Jan. 25, 1947: Al Capone Dies

Following his release from Alcatraz in 1939 at age 40, Al Capone was no longer the man he once was. Most believe it was the effects of untreated syphilis (contracted in his teens), but Capone family members insist it was mistreatment at Alcatraz that caused his mental undoing.

The "retired" Capone divided his time between the family home in Chicago (where his mother, Teresa, continued to reside) and his estate on Palm Island in Miami, FL. Over his remaining years, Capone's health and sanity continued to wane. He was often convinced that long-dead gangsters and the locked-up Bugs Moran were out to get him.

Capone suffered a stroke on January 21, 1947. Three days later, he contracted pneumonia. Finally, on January 25, at age 48, Capone suffered a fatal heart attack, surrounded by his grieving family. His devoted wife, Mae, collapsed at the scene.

Mae and their one child, Albert Francis (called "Sonny"), continued to live in Florida. Mae died at age 89 in 1986. Sonny, who was married three times and had four daughters with his first wife, eventually changed his last name to "Brown" ("Al Brown" was a frequent alias of his father). He died in 2004 at the age of 85, having lived a life the complete opposite of his infamous father.

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IN PRINT: Uncle Al Capone

Jan. 10, 1983: A Mob Executioner's Last Ride

There's being good at your job, and then there's being too good at your job. The latter was the case with Mob executioner Roy DeMeo and his crew, who perfected the process of murder and body disposal to the degree that it was named the "Gemini Method" (after The Gemini Lounge, where most of DeMeo's victims were killed).

DeMeo started out as a loanshark in the early 60s and worked his way up in the Gambino crime family (which would eventually be run by John Gotti). By the 70s, DeMeo ran most of his operations out of his club, The Gemini Lounge. This included DeMeo's primary job as mob executioner. Victims were lured to a back apartment at the club. A gunman, usually DeMeo, would quickly shoot in the victim in the head with a silenced pistol and immediately wrap a towel to contain the blood flow. Additional methods were employed to contain the blood before the corpse was later dismembered, wrapped in plastic bags, and packed in cardboard boxes. The boxes were then taken to the Fountain Avenue Dump in Brooklyn. DeMeo's crew had a near-100% record of a body never being found.

Eventually, the vast number of people who "disappeared" after visiting the Gemini Lounge piqued the attention of the FBI. That and some of DeMeo's other enterprises, such as extreme pornography and narcotics (both forbidden under threat of death by the family), made him too much of a liability. Gambino crime boss Paul Castellano was apprehensive about going up against DeMeo and his army of killers, but eventually gave the order.

On January 10, 1983, DeMeo went to a meeting at an auto bodyshop owned by one of his crew members. Two weeks later, after responding to the second report of an abandoned car left in a Brooklyn parking lot, police finally opened up the car to discern the owner. Inside the trunk, beneath a chandelier, was DeMeo's body, dead from multiple gunshot wounds to the head (a wounded hand was thrown up defensively), and frozen to the spare tire.

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