Al Capone had a brief, but intense life before he was arrested by the government. A gangster from his earliest days in Brooklyn and Manhattan, he preferred the streets to schoolwork. In his 20s, he moved to Chicago to begin his big-time crime career. The newly-passed Volstead Act that began prohibition gave Capone and his gang plenty of opportunity to “give the people what they want,” as he characterized it, bootlegging illegal liquor down from Canada. However, a turf war between Capone and a rival gang got him noticed by the police, and Capone, who lived a very public life, was arrested and tried.

On this day, January 25, 1947 Al Capone died in his home in a neighborhood of South Beach. He was eight years out of jail, but during the 11 years he served, his crime empire fell apart. Capone himself succumbed in his later years to syphilis, which affected his mind. The brilliant criminal was reduced to the mental capacity of a 12-year-old child, in the professional conclusion of his physicians.

During his heyday in the 1920s, Capone rode around in an armored limousine, with inch-thick bulletproof windows, run-flat tires and flashing police lights. It was confiscated and seized by the Treasury Department as part of the tax evasion lawsuit against him, and remained in a vault somewhere until 1941. In December of 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the government decided they could not risk President Roosevelt riding around in an unarmored car, and since building a new one from scratch would take time, they hit upon the idea of using Capone’s limousine. It worked so well that Roosevelt insisted on copying many of its features for his own future presidential limo.