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.

By paradox or coincidence, while Al Capone's personal items are offered by the Witherell's house for the best offer, that large white house is in the balance between demolition - the real estate developers who had won it would like to replace it with a more commercially usable building - and conservation demanded in a loud voice by those who consider it a monument of the American dark side.

This is a tug-of-war worth millions, something much more cumbersome than the still profitable spell baptized "A Century of Notoriety: The Estate of Al Capone" by the auction house. Yet even the sale of Caponian memorabilia will have a non-negligible economic impact, the overall estimate is 700 thousand dollars, which will remain in the family: to make the objects available to Witherell's are the daughters of Sonny Capone, the granddaughters of Scarface, who a somewhat counterintuitively they explain that they want to sell them to prevent their grandfather's heritage from being lost.

Whatever the meaning of the operation, after the Favorita .45 caliber and a 380 caliber revolver produced by Colt, we find, bizarrely paired at $ 12,500 as an auction base (it is assumed that the latest offer can travel around 50 thousand) Patek Philippe pocket watch in platinum with 90 gangster diamonds and a letter he wrote from Alcatraz to Sonny himself. The rest is an assortment of relics that bounces between Gozzano and Romanzo Criminale: Dresden-style porcelain and other firearms, sepia-toned photos and folding knives, a matchbox decorated with gold and diamonds and the bedroom furnishings.

74 years after the gangster's death - born poor in Brooklyn to a barber and a seamstress from Campania, ill-lived in Chicago and dead rich and forgetful in a palace that would have silenced the Casamonica family - his tacky legend continues to march. It hasn't shed blood in decades, the dollars are still flowing.

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