For Deirdre Marie Capone, a visit to 93 Palm Ave. near Miami Beach, Florida, feels like being in a time machine.
Even from the street, she can see that everything is still in its place: the simple arched garage door; the lily pond with grotto; the Spanish-style mansion, the palm trees, the guest house and, of course, the enormous swimming pool with its two-storey cabana that borders Biscayne Bay.
"Boy, this brings back some memories," Capone, 72, says as she walks in.
It has been almost half a century since her last visit. But the images are still in her mind. The beautiful house has a special past. Her grand-uncle bought it in 1928 as a summer residence. His name was Al Capone, and each time Deirdre came down from Chicago, she would watch the king of gangsters living in retirement.
In the decades since, the house has languished, occupied but falling into disrepair. After Capone died in 1947 and his wife, Mae, sold the mansion, it ended up in the hands of an airline pilot named Henry T. Morrison in 1971 for $56,000.
Three years ago, he sold it to Peter Corsell, founder of smart-energy company Grid Point, for $5.7 million. He finally moved out last year.
Corsell had it modernized and extensively furnished - and now the house and Capone's footsteps in Miami are making a comeback.
The seven-room, five-bathroom mansion was listed for sale in July for almost $10 million, and it has become a hotspot. TV stations fly in, Capone experts stop by, moneyed Russians are bidding - all looking for the stories the house has to tell about the infamous mobster who turned bootlegging into a booming business during the Prohibition era.
"I thought that we would get all these hip-hoppers," says Jorge Alonso, the real estate agent in charge for the Douglas Elliman firm. "But for now, I have been mostly dealing with people that are history buffs."
Revisiting Palm Island from Naples, Florida, where she has been living for 14 years, is a personal journey for Deirdre.
She is the last surviving family member born with the name Capone and one of the few who actually knew "Scarface." For years, she tried to leave everything about her family's history behind.
Sharing a name with the man who once was America's most-wanted criminal was a huge burden. Her father killed himself over a manuscript about his family when she was 10. Deirdre, who for years used the name Deirdre Gabriel, got fired from her first fulltime job when her identity was discovered.
She was so embarrassed about being a Capone that she didn't tell her children who she really was. When she finally revealed her last name to them in 1974, their reaction caught her by surprise. "They said, 'Cool, Mom,' " Deirdre recalls.
Deirdre was seven when Capone died. "Dropped dead here," Deirdre says, pointed to the floor of a second-floor bathroom. It was the morning of her 7th birthday. Capone, who had suffered a mini-stroke days before, took some laps in the pool. With the help of two male nurses, he went upstairs to shower.
When he stepped out he suffered a massive stroke. "He was instantly dead," recalls Deirdre, who had returned to Chicago only days before.
Miami had been a perfect city for Capone's retirement. It was far from Chicago, where in the late '20s his success was beginning to haunt him. The gambling business was promising. The Caribbean was around the corner. "Yes, I like Miami so well that I'm going to vacation here all winter," the mobster said after arriving in 1928.
In March 1928, he bought 93 Palm Ave. for $30,000 in his wife's name. He quickly turned its pool, which at the time was the largest private one in Florida, into a swank party venue.
Whereas Chicago historically had tried to keep the Capone story out of public focus, South Florida is capitalizing on it. Realtors are promoting the house as Capone's former mansion in an online video.
Preservation advocates in city government urged architects to retain much of the home's original flair.
Hotels where Capone is said to have stayed present themselves as historic sites - the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida, even nicknamed one of its most exclusive rooms "The Al Capone Suite."
It's part of how movies, biographies and TV series such as Boardwalk Empire, which returned for a second season on HBO, have softened his image to the extent that in the collective memory, Capone is seen as sort of a Che Guevara of crime rather than a brutal criminal and Public Enemy No. 1.
"He is seen as a celebrity," says Chicago Federal Public Defender Terence MacCarthy, who got Capone acquitted in a mock retrial there in 1990. "People tend to block out that he was a criminal who had people killed."
To Deirdre, the image change has been welcome. "He was a mobster, but not a monster," she says.
