'Delusional, sick, broke and demented': inside the sad final days of Al Capone
The new Capone movie bills itself as the story of “America’s most notorious gangster”: a man who was directly responsible for more than 200 murders. Yet Al Capone was full of paradoxes. He was both a violent psychopath and a jovial gentleman; a man who liked telling “knock knock” jokes to his nieces; a collector of cuckoo clocks and ornate porcelain elephants; a banjo enthusiast.
Tom Hardy is the latest actor to portray Capone, playing the mobster boss in his final dismal years in Florida, following his release from Alcatraz prison. The film, which also stars Dead to Me's Linda Cardellini, Matt Dillon and Kyle MacLachlan, raises the question of whether the gangster was, in fact, faking his descent into syphilis-induced dementia in those final years.
The film was a labour of love for its director and writer Josh Trank, who told GQ magazine this week that he lost about $150,000 in order to get Capone made. He reflected on the problems of being “blacklisted” for five years after the terrible reception to his second directorial project Fantastic Four, which he disowned after creative differences with the studio: “If anybody ever wants to know who I am they just have to look at Capone.”
He says the idea for the film came to him in 2015 when he was smoking in his backyard, miserably out of work (he resigned from directing Star Wars), and the image of Capone, then suffering dementia and sitting by his swimming pool with a cigar hanging out of his mouth, came to mind. He thought he could relate to the story of a man who had lost so much, and began writing a script.
Although Hardy has been praised by critics for his portrayal of “a feral and angry Capone”, reviewers have generally given the film unfavourable write-ups, accusing the movie of “fetishizing” Capone and zeroing in on the grotesque images of Hardy's character defecating himself during an FBI interview and while roaming his Florida mansion in a nappy. The Chicago Sun Times described it as “a noxious film about a noxious man”.
Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born on 17 January 1899 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of immigrants from Naples. He excelled at street-gang life at an early age and was thrown out of school at 14 for hitting a female teacher in the face. Within a couple of years, he was working as a bartender at the Harvard Inn. It was at this brothel-saloon that Frank Galluccio slashed Capone’s cheek with a razor, after the teenager made a crude joke about the gangster’s sister. Capone hated the nickname “Scarface” that followed the assault.
Capone’s rise to become the most famous criminal in America is well documented. By the late 1920s, he was running Chicago during Prohibition. His empire was built on illegal alcohol, gambling dens and bordellos, from loan shark operations and protection rackets extorting businesses and unions. He had judges, politicians, journalists and policemen on his payroll. His ‘Outfit’ brought in more than $100 million a year ($1.5 billion in today’s money) and left hundreds of corpses in its wake. Capone always had airtight alibis for these murders, including on the night of the famous St Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, when seven members of a rival mob were shot by his gang members posing as policemen.
He was eventually prosecuted for tax evasion in June 1931, sentenced to 11 years in prison and ordered to pay more than $300,000 in fines and back taxes. He was furious at having to give up his expensive diamond ‘pinky ring’. His first spell inside was at a penitentiary in Atlanta, and it was clear that something was wrong with his mind even then. A doctor’s report in May 1932 said that the 33-year-old had an “IQ of 95 and a mental age of 15.1 years”. A few years earlier his mind had been sharp enough to utter the witticism, “when I sell liquor, they call it bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, they call it hospitality.”
Things got worse in 1934, when he was sent to the newly-opened Alcatraz. Capone’s unchecked syphilis began to destroy his brain during his five years in cell No 181 of the feared institution known as “The Rock”. In Capone’s early days in Chicago, he was ‘the muscle’ for numerous brothels and slept with scores of sex workers, as a ‘perk’ of the job. He contracted syphilis but was too embarrassed to seek medical attention. As well as allowing the infection to fester, his inertia meant that he passed on venereal disease to his wife Mae and unborn son Sonny.
Capone’s early attempts to gain the upper hand in Alcatraz failed miserably. James Johnston, the prison’s first warden, rejected the famous mobster’s attempt at bribery and denied him special privileges. He was merely allowed to play dominoes in the recreation yard, like any ordinary inmate. “It looks like Alcatraz has me licked,” Capone told a friend.
The gangster had learned to read music as a youngster and became a fan of Verdi operas and jazz concerts – his acquaintance Louis Armstrong is played by Troy Anderson in the movie – and there is a strange tale of the time his henchmen kidnapped Fats Waller at gunpoint, forcing the jazz pianist to play non-stop for three days at Capone’s speakeasy birthday party. They eventually sent a stunned Waller away with his pockets stuffed full of thousand-dollar bills.
He decided to put his music to use in jail, joining an inmate band called “The Rock Islanders”. In a letter from January 1938, Capone told 20-year-old Sonny that he’d learned more than 500 songs and was playing different instruments. “First I learned a tenor guitar and then a tenor banjo, and now the mandola, but for solo work only,” he wrote. Capone even penned a love song called Madonna Mia, which he gave to a visiting Jesuit priest. His instrument came in handy in other ways, too. When James ‘Tex’ Lucas stabbed Capone with scissors, Capone retaliated by savagely beating his fellow prisoner with the banjo.
Prison physicians described his angry outbursts as “intermittent mental disturbances” and the Alcatraz guards began to notice strange behaviour traits in Capone. There were reports of him muttering to himself, staring at guards with a “strange grin” on his face, talking anxiously about having to keep an eye on a factory he oversaw and dressing up in his winter coat, hat and gloves in summer.
A formal diagnosis of syphilis of the brain prompted the authorities to release Capone four years before his sentence expired. Capone was freed on November 16 1938 – officially on the grounds of “good behaviour” – and his family noticed his decline immediately. In 2019, his great-niece Deirdre Capone recalled that at a party to celebrate his freedom, “Al would go around to his own sister and say ‘Who are you?’ then he would go to somebody else and then he'd come back to his sister and say ‘Who are you again?’”.
The board at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore refused to examine Capone, who was forced to attend the city’s Union Memorial Hospital instead. His entourage included bodyguards, his own barber, masseur and food taster. Although it was not made public, Memorial diagnosed paresis, a late stage of syphilis. As thanks for treating him, Capone donated two magnificent weeping cherry trees to the hospital, one of which survives to this day, providing clippings for saplings around the campus that are called “Caponettes”.
Capone would not have been safe back in Chicago and Mae persuaded him to recuperate at their Mediterranean-style mansion on Palm Island in Miami, a base that had once been handy for smuggling operations. The mansion, built in 1922, had six bedrooms, a white marble swimming pool – the biggest in Miami at the time, with a state-of-the-art water filtering system – and a 30,000-square foot garden filled with hundred-year-old palm trees. Capone always showed visitors the Art Deco toilet that was a particular source of pride. The mansion had high fortified walls, doors made from heavy iron and fierce guard dogs stationed along the perimeter. Capone bought the house for $30,000 in 1928 and it’s now valued at $13million.
Although Capone tried to project himself as an imposing figure in Miami, the damage to his mind and body was abundantly clear to doctors. In March 1939, he was examined by a physician, who indiscreetly told the Miami Daily that in his current condition Capone “couldn’t dominate anything, much less a gangland empire”. He attributed Capone’s illness to a “chronic nervous system ailment” and the newspaper described him as a man who was happy just to be taken to the drugstore to buy a pack of gum.
It is the Capone of this era that Hardy is portraying, following in the footsteps of former screen Capones such as Rod Steiger, Robert de Niro and Stephen Graham. Capone tries to foster mystery over whether the former mob boss actually had “full-blown dementia” in his post-prison years. “I have reason to believe that could all be an elaborate act,” says one character in the film.
Those who believe the “fake dementia” theory cite the testimony from the late Clyde Smaldone, head of a Denver crime family, who visited Capone in 1946 and told crime historian Dick Kreck that it was “a damned lie” that his friend had syphilis. “I snuck down to see him before he died,” said Kreck. “Al never had syphilis. I think his heart was broken more than anything.”
It’s true that Capone’s granddaughters also told biographer Deirdre Dair, who was 84 when she died on 17 April this year, that Capone sometimes “exaggerated” his condition if he thought he was being observed, but there is little credible evidence to counter the widespread accounts of him as a broken recluse. The FBI never stopped tracking the man they’d called “Public Enemy No.1” and their reports from the 1940s present a convincing picture of Capone’s decline.
Florida agents sent memos back to FBI headquarters in Washington. They described the “increasing gibberish” of Capone’s speech, his recurrent body tremors and the problems he had walking in a straight line. They also reported that, “he has become quite obese,” partly down to all the lasagne and “meatballs a la Capone” his mother kept feeding him. The shot of Hardy’s Capone wielding a machine gun in a garden that was usually filled with young relatives seems fanciful.
The gangster’s last years are detailed in Bair’s 2016 biography Al Capone: His Life, Legacy and Legend. Bair, who won a National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett, conducted scores of fresh interviews with Capone’s relatives. She describes him as “delusional… sick, broke and demented… a mindless blubbering idiot”. In the film, much is made of the mobster's unruly bodily fluids, with Capone soiling himself repeatedly. When Trank was confronted by Vanity Fair about these moments, which many critics have found unnecessary, he rebuked that those particular scenes were what hooked in his star, Hardy.
“For somebody like Tom, you can’t have enough scenes in a movie where he’s going to s___ himself,” said Trank. “He is game to undress himself. A big part of this movie is a deconstruction of masculinity…you’ve seen [Capone’s] own facade and masculinity just unravel, and go to this place where he’s just afraid and vulnerable and can’t defend himself from his own thoughts.”
Capone was also subject to wild mood swings and panic attacks. He could be aggressive to strangers during shopping trips. He had imaginary conversations with long-dead mobsters, some of whom he’d killed. His favourite nurse, Gertrude Cole, humoured him, pretending to place bets on the races at horsetracks he believed he still owned. “His once distinct and flowing handwriting had degenerated into an illegible scrawl,” wrote Bair.
Although it was true that Capone did spend a lot of time in his pyjamas, Bair debunked the myth that Capone had his huge swimming pool stocked with fish, so he could spend his afternoons catching tuna. In the film Capone's doctor suggests to his family that they replace his signature cigar with a carrot – Capone would know no better. In lucid moments, however, Capone enjoyed walking around his property with his granddaughters, looking for butterflies. He was calmest when he was playing cards, eating pasta or fishing on the jetty and chatting to his mother.
In his last two years, Capone was given shots of penicillin but they did little good as his condition was so advanced. The man who once ruled over a criminal empire that spanned North America now had, in Bair’s words, “a brain so riddled by syphilis that he had the mentality of somewhere between seven and 12 years”.
A 1998 report in the Florida Historical Quarterly detailed the agony of his final days, when he was “breathing continuously through an oxygen mask, and pneumonia filled both of his lungs”. He was having convulsions and was sedated with large doses of Demerol, codeine and morphine. Amid reports of his deteriorating health, a ghoulish death watch commenced on the street outside the mansion, which was filled with newspaper reporters, policemen, FBI agents and curious onlookers.
Capone died in his bed on 25 January 1947, aged 48. His death certificate cited “bronchopneumonia, due to apoplexy”. The family refused a request by Dr Kenneth Phillips to hold an autopsy on Capone’s brain. He was finally laid to rest near Chicago with a gravestone that read My Jesus Mercy.
Did he leave $10 million in cash hidden in underground vaults and secret containers? Deirdre Capone believed that her great uncle had stashed away a secret treasure. In Capone, FBI agent Crawford (Jack Lowden) tells the gangster’s attorney that he has “reason to believe your client may have tucked away a very large sum of money”.
Capone’s loyal wife, a woman who knew every terrible thing he had done and loved him unreservedly, did not seem to know about a missing fortune. She ran out of money, and was forced to sell the Miami mansion in 1952 and move into a smaller home. Mae died in a Florida nursing home in April 1986, aged 89, but not before she burned Capone’s letters and her own diaries. Some of the mysteries of Scarface’s life will never be solved.
Capone is available on demand in the US today and in the UK later in the year
Read more:
