Son of Neapolitan parents who emigrated to the US during the last decade of the 19th century, Alphonse Gabriel Capone , Al Capone , was born on January 17, 1899 in New York. After being expelled from school at the age of 14 for hitting a teacher, he worked various jobs until he met Johnny Torrio , a famous New York capo who will become his mentor. Shortly before Prohibition came into force in 1920 -prohibiting the sale, import, export, manufacture and transportation of alcoholic beverages throughout the United States- they moved to Chicago, where Capone began a meteoric career that in a few years allowed him to control the criminal empire his mentor had built:hundreds of brothels, speakeasies and gambling dens. If his business prospered so much it was thanks to the fact that he had many local police officers and politicians on his payroll. He also helped, and a lot, the numerous victims that he left along the way. The crime syndicate had just been born
Capone was the living image of the bad guy in the movie who did not deprive himself of anything, but also the image of the American winner, that of the self-made man. Capone was a complex character:he aroused fear and envy in equal measure; ruthless with his rivals and sensitive about family matters; a mobster - according to his business cards he presented himself as an antiques dealer - who ordered the St. Valentine's massacre in 1929 and a businessman concerned for his community who in 1930, during the Great Depression, opened soup kitchens that fed 3,500 people for free every day...
Although his history is linked to blood and alcohol, there is a legacy of Capone that is largely ignored:his concern that milk was safe to drink and the creation of expiration dates on products . Despite the fact that his criminal businesses (alcohol, gambling, organized crime and prostitution) brought him huge profits, Capone became interested in other more mundane businesses, such as dairy. His idea was to buy the milk in the neighboring state of Wisconsin, where it was much cheaper, bring it to Chicago, bottle it and break the market by selling it at a lower price. In this way, he ruined the beach bar that the Milk Union had set up-« the Milk Cartel «, in the words of Capone-, which controlled the production, distribution, marketing, prices and even the opening of new establishments. The Syndicate blocked Al Capone's milk shipments and... Al Capone played Al Capone. He kidnapped the union president and demanded a ransom of $50,000 which was paid by the Union. With this money he bought Meadowmoor , a Chicago bottler, and in 1932, a few months before entering prison, he had already "legalized" his milk business.
While in prison, a circumstance that did not prevent him from continuing to control the business, he found out that a niece fell ill from consuming spoiled milk. So he lobbied the Chicago City Council—and when Al lobbied, it was a success—to pass an ordinance requiring milk to be labeled with an expiration date. Said and done… and to this day.
Some wanted to see in this new regulation something more than an act of philanthropy, because, coincidentally, it seems that he also had a monopoly on labeling machines.