WTI Magazine #75    2016 January 18
Author : Vittorio Bocchi      Translation by:

As the book "L'Altro ItaloAmericano – La straordinaria storia di Vincenzo James Capone – Two-Gun il fratello di Al Capone" was published in Italy, it raised a lot of interest. It is a small and simple book, which presents for the first time to the Italian readers a story that seems unbelievable, but is indeed entirely true. Until now, this story was just very briefly and sporadically mentioned in a few books written by American authors and then translated in Italian, especially biographies dedicated to Al Capone.

First - the only one born in Italy - of nine children fathered by Gabriel Capone, a barber in Brooklyn, and Teresina Raiola, a seamstress, Vincenzo James disappears from Brooklyn in 1908 and none of the family is able to reach or hear from him for thirty-three years, when he is the one who contact his brothers. Only then, even his beloved wife learns that he is Al Capone's brother. Meanwhile, while Alphonse creates an empire in Chicago as a gangster, Vincent feeds his personal myth in the Midwest, as agent-cowboy of Prohibition in the Native American reserves, becoming the legendary Two-Gun Hart.

The book tells the parallel lives of Vincent and Alphonse, through the tumultuous years of Prohibition. A period that has revealed a kind of schizophrenia in the behavior of the Italian people in the United States, exploded in the crucible of immigrants that was Brooklyn at the beginning of the twentieth century.

It is the spring of 1919, when Vincent gest down a freight train in Homer, Nebraska, and decides to settle with the new identity of Richard Joseph Hart, taking his new name from the movie star William Surrey Hart, whose image stands on the cover of the book. From this moment, the metamorphosis is complete.

The Italian American, born in Italy and raised in Brooklyn, is transformed into a young cowboy: dresses like a cowboy, walks like a cowboy, talks like a cowboy. In Homer he is the sheriff of the city, and soon he becomes the most feared federal agent by smugglers in the reserves of the natives. He is enthralled by the charm of these wild tribes in disarray and he is very interested in their tribal culture.

His job is difficult and dangerous; over time he makes several enemies, even among his colleagues. His last years are marked by mishaps, bitterness and material difficulties. After his death, and after a short period in which the rapprochement with his siblings filled the pages of the newspapers, nobody has ever talked about his story: until his heirs resurrected it with a painstaking research, which led to a new publication in the US.

MnM Print Edizioni has had by the heirs of Richard Joseph Hart, aka Vincent "James" Capone, the the approval and permission to publish the story and a few photographs from their family archive. The book can be purchased here www.mnmprintedizioni.com.