Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesAl Capone’s wife, Mae Capone, tries to avoid photographers while visiting her husband in prison in December 1937. By all accounts, Mae Coughlin’s early life was much like that of any other hardworking Irish American in the early 1900s. The daughter of two immigrants, she was studious and ambitious as she began to make a life for herself. But her life would change forever when she met Al Capone. While much has been written about the legendary mobster, Al Capone’s wife has been largely relegated to the sidelines. But it was she who protected him from opportunistic journalists when he became gravely ill due to advanced syphilis in his 40s. It was also she who made sure the mob didn’t worry about the former leader’s deteriorating mental state. Though Mae Capone was an angelic figure in her husband’s life, she was also complicit in his crimes. While she didn’t wield a gun herself, Mae Capone was well aware of what her husband did for a living. During Al Capone’s rise from a low-ranking thug to a fearsome mob boss, Mae Capone was always by his side. And she never left, even when his syphilitic brain reduced his mental capacity to that of a 12-year-old. As Deirdre Bair’s book Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend put it: “Mae was a ferocious protector. The Outfit knew he was cloistered and that Mae wouldn’t let him become a problem for them. And Mae knew all about the Outfit. She was one of those wives who made spaghetti for Al and the gang at 3 in the morning when they did business back when he was in charge. She must have heard everything.” This is the little-known story of Mae Capone, Al Capone’s wife, his protector, and the one woman who surely did hear everything. Her Life Before Meeting Al Capone Wikimedia CommonsMae Capone was two years older than her husband, and was considered by some to be “marrying down.” Mary “Mae” Coughlin was born on April 11, 1897 in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents had emigrated from Ireland earlier that decade and started their family in America. After Mae Coughlin’s father died of a heart attack, the hardworking student left school at about age 16 to find a job at a box factory. When she first met Al Capone a few years later, he also worked at a box factory — but he was already getting started on less legitimate side businesses with 1920s mobsters Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale. Wikimedia CommonsBy the time Mae Coughlin met Al Capone, he was already mixed up in the world of organized crime in Brooklyn. Though a prudent Irishwoman from a religious Catholic family bringing home an Italian street punk was odd, their relationship was truly a love story. Mae Coughlin Falls For Capone And Decides To “Marry Down” Al Capone was about 18 when he first met Mae Coughlin, who was two years older than him (a fact she would go to great lengths to hide throughout her life). But despite his youth and mysterious side jobs, he thoroughly charmed his girlfriend’s family. Even when she became pregnant out of wedlock, she was allowed to live openly at home before they got hitched. It’s unclear exactly how the couple first met, but some think they may have hit it off at a party in Carroll Gardens. Others speculate that Capone’s mother might have arranged their courtship. Wikimedia CommonsAl Capone’s son was partially deaf, just like him. For Capone, marrying an Irish Catholic woman who was more educated than him was a definite step up. Some viewed Coughlin’s decision to wed Capone as “marrying down,” but she found security and trust in him. After all, he made enough money to forward a good chunk of it to his mother. Though Al Capone bedded countless women, he genuinely fell for Coughlin. Shortly after the birth of their first and only child, the unconventional couple got married at St. Mary Star of the Sea in Brooklyn in 1918. Mae Capone’s Tumultuous Life As Al Capone’s Wife Wikimedia CommonsThe Capone home in Chicago. 1929. By about 1920, Mae Capone had moved to Chicago with her husband and son, Albert Francis “Sonny” Capone. Like his father before him, Sonny lost some of his hearing early in his life. The gangster steadily rose in the ranks in the Windy City, but along the way he also contracted syphilis from a prostitute while working as a bouncer for mob boss James “Big Jim” Colosimo. It’s still debated whether the couple’s lack of other children besides Sonny was due to Mae Capone contracting the disease from her husband or not. Capone would later experience severe cognitive decline due to his untreated disease. But before that happened, he built himself an empire in the underworld. After colluding with Torrio to murder Colosimo and take over his business, the newly-promoted thug began his rise as a top mob boss. Mae Capone was aware of his job, but it was his philandering that hurt her most. “Don’t do as your father did,” she reportedly told Sonny. “He broke my heart.” Getty ImagesMae Capone successfully lobbied to get her husband out of prison early. Capone inherited the business in the late 1920s, after Torrio gave him the reins. From then on, it was a roaring rampage of bootlegging, bribing cops, and murdering the competition. “I’m just a businessman, giving the people what they want,” he’d say, as photos of Capone were splashed across newspapers nationwide. “All I do is satisfy a public demand.” In the end, however, Capone was ultimately nabbed for tax evasion on Oct. 17, 1931. After Capone’s net worth skyrocketed throughout Prohibition, federal agents led by Eliot Ness eventually discovered that they could put him away for not paying taxes on all that income. After he was sent away, Mae Capone visited her husband in prison, where his health started to visibly decline. News of his mysterious health issues made the papers, with an overwhelmed Mae being mobbed by press hounds when she arrived at at the penitentiary. “Yes, he is going to get well,” she reportedly said. “He is suffering from dejection and a broken spirit, aggravated by intense nervousness.” Mae Capone: “Feorcious” Protector Of An Ailing Husband Ullstein Bild/Getty ImagesThe former mob boss was reduced to a mentally deficient child in his final years — with tantrums filling his days. Al Capone never improved. He had already begun to act strange behind bars, wearing winter clothes in his heated cell. After he was released early in 1939 for good behavior, he spent a short time seeking medical care in Baltimore before his family relocated to Palm Island, Florida. The mob had moved on and restructured. They were satisfied to have Capone retire, paying him $600 per week — a pittance compared to his previous salary — just to stay quiet. Before long, Capone began to have delusional chats with long-dead friends. He became Mae Capone’s full-time job, most of which entailed keeping him away from reporters, who were routinely trying to catch a glimpse of him. Ullstein Bild/Getty ImagesAl Capone spent his last years chatting with invisible houseguests and throwing tantrums. “She knew that it was dangerous for him to go out in public,” wrote author Deirdre Bair. This was particularly concerning, as anything that painted Capone as a blabbermouth could cause his old friends to silence him for good. But Mae Capone was “protective of him to the end,” explained Bair. She also made sure he got the best medical treatment. In fact, Capone was one of the first people to be treated with penicillin in the early 1940s, but by that point it was too late. His organs, including his brain, had begun to rot beyond repair. A sudden stroke in January 1947 allowed pneumonia to take hold in his body as his heart began to fail. Mae asked her parish priest, Monsignor Barry Williams, to administer her husband’s last rites — knowing what was to come. Ultimately, Al Capone died of cardiac arrest on Jan. 25, 1947 after a series of health complications. “Mama Mae seemed to need our company,” her granddaughters recalled. “It’s as if the house died when he did. Even though she lived to be eighty-nine… something in her died when he did.” She never ascended to the second floor of the house again, and chose to sleep in another bedroom. She covered the living room furniture with sheets and refused to serve any meals in the dining room. In the end, Mae Capone died on April 16, 1986, in a nursing home in Hollywood, Florida. After learning about Al Capone’s wife, Mae Capone, take a look at Al Capone’s prison cell. Then, learn about the short life of Frank Capone. The post The Story Of Mae Capone, Who Stood By Al Capone As Syphilis Destroyed His Brain appeared first on All That's Interesting.

The Holocaust happened on a scale so massive that we’re virtually unable to fully comprehend its scope. Reading the words “6 million lives” is certainly chilling (to say nothing of the millions of others killed), but it is a number so large that it becomes abstract. It’s thus difficult to attach a human element to this great tragedy, to attach a face to every figure. Wikimedia CommonsCzeslawa Kwoka, photographed for Nazi records upon her arrival at Auschwitz and just after she’d been beaten by a camp guard. Circa 1942-1943. Czeslawa Kwoka was one of the 116,000 Poles deported from their tiny villages in the wake of the German invasion in 1939. These villagers, mainly Catholic farmers, were ripped from their homes to make room for the Germans that the Nazis imagined would soon come to populate the area. Very little is known about Kwoka’s life before this moment. We do know that Czeslawa Kwoka was born in the small village of Wolka Zlojecka in southeastern Poland on August 15, 1928, and that she and her mother were deported from Zamosc, Poland to Auschwitz on December 13, 1942. But to the Nazis, Czeslawa Kwoka was just prisoner 26947. She was also a photo. Wikimedia CommonsA young Polish girl discovers the body of her sister, killed by a German bomb in 1939. Known for their ruthless efficiency, the Germans photographed and cataloged the prisoners who passed through the death camps for their records. In Kwoka’s photo, the fright emanating from her expression has transcended the black and white of the image and remains potent decades later. Her terror is palpable, conveying all of the horrors of the Holocaust without words or movement. The 14-year-old girl in this haunting photograph would be dead three months after the shutter snapped, one of the 230,000 children at Auschwitz where life expectancy was a few months at most. It is not known how she was killed, whether by hard labor, exhaustion, horrifying experiment, or any of the other countless methods of murder the Nazis had at their disposal. Wikimedia CommonsChild prisoners stand near the fence at Auschwitz. 1945. While we don’t know exactly what came after the photo, we do know what had come just before, thanks to the recollection of photographer Wilhelm Brasse. A Polish man deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis, Brasse was forced to photograph between 40,000 and 50,000 prisoners at the camp, including Czeslawa Kwoka. He vividly remembered taking her photo, recalling how the terrified girl was ushered in with the others, unable to understand anything that was happening around her: “So this woman Kapo (a prisoner overseer) took a stick and beat her about the face. This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing. Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn’t interfere. It would have been fatal for me. You could never say anything.” The blood from the cut on Czeslawa Kwoka’s lip is still visible in the photograph that Brasse took. As camp photographer, Brasse was an eyewitness to all of Auschwitz’s nightmarish horrors. He captured the raw fear on the prisoners’ faces and preserved it for eternity. Wikimedia CommonsAn elderly Hungarian women and three children march to the gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1944. Even after Brasse was sent to another concentration camp and finally liberated by American forces in 1945, he wrestled with the ghosts of the tens of thousands of victims he photographed for years to come. Eventually, he had to give up photography altogether. “When I started taking pictures again,” he explained, “I saw the dead. I would be standing taking a photograph of a young girl for her portrait, but behind her I would see them like ghosts standing there. I saw all those big eyes, terrified, staring at me. I could not go on.” These ghosts live on thanks to people like Brasse, who preserved the photos despite the Nazis’ best efforts to destroy them. Once they realized the war was lost, the Germans tried to get rid of all evidence of the things they had done, a measure that included the burning of victim’s identity cards. But Brasse and a few others managed to hide the negatives, preserving the faces to the victims that suffered these unimaginable abuses. Wikimedia CommonsA small sampling of the more than 40,000 Auschwitz prisoner photos taken by Wilhelm Brasse. The photograph of Czeslawa Kwoka was among those that Brasse managed to save. The frail, young face emblazoned with fear remains a poignant reminder of the all-consuming horrors of genocide and war, of all the lives that were extinguished before they had really begun. After this look at Czeslawa Kwoka and her powerful portrait from Auschwitz, see the most photos taken during the Holocaust. Then, discover the horrors of the largely overlooked genocide in Nazi-occupied Poland. The post Czeslawa Kwoka Died At The Hands Of The Nazis, But The Power Of Her Auschwitz Portrait Lives On appeared first on All That's Interesting.

Olga Lyubimova/TelegramThis discovery has been hailed as one of the most significant coin hoards found in Russia in recent years. During restoration work at the historic home of 17th-century merchant Averky Kirillov in Moscow, archaeologists opened up a ceramic vessel and came across nearly 20,000 silver coins. This astounding hoard is not only an incredible numismatic discovery, it also helps shed light on an especially turbulent and pivotal period in Russian history. Nevertheless, many questions remain about who originally owned the coins, how they fell into the hands of Kirillov, and why they were hidden away in his opulent Moscow home roughly 400 years ago. The 20,000 Silver Coins Found In The Historic Home Of Averky Kirillov According to an announcement from Olga Lyubimova, Russia’s Minister of Culture on Telegram, the coin hoard was found during restoration work at merchant Averky Kirillov’s home, which Kirillov constructed in the 17th century along the Bersenevskaya Embankment near the center of Moscow. Olga Lyubimova/TelegramThe coins were found in a ceramic vessel on the second floor of Averky Kirillov’s historic home in Moscow. The 20,000 coins were hidden inside a ceramic vessel on the second floor of the building, and have been preliminarily dated to the late 16th and early 17th centuries. However, experts are still examining the markings on the coins. Such markings will be a valuable data point, as coins from this era were often simultaneously issued by various parties that were claiming power at the same moment. And the era when the coins were minted was a tumultuous one indeed, which may explain why they were hidden in Averky Kirillov’s home in the first place. Why Did The Coins End Up In Averky Kirillov’s Home Following The Time Of Troubles? Public DomainA 20th-century depiction of Russia’s Time of Troubles, an era of political violence and famine that killed as many as 1 million people. Though the 20,000 coins found in Kirillov’s home still need to be studied, experts believe for the moment that they were minted during the late 1500s and early 1600s. This was an especially tumultuous period of Russian history known as the Smutnoye vremya, or the Time of Troubles. This period began in 1598, when the ineffective ruler Feodor I, the son of Ivan the Terrible, died without an heir. He was the last of the Rurik dynasty, which had ruled Russian since the 9th century, and his death left a power gap that many factions rushed to fill. Feodor’s father had infamously killed Feodor’s older brother, Ivan, in 1581, but false rumors spread that Feodor’s younger brother was still alive, prompting many to claim to be this “lost” heir to the Rurik dynasty. The political upheaval led to widespread violence. And this, combined with a famine that began at the beginning of the 17th century and lasted for three years, killed up to a million people. Conditions didn’t stabilize until 1613, when Michael Romanov became tsar and established the Romanov dynasty. The Romanov dynasty, of course, lasted until 1917, when the tsar and his family were toppled during the Russian Revolution. It was during this era of political upheaval, violence, and famine, that the coins appear to have been minted. So how did they end up in Averky Kirillov’s home in Moscow? Experts think there are several possibilities. Kirillov is thought to have acquired the home, then a wooden property, around 1656. He replaced it with the striking red, two-story stone building that stands there today. Experts think that the coins could represent Kirillov’s personal savings, or that the hoard was merchant capital stored during a period of political unrest, or that it had been collected for trade or taxation purposes, but never collected — possibly because its owner was exiled or killed. Wikimedia CommonsRussian merchant Averky Kirillov’s historic home along the Bersenevskaya Embankment in Moscow. While many questions thus remain about the coin hoard found in Averky Kirillov’s home, future study will assuredly provide more answers about when the coins were made, and to whom they belonged. Hopefully that will in turn shed more light on why and when they were hidden — and how this treasure trove remained forgotten for the past several centuries. After reading about the hoard of 20,000 silver coins that were found in the Moscow home of merchant Averky Kirillov, discover the astounding story of the Lykov Family, which fled their village in Russia in 1936 and spent the next four decades living in total isolation in the wilderness. Then, look through these photos of life in Oymyakon, Russia, the coldest inhabited place on Earth. The post Workers Restoring An Historic Merchant’s House In Moscow Uncovered Nearly 20,000 Silver Coins Dating Back 400 Years appeared first on All That's Interesting.

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