For 34 years in the collective imagination - or at least in the visual archive of those who have seen “The Untouchables” - his weapon is the baseball bat, the one used under Brian De Palma's camera to massacre a henchman who had disappointed him. And that pool of blood, taken from above as it spreads out under the tortured head of the criminal, soaking the white tablecloth of the restaurant in front of the horrified eyes of the diners, is a great paragraph in the pop saga of metropolitan crime.
But Al Capone's personal weapon was actually "Favorite", a semi-automatic Colt .45 model 1911, one kilo and 105 grams of metal (apart from the horn grips of the grip), a ton of symbolic weight in the history of 'Contemporary America. As for the economic value, we will presumably know it on October 8, when in Sacramento, California, the Favorita will be auctioned as the main piece of a lot of Caponian souvenirs. The starting price is 50 thousand dollars but it is estimated that during the auction it can hoist up to triple.
It may come as a surprise, but despite the fact that films and TV series have been celebrating the dark epic of narcos, Colombians first and then Mexicans for years, the appeal to the public who loves to shiver in front of an icon of evil, or at least of the crime that has risen to a system of power. cheeky, he continues to reward Alphonse Gabriel Capone, known as Scarface since another Italian American, irritated by young Al's comments about his sister, opened his cheek with a razor.
That razor at the Sacramento auction won't be there, who knows where it ended up. But the rest of the lot is chock-full of gangster memorabilia, a rather long list for an overall short existence: 48 years, of which only a few really lived as the last 18 were a long fade. The first three of the forfeiture phase he spent in the Atlanta prison where he ended up for tax evasion, framed by accounting documents that unlike witnesses of much more serious crimes could not intimidate and force the retraction. But Atlanta was too comfortable a prison for Scarface, who had criminal charisma and enough money to secure many privileges. Then came the move to the far more austere Alcatraz, where he lived as a model inmate until a boy's syphilis contracted the bill: a year in the prison infirmary, then the release of his body while his mind was imprisoned more and more darkly by a dementia triggered by the bacterium. Twilight ended with a stroke that caught him in Miami, in the Palm Island villa where he planned his most famous ambush, the Valentine's Day massacre that in 1929 saw his men dressed as policemen massacre seven of Bugsy Moran's followers in a parking lot of Chicago.
