Alphonse "Scarface" Capone

Alphonse Capone was born in Brooklyn in 1899 to parents who had arrived from Naples six years earlier. He left school at fourteen after striking a teacher, and took the education that was available to him in the Brooklyn street gangs. The scars that gave him his least favourite nickname came from a knife fight in a Coney Island bar, over a remark he had made about another man's sister.

Johnny Torrio brought him to Chicago in 1921. Within four years Torrio had been shot five times by rivals, decided he preferred retirement to another attempt, and handed the organisation to his twenty-six-year-old lieutenant.

The business

Capone's reputation rests on violence, but his actual talent was distribution and municipal purchase. He supplied illegal beer across a city whose police and courts he had substantially bought, and in the suburb of Cicero his organisation effectively selected the town government. Estimates of the operation's annual revenue at its height run to sixty million dollars, though the figure comes from prosecutors rather than accountants.

He was also unusually public for a man in his position — giving interviews, opening a soup kitchen during the Depression, taking a seat at Chicago ball games. That visibility made him a national symbol and, eventually, a federal priority.

The end of it

No murder charge ever held. What ended his career was the income tax. In October 1931 a jury convicted him on five counts of tax evasion and he was sentenced to eleven years. He served in Atlanta and then Alcatraz, where the untreated syphilis he had carried since his twenties began to affect his mind. He was released in November 1939 and lived out his remaining years at his house on Palm Island in Florida, his mental capacity by then substantially diminished. He died there of cardiac arrest in January 1947, aged forty-eight.