All language subtitles for ORIGINAL GANGSTERS - 2 - Documentary (2025)

SEAN BEAN: One man's name

has become synonymous with crime in the 1930's.

Feared and respected, idolised and immortalised on screen

countless times.

(tense music)

Regarded by some...

(music intensifies)

BEAN: ..as the ultimate gangster.

(keys rattle)

- He's here, gentlemen.

BEAN: But who was he really?

What do we actually know about him?

- It's all yours, Al

- Me, I'm quittin'

BEAN: At only 26 years old,

Alfonse Gabriel Capone,

would become the boss of one of the biggest crime syndicates

America has ever known.

But this was just the beginning of the Al Capone story.

(high-pitched whirring)

(camera flash pops)

- (crowd shouting) (camera flash pops)

- We all know the name.

But what do we really know about the man?

(glass shatters) - (people scream)

- Why is it that his name sits above so many others?

(clapperboard snaps)

- The day that I learned about Al Capone in school,

I went back to my grandfather

and I told him that I had learned about this guy Al Capone

and he said, "Oh, yeah, what did they teach you?"

"Well, they taught me that he was a...

a thief and a robber and he killed people."

He said, "Oh, yeah, is that all they taught you?

Did they tell you that he gave people jobs?"

"No."

"Did they tell you that he gave people soup

in the time when they couldn't get soup at the other kitchens?"

"No."

"Did they tell you that he had given money

to build an orphanage?" I said, "No."

He goes, "What kind of school you go to, they teach you this?

Next time, don't pay attention to everything they say.

Come and ask me next."

What I learned was that Al Capone was many things.

He was almost anything to anybody,

which is what makes him such a good mythological figure.

- My name is Deirdre Marie Capone.

I am Al Capone's grandniece.

Was Al Capone a mobster? Yes, he was.

Was Al Capone a monster? No, he was not

- The myth has become the reality and that's the difficult part of it.

Once something has been said so many times it becomes the norm.

The myth is so enormous that we have to go back to the sources.

- I keep wondering if there were signs early on

of what Al Capone would become.

By all accounts, he came from a stable, caring family.

No evidence of cruelty or violence or abuse.

So what led him down that path?

We know that his father, Gabriele Capone,

was 29 years old when he boarded the ship, the Werra,

bound for America...

..alongside his pregnant wife, Teresa, 27, and their two children.

It was a time of mass immigration to America.

In the 1890s, over 600,000 Italians would make the crossing.

GARDAPHE: The prejudice against Italians was tremendous.

The Italians were the largest immigrant group

to come during that period.

And people didn't know when these numbers were going to stop.

You can go back and look at political cartoons of the time,

and they show Italians swarming onto the shores like little rats

with knives in their teeth.

DEIRDRE: They were the last to be hired and the first to be fired.

There's signs that were out in the window.

"If you're Italian don't apply for a job here."

- They had to learn

not only to navigate the world in a foreign language,

but they had to do it without skills that would have gotten them jobs.

The system fails the immigrant

and so the immigrant must resort to other ways of doing things.

- The family move to a small apartment

at 95 Navy Street in Brooklyn.

And it's here, five years after their arrival...

..that Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born...

on 17th January 1899.

The first child conceived and born...

..in their adopted America.

MAN: Capone grew up very poor. He was one of nine kids

and had to start working pretty young to try to help his family out.

His parents were law-abiding citizens.

His father was a barber in Brooklyn.

You know, barber salary wasn't going to feed nine kids.

So he and his brothers all went to work at a pretty young age.

- He eventually leaves school at 14 having apparently

beaten up one of the teachers.

WOMAN: For me, psychologically, that tells us a couple of things.

One he had no respect for authority.

Or is it that he felt anger and rage?

GARDAPHE: He pretty much grew up on the streets

- (children chattering) MAN: Oi, get out!

BEAN: Street gangs were prevalent at the time...

..and Al's early involvement with Brooklyn gangs

exposed him to people

who would go on to lead him down a far darker path.

ALLERFELDT: He was a bruiser. He grew to about 5'11"

and he was hefty.

- What happens when you see a tough guy on the street...

..gangsters begin to put them to work.

One time I did something I regretted.

I held this guy who somebody else beat up.

When it was all over, I had blood on my shirt.

The guy peeled off a $50 bill and threw it to me.

So when you see that kind of money come out, it's like, "Whoa."

When you're around that violence, you begin to take it for granted

and you begin to think of it as an option.

"Wow. You know, this is pretty profitable."

- I think as the son of an immigrant,

it would have taken him a long time to find his sense of self,

to figure out who he wanted to relate to and why.

But in finding that he was good at something,

finding a foothold in this criminal career,

gave him a very, very strong sense of identity.

ALLERFELDT: He's connected with the Five Points Gang

which is one of the leading gangs at the time.

EIG: His opportunities are pretty limited

as an uneducated first-generation immigrant.

And suddenly he sees a way

that if he's willing to take some risks, he can make some good money.

He found himself working at a place called the Harvard Inn

on Coney Island,

which was definitely not an Ivy League establishment.

This was a really rough bar owned by a guy named Frankie Yale.

Frankie Yale was a really tough guy.

He ran the ice rackets in Brooklyn.

If you tried to sell ice without Frankie's approval,

you were going to end up with an ice pick in your knee.

That's the kind of guy Frankie was and the guy Capone worked for -

as a teenager.

So he's hanging around the Harvard Inn and he's meeting

some of the toughest, most dangerous guys in New York.

And he's getting ideas. This is what it takes to be successful.

- So Capone's working at Frankie Yale's Harvard Inn in 1917

and a fight breaks out -

a fight that Capone's responsible for starting

and one, in a way, that he'd never recover from.

(glass shatters) - Arh!

(people screaming)

- When we think of gangsters...

..what's the name we think of first?

Al Capone.

But who was he really?

How did he get those infamous scars?

- When he was just a teenager, working at the Harvard Inn,

he saw a girl that he liked...

and he started talking to her

and she told him to get lost.

Capone didn't give up quite so easily.

He approached her again maybe two or three times.

And finally this girl's brother stepped in.

ALLERFELDT: We're not sure whether it was using a knife

or whether it was actually a bottle.

Whatever it was it left Capone with three deep scars down his cheek.

(flesh slicing)

(people screaming)

(panicked shouting and screaming)

- Al Capone is 17 years old...

..and he's just been marked for life.

He's been made to look like a criminal, scarred by violence.

Did this turn him away from leading a normal life?

Did it change him?

EIG: He's a young man, he's a teenager.

He hasn't found a wife yet.

And suddenly he's got these three brutal, really bright scars

across his face and neck.

You can't avoid seeing it.

It's probably the first thing you notice when you look at him.

So this must have been, you know, really traumatic.

- When a young person has been scarred they can go one of two ways.

Either they're going to take it inward

and be very insular about what's happened,

try and hide it, try and disguise it.

Or you might have someone who eventually turns that

into something else where they feel the rage

from what's happened to them.

- At this stage in his life, Capone's still just hired muscle.

He's not a gangster. Not yet.

In 1918, Al would meet the woman

he'd spend the rest of his life with, Mae,

a devout Irish Catholic from a respectable family.

They would get married three weeks after the birth of their only child.

Albert Francis "Sonny" Capone.

- Capone was a very good husband and father...

in a peculiar way.

He loved his only child, Sonny, he absolutely adored him.

He rang his mother and wife every single night. He would phone them.

He was, and he wanted to be, a family man.

But he played around.

BEAN: And in those days, playing around had serious consequences.

# RAY CHARLES: Mess Around

- During Al's youth...

..syphilis was very, very common.

- He probably contracted syphilis as a young man in his early 20s

and didn't seek the treatment that could have nipped it in the bud.

WOMAN: Alcohol was seen to be one of the big contributing factors

to the spread of venereal disease.

The perception was that people were more likely

to engage in extramarital sexual encounters

if they had been drinking.

- Around the turn of the century, there was a movement

to see about maybe banning alcohol.

- And liquor has no more business in the constitution of my country

than a rattlesnake has in your baby's cradle.

- The National Woman's Christian Temperance Union

announces a campaign for the prohibition

of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.

BEAN: It seems so bizarre looking at it now

that an entire country would ban the sale and production of alcohol...

..to try and curb its social ills.

EIG: Al Capone turned 21 just as prohibition was becoming the law.

It passes at a time when the nation was really more conservative

and, unfortunately, by the time it becomes the law in the early 1920s,

those attitudes have changed.

People no longer want to sacrifice. They want to have a good time.

But now we've got this law that we passed a while ago.

So, what happens when you take away

one of the biggest industries in America,

a business that brings pleasure to people, and you say, "It's over.

You can't go to your local liquor store,

you can't go to your local bar"?

Some people might decide to take that into their own hands.

BEAN: There was one criminal

that would alter the course of Al's life like no other.

- When Capone was working at the Harvard Inn on Coney Island,

he met a lot of powerful people - and one of them was Johnny Torrio.

DEIRDRE: Johnny Torrio was one of the brightest people

in that business.

If it wasn't for Johnny Torrio,

Al Capone would have never been able to be what he was.

- Torrio was much older and a very careful dignified guy

who treated the crime work that he did as a serious undertaking,

something not to be handled capriciously.

ALLERFELDT: He goes home every night to his wife.

He treats it as a nine-to-five job,

even though that nine-to-five job is extraordinarily violent.

He really takes to Capone and he takes him under his wing.

I think he sees Capone as brighter than the average thug,

and he trains him up.

He realised that here was an intelligent man

who could actually do the job well.

- Torrio eventually left New York and moved to Chicago

where he became one of the biggest of all operators in the underworld.

Torrio recruited Capone to come to Chicago.

- So it's 1920, Al's now living in Chicago.

# ED HARCOURT: Furnaces

BEAN: In the early 20th century, it's very much a working-class city.

It has a population of about 2.8 million,

which has doubled almost every decade since the mid-19th century.

EIG: It was a crazy town then because it was growing so fast.

It seemed out of control at times,

and that led to a kind of wildness, a kind of lawlessness.

ALLERFELDT: The great thing about prohibition for gangsters

is that it provides all sorts of different options.

You can distil, you can brew, you can ship.

And because it's illegal, you can hijack other people's.

BEAN: He's working for Johnny Torrio

but, at this point, he isn't the man at the top in Chicago.

So who is?

(mellow jazz piano)

- Johnny Torrio goes over to Chicago

to work for his uncle, Jim Colosimo.

- Who is the man in town.

ALLERFELDT: He's a ruthless businessman.

He's built up an empire of a hundred brothels.

EIG: He not only runs brothels and gambling operations,

he runs one of the most popular restaurants.

- Jim will become the catalyst for Capone's success.

Colosimo didn't really want to change things.

He knew his business. He was very good at the brothel business.

He felt he had a formula that worked.

He could see that other groups had managed to buy up

most of the breweries and the distilleries in the area.

So, he thought they'd be starting from scratch.

He's dragging his heels, whereas Torrio is ambitious.

He rightly thinks that prohibition

will be the making of any criminal enterprise during the 1920s.

BEAN: Torrio knows that, regardless of the law,

people will always want to drink.

And whoever fills their glasses, is gonna get rich.

- There's a growing sense that something has to be done

BEAN: On May the 11th 1920,

Colosimo gets out of his car and walks into his restaurant.

(gunshot echoes)

BEAN: Chicago police, acting on tips,

theorised that the person responsible

was none other than Brooklyn mobster...

..and Al Capone's old employer at the Harvard Inn...

..Frankie Yale.

(gunshot echoes)

EIG: I think there's a pretty decent chance

that Capone was involved in the hit on Big Jim.

He was young. He was new in town.

It's the kind of thing that Johnny Torrio

might have expected a new guy to do to prove himself.

But nobody saw Capone there, so we really don't know.

- No-one was ever convicted for the crime, surprisingly.

BEAN: Now we have Johnny Torrio right at the top of the pile.

And who does he take with him?

(dramatic music)

(upbeat jazz)

- 1920 was a big year for Al Capone.

With Jim Colosimo, the head of the Chicago outfit dead...

and the opportunities for bootlegging growing by the day,

the money is starting to roll in.

ALLERFELDT: He's running brothels, he expands into bootlegging.

But he also expands into all sorts of other businesses.

EIG: They can't keep track of it all.

They can't even keep track of how much money is coming in.

BEAN: Then on November 14th

his father, Gabriele, dies at 55 years old,

and Al becomes the new head of the family.

- Once Capone started making a little bit of money,

he brought his whole family with him from Brooklyn.

He moved his mother, his brothers and his sister

into this big house on South Prairie Avenue.

BEAN: His older brothers, Frank and Ralph,

start working with him in the business.

EIG: Suddenly he's not just the family man,

he's the leader of the family.

In some ways he's stepping in for his dad

to supply and to provide for the entire crew.

BEAN: Chicago is a divided city.

Turf wars are raging,

especially between the North Side Gang and Torrio's outfit.

- Once Big Jim was out of the way, Chicago was wide open.

Suddenly the amount of money he could make explodes infinitely.

Torrio and Capone, they had the best operation in Chicago -

the best and the biggest operation.

They were smart enough to go to some of the breweries

and say, "Hey, the feds have shut you down.

We'll put you back in business. We'll take all the risk.

We just want you to keep producing some beer for us.

And we'll distribute it, we'll pay you for your time."

A lot of other guys have the same idea.

So, rivals emerge all over town

and Capone and Torrio can't keep them all at bay.

BEAN: The North Side Gang is run by an Irishman,

Dean O'Banion.

- Dean O'Banion was a thorn in the side of the outfit.

EIG: Who ran a flower shop by day and used that flower shop for cover.

- The interesting thing about the North Siders

is even though they're quite a small gang,

they very cleverly bought up almost all the breweries,

so they have control of the product.

And that puts them in a very strong position.

- These guys were in constant battle.

There was sort of a code that "if you took out one of my guys,

I'm going to take out one of your guys."

And once you introduce the Tommy gun and the much greater firepower,

then the death count started to rise.

(gunshots)

ALLERFELDT: Dean O'Banion is killed in 1924.

EIG: Then that led to Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran,

the head of the North Side, they would have to seek revenge.

Capone and his brothers

move operations out of Chicago central

and into one of the suburbs called Cicero

where they have the local city manager in their pocket

and manage to do pretty much what they want.

EIG: There's an election. They wanna make sure people vote right.

The election is being tampered with, the voters are being intimidated.

A judge hears about this and sends a bunch of police officers

to turn back these gangsters from the polls to let people vote.

Shooting breaks out and Frank Capone gets killed.

BEAN: On January 10th 1925...

(machine-gun fire)

BEAN: ..Capone's Sedan was strafed with machine-gun fire.

On January 24th,

Torrio and his wife, Anne, were set upon by Moran and Weiss.

Several shots hit Torrio... (gun clicks)

BEAN: ..but when Weiss went to deliver the coup de gras,

the gun jammed and the two fled.

ALLERFELDT: Johnny Torrio received really significant bullet wounds.

Everyone thinks he can't possibly make it through this.

Capone takes this shooting really to heart.

He sleeps by Torrio's bed every night in a cot that he has made up

and he takes care of the day-to-day running of the business

while Torrio is incapacitated.

His time in hospital really is where we see

this passing of the baton to Al Capone.

BEAN: Against all odds, Torrio would recover from his wounds.

He will be taken straight from his hospital bed to prison

to serve a short sentence for bootlegging.

Though there are some who suggest this prison sentence

came about as a result of Torrio's own negotiating.

After all, where could be safer than a prison,

where he could buy off the guards?

- If you run into a situation where your life is threatened,

you begin to think differently.

SIMMONS: There's something really deeply ingrained here

about the legacy-building of this kind of industry.

It wouldn't be enough just to have it exist

and for it completely fall apart.

Any good leader knows that you hand on your empire.

EIG: When Capone is 26 he really faces a huge crossroads.

Capone could have said, "You know what? I'm good.

I've made enough money. I'd like to get back to my family.

I can take the money I've made and set up a legitimate business.

You're getting out. I'm gonna get out too."

But, no, he actually embraces this new challenge.

- So Al Capone,

at only 26,

is handed the keys to the kingdom.

ALLERFELDT: He takes over the running of the business

and no-one objects to it.

So, it was obvious that he was actually the ordained.

He was 26 years old

when he took over a business which, in today's terms,

was worth 1.5 billion dollars.

It's an extraordinary thing at 26 years old.

- And I think there's a part of him

that really likes the attention that comes with this job.

BEAN: With this change in leadership

comes a new way of interacting with the public and the media.

Al Capone loved the limelight.

(chuckles)

ALLERFELDT: His garishly-coloured suits.

His pale grey fedora that he always wore.

His overcoat that he always wore.

These are symbols of Capone.

- The Italians have some very important codes

and one of them is the code of bella figura.

You got to make yourself look better than you actually are.

You never let people know exactly what's going on inside of you

especially in front of public audiences.

EIG: He wanted to dress like a banker, except even more.

So he would go with bigger, wider pinstripes and brighter colours.

He wanted to show a certain lifestyle

And not just to show off that he was making money.

He wanted to be taken seriously.

GARDAPHE: Sound and image are coming together to create newsreels.

ALLERFELDT: He's probably the first real media gangster we have.

And he becomes iconic.

EIG: They start making movies with characters based on him.

- That would really feed into his ego,

so there's a really strong element of narcissism there.

GARDAPHE: This kind of attention is validation.

That, you know, "How bad can I really be

if all these people are paying attention to me?"

EIG: He's giving interviews to the newspapers.

He's giving to Cosmo magazine, a women's magazine, right?

He's basically saying, "Why don't you understand me?

I'm just a good guy. I'm just an American entrepreneur."

DEIRDRE: He was a businessman. He had a very successful business.

He supplied the demand.

People wanted to be in bars.

They wanted to have alcohol, and he supplied the alcohol.

- He has an oversized personality,

a nodding relationship with the truth, but he's charming.

A bit like people regard Trump today.

EIG: One of Capone's great strokes of genius

was that he realised that you don't keep all the money.

You hand it out. You make friends.

When people were really struggling, he gave people jobs.

He was responsible for opening a soup kitchen on the south side.

GARDAPHE: The Italians weren't always allowed

into the typical soup kitchens that were up.

Capone was responsible

for creating alternative soup kitchens,

soup kitchens that, you know, actually had good food...

(laughs) ..that the Italians would eat

because Italians are very particular about their food.

But he also had people come to him

and complain about buying spoiled milk.

I mean, I don't think he went to City Hall and did it himself,

but he made sure that the expiration dates

were put on milk cartons in Chicago.

You can only do this when you have so much money

you don't know what to do with your money.

But also when you do have some compassion

for the people that are your people.

- You see this Robin-Hood-type character come to life,

and I think that that really fed the story, the facade,

the character that he wanted to portray to the outside world.

Like a lot of men in his position,

he was able to groom people to do the dirty work.

He had a really compelling vision and could compel people

and draw them into his vision.

EIG: If you want to stay in business a while, you've got to have friends.

So he buys off the cops, he buys off the courts.

He can't get arrested if he tries.

ALLERFELDT: He understands that in order to protect himself,

he's got to buy everyone else off.

At his height, Capone probably had

60% of the Chicago Police Department in his pocket.

They always say about Capone that if you met him,

he was absolutely charming.

He would have a glint in his eye and he would have this great smile.

But it could turn...

(snaps fingers) ..and he would suddenly become a reptile.

(sinister music)

There's a story about how,

when he found out that there was an assassination attempt against him,

he beat one of the victims to death with a baseball bat.

It's estimated that in the period of the 1920s that we're interested in,

there were 700 gangland killings in Chicago

of which 200 are associated with Capone's gang.

EIG: Sometimes it felt like the Wild West in Chicago.

You'd just have guys rolling by shooting at each other,

seemingly unprovoked,

for grudges that you couldn't keep track of after a while.

We start to get a little pushback.

You start to see business leaders going to Washington DC and saying,

"You got to help us cos our local elected officials,

are not doing anything. People are afraid to do business in Chicago.

They're afraid to come here as tourists."

So, there's a growing sense that something has to be done.

This is becoming a national problem, that lawlessness is out of control.

BEAN: At 10:30 in the morning, on St Valentine's Day 1929,

seven men associated with George "Bugs" Moran's bootlegging operation

were inside a garage in the Lincoln Park neighbourhood

of Chicago's North Side.

Four men, two wearing police uniforms,

pulled up in a police car and entered the garage.

They drew guns and forced the men

to line up against a wall shoulder to shoulder.

At first Moran's men offered no resistance...

..until a side door opened

and two other men carrying Thompson submachine guns entered.

(machine-gun fire)

- The pictures go straight into the press and no-one holds back.

EIG: Folks are drinking their coffee and eating their Wheaties,

looking at the newspaper

and suddenly this gruesome, bloody scene is right in front of them.

We have the impression that Capone was responsible.

But it makes no sense.

He knew the feds were breathing down his neck.

People thought the cops did it because one of the Gusenberg boys

who died in the garage was still alive when police got there

and he said the cops did it.

There's a bunch of different possible theories

but I don't think we're ever going to really know.

Either way there's a sense that this is going too far.

Up until that point,

crime fighting had always been considered a local issue.

It was left to your police chief and your sheriff.

But now the federal government is getting involved and J Edgar Hoover

is taking over the FBI and building a national response to crime.

- Never before was there a greater need for unity.

For a calm appraisal of the forces which worked against us.

BEAN: Is this the beginning of the end for Capone?

Seems like he's finally got a problem on his hands

he can't buy his way out of.

But the fortunes of the whole nation are about to change.

BEAN: So things are beginning to shift now for Capone.

His image is tarnished.

The press have turned on him.

And now the federal government have labelled him

public enemy number one.

EIG: The president, Herbert Hoover,

no relation to J Edgar Hoover or the FBI, starts talking to his cabinet.

"What are we gonna do about Capone?

We can't have this kind of stuff on the front page of the newspaper.

We can't have these gangland killings.

We either have to enforce prohibition

or we have to strike it from the books,

but we can't just keep looking the other way.

So he decides that he's going to do something about it.

This is the president deciding that he's going to get involved

in an effort to take down Al Capone.

BEAN: The Wall Street crash of 1929

was a catastrophic collapse in the world economy,

which would take a generation to recover from.

EIG: We are now into this horrible depression.

The economy is tanking.

Stock market has nose-dived. People are losing their fortunes.

They're blaming Hoover for this.

And he figures that going after Al Capone will make him look good.

You'd think it'd be pretty easy, right?

Cos Capone is admitting that he's a bootlegger.

He's obviously making a fortune

selling booze and running guns and keeping brothels.

Casinos.

How hard could it be to take this guy out?

But remember, the Chicago cops aren't going to do it.

Capone was also very careful.

He didn't put a lot of the business in his own name.

So, it wasn't clear how they were going to take him down.

You've got federal prohibition agents trying to stop Capone

and they're raiding his breweries and his brothels,

looking for evidence of crime, but they can't pin anything on him.

But there's a federal prosecutor,

a US attorney named George E Q Johnson.

The Justice Department has asked him to find a way to prosecute Capone.

And he says, "What about his taxes? Has he been paying his taxes?"

Capone was not paying taxes.

All of his income was illegal.

The federal government said, "We'd like to talk about your taxes.

You haven't filed any returns in years."

And Capone actually offered to pay taxes.

He said, "Here's how much I think I made, tell me what I owe you."

After a while, negotiations fell apart.

So Capone had a chance to get out of this, but he didn't. He didn't pay.

Capone should've realised that this was a pretty good situation for him.

"The best they can do is come after me for income tax evasion.

I'm going to hire myself a really good lawyer

and I'll probably pay a settlement, and I'll be good."

But when this went to trial, Capone didn't hire a good tax lawyer.

He hired one of the usual lawyers who he turned to

any time he got in trouble with the law.

And this guy really didn't know tax law that well.

- The biggest mistake they make is Capone is convicted

of not providing tax returns

for 1925 and 1926.

Well, the law didn't demand that he had to until 1927.

So they could have argued that quite clearly, which would have

really damaged the prosecution's case. But they don't do that.

It's ridiculous. They just don't seem to know it.

The judge is determined

that Capone is gonna go down no matter what happens.

He manages to stop Capone from tampering with the jury

because he changes the jury the night before the actual trial.

He swaps the jury with another jury.

They're all from outside Chicago, rural characters.

And they're absolutely shocked by Capone's behaviour

because Capone arrives on the first day of the trial

in a suit that is described as glaring banana yellow.

So they're pretty baffled by the whole of Capone anyway.

They don't have any empathy with him.

They certainly weren't the jury that Capone would have chosen.

BEAN: Capone was convicted on five counts

of income tax evasion on October 17th 1931.

He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

- My grandfather got three years in the federal penitentiary

for the same amount of money

that he didn't declare on his income tax.

Al Capone got 11 years - for the same amount, the same thing.

I mean, that's unheard of.

- If you look at what he was convicted of -

today more people are convicted of the same crime

and it's just a simple fine.

EIG: I'm not saying he was a good guy, I'm not saying he was innocent

and I'm not saying that he didn't deserve to go to jail,

but he got a much stiffer sentence for income evasion

than he should have gotten.

BEAN: Capone would serve his sentence

in the infamous Alcatraz prison,

a place reserved for the most dangerous criminals of the time.

EIG: They built Alcatraz at a ridiculously high cost

to try to deter crime.

And what better way to call attention

to your new tough-on-crime approach

than by putting Al Capone there?

And he's only a tax evasion conviction, right?

Why do you got to put him in Alcatraz?

But they want to send a message. And this is really a new phase

in American history, this emphasis

on showing we're tough on crime, building more prisons,

something that still runs through our society today.

- He started off not knowing who he was,

to finding a really strong character,

so strong that he wears a costume,

to suddenly be imprisoned

where everything that provided that sense of status and character

is stripped away from him.

He's just now a man, and he's a very ill man.

- His health began to fail.

After spending years of his life on the edge,

syphilis was now taking a serious toll on him.

- We know that Al Capone lived with inadequately treated syphilis

for a very long time,

which is why he entered into a tertiary stage

later on in his life.

It's a slow degeneration of your nervous system

that comes with cognitive and motor impairment,

dementia, mood swings, delusions,

hallucinations, personality changes, violent outbursts.

Your entire person and sense of self changes

sometimes beyond all recognition.

BEAN: In 1939 he was released from Alcatraz

due to his failing health

and he returned to his mansion in Florida.

But the once powerful gangster was a shadow of his former self.

EIG: Most people think he died in prison

but he got out and lived another ten years in Florida.

DEIRDRE: The Al Capone that I knew,

he was kind of like a big child.

I was by his side with my father.

And he would call me baby girl.

He said, "Baby girl, I love you. Baby girl, baby girl."

And my father turned to me, he said,

"We've gotta go back to Chicago, You've gotta go back to school."

So we got on the train and we came back to Chicago.

The next day, my grandfather called and said, "Al just died."

BEAN: He died on January 25th 1947 at the age of 48.

- His body was...

..paraded through Chicago in a hearse

and people were lining up on the streets

with their hands over their hearts,

their hats in their hands, their heads bowed when his casket went by.

The church was filled with people.

Yeah, it was quite... quite something to see.

- So who was Al Capone?

A hardened thug who was also a savvy business leader

or might have been a successful CEO

or even president in another life?

A brutal bully who yet handed out food to the poor?

A caring husband who rang his wife every night

but whose countless infidelities exposed her to syphilis?

A loving father

who was yet responsible for countless cold-blooded murders?

The truth is he was all those things.

And yet as powerful and influential as Al Capone was,

like all of us, he was still subject to the whims of history.

- We love the idea of Capone as a morality tale.

Here's the man who makes this vast fortune

from illegal and violent means.

We can't have him win. He's got to be brought to justice.

He's not only got to be brought to justice,

but he's got to be seen to suffer.

GARDAPHE: This is what we don't want you to do. This is evil.

If you do this, you will end up dead.

People didn't understand

that even the dead gangsters

become heroes to somebody.

People who understood

why the gangster rebelled against the system

began to see that as a potential model

for rebelling against the system.

BEAN: But what lessons are there to be taken from Capone's legacy?

Why are we still talking about him almost a hundred years later?

His story reflects the contradictions of America...

..a nation built on law and order

yet rife with corruption and rebellion.

- We've seen lots of criminals live out loud in America

feeling like they're above the law

and that if they don't try to hide what they're doing

they might just get away with it.

- One thing's for certain...

..the legend of Al Capone will continue.

# ED HARCOURT: Furnaces

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