Quite a lot has been written and said about Al Capone in newspaper and magazine articles, books,
and movies that is completely false. The cliche for gangsters in that era is that they were born in Italy. For
many that is a true statement. For Alphonse Capone it is not. He was born in Brooklyn on January 17, 1899.
What kind of people were his parents, giving birth to one of the world's most notorious criminals? Was Al
Capone abused as a child? Did he spend his tender years in the company of murderers and thieves? Definitely
not. "...nothing about the Capone family was inherently disturbed, violent, or dishonest. The children and the
parents were close; there was no apparent mental disability, no traumatic event that sent the boys hurtling into
a life of crime. They did not display sociopathic or psychotic personalities; they were not crazy. Nor did they
inherit a predilection for a criminal career or belong to a criminal society... They were a law-abiding,
unremarkable Italian-American family with conventional patterns of behavior and frustrations; they displayed
no special genius for crime, or anything else, for that matter."(1)
Al Capone started to attend school at the age of five. Education for Italian children was very poor in
those days. The school system was prejudiced against Italians and didn't do much to encourage any interest in
higher education. Children were expected to leave school as soon as they were old enough to work. Despite all
this Alphonse maintained a B average. There was a lot of violence in schools at that time, fistfights were
common between teachers and students. A lot of the teachers were not much older than the students and most
of them female, but their gender did not stop the students from hitting them. At the age of fourteen Alphonse
got angry at a teacher and she hit him. He hit her back and was immediately expelled for doing so. After that ...