Page 30 - ARUBA TODAY

A30 PEOPLE & ARTS
Monday 26 June 2017
Al Capone song, pocket watch fetch over $100K at auction

By CRYSTAL HILL among the items that sold
Associated Press at the “Gangsters, Outlaws
BOSTON (AP) — Artifacts and Lawmen” auction. The
connected to some of watch fetched the most
the nation’s most notori- — $84,375 — according to
ous gangsters sold for more Boston-based RR Auction.
than $100,000 at auction The winning bidder of the
Saturday. watch was not identified.
A diamond pocket watch The buyer is a collector
that belonged to Al Ca- who has an eye for interest-
pone and was produced in ing American artifacts, said
Chicago in the 1920s, along RR Auction Executive Vice
with a handwritten musical President Bobby Livingston.
composition he wrote in He was among about 30
Alcatraz in the 1930s, were internet, telephone and in-

In this Jan. 19, 1931 file photograph, Chicago mobster Al Capone is seen at a football game in
Chicago.
Associated Press
person bidders. humanizes him, and shows leathercraft behind bars
Capone’s musical piece that he had an imagina- — as originally believed,
entitled “Humoresque” tion and creativity. These according to RR Auction’s
sold for $18,750. The piece people had talents and website.
shows Capone’s softer they used those talents, un- Clyde Barrow’s nephew,
side. It contains the lines: fortunately for criminal en- Buddy Barrow, and Bonnie
“You thrill and fill this heart deavors.” Parker’s niece, Rhea Leen
of mine, with gladness like Livingston was referring not Linder, were in attendance.
a soothing symphony, over just to Capone, but to infa- “I asked Buddy Barrow
the air, you gently float, mous couple Bonnie and what his uncle would be
and in my soul, you strike a Clyde. An autographed thinking about the auction,
note.” “So Long” letter written by he felt that Clyde would
Livingston told The Associat- Bonnie Parker and signed have said ‘make as much
ed Press he wasn’t surprised by Clyde Barrow just before money as you can’,” Liv-
that lyrics written by a man their deaths sold for $16,250. ingston said.
better known for organized A pair of Texas arrest war- A letter written by John
crime than his musical tal- rants fetched $8,125. Gotti, the reputed head of
ents sold at the auction be- Parker’s silver-plated, three- the Gambino crime family
cause of the way Capone headed snake ring fetched in New York, didn’t sell. The
“resonates in the American $25,000. The ring was not 1998 letter to the daughter
imagination.” made by Barrow— a skilled of a mob associate urges
“The musical artifact gives amateur craftsman who the recipient to tell her fa-
insight into who this man engaged in jewelry mak- ther “to keep the martinis
was,” Livingston said. “It ing, woodworking and cold.”

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