The roaring 20's for many people may bring to mind flappers or changing times of a positive nature. But on the flip side of the coin during that decade were a lot of activity in the crime world as well and in magnitudes no one could predict beforehand. Breweries, smoking, swearing, cheating, gambling, frequenting places called speakeasies which sold alcohol during the Prohibition, brothels and murder were headline news for much of this time for a man by the name of Alphonse (Al) Capone.
             Al Capone was born the fourth child to Gabriele Capone and Teresina (called Teresa) Capone on January 17, 1899. A seemingly normal family who was striving in the 'New World' after Gabriele and Teresa arrived in the United States in 1894 with 43,000 Italian immigrants. Al's father was a barber by trade and Teresa raised her family and also took in sewing piecework for extra income. Laurence Bergreen wrote in his biography called Capone: The Man and the Era" in regards to Capone's upbringing that "...nothing about the Capone family was inherently disturbed, violent or dishonest." He further stated that the family, as a whole, "were law-abiding, unremarkable Italian-American family with conventional patters of behavior and frustration; they displayed no special genius for crime, or anything else, for that matter".
             One of the main downfalls, in my opinion, was a move Gabriele Capone made for his family to a neighborhood they could afford. Their apartment was above his barbershop he had opened but the neighborhood opened his eyes to a different world other than the seemingly more strict, traditional upbringing of the solidly Italian family. The schools that he was raised in seemed to be of a lower class of people. Educational goals for Italian children were very poor; the school system didn't help with their prejudices of immigrants. Immigrant families expected their children to quit...