Original Rayleigh News and Observer

March 17 1930

18 pages

Capone’s activities attracted the attention of President Herbert Hoover who in March 1929, asked Andrew Mellon, his Secretary of the Treasury, "Have you got this fellow Capone yet? I want that man in jail." Mellon set out to get the necessary evidence both to prove income tax evasion and to amass enough evidence to prosecute Capone successfully for Prohibition violations.
Eliot Ness, a dynamic young agent with the US Prohibition Bureau, was charged with gathering the evidence of Prohibition violations. He assembled a team of daring young men and made extensive use of wire tapping technology. While there was doubt that Capone could be successfully prosecuted for Prohibition violations in Chicago, the government was certain it could get Capone on tax evasion.
In May 1929, Capone went to a ‘gangsters’ conference in Atlantic City. Afterwards he saw a movie in Philadelphia. When leaving the cinema he was arrested and imprisoned for carrying a concealed weapon. Capone was soon incarcerated in the Eastern Penitentiary where he stayed until 16 March 1930. He was later released from jail for good behaviour, but was put on the America’s ‘Most Wanted’ list which publicly humiliated the mobster who so desperately wanted to be regarded as a worthy man of the people.
Elmer Irey undertook a cunning plan to use undercover agents posing as hoods to infiltrate Capone’s organisation. The operation took nerves of steel and despite an informer ending up with a bullet in his head before he could testify, Elmer managed to amass enough evidence through his detectives, posing as gangsters, to try Capone in front of a jury. With two vital bookkeepers Leslie Shumway and Fred Reis, who had once been in Capone’s employment, now safely under police protection it was only a matter of time before Capone’s days as Public Enemy No. 1 were over.
Furthermore, agent Eliot Ness, angered by Capone for the murder of a friend, managed to enrage Capone by exposing Prohibition violations to ruin his bootlegging industry. Millions of dollars of brewing equipment was seized or destroyed, thousands of gallons of beer and alcohol had been dumped and the largest breweries were closed.

The Trial of Alphonse Capone opened on the morning of October 5, 1931 at the federal courthouse in downtown Chicago.  Capone, accompanied by his bodyguard, smiled at jurors as he strolled into court in his mustard-colored suit.  Judge Wilkerson took his seat at the bench and looked out over the packed courtroom.  He called the bailiff to the bench.  "Judge Edwards has another trial commencing today," he told the bailiff.  "Go to his courtroom and bring me his entire panel of jurors; take my entire panel to Judge Edwards." 

After a jury of twelve was seated, and after Assistant U. S. Attorney Dwight Green outlined the 23 charges of tax evasion against Capone in the government's opening statement, George Johnson called his first witness. Charles W. Arndt, a tax collector for the United States, told jurors that Al Capone failed to file any tax return at all during for the years 1924 through 1929.

The team of prosecution lawyers that convicted Al Capone (U.S. Attorney George E. Q. Johnson is seated)

At 2:42 P.M. on October 18, the jury left the courtroom to begin its deliberations.  They filed back into the courtroom eight hours later with there verdict in hand.  When the clerk pronounced the word "Guilty" (on the charge of tax evasion for 1925) reporters dashed to phones to report the news.  Six days later, Judge Wilkerson imposed a prison sentence of eleven years, the longest term ever handed down for tax evasion.  Capone, as he was led in handcuffs to a courtroom elevator, yelled, "I'm not through fighting yet."  

 Capone served time in federal penitentiaries in Atlanta and at Alcatraz.  In November 1939, after serving less than eight years, he was released while suffering from paresis caused by untreated syphilis.  On January 25, 1947, Capone died of a stroke in Palm Island, Florid