Donald Trump, the former president, has often said this autumn in public events that he has been indicted three times more often than Al Capone, the notorious gangster.
It’s just not so.
In an effort to portray himself as the victim of baseless and politically driven charges, Republican frontrunner and billionaire businessman Donald Trump has used the claim about Al Capone. And by the way, I’ve been indicted more times than Alphonse Capone,” he stated during a speech in Iowa on Saturday. He is the most dangerous criminal ever. If he took you to dinner and if you didn’t look proper, if you chuckled a little bit, he may believe you’re laughing at him, it’s hazardous to laugh – he’d kill you immediately. He was charged with a crime once. I faced four separate indictments.
In a similar vein, he warned that “if you looked at him wrong, he’d kill you, and he’d kill you with his hands” during a rally in Florida last October. He was a serious badass. He got indicted one time. Four times I was accused of a crime.
First, the facts: Trump is wrong in saying that Al Capone was only indicted once. Author and Capone expert A. Brad Schwartz told AWN that Capone faced at least six indictments.
Furthermore, AWN was unable to instantly determine whether there was an indictment in a number of less prominent Capone cases. They included a variety of criminal charges that did not involve an indictment, such as certain misdemeanours.
List of charges against Capone
Indictments faced by a gangster in the early 20th century and the president of the United States in the 21st century are obviously incomparable because they were investigated by different persons for different things under different laws. Here are the facts, though, as Trump has made his Capone claim central to his attacks on his own criminal prosecutions.
In the same year as his infamous conviction for tax evasion and 11-year federal prison sentence (1931), Capone was indicted three times. Schwartz, co-author of “Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago,” detailed these as follows: “A secret indictment for tax evasion handed down in March 1931 (before the statute of limitations ran out for charges from the year 1924)”; “a larger indictment in June 1931, with more than 20 counts for tax evasion in the period from 1925 to 1929”; and “a bootlegging conspiracy indict
The story continued. Before the famous 1931 trial, Capone was charged and convicted in 1929 for carrying hidden guns in Philadelphia. Schwartz drew attention to two of Capone’s indictments that received less attention but yet did not result in a conviction: one in 1926 by the federal government for conspiracy to break Prohibition laws, and another by the municipal government in 1933 for racketeering.
Capone also had other criminal court hearings in the 1920s, but AWN was unable to immediately confirm whether or not any of them involved an indictment. (Capone used aliases, and some of these records are shaky because they date back a century.)
A journalist and author of another book on Capone, Jonathan Eig, pointed out to AWN that in 1922, Capone was charged with assault with a vehicle and other charges. In 1929, he was charged with federal contempt of court and convicted in 1931.
Addressing Trump’s misleading claims about apparently being indicted more than Capone, Schwartz stated: “This isn’t a race, of course, but it may be worth noting that Capone is also way ahead in individual counts (the 1931 Prohibition indictment alone added up to five thousand conspiracy charges).” With two federal indictments and two municipal indictments, Trump is facing 91 charges in total.
Trump is attempting to invalidate the 2020 election in one of his federal challenges. The other concerns his keeping secret paperwork after he left office. The prosecution against Trump in Fulton County, Georgia is also connected to his efforts to disrupt the election. Business record fabrication and a hush money plan are at the heart of his New York case.