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.
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.
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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 Al Capone 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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Shortly after Al was born, Gabriele moved the family to better lodgings in an apartment over his barber shop at 69 Park Avenue in Brooklyn (not to be confused with the posh Park Avenue of Manhattan).
This move would expose Al to cultural influences well beyond what was supplied by the Italian immigrant community. Most of the people living around Park Avenue were Irish, although Germans, Swedes and Chinese were also in the neighborhood.
Moving into a broader ethnic universe allowed Al to escape the insularity of the solidly Italian neighborhood. There is no question that this exposure would help him in his future role as the head of a criminal empire.
A block from Al’s home was the parish church, St Michael’s, where the Reverend Garofalo baptized him several months after his birth. John Kobler captures the atmosphere of the neighborhood in The Life and World of Al Capone:
“Life in the sector where Al lived his first ten years was harsh, but never drab, never stagnant. Hordes of ragged children gave the streets an explosive vitality as they played stickball, dodged traffic, brawled and bawled, while their mothers, dark heavy-thighed women, bustled to and fro balancing on their heads baskets laden with supplies for the day’s meals. Fruit and vegetable carts, standing wheel to wheel, made a bright, fragrant clutter along the curb. The fire escapes that formed an iron lacework across the faces of the squat tenements shook and shuddered as the El trains roared by close behind on Myrtle Avenue.”
At the age of five in 1904, he went to Public School 7 on Adams Street. Educational prospects for Italian children were very poor. The school system was deeply prejudiced against them and did little to encourage any interest in higher education, while the immigrant parents expected their children to leave school as soon as they were old enough to work.
Bergreen describes the poor learning conditions for the children of Italian immigrants:
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“Schools such as Capone’s P.S. 7 offered nothing in the way of assistance to children from Italian backgrounds to enter the mainstream of American life; they were rigid, dogmatic, strict institutions, where physical force often prevailed over reason in maintaining discipline. The teachers — usually female, Irish Catholic, and trained by nuns — were extremely young. A sixteen-year-old, earning $600 a year, would often teach boys and girls only a few years younger than she…Fistfights between students and teachers were common, even between male students and female teachers…Al Capone found school a place of constant discipline relieved by sudden outbreaks of violence…”
Al did quite well in school until the sixth grade when his steady record of B’s deteriorated rapidly. At fourteen, he lost his temper at the teacher, she hit him and he hit her back. He was expelled and never went to school again.
About this time, his family moved from their house on Navy Street to 21 Garfield Place. This move would have a lasting impact on Al because in this new neighborhood he would meet the people who would have the most influence on his future: his wife Mae and the gangster Johnny Torrio.
