Abandoned Mansions Of America's Deadliest Mafia

Ninety-three Palm Avenue, Miami Beach. August 2023, and an excavator is taking the roof off Al Capone's house. Nearly twenty-six thousand people had signed a petition to stop it. The city had spent two years arguing about it. And the developer who owned the place told the Miami Herald exactly what he thought of the argument: the house was a piece of junk and a disgrace to Miami Beach. Capone bought it in 1928, when he was twenty-nine years old and running Chicago. He paid forty thousand dollars for a property that had been built six years earlier on Palm Island — a man-made island in Biscayne Bay, so new that his was among the first houses on it. He is widely believed to have been at that house in the weeks before the most notorious killing in American criminal history, which happened fifteen hundred miles away. We'll get to that.