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Al Capone always insisted he was an American, born and bred, and so he was, but his Italian heritage formed and informed every aspect of his life and career. He belonged both to the Old World—with its fatalism, corruption of flesh and spirit, and charm—and to the New—with its striving, materialism, and violence.
His mother, a seamstress named Teresina Raiola, and his father, a barber named Gabriele Capone, grew to maturity, married, and started their family in Naples. Italy’s third-largest city, located on the western coast approximately halfway between Rome and the boot’s toe, Naples sprawls down to the ocean like a brightly colored, tattered and soiled dishrag. Neapolitans are renowned for their ability to improvise and adapt; they have to, living in a city hemmed in by Mount Vesuvius on one side and the Tyrrhenian Sea on the other, a capital that had been changing hands for over two thousand years. At one time or another, Greeks, Romans, Austrians, Spaniards, and the French (in the person of Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother) ruled the city; for a time during the eighteenth century, it had served as the seat of an improvised nation, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. As a result of this ceaseless upheaval, the city had the air of an abandoned capital that had fallen into chaos; where kings once walked, herds of sheep later grazed. “There is nothing . . . quite like Naples in its sordid and yet tremendous vitality,” wrote Edward Hutton, an English visitor, of the city in 1915. The noise, dirt, and overcrowding appalled the fastidious Hutton; Naples seemed more “a pen of animals than a city of men, a place amazing if you will, but disgusting in its amazement, whose life is . . . without dignity, beauty or reticence.”
However, Neapolitans enjoyed a reputation for being singularly accepting and relaxed in the midst of the dirt and chaos of their city. They had seen too much of history’s folly to heed the Catholic Church; resentful of the North, or at least mindful of the North’s resentment of them, Neapolitans tended to be antipapist, antimonarchist, antiauthoritarian. The centuries of rulers coming and going, cynically exploiting the region and then carelessly abandoning it, had a profound effect on the Neapolitan and Southern Italian consciousness. Proverbs dear to the peasantry expressed rage at the scarcity of social justice and the abundance of hypocrisy: “The gallows is for the poor man, the law courts for the fool,” “He who steals from the king commits no crime,” and most tellingly, “The fat pig pays no taxes.”
In this richly cynical atmosphere, organized crime flourished openly. Criminal societies were a prominent feature of Neapolitan life and commerce—not in the form of the Mafia, a clannish, closed society with mystical overtones specific to Sicily—but rather the Camorra, a far more open assemblage of racketeers, extortionists, pimps, and gamblers. The Camorra was a secularized Mafia, all business and unencumbered by ritual, operating on the principle of exacting tribute from the populace. A 1912 inquiry into the workings of the Camorra discovered that it “levied blackmail upon all gambling enterprises, brothels, drivers of public vehicles, boatmen, beggars, prostitutes, thieves, waiters, porters, marketmen, fruitsellers, small tradesmen, lottery winners, pawnbrokers, controlled all the smuggling and coined bogus money.” The various forms of blackmail, some large, some trivial, were so widespread that Camorristi became synonymous with extortionists of any type. The Camorra played a larger role than mere extortion, however; the people got something in return for their money. In the absence of a respected government, it functioned as a subterranean political organization as well; Camorristi offered their services as political fixers, and they could work minor miracles in obtaining permits, eliminating unwanted competition, and bringing obstinate public officials to heel.
Attaining this powerful role was an extraordinary accomplishment for an organization that had begun life early in the nineteenth century in the jails of Naples, where it functioned as a force for order rather than a destructive conspiracy. The Camorra succeeded in levying tribute or taxes, depending on one’s point of view, on prisoners, for whom it obtained all manner of services and privileges in return. By 1830, the Camorra had moved beyond the prison walls to embrace the remnants of local government, and Camorristi were readily identified by their dashing “uniform,” which consisted of a red kerchief, sash, and rings adorning every finger. The Camorra assisted the police with keeping order in Naples because it addressed working-class unrest, sometimes blunting it by making vice easily available, and sometimes righting blatant wrongs and offering a rough justice that could not be found in the courts. Anyone who defied the Camorra wound up with a huge scar running along the neck from ear to ear. Naples was said to be filled with people disfigured for this reason, each of them a warning to others not to disobey the Camorrists. However, the real key to the Camorra’s effectiveness was its organization. Naples was divided into twelve sections, and the Camorra assigned a capo’ntrine, a sectional captain, to cover each one, and the sectional chiefs in turn reported to the capo in testa, the head captain. Within each of these sections, various local gangs, or paranze, held sway, their powers sharply circumscribed by the Camorrist hierarchy. By 1860, the Camorrist influence was so great that the political establishment entrusted the organization with the task of ensuring public safety.
Despite their quasi-legitimate status, Camorristi knew full well they had chosen a dangerous way of life, ruled by the shotgun and the whims of local bosses who jealously guarded their profitable, illicit fiefdoms. A Camorrist knowingly chose la mala vita, the evil life: the general term for a life of crime, the underworld. Camorristi added to the hazards they faced by their use of prostitutes. Many suffered from venereal disease, and many Neapolitans came to think of Camorrists as ravaged in mind and body by the malady. Though fraught with risks, la mala vita was also glamorous, and if a follower survived, he could be assured of becoming a fixture in the community, for the Camorra clung parasitically to the political establishment and offered a measure of social stability.
When Al Capone reached Chicago in 1921, he encountered a city that was in many ways an American version of Naples, for Chicago also had a large working-class population that supported semilegitimate criminal societies working hand in glove with a corrupt local government. Capone did not consciously model the organization he built in Chicago on the Camorra of Naples, and he certainly never called it by that name (or any other name, for that matter); nonetheless, the intricate, hierarchical, civic-minded Camorra served as his prototype.
A thousand years of history demonstrated the futility of life in Naples, but in America anything was possible. Yet before most would-be immigrants set foot on a boat bound for the New World they had already committed themselves to a form of indentured servitude known as the padrone system, an adaptation of the Camorrist way of doing business; even the means of reaching America became an extension of Neapolitan corruption. Under this system, Italian emigrants found themselves instantly reduced to the status of a commodity, and that commodity was labor, sciabola—work done with the shovel. The boss or the extortionist who organized the laborers and exploited them was known as the padrone, and life for the Italian immigrant under his regime was extremely harsh. Adult men earned an average of only $40 a year, and children worked as well, hawking newspapers, shining shoes, begging, and then giving the pennies they earned to their padrone. Women often became prostitutes. Writing in the Bulletin of the Department of Labor in 1897, three years after the Capones’ arrival in New York, John Koren labeled the padrone system a “species of semislavery” exploiting at least two-thirds of all Italians in America.
Italians endured the cruel system because their sojourns in the United States were generally brief. During the mid-1890s, far more Italians returned to their native land from the United States than immigrated; the returnees consisted largely of laborers who had worked in America for slave wages under the padrone system and then limped home, exhausted and disillusioned, to the hamlets from which they had come. But that situation was slowly changing. Through exposés such as Koren’s, the American public perceived the padrone sys
tem as an evil to be wiped out. Under pressure of government scrutiny, the monopoly abated. Now entire families came from Italy, not just individual males to earn illusory “princely wages” and flee home. These families came to seek a new way of life, to settle permanently, to become Americans.
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Among the 42,977 Italians who arrived in the United States during 1894 was an unremarkable young family from Naples. Their name, as they themselves wrote it on their immigration and naturalization papers, was a fairly common one in their region: Capone (not Caponi, as many published accounts later claimed). The Capones would soon expand into a large, closely knit family, but at the time they arrived in New York, they consisted of only four members: the head of family, Gabriele Capone, then thirty years old; his wife, Teresina (or Teresa, as she was often called), who was three years his junior; and their two small children: Vincenzo, who was born two years earlier, in 1892; and his infant brother, Raffaele, who, having been born on January 12, 1894, came ashore in his mother’s arms. They came to stay, not to return to Italy in a year or two, as so many other immigrants had. The timing of their arrival in America meant that they missed the peak of the padrone system; Gabriele arrived on his own recognizance. He was a barber, a humble occupation to be sure, but a trade nonetheless. He was beholden to no boss, and he was still young enough to make a fresh start.
Gabriele had married Teresina Raiola just three years earlier in Naples, and their first priority was starting a family; at the time of their transatlantic crossing, she was pregnant with their third child, Salvatore, who was born in January 1895, a year after Raffaele. Within the family, all the children would always be called by their Italian names, but they acquired and were known to the world by the American names they adopted. Vincenzo became James, Raffaele became Ralph, and Salvatore became Frank. As for their parents, neither of them altered their names to suit American custom. In time, Gabriele learned to read, write, and speak English, while Teresa, who lived a more circumscribed life in the home, never troubled to memorize more than a few simple English phrases.
Once they had passed through Ellis Island and arrived in New York, the Capone family, like other Italian immigrants, gravitated toward neighborhoods sheltering people who had fled the same region, if not the same town. This powerful sense of place was known as campanilismo. The word derived from campanile, a church bell tower, and it signified the region within the sound of the tolling of the village bell. The pull of campanilismo caused Southern Italians to pass their daily lives within their village: to work, marry, live, and die within tightly circumscribed borders. In America, by extension, campanilismo came to mean the immediate neighborhood. More than religion, perhaps even more than language, campanilismo reinforced the Italian immigrant’s alienation from American life, for every neighbor, coworker, or merchant with whom an Italian immigrant dealt came from the same region of Italy. The sameness buttressed the immigrants’ identity, but at the same time it cut off the immigrants from a world of American possibilities.
Most Americans were oblivious to the nuances of settlement patterns of Italian immigrants; the mere mention of that ill-favored class conjured one neighborhood in particular: the Mulberry Street Bend, near the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an area notorious as a breeding ground of human degradation in all its gaudy variety. Although it was widely assumed in the press that Al Capone grew up in Mulberry Bend and first learned the rudiments of his trade there as a street urchin (he must have, master criminal that he was), neither he nor his family lived there.
The more prosaic truth is that the Capone family followed the path of least resistance, settling in Brooklyn, a borough that had rapidly become home to tens of thousands of Italian immigrants. No mere appendage to New York City, Brooklyn was a world unto itself. In fact, Brooklyn was a separate city until as late as 1898 (four years after the Capone family first moved there), when it finally joined New York City in law if not in spirit. Although it was connected to Manhattan by two immense bridges, the Brooklyn Bridge and the newer Williamsburg Bridge, it was a million miles away. None of the Capones would ever have much to do with Manhattan; nor would Manhattan and its racketeers have much to do with them, except to condescend to them. Manhattan was a noisy, compact environment, frantic, abrasive, and vertical. Brooklyn remained a succession of congenial, low-profile neighborhoods, provincial and insular, as much a state of mind as a borough of New York City.
In Al Capone’s Brooklyn, the presence of the Atlantic Ocean was felt everywhere. Sea gulls wheeled, screeching, above empty, sun-splashed streets lined with row houses and gaunt trees. The tang of brackish seawater permeated the air, mingling with the acrid odors of oil, exhaust, and rotting vegetation. The docks—a source of employment for thousands of local inhabitants—were located but a few minutes’ walk from the streets of his youth. The presence of shipping and shipbuilding introduced a large transient population of sailors, who in turn attracted gambling houses, bars, and brothels catering to them. Prostitutes were common in the area, especially on Sands Street, which featured the full array of honky-tonk attractions designed to separate sailors from their hard-won pay: tattoo parlors, saloons serving cheap whiskey and the occasional Mickey Finn, dance halls, gambling joints, and whorehouses to suit every taste.
On a hot day in Brooklyn, the stink off the Gowanus Canal—the local River Lethe, a man-made waterway for barges—brought tears to the eyes. Though it was the only unusual topographical feature of the neighborhood, it wasn’t much of a canal, just a jagged slash zig-zagging through the marshy Brooklyn terrain, its water now brownish, now unnaturally green, opaque, gnawing at the hulls of rusty barges, its banks overhung with dense, tangled weeds from which protruded discarded machinery. A short walk from the street where Capone grew up, the Gowanus Canal had long been a magnet for criminal activities of all types. It was not unusual for corpses to turn up in the canal, often mangled, with signs of having been dead for several days before they had been dumped.
The Capones’ first apartment was located at 95 Navy Street, in the Red Hook section, “a slum that faces the bay/ Seaward from Brooklyn Bridge,” wrote Arthur Miller, another product of Brooklyn, in his drama A View from the Bridge. Their housing was primitive, an unfurnished flat in a block of four-story tenements next to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and its cacophony. The Capone family was poor and had no furniture or decorations to soften and domesticate the surroundings. Heat was provided by a potbellied stove in the parlor and an oven in the kitchen. Cold water was available from a sink in the hallway. Indoor plumbing was unknown. To reach the bathroom, they went down the steps to the yard, where a small shack offered scant privacy. Rents in the district, which was heavily Italian, fluctuated between $3 and $4 a month; even though the figure was low, the prices of food and other necessities such as coal for heating were relatively high and placed a huge financial burden on immigrants like Gabriele Capone. At the time, men in his position were lucky to make ten dollars a week—considerably less, incidentally, than their counterparts were earning back in Italy. From the front of his tenement, Gabriele could see the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s black-and-white sign arching over the entrance, but if he thought he might find work within, he was soon disappointed, for at the time Italian immigrants had no foothold there; the Irish, Germans, and other, better-established ethnic groups had made it their preserve. Gabriele had no alternative but to resume his trade of barbering, while Teresina took care of the children and, when she had time, took in piecework to supplement their meager income.
Their new neighbors, virtually all of whom were recent Italian immigrants, recalled the Capones as a quiet, conventional family. The mother, Donna Teresina as she was known, kept to herself. Her husband, Don Gabriele, made more of an impression, since he was, in the words of one family friend, “tall and handsome—very good-looking.” Like his wife, he was subdued, even when it came to discipline. “He never hit the kids. He used to talk to them. He used to preach to them, and they listened to their father.” Since n
o photograph of Gabriele survives, the most complete portrait of this man comes from his second son, Raffaele, who more than thirty years later found himself serving a sentence at the U.S. penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington, for federal income tax evasion. There he talked about his father—and what it was like growing up in the newly transplanted Capone household—with a pride and affection that survives even the routine notes from the interview.
The subject states that his father received a very good education in Italy. Thinks it must have been at least equal to a high school education. States that his father belonged to several Italian Societies of various kinds and spent considerable of his working time in them. Also gave considerable to duties in the Catholic church. States that his father worked as a barber throughout his entire life, having learned the trade at an early age. The subject thinks his home was equal to if not better than the average American home. States that his parents took great interest in their children and that they always had plenty to eat, good clothes to wear, and a good house to live in.
When it came to Teresa, her second son noted for the record that she “was very devoted to her children and did all for them that any mother could do.”
As Ralph’s reminiscences of his parents suggest, nothing about the Capone family was inherently disturbed, violent, or dishonest. The children and the parents were close; there was no apparent mental disability, no traumatic event that sent the boys hurtling into a life of crime. They did not display sociopathic or psychotic personalities; they were not crazy. Nor did they inherit a predilection for a criminal career or belong to a criminal society. Criminal dynasties did exist among some Italian immigrants, especially in New York, but the Capones were too modest, too unsuccessful, to belong to that particular elite. They were a law-abiding, unremarkable Italian-American family with conventional patterns of behavior and frustrations; they displayed no special genius for crime, or anything else, for that matter.
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