Call it Al Capone’s final haul. A trove of family mementos, jewelry and weapons that were once owned by the notorious gangster will be auctioned off by his three surviving granddaughters, who lived in relative obscurity until they emerged in 2019.
The collection, which includes Capone’s “favorite” gun (a Colt .45 pistol starting at $50,000), a Patek Philippe pocket watch monogrammed with 90 diamonds, and personal letters is estimated to sell for $700,000, by luxury asset auctioneer Witherell’s, based in Sacramento, which revealed the catalog today. Timothy Gordon, of PBS’s “Antiques Roadshow,” appraised the items.
“Al Capone is the most-collected historical figure in the criminal world, and traditionally his items have sold at astronomical amounts,” said Mr. Gordon. Personal items, especially monogrammed, perform particularly well, experts said. In 2017, a diamond watch owned by Capone sold for $84,375, more than tripling its pre-auction estimate. A 2014 Sotheby’s auction sold Capone’s engraved 1932 silver-plated cocktail shaker for roughly $68,500.
This latest batch of items comes at a time when there is renewed focus on how the culture and market value objects of historical significance but moral murkiness. “Some people buy Nazi paraphernalia for the purpose of taking it off the market,” said Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “I would feel uncomfortable putting up for sale something that doesn’t benefit victims. But this Capone collection gets at bigger questions buyers and curators are asking now: Who do we want to honor in American history? Whose lives are of interest? Whose possessions are of interest?”
Capone’s granddaughter, Diane Pette, a retired counselor at Mission College in Santa Clara, Calif., said she and her sister Barbara decided in January that the time was right to unload the collection. “We were getting older and we were concerned that if anything happened to either of us, that people wouldn’t know what was what and what was the story that went with each thing,” she said. She also worried that some of the collection might be damaged by the wildfires that have recently burned much of Northern California; last year, her home in Auburn, Calif., was under threat of evacuation.
