Al Capone

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32886, 8 April 1972, Page 10

Al Capone

The Life and World of Al Capone. By John Kohler. Michael Joseph. 409 /PPThe author, a journalist of high repute and a former crime-editor of the magazine "PM,” has given us a clear picture of Al Capone from his New York boyhood, through his days of influence and affluence in Chicago, to his imprisonment at Alcatraz, and finally to his death through what appears tohave been general paralysis of the insane at the early age of 48. The book .is carefully documented, contains a wide bibliography, and has a detailed index. Al Capone grew up in Brooklyn suffering the disillusionments, the hardships and brutal prejudice meted out to the Italian families there. From early years the need for companionship, a sense of adventure, and the profits to be made kept him within gangster; influence, although it must be said in fairness that many kids in New York kept themselves free from such influence. Capone was befriended by John Torrio, a gangster who moved to Chicago where he did his best to indiice the gangsters to collaborate, to share oiit territories, and to avoid deadly warfare. He brought Capone to Chicago as a strong-ann man, and they soon became partners. With the Volstead Act prohibiting the sale of liquor in the United States it opened the floodgates to bootleg beer. The profits to the gangsters became immense and greed ana hijacking one another’s produce led to much shooting. Chesterton once congratulated Chicago on its fastidiousness and good taste m assassinating nobody except assassins. This was not entirely true for bystanders sometimes got caught in crossfire. Mobsters figure in the book a-plenty, some just popping up to be shot down like clay pipes in an old-fashioned shooting gallery. For the most part they were a sleazy lot, and in their company Capone seemed to shine forth with a certain panache. Whatever may be said of him, he seemed to be a better man than the crooked politicians and jurists who made his life of crime possible. The other thing which comes clearly from the book is the utter absurdity of allowing all sorts and conditions of gorrillas to own guns.