FILE NO. 0184
Content warning: This case file describes organized crime in Chicago during Prohibition, shootings and killings that newspapers and officials attributed to gangs, the 1929 killing of seven men in a Chicago garage (described without graphic detail), an attack on a prisoner with a blade, imprisonment, and the subject’s illness and death. The seven men killed in 1929 are named as the newspapers of the time printed their names.
Al Capone and the Ledger: Chicago, Prohibition and the Tax Case, 1899 to 1947
The FBI says the Chicago suburb of Cicero became “a fiefdom of the Capone mob,” and the 1929 killing of seven men in a North Clark Street garage was “generally ascribed” to his gang. He was never charged in it. What sent Alphonse Capone to Atlanta and Alcatraz was a gun plea in Philadelphia, a contempt finding over a doctor’s affidavit, and a tax case built from a seized ledger and a cashier’s testimony. This case file follows the court, Treasury, FBI and newspaper records and marks where they disagree.
Legal status: This is a historical case. Alphonse Capone died in 1947. Three convictions are on the record and are stated as fact below. In May 1929 he pleaded guilty in Philadelphia to carrying a concealed deadly weapon and was sentenced to one year. In February 1931 a federal judge in Chicago found him guilty of contempt of court and sentenced him to six months. In October 1931 a federal jury in Chicago found him guilty on three felony counts of attempting to evade income tax for 1925, 1926 and 1927 and on two misdemeanor counts of failing to file returns for 1928 and 1929; the Seventh Circuit affirmed that judgment on February 27, 1932. He was never charged in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Bootlegging, gambling, leadership of the Chicago organization and every killing mentioned below are allegations or attributions by the sources named, not findings of a court. Status checked against the saved sources on October 23, 2026.
The verdict form that ended Al Capone’s years in Chicago is a single sheet. It was returned before Judge James H. Wilkerson on October 17, 1931, and it finds the defendant not guilty on one indictment and guilty on five counts of another. Those five counts concerned his income: money he had received in 1925, 1926 and 1927 and the tax on it, and the returns he never filed for 1928 and 1929. Nothing on the sheet mentions beer, brothels or bullets.
That gap is the subject of this file. Capone was, in the FBI’s later words, a man whom “it seemed that law enforcement couldn’t touch.” The Mob Museum puts the result plainly: “In contrast to the standard movie plot of tommy gun-firing G-Men bringing down the Mob, accountants and prosecutors assembled the most effective cases against people like Capone.” The court, Treasury, FBI and newspaper records saved for this dossier show how that was done, and how much of the legend was never tested in any courtroom.
Brooklyn and the Five Points
The FBI’s history page says Capone was “Born of an immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York in January 1899.” The National Archives catalog entry for his Alcatraz notebook page gives the exact date as January 17, 1899, and the place as Brooklyn. No birth, school or immigration record was saved for this file, so those two federal statements are the whole of the documentary evidence here for his beginnings.
The same FBI page says he “quit school after the sixth grade” and joined a street gang, “becoming accepted as a member.” It names Johnny Torrio as the gang’s leader and Lucky Luciano as another member. The Mob Museum names the gang as the Five Points gang, “a criminal enterprise of mostly younger Italian-Americans in Manhattan that also graduated such well-known mobsters as Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Johnny Torrio.”
The nickname came from New York as well. The Mob Museum says that “It was in New York that Capone suffered a facial wound in a fight at a brothel, earning him the nickname ‘Scarface.'” The museum gives no date and names no one else in the fight, and no police record of it was saved for this file. The name stuck. The National Archives list of former Alcatraz inmates prints it beside his register number, and the catalog title of his Alcatraz notebook page reads CAPONE, ALPHONSE GABRIEL “SCARFACE”.
The first entry in the criminal history typed on that Alcatraz page, according to the archive that transcribed it, is a 1919 arrest in New York City. The transcription does not say what the arrest was for, and this file does not guess.
Torrio, Colosimo and the move to Chicago
Johnny Torrio went west first. The Mob Museum says he “moved to Chicago in 1909 to work for syndicate boss ‘Big Jim’ Colosimo.” An FBI memorandum of April 19, 1947, in the Bureau’s file on Torrio, says Colosimo “imported Johnny Torrio from New York to be his bodyguard and right-hand man.” The Mob Museum describes Colosimo as running “hundreds of brothels and gambling rackets” and says he “reportedly refused to go into bootlegging,” which, once Prohibition began in 1920, was the great new opportunity in the trade.
The FBI’s history page says that “About 1920, at Torrio’s invitation, Capone joined Torrio in Chicago where he had become an influential lieutenant in the Colosimo mob.” The 1947 Torrio memorandum says Torrio, after taking over Colosimo’s operations, brought “a New York hoodlum named Alfonse Capone” to Chicago. The spelling is the memorandum’s.
Colosimo did not survive the year. The 1947 memorandum says “Colosimo was murdered on May 11, 1920, and it is alleged by the Chicago Police that this killing was planned by Johnny Torrio.” The Mob Museum goes further: “Although nobody was ever arrested for Colosimo’s murder, many believe Torrio ordered the hit, and that Capone was an accomplice in the killing.” That is a belief, not a finding. No court record of the killing was saved for this file, and no source here records a charge against anyone.
Guy T. Helvering’s narrative for the Intelligence Unit, written in the 1930s, tells the same story in a different order. It says Torrio came to Chicago from New York in the early days of Prohibition to succeed Colosimo after Colosimo had been murdered, rather than arriving years before as Colosimo’s employee. The two accounts cannot both be right on that point, and neither cites a document.
The boss of Cicero, by the Bureau’s account
The sources disagree on when Capone took over. The FBI’s history page says “In 1925, Capone became boss when Torrio, seriously wounded in an assassination attempt, surrendered control and retired to Brooklyn.” The Mob Museum also gives 1925, and adds that Torrio, after being shot, was sentenced to nine months in jail for operating an illegal distillery and then moved to Italy for three years, leaving “the Outfit,” as the Chicago organization came to be known, in Capone’s hands. An FBI memorandum quoted by mobfiles.org says Torrio had been arrested in January 1925 in a raid on the Sieben Brewery. Helvering’s Intelligence Unit narrative, by contrast, dates both the shooting of Torrio and the start of Capone’s reign to 1924.
Whichever year is right, the FBI page says Capone “had built a fearsome reputation in the ruthless gang rivalries of the period,” and that as rival gangs “were eliminated or nullified,” the suburb of Cicero “became, in effect, a fiefdom of the Capone mob.” Helvering’s narrative says the murder count in Chicago gang wars rose as high as 64 in one year before the wars ended in 1929. None of the killings of these years was charged to him in any record saved here.
The newspapers were careful even when they were not cautious. On October 12, 1926, the Evening Star printed the Associated Press report of a machine-gun shooting near Holy Name Cathedral in which Earl “Hymie” Weiss and Paddy Murray were killed. It named no one as responsible. The next day the Bismarck Tribune carried Capone’s own remarks to reporters in a Cicero hotel room, that he wanted an end to the killings, together with the report that police suspicion had turned toward Cicero but that “there was no direct evidence.”
By 1928 Capone, whom The Mob Museum calls “the most-visible mobster in America” in these years, was easy to find and hard to reach. A United Press feature in the Milwaukee Leader of July 6, 1928, described the Metropole Hotel at Michigan Boulevard and 23rd Street as his headquarters, with guards watching the lobby. When Special Agent Frank J. Wilson of the Intelligence Unit later wrote up the government’s tax case, he headed it “In re: Alphonse Capone, Lexington Hotel, 2300 Michigan Boulevard, Chicago, Ill.” A report by three revenue agents dated July 8, 1931, gives a different, quieter address: 7244 Prairie Avenue.
A house on Palm Island
The Bureau’s first file entry on Capone was not about a crime. On June 20, 1928, a letter on the letterhead of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce asked J. Edgar Hoover for a résumé of any Bureau record on Al Capone, describing him as recently known as the Chicago gangster and as then living at Miami or Miami Beach. According to mobfiles.org, which reads the file, it is the first serial of the Bureau’s Capone file.
He was by then spending time in Florida. The FBI page says that after his release in 1939 he went on “to his Florida home, an estate on Palm Island in Biscayne Bay near Miami, which he had purchased in 1928.” Wilson’s report records how the house was furnished. A bookkeeper for a Chicago furniture company, Jean Rives, testified that Capone came to the store in 1928 to choose furniture, that he bought it in the name of P. Henderson, and that it was sent to 93 Palm Island, Miami Beach. She said the first purchase came to $7,289.15. A deposit was paid when the order was placed, and the balance two days later, on June 13, 1928, in checks that, she said, Guzik had made out.
Helvering’s narrative says the men investigated in the Chicago drive kept little or no records and had no bank accounts in their own names, and the indictment charged that Capone had filed no returns for 1928 and 1929. Purchases like the Palm Island furniture became evidence of what he spent, and so of what he must have earned.
The same summer brought another killing that the newspapers connected with Chicago. On July 1, 1928, Frank Yale was shot dead on a Brooklyn street. Short wire items in the Brownsville Herald the next days called him a friend and “confederate” of Capone and reported that Chicago gangsters were being sought. Those are the papers’ attributions. No source saved for this file records a charge against Capone or anyone connected to him in Yale’s death.
February 14, 1929: seven men in a North Clark Street garage
The event most often attached to Capone’s name is one he was never charged with. On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929, seven men were shot dead in a garage on Chicago’s North Side. The Evening Star in Washington had the Associated Press account on its front page the same afternoon. It placed the bodies “in the rear room of the S. M. C. Cartage Co., 2122 North Clark street,” and said police had been summoned by a woman living nearby. The continuation the next day put the shooting at about 10:45 a.m.
The first wire story said the dead were members of the North Side gang of George “Bugs” Moran and that a band of five men had entered the gang’s headquarters posing as police officers. The version that reached the Seward Daily Gateway in Alaska the next day reads: “Seven members of a powerful North-side gang, headed by George Moran, were trapped in a North Clark street headquarters by five gunmen who lined them up with their faces to a brick wall and beneath a powerful electric light, and shot them to death.” These were reporters’ reconstructions written within hours, not testimony.
The Washington Daily News printed the names of the dead on February 15, as the page image reads, as “James Clark, Dr. Reinhart Schwimmer, Frank Gusenberg, Peter Gusenberg, Adam Heyers, John May and Alfred Weinshank.” Other papers printed some of them differently. The Evening Star gave the doctor as Dr. R. H. Schwimmer, an optometrist, and the Washington Times listed “Myers, Adam, alias Frank Schneider.” The Daily News said Schwimmer “was not a gangster” but was friendly with the Moran gang. Frank Gusenberg was alive when police arrived. The Evening Star reported that he did not say who shot him before he died at Alexian Brothers Hospital.
Police Commissioner William F. Russell, Coroner Dr. Herman N. Bundesen and Assistant State’s Attorney Harry Stansbury took charge, according to the first report, which quoted Russell: “This is the end of gangland in Chicago.” Bundesen empaneled a coroner’s jury of businessmen, “with Bert A. Massee, manufacturer, as foreman,” which viewed the bodies at a police station and then visited the garage. The Washington Times reported that “Police Commissioner Russell blamed prohibition for the massacre,” and that “the Federal Government is sending Assistant United States District Attorneys to attend the inquest.”
Capone was in Florida. The FBI history page says the killings were “generally ascribed to the Capone mob, although Al himself was in Florida.” The Mob Museum says he “is widely suspected of having ordered this massacre on Bugs Moran’s gang,” and that “he was never charged with the crime.” One affidavit gathered in Miami for the federal contempt case the next month, as far as its scanned text can be read, has a Dade County official swearing that on February 14 itself he and an assistant district attorney of Kings County, New York, questioned Capone for about two hours. The archive that transcribed it says the page image has not been checked.
Theories, arrests and a denial from Miami Beach
Within a day there were competing explanations, and the newspapers printed all of them. On February 15 the Evening Star carried an Associated Press story that opened: “Maj. Fred D. Silloway, assistant prohibition administrator, today advanced the theory that police officers themselves killed the seven gangsters shot to death in a North Side gang stronghold yesterday.” Silloway pointed to witnesses’ descriptions of men in police uniforms and a car like a police squad car. Russell called the statement “all rot.” The same report said State’s Attorney Swanson suspected a Detroit gang.
The Daily Alaska Empire, on February 16, reported that two women and a man who lived across an alley from the garage had picked out, from police photographs, three Detroit men they said had rented rooms overlooking it in the days before. It also quoted Moran: “There is only one gang that kills like that … and that is the Capone gang.” That is an accusation from the leader of the gang that had lost seven men, printed in a newspaper. It was not evidence, and it was never tested.
Capone answered from Florida. On February 18 James L. Kilgallen of the International News Service interviewed him at his island home at Miami Beach. The Washington Times printed his words at the top of the story: “I don’t know a thing about the killing of those seven gangsters in Chicago. How could I? I have been living here peacefully. Why do they blame me for all those unsolved crimes?” He told the reporter, “I have retired.”
The investigation moved by fits. On February 22 the Washington Times reported that the charred parts of the car used in the killings had been found in a private garage on the North Side, rented on February 12 “by a man giving the name of Frank Rogers,” in the district called “Little Sicily.” The Nome Nugget reported on February 23 that “Nosey” Joe Lewis had been arrested in Detroit and charged with murder. On March 13 the Washington Times named three men “now sought as the connecting links”: Joseph Lewis, James Ray and Claude Maddox. Nothing in the saved pages shows any of those charges proved.
On March 26 the Washington Daily News printed a United Press reconstruction, attributed to men “close to gangland itself,” that opened: “Scarface Al Capone’s men massacred seven Bugs Moran gangsters in a North Side garage last St. Valentine’s Day because:” and gave three reasons, among them the killings of Tony Lombardo and Pasqualino Lolordo. The same story conceded: “Just how much Capone himself had to do with the massacre is not known.”
The most concrete evidence came in December. After a policeman, Charles Skelly, was killed in St. Joseph, Michigan, police searched the home of Fred R. Burke there and found machine guns. On December 23 the Evening Star reported that Maj. Calvin H. Goddard, a ballistics expert “now a member of the faculty of Northwestern University’s Crime Detection School,” had told the reconvened coroner’s jury that he “fired 35 bullets from the weapons” and found the markings on test bullets “identical” with those on bullets from the victims. The United Press account of the same session, in the Indianapolis Times, said “very similar.” Neither page reports the jury’s verdict, and no inquest record was found.
A doctor’s affidavit and the first federal conviction
The Bureau of Investigation, the FBI’s predecessor, had no authority over Chicago’s gang wars. Its history page says “the gang warfare and depredations of the period were not within the Bureau’s investigative authority.” Its case against Capone began with a missed appointment. He had been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago on March 12, 1929. On March 11 his lawyers asked for a postponement, filing a physician’s affidavit dated March 5 which said he had been suffering from bronchial pneumonia in Miami and had been “confined to bed from January 13 to February 23.” The appearance was reset for March 20.
On March 21 the Director told Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt that he had ordered an inquiry into whether Capone and Dr. Kenneth Phillips could be held in contempt over the affidavit. Agents gathered statements in Florida that Capone had been seen at race tracks in the Miami area, including Hialeah, had made a plane trip to Bimini and a cruise to Nassau, and had seemed in good health each time. Capone testified before the grand jury from March 20 to March 27. The Milwaukee Leader reported that the hearings were held on the eighth floor of the federal building in Chicago, and that he was arrested on the contempt charge as he left the grand jury room. He gave a $5,000 bond.
The contempt case was tried before Judge James H. Wilkerson from February 25 to 27, 1931. According to the court reporter’s transcript of his finding, as summarized by mobfiles.org, the judge held false the statement that Capone had been out of bed only ten days, found him guilty of contempt, and committed him to the Cook County jail for six months. The FBI page dates the verdict February 28. Two days before the finding, city detectives had arrested Capone on a vagrancy charge. His appeal on the contempt charge was later dismissed.
It was a small case with a long afterlife. In 1947 Edward A. Tamm told Hoover he had given a columnist the Bureau’s write-up of it, “emphasizing the fact that the Bureau was the first agency to secure Capone’s conviction in the Federal Court.” By the time Wilkerson ruled, Capone had already served a sentence in Pennsylvania.
Philadelphia, May 1929
Capone’s first conviction anywhere came almost by accident. On May 17, 1929, the Evening Star reported from Philadelphia: “‘Scarface’ Al Capone and Frank Cline, Chicago gangsters, sentenced today to one year for carrying concealed deadly weapons, entered Moyamensing Prison at 12:50 p.m.” The inside page said that they had arrived from Atlantic City and that “Last night they were picked up leaving a motion picture house by two Philadelphia detectives.” It reported a side-bar conference with Judge John E. Walsh, said that one year “was the maximum prison term under the law,” and named the district attorney as John Monaghan. The FBI page says Capone and his bodyguard were arrested on May 17 and sentenced “Within 16 hours.” The arrest was the night before by the Evening Star’s account.
Both men pleaded guilty “when their trial was about to start,” and the sentence is the one conviction in this file that came from his own admission in open court. The fingerprint card in the Bureau’s files came from Eastern State Penitentiary on his commitment on August 8, 1929, according to mobfiles.org. The archive’s note on the National Archives arrest photograph says the date on the placard is unsettled. This file does not reproduce that photograph.
The day after the sentence, an Associated Press report said he would be moved from Moyamensing to Holmesburg. By August a short item in the Washington Times placed him in the Eastern Penitentiary, describing him as “Prisoner No. 5527.” The release came in March 1930. Governor John S. Fisher “signed official release papers” at 11:25 a.m. on March 17, and the Indianapolis Times reported a crowd waiting outside the Eastern Penitentiary. Capone was not there to meet it. The Washington Daily News reported the next day that he had been moved secretly to Graterford and slipped out before sundown; the Daily Alaska Empire said he left “the new prison at Gratersford” after ten months of the year’s sentence. The FBI page says he “was released in nine months for good behavior.”
Public enemy, and a ledger in a drawer
On April 24, 1930, a month after Capone left prison in Pennsylvania, the Evening Star and the Indianapolis Times reported that the Chicago Crime Commission, through its president Frank J. Loesch, had sent the police a list of twenty-eight men it called public enemies. Capone’s name was first. The list was the commission’s designation, not a court’s, but it fixed a phrase to him for the rest of his life.
The case that would hold up in court had been handed to Special Agent Frank J. Wilson of the Intelligence Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue on May 19, 1930. Wilson’s sixty-page summary report of December 21, 1933, addressed to the Chief of the Intelligence Unit, says the case concerned “the evasion of income taxes by Alphonse Capone” for the years 1924 to 1929. The chief was Elmer Irey. Helvering’s narrative for the unit says the men it pursued in Chicago kept little or no records, which is what made such cases so hard to prove.
The break, by Wilson’s account, was a book. On the night of April 26, 1926, an assistant state’s attorney for Cook County was murdered in Cicero. Wilson wrote that Capone was accused of the killing and that police raided his gambling house in Cicero that night. No charge from it appears in any record saved here. In the safe the police found a ledger of daily profits, which they handed to Special Agent P. F. Roche. With no tax case pending, it was filed away. Years later Wilson found it by accident in a lot of apparently unimportant papers Roche had left behind when he resigned from the government service.
Analysis showed it was the daily record of the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, a gambling establishment in Cicero that had opened on May 1, 1924, first in the Western Hotel on West 22nd Street. Handwriting comparisons, Wilson wrote, showed that most of the entries were by Leslie A. Shumway and a small part by Peter Penovich, Jr. and Ben Pope. Shumway had disappeared in April 1926. After a search of four months, Wilson found him at Miami on February 18, 1931, and took a sworn statement which Wilson called the first evidence directly establishing taxable income to Capone. Shumway appeared before the grand jury in Chicago on February 24. Wilson wrote that the government kept his role secret and that the defense did not learn he was a witness until he appeared in the courtroom at the trial.
Other evidence followed the money Capone spent rather than the money he took in: the Palm Island furniture and the checks drawn by others to pay for it. Wilson’s report also describes concurrent cases that ended in the conviction or guilty pleas of Jack Guzik, Sam Guzik, Frank Nitto, T. J. Druggan and Frank A. Lake. The FBI page says Ralph “Bottles” Capone was another subject of the tax drive.
Two indictments and a deal that fell apart
The first indictment, No. 22852, was returned on March 13, 1931. It had one count, for the year 1924, built on the Hawthorne Smoke Shop ledger and Shumway’s testimony. A second indictment, No. 23232, followed on June 5, 1931, with twenty-two counts charging attempted evasion of income tax for 1925 through 1929 and failure to file returns. In June a separate federal indictment charged Capone and about seventy co-defendants with Prohibition offenses; the National Archives holds that file as case 23256, and its outcome has not been read for this file.
On June 16, 1931, Capone pleaded guilty. The Attorney General’s letter of July 24, 1931, to United States Attorney George E. Q. Johnson approved a recommendation of two and one-half years on pleas of guilty, on condition that Capone waive his rights to challenge the sentence. The FBI page says Capone “boasted to the press that he had struck a deal for a two-and-a-half year sentence,” and that “the presiding judge informed him he, the judge, was not bound by any deal.” The Seventh Circuit records that on July 30 the court informed him “that he would be subjected to all proper questions,” whereupon he withdrew the plea. The two tax indictments were consolidated the same day, and on September 10 the trial was set for October 6. His demurrer to the second indictment was overruled on September 29.
Capone’s lawyers later argued that the felony counts were too vague to answer. The appeals court agreed that they were general. “The form used is indeed quite general,” it wrote, “and this fact would have abundantly justified appellant in asking the court to require the district attorney to furnish a bill of particulars.” But, it added, “appellant made no such request, and he now has no reason to complain.”
The trial, the jury and the verdict
The trial opened before Judge Wilkerson in Chicago in October 1931. Wilson’s report says that, by an underhand method and the payment of a large sum, Capone’s side obtained a copy of the list of prospective jurors and that it was turned over to Capone at his office in the Lexington Hotel, to be passed to people who would try to influence the men on it. The judge was told, according to the report, and on the first day of trial the entire panel of one hundred was withdrawn and a new one used. Wilson wrote that attempts were then made to reach jurors through their families, that the court ordered the jury locked up until the trial was over, and that the defense attorneys were not alleged to have taken part. He also wrote that the information came from a source so confidential that no prosecution was advisable.
The verdict came on October 17, 1931. Wilson’s report states it this way: “On October 17, 1931, the defendant was found guilty of evasion of income taxes for the years 1925, 1926 and 1927 and for failure to file income tax returns for the years 1928 and 1929.” The jury acquitted him on the 1924 indictment built on the Cicero ledger and on seventeen of the twenty-two counts of the second. The FBI page gives the conviction date as October 18.
The judgment came on October 24. It imposed five years and a $10,000 fine on each of the three felony counts, and one year in the county jail and a $10,000 fine on each of the two misdemeanor counts: eleven years and $50,000 in all, plus costs. The opinion of the district court at Atlanta in 1933 explains how the parts fit. The sentence on count 5 ran concurrently with count 1, and the sentence on count 9 was to begin when those ended. That makes ten years in a penitentiary and one year in jail, which is how Helvering’s narrative describes the sentence. The FBI page dates the sentencing November 24 and adds $7,692 in court costs and back taxes of $215,000 plus interest, and says the six-month contempt sentence was served concurrently.
Appeals, and the road to Atlanta
Capone’s lawyers, Michael J. Ahern and Albert Fink, appealed. The Seventh Circuit, with Judges Alschuler, Evans and Sparks sitting, affirmed on February 27, 1932: “We are convinced that the counts complained of are not defective as contended by appellant.” Rehearing was denied on March 23, 1932, and the mandate came down on May 3. The Alcatraz notebook page gives his sentence as beginning on May 4, 1932.
At Atlanta, register No. 40886, he tried habeas corpus. His petition argued that the tax charges had been brought too late. On January 25, 1933, District Judge Underwood dismissed it in Capone v. Aderhold, holding that the statute of limitations was a matter for trial and appeal. In 1937, from Alcatraz, he asked the court at Chicago to vacate the county-jail sentences on counts 13 and 18. The court refused on August 12, 1937, and on December 20 the Seventh Circuit dismissed his appeal. “Consistency in the verdict is not necessary,” it wrote. “Each count in an indictment is regarded as if it were a separate indictment.” That opinion describes the two misdemeanor counts as covering 1929 and 1930, not the 1928 and 1929 of the earlier opinion.
Alcatraz, No. 85
On August 21, 1934, Hoover recorded calls about press reports that Capone was not being sent to Alcatraz. He noted that he had explained Capone was among those due to arrive the next day. The warden’s notebook page records him as received on August 22, 1934, from Atlanta, register number 85. Its “Reason for Transfer” box reads in part: “He is a notorious criminal, being a gang leader and racketeer. He has been suspected of clandestine correspondence, while confined at USP Atlanta.” The page records parole denied on September 3, 1935.
On June 23, 1936, he was attacked. The FBI’s San Francisco report of July 1 says inmate James C. Lucas stabbed him in the back with a single blade of barber shears at about 9:45 a.m., that the wound was a superficial flesh wound, and that the United States Attorney declined to prosecute, treating it as a prison matter. The National Park Service places the attack in the shower room and describes “a minor chest wound and superficial cuts to his hands.” It quotes Lucas: “Well… he threatened to kill me.” Lucas lost 3,600 days of good time.
By the end of his time on the island, Capone was ill. The notebook page says he was transferred to Terminal Island on January 6, 1939; the catalog gives January 4. An FBI letter of January 17, 1939, called press stories of paralysis false. In October an agent who interviewed him at Terminal Island wrote that he kept losing the thread of the conversation.
Palm Island, 1939 to 1947
He was released on November 16, 1939. A note in the Director’s office records a United Press reporter’s word that the release had been announced that morning at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The FBI page says he “was released after having served seven years, six months and fifteen days, and having paid all fines and back taxes.” It says he was “Suffering from paresis derived from syphilis,” went first to a Baltimore hospital for brain treatment, and then to Palm Island.
The FBI page says he “never publicly returned to Chicago” and that in 1946 “his physician and a Baltimore psychiatrist, after examination, both concluded Capone then had the mentality of a 12-year-old child.” The Mob Museum puts that finding in 1939. He died on January 25, 1947. The FBI gives the cause as “a stroke and pneumonia.” The National Archives catalog gives the place as Miami Beach. The Mob Museum says he was 48. On January 27 the Evening Star ran an unsigned editorial headed “End of Capone.”
What the record leaves open
No court ever decided who killed the seven men in the North Clark Street garage. The inquest verdict, the police file and Goddard’s full findings were not found. The wire services did not even agree on whether his test bullets were “identical” or “very similar.”
The killings of Colosimo, Weiss, Yale and the Cook County prosecutor in 1926 rest on police allegation, newspaper attribution and later belief. None produced a charge against Capone in any record saved here.
The federal records disagree on dates: when Torrio was shot and Capone took over, whether the verdict came on October 17 or 18, whether he was sentenced on October 24 or November 24, which years the misdemeanor counts covered, when he left Alcatraz and when he was released. The Atlanta commitment date, his cell on Alcatraz and the outcome of the 1931 Prohibition indictment remain unread or unknown. His 2,688-page Alcatraz case file is not online.
What is not open is the conviction. It came from a ledger seized in a raid, a cashier found in Miami, and a jury that convicted on five counts of tax and returns.
Frequently asked questions
What was Al Capone convicted of?
Three convictions are on the record. In May 1929 he pleaded guilty in Philadelphia to carrying a concealed deadly weapon and was sentenced to one year. In February 1931 a federal judge in Chicago found him guilty of contempt of court and sentenced him to six months. In October 1931 a federal jury in Chicago found him guilty on three felony counts of attempting to evade income tax for 1925, 1926 and 1927 and on two misdemeanor counts of failing to file returns for 1928 and 1929.
Was Capone charged in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre?
No. He was never charged in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The FBI says the killing of seven men in a North Clark Street garage on February 14, 1929 was “generally ascribed to the Capone mob, although Al himself was in Florida.” The Mob Museum says he “is widely suspected of having ordered this massacre” and that “he was never charged with the crime.” No court ever decided who killed the seven men.
How did the government build the tax case?
By Special Agent Frank J. Wilson’s account, it rested on a ledger of daily profits that police found in a 1926 raid on a gambling house in Cicero. It was the daily record of the Hawthorne Smoke Shop. Wilson found Leslie A. Shumway, who wrote most of its entries, at Miami on February 18, 1931, and took a sworn statement he called the first evidence directly establishing taxable income to Capone. Purchases such as the Palm Island furniture became evidence of what he spent.
What sentence did he receive, and how did it end?
The judgment came on October 24, 1931; the FBI page dates the sentencing November 24. It imposed eleven years and $50,000 in fines in all, plus costs, which Helvering’s narrative describes as ten years in a penitentiary and one year in jail. He was held at Atlanta and then at Alcatraz, where he was received on August 22, 1934 as register number 85. He was released on November 16, 1939, and died on January 25, 1947.
Citations & Sources
Sources
- Capone v. United States, 56 F.2d 927 (7th Cir. 1932), via the Caselaw Access Project, Harvard Law School Library.
- Capone v. Aderhold, 2 F. Supp. 280 (N.D. Ga. 1933), via the Caselaw Access Project.
- United States v. Capone, 93 F.2d 840 (7th Cir. 1937), via the Caselaw Access Project.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Al Capone,” FBI history (famous cases).
- Internal Revenue Service, historical documents relating to Alphonse Capone: Special Agent Frank J. Wilson’s summary report of December 21, 1933, and the Intelligence Unit narrative by Guy T. Helvering.
- Mob Files (mobfiles.org), Alphonse Capone section and its spokes on the rise, Prohibition, the Saint Valentine’s Day killings, the tax trial, Atlanta and Alcatraz, and the death, with the National Archives, FBI Vault and Chronicling America records they describe.
- Newspapers of 1926 to 1947 via the Library of Congress, Chronicling America, as described on Mob Files: the Evening Star, the Sunday Star, the Washington Times, the Washington Daily News, the Indianapolis Times, the Milwaukee Leader, the Bismarck Tribune, the Brownsville Herald, the South Bend News-Times, the Seward Daily Gateway, the Daily Alaska Empire and the Nome Nugget.
- The Mob Museum, “Al Capone,” and its exhibit page on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
- National Park Service, Alcatraz Island, “The Man Who Tried to Kill Al Capone.”
- Images: Wikimedia Commons, credited in each caption.
Image credits
- Photo: Unknown author, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
- Photo: Unknown author, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
- Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
- Photo: Mike Graham from Portland, USA, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.
- Photo: George Grantham Bain Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
- Photo: Daniel Ramirez from Honolulu, USA, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.
- Photo: Marine 69-71, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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