Mention the name Al Capone and it conjures up images of a notorious gangster from the time of the American Prohibition era who was involved with murder, bootlegging illegal liquor, smuggling and prostitution.
However this machine gun tottling criminal legend, who many believe instigated the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, was given shots in playing golf on the Old Course at St. Andrews, Turnberry and Muirfield.
Capone’s exploits with the golf clubs are detailed in a new book released by his grand-niece, Dierde Marie Capone – Uncle Al Capone: The Untold Story From Inside His Family.
Despite being just aged seven when Capone died, the author goes to lenghts to say how America’s most famour criminal, who served part of his 11-year tax evasion sentence on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, just adored Scotland and revealing Capone once made a secret trip to play the just as infamous Old Course.
The books also Capone so much enjoyed golf he bought a set of clubs when in Scotland and had the suppier engrave his initials into the heads.
”He was in love with the game and with Scotland,” says Mrs Capone (72). ”I remember seeing his bag of clubs in the house in Miami where he lived. He told me they’d been made for him in Scotland.”
Capone sailed to Britain under a false identity, and is believed to have played rounds at St Andrews, Turnberry and Muirfield, where he met businessmen and those also on the wrong side of the law exporting alcohol.
Earning $28 million a year in the 1920s by satisfying the illicit demand for alcohol in the US, he slipped out of Chicago to visit Scotland.
Armed with false papers, he sailed for Britain with his personal caddy, a gun-toting thug who doubled as a bodyguard.
While he was in Scotland, hand-picked professionals apparently pocketed large fees for giving him lessons — and, if they recognised their student, keeping their mouths shut.
Mrs Capone, a mother-of-four, said the man who ordered the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 was sick of gangland life by the time he left jail in 1939.
”Al would tell my grandfather, ‘I’ve got to get out,” she said.
“I’ve been shot, almost poisoned and there’s an offer of $50,000 to any man who kills me’.
”Maybe if he’d taken another trip to Scotland to relax, he’d have lived longer. I could see him buying a home in St Andrews”.
Capone led a $100million Chicago crime syndicate but his reputation soured with the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in the Lincoln Park neighbourhood on Chicago’s North Side. Details of the killing of the seven victims in a garage at 2122 North Clark Street and the extent of Capone’s involvement are widely disputed.
Capone was finally arrested by Federal agent Eliot Ness and his team, The Untouchables, and jailed in 1931 but not for murder but for tax evasion, and his 11-year sentence was one of the largest in US history for such an offence.
He was paroled in 1939, but syphilis caused his mental health to deteriorate.
On January 21st, 1947 and only aged 48, he suffered a stroke. He regained consciousness and started to improve but contracted pneumonia and suffered a fatal cardiac arrest the next day before passing away on January 25, 1947, on Deirdre Marie’s seventh birthday.
He died in his Palm Island, Florida and with his family around him.
