that the older Capone books could not have used: that Prohibition's enforcement fell hardest on immigrants, Black Americans and the poor, while the customers were universal. That asymmetry is the reason the association got made at all. Enforcement went where the enforcers were sent, arrests were made where arrests were easy, and a national appetite acquired a foreign face because the face was the one being photographed in custody. Neither Landesco nor Binder nor McGirr wrote a book about a Brooklyn childhood. All three of them are the reason this chapter refuses a shortcut that was available on page one.

Then there is the school. He attended public school through the sixth grade, and he was out at fourteen after striking a teacher.

That sentence is the closest thing the Brooklyn years contain to an event, and it is worth being precise about how little of it is established. The record fixes the grade he reached and it fixes the leaving and it fixes the blow. It does not preserve the teacher's name. It does not preserve what was said before the blow, or by whom, or whether there had been trouble in that classroom before, or what the school did afterward beyond the fact that he did not come back. Anyone who tells you what happened in that room is telling you a reconstruction, and the reconstructions differ, and they differ in the direction of whatever the writer had already decided about the man.

It is also worth saying what leaving school at fourteen did and did not mean in that district in those years. The evidence assembled here does not establish that it distinguished him from the boys on his block. Sons of dockworkers went to work. The interesting question is not why a fourteen-year-old in a Navy Yard tenement district left school, because that question mostly answers itself; it is why this particular one has had that departure read backward, for a century, as the moment a criminal was made. The answer has nothing to do with the classroom and everything to do with what was built on top of it afterward.

There is one further difficulty with the Brooklyn years, and it is the difficulty that governs the whole book. Capone left no memoir, no diary, and no known private papers of substance. What exists in his own voice is interviews, given many and given freely to Chicago reporters and to visiting writers between roughly 1927 and 1931 — that is, given by a man in the middle of a business, to people whose trade was print, at the exact moment he had the most to gain from being understood a particular way. Those are the only remarks about his origins that come from him, and they reach us secondhand, through writers with deadlines and space to fill. They exist in multiple and mutually inconsistent printings. This book does not put any celebrated Capone line inside quotation marks without a located contemporaneous printing behind it, and where the wording cannot be fixed it describes the remark instead. That rule costs the book some famous sentences. It is worth the cost, because the single most likely way a fabrication enters a Capone book is through a quotation everybody already knows. And anything he said after 1938 comes through custodians, physicians and relatives, and is not the testimony of a competent man.

So the childhood has no witness. It has an outline of documents and it has a large literature written backward from a reputation. And the search through that literature began early — it began, in fact, while the subject was still at liberty and still in business.

Fred D. Pasley's Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man appeared in 1930, written by a Chicago newspaperman, published while Capone was neither in prison nor out of the trade. Its value to a modern reader is not evidentiary. Much of it is Capone's own account of himself, given freely to a reporter by a man who understood exactly what a reporter was for. It is the myth's birth certificate. And already in 1930, in the first biography ever written about him, the machinery is running: a life is being read backward from a reputation, and the early years are being made to explain the late ones.

Everything since has done some version of the same thing, with steadily better sources.

John Kobler's Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone, published in 1971, fixed the popular Capone for a generation. Kobler built it on interviews with people who had survived the period, which is a real method and produced real material, and it is also the book that gave the baseball-bat banquet story its canonical form and that reproduces a good deal of Chicago newsroom folklore as fact. It is indispensable for knowing what the story is. It is not a source for what happened.

Robert Schoenberg's Mr. Capone, in 1992, is the most careful of the older lives. Schoenberg went back to the documents and demolished a number of the standard anecdotes, and any book that follows him has to earn back every story he took away. Laurence Bergreen's Capone: The Man and the Era, in 1994, is the fullest and most literary of the standard biographies, and it is the one that treats the syphilis as biography rather than as a postscript — a decision this book agrees with and will build three chapters on. Bergreen is also drawn to the tragic reading, and at times lets the disease explain more than the record supports, which is a caution to be carried rather than a reason to discount him.

Luciano J. Iorizzo's Al Capone: A Biography, in 2003, is short and academic, and its usefulness here is that it places Capone inside immigration history rather than inside crime writing. That is the correct shelf for a chapter about Navy Street. Jonathan Eig's Get Capone, in 2010, is the strongest revisionist account, built by working the federal records hard; its arguments are about the massacre, the conviction and the timing of the mental decline, and this book takes them up where they belong, in the chapters that have the documents. Deirdre Bair's Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend, in 2016 — the last book of a serious career by a National Book Award-winning literary biographer — worked with previously unused family sources and with descendants, and comes with the cost that such access always carries: it is gentler on the domestic Capone than the record requires. Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz published Scarface and the Untouchable in 2018, the most recent major synthesis and the direct rebuttal to Eig on the question of whether Eliot Ness mattered; that argument is live, and it gets a chapter of its own later, stated as a disagreement between named researchers rather than settled by assertion.

Set those books beside one another and something becomes visible that is difficult to see inside any one of them. Every biographer since 1930 has gone looking for the thing that made him. Nobody has found it.

There is no documented beating. There is no documented abandonment, no documented death that broke the household, no documented humiliation with a date on it. There is no early cruelty preserved in any record this book has been able to reach. The father is a barber with a trade, present in the household. The mother is a seamstress. The block is poor and crowded and multi-ethnic and entirely ordinary for Brooklyn in 1899. The school ends in the sixth grade, in a district where nothing in the evidence marks an early leaving as unusual, and it ends in a punch, and the punch has been asked to carry more explanatory weight than any fourteen-year-old's temper can carry. The most careful readers of the Brooklyn material — Bergreen among them, and Bair, working from inside the family's own sources — approach the same conclusion from opposite directions: an unremarkable immigrant childhood with no identifiable formative trauma.

That is a finding. It reads like a failure of research, and it is not one. It is the result, and the resistance to it is instructive, because the resistance is not really about Capone. Biography as a form has an appetite for cause. A reader who has been told what a man did wants to be told why, and the why is expected in the childhood, because that is where we have agreed to keep it. When the childhood declines to produce one, the pressure does not go away; it goes looking. It finds a teacher and turns him into a symbol. It finds nine children in a tenement and calls it deprivation. It finds a barber from the province of Salerno and, in the hands of a hundred years of lazier writing, calls that an explanation all by itself.

This book refuses all three, and it refuses them here, on page one, because the refusal is the argument.

The argument is that almost nothing in this life was personal. He is the most famous individual criminal in American history and he is best understood as a product — of a statute, of a city's purchasable government, and of an infection that, on the best available reading, he was carrying before he was twenty. National Prohibition took effect on his twenty-first birthday. It created, in a stroke, the largest consumer market in the country and left it with no lawful supplier, and it left the supply to whoever could organize trucks, breweries and policemen. Chicago's government was already for sale, on terms a trained sociologist would set down in print, from inside the city, while it was happening. He organized the supply better than his competitors for about six years. Then the same federal government that had manufactured the market removed him — not with the Prohibition Bureau, which raided him hard and convicted him of nothing that stuck, but with a doctrine of tax law, a seized ledger and two frightened bookkeepers. And the third force was inside him the whole time, and it finished the job that the courts had only started.

None of that makes him a victim, and a book that lets those three impersonal forces do the moral work will be worthless. Seven men were shot against a garage wall on North Clark Street. A prosecutor was machine-gunned in Cicero. The enterprise ran brothels in which the women were not free, and the record does not preserve those women as individuals, which is a fact about the record and not about them. Two of the nine children born to Gabriele and Teresina Capone will appear in the later chapters of this book — one of them shot dead in a street outside a polling place, one of them convicted in federal court — and a family in which that happens is not a family to which nothing happened. The Brooklyn chapter is not an argument that he was harmless. It is an argument that he was ordinary, at the start, in the specific and limited sense that nothing in his origins predicted him, and that a great deal in the law and the city he moved to did.

The calendar has one coincidence in it and it is only a coincidence. He was born on January 17, 1899, and the statute that made him possible came into force on his twenty-first birthday. That is arithmetic and not fate, and the book will not treat it as fate. A boy born on a different day in the same year would have turned twenty-one into the same market, in the same city, under the same aldermen. The date is worth stating precisely because it makes the shape of the argument visible: the interesting number in this life is not the birthday, it is the statute; not the childhood, but the market that a childhood in Brooklyn had nothing to do with creating.

One more thing follows from taking the record seriously, and it will reorganize the book in a way some readers will find perverse. This life is inverted relative to its fame. The years everyone knows — the garage wall, the machine guns, the massacre he is famous for — are the least provable years in it. Nobody was ever convicted of the killings on North Clark Street, and nobody is going to be. The years nobody dramatizes — the Treasury accountants working a seized ledger, the intake examination at a federal penitentiary, the physicians' notes from a prison hospital wing — are the best-evidenced stretch of the whole life by a wide margin, and most popular accounts compress them into a paragraph. So four of the chapters that follow are given to the prosecution and the prison, because that is where the evidence actually is, and three chapters follow the verdict, because the disease is the third act and the literature throws it away in a sentence. A book that follows the evidence rather than the folklore is going to feel unfamiliar. This chapter is the first instance of that discipline rather than an exception to it: state what the documents fix, name what they do not, and decline to supply the difference.

So the chapter ends where the evidence ends, which is early. He was born at 95 Navy Street on January 17, 1899, to a barber from Angri and a seamstress. He was one of nine. He went to public school through the sixth grade, hit a teacher, and left at fourteen, and after that the record on Brooklyn thins out toward 1918 and gives up almost everything an explanation would need. Every writer who has come looking for the wound has left without one. This book has looked too, and reports the same emptiness, and then declines the invitation to fill it — because a man produced by an ordinary childhood and an extraordinary statute is not a gap in the account.

It is the account.