At the beginning and end of this biography about Al Capone, Donald Trump is called out: First, with the fact that in 2018 he compared the criminal prosecution of his campaign manager with what he considered to be just as unfair treatment of the crime boss.

Eventually, what Capone planned at the height of his criminal career was accomplished by Trump as he transitioned from economic to political power.

Both figures are placed next to and against each other several times: the young Trump had an exchange of blows like the sixth grader Capone had with his teacher with his music teacher, whom he gave a black eye.

Like Capone, Trump has tried his luck building casinos in Atlantic City, and twice—once indirectly,

Andreas Rossmann

Freelance writer in the feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

The parallels are striking and extend to biographical details.

Al Capone's father, who emigrated from the province of Salerno in 1895, worked as a hairdresser in America, just like Donald Trump's grandfather, who had arrived ten years earlier from Kallstadt on the Wine Route, albeit only for a short time.

But there is a fundamental difference: as "dark-skinned" Southerners, the Capones would fall among those refugees from poverty against whom the forty-fifth President of the United States was trying to seal the nation.

Birth defects of American democracy

In their relationship to the American dream, the distance becomes concrete.

Trump embodies its caricature, Capone its flip side.

The Republican once portrays the gang boss as a victim of unfair treatment, while at other times he speaks of the “worst crime since Al Capone”.

The ratings change, the character remains controversial, ambivalent - and in conversation.

Hornung illustrates how Al Capone can still be present in America's collective memory and remain a constant, seventy-five years after his death.

The “birth defect of American democracy resulting from the constitutional documents”, which the then presidential candidate Barack Obama described in 2008 as the “original sin of the nation”, is for the author the key to understanding Al Capone: In the early twentieth century, the Southern Italians, not only the execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927, but already the lynch law against five "Dagos" from Cefalù in Louisiana in 1899, which Enrico Deaglio described in the 2019 essay "A truly terrible story between Sicily and America ' has researched, bears witness to this.

Speakeasys, brothels, racketeering

The realization of the American dream was reserved for the business elite of Anglo-Saxon mainstream society.

The newcomers with visibly different ethnic characteristics were left with the option of pursuing him in the parallel world of organized crime.

Al Capone identified with John D. Rockefeller at the height of his power.

Hornung traces the life of Alphonse Capone, who, unlike two of his brothers, was born in America in 1899, chronologically: First, there are the early days of the school dropout in the street gang in Brooklyn's waterfront and his early marriage to the Irish woman Mae.

This is followed by an acquaintance with Johnny Torrio, who becomes his foster father and brings him to Chicago in 1920, where, benefiting from Prohibition, he builds an empire that turns over twenty-five million dollars a year with speakeasies, brothels, racketeering, betting shops and gambling.

Eventually Capone retired to Florida, where he bought a villa by the sea in 1928 and continued conducting his business until, after two shorter prison terms, he was sentenced in 1931 to 11 years in prison for tax evasion, seven of which he spent - the last on Alcatraz - sits down

The mobster, who died of neurosyphilis in 1947 as a result, led a dazzling double life.

Because the busy cheater was also a family man and caring father, the brutally cunning businessman was also a gifted organizational talent, the enemy of the state was also a benefactor.

Al Capone has always professed to be an American: "I'm not Italian." And—always impeccably dressed and mannered, an excellent dancer and an excellent cook—he mastered the art of (although Hornung doesn't call it that) "bella figure".

The presentation betrays the Americanist, with references to literature and cultural-historical contextualizations as well as the sober language.

The organization of the syndicate that enabled Capone, who never had a bank account, to become another Rockefeller, remains largely hidden.

With the analysis of the mafia-like business practice, Hornung could have further removed the crook icon from creating a legend.

Above all, Brian de Palma's films, which were dealt with in the end, elevated Al Capone to the level of myth.

Alfred Hornung: "Al Capone".

The American Dream and Organized Crime.

WBG/Theiss Verlag, Darmstadt 2021. 320 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €32.