Several items are for sale, including a gun he nicknamed "sweetheart."
Al Capone was a reputed gangster. But according to his granddaughter Diane Capone, he was also a loving grandfather.
“He's Papa,” she said. “He's a very loving, grandfatherly figure. He was somebody who played with us in the garden. He was somebody who would throw us up in the air and was very affectionate.”
Capone’s granddaughters are now auctioning off his belongings, which they say have never left the family’s possession after his death in 1947.
“My sisters and I are getting older. We didn't want these things to be left,” she explains. “And people who wouldn't know what they were, what the story behind each of them is. We didn't want to leave them for someone else to have to deal with.”
If the price is right, Diane says you could snag some of his everyday items that were embellished to his liking, like his favorite firearm.
“Papa many, many times had to be prepared to protect himself. That was his number one gun for protection, as far as he was concerned, and I know he referred to that as his sweetheart. She was watching out for him.”
No matter how you look at Capone’s legacy as a “businessman,” the items on offer could give you a glimpse of the man beyond the legend.
“When you handle his possessions, you get a sense of who a person is,” Brian Witherell, from Witherell’s Auction House, says.
“And you see his artifacts, you see his pictures, you see him holding his grandchildren, you see the letters to his son, and you see regardless of how he made his living and what his profession was, you see the human side of him.”
In October, Witherell’s Auction House will present “A Century of Notoriety: The Estate of Al Capone” in Sacramento.
