On 17 October 1931, Al Capone was convicted in a Chicago federal court on five counts of tax evasion, and a week later Judge James Wilkerson sentenced him to eleven years in prison and to fines and court costs that came to more than 200,000 dollars. He was thirty-two. The conviction was for failing to pay tax on income that the government said came from illegal gambling and prostitution, and the jury had been told nothing about murders.
The investigation had been run by the Treasury Department rather than by the police. Frank Wilson, an Internal Revenue agent, had worked undercover in the Chicago underworld for years, gathering records of betting operations, and the case rested on showing that Capone had large unexplained income in the years from 1924 to 1929 and had not declared it. The evidence included ledgers, betting slips and testimony from men who had handled money for him.
Capone's defence had assumed that the charges would be about violence. He was the best-known criminal in the country, the man associated with the St Valentine's Day massacre of 1929, in which seven men were shot in a garage, and with a decade of gang warfare over bootleg alcohol in Chicago. His lawyers had been preparing for a murder or prohibition case, and when the government moved on tax they tried to negotiate a plea and were outmanoeuvred when the judge refused to accept one.
He served time in Atlanta and then in Alcatraz, where he arrived in 1934 and was given work in the laundry and, later, in the shoe shop, and where his health declined from syphilis that had gone untreated. He was released in November 1939, eight years early, and was described by doctors as having the mind of a child. He retired to his house in Florida and died there in January 1947. The tax case is still the standard method for prosecuting organised crime. It was used on him first.
He died in 1947. Tax is still the method.