The Valentine’s Day Massacre & our Capone complex

Valentine’s Day. If those two words are a bit of an emotional massacre for you, don’t worry – this column concerns a literal one instead.

The St Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 belongs in that category of ‘events from the GCSE History curriculum that have indelibly lodged in my brain’, ready and waiting to be deployed at a pub quiz one day – or indeed, an en article.

Public enemy number one

It was during Chicago’s Prohibition-era when, on 14 February 1929, four unidentified gunmen – two of whom were disguised as police officers – stormed a garage being used by Chicago’s North Side Gang and shot seven of its members at close range. It was quickly assumed to be the work of the rival South Side Gang and its notorious leader, Al Capone. While neither Capone nor his associates were ever convicted, the incident marked a sea-change in public opinion towards him. The media dubbed him ‘public enemy number one’ and federal authorities finally succeeded in jailing him (for tax evasion) in 1931.

With Capone occupying such a place in popular history, it was of little surprise that the auction of 174 items from Capone’s estate in October last year generated considerable interest. The lots included not only the sorts of items one might expect from a gangster – pistols, platinum pocket-knives and diamond-encrusted watches emblazoned with Capone’s initials – but also family photographs and personal letters. One of the photos that gained the most interest in the media’s coverage of the sale showed Capone and his wife with his three granddaughters standing on a pier on Christmas Day 1946. It was the last photo taken of him before his death a month later – and in it he looks just like any other doting grandfather.

The human side of Capone

In an interview given in the run-up to the auction, one of the granddaughters in the photo, Diane, explained how she hoped the sale would shed light on the human side of her ‘Papa’. Speaking of a letter from Capone to his son (her father), written from prison in Alcatraz, Reuters quotes her as saying: ‘It’s such a lovely letter, and it is a letter that conveys a side of this man that the vast majority of people have no idea of … These are not the words or the ideas of a man who is a ruthless gangster. These are the words of a loving father.’

‘When it comes to squaring the man she knew with the violent gangster the rest of the world knew, Diane Capone has no answers,’ reported the Chicago Sun Times. ‘It’s a conundrum,’ she said. ‘Someday, when I get to heaven, maybe I’ll get to ask.’

A conundrum indeed. In fact, it’s a conundrum that gets to the core of the human condition. Human beings are… complicated. Notorious gangsters can be devoted grandfathers. And it works the other way too: great preachers and theologians can be slave-owners; Reformation heroes can be dreadful anti-Semites. But we don’t like complexity. We want good guys and bad guys, so we conclude that on balance ‘our guys’ were good guys and Al Capone was a bad guy. And with everyone neatly in their boxes we can put ourselves in the good guys category and close the door behind us. But if we’re honest, the uncomfortable Al Capone conundrum is one we find in each of our hearts, if we dig deep enough: madein-God’s-image goodness and total depravity that are difficult to reconcile.

Human beings are complicated. All except one, that is. Jesus was completely, and gloriously, uncomplicated. There were no double standards. No hint of hypocrisy. No hiding behind a veneer of words: He always said what He meant and He meant what He said.

Diane Capone is (almost) right about one thing though: the final verdict on our human condition belongs to heaven alone. And in the final summation, as followers of Jesus our hope is not that God will look at our complexity and find us to be, on balance, a good person. Our hope is in His uncomplicated record.