Remembering Uncle Al (Capone, that is).

• Author: Capone, Deirdre Marie
• Position: USA Yesterday - Essay

I AM A CAPONE. My grandfather was Ralph Capone, listed in 1930 as Public Enemy No. 3 by the Chicago Crime Commission. That makes me the grandniece of his partner and younger brother, Public Enemy No. 1: Al Capone. For almost half of my life, this was not information I volunteered readily. In fact, I took much care to hide the fact that I was a Capone, a name that had brought endless heartache to so many members of my family.

In 1972, when I was in my early 30s, I left Chicago and my family history far behind me, reinventing myself in Minnesota and making sure that no one in my life other than my husband Bob knew my ancestry. I succeeded--even with our four children--but the truth about who I was hovered at the edges of the reality I had created, and I was terrified of it. Terrified of revisiting the shy, wounded girl who grew up friendless, shunned by classmates forbidden to play with a mobster's child; of once again hearing those dreaded words, "You're fired," and seeing another employer's door close to me because of my name; of reawakening the grief of losing both my father and brother to suicide, collateral damage of the Capone legacy; and, above all, of my children learning they had "gangster blood" running through their veins and being exposed to the same pain I had experienced.

My silence also was motivated by a little trick of fate that truly was stranger than fiction. My husband's uncle married the sister of one of the men killed in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. I have good reason to believe that Al Capone was not as responsible for those cold-blooded murders as history has written, but all the same, how could I bring such a terrible complication into our family life? How could I know that my aunt by marriage would not see her brother's murderers in my face?

So, when my nine-year-old son Bobby came home from school one day in 1974 to announce that his class was learning about Al Capone, it knocked the wind out of me. I felt like the whole world had just slid out of focus, leaving only Bobby and me. There he was, smiling and cheerful as usual, telling me that he was learning about my great uncle in his fourth-grade class.

My heart seized, but somehow, I managed to get out a half-casual, "What did you learn about Al Capone?"

"We learned that he was a gangster." Bobby went on to tell me about Prohibition, the Capone bootlegging operation, and how AI had been such an expert outlaw that, when the police finally nabbed him, the only charge they could pin on him was tax evasion. I was so astonished that it was all I could do to nod along as he spoke.

Later that evening, when my husband and I were alone, I told him about what our son had...