The beautiful Mae Coughlin Capone in all her splendor. (Mario Gomes collection). 
Posted on 10/16/2016 2:36:28 PM PDT by heterosupremacist
Al Capone, public enemy No. 1 and the most powerful gangster of the Prohibition era, spent the last years of his life in seclusion at his house in Florida. He fished from his boat, doted on his grandchildren, dined on his wife Mae’s spaghetti — and had imaginary conversations with long-dead mobsters, some of who, he’d had killed.
His brain ravaged by a syphilis infection that had gone untreated, he had the mental capacity of a 12-year-old. The man who once ruled the Chicago Outfit, a multimillion-dollar bootlegging and racketeering empire that spanned North America, was just happy to be taken to the drugstore to buy a pack of Dentyne gum.
The gangster’s last years are detailed in Deirdre Bair’s new biography, “Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend.”
“It was, in many ways, an ideal, middle-class Italian-American household where family came first,” says Bair, who’s written acclaimed biographies of Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung. “It was much different from the lavish life he led when he was at the top of the world.”
That’s partly because Capone was broke, Bair reports. In the 1920s, his yearly income was estimated at $40 million. But he ran the Outfit for only six years. He spent most of the 1930s in jail for tax evasion. When he was released in 1940, the Outfit gave him a salary of $600 a week, hardly enough to support his family, house and staff.
Newspaper reports that Capone secretly controlled the Outfit from behind the walls of his Palm Island compound may have originated from the occasional flashes he had of his glory years, as well as those imaginary conversations he had with old cronies. Reporters camped outside the gates of his house and turned any scrap of gossip into a headline.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“She knew that it was dangerous for him to go out in public,” Bair says.
An angry public outburst, caused by his syphilis-addled mind, would have been fraught with peril. If the Outfit got wind he was nattering on about old business, he was a dead man. And if a judge heard Capone was violent, he could have been confined to a mental home.
She was one of those wives who made spaghetti for Al and the gang at 3 in the morning when they did business back when he was in charge. She must have heard everything.”
Capone died in bed on the morning of Jan. 25, 1947. The cause was bronchial pneumonia. His death made front pages around the world, but the funeral was a modest affair, Bair writes, because the Outfit allowed only a few of Capone’s old friends to attend.
Mae clung to the Palm Island house until 1952, when reduced circumstances forced her to sell it. It sold two years ago for $7.4 million and can now be rented for film shoots or private functions.
Mae died at 89 in 1986. Not long before her death, she put a match to her diaries and the love letters Capone sent her from prison.
She was, Bair says, “protective of him to the end.”
Bill already has.
Given Hillary’s advanced Parkinson’s it will be interesting to see how Huma governs.
Not Hillary’s last days?
The beautiful Mae Coughlin Capone in all her splendor. (Mario Gomes collection).
And where are they all now? Probably in the lake of fire. What does it profit to gain the whole world - and lose your soul?
What? Don’t you all realize that ...
Hillary’s Dad took over the Chicago mob when Al Capone was locked away. And the Chicago mob is actually America’s mob.
That & Alinsky is why criminal Hillary may be next President.
$600 a week in 1940 was pretty good pay.
My suggestion is that the government should re-open Alcatraz and make it a retirement home for Bill and Hillary...and look at all the “friends” they could take with them....good idea??
Really, more than pretty good. To give an idea, when my dad got home from WWII he bought a beachfront lot in So. California for $600.
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=600&year1=1940&year2=2016
Yes. In 1940, inflation had not set in from the war yet.
Adjusted for inflation, that would be over $333,000 dollars a year. I could “get along” on that.
Remind you of anyone?
Butch O’Hare was a WWII ace Navy aviator who was awarded the Medal of Honor. O’Hare International is named for him. His father was Easy Eddie O’Hare, a Chicago lawyer who worked for Al Capone and the mob. He later turned against Capone and helped the IRS get the evidence to convict him of tax evasion. He was assassinated mob-style while driving in Chicago just before Capone’s release from prison.
Pretty, but amoral.
I doubt if she's strumming a harp right now.
Leni
over 10,000 bucks a week today.
Syphilis treatment in the days before penicillin took a year-long regimen of neoarsphenamine shots and mercury rubbings, analogous to chemo and radiation in today’s cancer treatments. As in the chemo/rad with cancer, it either cured you, or killed you. It’s not surprising that people with checkered young lives would succumb to tertiary syphilis in their middle age, especially if, like an Al Capone, they would have thought themselves invincible.
NYP getting worse and worse under Murdoch kids. Making a sadistic criminal a sympathetic figure while dumping daily on this nation’s salvation.
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