Mobster

Mobsters

I’ve always wondered how Mafioso and crime families make all the money to drive Rolls Royce and Ferrari’s. The mafia is a criminal organization that originated in Sicily and slowly assimilated to a less dangerous but altogether worrisome group of people in America. Cosa Nostra, also another name for mafia, had origins dating back to the 18th century. In America they are relatively new, late 19th early 20th century when the immigration boom occurred. Little did people know that this small group of Sicilian immigrants would plague the large cities for several years to come. The Cosa Nostra consists of several hundred crime families, these families control small villages, towns, or a neighborhood in a large city. Cosa Nostra is Latin for Our Thing; the general public created the term mafia. Mafia members also call themselves Men of Honour, as well as The Honoured Society. The mafia had several very important figures, as well as unimportant ones. When looking at the accomplishments of these mobsters it can be very difficult to stop them (Database).

One of the most famous mobsters of all time would be Al Capone, his full name is Alphonse Gabriel Capone born on the 17th of January 1899. Severely injured in a 1925 assassination attempt by the North Side Gang, the shaken Torrio (previous leader) turned over his business to Capone and returned to Italy. Capone was notorious during the Prohibition Era for his control of large portions of the Chicago underworld, which provided the Outfit (the name of Capone’s gang) with an estimated ten million dollars per year in revenue. Most of his wealth came from illegal activities, and the largest moneymaker was the sale of liquor. However, because Capone was infamous, it caught the attention of Capone's rivals, particularly his bitter rivalries with North Side gangsters such as Dean O’Banion, Bugs Moran and lieutenant Earl "Hymie" Weiss. His rivals tried to assassinate him several times throughout the depression. These attacks scared Capone into fitting his Cadillac with armor plating, bulletproof glass, run-flat tires, and a police siren. Most of the assassins were not very good and Capone was never seriously injured, but every attempt on his life made him more scarred and afraid of Moran, who Capone was almost sure involved in most of the attacks. Capone most notorious event was the St. Valentine massacre where seven people were killed in the North Side of the Lincoln Park Neighborhood, Chicago Illinois. The massacre was Capone's effort to kill Moran, the leader of the North Side gang. The North Side gang had become increasingly annoying in hijacking Capone’s booze trucks and getting too close on the South Side and Capone was ready to put it to an end. The victims were cut in half by machine gun fire, with their faces missing from the shotgun blast. Apparently, the gang members thought that they had been scammed and that they had been set up for a raid. They lined up to cooperate in the belief that their lawyers would fix things downtown, as they had many times before. Moran, spotting what he thought to be a police car outside, decided to keep walking and did not enter the garage. The grim scene was discovered after the mechanic's dog began to bark so loudly that neighbors went in to see what was wrong. Frank Gusenberg, a member of the Moran gang, survived long enough to be questioned in a hospital before he died. However, when asked, "Who shot you?" Frank replied, "Nobody shot me” making it impossible to blame anyone. Moran was not even at the garage when the massacre began. In a later statement he said, “Only Capone kills like that”(Blackwood). After several years of Moran saying he was going to avenge his dead brothers and beloved friends, he never did. In 1929 Capone was finally arrested, and sent to prison. Capone’s incarceration was on the base of tax evasion, when the FBI raided his garage and found several coded accounts, the government finally had caught Capone. The charges were on his illegal income, and not paying a federal income tax. He only served six and a half years in prison because of good behavior. At first he was sent to Atlanta federal prison, a tough prison in the depression. After obtaining certain privileges he was then transferred to Alcatraz. Al Capone was famous during the depression, after Charles Lindbergh had finished his transatlantic flight; Capone was the first person he shook hands with (Sifikas).

Another high profile mobsters was John Dillinger with a soft “g”. He was born on the 22nd of June 1903. Dillenger was a bank robber in the great depression and earned his nickname “jack rabbit” by jumping over counters and escaping the police by mere seconds (World Book). John was one of the reasons the Federal Bureau of Investigations was created, along with Bonnie and Clyde.