Most Overrated Gangster:

Al Capone. It’s amazing what a hit TV series and a few popular movies can do for a guy’s image. Al Capone and Eliot Ness are inextricably locked together in the mythology of twentieth-century American gang warfare, yet they never met and had practically nothing to do with each other. Capone, of course, made Ness famous, not the other way around. Capone was the best-known gangster in America in his own lifetime, and no one knew the name of Eliot Ness until Robert Stack played him on television. But it’s altogether possible that Capone’s fame would have faded by the sixties.

It certainly should have. Nearly every popular conception about Al Capone is erroneous, and nearly all his significance exaggerated. Though his name is generally the first one that pops up when TV journalists discuss “the Mafia,” Capone had virtually nothing to do with that organization outside of occasionally using one of its assassins on loan. Capone wasn’t even Sicilian, and neither was the man who brought Capone to Chicago from Brooklyn, Johnny Torrio. Torrio, along with Arnold Rothstein and Meyer Lansky, was one of the great brains and organizers of the modern mob. It was Torrio who saw the coming of Prohibition and what it would mean to the Chicago gangs, it was Torrio who understood the importance of organization within the Italian mob of his uncle “Big Jim” Colosimo, and it was Torrio who had Colosimo eliminated. History and Hollywood gave Al Capone credit for most of these achievements, but it was Torrio who overcame the obstacles and then went back to Brooklyn, handing Capone the machine that would reputedly make him the richest man in America.

Capone didn’t improve on Torrio’s ideas in any appreciable way. If anything, he never understood the principie of cooperation between gangs; to put it simply, he never understood the idea of a syndicate. Though he always claimed to be a businessman, he understood nothing about the art of negotiation, and every confrontation with competing gangs ended in war.

For all the talk of Capone as the “unofficial mayor” of Chicago, he never succeeded in “taking over the city.” He never came close. He wasn’t even safe in his own headquarters town of Cicero, Illinois, where the North Siders parading by Capone’s hangout in black sedans pumped more than a thousand rounds of Thompson .45 bullets through the windows. He eventually had to turn himself in on a phony gun-possession rap and serve a prison stretch partly to escape reprisals from his enemies and partly because the real mob leaders in New York —Luciano, Lansky, and Owney Madden—told him to cool it.

He was on top of the organization that would continue to bear his family name for only a few years and was thirty-one when sentenced to eleven years in prison for income tax evasion, after which he was finished