Torrio quickly used his city government connections to get him off.Ĭapone cleaned up his act when his family arrived from Brooklyn. After hitting a parked taxicab while driving drunk, he was arrested for the first time. But unlike the low-profile Torrio, Capone began to develop a reputation as a drinker and rabble-rouser. Torrio recognized Capone’s skills and quickly promoted him to partner. As a former petty thug and bookkeeper, Capone brought both his street smarts and his expertise with numbers to Torrio’s Chicago operations. In Chicago, Torrio was presiding over a booming business in gambling and prostitution, but with the enactment in 1920 of the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcohol, Torrio focused on a new, more lucrative field: bootlegging. But when Capone’s father died of a heart attack in 1920, Torrio invited him to come to Chicago. Now a husband and a father, Capone wanted to do right by his family, so he moved to Baltimore where he took an honest job as a bookkeeper for a construction company. His former boss and friend Johnny Torrio was the boy’s godfather. When Capone was 19, he married Mae Coughlin just weeks after the birth of their child, Albert Francis. Her brother punched Capone, then slashed him across the face, leaving three indelible scars that inspired his enduring nickname. It was there that Capone earned his nickname “Scarface.” One night, he made an indecent remark to a woman at the bar. ![]() In 1917, Torrio introduced Capone to the gangster Frankie Yale, who employed Capone as bartender and bouncer at the Harvard Inn in Coney Island. He did spend some time among the street gangs in Brooklyn, but aside from occasional scrapes, his gang activities were mostly uneventful. Early on, Capone stuck to legitimate employment, working in a munitions factory and as a paper cutter. ![]() Although Torrio left Brooklyn for Chicago in 1909, the two remained close. Torrio was running a numbers and gambling operation near Capone’s home when Capone began running small errands for him. It was here that Capone would meet both his future wife, Mary (Mae) Coughlin, and his mob mentor, numbers racketeer Johnny Torrio. By this time, the Capones had moved out of the tenement to a better home in the outskirts of the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. The principal gave him a beating, and Capone never again returned to school. ![]() One day, Capone’s teacher hit him for insolence and he struck back. It was around that time that he started playing hooky and hanging out at the Brooklyn docks. There was nothing in Capone’s childhood or family life that could have predicted his rise to infamy as America’s most notorious gangster.ĭid you know? Capone earned $60 million annually selling illegal liquor.Ĭapone was a good student in his Brooklyn elementary school, but began falling behind and had to repeat the sixth grade. Capone’s father was a barber, and his mother was a seamstress. A poor family that came to America seeking a better life, the Capones and their eight children lived a typical immigrant lifestyle in a New York tenement. ![]() Alphonse Capone (1899–1947) was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of recent Italian immigrants Gabriele and Teresina Capone.
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