>> you're watching book tv with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. book tv television for serious readers. >> tonight on c-span 2, a special night of book tv by biographies. next up deirdre bair with al capone. a biography of elinore roosevelt. clint hill on five presidents. and diane guerrera wrote a book with her immigrant parents i

don't the country we love". and darrell issa on his time as committee chair. >> ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 52nd season of theater 80, the museum of american gangster. welcome to the c-span audience. extraordinarily happy to have deirdre here to speak about this book. it's one of my great interests growing up in organized crime. i was raised in the religious society of friends, what anybody ever says, oh, you know, i don't subscribe to organized religion, i always say, i don't either. i grew up quaker where organized crime. the only thing we ever did in an organized way, we don't have theology so is break the law, from the 1600's when we came

about with draft resistance, the underground railroad, the sanctuary movement. the only thing we do in an organized way is break the law. and so, in our museums we began to redefine the way people look at organized crime as a struggle between american moral certainty, the thou shalt not rule and the liberty, yes, but it's our right to. and organized crime has always come out of that intersection between these two great concepts that are always at war and define us and one of the great, great characters in this story. one of the true geniuses to come out of this is al capone and it's so wonderful to have a new book that delves into him as something more than stereotypes and car soon figures. enough from me other than

housekeeping, if anything horrible happens the emergency exits are here and here. if you have anything that will make noise during the talk, cell phones, beepers, small children, dates from new jersey, please do turn them off now. also, please do not take any film or recordings of the talk in progress. very important. without further ado, and great joy, deirdre bair. thank you. [applaus [applause] >> there will be a questions and answers period afterwards. we'll organize that and you can step up to the mic in an orderly fashion and ask your questions. >> well, thank you all for coming. it's delightful to see everyone here and so many good friend,

that makes me especially happy. i'm going to begin tonight by reading a few pages from the book that's going to give you a brief introduction to al capone starting with the man himself and the legend that he became and then i'm going to talk a little about his life and his legacy to sort of give you a sense of what you're going to find when you read the book yourself. this is how i begin the book. this is the story of a ruthless killer, a scoff law, a keeper of brothels, and bordellos, a tax cheap, a perpetrator of fraud and a mindless blubbering idiot. this is the story of a loving son, a husband and a father who described himself as a businessman, whose job was to serve the people what they wanted. al capone was all of these.

he died in 1947 and almost seven decades later, it seems that anywhere one travels in the world people still recognize his name and they have something to say about who he was and what he did. everyone has an opinion and, yet, within the deeply private world of his extended family, there is an ongoing quest to find definitive answers about the family's most famous member. the saying goes that all family history is often a mystery and that all families are closed narratives, difficult to read from the outside, attempting to reconstruct the truth of the family is very much like trying to solve the most complicated puzzle imaginable and in the case of those who bear a name that is famous or in the case of al capone's relatives and descenden descendents, infamous, the task

can be heavy indeed. some of his relatives found it easier to change their surname than to deal with the history and chose to distance themselves and denied the relationship for a number of reasons. some merely wanted to lead ordinary, private lives. some said they feared reprisals from gangland chicago while still others, who remained connected, in varying degrees, said they wanted to make their way in the world unencumbered by the long shadow of al capone and still, there were those who kept the capone name, but said it was the reason why they had to lead parapatetic lives. tomorrow moving far away as they could get and some moving cautiously throughout northern illinois, never far from the security and the familiar environment of chicago. in recent years, the question

who has the right to claim a legitimate place within the family of al capone has resulted in some interesting pieces that may or may not fit into the puzzle of its history. you, who only know him from newspaper stories, will never realize the real man he is, said his sister in 1929 when he was in his prime. it's a remark echoed today by his granddaughters who have only recently become involved in sorting out what they call their amazing family history. one of the questions they ponder repeatedly is how one man could embody so many different personality traits. they talk among themselves about their family history and they argue and they debate about whose memory is the most correct and which is the

closest to the truth. they strive to assess their grandparents and parents with honesty, objectivity, distance and attachment and they admit the difficulty, if not the impossibility of arriving at a definitive conclusion. when they talk about their papa, as they call him, they first put al capone in air quotes and ask themselves what gave rise to the myth and to the lend. how did the grandfather they adored fit into all of these stories. where was the real person within the grandiose and exaggerated public personality whose exploits continue to grow ever more outrageous, seven decades after his death. it will be 80 years next year that al capone has been dead. what was it that makes the name of a man who died sick, broke

and demented in 1947 so instantly recognizable a decade and a half into a brand new century? are we fascinated with him today because of the so-called roaring 20's, the colorful time in which he lived? is it because we now seek to understand the many ethnic histories that formed our country and therefore, the circumstances of his birth and family life as an italian american that might shed some light on our own asemlation as americans? or is it simply al capone's larger than life personality, the outsized figure who strutted across our historical stage for such a brief time that we did not have enough time when he was with us to assess him? after so many intervening years can we figure him out?

and after seven decades, is nothing left, but a myth? the members of his family agree with me that the enigma of al capone is a riddle to be solved and now is the time to try to do it. and now i'm going to read you a little about the legend of al capone as it is today. al capone's brief life was florid and dramatic, but his after life is even more colorful and outsized. his reign as the king of crime lasted for six short years and even after he was stripped of power, the public still could not get enough of him. in the almost seven decades since he died, the frenzy of publicity he inspired during his lifetime has increased exponentially and shows no sign of slowing down. he died in 1947 and in 2016,

the daily google alert still records anywhere from half a dozen to two dozen new hits every single day. new books and films appear about him almost every year and these include novels, biopics, documentaries and even mockumentries. and they purport to tell the whole truth for as well audiences that include adults and one very, very young children. and one eight-year-old told me he killed bad guys and that was okay because it let him feed poor people. the television series boardwalk empire made him surprisingly not an anti-hero, but a genuine hero and younger viewers can't get enough of him. his name appears on all sorts of lists, including one from the smithsonian magazine that named him one of the 100 most

influential americans of all time in the entire history of our country. websites are devoted to him and the mob museum in las vegas have its best crowds when they future him. mad madame tussaud museum had a life sized statue of al capone in his cell playing the mandolin. and gangsterologists has those fascinated by criminals have been dubbed and professors who proclaim themselves capone scholars have every aspect of his life and if it can be called as such, his work. law schools study his court case. bar associations reenact it, and academic institutions from the most august to the most local offer courses. harvard business school

examines the capone outfit as a case study. the kankakee community college in illinois holds a course entitled simply, al capone, and when it was first given it was so popular that it was oversubscribed and two more sessions had to be scheduled. restaurants claimed he ate there and cocktails and sandwiches were named for him. hotels contend he slept there and there was the legend that he sneaked away to play golf on scottish courses. one reporter said it best. if al capone frequented a tenth of the places he was said to have, the notorious mobster would not have had time to be in the chicago empire let alone run the thing. the title can command far more interest than most of them

merit. cats and dogs on internet postings, the countless pit bulls who bear his name are sure to be quickly adopted. his name alone can secure a good table as a young woman in san francisco who bears the capone surname finds every time she tries to reserve a table in a posh restaurant. his face is on postage stamps and they even have one of may hiding her face behind a fur coat. and in kyrgyszstan where his image is centrally placed among the notorious gangsters, mugshots, al capone is in the center. in romania websites and meetup groups proliferate and writers there speak with americans who write about al capone's life in crime. in bulgaria. the bulgarian mafia say they

study the out fit to learn how to conduct business. [laughter] >> in 1950's. the cray brothers notorious for murder and extortion modeled themselves after, quote, that upper class criminal, al capone. and in iceland, the entire town of arberg is allegedly obsessed with its week long al capone festival, where all the residents are devoted to the scourge of chicago. when the mexican drug lord, el chapo, escaped from prison, the comparison to al capone was immediate and el chapo was quickly dubbed the new public enemy number one. reporters don't stretch their intellects when writing stories about tax dodging hedge fund managers. they just make the immediate comparison to al capone and the public gets the message. amazing, mused a criminal

defense lawyer in chicago, how often his name is used to spice up a story. and without any reference to who he is, was or might have been, al capone's name is the one to grasp when making comparisons with everything from the current presidential election to the finale of the immensely popular television series downton abby. it's so easy for everyone to compare donald trump to al capone, but hillary clinton gets her comparisons as well. donald trump is al capone on steroids and hillary clinton is al capone in a pantsuit. [laughter] >> and donald trump's tax situation and hillary clinton's e-mails get plenty of comparison.

and as for downton abby, the new york times, summing up the six seasons of the pbs serial wrote that that hapless servant couple, bates and anna, each charged with separate murders spent more time in jail than al capone. [laughter] >> people from chicago who travel abroad have a tale or two to tell of what happens to them when they say they're from chicago. the local residents quickly form their hands into a tom why i -- tommy gun and make the sound. and as one man wrote on reddit, i get sick and tired of tourists coming here in al capone t-shirts. one of more thoughtful replies says the fascination continues because idolizing al capone

gets easier as time goes by, and we get more and more disconnected from what he actually did and it's precisely this disconnect that has contributed to the unending question of what was there about this man to turn him into an international cultural icon and why the mere mention of his name sets up a chain of immediate associations. writers have long pondered the question of why this particular man became the ubercelebrity among gang stars and mobsters and why the legends that have grown up around both sides of his life, vite and the benevolent have become so shrouded in myths. how did he of all the other outsized criminal characters of his era become an internationally recognized cultural reference while so many others go unrecognized

today. and he was born in brooklyn, january 17th, 1899. and he was the fourth son and the second one born in the united states to italian immigrant parents, gabrielli and theresa capone. he was from a family that was born in the old country and seeped in italian tradition, but all his life he was quick to correct anyone angrily and say i am an an american, i was born in brooklyn and he was proud of it. his first home was a tenement at the main gate of the brooklyn navy yard and grew up watching a group of boys who would assault sailors that

would pour out of the main gate. as soon as he was old enough, probably around 8 years old. he joined this gang. he was big for his age and he was a fast runner so no sailor ever caught him and by the time he was 12, he had graduated from being the gang's mascot to being one of its most dependable and fearless fighters. he stayed in school through the 6th grade, which he had to repeat, but not because he was a bad student, but because actually he was a very good student, but because he played hooky so often he was seldom in the classroom. his parents believed in education and they wanted all their sons to stay in school as long as possible, but every one quit at the first opportunity and they found work such as it was in pennyante activity. and he liked school and might

have stayed longer if he hadn't gotten into a brawl with his teacher. he knocked her down and knocked her out and left school and never went back and then followed his two older brothers into the criminal world. this is after the oldest brother simply walked out of the house one day and disappeared not to be heard from again for the next 40-some years. and when he came back, he was known as two gun heart. a gun-toting horse riding cowboy in full regalia who had been a lawman in nebraska, dedicated to smashing stills and enforcing the laws of prohibition all of which his brothers had been actively flaunting. you can't make that up. al's leaving school was a particularly hard blow to his father and he hoped that his

son would lead a better life than his own. he set himself up, gabriel capone, as a barber while his wife took in boarders and she did sewing to help them keep afloat. he thought he was helping al be a legitimate businessman when he bought him a shoe shine box and set him under the clock. instead al became the opposite. from the ages of 14 to 18, he was a brooklyn punk who very early showed signs of the straight smarts that he later used to run the chicago outfit. now, his father did want al to learn the lessons of capitalism and in a very real sense he did. when the other boys saw what a gad location al had chosen, they set up their own boxes near his. well, al didn't want to get his hands dirty so he sold his box and then he rounded up some

other boys to intimidate the other enterprising shoe shiners into paying him protection money. if they wanted to keep on doing business, they had to pay al capone or else. so what are we going to call this? are we going to call this talent? and such talent did not go unnoticed by the various brooklyn crime bosses, who were always on the lookout for young and enterprising hoodlums to gin their prank. so that by the time al was 18 he was working for johnnie torio, the crime boss responsible for bringing him to chicago. by the time he was 19, al capone was also a father, several weeks before he became a married man. it was a most unlikely marriage for this was early in the 20th century when immigrant ethnic groups lived in their own enclaves and tend today stick

to their own kind. and mary jo kaufman, always called may, was irish. she was two years old than al and very much above him on the social rung of the immigrants groups pouring into this country. may's family was lace curtain irish while al was poorest of the poor. the kaufman's lived in their own house and the capons lived on the tenement walkup packed with others just like them. her father went to work in a white shirt and tie while his father cut hair in the family kitchen until he could save enough until he could set up his own shop. her mother went directly from her parents' house to her own house and never worked as so many irish girls did as a household servant. his mother clung to the ways of

the old country and was so frightened of the world outside her building that she never left it except for food shopping and she called that going down to america. the marriage of al and may was highly unusual for several other reasons. in those days, irish girls who married italian men were said to have made mixed marriages and the italian partner was commonly referred to as the coward. even more unusual, the marriage did not take place until several weeks after the birth of their only child, albert francis capone, who was always called sonny. a mixed marriage such as this brought almost as much shame to an irish family as did a pregnancy before marriage, but may stayed throughout the pregnancy, openly and proudly in her family home. al stayed in his and had to

visit the woman he desperately wanted to marry, but only when her mother wasn't there. it was generally believed by the capone descendents that mrs. kaufman was responsible for the delay because may's pregnancy was a difficult one and her mother thought she would miscarry and therefore there would be no need for a mixed marriage. sonny was born prematurely and may held firm. shortly after she gave birth she and al were married. before i talk about his life in crime, i want to take a moment to talk about the circumstances in which italian immigrants lived in the early years of the 20th century. i'm not using it to defend the reasons that al capone turned to a career in crime, but i want to use it to explain the world in which he grew up.

it was a time when the new york metropolitan area was swelled by around 800,000 people who came from southern and eastern europe. and it was when people like john quinn, the wealthy manhattan lawyer who bank rolled writers like t.s. elliott and james joyce and ezra pound, despised every one of these newcomers and this is what quinn said using one of the many slurs for italians. and i quote. there are 7 or 800,000 dagos, couple hundred thousand slavoks. 50 or 60,000, croats and ghermans, nothing, but walking appetites, but new york city officials had a different perspective and i quote again. we can't get along without the italians. we need someone to do our dirty

work and the irish won't do it anymore, only jacob reese who wrote about italian immigrants in his classic book, how the other half lives, saw the italian american situation for what it was and this is what he said. italians have the instinct of cleanliness, but it is drowned out by the nastiness of the tenements. gangs of every sort were rampant and it was almost as if there w there was no way for an upwardly striving italian boy than a life of crime. several things happened just off sonny capone was born and after al married may. their descendents and many scholars who study his life and work believe why he turned from legitimate work to a life of crime. just after he was married, his father died of a heart attack

at a very young age, 59 years old. and even though al was the fourth son, he was the dependable one, so he became the patriarch and the head of his family. the older brother had disappeared, the next two could not be counted on to support their mother, their sister and their three younger brothers, and it fell to al to provide for those five people as well as his own wife and son. his family thinks he might have been the legitimate businessman he always proclaimed himself to be if he had not suddenly become the sole support for seven people and writers who study al capone when he started his life in crime, they make remarks such as if he had been born 30 or 40 years later, he could have been lee iacocca and the case study supported that

possibility. so i'm not going to go into details how he got to chicago except i'm going to say that he claimed one simple reason for going there and i quote al capone here. i needed to make a living and i thought, i needed more. once he got there, his rise was spectacular. as one writer put it, and i quote here, capone would go from a $15 a week mop boy and occasion occasional beater to one of the most wealthy men, and did it in a mere six years. he was 25 when he took over and 31 when it all ended. and during those six years, his personal fortunate was estimated at over $40 million and by the time he went to jail, he was broke. in the book, i wrote that his

ascent in mobdom was sensational and his downfall meteoric and yet, here we are almost 80 years later and all of that has worldwide attention, interest and speculation. one of the reasons i think is because early on he learned how to co-on the media. i credit al capone with the invention of spin. while other gangsters stayed out of the limelight he courted it. he put reporters on his payroll and with one editor in particular, he offered the first crack at scoops in exchange for positive stories being written about him. he even tried to hire one of the earliest and most famous publicists to polish his public image. this was a man ivy lee, known

to all as poison ivy lee, he's a man who changed the public image of rockefeller and charles limbberg. and he offered ow r with unauthor to write about him as savior, this terrified writer, and the government set its sights on al capone and he had other things to worry about. and i hate to make comparisons to the current campaign year and can't resist doing it. reporters vied to describe the clothing he wore, the billious yellow or the pea green suit or the pinky ring 4 to 11 carats depending who was writing about it or the wads of silver

dollars that he allegedly threw from his special ly constructed sleet of bulletproof cars and when he set up a soup kitchen as a genuine act of kindness in the depression, reporters were quick to say, yeah, sure, kindness, but he extorted all the food he served from small businesses. and even after he went to prison, when there was nothing to report or write about, they invented stories. one headline read, al capone lost 11 pounds. another one was al capone read a biography of napoleon and the biggest scoop of all, in 1935, two russian soviet writers were touring the united states and in their book they wrote that al was sitting in his alcatraz cell secretly writing anti-soviet articles that the hearst groups were publishing. so i found out lots of surprising things about al capone during the four years i

spent researching and writing the book, but one of the most surprising was how briefly he was on top of the criminal world. he was in the courtroom for five, five and a half years after he ascended to power defending himself, but not from the several hundred murders he was thought to have ordered and the several dozen or so he was alleged to have been directly involved in. he was in the courtroom for tax evasion, particularly his income tax, and by 1931 he was in the atlanta federal penitentury, the most punitive prison in the country until alcatraz was set up in 1934 because the government wanted to send a lesson to the criminal world, that this was going to be a prison whose name would send shivers down the spines of the most hardened

criminals and who better to imprison than public enemy number one, al capone. never mind that his brain was already so riddled by syphilis that he had the mentality of somewhere between seven and 12 years of age. his end was a sad one, as he was released early on because the syphilis which he had contracted as a very young man and which he gave to his wife and son, had so riddled that mentality. he didn't die in prison, he died in his own bed in his miami house surrounded by the family that loved him and the wife who claimed she knew every terrible thing he had ever done, but she still loved him anyway. he was only 48 years old. and as i said, here we are, almost 80 years later, with his name so widely known that the smithsonian put him on its list

of the 100 most influential americans of all time. what was there then about al capone that captured so many different kinds of imagination? and i'm going to end by reading just a few paragraphs, again, from the book. a writer named katherine fullerton jarube in 1931 wrote an article about al capone and she called him gorgeously and typically american. and i think she was correct to say that about him because his rise to fame so paralleled the most unusual moment in american history, one that could well fit that same description and of course, i refer to prohibition. it was curious early form of political correctness that was imposed upon the entire country

when a small number of fanatics convinced the national government that laws mandating universal behavior could be enforced. it was a weirdly schizophrenic time when even the former president and later chief justice of the supreme court, william howard taft, observed with regret that the strongest tendency of human nature was the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people. i don't think we've changed very much, have we, since then? unlike others who had wealth and social station and used them surreptitiously to defy the unpopular law that they were often charged with enforcing, al capone ignored it and he told the truth about why he did so. he openly admitted that he sold illegal alcohol to the best

people and he said he did it as a public service to supply a demand that was pretty popular for most americans and in the 1920's, it made him an american hero because he did publicly what most of them had to do in hiding. al capone defied the law and he got away with it. it's an accepted truism that cultural norms underwent seismic changes at the end of world war i. women got the vote. they shortened their skirts and went to work. jaded and disillusioned men refused to join the traditional work force and they took off for foreign climbs to create the great american novel or to revolutionize the art world and their opting out of what was known as the traditional american way gave rise to the glamorous myths that have since surrounded european expatriates.

the rich, who always got richer, suddenly found they had lots of company as the economy soared and the middle classes found themselves with lots of disposable income. the time was right for thumbing one's nose at what constituted acceptable social conduct and with the flamboyant bootlegger leading the way many others were as eager to break the smaller prohibitions and restrictions on their private lives as they were to disobey the large one that was forced upon them by the 18th amendment. al capone led them on and the public loved him. even though he was largely responsible for watching the streets of chicago in blood. for most americans who did not experience such sights directly, newspaper photos and movies that portrayed sprawled

and bloody dead gangsters and bullet-ridden cars were only entertainment and far removed from real life. evil was appealing. it was even enticing as long as it didn't touch them directly. evil had become entertainment, disconnecting the public even more from the gang wars and al capone's part in them. james o'donnell bennett was one of the first journalists who tried to explain the phenomenon that al capone had become and he described how, and i quote here, with no conscience effort he emanated menace while saying please. he was the criminal version of a fopish dandy in his luredly colored, but exquisitely tailored suits with the handkerchief neatly folded in

his breast pocket to be whipped out to cover the facial scars whenever he needed to smile for the cameras. everyone knew to we bare of-- beware of the smile because it could turn sinister in a moment. there was a paradox with prohibition. he was so wildly charming, so blatantly outsized in everything that he did and so in the public eye, it was hard to believe that such a good fellow and one so highly entertaining, he of the pithey quotation and the phrase, he couldn't be that bad. and prohibition might have been the law of the land and no one would take it seriously. so why not take that drink? that's how al capone fulfilled the public's imagination and

how he was regarded until the market crashed and once that happened, public opinion reflected the changed new world of the great depression. public opinion is easily diverted and fickle at best and it turned against him. not entirely, but just enough for people to feel self righteous satisfaction to say in one breath that he got what was coming to him and in the next that he got that comeuppance in the shaky trial on trumped up charges and yet, even as they passed righteous judgment, they remained alert for every scrap of information about al capone's life in prison and his tales of his mea mental decline got out, they were there, the more the better. the stories of his lifetime are

often flawed both in content and interpretation. so arriving at the factual certainty of public events is difficult. the concensus-- sorry, the concensus is that arriving at anything approaching a definitive interpretation of the man who was al capone remains elusive. all that we have are speculation and probability, and they only lead to endless possibilities. oscar wilde said of himself, god knows when he was asked, what's posterity going to make of you? his answer, oscar wilde's answer was something that al capone could have said as well, and i quote, somehow or other i'll be famous and if not famous, i'll be notorious.

wilde envisioned himself as leading and again, i quote, a life of pleasure for a time and then after that, who knows? perhaps that will be the end of me, too. and for now, the only certainty as time passes and the man who was al capone recedes into history, the legend shows no sign of stopping. thank you. [applaus [applause] >> so often when you read a book it's a one way conversation. as you read i know you're going to want to have the opportunity that you're going to have now. don't miss it. if you have a question, please line up on say the fourth stair back and we'll have you come forward and ask a question. >> happy to answer it. >> have we any questions from the audience?

step up. real loud. can you-- >> i'll repeat it. i'll repeat it. i'll repeat the question. >> from the reality of a shoe shine boy. i'm sure you answered this later on, how did he get away with all of those murders. >> oh, the question, the basic question is how he got away with all of those murders. well he delegated. and he learned that from john why i torio. who deserves a biographer. i'm not going to write it, someone else. and al didn't get his hands dirty with the shoe shine kit or the murders. the st. valentine's day

massacre, one morning i had 12 different books spread out in my office as i was trying to arrive at certainly and every single one of them had a different version of who did what to whom. so, i gave up on trying to settle that question once and more all, but the point is when the st. valentine's day massacre took place, al capone was throwing a party for miami city government officials in his miami house. and that's one of the ways he got away with it. no murder was ever pinned on him as everybody seems to know, he went to jail for tax evasion and that was shaky because income tax was so new and there were so many differences in the laws at the time. another question? y yes. >> thank you so much.

the background of how you came to write the book. >> well, that's a very interesting story. all of my books begin, everything i write begins with either an idea that i have or a question that i want to find an answer for. and this one, in a sense, was a whole lot of questions i wanted answers for. but it began when a young man with an surname capone wanted to know his family history. he had heard a particular version of his family history that one of his uncles or perhaps even his own grandfather, could have been an illegitimate son of al capone and he through a friend of his sister who worked in new york city and found him. what should i tell him? should i tell him to get a private detective or a ghost writer?

and i said, well, i don't know, i don't really know what it is that they want to find out. so she said she'd get back to me and let me know and perhaps i could help her and help him. and i started reading books, i went to the library and picked up two or three books about al capone and i thought, this is it an incredibly fascinating man and having been a former journalist and investigative reporter, i thought, wow! wouldn't this be the scoop of the century? and so one thing led to another and i started out to write the boo being so i went to my agent and my publisher and told them i wanted to write about al capone and never forgot the shocked expressions on their faces. you? al capone? but i'm happy to say they both decided it might be a pretty decent book why didn't i go ahead and write it.

>> well, i just want to remind you, there will be books available in the lobby that she will sign for you. come up and use the mic. the microphone right here. >> why do you think people in bulgaria or-- what particular aspects of al capone they admired his murdering or his extortion? >> i just -- it boggles the mind, doesn't it? i wish i could give you an answer, i think there are probably many, many answers to such a question, but those countries, i do hate to generallylize, but they do have a reputation for what should we call it, disreputable behavior

and perhaps that has to do with it. there's a lot of gangs, and poverty. in romania in particular. i know romania because i wrote about sal steinberg. i don't know about bulgaria, the poverty, the way that certain ethnic groups have to live, there are parallels to the immigrant experience in the early 20th century, it may have something to do with it, an immigrant boy in brooklyn who became a success and they may think that's the way for them to go. other than that, i can't answer it. >> i'm sure there are questions. don't feel shy. there have got to be more questions. >> can i add to that? >> yes, please. >> going along with the

different cultures and like being attracted to him, there's a lot of myths within like mexico, like a robinhood type and maybe like they have some sort of myth of their own that sort of goes along with the lines of like al capone. i've noticed that with a bunch of different countries that they all seem to have this myth of like this robin hood type character and maybe that's what they're sort of like, you know, sort of like grabbing onto. >> sure. >> as far as like idealizing him. >> sure, excellent observation. >> going once. >> oh,here comes somebody. >> i've had the joy and

pleasure of reading the book and it's phenomenal. and one of the things i understand that distinguishes this book is because of your talk and work with the family about it, the man is more human than we've ever known, a side of him that the family man from their point of view. so, could you say some more about that now? >> sure. as i said, he had, he and may had one son, always known as sonny, and perhaps because sonny was a sickly child, sonny did not go to school until he was in, i think, the 7th grade. he was home schooled and may was very protective of sonny. that might have had something to do with why he did not follow his father into a life of crime. but also, i believe, that may

was responsible and i think al wanted sonny to grow up straight, if we will. sonny went to notre dame. he started at notre dame and the joy al felt in his son being a student at notre dame university was beyond stratospheric. so sonny had four daughters. he married his high school sweetheart and of the four daughters, one of them died of cancer and the three others are still alive. and i had the great pleasure of getting to know them as well as so many other family members and they were young, they were children, very small children, but they were older enough to have strong memories of their grandfather and their grandmother and they told me the stories of being-- they grew up in miami and told me the stories of being at the

palm island house with their grandparents who adored them and may lived to be 86. al died when he was 48. she was 50 then. so she lived a very long life after his death and she would often visit these grandchildren and she would tell them her stories and as one of them said to me, it was mama may's-- they called her mama mae. and it was mama mae's reality and of course, it was a reality with rose-colored glasses, we understood it and we loved her so we let her tell the stories. that's how the family background came in. and then something interesting, when i first started talking to the granddaughters and i had met a couple of other family members in the chicago area who were descendents of one of his

brothers and then someone phoned me and said, you know, i'm in the midwest and i know a whole capone family here and maybe you'd like to talk to them. they have another name. they were all deeply closeted. all the brothers, except ralph, changed their name from capone and they did this during al's lifetime. they wanted to get away from under his shadow. and i joke about this, that this is true, i'm responsible for so many capone family reunions, i can't tell you. [laughter] >> because i introduced the cousins on the west coast to the midwest cousins to the chicago area cousins, to the eastern cousins and they've all met each other. i have been able to see some of the reunions, the great emotion that takes place when they see each other. so i had lots of stories from lots of different family

members and friends. there was a 96-year-old woman still alive who knew many people in al capone's immediate personal world and my job was to take all of these stories and to factor them into, what shall we call it, the most objective, the most real, the most probable, possible version of his life and so that's what i tried to do and it's really interesting to me. the reviews and comments are starting to come out, the internet is a great thing. we all let loose and say what we think on it and there are people-- there was one man just the other day who wrote, yeah, sure, he was a good family man, but hitler loved his dog, too. so, you know, there's going to be that kind of response to the book and it's probably appropriate and it's probably necessary because he was so --

he had so many different facets of his personality. every time i talk to the family members, particularly the granddaughters, we would use words like enigma, conundrum, riddle, and we all-- they all read the book and i'm happy to say they had very positive things to say about it, but we all agreed that my book is the first step. it's not the final word. i hold the view that no biography is ever definitive. every generation needs its own. we don't know the questions the next generation is going to want to get answers for. we can only take care of our own time and offer possibilities for further research, further writing and thinking, further understanding. and that's how i see this book. i see this book as the tool that other writers are going to need to explore different

facets of al capone's life and again, i'll use the word, his work. [applause] >> let me end with a very short story from our museum, which, by the way, is open every day from 1:00 to 5:00 and-- we have the forensic evidence, the bullets from the st. valentine's day massacre, we have lots of interesting things and we give you a tour of all of this place, but we also have remarkable oral histories. and so i'm going to butcher the last name because i'm doing it this from memory. but little new york companion, one of capone's lieutenant's granddaughter came to the museum and told us a wonderful story about ralph capone, so sad and why books like this is important. she said she would go and visit

her grandfather in the old people's home where he was in the same home as ralph capone, who would sit in a wheelchair with a large fedora and notice him and instead of asking her grandfather, asked one of the nurses and she said, oh, that's ralph capone, he still thinks he's somebody. and it's important and these old treasures of memory need to be found and talked about and written about and thank you so much.

nonfiction from 2016.