Made
In America
Quite a lot has been written and said about Al Capone
in newspaper and magazine articles, books, and movies that is
completely false. One of the most common fictions is that like many
gangsters of that era, he was born in Italy. Absolutely not true.
This amazing crime czar was strictly domestic -- taking the feudal
Italian criminal society and fashioning it into a modern American
criminal enterprise.
Certainly many Italian immigrants, like immigrants of all
nationalities, frequently came to the New World with very few
assets. Many of them were peasants escaping the lack of opportunity
in rural Italy. When they came to the large American port cities
they often ended up as laborers because of the inability to speak
and write English and lack of professional skills. This was not
the case with Al Capone's family.
Gabriele Capone (not Caponi as often claimed) was one of 43,000
Italians who arrived in the U.S. in 1894. He was a barber by trade
and could read and write his native language. He was from the
village of Castellmarre di Stabia, sixteen miles south of Naples.
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Teresina Capone |
Gabriele, who was thirty years old, brought with him his pregnant
twenty-seven-year-old wife Teresina (called Teresa), his
two-year-old son Vincenzo and his infant son Raffaele. Unlike many
Italian immigrants he did not owe anyone for his passage over. His
plan was to do whatever work was necessary until he could open his
own barber shop.
Along with thousands of other Italians, the Capone family moved
to Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was a stark beginning in
the New World. 95 Navy Street was a cold-water tenement flat that
had no indoor toilet or furnishings. The neighborhood was virtually
a slum, given its proximity to the noisy Navy Yard, its many sailors
and the vices that sailors seek when they're off duty.
Gabriele's ability to read and write allowed him to get a job in
a grocery store until he was able to open his barber shop. Teresina,
in spite of her duties as a mother of a growing brood of boys, took
in sewing piecework to add to the family coffers. Her third child,
Salvatore was born in 1895. Her fourth son and the first to be born
and conceived in the New World was born January 17, 1899. His name
was Alphonse.
What kind of people were these two, giving birth to one of the
world's most notorious criminals? Did they pass on to him some
virulent genetic strain of violence? Some subtly mutated
chromosomes? Was Alphonse abused as a child? Did he spend his tender
years in the company of murderers and thieves?
Definitely not. The Capones were a quiet, conventional family.
Laurence Bergreen in his excellent biography Capone: The Man and
the Era says "The mother...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.
"...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... 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."
In May of 1906, Gabriele became an American citizen. Within the
family, his children would be always known by their Italian names,
but in the outside world, the boys would be known by the American
names they adopted. Vincenzo became James; Raffaele became Ralph;
Salvatore became Frank; Alphonse became Al. Later children were
Amadeo Ermino (later John and nicknamed Mimi), Umberto (later Albert
John), Matthew Nicholas, Rose and Malfalda.
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Al Capone: Mugshot of Public Enemy
Number 1 |
