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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 17, 1931
Chicago, Illinois, USA
95 years ago
Al Capone, the Chicago crime boss of the Prohibition era, found guilty of income tax evasion by a federal jury on October 17, 1931, and later sentenced to eleven years in prison.
On the evening of October 17, 1931, after about eight hours of deliberation, a federal jury in Chicago found Alphonse Capone guilty on five counts: three felony charges of evading income tax for the years 1925 to 1927 and two misdemeanor charges of failing to file returns. A week later Judge James Wilkerson sentenced him to eleven years in federal prison, fined him fifty thousand dollars, and ordered him to pay court costs and back taxes. It was the harshest sentence ever handed down for tax evasion up to that time.
Capone was thirty-two and had been the most powerful criminal in the United States for six years. His organization controlled bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution across Chicago and its suburbs, with an income sometimes estimated at around one hundred million dollars a year. He had bought policemen, judges, and aldermen wholesale. He was widely believed to have ordered dozens of killings, including the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, in which seven men were lined up against a garage wall and machine-gunned. He had never been convicted of any of it.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Prohibition in the United States, the nationwide ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol from 1920 to 1933, which created the vast illegal market that made Capone rich.
Capone was born in Brooklyn in 1899 to immigrants from the Naples area, left school at fourteen, and acquired the scars that gave him his hated nickname in a bar fight. He moved to Chicago around 1920 to work for the gang leader Johnny Torrio, just as Prohibition turned beer and whiskey into contraband. When Torrio retired in 1925 after barely surviving an ambush, Capone inherited the business at twenty-six. He cultivated a public image as a generous businessman supplying a popular demand, and opened a soup kitchen during the Depression. 'I am just a businessman,' he liked to tell reporters.
After the St. Valentine's Day killings, the federal government came under pressure to act. Two separate efforts began. A young Prohibition agent named Eliot Ness led a small squad that raided Capone's breweries and became famous as the Untouchables. The case that actually convicted him was built more quietly by the Treasury Department's Intelligence Unit under agent Frank Wilson. The Supreme Court had ruled in 1927 that income from illegal activity was taxable. Capone owned nothing in his own name and had never filed a return. Wilson's men spent years combing through seized ledgers and tracking down frightened bookkeepers until they could prove he had received income.
On the first day of the trial, Judge Wilkerson, tipped off that Capone's men had bribed the jury pool, calmly swapped his panel with that of another courtroom. Capone served his time first in Atlanta and then, from 1934, in the new island prison of Alcatraz. By then his mind was deteriorating from syphilis contracted in his youth. He was released in 1939, and spent his last years in seclusion at his Florida estate. He died there in January 1947, at forty-eight. Prohibition had been repealed in 1933. The idea that organized criminals could be reached through their finances became a permanent tool of American law enforcement.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The conviction established a lasting method for fighting organized crime. Following the money, and prosecuting financial offenses when violent ones cannot be proved, has been a standard strategy against mobsters, drug traffickers, and corrupt officials ever since.
Capone's career exposed the unintended consequences of Prohibition. Banning alcohol did not end drinking. It handed a huge industry to criminals, financed the corruption of city governments, and helped build crime syndicates that outlasted repeal by decades.
He became the template for the American gangster in popular culture. From Scarface in 1932 to The Untouchables and beyond, the image of the flashy, ruthless mob boss owes more to Capone than to any other individual.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 17, 1931, a Chicago jury convicted the most feared gangster in America of failing to pay his income tax. The government could not prove the murders, so it proved the money. Capone went to Alcatraz, lost his health and his empire, and gave prosecutors a lesson they have never forgotten.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“They can't collect legal taxes from illegal money.”
— Attributed to Al Capone
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Al Capone, his Prohibition-era empire in Chicago, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and the tax investigation that finally sent him to prison?
