Capone’s Last Gamble: The Alcatraz Kingpin Seeks Supreme Court Mercy

On August 27, 1934, the notorious Alphonse Capone, once the undisputed kingpin of Chicago’s underworld, made a desperate bid for freedom. The notorious gangster, convicted of violating the Internal Revenue laws, petitioned the Supreme Court to review his conviction, citing a technicality that could potentially set him free. Attorneys William E. Leahy and William J. Hughes Jr. of Washington D.C. filed the petition on his behalf, arguing that Capone was tried in the Federal District Court in Illinois and convicted on three counts of violating the Income tax laws for the calendar years 1925, 1926, and 1927. However, the indictment, they claimed, showed on its face that the offenses charged in counts 1, 5, and 9 had expired by the time the indictments were returned on June 5, 1931.