When was capone convicted

By , Capone had moved to Chicago, where he was soon helping to run crime boss Johnny Torrio's illegal enterprises, which included alcohol-smuggling, gambling and prostitution. Torrio retired in after an attempt on his life and Capone, known for his cunning and brutality, was put in charge of the organisation. Prohibition, which outlawed the brewing and distribution of alcohol and lasted from to , proved extremely lucrative for bootleggers and gangsters like Capone, who raked in millions from his underworld activities.

Capone was at the top of the FBI's "Most Wanted" list by , but he avoided long stints in jail until by bribing city officials, intimidating witnesses and maintaining various hideouts. He became Chicago's crime kingpin by wiping out his competitors through a series of gangland battles and slayings, including the infamous St.

Valentine's Day Massacre in , when Capone's men gunned down seven rivals. His health deteriorated in prison, the result of late-stage syphilis. Though paroled in , he never returned to gangland politics and retired to his mansion in Palm Island a different man — according to his physician, he had the mental capacity of a year-old.

He died of a heart attack in This article was first published in the October edition of History Revealed. Sign in. For the day-to-day job of gathering incriminating evidence for Capone's tax evasion case, Irey turned to Frank Wilson, his most aggressive and relentless investigator.

Frank Wilson and his team of five other Treasury investigators set up offices in the Chicago Post Office Building and set about the job of building a case against Capone. Capone made their task difficult by not maintaining a bank account and never signing any checks or receipts. They uncovered purchases of high-end furniture, custom-made shirts, diamond-studded belt buckles , gold-plated dinner service , hotel suites, and a Lincoln limousine.

While such unusual extravagance does not in itself prove taxable income, a juror could easily draw such an inference.

While successful in tracking down evidence of expenses, investigators encountered considerable difficulty in finding direct evidence of income. Wilson described most as either "hostile to government and ready to give perjured testimony" or "so full of fear of the Capone organization To convict Capone would require help from inside Capone's illicit operation, but--for reasons all too obvious--few on the inside wanted to step forward to help the government make its case.

One who did was Eddie O'Hare, owner of the patent for the mechanical rabbit used in greyhound racing. O'Hare ran dog racing tracks for the Capone syndicate in the Chicago area, as well as in Florida and Massachusetts. Years later, just days before Capone's release from prison, O'Hare would pay the ultimate price for the leads he provided the government over the course of their two-year investigation.

While driving on a Chicago street, he was gunned down by two men in a passing car. In , Chicago's new international airport was named in Edward's memory. The first big break in the investigation came in the summer of when Wilson stumbled across three bound ledgers seized in a raid of one of Capone's establishments. The ledger was divided into columns with labels such as "Craps," "21," and "Roulette.

Building on the ledger evidence, Wilson collected sworn testimony from persons whose participation in a citizen's raid on a Cicero gambling hall had left them convinced beyond any doubt that Capone was the proprietor of the place.

An even more significant potential witness was located by comparing the handwriting in the ledger with that on deposit slips from local banks. Investigators identified the likely author of the ledger as Leslie Shumway, the same man who signed deposit slips that turned up at a small Cicero bank. Agents tracked Shumway to Florida, where they interrupted a breakfast at his home to offer him a ride down to the Miami Federal Building to talk to agents.

Threatened with a not-so-secret subpoena and well aware of what Capone might do to someone about to disclose embarrassing facts to the government, Shumway agreed to talk. In his affidavit, Shumway described the nature of the gambling businesses and stated that "I took orders relating to the business [from] Mr. Alphonse Capone. In April , Capone's tax attorney, Lawrence Mattingly, contacted Treasury and expressed the desire to have his client meet with agents to settle his indebtedness with the government.

In response to the question, "How long, Mr. Capone, have you enjoyed a large income? As he prepared to leave the room after the interview, he inquired, "How's your wife, Wilson?

On September 30, Mattingly met with Wilson to discuss Capone's tax liability. Capone is willing to pay the tax on these figures. Wilson filed the letter away.

A year later, the letter became the trial's most contentious piece of evidence. Wilson, not a person easily intimidated, continued to identify witnesses and amass incriminating evidence. One of the last and most important witnesses to be discovered was Fred Reis, the named payee on numerous large cashier checks that Treasury assumed found their way into Capone's coffers. Reis decided to talk after having four solitary days to think about it in a cockroach-infested jail in Danville, Illinois.

He admitted, first to agents and then in testimony before a Chicago grand jury, that his boss was Capone, and that the checks represented Capone's net profits at his Cicero gambling hall. With Reis's statement, prosecutors decided they had enough evidence to go before a grand jury. After completing his grand jury testimony, Reis was shipped off to South America for safekeeping until trial.

On March 13, two days before the statute of limitations would have run, the grand jury indicted Al Capone for evading federal income taxes in Two months later, the grand jury added counts for the years to Over the three months that followed, Capone's attorneys met frequently with U. Attorney George E. Johnson to discuss a possible plea bargain. With witnesses to try to keep alive and with thorny legal questions concerning the charges, Johnson was willing to listen, hoping to get a two-and-a-half year sentence out of the negotiations.

With an agreement for the two-and-a-half year sentence apparently in place, Al Capone appeared on June 18, before Federal Judge James H. Wilkerson and entered a plea of guilty. Wilkerson adjourned court until July 30 to consider the plea. On the day before his expected sentencing, Capone told reporters, "I've been made an issue and I'm not complaining, but why don't they go after all those bankers who took the savings of thousands of poor people and lost them in bank failures?