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He reached his hand into St. Louis, Newark, Atlantic City. He spread his power over the newborn labor rackets. He built a $65,000 walled fortress in Florida on Palm Island, near Miami. He turned up at theatres, thick lips puckered, flanked by watchful bodyguards. Honest men patted him gingerly on the back, said of him, "Great fellow, Al." He sat with society in Miami, he had a ringside seat at the big fights. His levy fell on millions—every man paid through his liquor, entertainment, food, clothing. The take of his racket organization was estimated at $30,000,000 a year. He was a national sensation; he gave the public shivers of delight.
He was "Public Enemy No. 1."
Hollywood glorified the era with miles of film, broadcast the U. S. gangster to the world: Scarface, Manhattan Melodrama, On Wings of Song. Pulp magazines dedicated to crime inundated the newsstands. "Stick 'em up," little boys screamed at one another, "or I'll blow your guts out."
Al Capone was arrested in 1929 in Philadelphia and went to prison for a year on a charge of carrying concealed weapons. After his release a Chicago newspaper man, Jake Lingle, was shot. He was suspected of being "in the racket," said to have been Capone's friend. Whatever he was, his murder was one too many. There was a sudden bellow of public indignation. In Chicago Colonel Robert Isham Randolph and his Secret Six Committee, Investigator Pat Roche, many another, took up the crusade for decency. Capone was near the end.
Scarcely a year out of jail, he was sentenced by Federal Judge James H. Wilkerson for contempt of court. Four months later, the Federal Government rose from an examination of his riches and with a straight face made the statement that Capone had illegally withheld from the Government a cut of his ill-gotten gains. He was convicted on five of 22 counts of evading the income tax, fined $57,692.29, and sentenced to the penitentiary for ten years, an additional year in jail for the charge of contempt. His day was dead. Depression and repeal of the 18th Amendment buried it.
Last January his family paid $37,692 of the fine and his penitentiary term in Alcatraz was declared at an end. At Terminal Island he served out his jail sentence, paid the balance of his fine, and good behavior there entitled him to final release this month.
For the only misdeeds the State could prove, this onetime Public Enemy No. 1 will have served seven years and six months. His plans were secret. He was diseased and afraid. There were many men left who remembered his tyranny.
Last week a car speeding from Cicero crashed into a telephone pole, its windows shattered by bullets, a bloody corpse at its wheel. The man was Edward J. O'Hare, president of the National Jockey Club, president of Sportsman's Park track (once owned by Capone). In Cicero they had not forgotten how.