Al Capone's Whiskey Importation Turns Into Cocaine Hydrochloride

Al Capone's Whiskey Importation Turns Into Cocaine Hydrochloride Al Capone had been a juvenile delinquent and gained his "scarface" nickname after he was slashed across the cheek while working as a night club bouncer. The once small-time thug moved up and up to become the head of a huge villainous organization, believed to be responsible for at least 300 murders. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre in which seven members of a rival gang were lined up against a garage wall and gunned down, is probably the most notorious and bloody killing attributable to Capone's reign of terror in Chicago's 1920's. However, Capone was more prominent in going against the law of prohibition. While alcohol was outlawed, Capone smuggled whiskey from Canada to New York and then on to Chicago. Bringing in this illegal good is what made Capone $105 million in 1927 alone. Although alcohol is now legal, the United States is still a consumer of illegal substances. One of these main illegal imports is cocaine. It is shipped up from Central American countries and then distributed throughout the states. The problem is that it's not just a few key people as it was in the days of Capone, but many take part in this country to country business. The government tries to control the problem, but can't get off as easy as convicting them of tax evasion as it did to Capone. Much has been written and said about Al Capone, most of which is completely false. One of the most common fictions is that like many gangsters of the Capone era, he was a native Italian. This is not true. This amazing crime czar was born in Brooklyn, taking the feudal Italian criminal society and turning it into a modern American criminal enterprise. Many Italian immigrants, like immigrants of all nationalities, frequently came to the United States with very few belongings. Many of them were peasants of rural Italy escaping the lack of opportunity. When they arrived at large American port cities they often ended up as laborers due to their inability to speak and write English. This was not the case with Al Capone's family. Gabriele Capone was one of 43,000 Italians who arrived in the U.S. in 1894. A barber by trade, he could read and write his native language. He was from the village of Castellmarre di Stabia, sixteen miles south of Naples. At thirty years old, Gabriele brought with him his pregnant twenty-seven-year-old wife Teresina, his two-year-old son Vincenzo and his infant son Raffaele. Gabriele was one of few Italian immigrants who did not owe money for his passage over. His plan was to do whatever it took to 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 bare beginning in the New World. The Capones' new home was a cold-water tenement flat that had no indoor toilet or furnishings. The neighborhood was a slum, given its nearness to the noisy Navy Yard. Gabriele's ability to read and write opened an opportunity to get a job in a grocery store until his barber shop was up and running. Teresina, in spite of her duties as a mother, took in sewing piecework for an addition to the family income. 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 genetic strain of violence? Some subtly mutated chromosomes? Was Alphonse abused as a child? Did he spend his younger years in the company of murderers and thieves? Definitely not. The Capones were a quiet, conventional family. "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." (Bergreen, 29-30) In May of 1906, Gabriele became an American citizen. Within the family, his children would always be called 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. Shortly after Al was born, Gabriele moved the family to a better area in an apartment over his barber shop at 69 Park Avenue in Brooklyn. This move would expose Al to cultural influences well beyond what he was accustomed to in 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 solidity of his 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. "Schools such as Capone's P.S. 7 offered nothing in the way of assistance to children from