Ermino "John" "Mimi" Capone, aka John Martin

John Capone

Erminio was born in 1901 and was called John or Mimi by family and friends. If there was a loser in the family, it was John. Fined once for disorderly conduct when he was 18, his contributions to the gang were menial ones. One of his jobs was to escort beer trucks on deliveries to the suburban cabarets. At one stop, the Arrowhead Club in Burnham, Ill., John fell in love with a cabaret singer. Brother Al, according to Schoenberg, decided that this was a bad match and ordered the bandleader to fire the girl stating, "Get her out of here. If I hear any more stuff about her and Mimi," you'll go to.

The bandleader, Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow, refused saying; "I won't fire her. She's one of the best entertainers we've got around here. Why don't you keep Mimi out of here, if that's the way you feel about it?"

Well. "She can't sing anyway," Al grumbled.

"Can't sing! Why you couldn't even tell good whiskey if you smelled it and that's your racket, so how do you figure to tell me about music."

Capone must have been in a good mood. Mezzrow lived. Al left warning the bandleader he'd better not catch the girl around John anymore.

In 1926, police arrested John at the family home on Prairie Avenue. At the time they were looking for Al in connection with the highly publicized murder of William McSwiggen, an assistant state's attorney. While in Florida in 1929, John was arrested during a raid at Al's Palm Island estate where police found bottles of liquor in his closet. An additional charge of vagrancy, a popular charge used against gangsters at that time, was placed against him. Another time, as he and Al drove to Miami for an afternoon movie the two were stopped and tossed in jail for "investigation" and "suspicion." During the early 1930s John was called to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the liquor rackets.

After Al went to Alcatraz in 1932, John helped Al's wife, Mae, by delivering payments to clear up tax charges and other misdemeanor counts while trying to run a small business in Villanova, Pa. After Al's release from Alcatraz in 1939, John served as the family spokesman carefully giving out information to the media. During the Kefauver Crime Committee hearings, he and Ralph were questioned in Washington D. C. In 1955, photographers caught him and his younger brother Albert attending the funeral of Louis "Little New York" Campagna, an old family friend. Then John changed his last name to Martin and stayed out of the public eye. As of the last book published about Al Capone, in 1994, John had not been reported dead, although he would have been 93 at that time.