A photograph from the late 1920s shows a young woman standing outside a pink mansion in Miami Beach, her hand resting on the shoulder of a boy no older than 10. Just out of frame was the most feared man in America. Nobody looking at that photo could have guessed what was waiting for the woman and the boy once his name stopped making headlines. Mary Josephine Coughlin was born in Brooklyn in April 1897, the daughter of Irish immigrants.
Everyone called her May. She went to school, then worked as a sales clerk, a quiet and respectable path for thousands of young Irish American women in Brooklyn at the time. Somewhere along that path, she met a young man named Alphonse Capone. Stories differ on exactly how.
Some say they crossed paths at a party; others say Al’s own mother arranged the introduction. By the time May was 21, she was pregnant. Their son, Albert Francis Capone, was born on December 4, 1918. Nobody called him that.
He was Sunny, a nickname he carried for the rest of his life. May and Al didn’t marry until December 30, 1918, almost four weeks after Sunny was born. The ceremony took place at St. Mary Star of the Sea Church in Brooklyn.
On the marriage certificate, Al added a year to his age, and May shaved two years off hers. A young Irish Catholic woman in 1918, pregnant and unmarried in a community where that could follow a family for a generation, May carried the pressure quietly. She married the father of her child before the year was out and never once, in the seven decades of life ahead of her, spoke publicly about what that autumn had been like. There was something else waiting in that marriage.
Sunny was born with a congenital infection passed to him before birth. It damaged his hearing and led to a serious mastoid infection behind his ear. Doctors operated on his skull to control it. He survived, but the surgery left him partially deaf for the rest of his life.
It’s widely believed the infection came from his father, the same illness that would decades later become one of the most talked-about details of Al Capone’s final years. May would go on to lose other pregnancies in the years that followed. Sunny would remain her only child. Before Al Capone had built a single speakeasy or paid off a single police captain, his wife was already living with the two things that would define the rest of her life: devotion to a man who had already begun causing her quiet, private harm, and a son who would carry the physical consequences of that harm into adulthood.
What followed was Chicago, the empire, the Prohibition years that turned Al Capone into a name recognized on nearly every continent. May was there for all of it, but she is almost entirely absent from the historical record of those years. She didn’t attend the parties. She didn’t pose for the photographs.
She raised Sunny, managed a household, and kept her opinions about her husband’s business to herself. There’s a story reported years later by a Chicago magazine that offers a rare window into her marriage. Al Capone had a habit, when he took up with a mistress, of asking the woman to change her hairstyle or hair color to match his preference. At one point, May discovered one of these affairs and responded not with tears or an ultimatum, but by bleaching her own hair to match the color of the other woman’s.
She never left him. She never spoke to the press about what she knew. Whatever grief his infidelity caused her, she absorbed it privately. Sunny, meanwhile, was growing up as the son of the most photographed criminal in America.
The family mansion on Palm Island in Miami Beach was purchased by his father in 1928 at the height of his power. It was placed in May’s name rather than Al’s, a decision that would matter enormously years later. The estate was a sprawling waterfront property with a swimming pool larger than most homes in the neighborhood, behind a wall high enough to block curious eyes. Visitors described a household that, apart from armed men occasionally stationed near the gate, looked almost aggressively ordinary.
By the turn of the 1930s, the government had run out of ways to touch Al Capone through his violence, so they came at him through his money instead. On October 17, 1931, Al Capone was convicted of federal tax evasion. Investigators led by Elliot Ness had spent years chasing him for bootlegging and extortion. In the end, it was unpaid taxes on his illegal income that finally put him away.
He was sentenced to 11 years, a number that shocked even seasoned observers. When the sentence came down, most of the room reportedly gasped. He was shipped first to a federal penitentiary in Atlanta before being transferred to Alcatraz. May was there for parts of the trial, seated quietly, drawing far less attention than the spectacle unfolding around her husband.
This is where most retellings of Al Capone’s life fade out. But May’s story intensifies. She visited him regularly at enormous personal cost. Getting to Alcatraz from the East Coast or Florida in the 1930s wasn’t a quick trip, and every visit came with a swarm of reporters.
After one visit, the press pursued her taxi for 65 miles, cameras pressed against car windows trying to get a photograph of a woman who had spent over a decade trying to stay out of the papers. May also worked quietly to improve her husband’s conditions and eventually to speed his release, lobbying where she could and managing whatever remained of the family’s legitimate finances. Something else was happening to Al Capone during those years. The infection he was believed to have passed to his wife and newborn son years earlier hadn’t stayed contained.
Left largely untreated, it had begun working its way into his nervous system. By the mid-1930s, prison medical staff were noting signs of serious mental decline. The man who had once run an empire was starting to lose track of conversations mid-sentence. May would travel across the country for a conversation that might last only minutes through reinforced glass with a husband whose mind was becoming harder to reach with each trip.
She kept making the trip anyway, year after year. He was released in 1939, seven years into an 11-year sentence, his health having declined to the point that keeping him incarcerated no longer served any purpose. The man who returned to the Palm Island mansion bore almost no resemblance to the one who had built an empire a decade earlier. The infection had reached his brain.
Doctors would later describe his condition as late-stage neurological damage. In practical human terms, the man reportedly now had the mental capacity of a child. The organization he had once run had moved on without him. What remained of his old associates arranged for him to receive a modest weekly allowance, reportedly around $600, essentially payment to remain quiet.
He never returned to organized crime. He couldn’t have. May became, in the words of people who observed her during this period, a fierce protector of a husband who could no longer protect himself. She worked to keep him shielded from photographers and strangers.
She also made sure he got real medical care. In the early 1940s, as researchers began experimenting with penicillin, Al Capone became one of the first patients in the country to receive it for his condition. May pushed for the treatment even as the drug was barely out of experimental use. It didn’t reverse the damage already done, but it slowed the disease’s progression and likely extended his life.
Meanwhile, their son was becoming a young man and deliberately choosing a completely different kind of life. On December 30, 1941, Sunny married Diana Ruth Casey, his high school sweetheart, at St. Patrick’s Church in Miami Beach. Over the following years, they would have four daughters together: Veronica, Teresa, Barbara, and Patricia.
They built exactly the kind of ordinary, unremarkable domestic life that Sunny’s own childhood had never been allowed to have. By January 1947, Al Capone’s health had deteriorated to the point where the end was near. He had suffered a stroke, and pneumonia had set in. May contacted the family’s parish priest and asked him to administer last rites, wanting to make sure that whatever else the world thought of her husband, he would leave it having received that final sacrament.
On January 25, 1947, Al Capone died of cardiac arrest in the Palm Island mansion, at the age of 48. What happened to May in the years immediately after is in some ways the most quietly devastating part of the story, because almost nothing dramatic happened at all. There was no public breakdown, no tell-all interview, no bitter reckoning. Instead, something in her simply seemed to dim.
She never went back upstairs to the bedroom she had shared with her husband, not once, for the rest of her life. She told one of her granddaughters years later that the room held only good memories, and now that he was gone, she couldn’t bring herself to be in it. She stopped eating in the formal dining room. She began covering pieces of furniture with sheets, room by room, the way people do when preparing to leave a place.
Except May wasn’t leaving. She was retreating inch by inch inside a house that had grown too large and too quiet. The house itself had been placed in May’s name back in 1928. That single decision, made likely to hide assets from the government, ended up being what let May hold onto her home and financial footing after his death.
She was left alone in a very large house with a grief she had no intention of sharing. For the first two decades of his adult life, Sunny Capone did something that looks almost impossibly disciplined. He simply lived. He worked as an apprentice printer, tried running a restaurant, and eventually settled into selling tires and cars.
He raised four daughters with Diana, paid his bills, and stayed entirely clear of any criminal activity. But a last name like Capone doesn’t let a person simply live. Reporters occasionally tracked him down. Strangers recognized the name on a sales slip and treated him differently.
His mother had reportedly told him directly more than once not to follow in his father’s footsteps, that it had broken her heart once, and she couldn’t survive watching it happen again. In 1965, something happened that seemed to finally tip the scales. Sunny was arrested for shoplifting, caught taking a small handful of items, reportedly nothing more significant than aspirin and batteries from a local store. It was a minor offense by any measure, but it became national news.
When he stood before the judge, he reportedly shrugged the whole thing off, saying something to the effect that everyone has a little bit of larceny in them. He received two years of probation and a fresh humiliating reminder that no matter how quietly he lived, his father’s name was always going to be the headline. The following year, in 1966, Sunny made it official. He legally changed his name to Albert Francis Brown, choosing a surname as plain and forgettable as the English language offers.
His lawyer explained the decision simply: Sunny was, in his words, sick and tired of fighting the name. His marriage to Diana hadn’t survived much longer either. The couple divorced in the summer of 1964, ending a partnership that had started as high school sweethearts and lasted more than two decades. Sunny would marry two more times over the following years.
There’s something almost cinematic about the timing. While Hollywood studios were turning his father into a swaggering villain, the real Sunny Capone was quietly filling out paperwork at a county courthouse, trading one of the most recognized surnames in America for one so plain it could belong to almost anyone. Sunny, now living as Albert Francis Brown, eventually settled in a small community called Orin Lake Trails, tucked into the hills of El Dorado County, California. He married a third time, to a woman named America, known as Amy.
There, for years, he simply existed as one more retired neighbor. He rarely, if ever, discussed his family background. On July 8, 2004, Albert Francis Brown died in that small California town at the age of 85. It was only in the days that followed, as the truth of his identity became known, that his neighbors learned the quiet retiree had actually been born Albert Francis Capone, the only son of the most infamous gangster in American history.
His widow Amy spoke to a reporter shortly afterward. She said that Al Capone had been dead a long, long time, and that his son had nothing to do with any of it. She asked simply that people let him rest in peace, pointing out that he had already suffered enough for the simple fact of who his father happened to be. While Sunny was rebuilding his identity out west, May remained in Florida, living for decades in that same Palm Island mansion, visited regularly by her son, her daughter-in-law, and eventually her grandchildren, but rarely by anyone else.
She kept almost entirely out of public view for the better part of 40 years. There’s no memoir, no paid interview, no tell-all account bearing her name. The one time May did step into public conflict over her husband’s legacy came in 1964, when she and Sunny together filed a lawsuit against Desilu Productions, the studio behind the hit television series “The Untouchables. ” May’s complaint centered on the way the show used her husband’s identity and likeness for profit without consent from the family.
She could tolerate the world remembering Al Capone. What she seemed unwilling to tolerate was other people profiting from that memory while she and her son were left to deal with the consequences. As she grew older, May took one more step to protect her privacy. Before her death, she made the decision to burn her personal diaries along with the love letters she and Al had exchanged over the course of their marriage.
Whatever private record existed of what their relationship had actually felt like, May made sure no one else would ever get to read it. Mary Josephine “May” Capone died on April 16, 1986, in Hollywood, Florida, at the age of 89. She had outlived her husband by nearly 40 years, never remarried, and never once sold her side of the story. Decades later, it wasn’t May or Sunny who put any of this in writing.
A grandniece of Al Capone’s, born into a different branch of the family through his brother Ralph, wrote a memoir about growing up as a Capone. She spent years quietly hiding that name herself before eventually deciding to write about it, gathering family recollections and photographs that had never been shared publicly before. Her book stands as one of the only accounts to come from inside the family at all, and it exists specifically because May and Sunny never wrote one of their own. Looking back at the two of them, May and Sunny represent two completely different answers to the exact same impossible question.
What do you do with a name like Capone once the man who made it famous is gone? May’s answer was to stay, to remain in the house, in the state, in the identity she’d carried since 1918, and to simply refuse to let the outside world dictate how she processed her grief, mostly by not telling her story at all. Sunny’s answer was to leave, to become someone else entirely, to build a life so ordinary and so far removed from Florida that even the people who shared a fence line with him for years had no idea who he’d once been. Neither of them ever spoke badly about the man at the center of it all, at least not publicly.
Neither of them ever cashed in on the name. Both of them, in their own very different ways, spent the rest of their lives quietly working to make sure that the people they loved wouldn’t have to carry the same weight they had. Today, the descendants of Al Capone, May, and Sunny are still out there living under names that mostly have nothing to do with the one that made their family famous.
The two people who actually lived through his rise, his fall, and the long, difficult unraveling that followed him home chose, each in their own way, to let that name grow quieter with every passing year.