The Decline of the Capone Sisters: Infamy Beyond the Crime Empire – HT
On December 14th, 1930, a photographers’s flashbulb lit up the inside of a Chicago church as a young woman walks down the aisle in a white satin gown with a 25 ft train carrying a bouquet of 400 flowers. She is 18 years old. Newspaper photographers have waited outside for hours. The Associated Press has sent wire reports about the wedding to papers across the country.
The bride is Mafala Capone. Her brother Al is the most famous criminal in America. He is also not at the wedding. He fears arrest if he sets foot in Chicago. This is what it meant to be a woman in the Capone family. Your wedding, your pregnancy, your grocery shopping, all of it was news. All of it carried the shadow of a name that did not belong to you, that you had not chosen, and that you could never put down.
The story of the Capone women, Al’s only sister, his devoted wife, and the granddaughters who grew up long after the empire had fallen, is one of the most quietly extraordinary stories in American history. And it does not end where the crime story ends. It goes on for decades afterward through a silence that was in its own way just as complicated as the noise that preceded it.
The family before the infamy. Gabriel and Teresa Capone arrived in the United States from the Campa region of southern Italy in the early 1890s, part of the enormous wave of Italian immigration that transformed American cities at the turn of the century. They settled in Brooklyn in the Navyyard neighborhood that was already home to a dense Italian-American community and they built a life that was by the standards of immigrant workingclass New York entirely ordinary.
Gabriel worked as a barber. Theresa kept the household. They had nine children, seven boys and then at the end two daughters. The first daughter, Rose, sometimes called Aminia, died as an infant before she had lived a year. The second daughter, born January 28th, 1912, was named Mafala after Princess Mafala of Seavoi, an Italian royal figure.
She was the last of the nine children and the only girl to survive. The household that Mafala was born into was a large and complicated one. Her oldest brother, James, had left home as a teenager and was living an entirely separate life under a new name out west. He had become Richard James Hart, a prohibition agent and occasional lawman who kept his Capone origins hidden for decades and would eventually be described by newspaper reporters as having arrested more bootleggers than any agent in his region. apparently unaware or at least
not reporting that one of the country’s biggest bootleggers was his brother. Her brother Ralph, who would later be involved in the organization Al built in Chicago, was a young man already making his way in the world by the time Mafala was old enough to remember him clearly. Frank, who would die in a confrontation with police during the 1924 Cicero municipal election violence, was a present and intense figure during her earliest years.
And Al, 13 years older than his baby sister, was a young man whose trajectory was already pointing toward the path that would eventually make his name the most famous criminal name in American history. By the time Mafala was a toddler, the family had moved from Brooklyn to the Park Slope neighborhood and eventually to Flatbush. The world around them was Italian American Brooklyn in the early decades of the 20th century.
a world of parish churches, neighborhood loyalties, Sunday dinners, and the particular social codes of a community that was still navigating its place in a country that was not always welcoming to new arrivals from the south of Italy. Gabrielle Capone died in 1920 when Mafala was just 8 years old.
His death left Teresa as the head of the household, a position she occupied with the particular authority of a woman who had raised nine children and was not going to be told anything by anybody. Terresa Capone was by all accounts a formidable person, deeply Catholic, deeply devoted to her children, and genuinely uninterested in the public narrative about what her son Al had become. To her, he was her son.
The rest of it was other people’s business. Teresa became, in the years that followed, one of the more quietly remarkable figures at the edges of the Capone story. She was present through everything. The peak of Al’s power in the late 1920s, his arrest and conviction, his years in federal prison, his release and decline, and his death in 1947.
She outlived him by 5 years, dying in 1952. She never gave the press what they were looking for. She never expressed, as far as any public record shows, regret or horror about who her son had become. She was a mother. She loved her children. The world’s verdict on Al Capone was not something she accepted or engaged with.
After Gabriela’s death, the family gradually followed Al Westward. By the late 1920s, Teresa and Mafala were living with Al at 7,244 South Prairie Avenue in Chicago, the family’s main residence during the peak years of his power. The house was large, comfortable, and busy with the constant movement of family members, associates, and the general organized chaos of a household centered on one of the most powerful and dangerous men in America.
For Mafala, who was a teenager during these years, this was simply home. The newspapers wrote about her brother as though he were a monster. in the house on Prairie Avenue. He was the person who cooked for the family on weekends, who doted on his mother, who was proud beyond words of his younger sister.
Both things were simultaneously true, and living inside that contradiction was the central fact of Mafolder’s existence from the time she was old enough to understand what was happening around her. The question of what it costs a person to hold those two images together, the public one and the private one without ever being able to fully surrender either, is one that runs through the story of every woman in this family.
And none of them navigated it more publicly or more stubbornly than Mafala. Mafala, the sister who refused to disappear. Mafala Capone grew up in the most intense possible version of a spotlight she had never sought. By the time she was a teenager, her brother’s name was appearing in newspapers across the country with a frequency that made Al Capone one of the most recognizable figures in America.
Every feature story about him eventually made its way to the family home on Prairie Avenue. Every interview with neighbors, every description of the household noted the presence of the devoted mother and the pretty younger sister. She attended Lucy Flower Vocational High School on Chicago’s west side. She was a student like other students with friends, with daily routines, with the ordinary concerns of a teenage girl in the late 1920s.
But outside the school, reporters sometimes waited. People who recognized her name would stop and stare. The gap between the ordinary interior of her daily life and the extraordinary way the outside world looked at her was something she had to navigate from an age when most young people are not navigating anything more complicated than their social lives.
The press found Mafala interesting in her own right, not because she had done anything in particular, but because the name Capone, attached to a young woman who appeared entirely normal, was, by the standards of the era’s journalism, a story in itself. She was photographed. She was followed. Reporters waited outside the church she attended, outside the school she went to, in front of the house where she lived.
When Al was being tried, or when a major development in his public story occurred, the coverage would expand outward to include the family on Prairie Avenue, and Mafala would find herself described and photographed and quoted, whether she had sought any of it out or not. She was not, by the available accounts, a shrinking violet about any of this. She gave interviews.
She spoke to reporters with a directness that sometimes surprised them. She said consistently and emphatically across the years that her brother Al was a kind, generous, devoted man, a good son, a good brother, someone who was misunderstood by the public that had made him a symbol of everything dangerous about modern America.
Newspapers from the period carry her statements verbatim, the 18-year-old girl insisting to anyone who would listen that the man the world saw and the man she knew were two entirely different things. Whether she fully believed this, or whether it was the only position available to someone in her situation is something that cannot be settled from the outside.
What is observable is that she held to it with remarkable consistency across decades, and that she never expressed, at least not publicly, any ambivalence about the brother, who had made her name impossible to carry without drawing attention. Her wedding in December 1930 was one of the most written about events of its kind in that era of American life.
The groom was John Marriott, the younger brother of Frank Marriott, a figure connected to the Capone organization. The press immediately characterized the marriage as a gang alliance rather than a romance, a framing that the family found deeply insulting and that Mafala pushed back against with her characteristic directness.
She was getting married because she was in love, not because of any organizational considerations, and she was not particularly interested in what anyone else thought about it. The wedding itself was lavish in the only way a Capone family event of that era could be. Mafala wore a white satin gown with a 25- ft train and carried a bouquet of 400 flowers.
The church was St. Mary of Chester Choa in Cicero, Illinois, a Polish parish in the part of the town that was safely removed from the Chicago locations, most associated with the Capone organization. Hundreds of guests attended. The ceremony and the reception were covered by reporters from Chicago papers and wire services that distributed the story nationally. Al Capone did not attend.
He feared that appearing in public in Chicago would lead to arrest. He sent word and he sent money, but he was not there to give her away. That duty fell to her brother Ralph. It was an absence that contained in miniature the entire texture of what the family’s life had become.
The most important member of the family was simultaneously the reason for everything, and the person who could not be present for it. In April 1932, Mafala gave birth to a daughter, Dolores Teresa Marito. The birth was reported in newspapers. The new mother’s identity as Al Capone’s sister was, of course, the lead detail of every item.
That same month, Al Capone was convicted on income tax evasion charges and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. He began serving that sentence at the penitentiary in Atlanta and was transferred to Alcatraz in August 1934. The empire he had built crumbled in his absence. The family that had organized itself around his power and his money was left to find its own footing without him.
For Maldda and John Marriott, the years following Al’s conviction were years of deliberate quieting, a slow retreat from the Chicago world that had surrounded them, and an attempt to build a life that was less visible, less connected to the identity that the name Capone imposed on everything around it.
They moved around. They lived in various places across the Midwest and beyond. There are accounts of them running a bakery and cafe on the California coast at some point during the 1950s or 1960s of building a quieter domestic existence away from the city where everyone knew exactly who they were.
The retreat was never quite complete. The Capone name followed Mafala everywhere and in 1959 a new chapter of unwanted attention arrived. One that she found sufficiently outrageous that she took it to court. The untouchables and the lawsuit that failed. In 1959, the television production company Desilu, founded by Desessie Arnaz and Lucille Ball, sold to CBS a two-part drama called The Untouchables based on the memoir of Elliot Ness.
The drama dramatized events from the Prohibition era using Al Capone as a central character. It was successful enough to spawn a weekly series on ABC that ran for 5 years from 1959 to 1963. The series made free use of the Capone name and presented fictionalized versions of events from his career in a way that as the court documents later put it was the product of the imagination of the script writers.
It was enormously popular. It was also from the perspective of the Capone family an invasion. Mafala Marito acting as administr of her brother Al’s estate joined May Capone Al’s widow and Sunonny Capone Al’s son in a federal lawsuit against Desilu CBS and Westinghouse Electric Corporation. They sought $2 million from Dizilu and $250,000 each from the other defendants, arguing that the fictionalized dramatizations exploited Al Capone’s name and likeness in ways that harmed the living members of his family. The harm was not
abstract. When The Untouchables began airing, Sunonny Capone was living in Florida, running a restaurant, raising his four daughters in what had been until then a relatively quiet, private life. After the series launched, his children came home from school in tears because their classmates were taunting them about their grandfather’s name.
The situation became so distressing that Sunny eventually felt he had no choice but to remove his daughters from school. sell his home and his restaurant, change his surname, and move to a different city. This is what the lawsuit was actually about. Not abstract rights of publicity, not legal technicalities about whether a dead person’s estate could sue a television network.
It was about four little girls crying on their way home from school because of something a television show had done. Mafala was in this respect fighting for her family in the most literal possible way, using the legal tools available to her to push back against a force that was reaching into the private lives of people who had nothing to do with Al Capone’s crimes and causing them genuine harm.
The lawsuit did not succeed. The federal courts dismissed it. The legal argument that the family made that the fictionalized use of Al Capone’s name and likeness constituted an invasion of the privacy rights of his living relatives did not find sufficient support in the law as it existed at the time. They appealed. They were dismissed again.
Mafala lost. The series continued. The Capone name remained public property in a way that neither she nor any other member of the family had the power to change. The failure of the lawsuit had implications beyond the specific legal outcome. It established in practical terms that the family had no effective legal recourse against the commercial exploitation of Alapone’s name and likeness.
that the name once it had passed into the cultural consciousness at the scale that Scarface and Public Enemy number one and years of front page newspaper coverage had put it was no longer something the family could control. It belonged to the culture in whatever form the culture chose to present it. And the Capones, the living ones, the ones who had not asked to be Capones, had no enforcable claim against what was being done with it.
The series continued through 1963. 56 episodes of The Untouchables aired over 4 years after the lawsuit was dismissed, each one using the Capone name in ways that the family found distressing and that they had no means of stopping. Every week that the series aired was another week during which Sunny’s daughters, wherever they now were in their new school, in their new city under their new name, might encounter someone who had watched the previous night’s episode.
She lived with that outcome for the rest of her life. She and John Marito eventually settled in northern Michigan in the small town of Oscoda on the shore of Lake Hurine about as far from Chicago and the world of her brother’s fame as a person could get while remaining in the same country. Jon cared for Mafala as her health declined in her later years, visiting her everyday when she was moved to a nursing home in the area.
Mafala Capone Marito died on March 25th, 1988 in Oscod, Michigan. She was 76 years old. There was no obituary, no death notice, no public announcement of any kind. After a lifetime of unwanted attention, the woman who had been Al Capone’s sister departed the world in complete silence. Her body was brought back to Illinois and buried in the Capone family plot at Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery in Hillside.
Her tombstone lists her married name first and the Capone name last. It was said that she had always considered herself a Capone first and foremost. But the tombstone’s ordering suggests something else. That even in death there was a negotiation happening. A question about which identity to present to the world that looked at the stone.
The answers she gave to that question across her life were complicated. She was proud of being a Capone. She was also exhausted by it. Both things were true at once, as they had always been. May Capone, the wife who waited. While Mfelda carried the Capone name as a birth identity, May Capone carried it by choice.
And what that choice cost her across decades is a story as remarkable as any other in this family. Mary Josephine Coughlin was born on April 11th, 1897 in Brooklyn to Irish immigrant parents. She was a quiet Catholic, dark-haired young woman from a respectable workingclass family, and she met Al Capone when both of them were teenagers in Brooklyn.
They fell in love in the easy, uncomplicated way of two young people from the same neighborhood who simply found each other before either of them had any idea what the future was going to look like. Their son, Albert Francis Capone, called Sunny, was born on December 4th, 1918. Al and May married later that same month on December 30th.
Sunny was born with a mastoid infection that left him with significant hearing difficulties, a medical situation that required serious attention in an era when treatment options were limited and expensive. The fact that Al Capone, at the height of his power, and at the center of an organization built on violence and corruption, was a devoted and attentive father to a son with serious health needs, is one of the more humanizing details of a story that does not always have many of them.
May’s role through the years of Al’s rise to power was one of deliberate invisibility. She was present at the house in Chicago, later at the Palm Island estate in Miami Beach that Al purchased in 1928 as a birthday gift for her. But she did not speak to the press, did not attend public events, and maintained a domestic life that was organized around her son and her husband and as little public exposure as possible.
She was deeply Catholic. She attended mass. She raised Sunny. She stayed out of everything that was not her direct and immediate concern. This was in the context of the Capone world a form of both wisdom and necessity. The women associated with major criminal figures of that era who attracted public attention tended to attract the wrong kind.
The press coverage was not flattering. The legal risk was real and the safer course was always invisibility. May understood this and maintained it with remarkable consistency. In years of coverage of the Capone organization, she appears almost not at all, a shadow at the edge of every story about her husband, present, but never visible.
When Al was convicted in 1931 and sentenced to federal prison, May relocated with Sunny to the Palm Island estate in Florida, away from Chicago and the media attention and the world that had surrounded them. The estate was a grand property on an island off the coast of Miami Beach, and May kept it with a care and a preservation that reflected her particular way of loving, not through words or public declarations, but through the maintenance of the spaces and objects that her husband had cared about. She visited Al during his time in
Atlanta and then in Alcatraz, making the difficult journey to the remote island prison off the coast of San Francisco with a regularity that required genuine commitment. Alcatraz was not designed for easy visitation, the ferry, the processing, the controlled conditions of every meeting. But May went. She was along with Al’s mother, Teresa, and his lawyer, one of only three people initially permitted to visit him.
She wrote to him. She waited for him. The 11 years of his imprisonment were years in which May built her life around a man who was not there. She organized her days around Sunny’s needs, around the maintenance of the Palm Island property, around the practice of her faith. She was 34 when Al went to prison and 45 when he was released.
An entire decade of her life lived in a kind of suspension. Al was released from federal custody in 1939. Already suffering the effects of a neurological condition caused by an untreated syphilytic infection contracted years earlier. His mental capacity had begun to deteriorate during his time at Alcatraz, and the decline continued after his release.
The man who came back to the Palm Island estate was not the man who had left. Sharp, commanding, in control of everything around him. He was someone who needed care, and May provided it. She cared for him through the years of his decline, through the long, slow fading of a man who had once been defined by his absolute authority, and who now required the kind of attention that reversed the normal direction of the relationship.
She did this without apparent bitterness, and without seeking any public recognition for it. She simply did it, as she had always simply done whatever needed to be done. He died on January 25th, 1947 at their Palm Island home. He was 48 years old. May stayed in Florida. She sold the Palm Island estate eventually and lived quietly, privately, entirely removed from public life.
When the Untouchables arrived on television in 1959 and forced Sunny to uproot his family, she joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff. This was one of the few public actions of her postal life. When the lawsuit failed, she absorbed that outcome and continued living her quiet life. The question of what May Capone thought about her own life, about the choice she had made at 17, about the decades of waiting, about the years of caregiving, about what she had given up and what she had kept, is one that she never answered publicly.
She gave no interviews. She wrote no memoir. She simply lived privately for 39 years after her husband died. She outlived almost everyone. Terresa Capone died in 1952. May Capone died on April 16th, 1986, 2 years before Mafala. She was 89 years old. She had spent essentially her entire adult life defined by her association with Al Capone and she had never, as far as any public record shows, expressed regret about any of it.
She had made her choice at 17 in Brooklyn. She kept it until the end. Sunny and the four daughters. Albert Francis Capone Jr. Sunny was the crucial bridge between the generation that had lived through Al’s empire and the one that had to carry the name forward into a world that did not stop associating it with crime even as the decades accumulated.
He had grown up as the protected beloved only child of two parents who were both intensely devoted to him. His hearing difficulties stemming from that early mastoid infection had required medical attention throughout his childhood, and Al had made sure he received it, including at one point arranging significant medical intervention that improved Sunny’s hearing substantially.
Whatever Al Capone was to the world, to his son, he was a father who showed up, who worried, who made sure the problem was addressed. Sunny was shielded as much as possible from the full implications of what his father did. He grew up in Chicago in the first years of his life, then relocated with May to Florida when Al was sent to prison.
The Palm Island Estate in Miami Beach was his home through his teenage years. A large, gracious property on an island that was in those years still relatively undeveloped and genuinely beautiful. He finished school in Florida. He married Diana Casey, a young woman who shared his desire for a quiet and private life. And they settled into exactly that, a small restaurant in Florida, a home, an existence built deliberately apart from the world of the Capone name. They had four daughters.
Veronica was the eldest. Theresa came next. Barbara followed. Patricia, who went by Diane, was the youngest. All four were born and raised in Florida. They attended school in the Miami area. Their father’s restaurant was a small neighborhood place, not glamorous, not prominent, just the kind of local business that provides a family with a livelihood and a daily routine.
Their mother took care of the household. By the early 1950s, it was about as close to ordinary middle-class American family life as a person named Capone could probably manage. And then the untouchables arrived, and the ordinary life collapsed. The experience of those four little girls coming home from school in tears, taunted by classmates who had watched their grandfather dramatized on national television week after week.
Is the detail that makes the legal arguments in the lawsuit visceral rather than abstract? Legal disputes about the rights of a dead man’s estate to control the use of his name and likeness are complicated and dry. Children crying on the walk home from school are neither complicated nor dry.
Sunny tried first to handle it through personal channels. He had known Desi Anaz, the president of Desilu since their youth. They had overlapping social worlds in some sense in their early lives, and he reached out directly to ask Arnaz not to proceed with the untouchables. Anaz did not stop the production. The weekly series continued for 5 years.
The daughters continued to go to school. The taunting continued. Eventually, Sunny concluded that there was no alternative to a complete reinvention. He withdrew his daughters from school. He sold the restaurant and the family home. He changed the family’s surname to Brown. He moved them to a different city, somewhere where the Capone name would not follow them quite so immediately, where a new start was possible.
The four daughters grew up under that new name. They finished their educations without the weekly reminder that their grandfather had been Al Capone. They built adult lives, married, had children of their own, made careers and friendships, and the other textures of ordinary existence. But the Capone identity never quite went away.
It was always there in the family memory, in the objects that had been passed down from the Palm Island estate, in the stories that their father told them about the grandfather they had been too young to fully know. Al Capone had died in 1947. Veronica, the eldest, would have been born around that time, or shortly after.
The granddaughter’s actual memories of him were limited or non-existent. What they knew about him came from photographs, from family stories, from the portrait that their father and grandmother had maintained of a man who at home was something different from the figure in the newspapers. Diane, the youngest, Patricia, became the most publicly engaged of the four sisters in telling their family story in later years.
She has described in interviews and in her own writings the particular experience of carrying a famous name that you associate with love and private family warmth, while the world associates it with something entirely different. She has spoken about her grandfather with genuine affection. The man who held her in the limited time she was alive while he was still alive was tender and loving in the way of a grandfather with a grandchild.
She does not pretend the contradiction away. Veronica, the eldest sister, died at some point before 2021. Diane described her death as simply devastating in an interview with the Chicago Tribune without elaborating on the circumstances with the brevity of someone who had processed the loss privately and was not going to perform it for a journalist.
In 2021, Diane and two of her surviving sisters held an auction of family items, objects from the Palm Island estate that had been passed down from May to Sunny and from Sunny to his daughters. The auction included personal effects, furnishings, and items that had belonged to Al Capone himself. The decision to sell them was, as Diane described it, partly practical.
They were getting older. Preserving historical artifacts privately is genuinely difficult, and the time had come. But it was also clearly something more than practical. It was a final letting go of something, a severing of the physical thread that connected the Florida family to the Chicago history. The items sold. The connection remained.
It always does in stories like this one. Sunonny Capone died in 2004. He was 85 years old. He had outlived his parents by decades, had raised four daughters to adulthood under two different surnames, had run a restaurant, and built a quiet life in the long shadow of his father’s name. He spent the last decades of his life in California, as private as he had always tried to be.
He was buried there without the kind of public notice that the Capone name would once have guaranteed. What the name left behind. There is a monument in Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, where several members of the Capone family are buried. Al Mafolda and others [clears throat] from the family. For many years, the cemetery planted evergreens in front of the monument to prevent vandalism.
Eventually, those evergreens were removed. The monument is there now, visible to anyone who visits, carrying the name that everyone knows. What is less visible is everything that name cost the people who carried it without having chosen it. Mafala, who was born with it and spent 76 years defending her brother against a world that had made him a symbol while insisting he was also simply her brother.
She attended his wedding preparations and gave birth during his trial. She fought for her family in a federal courtroom and lost. She retreated to a small town in northern Michigan and died quietly and without announcement in 1988. her tombstone listing the Capone name last, as if even in death the arrangement of words on a stone was something to be negotiated.
May who chose the name at 17, and kept that choice without apparent regret for the next seven decades. She raised a son, visited a prison, cared for a deteriorating husband, and outlived him by nearly 40 years, spending those decades in a privacy so complete that the historical record has almost nothing of her inner life to offer.
She is known primarily in relation to Al and she apparently preferred it that way. Though whether that preference was freely chosen or simply the only option available to a woman in her circumstances is a question that cannot be answered. Teresa, the mother, who came from Italy to Brooklyn and watched her family become one of the most infamous in American history, and who went to her grave in 1952, having never, as far as anyone can tell, doubted for a moment that her son was worth loving.
She was the original anchor of the family, the woman around whom all the others oriented themselves. And her particular form of ferocious unconditional loyalty set the tone for how the women who came after her understood their role. The four granddaughters who grew up with the name and then without it, who cried on the way home from school and were moved to new cities under new names, who built adult lives in Florida and California that were as far from the south side of Chicago as geography could take them.
Who held an auction in 2021 and let the physical objects go while keeping the stories and the memories and the complicated warmth of loving people whom the world condemned. None of these women ran the empire. None of them chose the violence, the bootlegging, the corruption that made Al Capone the most famous gangster in American history.
They were the people left holding the aftermath, the name that the empire left behind when the empire itself was gone. what they did with that aftermath, the lawsuits and the retreats and the quiet perseverance and the occasional public statements that insisted on the full humanity of people the world had reduced to symbols constitutes a story that runs parallel to the famous one and is in certain respects more interesting because it is the story of what happens after the cameras go away, after the trial ends and the gangster goes to
prison and The empire collapses and the mythmaking begins. It is the story of the people who had to keep living inside a myth that the rest of the world had already decided was finished. Mafala’s tombstone in hillside has no obituary attached to it because there was no obituary.
After a lifetime of unwanted coverage, she slipped out of the world without a word in the press. That silence finally was entirely hers. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.