Al Capone Essay.

Essay by ballsy2743High School, 11th gradeA+, January 2006

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Al "Scarface" Capone was an American gangster of the prohibition era whose career illustrated the power and influence of organized crime in the United States. Capone took the "Italian criminal society" and fashioned it into a modern American criminal enterprise. There were a few major points in his existence that impacted him considerably starting with his childhood, the beginning of his criminal empire, and his peak when he became one of the most talked about criminals in America.

Al Capone was born on January 17, 1899 to an immigrant family from the Naples region in Italy (Haller 1). At the age of fourteen, Al dropped out of school because his family background made it impossible to succeed. He was discriminated against all his childhood. As Joel Goldfarb put it, he was "embittered by the gap between the American dream and reality" (Goldfarb 1). Capone felt forced to turn to illegal activities and gangs to achieve success in what he saw as an unjust society.

He grew up in a rough neighborhood and became a member of two "kid gangs", the Brooklyn Rippers and the Forty Thieves Juniors.

Al Capone was introduced to the criminal world through a man named Johnny Torrio, whom was the first modern fraudster. Torrio owned an office nearby Al's neighborhood and as a child, Al would run errands in order to earn money. Torrio became a mentor of Capone and showed him how cunning and intelligence, rather than force, could be used to make a fortune ("Al Capone"). Despite these teachings from Torrio, Capone planned to earn his money legitimately as an adult rather than to pursue a criminal career. Capone later held legal jobs in a Brooklyn munitions factory and then as a paper cutter.

At the age of fifteen, Al met his future wife,