Record
Court opinion
1931-07-24
CourtListener (Free Law Project), reprinting the Seventh Circuit opinion
Capone v. United States, 51 F.2d 609 (7th Cir. 1931): the appeal of Ralph J. Capone
The Seventh Circuit's July 1931 decision in the income-tax appeal of Ralph J. Capone. It reverses one count and affirms the rest. It is not a ruling in Alphonse Capone's case.
- Date
- 1931-07-24
- Kind
- court-opinion
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-11
- Docket
- 51 F.2d 609 (7th Cir. 1931), No. 4457
- Rights
- Opinion of a United States court. Works of the federal judiciary are in the public domain in the United States. The text read here is CourtListener's scan-derived copy of the reported opinion.
Circuit Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, No. 4457. Decided July 24, 1931; rehearing denied September 25, 1931. The opinion is by Judge Evans, sitting with Alschuler and Sparks. The appellant is Ralph J. Capone, a resident of Cook County. This is not Alphonse Capone’s appeal, and the opinion does not mention him. The Intelligence Unit’s 1919–1936 narrative names Ralph Capone as “Al Capone’s brother.”
The court sets out the evidence. Ralph Capone filed delinquent returns in November 1926 for 1922 through 1925 giving his occupation as “gambler” and his income as “from speculation.” In 1927 he offered $1,000 in compromise, saying his liabilities exceeded his assets. The court states that those statements were false and that he had deposited money under fictitious names, “sums aggregating $1,851,840.08” over five years and four months before April 22, 1929.
The disposition: “The judgment and sentence pronounced upon the second count of indictment 21,118 is reversed. The judgment and sentence on all other counts of the three indictments are affirmed.” Counsel for the government included George E. Q. Johnson, U.S. Attorney, whose office prosecuted Alphonse Capone the same year. Quotations follow CourtListener’s scan-derived text, with obvious scanning errors corrected.