Chicago is best known for its transplants. Our biggest celebrities come to a pocketful of names—most from elsewhere, but now synonymous with the Windy City. Much like Oprah, Michael, Ditka, and others then, Alphonse Gabriel “Scarface” Capone is irrevocably connected with the city. Yes, Capone’s story is a Chicago one. Born in Brooklyn, he moved here in search of opportunity, finding and exploiting it through cunning and a ruthless amount of bloodshed. Profiting off Prohibition, Capone became a criminal kingpin and begat the Chicago Outfit besides.
Capone has a repugnant purity. Unlike some of the city’s historical rogues and rascals, he is not merely checkered or controversial. He was an irredeemable thug, despite his efforts to buy public goodwill. Still, he enjoys a postmortem glow favored by too many Americans, who view organized crime as a clever hustle rather than a social poison. Capone’s notoriety is further bolstered by appearances in multiple movies and TV shows such as Brian DePalma’s The Untouchables and HBO's Boardwalk Empire, and fictional spiritual heirs like Tony Montana of DePalma’s remake of Scarface or any number of other modern gangster/gangsta flicks. While one can’t imagine Capone’s Roaring '20s lifestyle backed by a hip-hop or narcocorridos soundtrack, he remains the archetype of the small-time street hood ascending to a state of underworld royalty.
Pierre-Franco̧is Radice and Swann Meralli’s biographical comic Al Capone charts the titular goon’s rise thusly. Al Capone makes no attempt to reform, redeem, or praise the 1920s gangster and bootlegger, though it does employ the ironic narrative of Capone explaining his life to his mother Teresina. He tells her what he believed he did—fought anti-Italian prejudice and brought booze and good times to his fellow citizens—over imagery of what he really did: assault and battery, corruption, pimping, bootlegging, narcotics dealing, protection, racketeering, murder, and a raft of other crimes. Al Capone is unrelenting in taking the shine off the image of gangsters as rascally ne'er-do-wells, men of honor in natty suits doing it for the famiglia, and other such tropes.
Capone’s tale is an American success story gone rotten. A storyline that repeats itself in film and fiction to this day. We’ve emerged from a long period of prestige TV reflecting this conceit. Tales of economically downtrodden, or at least financially hobbled, Americans looking for a way out of the hole. The proper term for such characters is villain protagonists. Some modern villain protagonists reflect Capone’s meteoric rise, and on occasion fall, as a crime lord. Breaking Bad’s Walter White, Jimmy McGill of Better Call Saul, and Nancy Botwin of Weeds come to mind. Sick, broke, and/or prevented from rising in society, they face financial difficulties and family turmoil, and so turn to crime—just a smidgen—to get by. Initially, they succeed, gaining that basic sense of security that comes with a steady income. But like any job, that security is often threatened by external forces: layoffs, inflation, medical bills, and taxes. Later those forces involve the Feds, Chechen mobsters, Mexican cartels, and the like, and their security depends on how much of their soul they’re willing to destroy in pursuit of the buck.
Capone’s story is similar—though lacking in white middle-class suburban angst. The son of Italian immigrants, young Capone was dirt poor but driven to rise above his circumstances through his fists and wits. Roaring Twenties gangster tales like his have lent themselves to epic cinematic treatment. Seedy and vile as crime is, there’s something thrilling, earthy, and operatic about the old-time gangsters, their amazing nicknames, and their turbulent lives. But while DePalma, Scorsese, and Coppola can choreograph hits and corpse discoveries like nobody’s business, Al Capone shows how tawdry, crude, and cruel it was. Al Capone humanizes Capone, in that it shows how leadenly inhuman a human can be.
A quick internet search turns up the occasional portrait of Capone as a Robin Hood figure who bent the rules a bit. He does seem quaint beside modern organized crime groups and cartels. Yet, Capone holds his own as a human cyst. He was responsible for bribing an endless parade of public officials, threatening and beating voters and candidates to game the 1924 municipal elections in Cicero, Illinois, beating underlings to death with a baseball bat, and ordering or committing more than 400 murders. While not engaging in decapitations, immolations, and other shock and awe tactics perpetuated by today’s cartels, he was bad enough, as Al Capone makes clear. It feels like Capone’s crimes are put at a remove by time, the repeal of Prohibition, and black and white crime scene photos whose vintage nature bely the actual pops, squishes, crunches, and leaks attendant to murder. The graphic novel doesn’t shy from showing the level of brutishness practiced by Capone and his rivals.
It also relies on the basic template for the notion of the entrepreneurial, social-climbing gangster. Capone wasn’t the first to try to climb the ladder through criminality, but he remains the nonfictional archetype. Even his life is theatrical in the Grecian drama sense, with a meteoric rise and hubristic fall from unholy grace. It repeats itself in our prestige TV villain protagonists in which Walt, et alia, eventually run afoul of the authorities and battle rivals, but remain the “good guys” for us because, well, it’s their show. But invariably, the money gets too good and the original notion of surviving becomes more about actual survival. Corruption sets in and redemption arcs are rare.
As a culture, many folks seem fine with getting away with a little bit of naughtiness, or even killing the bad guys, for a “good cause”. It’s especially easy to believe with fictional heroes. Excess in greed or violence, however, must eventually be punished. Though only if our “heroes” are lower or middle class. Few of these shows claim to have morals, though the old proverb about "If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas” suggests itself. None of these shows ended with the “hero” puffing a pipe on the front porch, watching the grandkids play touch football. Notably, we rarely see villain protagonists born to wealth and power coming to as bad, or as deserved an end as Walter White’s. Succession underscores the lack of upper tiers consequences, with the Roy kids losing…pretty much nothing and going on with their grossly affluent lives.
By that token, while some folks supposedly loved Capone (online rationalists/Robin Hood purveyors mention his soup kitchens, orphanages, charities, hiring black jazz musicians for his clubs, and taking kids to ball games—all shown in the graphic novel, but only as part of Capone’s self-promotion)—but most Chicagoans were fine with him going down. Long before it became a frightened tourist and Republican talking-point, Chicago has long connected with violence. Capone had much to do with that. His influence sadly endures.
That said, Al Capone doesn’t glamorize its subject. Not once. The art is ugly, though the more accurate and aesthetic term would be grotesque, in the sense of caricature. Despite what Hollywood has shown us, few mobsters are sexy beasts. In Al Capone, gangsters have a disturbingly dull and normal cast to their faces, only occasionally disrupted by an unpleasant smile, smirk, or scowl. As for Capone, the art portrays him as a baby-faced figure (not so hard to believe; shockingly, Capone ruled Chicago in his late 20s and early 30s), save for the three scars along his left cheek, crisscrossed and clearly poorly stitched and healed. Cherubic as he is, it keeps with the graphic novels’ conceit of the naughty little boy semi-confessing to his madre. In Radice’s art, that face is prone to become deformed with rage. Sweaty and twisted into a terrifying ferocity, especially when Capone feels he’s been insulted or crossed, often presaging a violent montage. That’s good. Photorealism would not have suited the story. The coloring is lovely as well, and while it’s muted, I’m grateful Radice resisted the cliché of rendering it in black and white or sepia tones.
“Cartoonish” applies in the storytelling as well. While the tale is well-told, liberties have been taken in Al Capone. The book admits as much in an endnote, claiming the story came from several sources, including a supposed Capone autobiography available only in French. Regardless, some parts of the story simply don’t jibe. Basic online research reveals, for example that Chicago gang boss and pimp “Big Jim” Colosimo, Capone’s original employer in Chicago, was shot in his restaurant at 2126 South Wabash, on May 11, 1920. Contemporary photos show a clearly clothed and culled Colosimo lying dead on the floor of his restaurant. He was likely liquidated by New York Capone associate Frankie Yale who walked in, shot Colosimo, and left. Quite different from the graphic novel’s portrayal of Colosimo’s last moments spent in the company of a famous local prostitute named Pompita, seen here in a state of voluptuous undress. Here, Colosimo is literally caught with his pants down and whacked by Capone himself. A likely 98.6 percent untrue situation. Why embellish? I suspect cinema, particularly that choreographed by Scorsese, Coppola, and perhaps Italian poliziotteschi films, has had an outsized influence on how gangsters’ lifestyles and deaths are portrayed. There’s a touch of that embellishment in Al Capone.
But lies are all part of the Capone story, and it’s easy to follow the advice of the reporter in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance who said, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” But Capone’s story was violent and lurid enough. Why alter it? Another quibble: as mentioned, the story is told by Capone in his Alcatraz cell, defending his life to his beloved mother, ironically and couched in euphemisms and outright falsehoods against background memories of what really happened. All fine, though the predictable “twist” at the end might provoke an eye-roll.
Nevertheless, Al Capone explores a commonly ignored point about the American myth. The USA is both the land of opportunity and discrimination. Oftentimes the opportunity isn’t legal, and sometimes crime is the only upwardly mobile alternative available to the discriminated against. Yet, the Al Capone we meet here justifies, or rather rationalizes, his status as an American success story, battling and supposedly winning against a spate of anti-Italianism in the US during the late 19th and early 20th century. All the crass trappings of gangsterism he enjoyed, however, make it clear where his motivations laid.
But then, if Walter White stopped making meth after his cancer went into remission, Breaking Bad would’ve ended in the middle of season two. We want our villain protagonists to continue to succeed, but there’s a point where it’s not about getting by. All the bread-loaf-stealing analogies go out the window when the money goes toward cars, champagne, prostitutes, and those fancy suits
As Tony Montana opined, “first…you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” Few remember Tony’s original boss, Frank Lopez warning him that “the guys that last in this business, are the guys who fly straight. Low-key, quiet. But the guys who want it all, chicas, champagne, flash… they don't last.”
Capone didn’t last. He had an inglorious fall after the Feds nabbed him for tax evasion and packed him off to Alcatraz where he worked in the laundry room. Eventually released he was stripped of his assets, his financial troubles compounded by the syphilis that slowly turned his brains to soup. The final page portrays the original Al Capone, Chicago kingpin, doltishly fishing in his Florida villa’s swimming pool. Oh how the mighty, et cetera, et cetera.
Al Capone, the graphic novel, doesn’t address his Chicago legacy—a missed opportunity. Chicago’s connection with Capone endures, though perhaps less so than in previous decades. He’s a relic now, with his rise to power in Chicago hitting the century mark next year. A handful of pizzerias, pubs, and smoke shops carry his name in the Chicago suburbs, Michigan, Wisconsin, and beyond (as do a few bars and liquor stores, which seems as tasteful as calling a barbecue joint “Dahmer’s”). Yet his presence and influence remains—not for better, only for worse.
Al Capone, the graphic novel, provides a beautifully rendered, loose breakdown of what made Capone Capone. Though, like the man himself, it doesn’t always show the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Al Capone is available at bookstores and through the Black Panel Press website.