Al Capone’s Armored Cadillac Came With a Fold-Down Gun Window. The FDR Story Doesn’t Hold Up

It was built with an estimated 3,000 pounds of steel plate, most of it removed in a later restoration. The glass was about an inch thick. The rear window folds down so a passenger can shoot back at whoever’s following. And it’s painted green and black, with a siren and a radio, to pass for a Chicago police car.

This is the 1928 Cadillac said to have belonged to Al Capone, and it’s outrageous even by Prohibition standards. It also comes with a famous story: that after Pearl Harbor, the government pressed it into service to carry Franklin Roosevelt safely to Congress. That part doesn’t hold up.

The car

It’s a 1928 Cadillac Series 341-A Town Sedan, and it doesn’t need a president in the back seat to be interesting. It’s among the earliest surviving bulletproof cars. For a man who spent the late 1920s dodging rival gunmen, every pound of that steel made sense.

The paper trail

The ownership history is where you have to read carefully. The car is described as “purportedly” Capone’s, and that qualifier matters. What can be followed is its path after Chicago. It ended up in England, where it spent years as an amusement-park attraction, then moved through museum displays and into the collection of Texas attorney John O’Quinn. When the O’Quinn cars were dispersed, it crossed the block at RM Auctions’ St. John’s sale in Michigan in 2012 and sold for $341,000.

For years, kids in England climbed in and out of what may have been Al Capone’s rolling fortress at a fairground.

The FDR story

The tale goes like this: after Capone went down, the Treasury seized his bulletproof car, and after Pearl Harbor the Secret Service used it to carry Roosevelt to Congress. It’s been repeated in articles, on tours and at auctions.

Put it next to this car’s documented history and it falls apart. There’s no record of the Secret Service taking possession of this car, and the trail has no gap where a stint in Washington would fit. Some accounts say the Secret Service did borrow a seized Capone car for Roosevelt, but if that happened, it wasn’t this one.

The story caught on because it’s so satisfying: the gangster’s car ends up protecting the president. It’s also easy to believe, because presidential cars really do have strange second lives. JFK’s Lincoln carried four more presidents after Dallas.

Myth versus provenance

The FDR chapter is free to repeat and impossible to check, which is how it got repeated at auctions. Only the paper trail is worth paying for.

Skip the presidential chapter. An armored Cadillac disguised as a police car is already one of the great outlaw cars, right up there with Bonnie and Clyde’s Ford.

What’s the best car myth you’ve heard at an auction or show that fell apart once you checked the paperwork?

Sources

• Hemmings: Al Capone Cadillac Sells for $341,000 at RM St. John’s
• My Al Capone Museum

About the Author

Shawn Henry

Administrator

Shawn Henry has spent years writing about cars, and it shows—not in a resume kind of way, but in how he talks about them. He's the type who'll notice the weird trim option nobody remembers and actually know why it mattered. At Backfire News, he covers pretty much the whole spectrum: off-road trucks and trail builds, performance cars, racing, and the collector market. He's comfortable getting into the technical weeds, but he never forgets that most people read about cars because cars are fun, not because they want a spec sheet. His beat runs from classic and collector vehicles to overlanding culture, modified performance builds, new automotive tech, and the industry news that actually affects what ends up in your driveway. Mostly, though, Shawn thinks the best car stories are about people—the builds they pour money into, the road trips, the communities that form around a shared obsession. That's the stuff he likes writing about, and it's what you'll find in his work here.

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