The gun Al Capone used for personal protection will be auctioned in SC soon. Here’s when
He called it Sweetheart, a Colt 1911 .45 semi-automatic pistol that gangster Al Capone always carried with him for protection.
He said the gun saved his life many times.
It was left to his wife, Mae, then passed to his son, Sonny, and finally his granddaughters, who auctioned it off in 2021 for $860,000.
Now, it’s going to auction again, this time in South Carolina by Greenville based Richmond Auctions. Estimated value: $2 million to $3 million, with some speculation it could go much higher.
The Greenville auction will be held at 3 p.m. May 18 at 1451 Donaldson Road. Online bidding is available. Starting bid is $500,000.
Jordan Richmond, owner of Richmond Auctions, said he suspects it will break records, including the $6 million paid for the gun that brought down Billy the Kid and two Army revolvers owned by Ulysses S. Grant at $5 million.
He said he got goosebumps holding the Capone gun.
“The history is incredible,” he said. “What it’s been through, what it’s seen.”
The owner is a businessman in Las Vegas who is not a gun collector, Richmond said. He bought it as an oddity to show visitors to his office.
He found Richmond on Google, from the news that Richmond sold guns owned by John Wayne’s family last year for $5.4 million.
When the Capone family sold the Colt in 2021 it was through Witherell’s Auction House in Sacramento, California, close to where Sonny Capone lived after changing his last name to Brown in his later years.
The gun was one of 174 items sold, including personal photographs, pocket watches, jewelry, furniture and kitchenware owned by the Capone family.
People registered for the auction from around the world.
The Colt pistol was the top seller. Early estimates said it would sell for $100,000 to $150,000.
The Capone granddaughters were criticized at the time for making what some called “blood money.” The lot went for $3 million.
Granddaughter Diane Patricia Capone told CBS News at the time the family wanted the world to know the grandfather they knew, not the mobster. They did not know him until he returned to Florida after serving a prison sentence for tax evasion at Alcatraz.
‘He had gone through quite a transformation,” she said. “He lived out the rest of his life trying to make amends, trying to make peace with God and he believed that he was given a second chance.”
She said the granddaughter knew him as Papa, a doting husband, father and grandfather.
He “would run around the house playing with us as small children. He was clearly a complex man, and that’s evident if you examine the years after his imprisonment at Alcatraz.”
She also said she was concerned about losing everything in a wildfire. At the time, she lived in Northern California.
During the 1920s Prohibition Era in Chicago, Al Capone was among the most feared men in organized crime. The feud over racketeering and booze was fierce and bloody, including the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, during which seven men were lined up and shot in a Chicago garage.
The killers have never been identified but it is commonly held that Capone was behind the murders.
He was known by many nicknames including Scarface for the scar he got in a bar fight and Big Al, as well as being known as “Public Enemy Number One,” and to others, a “modern-day Robin Hood.”
His life is the subject of many movies, the best known being “Scarface.” He was also a character in the Mario Puzo’s book The Godfather, in which Capone sends two men to kill Don Vito Corelone but instead get killed by Luca Brasi.
Capone was born in 1899 to Italian immigrants, lived in Brooklyn and moved to Chicago in 1919 at the invitation of Johnny Torrio, who worked for crime boss James “Big Jim” Colosimo as an enforcer. Capone was a bouncer in a brothel initially before ultimately taking over the Chicago Outfit six years later.
He was known to say “you can get more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word.”
Capone was 48 when he died on Jan. 25, 1947, after developing dementia from syphilis.
