Jan 22 2016

Al Capone – Be careful who you call your friends…

Seen today on Good Fellas food truck

Be careful who you call your friends. I’d rather have four quarters than 100 pennies – Al Capone

Alphonse Gabriel “Scarface” Capone (1899-1947) had very good reason to be sure that he had very good friends.

Al Capone is the best known gangster of the American prohibition era. He was the boss of the Chicago Outfit. Due to his cosy relationship with the mayor and the police he was able to run all the rackets in town for a seven year period.

Despite the violence of his gang, he became a poplar folk hero in Chicago. He saw himself as a Robin Hood figure, and would be cheered when he attended football games.

Capone was confirmed as Public Enemy Number 1 after the St Valentines Massacre of 1929. Capone’s Italian gang gunned down seven members of Bugs Moran’s Irish gang in broad daylight.

Elliot Ness and his team of “Untochables” lead the FBI’s pursuit of Capone.

Capone had so many ‘quarters’ and so few ‘pennies’ that no one would inform on him. He was never prosecuted for bootlegging, violence, or murder. But, famously, he was convicted of tax evasion in 1931. He spent eight years in jail, some of this time in Alcatraz. He must not have been a good boy, as while in jail he developed dementia from tertiary syphilis, and died in 1947.

I wonder how many of his quarters or even his pennies were by his side at the end?