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Original Gangsters with Sean Bean Season 1 Episode 2
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00:00One man's name has become synonymous with crime in the 1930s.
00:10Feared and respected.
00:13Idolized and immortalized on screen countless times.
00:19Regarded by some...
00:23...as the ultimate gangster.
00:30He's here, gentlemen.
00:33But who was he, really?
00:37What do we actually know about him?
00:41It's all yours, Al.
00:45Me. I'm quitting.
00:51At only 26 years old, Alphonse Gabriel Capone...
00:55...will become the boss of one of the biggest crime syndicates America has ever known.
01:04But this was just the beginning of the Al Capone story.
01:25We all know the name.
01:51We all know the name.
01:56But what do we really know about the man?
02:05Why is it that his name sits above so many others?
02:12The day that I learned about Al Capone in school...
02:15...I went back to my grandfather and I told him that I had learned about this guy, Al Capone.
02:19He said, oh yeah, what did they teach you?
02:22Well, they taught me that he was a thief and a robber and he killed people.
02:28He said, oh yeah, is that all they taught you?
02:31Did he tell you that he gave people jobs?
02:34No.
02:36Did they tell you that he gave people soup in the time when they couldn't get soup at the other kitchens?
02:41No.
02:42Did they tell you that he had given money to build an orphanage?
02:46I said no.
02:47He goes, what kind of school you go to, they teach you this.
02:50Next time you go to school, don't pay attention to everything they say.
02:53Come and ask me next.
02:54What I learned was that Al Capone was many things.
02:58He was almost anything to anybody, which is what makes him such a good mythological figure.
03:04My name is Deirdre Marie Capone.
03:08I am Al Capone's grand-niece.
03:11Was Al Capone a mobster?
03:13Yes, he was.
03:15Was Al Capone a monster?
03:17No, he was not.
03:19The myth has become the reality, and that's the difficult part of it.
03:22Once something has been said so many times, it becomes the norm.
03:27The myth is so enormous that we have to go back to the sources.
03:31I keep wondering if there were signs early on of what Al Capone would become.
03:37By all accounts, he came from a stable, caring family.
03:42No evidence of cruelty or violence or abuse.
03:47So what led him down that path?
03:52We know that his father, Gabriel Capone, was 29 years old when he boarded the ship, the Werra, bound for America.
04:04Alongside his pregnant wife, Teresa, 27, and their two children.
04:08It was a time of mass immigration to America.
04:14In the 1890s, over 600,000 Italians would make the crossing.
04:19The prejudice against Italians was tremendous.
04:23The Italians were the largest immigrant group to come during that period.
04:28And people didn't know when these numbers were going to stop.
04:32You 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.
04:42They were the last to be hired and the first to be fired.
04:48The signs that were out in the window.
04:51If you're Italian, don't apply for a job here.
04:54They 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.
05:04The system fails the immigrant, and so the immigrant must resort to other ways of doing things.
05:14The family moved to a small apartment at 95 Navy Street in Brooklyn.
05:20And it's here, five years after their arrival, that Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born on the 17th of January, 1899.
05:34The first child conceived and born in their adopted America.
05:40Capone grew up very poor. He was one of nine kids and really had to start working pretty young to try to help his family out.
05:51His parents were law-abiding citizens. His father was a barber in Brooklyn.
05:56You know, barber's salary wasn't going to feed nine kids.
05:59So he and his brothers all went to work at a pretty young age.
06:03He eventually leaves school at 14, having apparently beaten up one of the teachers.
06:07And for me, psychologically, that tells us a couple of things.
06:12One, he had no respect for authority.
06:16Or is it that he felt anger and rage?
06:20He pretty much grew up on the streets.
06:27Street gangs were prevalent at the time.
06:29And Al's early involvement with Brooklyn gangs exposed him to people who would go on to lead him down a far darker path.
06:45He was a bruiser. He grew to about 5 foot 11 and he's hefty.
06:50What happens when you see a tough guy on the street, the gangsters begin to put them to work.
06:57One time I did something I regretted.
07:01I held this guy who somebody else beat up.
07:06When it was all over, I had blood on my shirt.
07:09The guy peeled off a $50 bill and threw it to me.
07:14You know, so when you see that kind of money come out, it's like, whoa.
07:18When you are around that violence, you begin to take it for granted and you begin to think of it as an option.
07:25Wow, this, you know, this is pretty profitable.
07:28I think as the son of an immigrant, it would have taken him a long time to find his sense of self,
07:35to figure out who he wanted to relate to and why.
07:39But in finding that he was good at something, finding a foothold in this criminal career,
07:45gave him a very, very strong sense of identity.
07:49He's connected with the Five Points Gang, which is one of the leading gangs at the time.
07:54His opportunities are pretty limited as an uneducated, first-generation immigrant.
08:03And suddenly, he sees a way that if he's willing to take some risks, he can make some good money.
08:12He found himself working at a place called the Harvard Inn on Coney Island,
08:18which was definitely not an Ivy League establishment.
08:21This was a really rough bar owned by a guy named Frankie Yale.
08:28Frankie Yale was a really tough guy.
08:30He ran the ice rackets in Brooklyn.
08:33If you tried to sell ice without Frankie's approval, you were going to end up with an ice pick in your knee.
08:39That's the kind of guy Frankie was, and that's the guy Capone went to work for as a teenager.
08:43So he's hanging around the Harvard Inn, and he's meeting some of the toughest, most dangerous guys in New York.
08:51And he's getting ideas. This is what it takes to be successful.
08:55So Capone's working at Frankie Yale's Harvard Inn in 1917, and a fight breaks out.
09:04A fight that Capone's responsible for starting.
09:08And one, in a way, that he'd never recover from.
09:12When we think of gangsters, what's the name we think of first?
09:23Al Capone.
09:26But who was he really?
09:29How did he get those infamous scars?
09:31When he was just a teenager working at the Harvard Inn, he saw a girl that he liked.
09:40And he started talking to her, and she told him to get lost.
09:44Capone didn't give up quite so easily.
09:47He approached her again, maybe two or three times, and finally this girl's brother stepped in.
09:55We're not sure whether it was using a knife or whether it was actually using a bottle.
09:59Whatever it was, it left Capone with three deep scars down his cheek.
10:14Al Capone is 17 years old, and he's just been marked for life.
10:20He's been made to look like a criminal, scarred by violence.
10:24Did this turn him away from leading a normal life? Did it change him?
10:31He's a young man, he's a teenager.
10:34He hasn't found a wife yet.
10:37Suddenly he's got these three brutal, really bright scars across his face and neck.
10:43You can't avoid seeing it.
10:45It's probably the first thing you notice when you look at him.
10:47So this must have been, you know, really traumatic.
10:51When you're looking at a young person who's been scarred, they can go one of two ways.
10:54Either they're going to take it inward and be very insular about what's happened, try and hide it, try and disguise it.
11:02Or you might have someone who eventually turns that into something else where they feel the rage from what's happened to them.
11:07At this stage in his life, Capone still just tired muscle.
11:15He's not a gangster.
11:17Not yet.
11:19In 1918, Al would meet the woman he'd spend the rest of his life with, May, a devout Irish Catholic from a respectable family.
11:28They would get married three weeks after the birth of their only child, Albert Francis Sonny Capone.
11:36Capone was a very good husband and father in a peculiar way.
11:42He loved his only child, Sonny.
11:45He absolutely adored him.
11:47He rang his mother and his wife every single night.
11:50He would phone them.
11:51He was, and he wanted to be, a family man.
11:57But he played around.
11:59And in those days, playing around had serious consequences.
12:06During Al's youth, syphilis was very, very common.
12:12He 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.
12:19Alcohol was seen to be one of the big contributing factors to the spread of venereal disease.
12:27Perception was that people were more likely to engage in extramarital sexual encounters if they had been drinking.
12:36Around the turn of the century, there was a movement to see about maybe banning alcohol.
12:41Banning alcohol.
12:45And liquor has no more business in the constitution of my country than a rattlesnake has in your baby's cradle.
12:52The National Women's Christian Temperature Union announces a campaign for the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.
13:01It seems so bizarre looking at it now that an entire country would ban the sale and production of alcohol to try and curb his social elves.
13:16Al Capone turned 21 just as prohibition was becoming the law.
13:23It passes at a time when the nation was really more conservative.
13:27And unfortunately, by the time it becomes the law in the early 1920s, those attitudes have changed.
13:34People no longer want to sacrifice. They want to have a good time.
13:38But now we've got this law that we passed a while ago.
13:41So 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?
13:50You can't go to your local liquor store. You can't go to your local bar.
13:54Some people might decide that they're going to take that into their own hands.
13:59There was one criminal that would alter the course of Al's life like no other.
14:05When Capone was working at the Harvard Inn on Coney Island, he met a lot of powerful people, and one of them was Johnny Torrio.
14:15Johnny Torrio was one of the brightest people in that business.
14:20If it wasn't for Johnny Torrio, Al Capone would have never been able to be what he was.
14:26Torrio was much older and a very careful, dignified guy who treated the crime work that he did as a serious underdog.
14:34Something not to be handled capriciously.
14:38He goes home every night to his wife.
14:41He treats it as a nine-to-five job, even though that nine-to-five job is extraordinarily violent.
14:47He really takes to Capone, and he takes him under his wing.
14:52I think he sees Capone as brighter than the average thug, and he trains him up.
14:58He realized that he was an intelligent man who could actually do the job well.
15:02Torrio eventually left New York and moved to Chicago, where he became one of the biggest of all operators in the underworld.
15:15Torrio recruited Capone to come to Chicago.
15:19So it's 1920. Al's now living in Chicago.
15:23In the early 20th century, he's very much a working-class city.
15:35It has a population of about 2.8 million, which has doubled almost every decade since the mid-19th century.
15:45It's a crazy town then because it was growing so fast.
15:49It seemed out of control at times, and that led to a kind of wildness, a kind of lull.
15:53The great thing about prohibition for gangsters is that it provides all sorts of different options.
15:59You can distill, you can brew, you can ship, and of course, because it's illegal, you can hijack other peoples.
16:05He's working for Johnny Torrio, but at this point, he isn't the man at the top in Chicago. So who is?
16:18Johnny Torrio goes over to Chicago to work for his uncle, Jim Colosimo.
16:25Who is the man in town?
16:29He's a ruthless businessman. He's built up an empire of a hundred brothels.
16:35He not only runs brothels and gambling operations, he runs one of the most popular restaurants.
16:41Jim will become the catalyst for Capone's success.
16:48Colosimo didn't really want to change things.
16:50He knew his business. He was very good at the brothel business.
16:55He felt he had a formula that worked.
16:58He could see that other groups had managed to buy up most of the breweries and the distilleries in the area.
17:05So he thought they'd be starting from scratch.
17:08He's dragging his heels, whereas Torrio is ambitious.
17:13He rightly thinks that prohibition will be the making of any criminal enterprise during the 1920s.
17:21Torrio knows that regardless of the law, people will always want to drink.
17:27And whoever fills the glasses is going to get rich.
17:32There's a growing sense that something has to be done.
17:35On May the 11th, 1920, Colosimo gets out of his car and walks into his restaurant.
17:44Chicago police, acting on tips, theorized that the person responsible was none other than Brooklyn mobster and Al Capone's old employer at the Harvard Inn, Frankie Yale.
18:10I think there's a pretty decent chance that Capone was involved in the hit on Big Jim.
18:18He was young. He was new in town.
18:20It's the kind of thing that Johnny Torrio might have expected a new guy to do to prove himself.
18:25But nobody saw Capone there, so we really don't know.
18:28No one is ever convicted for the crime, surprisingly.
18:33Now we have Johnny Torrio right at the top of the pile.
18:37And who does he take with him?
18:391920 was a big year for Al Capone.
18:50With 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.
19:01He's running 100 brothels. He expands into bootlegging, but he also expands into all sorts of other businesses.
19:09They can't keep track of it all. They can't even keep track of how much money is coming in.
19:14Then on November the 14th, his father Gabriel dies at 55 years old, and Al becomes the new head of the family.
19:23Once Capone started making a little bit of money, he brought his whole family with him from Brooklyn.
19:30He moved his mother, his brothers, and sister into this big house on South Prairie Avenue.
19:36His older brothers, Frank and Ralph, start working with him in the business.
19:42Suddenly, he's not just the family man, he's the leader of the family.
19:46In some ways, he's stepping in for his dad to supply and to provide for the entire crew.
19:51Chicago is a divided city. Turf wars are raging, especially between the Northside Gang and Torrio's outfit.
20:02Once Big Jim was out of the way, Chicago was wide open.
20:07Suddenly, the amount of money he could make explodes infinitely.
20:11Torrio and Capone, they had the best operation in Chicago, the best and the biggest operation.
20:16They 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.
20:25We just want you to keep producing some beer for us, and we'll distribute it, we'll pay you for your time.
20:31A 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.
20:41The Northside Gang is run by an Irishman, Dino Banyan.
20:48Dino Banyan was a thorn in the side of the outfit.
20:52Who ran a flower shop by day and used that flower shop for cover.
20:55The interesting thing about the Northside is, even though they're quite a small gang, they're very cleverly bought up almost all the breweries.
21:04So they have control of the product. And that puts them in a very strong position.
21:10These guys were in constant battle.
21:13There was sort of a code that if you took out one of my guys, I'm going to take out one of your guys.
21:17And then once you introduced the Tommy gun, and the much greater firepower, then the death count started to rise.
21:30Dino Banyan is killed in 1924.
21:35And that led to Jaime Weiss and Bugs Moran, the head of the Northside. They would have to seek revenge.
21:43Capone and his brothers move operations out of Chicago Central and into one of the suburbs called Cicero.
21:52Where they have the local city manager in their pocket and manage to do pretty much what they want.
22:00There's an election out there. They want to make sure people vote right.
22:04The election is being tampered with, that voters are being intimidated.
22:06A judge hears about this and sends a bunch of police officers to turn back these gangsters from the polls to let the people vote.
22:14Shooting breaks out, and Frank Capone gets killed.
22:17On January the 10th, 1925, Capone's sedan was strafed with a machine gun fire.
22:30On January the 24th, Torrio and his wife Anne were set upon by Moran and Weiss.
22:41Several shots hit Torrio, but when Weiss went to deliver the coup de grace, the gun jammed and the two fled.
22:50Johnny Torrio received really significant bullet wins.
22:56Everyone thinks that he can't possibly make it through this.
22:59Capone takes this shooting really to heart.
23:03He sleeps by Torrio's bed every night in a cot that he has made up.
23:08And he is the person that takes care of the day-to-day running of the business while Torrio is incapacitated.
23:13His time in hospital really is where we see this passing of the baton to Al Capone.
23:22Against all odds, Torrio would recover from his wounds.
23:28He would be taken straight from his hospital bed to prison to serve a short sentence for bootlegging.
23:34Though there are some who suggest this prison sentence came about as a result of Torrio's own negotiating.
23:40After all, where could be safer than a prison where he could buy off the guards?
23:45If you run into a situation where your life is threatened or you begin to think differently.
23:51There's something really deeply ingrained here about the legacy building of this kind of industry.
23:56It wouldn't be enough just to have it exist and for it to completely fall apart.
24:02Any good leader knows that you hand on your empire.
24:05When Capone is 26, he really faces a huge crossroads.
24:10Capone could have said, you know what, I'm good.
24:13I've made enough money, I'd like to get back to my family.
24:17I can take the money I've made and set up a legitimate business somewhere.
24:20You're getting out, I'm gonna get out too.
24:22But no, he actually embraces this new challenge.
24:25So Al Capone, at only 26, he's handed the keys to the kingdom.
24:34He takes over the running of the business and no one objects to it.
24:40So it was obvious that he was actually the ordained.
24:42He was 26 years old when he took over a business which in today's terms was worth $1.5 billion.
24:52I mean, it's an extraordinary thing at 26 years old.
24:55And I think there's a part of him that really likes the attention that comes with this job.
25:06With this change in leadership comes a new way of interacting with the public and the media.
25:14Al Capone loved the limelight.
25:20His garishly coloured suits, his pale grey fedora that he always wore, his overcoat that he always wore.
25:29These are symbols of Capone.
25:32The Italians have some very important coats and one of them is the coat of bella figura.
25:38You gotta make yourself look better than you actually are.
25:43You never let people know exactly what's going on inside of you.
25:47Especially in front of public audiences.
25:52He wanted to dress like a banker, except even more.
25:56So he would go with bigger, wider pinstripes and brighter colors.
26:00He wanted to show a certain lifestyle and not just because he wanted to show off that he was making money.
26:05He wanted to be taken seriously.
26:06Sound and image are coming together to create newsreels.
26:11He's probably the first real media gangster that we have.
26:16And he becomes iconic.
26:19They started making movies with characters based on him.
26:23That would really kind of feed into his ego.
26:26So there's really strong elements of narcissism there.
26:28This kind of attention is validation.
26:29That, you know, how bad can I really be if all these people are paying attention to me?
26:38That's why he's given interviews to the newspapers.
26:41He's given interviews to Cosmo magazine, a women's magazine, right?
26:45He's basically saying, why don't you understand me?
26:47I'm just a good guy. I'm just an American entrepreneur.
26:49He was a businessman. He had a very successful business.
26:55He supplied the demand. You know, people wanted to be in bars.
26:58They wanted to have alcohol and he supplied the alcohol.
27:02He has an oversized personality, a nodding relationship with the truth.
27:06But he's charming, a bit like people regard Trump today.
27:16One of Capone's great strokes of genius was that he realized that you don't keep all the money.
27:23You hand it out. You make friends.
27:28When people were really struggling, he gave people jobs.
27:31He was responsible for, you know, opening a soup kitchen on the south side.
27:36The Italians weren't always allowed into the typical soup kitchens that were up.
27:42Capone was responsible for creating alternative soup kitchens, soup kitchens that, you know, that actually had good food that the Italians would eat because Italians are very particular about their food.
27:56But he also had people come to him and complain about buying spoiled milk.
28:00I 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.
28:10You can only do this when you have so much money you don't know what to do with your money.
28:14But also when you do have some compassion for the people that are your people.
28:20You see this kind of Robin Hood type character come to life.
28:24And I think that that really fed the story, the facade, the character that he wanted to portray to the outside world.
28:29Like a lot of men in his position, he was able to groom people to do the dirty work.
28:32He had a really compelling vision and could compel people and draw them into his vision.
28:43If you want to stay in business a while, you've got to have friends.
28:47So he buys off the cops. He buys off the courts. He can't get arrested if he tries.
28:51He understands that in order to protect himself, he's got to buy everyone else off.
28:57At his height, Capone probably had 60% of the Chicago Police Department in his pocket.
29:05They always say about Capone that if you met him, he was absolutely charming.
29:10He would have a glint in his eye and he would just have this great smile.
29:14But it could turn. And he would suddenly become a reptile.
29:21There's a story about how when he found out that there was an assassination attempt against him,
29:29he beat one of the victims to death with a baseball bat.
29:34It's estimated that in the period of the 1920s that we're interested in,
29:40there were 700 gangland killings in Chicago, of which 200 are associated with Capone's gang.
29:48Sometimes it felt like the Wild West.
29:50In Chicago, you just have guys, you know, rolling by, shooting at each other, seemingly unprovoked,
29:56for grudges that you couldn't keep track of after a while.
29:59And we start to get a little pushback.
30:02You start to see business leaders going to Washington, D.C. and saying,
30:06you've got to help us, because our local elected officials, they're not doing anything.
30:10People are afraid to do business in Chicago. They're afraid to come here as tourists.
30:12So there's a growing sense that something has to be done, that this is becoming a national problem, that lawlessness is out of control.
30:21At 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 neighborhood of Chicago's Northside.
30:39Four men, two wearing police uniforms, pulled up in a police car and entered the garage.
30:48They drew guns and forced the men to line up against a wall, shoulder to shoulder.
30:55At first, Moran's men offered no resistance until a side door opened and two other men carrying Thompson's submachine guns entered.
31:06The pictures go straight into the press, and no one holds back.
31:14Folks are drinking their coffee and eating their Wheaties, looking at the newspaper, and suddenly this gruesome, bloody scene is right in front of them.
31:24We have the impression that Capone was responsible, but it makes no sense.
31:38He already knew the feds were breathing down his neck.
31:41People thought the cops did it, because when one of the Gusenberg boys who died in the garage was still alive when police got there, he said it was the cops that did it.
31:49Well, there's a bunch of different possible theories, but I don't think we're ever going to really know.
31:55Either way, there's a sense that this is going too far.
32:00Up until that point, crime fighting had always been considered a local issue.
32:05It was left to your police chief and your sheriff, but now the federal government is getting involved,
32:10and J. Edgar Hoover is taking over the FBI and building a national response to crime.
32:15Never before was there a greater need for unity, for a calm appraisal of the forces which work against us.
32:26Is this the beginning of the end for Capone?
32:31Seems like he's finally got a problem on his hands he can't buy his way out of.
32:36But the fortunes of the whole nation are about to change.
32:46So, things are beginning to shift now for Capone.
32:52His image is tarnished. The press have turned on him.
32:56And now the federal government have labelled him public enemy number one.
33:03The president, Herbert Hoover, no relation to J. Edgar Hoover with the FBI, starts talking to his cabinet.
33:12What are we going to do about Capone? We can't have this kind of stuff on the front page of the newspaper.
33:16We can't have these gangland killings anymore. We either have to enforce prohibition or we have to strike it from the books.
33:23But we can't just keep looking the other way.
33:26So he decides that he's going to do something about it.
33:29This is the president deciding that he's going to get involved in an effort to take down Al Capone.
33:34The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was a catastrophic collapse in the world economy, which would take a generation to recover from.
33:46We are now into this horrible depression. The economy is tanking. Stock market is nosedived.
33:53People are losing their fortunes. They're blaming President Hoover for this.
33:57And he figures that going after Al Capone will make him look good.
34:01Now you think it'd be pretty easy, right? Because Capone is admitting that he's a bootlegger.
34:09He's obviously making a fortune selling booze and running guns and keeping brothels, casinos.
34:16How hard could it be to take this guy out? But remember, the Chicago cops aren't going to do it.
34:21Capone 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.
34:31You'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.
34:43But there's a federal prosecutor, a U.S. attorney named George E.Q. Johnson.
34:48The Justice Department has asked him to find a way to prosecute Al Capone, and he says, what about his taxes? Has he been paying his taxes?
34:57Capone was not paying taxes. All of his income was illegal, and the federal government said to him, hey, we'd like to talk to you about your taxes. You haven't filed any returns in years.
35:06Capone actually offered to pay taxes. He said, here's how much I think I made. Tell me what I owe you. And after a while, the negotiations fell apart.
35:15So Capone had a chance to get out of this, but he didn't. He didn't pay. Capone should have realized that this was a pretty good situation for him, right?
35:24The 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.
35:32But 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.
35:41And this guy really didn't know tax law that well.
35:43The 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.
36:04But they don't do that. It's ridiculous. They just don't seem to know it. The judge is determined that Capone is going to go down no matter what happens.
36:14He 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.
36:22They're all from outside Chicago, rural characters, and they're absolutely shocked by Capone's behavior because Capone arrives on the first day of the trial in a suit that is described as glaring banana yellow.
36:36So they're pretty baffled by the whole of Capone anyway. They don't have any empathy with him. They certainly wouldn't have been the jury that Capone would have chosen.
36:44Capone was convicted on five counts of income tax evasion on October the 17th, 1931. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
36:56My grandfather got three years in the federal penitentiary for the same amount of money that he didn't declare on his income tax.
37:08Al Capone got 11 years for the same amount, the same thing. I mean, that's unheard of.
37:18If you look at what he was convicted of today, more people are convicted of the same crime and it's just a simple fine.
37:27I'm not saying he was a good guy and 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.
37:38Capone would serve his sentence in the infamous Alcatraz prison, a place reserved for the most dangerous criminals of the time.
37:48They 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.
38:02And he's only a tax evasion conviction, right? Why do you got to put him in Alcatraz? But it's clear that they want to send a message. And this is really a new phase in American history, this emphasis on showing that we're tough on crime, building more prisons, something that really still runs through our society today.
38:20He 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.
38:39His health began to fail. After spending years of his life on the edge, syphilis was now taking a serious toll on him.
38:48We 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.
39:03It's a slow degeneration of your nervous system that comes with cognitive and motor impairment, dementia, mood swings, delusions, hallucinations, personality changes, violent outbursts.
39:20Your entire person and sense of self changes, sometimes beyond all recognition.
39:28In 1939, he was released from Alcatraz due to his failing health, and he returned to his mansion in Florida.
39:39But the once powerful gangster was a shadow of his former self.
39:45Most people think he died in prison, but he didn't. He got out and lived another ten years in Florida.
39:50The Al Capone that I knew, he was kind of like a big child.
39:57I was by his side with my father, and he would call me baby girl.
40:06He said, baby girl, I love you, and baby girl, baby girl.
40:10And my father turned to me, he said, dear dear, we've got to go back to Chicago, you've got to go back to school.
40:15So we got on the train and we came back to Chicago.
40:20The next day, my grandfather called and said, Al just died.
40:29He died on January the 25th, 1947, at the age of 48.
40:37His body was paraded through Chicago in a hearse.
40:46And 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.
41:00The church was filled with people.
41:04Yeah, it was quite something to see.
41:09So who was Al Capone?
41:15A hardened thug, who was also a savvy business leader, who might have been a successful CEO, or even president in another life.
41:26A brutal bully, who yet handed out food to the poor.
41:32A caring husband who rang his wife every night, but whose countless infidelities exposed her to syphilis.
41:40A loving father, who was yet responsible for countless cold-blooded murders.
41:47The truth is, he was all those things.
41:50And yet, as powerful and influential as Al Capone was, like all of us, he was still subject to the whims of history.
42:00We love the idea of Capone as a morality tale.
42:05Here's the man who makes this vast fortune from illegal and violent means.
42:12We can't have him win.
42:14He's got to be brought to justice.
42:16He's not only got to be brought to justice, but he's got to be seen to suffer.
42:21This is what we don't want you to do.
42:23This is evil.
42:24If you do this, you will end up dead.
42:28People didn't understand that even the dead gangsters become heroes to somebody.
42:38People who understood why the gangster rebelled against the system began to see that as a potential model for rebelling against the system.
42:50But what blessings are there to be taken from Capone's legacy?
42:56Why are we still talking about him almost a hundred years later?
43:02His story reflects the contradictions of America.
43:07A nation built on law and order, yet rife with corruption and rebellion.
43:15We've seen lots of criminals live out loud in America, feeling like they're above the law.
43:24And that if they don't try to hide what they're doing, they might just get away with it.
43:30One thing's for certain, the legend of Al Capone will continue.
43:39The legend of Al Capone is a part of the world's legacy of America.
43:58The legend of Al Capone is a part of the world's legacy of America.
44:04The legend of Al Capone is a part of the world's legacy of America.
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