>> what we don't want to do is respond in such a way that will produce more of these militants, more of these militant organizations. they want us to overreact. they want us to occupy muslim countries so they can build their recruitment. they want us to torture people and do things that's going to allow them to make their case against us.

good evening, ladies and gentlemen. welcome to the 52nd season, the seventh year of the museum and american gangster. welcome to the c-span audience. i am extraordinarily happy to have you here to talk about this book. it's one of my interests growing up in organized crime. i was raised in th a religious society of france. when anybody ever says i don'tev subscribe to organized religion, i always say i don't either. i grew up quaker with organized crime.on the only thing we ever did in an organized way is break the law from the 16 hundreds when we

came about until now with draft resistance, the undergroundta railroad, the sanctuary movement. the only thing we do in an organized way is break the law. so in our museum, we began to redefine the way people look at organized crime as a struggle between american moralcan mora certainty, the thou shalt notnte rule and liberty where people say yes but it's our right to come and organized crime has always come out of that between these two great concepts at war and define us and one of the great characters in the story, one of the true geniuses but came out of this is al capone, and it's wonderful to have a new book that really delves into him as something more than the stereotyping of cartoon figures that you see on tv. and so, enough fo from me other than a little housekeeping.

if anything horrible happens, 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, to turn them off now. [laughter] also, please do not take any film or recordings of the talk in progress. a very important. without further ado and a great. joy, deirdre. [applause] there will be a question and answer period afterwards. step up to the microphone in an orderly fashion to ask. >> thank you all for coming. it's delightful to see everyone here and so many good friends.

that makes me especially happy. i'm going to begin tonight by reading a few pages from the book that will give you a brief introduction to alpha code starting with the man himself and then by alleging that he became. then i'm going to talk a little about his life and 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 keeper of brothels an marcellus, a tax cheat, perpetrator of fraud, convicted felon, and a mindless blathering idiot. it's all the story of a loving a son and father who described himself as he does this band, 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 anywhere one travels in the world, peoply still recognize this name and have something to say about who he was and what he did. everyone has an opinion, and get 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 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 complicating puzzle imaginable and in the case of those that bear the name that is famous or as in the case, relatives and descendents infamous the task can be heavy indeed.

some of his relatives found it easier to change their settings band history, they chose to distance themselves for a numbe of reasons. some merely wanted to lead ordinary private lives. some said they feared reprisals from the game land 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 that kept the name but said it was the reason why they had to leade these lives some moving away as far as they could get while others only moved cautiouslyfarw from one town to another throughout northern illinois,io never far from the security and familiar environment of chicago. in recent years, the question of

who has the right to claim a legitimate place within thele 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 sisteto his sister in 1929 e was in his prime. it's a remark echoed today by r his granddaughters who spoke 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 differentpersonal personality traits. they talked among themselves about their family history and they argue and debate about whose memory is the most correct and which is the most closest to

the truth. they strive to assist parents and grandparents with honesty, objectivity, distance and detachment and admit the difficulty, if not the impossibility of arriving at a definitive conclusion. when they talk about their papa as they talk about him, they put his name in air quotes and ask themselves what gave rise to the myth and legend. how did the grandfather they adored fit into all theseies. 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? they will be 80 years next yeare that al capone has been dead. what was it that makes the name of a man that died sick, broke

and demented in 1947 so instantly recognizable at decade and a half into a brand-new century? are we fascinated with him today because of the so-called roaring 20s, the colorful times at in which he lived? is it because we now seek tobec 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 assimilation as american? or is it simply his larger than life personality, the figure that strutted across our historical stage for such ae fou brief time that we didn't have enough time and he was wit whens to assess him and after so many intervening years, can we figure him out, and after seven decades

is there nothing left by the death? the members of his family agreed the enigma of al capone is a riddle to be solved and now is the time to try to do it. now i'm going to read you a little bit about the legend of al capone as it is today. his brief life was flawed and dramatic but his afterlife is even more colorful than outsized. his reign of the king of crime lasted for six short years and even after he was stripped of power the public still couldn't get enough of him. an 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 alerts still records anywhere from half ard dozen to two dozen new hits every single day. new books and films appear about him almost every year and these include bottles, bio pics, documentaries and even documentaries. there are memoirs to purport to tell the real truth along with biographies for specificic audiences that include young adults and very young children.u 18 year old told me she told bad guys and that was okay because it let him keep poor people. the television series boardwalk in tiger has made him surprisingly not an antihero bup a genuine hero and younger viewers can't get enough of them. his name appears on all sorts of lists including one from the smithsonian magazine named him one of the 100 most influential

americans of all time in the entire history of the country. websites are devoted to him, and the museum in las vegas gets the best crowds when the teachers exhibit him. the wax museum in san francisco captured him after his disease took over in the life-size statue of al capone sitting in his alcatraz cell playing the mandolin.mandolin and those that are fascinated by criminals and professors who proclaim themselves to be al capone scholars debate every aspect of his life in difficult devito can be called as such, his work. law schools study his court case in the bar associations reenacted and academic institutions from the most august the most local offer courses. harvard business school examines

the outfit as a case study. at the community college in illinois holds the 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 their, cocktails and sandwiches are named after him at hotelss claimed he slept there and there'thereis even the laughabln to play on scottish courses. one reporter said it best. if al capone frequented even attend the places he sent to have the notorious mobsters hardly would have had time to build his chicago crime empire let alone run the thing. the musical groups to the young adult novels just the name in the title can command far more interest than most of the merit.

cats and dogs on internet postings especially the countless pit bulls that bear his name or short to be quickly adopted. his name alone can secure a good table as a young woman in san francisco who bears the name finds every time she tries toer reserve a table in the restaurant. his face is on postage stamps where they even have one of may hiding her face behind a fure bd coat and in kurdistan where its images centrally placed among the notorious gangsters mugshots al capone is at the center. in romania, websites and groups proliferate and writers andmeet journalists seek contact with americans to write about al capone's life in crime. in bulgaria, the bulgarian mafia claims they study the outfit to

learn how to conduct their business. [laughter] in england in the 1960s, two brothers notorious for murderr and extortion modeled themselves after, quote, that upper-classot criminal al capone. and in iceland, the entire towne of arbor is allegedly obsessed with its weeklong al capone festival where all the residents are devoted to the scourge of chicago.ou when the mexican job board escaped from prison, the comparison to al capone waspo w immediate and he was quickly dubbed the new public enemy number one. reporters don't stretch their intellect when writing stories about tax dodging hedge fundrs managers. they make the immediate comparison to al capone into the public gets the message. amazing, music, no defense

lawyer in chicago. how often his name is used to spice up the story and without any reference to he is, was or might have been, al capone . name is the one to grasp when making comparisons with everything from the current presidential election to the finality of the immensely popular television series downo to 90. krispy six down to now be.e it's easy 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 iasal capone in a pan. [laughter] donald trump's tax situation and hillary clinton's e-mails get plenty of comparison.

and as for abbey, "the new yorkp times" summing up the six seasons wrote the haplessservan servant couple who were each charged with separate murders, quote, have spent more combined time in jail than al capone. [laughter] people from chicago to travel abroatravelabroad have a tale oo tell us what happens to them when they say they are from chicago. local residents quickly form their hands and make the sound. as one young man wrote on the internet a short time ago, i get sick and tired of tourists coming here in our capone t-shirts. one of the more thoughtful replies, the fascination continues because idolizing al capone gets easier as time goesa by, and we get more and more ea

disconnected from what he actually did. it's precisely this disconnect that has contributed to thent unending question of what was there about this band to turn him into an internationalicon cultural icon and why the mere mentioning of his name sets up a chain of immediate associations. writers long pondered the question of why this particular man became the celebrity among so many other colorful gangsters and mobsters and why the legends that have grown up around both sides of his life, the violent and benevolent have become so shrouded in myth. how did he of all the other outside criminal characters of his era become ann internationally recognized cultural reference while so many

others go unrecognized today. now i'm going to talk a little bit and i'm going to start by telling you he was born in brooklyn, january 17, 1899 andd he was the fourth son in second one born in the united states to the italian immigrant parents. he grew up in a family that kept to the ways of the old country and was deeply steeped in the tradition. but all his life he was quick to correct anyone and become angry every time he was called italian. i am an american. i was born in brooklyn and i'm proud of it. his first home wa of the crowded tenement on the street that led to the name date of the dvr. he grew up watching the boys in the local gang called the boys of davie street. he watched the sailors that poured out of the main gate.

as soon as he was old enough, which is probably what he was around 8-years-old, he joined this gang. she was big for his age and he was a fast runner, so no sailor ever caught him. by the time he was 12 when he graduated from beating the game was passed off to being one of its most dependable as andof itm fearless fighters. he stayed in school through the sixth grade, which he had to repeat but not because he was a bad student that actuall but acs a very b good student. but because he played a key so often he was seldom in the in classroom. his parents believed in education and wanted all of their sons to stay in school as long as possible. but every one of them quit aton the first opportunity and they found work such as it was in the spivey criminal activities. he liked school and he might have stayed longer if he hadn't gotten into a brawl with hishava

teacher. he knocked her down or maybe even knocked her out and then simply walked out of school and never went back. after that he followed his two older brothers into the criminat world. this was after the oldest brother walked out of the house one day and disappeared not to be heard from again for the next 40 some years. when he came back, he was known as two gu to gun hard, a gun tog horse riding cowboy who'd been dedi may en man in nebraska dedd to smashing and enforcing the law's prohibition all of which h his brothers had been actively flaunting. [laughter] can't make that up. his leaving school was a blow to his father that worked hard to learn english and hoped his sons

would lead better lives than his own.n. he set himself up as a barber while his wife took him to get a piecework something to keep theh family of food. she thought he was encouraging at all tadult to become a legite businessman when he he bought a shoe shining box and set him up on brooklyn's columbia street under the famous clock. instead, he became the opposite. from the age of 14 to 18, he waa the brooklyn punk who early showed signs of the street smarts he later used to run the chicago outfit. his father did want him to learn capitalism and in a real sense, he did. when the other boys assaul saw a good location he'd chosen, they set up their own boxes near his. he didn't want to get his hands dirty so he sold his box then he

rounded up some other boys to intimidate the other enterprising shoe shiners into paying him protection money. if they wanted to keep doingep business they have to pay out the phone royals. so what do we call this? talent? such talent didn't go unnoticed by the various brooklyn crime bosses who were always on the lookout for young enterprising hoodlums to join the ring. so by th the time he does a team come he was working for johnny torre era, the crime boss responsible for bringing him toi 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 the immigrant ethnic groups lived in their own

enclaves and tended to stick to their prime. mary jo who was always called mae was irish. she was two years older and very much on the social round of immigrant groups pouring into the country. her family was laced curtis irish. they lived in their own house while a capone's lived in for small rooms on the upper floor debate walk up that was packed. her father went to work in an office every day with a white shirt and tie while his father cut hair in the family kitchen until he could save enough to set up his own shop. her mother went directly from her parents house to their own house and she never worked with so many irish girls as aid as a household servant. his mother clung on to the ways of the old country and was so

frightened of the world outsidel her building that she never left except for food shopping, and she called that going down to america. ' they'd go [laughter]as it was highly unusual for several other reasons. in those days, irish coast on. italian men were said to have made mixed marriages into the italian partner was commonly referred to as the colored. them even more unusual cut the marriage didn't take place until several weeks after the birth oe their only child who was alwaysd called sunday. a mixed marriage such as this brought almost as much shame to an irish family as a pregnancy before marriage. but she stayed throughout the pregnancy, openly and proudly in her family home.

he stated his intent to visit the woman he desperately wanted to marry but only when her mother wasn't there. this was generally believed by the capone descendent of she was responsible for the delay because they pregnancy was a difficult one and her mother thought she would miscarry and therefore they would be no need for a mixed wedding. but sunday was born prematurely after a troubled pregnancy so she held firm i and several wees shorr, she gave birth and they were married. before i talk about his life in crime, i want to take a moment to talk about the circumstances in which italian immigrantss lived in the early years of the 20th century. i'm not using it to defend the reasons i'll 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 800,000 people who came from southern and eastern europe, it was when people like the wealthy manhattan lawyer with writers by t.s. eliot despised every one of these newcomers and this is what he said using one of the many slurs and i quote, there are seven or 800,000, a couple hundred thousand. 50 or 60,000 [inaudible] and seven or 800,000 sweating germans. they are all nothing but walkinn appetites. at the new york city government officials have 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 who wrote about italian immigrants in his classic book how the other half lives they solve the situation for what it was int and this ist he said. the italians have the instinct of cleanliness but it is drowned out by the nastiness. thosof those of every sort are rampant and it was almost as if there was no other possibility for an awkwardly striving boy to better himself and then through a life of crime.ia several things came together just after sunday was born and he married may. descendents and many scholars have studied his life and work believe this is why he turned away to a life of crime. just after he was married, his father died of a heart attack

and a very young age even though he was before the sun he was the dependable one and was ahead of his family. the older brother disappeared and they couldn't be counted on to support her mother, sister and three younger brothers and to provide for those five as well as his own wife and son. his family thinks he may have been the legitimate businessmanh he always proclaimed himself to be if he hadn't become the source for seven people and writers study when he started his life in crime make remarks such as if he had been born 30 or 40 years later, and the fact that they make a case study supports the possibility.

he claimed one simple reason for going there and i quote al capone i needed to make a living and i thought i needed more. as one writer put it he would go from a 15 per week to one of the most powerful and wealthy in the world and he did this in a mere six years.ll end he was 3 31 when it all ended.hi his personal fortune was estimated at over $40 million by the time he went to jail he was broke. in the book i wrote that his dissent was insatiable and his

downfall here we are almost 80 years later and everything about that time continues to command worldwide attention of interesting speculation.of while they stay out of the limelight, he courted it and put reporters on the payroll with one editor in particular, he offered the first crack and scoops in exchange for positive stories being written about him. he even tried to hire one of the most famous publicists to polish his public image. he was known as poison ivy and

was the man that changed theon l public image such as john d. rockefeller and he very quickly declined and tried to hire the writer put it seem printed to bm as but this fellow was let off the hook once the government set his sights on al capone and he had other things to worry about. i hesitate to make comments but i can't resist giving it and reporters via to describe the clothing he wore a diamond pinky ring depending on who was writing about it with a silver dollars that he threw from hisis

fleet of bulletproof cars and as a genuine act of kindnesses reporters were quick to say sure, kindness. even after he went to prison when there was nothing to report or write about, one headline read he lost 11 pounds in another was he read a biography of napoleon. the biggest of all 1935, two russian soviet writers were touring the united states and in their book they wrote he was sitting in his alcatraz so writing articles for newspapers were publishing sweet sound of lots of surprising things during the four years researching but

one of the most surprising is how briefly he was on top of th criminal world. he was in a court room five and a half years after defending himself but not from the several hundred murders he was thought to have ordered into the several dozen or so he was alleged to have been directly involved in.r he was in the courtroom for tax evasion particularly his income tax and by 1931, he was in the atlanta federal penitentiary the most punitive prison in the country until alcatraz was setbh up in 34 because the government wanted to send a lesson to the criminal world but this was gointhat this wasgoing to be a e name would send shivers down the spines of the most hardened

criminals and who better to in prison than public enemy number one. nevermind that his brain was already so riddled with that he had the mentality of somewhere between seven to 12 years of a age. as he was released early on he because the syphilis as he contracted as a young man and he gave to his wife and son had riddled with that mentality. he did die in prison, he died in his own bed in his miami house surrounded by the family that loved him and the wife have claimed she knew every terrible thing but still loved him anyway. he was only 48-years-old. and as i said, here we are with his name so widely known that the smithsonian put them on their list of the 100 most

influential americans of all alm times. what was there then about al capone that captured so many different kinds of imagination, and i will end by reading a few paragraphs in the buc book. a writer named kathryn in 1941 wrote an article about al capone and she called him gorgeously american and i think she was correct to say that about him because his rise to fame paralleled the most unusual moment in history one that could fit the same description.

it was imposed on the country when a small number of fanatics composed the national government that the law mandating the 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.