![]() ![]() Inside of the soup kitchen run by Capone, circa 1930.Įvery day, the soup kitchen served 350 loaves of bread, 100 dozen rolls, 50 pounds of sugar and 30 pounds of coffee at a cost of $300. ![]() Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Mary Borden called Capone “an ambidextrous giant who kills with one hand and feeds with the other.” She noted the irony that the line of jobless waiting for a handout from Chicago’s most-wanted man often stretched past the door of the city’s police headquarters, which held the evidence of the violent crimes carried out at Capone’s behest. As the Bismarck Tribune noted, “a hungry man is just as glad to get soup and coffee from Al Capone as from anyone else.” For anyone who felt conflicted about taking charity from a gangster, hunger trumped principles. When the government failed to feed them in their desperate days, the crime boss gave them food. When the government deprived them of beer and alcohol during Prohibition, Capone delivered it to them. They pointed to the newspaper reports of the handouts he gave to widows and orphans. The soup kitchen added to Capone’s Robin Hood reputation with a segment of Americans who saw him as a hero for the common man. Although “Scarface” had not been responsible for the theft, he feared he would be blamed for the caper and made a last-minute menu change from turkey and cranberry sauce to beef stew. Reportedly, Capone had planned a traditional Thanksgiving meal for the jobless until he had heard of a local heist of 1,000 turkeys. On Thanksgiving in 1930, Capone’s soup kitchen served holiday helpings to 5,000 Chicagoans. No questions were asked, and no one was asked to prove their need. Inside the soup kitchen, smiling women in white aprons served up coffee and sweet rolls for breakfast, soup and bread for lunch and soup, coffee and bread for dinner. “He couldn’t stand it to see those poor devils starving, and nobody else seemed to be doing much, so the big boy decided to do it himself,” a Capone associate told a Chicago newspaper. Capone’s soup kitchen served breakfast, lunch and dinner to an average of 2,200 Chicagoans every day. “The Madison Street hobo type was conspicuously absent from these lines of men,” reported the Chicago Tribune, which noted that many of the unemployed were well-dressed.Ī week later the Chicago Tribune reported the surprising news that the mysterious benefactor who had recently rented out a storefront and opened a soup kitchen at 935 South State Street was none other than the city’s king of booze, beer and vice. Nearly a third required immediate relief. In early November 1930, more than 75,000 jobless Chicagoans lined up to register their names. ![]()
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