Every intimate detail in the criminal life of Alphonso Caponi is common knowledge in most households. The name conjures up images of early 1900s Chicago, Prohibition, and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; or Eliot Ness, tax evasion, and the Untouchables. Some legends are fact, others fiction. Either way, Al Capone had people killed.
While there is no excuse for murdering a dinner guest with a baseball bat, an examination of Capone’s formative years is revealing. Not much is publicized about young Alphonse, how he quit attending a Brooklyn school and joined up with one of the gangs of New York.
The gangs Martin Scorsese portrayed in his movie of the same name were the forerunners and mentors to the ones Alphonse and his brothers joined. Likely, Capone was a descendant member of the original and ruthless Five Points gang, the gang that won elections with the sharp end of a hatchet.
Alphonse Capone, also known as Scarface, wasn’t a unique mob boss. He was a lemming who followed in the footsteps of earlier generations, ‘survival of the fittest’ gangs with names like Dead Rabbits, Bowery Boys, and Plug Uglies.
Would you agree that inhumanity, not Eliot Ness, ended the reign of Al Capone?
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