Al Capone

In 1925, Alphonse Capone, also known as "Scarface", became head of the Chicago crime organization and the most famous U.S. gangster of the twentieth century. In 1928, at the age of 28, he grossed 105 million a year from his operations and continued to dominate organized crime until 1931. It was then that he was imprisoned for income tax evasion. No other American gangster rose to the international reputation of Al Capone, whose historical image is a curious blend of ruthless gangster and a "distorted Horatio Alger hero who went from rags to riches to jail" (Nash, 1992). Nash goes on to characterize Capone as "a ruthless, murderous thug who killed without remorse--street smart, clever, and ingenious when it came to crime . . . killing without compunction . . . at the whims of a mercurial and murderous temperament" (Nash, 1992). Capone killed his friends as well as his enemies, while at the same time spending lavishly on himself and those about him. In fact, as Nash notes, Capone "projected an image of generosity, of a philanthropist to the common man" (Nash 1992).

In a brilliantly written biography by John Kobler called Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone, the author portrays Capone's Brooklyn neighborhood as a "lush ground for criminal activities" (Kobler, 1992). In fact, the early Italian settlers "tended to place loyalty to family and community above loyalty to their adopted country, and they did not necessarily condemn those who transgressed against the new society, even the hoodlum and the racketeer; sometimes . . . they invested the outlaw with heroic stature, as long as he kept faith with his community and above all, remained a good family man" (Kobler, 1992).

Behavior presumptions offer the most complete imaginary structure for understanding the cause of an Al Capone. In behavior assumption, the basic idea is that almost all human behavior is learned, and the theory is directed toward explaining how it is learned and performed. Its primary belief is that action is restricted by its penalty. For example, to elaborate on initial discussion of Al Capone's upbringing, we can see that there were no negative consequences to anti-societal, or criminal behavior in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up, mainly because "the disillusionments, hardships, and brutal prejudice that the Italian immigrants endured in the promised 'land of opportunity' confirmed them in their tribalism" (Kobler, 1992), and as we have already seen, sometimes "they invested the outlaw with heroic stature" (Kobler, 1992).

The dependent association between behavior and consequent actions is the core of both behavior theory and behavior change, which is the theory's purpose to behavior modification. In a psychobiography of Al Capone, his conditions lead to his gangster behavior with the belief that under different shared conditions, he may have very well been a true, rather than a brutal, humanitarian.

With the image of a promise land and golden opportunity, Al Capone's parents, Gabriel and Teresa Capone moved from Italy to America. Gabriel worked as a grocer and then as a barber, and Teresa, as a dressmaker. They struggled to make ends meet, but still they could barely pay the monthly rent. The poor, illiterate immigrants failed miserably in their attempts to adapt to the new country. "Criminality does not result from unconscious forces, hypothetical antecedent events, or the aggressive nature of humans, but from an individual's past reinforcements for crime and for alternatives to crime. Thus, any environmental circumstances that reinforce acquisition and performance of behavior defined as criminal are the "causes" of crime" (Quay, 1983). We can safely say that Capone saw his father fail miserably at making an honorable living, and thus, he did not see the benefit in an honest living.

A life of crime was an attractive alternative. Acceptance was not a quality of the younger Italians. As they grew up poor in the world's richest nation, as educational, social, and economic opportunities, apparently available to all Americans, avoided them, they did not, like their elders, inactively accept frustration. Without yet having recognized reasonable morals of their own, they rejected their parents' old country customs as inappropriate to the challenge of America. Their defiance seemed that only crime could open the door to the good life, and they joined the position of professional gunmen and bombers, extortionists, vice peddlers, labor racketeers, gambling-house operators and bootleggers (Kobler, 1992).

Actually, this uncontrolled first- and second-generation minority consist of only a small fraction of the Italo-American population. Even so, other immigrants labeled the Italians as naturally criminal. "They saw the 'dago,' the 'ginzo,' as not only criminal by nature, but physically unclean and of low mentality. The effect of such criticism was to draw its victims still closer together. They formed tight, proud enclaves which no outsider could penetrate" (Kobler, 1992).

These gangster territories are explained by support theory. No community endorsement is given to such ethnic underdogs, and so they form their own group. I "Explanations of Gangs" by W. Cloward, "youths of low social status or those belonging to certain racial or ethnic populations are denied the opportunity to achieve success through legitimate means, and hence they must resort to illegitimate avenues to gain personal achievement. One such avenue is gang membership, which enables youths to gain prestige through gang fighting and other forms of criminal activity" (1983).

The gang Capone joined during his mid-teens, as did Lucky Luciano, was the Five Pointers, based on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (Kobler, 1992). It was the style among the young gangs of Capone's environment to start a cellar club. This usually consisted of a storefront where, "behind drawn blinds, the members gambled, drank and entertained girls. Based on studies done on the social individuality of gang members, the age of most male youth gang members (90 percent) approximates that of the age of social adolescence, roughly twelve to twenty-one years, and "the average age of male gang members in the larger cities is about seventeen" (Cloward, 1983). It is important to know that not all gangs were aggressive, nor were they all criminal. However, "practically every racketeer, Capone included, spent his formative years on the prowl with a gang" (Kobler, 1992). For many young male gangs,