There is a popular story on the Internet that the production date and expiration date on milk bottles began to be placed thanks to an American gangster. We decided to check if this is true.

This fact from the biography of the famous criminal is found on entertaining resources, on websites questions and answers and forums. Some media outlets also published such information (for example, “Russian newspaper" And "Military Review"). This story is also shared by social media users (“VKontakte", Telegram, Facebook*) and blog platforms (LiveJournal, "Peekaboo").

Alphonse Capone, better known as Al Capone, was an American Prohibition-era gangster who led the Chicago underworld from 1925 to 1931. His crimes include the F.B.I. calls bootlegging, bribery, drug trafficking, support of prostitution, racketeering, robbery and murder. It would seem, what relation could such a person have to dairy products and expiration date labeling?

According to one of the distributed versions, either niece Al Capone, or all his family Once she was poisoned by stale milk, and that is why the gangster began to lobby for the appearance of relevant information on dairy products. By another — the idea came to the criminal not out of concern for health, but because of a banal thirst for profit: supposedly he was the only one in the city who had the equipment to apply such markings, and all manufacturers would be forced to turn to him.

The Chicago mafia really wanted to take over the city's dairy industry in the 1930s, when it became clear that Prohibition will soon be canceled and it will no longer be possible to make money from the underground sale of alcohol. But according to the newspaper Chicago Tribune, who wrote about the “milk wars” at that time, the gangsters, to achieve this goal, did not lobby for the requirement to mark the expiration date, but used completely different methods, more familiar to criminals. They purchased a dairy plant and tried to force dairy union leader Steve Sumner to help them with the scam in exchange for protection from them. The gangsters were going to hire non-union workers, which would allow them to save on production and sell milk cheaper than their competitors, and then thus bankrupt them and take over the market. Sumner would then hold a demonstration at the plant, after which the plant would hire union workers and sharply raise prices. Sumner refused to cooperate with the mafia, which marked the beginning of the “milk wars,” during which gangsters attacked both factories and union leaders.

American journalist and non-fiction author Gus Russo in his book The Outfit, dedicated to the Chicago gang of the same name, which was led by Al Capone, writes that in 1931, the gangsters founded the Meadowmoor dairy company, and then, with the help of their representatives in the city council, introduced a scale of milk quality, prohibiting the sale of products below class A (the highest that their own product corresponded to) and thereby beginning to squeeze competitors out of the market. And yes, according to Russo, the mafia allegedly also lobbied for the introduction of mandatory expiration date labeling on dairy products, although nothing was said about the reasons that prompted them to push through such a measure. Note that Al Capone did not directly take part in either the “milk wars” or in lobbying for labels - from 1931 to 1939 he was in prison for tax evasion, and led the gang Frank Nitti. There is no reason to believe that Nitti's actions were Al Capone's idea, which he somehow conveyed and/or implemented from behind bars.

Source: FBI/United States Bureau of Prisons, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Mario Gomez, a collector of Al Capone-related items, a researcher of his life and a guest expert on the biography of the famous gangster in many television shows and documentaries, assertsthat the story about a criminal's idea to put an expiration date on milk bottles is nothing more than a myth. He even cites a clipping from the Chicago Daily Tribune, published in 1913, when the future criminal was only 14 years old, which already mentioned similar labels on dairy products. In addition, Gomez also notes that the Chicago criminal organization, headed by Al Capone, entered the dairy business after the gangster was sent to prison.

Deirdre Capone, great-niece of the famous gangster, in her bookUncle Al Capone: The Untold Story from Inside His Family" writes that the initiator of the introduction of labeling on dairy products was not Alphonse himself, but precisely his older brother Ralph, also an active member of the Chicago Mafia. She even claims that her father got his nickname Bottles not because of bootlegging, but because of his idea to put expiration marks on bottles of milk. At the same time, Ralph Capone, like his more famous younger brother, missed the beginning of the “milk wars” and the founding of the dairy company by the gang, since he also was in prison on charges of tax evasion from April 1930 to February 1934.

In 2016 American edition Huffpost also tried to get to the bottom of this story and contacted the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Department of Agriculture and a milk safety expert at Cornell University for comment, but no one could confirm that Al Capone or his gang had anything to do with the introduction of expiration date labels on milk. At the same time, today the law in the USA does not require from producers of not only milk, but also other perishable products (with the exception of baby food) mandatory labeling with an expiration date. Therefore, each manufacturer decides for himself whether to indicate it and what wording to choose for this.

Thus, there is no credible evidence that Al Capone had anything to do with the introduction of mandatory expiration date labeling on dairy products in Chicago in particular and the world in general. Some researchers studying the history of the Chicago mafia believe that the gang, whose leader for some time was Capone, could indeed lobby for such a rule, but by that time he himself was already in prison and was unlikely to have a serious influence on the decisions made by the gangsters. In addition, judging by the archives of newspapers from the beginning of the last century, some milk producers had put such marks before, although this was not enshrined in law, so Al Capone could hardly have been the inventor of such markings. The story about the poisoning of milk by one of the members of the Capone family, which allegedly prompted the gangster to introduce expiration dates, was also not confirmed by Verified.

*Russian authorities think the company Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.

Cover photo: Wide World Photos, Chicago Bureau (Federal Bureau of Investigation), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons