by Deirdre Bair
Others have a more dynamic interest in attaching themselves to the name of Al Capone, like the current generation of the Rockford descendants of Raphael and Clotilde Capone, who just wanted to know whether, as family legend had it, one of their fathers was Al Capone’s illegitimate son. Through the research for this book, they were introduced to members of two branches of Al’s family: the grandsons of Sherman Hart in Wisconsin, and Dennis Gabriel’s family in Chicago. Both agreed to have DNA testing with the Rockford Capones, and it proved that they were not Al’s progeny. At best, they may be distant cousins.
When the Rockford family discusses “the Oath” they swore so solemnly after the death of their patriarch, their positions diverge. Many still insist that despite the DNA evidence what their elders told them about their heritage is still valid: “They told us, ‘You don’t know how close you are’ [to Al], and then they said for our own protection they couldn’t tell us which one was his son. I just have to believe they didn’t lie to us.” An equally large number thinks otherwise: when one who speaks for this faction refers to his grandfather, he says, “If we ever asked about Al, he would get so mad, he would tell us, ‘You don’t fuck around with those people.’ He would scare the shit out of us if we made him mad. And when he got mad, you steered clear of him.” To this young man, his task is to convince his family to accept that “the Oath” is nothing more than its principal myth. With the DNA test results for both the maternal and the paternal lines, it now seems certain that whatever the reason for the deep bond forged between Al and Raphael Capone, it was not one of paternity.
Another major reason why people connect themselves to Al Capone involves a knotty question: Where does wanting reflected glory end, and where does wanting to cash in begin? In 2009, a thirty-seven-year-old man named Christopher Knight declared that he was the legitimate grandson of Al Capone and that his deceased father, William Knight, was Al’s legitimate second son. He says his father’s parentage is a “touchy subject,” and he bases his contention on two points: his father’s say-so and a 1927 newspaper article that said after Al had been summarily kicked out of Los Angeles, he returned home to his “two” children. Calling Mae by her birth name, Knight claimed that “Mary and Al” were his father’s parents. When asked why they would have put him out for adoption, to be raised on a farm “outside Chicago,” he said it was “because Sonny was so much older and already known. By the time my dad was born, Al was on his way to prison and they had to hide him.” Knight received extensive publicity after he made his claim. Newspapers took him seriously and did haphazard investigations. Even so, there were so many inconsistencies in the stories he told about his parentage that he hired a genealogist to sort them out. Her conclusions were as vague as those he gave in the book he self-published in 2008, Son of Scarface: A Memoir by the Grandson of Al Capone.
That book appeared shortly after he went to court to have his name legally changed to Chris Knight Capone. With all the publicity generated by both his memoir and his name change, he contacted several of Sonny’s descendants plus those of Al’s siblings to ask them to submit to DNA testing. In one of the versions he offered about their responses, Knight said they refused: “I always wanted paper proof but they wouldn’t give me any.” In another version, he claimed, “I did test with some Capones who are not Italian, but I am.” And in yet another version, he claimed that although he has the legal right to call himself Knight Capone, he no longer does because one member of the family told him, “If the mob and Al were still in business, you would be at the bottom of the river. You deserve what you’re gonna get.” He claims this last encounter happened just after he had a lawyer file a legal motion in 2009 asking the Archdiocese of Chicago to agree to exhume Al’s body so that DNA samples might be obtained. His lawyer said Knight wanted “to proceed through less invasive means but wants to keep disinterment as a possible option should those fail.” The archdiocese denied his request, and Knight said he decided to end the matter there. In actuality, his quest for proof of his identity ended far less dramatically: when two children of Al’s brothers offered to take a DNA test with him, “he just disappeared into the woodwork.”
Not surprisingly, Chris Knight ran afoul of Deirdre Marie Gabriel O’Donnell Griswold, who has called herself Capone since the 2010 publication of her book, Uncle Al Capone. “He has absolutely no proof of anything he says,” said Griswold. “My proof is my blood,” Knight retorted. David Kesmodel, who wrote about the sudden emergence of people who claim relationships to Al for the Wall Street Journal in 2010, described the Capone family as long having desired to “keep a low profile, forgoing the opportunity to cash in on their infamous relative’s name. Most live modest, middle-class lives. No living relative has been linked to organized crime.” This was the situation, he continued, until “some Capones—authentic or not, [began] bickering. And money may be at stake.” Kesmodel reported on Griswold’s efforts to set up a company to license rights to Al Capone’s name and his likeness in California, where state laws are favorable toward “asserting publicity rights for dead celebrities.” He quotes Knight as saying he wants them, too: “I want to get what my family deserves.”
After that fiasco, when Knight stopped using the Capone name and retired from the scene, and with Griswold continuing her campaign of self-promotion, there was a flash of publicity announcing a reality television series on the ReelzChannel called The Capones. The premise of the show was to follow a family named Capone who own a pizza parlor in Lombard, Illinois, and who made the claim that they were related to Al through a “great-great-grandfather who was Al’s uncle” (via several unspecified “greats” on his family tree). Supposedly, one of the Lombard Capones had an aunt (a non-Capone) several generations earlier who married into this branch, but neither the family nor the sponsors of the series offered any proof of relationship to Al Capone on either side.
Knight jumped into the fray, asserting that the program should “sleep with the fishes,” and demanded that its creators hire a genealogist to prove the relationship. Griswold threatened vague legal action, claiming that she controlled the rights to the use of Al’s name and that she had hired lawyers to enforce “Illinois’s ‘deceptive practices’ law.” When asked to explain this, she declined to answer. Both were ignored by the sponsors, and the program went on, a mess of vulgarity and stupidity. When it was canceled for low ratings and lack of viewers, the rented mega-mansion in which it was filmed was returned to its owners, and Dominic Capone, the “star,” went back to his real job as a parking enforcement officer in Cicero.
Meanwhile, throughout all these shenanigans, claims, and counterclaims, the descendants of Al and Mae stay silent, content to get on with their satisfying private lives. Nevertheless, things happen almost daily to keep their famous ancestor omnipresent. Vince Gilligan, who created the television series Breaking Bad and who gives credit to Al Capone for inspiring much of it, made the comment in a television documentary that “kids who can’t name the last three presidents can tell you who Al Capone was.” One of Al’s granddaughters can offer proof of this. One of her friends, a docent at a Bay Area museum, was taking a group of fourth graders on a tour and was astonished when one of them asked, “Don’t you have some more exciting stuff than this, like—about Al Capone?” The child’s request supports the biographer Schoenberg’s contention that “given today’s educational trends and the debate over what should be included in the canon, the day may come when there is only one name that writers and speakers dare allude to with perfect confidence that their entire audience will get the point. Al Capone may become America’s last allusion.”
The question remains: When did he graduate from person to myth, and from myth to legend? The legends may not be true, but they are definitely real to the world at large. His granddaughters agree that he is a riddle to be solved but wonder whether it is possible. Gilligan wonders how Al Capone could have become the major cultural figure that he is today. He suggests the phenomenon is something akin to the 1962
film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “where the legend outran the man.” Perhaps a line from the film itself describes the phenomenon best: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Chapter 26
THE LEGEND
Al Capone’s brief life was florid and dramatic, but his afterlife is even more colorful and outsized. His reign as the king of crime lasted for six short years, and even after he was stripped of power, the public still could not get enough of him. In the almost seven decades since he died, the frenzy of publicity he inspired during his lifetime has increased exponentially and shows no sign of slowing down. He died in 1947, and in 2016 the daily Google alert still records at least half a dozen new hits per day.
New books and films appear almost every year, including novels, biopics, documentaries, and even mockumentaries, such as the recent one about an annual festival dedicated to his memory in Árborg, Iceland. There are memoirs purporting to tell the “real truth,” along with biographies for specific audiences that include young adults and very young children, so even eight-year-olds can tell you how “he killed bad guys and that was okay because it let him feed poor people.” The television series Boardwalk Empire has made him, surprisingly, not an antihero but a genuine hero to avid younger viewers.
His name appears on all sorts of lists, including one from the Smithsonian magazine that in 2014 named him one of the hundred most influential Americans in the entire history of the country. Websites are devoted to him, and the Mob Museum in Las Vegas gets its best crowds when exhibits feature him. The Madame Tussauds wax museum in San Francisco has captured him after his disease took over, in a life-sized statue that sits in his Alcatraz cell playing the mandolin. “Gangsterologists,” as those who are fascinated by criminals have been dubbed, and professors who proclaim themselves “Capone scholars” debate every aspect of his life and (if it can be called so) his work. Law schools study his court case, bar associations reenact it, and academic institutions from the most august to the most local offer courses: the Harvard Business School examines the Chicago Outfit as a case study, and the Lifelong Learning Institute at Kankakee Community College in Illinois holds a course titled simply “Al Capone.” When first given, it was so popular that it was oversubscribed and two more sessions had to be scheduled to accommodate the demand.
Restaurants claim he ate there, cocktails and sandwiches are named for him, hotels claim that he slept there, and there is even the laughable contention that he often sneaked off anonymously to play golf on Scottish courses. One reporter said it best: “If Capone frequented even a tenth of the places that he’s said to have, the notorious mobster hardly would have had time to build his Chicago crime empire, let alone run the thing.”
From musical groups to young adult novels, just his name in the title can command far more interest than most of them merit. Cats and dogs on Internet postings, especially the countless pit bulls who bear his name, are sure to be quickly adopted. His name alone can secure a good table, as a young woman in San Francisco who bears the same surname finds every time she tries to reserve one in a posh restaurant. His face is on postage stamps in Tajikistan (where they even made one of Mae, hiding her face behind a fur coat) and Kyrgyzstan (where his image is centrally placed among other notorious gangsters’ mug shots). In Romania, websites and meet-up groups proliferate, while writers and journalists seek contact with Americans who write about Capone’s life in crime. In Bulgaria, gangs claim they study the Outfit to learn how to conduct their business. In England in the 1960s, the Kray brothers, notorious for murder and extortion, modeled themselves after that “upper class criminal, Al Capone.” In Iceland, the entire town of Árborg is allegedly obsessed with its weeklong Al Capone Festival, where all the residents are devoted to “the scourge of Chicago.” When the Mexican drug lord El Chapo escaped from prison, the comparison to Al Capone was immediate, and El Chapo was quickly dubbed “the new Public Enemy No. 1.”
Reporters don’t stretch their intellects when writing stories about tax-dodging hedge fund managers: they just make the immediate comparison to Capone, and the public gets the message. “Amazing,” mused a criminal defense lawyer in Chicago, “how often his name is used to spice up a story.” Without any reference to who he is, was, or might have been, Al Capone’s name is the one to grasp when making comparisons with everything from the 2016 presidential election, to the finale of the immensely popular television series Downton Abbey. A reader wrote a letter to the Midland, Michigan, Daily News comparing Donald J. Trump to Al Capone, who also “understood the ‘average’ person and used them to his advantage.” In an overwrought contribution to the Jewish Journal, a writer who denounces Trump supports his argument with Freud, continues with a reference to Erik Erikson, and touches on Hitler and Himmler before attesting that Al Capone “was America’s contemporaneous lawless contribution to this tradition.” On the other side, bloggers wonder whether “Hillary’s emails [are] the same deal as Al Capone’s tax records.” And the New York Times, summing up the six seasons of the PBS serial, wrote that the hapless servant couple, Bates and Anna, who were each charged with separate murders, “have spent more combined time in jail than Al Capone.”
People from Chicago who travel abroad usually have a tale or two to tell of the response they get when asked where they come from: the questioner’s recognition comes with the shout “Al Capone!” followed by pretending to fire a tommy gun and mimicking the sound it makes. Most Chicagoans just sigh and say they have gotten used to it, but the topic led to an extensive conversation in 2015 on the Internet site Reddit. “I get sick and tired of tourists wearing Al Capone t-shirts,” said the originator of the exchange. One of the more thoughtful replies said the fascination continues because “idolizing Capone just gets easier as time goes on and we get more and more disconnected from what he actually did.”
It is precisely this disconnect that has contributed to the unending questions of what there was about this man to turn him into an international cultural icon and why the mere mention of his name sets up a chain of immediate associations. Writers have long pondered the questions of why this particular man became the über-celebrity among so many other colorful gangsters and mobsters and why the legends that grew up around both halves of his life—the violent and the benevolent—became so shrouded in myth. How did he, of all the other outsized criminal characters of his era, become an internationally recognized cultural reference, while their names often go unrecognized today?
When he was at the height of his criminal career in 1931, Katharine Fullerton Gerould wrote a profile in which she concluded that “it is not because Capone is different that he takes the imagination; it is because he is so gorgeously and typically American.” Speaking in a 2014 television documentary, Vince Gilligan carried the analogy much further, saying he is not only a “major cultural figure” but a “truly Shakespearean” one. One of Capone’s numerous biographers, Robert Schoenberg, took another tack in a 2015 post on his website, when he used Capone to make the distinction between a “celebrity” and an “allusion.” He describes celebrities as those whose names appear in headlines or commentaries only when the story is directly about them, whereas a person becomes an allusion when his name is so instantly recognizable that the use of it conveys meaning without any need for further explanation.
His family seeks answers, too, beginning with a vested interest in stripping away the myths that cling in order to find the actual person whose life has so dominated theirs. After trying to ignore or evade their famous ancestor and fade into obscurity, going their separate ways for so many decades, they have been led by the public’s unending fascination to make their first hesitant steps toward examining their heritage and trying to connect with one another. As the older ones share their memories and impressions of their grandfathers and uncles, sorting through the family stories that have been handed down, the younger ones who did not know Al Capone find themselves sorting through the reminiscences of others in search of their own reality.
During the many years they tried to hide their connections to Al Capone and to each other, a curious thing happened: they were so determined to stay hidden that many did not know some of the others existed. Their search for truth has resulted in meeting relatives they did not know they had and forming solid friendships among themselves. However, instead of these meetings letting them refine or refute the many myths about Al Capone, when they put all their conversations together and try to create a whole person, they find themselves shaking their heads in amazement at the many new parts of the puzzle that just won’t fit.
One of their first questions to each other was where, from the public image to their personal memories to the stories that were handed down, is the man they knew: the one who loved his wife and son; phoned his mother every day; loved to sing, play, and write music; was happiest when fishing, enjoyed swimming and golf, and took pride in being able to support financially too many people for an accurate account to be made? They are proud of the good things they know about his public life, about how he fed the hungry, gave lavish amounts to charity, was alleged to be responsible for expiration dates on milk bottles, and always made sure to provide for the widows and orphans of his men. When describing him, one member of the extended family repeatedly intones several sentences intended to be both a solemn pronouncement and a vindication: “Was he a mobster? Yes. Was he a monster? No.” Actually, he was both, and most of the Capone family admits what he did and accepts that he was. Al Capone was a gangster and racketeer whose illegal and immoral activities ran from selling booze to running gambling places, selling women’s bodies, and selling drugs. Like the rest of his cohorts, he had no reservations about doing all these things if he thought they would make money.