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The Capone family moved to a small, unassuming house at 7244 South Prairie Avenue in Chicago. Cicero, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, would serve as Al Capone's first headquarters. Initially, Capone took up grunt work with Johnny Torrio's outfit, but the elder Torrio immediately recognized Capone's talents and by 1922 Capone was Torrio's second in command, responsible for much of the gambling, alcohol, and prostitution rackets in the city of Chicago. One of his greatest triumphs was the seizure of the region of Cicero in 1924. It became known as one of the most crooked elections in Chicago's long history with voters threatened at the polling station by thugs. His mayoral candidate won by a huge majority but it was only weeks later he claimed he would run Capone out of town. In order to counter this, Capone met with his puppet-mayor and personally knocked him down the town hall steps. It was a powerful assertion of gangster power and a huge victory for the Torrio-Capone alliance. The event was marred however by the death of Frank Capone at the hands of the police. It broke his brother's heart. Unshaven (a gangster form of mourning), Capone cried openly at the funeral and ordered the closure of all the speakeasies in Cicero for a day as a mark of respect.Severely injured in an assassination attempt in 1925, the shaken Torrio returned to Italy and gave the reins of the business to Capone. Capone was notorious during the Prohibition era for his control of the Chicago underworld and his bitter rivalries with gangsters such as Bugs Moran and Hymie Weiss. Raking in vast amounts of money from illegal gambling, prostitution, and alcohol (some estimates were that between 1925 and 1930 Capone was making $100 million a year), the Chicago kingpin was largely immune to prosecution due to witness intimidation and the bribing of city officials, such as Chicago mayor William "Big Bill" Hale Thompson. Capone was reputed to have several other retreats and hideouts including French Lick, Indiana; Dubuque, Iowa; Hot Springs, Arkansas; Johnson City, Tennessee; and Lansing, Michigan.In 1928, Capone bought a retreat on Palm Island, Florida. It was shortly after this purchase that he orchestrated seven of the most notorious gangland killings of the century, the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Although details of the massacre are still in dispute, and no person was ever charged with the crime, the killings are generally linked to Capone and his henchmen, especially Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn, who is thought to have led the operation. By staging the massacre, Capone was trying to dispose of his arch-rival Bugs Moran, who controlled gang operations on the North Side of Chicago. Moran was late for the meeting and escaped an otherwise certain death.Throughout the 1920s, Capone was often the target of attempted murders, being shot once in a restaurant and having his car riddled with bullets from nose to tail on more than one occasion. However the assassins were normally amateurs and Capone was never seriously wounded.Capone also often tried to rehabilitate his image and seem like a community leader. For example he started a daily program to fight rickets by providing a daily milk ration to Chicago school children, a program that was continued even decades after his death. Such efforts, however, did not change his lifelong legacy of violence and and murder within that city.Al Capone
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CAPONE'S HOME AT 7224 S. PRARIE AVE
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