Old Al Capone

 There was once this little boy who showed up in Chicago. He was a very nice boy and had two little brothers.

His younger brother would eventually run away and join the circus. Really he was part of the Old West performers who traveled often appearing as an outlaw with his gun drawn.

This was after his two older brothers joined a gang. Or the mafia as they call themselves while the authorites insisted there was no organized criminal group.

Al Capone is what he came to be called and he did everything on the way up the ladder in order to get noticed. 

The authorities finally sent him to Alcatraz, well known as a bad prison due to being on a island. It was a civil war fort before it was a prison and before that a lighthouse in the middle of the bay across from San Francisco.

They got him for tax invasion, legally they could not touch him for anything else. He was known to party and play with movie stars. His gambling and womanizing were notorious. 

There have been many movies on him and his antics but never a word of his family he left back at home while he traveled on business.

Business is what his granddaughter calls it, the auction house called it a century of notoriety. 

He had married a beautiful woman named MAE who gave him a son called sonny. They lived outside his sphere of influence. They also went to parades and other types of normal Americana. 

Sonny had a collection of knives, guns, badges and belt buckles of the Old West. It was said often he became a dentist perhaps a reference to a type of torture or just mundane livelihood.

He did marry as well, and had three blond girls. Al's granddaughters are not bad people and for the most part are ignored by the mainstream media. 

Diane is the oldest and has written a book about grandpa and given lectures including the new mafia museum in Los Vegas. 

She also decided to have an auction of her families legacy. For the most part, her father was seen as a good boy who stayed home with mom. 

Thier collection was of a few antiques, the dinnerware and what not that went along with his private parties at the Florida home. 

And a lot of photos of the family, sonny's collections and a few oddities of Al's. Most of his items had been seen in movies or news shows of his not so good life.

He was cigar smoker, he had a monogrammed matchbook cover, tie pins, cufflinks and one or two of his favorite guns. 

Now this story is an old one for me or myself. My grandmother worked as a radio announcer during WWII while her husband was away parachuting in Europe. He broke his back at one point and was assigned to be a clerk in Cairo. 

Which meant he took a law degree and used his wives knowledge of the Dewey system, since she had been a Librarian before the war. He was also a photographer by wars end, all the non glorious jobs while his wives voice came across the airwaves.

She was not having a good time but doing her job for the war effort. Her family at home were a mixed religion which did not include Catholics. There was often trouble between the in laws, she had many brothers and only one surviving sister who worked in Hollywood during the war.

She often traveled across the borders, Canada and Mexico for her family and was noted for the small child who pestered her constantly. They had a girl before the war started, my mother and then a boy just after the war who disappeared.

My grandmother survived being blitzed in London, and torpedoed on her way to Africa to find her husband in a military's hospital. 

But she had difficulty dealing with her own family, some of whom turned out to be the enemy, Nazis who had joined the Mormon movement in order to promote their white race supremacy. 

Even today, the joke about the book of Mormon shows white, blond, and blue eyed males in white shirts promoting purity and chastity. 

She was a throw back and had black hair while her parents mused how that occurred. Her mother was something else and endured the harassments on the knowledge her husband supported her. He was the one to throw out the extra in laws.

She also ended up with an in law sent to Alcatraz, who later turned out to be innocent, but not until after he endured decades in jail. His last name was spelled several ways and one way was hitsman instead of heightsman. 

Anyways, in her journeys she meet Al Capone at the spas in Mexico, at the Alcatraz prison's and probably at the border crossings in Canada. He was supposed to be an importer of alcohol which was illegal at that point. 

She often carried personals messages of her family and equipment for her radio or her husbands photography. 

My mothers middle name was trouble. She caused enough of it and later her family found out she had tumors and died of brain cancer. 

It does not explain her difficulty in getting along with her ow family nor her obsession's in adopting those who clearly did not belong nor were religious but criminals. 

Often the family found new digs or houses to live in outside of Salt Lake in order to keep her under control and away from those inside the family who might do her serious harm. 

One such place was Florida, they had built a small house with a huge yard, a dock for the boat, and a swimming pool with slide for her to exercise and have friend over for parties. 

My grandparents were always Romanizing their daughter would be well and sane one day. Instead she had a steady decline but married her childhood boyfriend, my father who kept her from the worst of her fantasies. 

Here Al Capone arrived and built a huge house right next door. His family had thier own little paradise while my grandmother was having a melt down. 

She wanted peace and was not amused but the time to flee was too late. She stayed when she thought he was not in residence. She knew famous authors such as Hemingway in Cuba and was often traveling. 

Another episode in their lives was the arrival of a certain Jim. He is not related to us nor could we ever get him to go away. Even now he uses the family name and wont acknowledge his own father Captain Kangaroo whom he looks just like. 

He was on his shows and he did everything he could to be a bad guy. His psychologist had a nervous breakdown and has since died. While he has brought one more girlfriend home with him, when he gets tired of the one in residence, he just moves on to a different girl and then another girl and then a different one.

Anyways, he liked to stalk us and carry out little situations where he got to play god. The authorities put him in insane asylums, prisons, deportation centers and even attempted to execute him. He tripped on his way to the chair, and pulled the plug out of the wall with his foot. They only throw the switch once in Arizona and he was allowed to walk free due to a technicality. 

Ever lucky, he found Al's house especially tantalizing. The family after Al's death was not in residence and Jim treated it as his own. He liked the tunnels and even found a little tiny submarine. My grandparents called the FBI whom they believed had them under surveillance anyways. When they arrived and Jim was happily driving the little thing around in the water with the hatch up, he simply plunged it down and swam away. 

God knows where he found the thing, maybe at Al Capones and maybe at one of the other houses along the stretch of homes with boat houses as access to their homes. His girlfriends enjoyed going through my families possessions on the basis they would one day inherit from a family that was not thiers. 

Which just meant the items went missing as soon as our backs were turned. We were not the Kennedys but had enough to get through life until the many girls arrived asking for handouts and leaving behind their bastards, non of which were the impotent Jim's.

So, the granddaughters of Al Capone decided to hold a small auction in Sacramento instead of New York city. I watched it online, hoping to bid on something small. The little black watch which is just like the one in my grandmothers radio photo for instance. 

Instead, the bidding was fierce, the memorabilia was wanted, even small items for collectors. The letter written from Alcatraz went for much higher than was thought. And on it went, everything was much higher than the auction house had anticipated.

His favorite gun, listed at about one hundred thousand prospect, went through a horse race of bidders. The end result, was just over a million dollars for one gun once used by the notorious Capone. 

His family home in Florida went for a modest price and the furniture also had nice prices but not enormous ones. 

There was a very fine painting with a brass placard as if it had hung in a museum, along with several other items of worthiness. 

But the watch was too high to even place a bid, and the rest of the loot went at a fast pace. The last was his cufflinks, often shown on shows, for an enormous price. 

The private collectors had a field day in a small auction house instead of Sotheby's. I wonder if any of the museums attempted to collect his items. 

For better or worse, a family who has had to deal with at least the public view of their grandfather being a criminal has come full circle in their benefiting from his notoriety. 

While my family lost most of their respectability over a celebrities insistence on targeting them. He is still seen as a saint with his blond hair and blue eyes, while most of my family are gone and those who remains have difficulty remembering whom they are to us. 

Friend or Foe, take it or leave it. Family is family and friends loyalty often tested, but it is the insanely obssessed who ruin even a good criminals auction.