Al Capone’s official cause of death was heart failure, following on from his stroke and pneumonia. His body was prepared by Louis Rago, an undertaker flown in from Chicago who co-founded one of Chicago’s first full-time funeral parlors. Capone was dressed in a double-breasted blue suit with a black tie, black and white shoes, and black silk socks. His coffin was made of bronze and cost $2,000.
Before his return to Chicago, Capone’s dressed and prepared body had an open casket wake in a Miami Beach funeral home. We don’t know the names of most of the mourners at that wake — many of them came and went through the back door of the venue. Capone’s family was also keen to keep it a small, private affair. But a few employees of the funeral home let slip to friends that their place of work would be sending off the country’s most well-known mafioso, and those friends decided to have a look for themselves.
As friends of funeral home workers, and with one of the curious intruders being a guest at the home, they had no trouble getting around the guards. They brought along a camera and got several pictures of Capone’s body and floral arrangements. Their accomplice at the funeral home later convinced them to surrender the negatives to Capone’s doctor and never breathe a word about the incident. But the photographer kept a set of prints, which resurfaced decades later and provided the only known images of Capone’s body after death.
