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Al Capone and the Internal Revenue Service: State-Sanctioned Criminology of Organized Crime

NCJ Number
136418
Journal
Crime, Law, and Social Change Volume: 17 Issue: 1 Dated: (January 1992) Pages: 1-23
Author(s)
J D Calder
Date Published
1992
Length
23 pages
Annotation
The whole story of Al Capone's career in American organized crime will never be known until researchers are given full access to Federal agency records, particularly those of the Internal Revenue Service which was involved in a struggle to collect back taxes from Capone even after his death.
Abstract
This article explores the methods by which IRS investigative files on Capone have been withheld from public scrutiny. He argues that such IRS actions severely chill and intimidate historical scholarship on organized crime in the U.S. Instead of knowing the truth about Capone and other gangsters, the public is left only with State-sanctioned narrations of criminal conspiracies and their prosecutions. State-sanctioned criminology, as used in this article, is defined as the ways in which State authorities perceive threats to social order, usurp State jurisdiction, allocate resources, and record outcomes consistent with the desired policy and administrative objectives. Federal district and appellate courts have rejected the author's petitions to gain access to the Capone records. He contends that the government view of this mobster's organization is defective in at least three ways: it does not answer questions about investigative initiate, it aligns reality with the political rhetoric of the time, and it provides no insights into interagency competition between bureaucracies pressured to answer political expediencies. 98 notes