During the Prohibition Years, Al Capone and his Chicago Outfit ran the bootlegging operations in their city and much of the Midwest US. Controlling this territory was no easy task. To keep ahead of his gangland rivals, Capone operated out of a succession of hotels, taking over entire floors to administrate his criminal empire. Among these headquarters, the Lexington Hotel became most closely associated with Capone and his crimes.

The Lexington Hotel opened in 1892 during the boom years of the Chicago meatpacking-industry and in anticipation of the Chicago’s World Fair the next year. Designed by local architect Clinton J. Warren, the hotel was built in a brick and terracotta style, featuring 362 rooms across ten stories. By the 1920s, the hotel was increasingly dilapidated, which suited Capone just fine for its use as a hideout.

Under the name George Philips, Capone moved into the fourth and fifth floors, taking over around 50 rooms to be staffed by bodyguards and cronies, not to mention a few personal chefs for good measure. Here, Capone administered his racketeering and bootlegging schemes. After the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, the hotel was dubbed “Capone’s Castle,” but the hideaway was not exactly impervious. After his conviction, Capone traded the castle for Alcatraz, and the Lexington Hotel fell into disarray.

This specimen is a fragment of brick from the Lexington Hotel, retrieved after its demolition in 1995. All specimens are enclosed in an acrylic specimen jar with a removable top which arrives in a handsome, glass-topped riker box case measuring 4x3x1". It comes complete with an informational card that serves as statement of authenticity.

American culture is one that idolizes the outlaw, and among all the cowboys, gangsters, desperados, pirates, and bandits, there is perhaps no one who maintains such a grip on our imagination more than Al Capone. At the height of the Prohibition Era, Capone’s Chicago Outfit controlled much of the bootlegging in the city and the larger Midwest, a criminal empire that maintained its grip on power with both brutal gang violence and insidious political corruption. Along with John Dillinger, Capone inhabited a new place in American life: the celebrity criminal who flouted his deeds proudly to the public.

Capone came to power in the context of the ascendancy of organized crime in opposition to the federal ban on the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol. Temperance movements had been organizing alcohol bans for decades before the 18th Amendment was passed, but with the new amendment to the Constitution, the bans went nationwide. The reasons for prohibition’s success go far beyond the political will of persistent religious groups. Prohibition also provided a vast expansion of the federal government’s powers, while the ban was most severely enforced upon disenfranchised immigrant and African American communities.

Just as the American government expanded to enforce this new ban, illicit enterprises grew to evade it. Local criminals in urban centers moved in to satisfy the demand that the shuttered breweries and distilleries no longer could. Networks were formed to organize the production and transportation of alcohol, transforming some fortunate gangsters from small-time enforcers of their respective territories into the leaders of vast criminal enterprises. Chicago, with its geographical placement, industrial resources, political corruption, and ascendant criminal groups, was primed to become the bootlegging capital of the nation, headed by Capone.

Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born on January 17, 1899, in Brooklyn to Italian immigrants Gabriele and Teresa. Journeying to the new world in search of a better life, Capone’s family was one of tens of thousands of Italian immigrants who came to America—one estimate puts the number of Italian immigrants in 1903 at 230,000. Like most of those others, the Capones found themselves living in squalid ghettos, the victims of anti-immigrant prejudice rife at the turn of the century. It was in destitute communities like these that some immigrants turned to crime as a means of survival, among them a young Al Capone.

As a young man, Capone worked at a box-making factory by day while operating as a small-time enforcer for different criminal groups in New York by night. While working as a bouncer at gangster Frankie Yale’s bar, The Harvard Inn, Capone offended a female patron whose brother slashed his face, earning Capone his permanent nickname: Scarface. Capone’s work for the mob deepened partly out of necessity to support his growing family. In 1918, he married his girlfriend Mary "Mae" Coughlin just after their son Albert was born. Capone was unfaithful to his wife and ended up contracting syphilis, which he passed to Mae and thus Albert, who needed a brain operation that left him partly deaf.

In 1919, Capone moved to Chicago to work as an enforcer under Johnny Torrio, whom he met through Yale. Torrio was one of many gangsters who recognized the opportunity in both bootlegging and mutual cooperation. Having ordered his boss Big Jim Colosimo’s assassination, Torrio sought to foster peace and cooperation between the various Italian, Jewish, Irish, German, Scandinavian, and Polish enterprises in the city. The tentative peace faltered with the enforcement of Prohibition in 1920 as different groups vied to control the city, chief among them Torrio and his new protege Capone.

In 1924, the Genna gang began running their bootlegging operation on the North Side Gang’s territory. The gang’s boss Dean O'Banion appealed to Torrio to enforce the peace he championed, but Torrio refused. Outraged, O'Banion set up a trap and had him arrested. Torrio in turn ordered the killing of O'Banion to be carried out again by Yale. O’Banion’s successor Hymie Weiss and his allies Bugs Moran and Vincent Drucci attempted to assassinate Torrio a few months later in early 1925. Gravely wounded, Torrio ceded control of the Outfit to Capone.

Capone was just 26 at the time and now in charge of one of the most deadly criminal enterprises in the country. Under his reign, the gang violence began in earnest during a period of six years dubbed the Beer Wars, during which hundreds of gangsters were killed. Capone was able to insulate himself from the violence and instead lived a life of luxury. With designer suits and a penchant for fine jewelry, he lived like a king while simultaneously attempting to cultivate a Robin Hood persona by opening a soup kitchen in the midst of the Great Depression. It was during this time that Capone and his crew operated out of the Lexington Hotel.

Capone’s celebrity image was stronger than ever, but that would soon come to an end. By 1929, Bugs Moran headed the North Side Gang, abiding by another tentative peace between his group and the Outfit, but territorial disputes assured more violence. On February 14, 1929, seven of Moran’s men were executed at a warehouse while waiting to receive a bootlegging shipment. The intended target, Moran, was a few minutes late and was spared the fate of his men. Capone, visiting Florida at the time, was safe from prosecution for the hit he most assuredly ordered.

With the massacre splashed across every front page in the country, Capone’s celebrity image evaporated overnight, while President Herbert Hoover branded him Public Enemy No. 1. Long protected by Chicago’s corrupt political class, Capone found himself cornered by law enforcement. Prohibition agent Eliot Ness and his team of Untouchables sought to prosecute Capone on his many connections to bootlegging and violence, but it was United States Attorney George E. Q. Johnson who was able to indict Capone on tax fraud in 1931. 

The man who had lived like a king all through Prohibition found himself just another inmate on Alcatraz Island with a sentence of 11 years. Never treated for his exposure to syphilis, the disease advanced to the point of severe mental deterioration, and Capone was paroled in 1939. With Prohibition over, the gang violence died down, and the Outfit largely returned to the other vices it had profited from before the 18th Amendment. As for Capone, he retired to Florida, where he died in 1947. His lavish mafioso lifestyle was echoed by Bugsy Siegel, John Gotti, and others who proudly flaunted their wealth to the public.