Al Capone visited Mission San Juan Capistrano, did he also try to buy what is Rancho Santa Margarita?

Dec. 10, 1927.

Not exactly a date that lives in infamy.

But the name of the man who signed the guest book at Mission San Juan Capistrano on that particular Saturday sure does: Al Capone.

Then – and still – Capone was America’s most notorious gangster.

He made millions off bootlegging during the Prohibition era when alcohol consumption was banned nationwide from 1920 to 1933 under the 18th Amendment. Capone emerged as Public Enemy No. 1 with the gun-slinging mayhem of feuding mobsters in Chicago.

Then came imprisonment on tax evasion at Alcatraz, a long bout with syphilis, and his death in 1947.

But in the middle of all that, the man nicknamed Scarface made a stop at the famous mission favored by the swallows.

As fascinating as the mere fact of Capone’s visit is, confirmed by that guest book in the mission’s archives, more intriguing is why he was even in the area.

Capone allegedly was scouting out the possibility of buying land.  A lot of land – the gigantic Rancho Santa Margarita, made up of the combined Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, Rancho Misión Vieja and Rancho Trabuco properties.

The land was owned at the time by the heirs of James Flood and Jerome O’Neill, who both died in 1926, and its future was uncertain.

The 200,000 or so acres of mostly cattle range stretched just above Oceanside in San Diego County into much of what is now south Orange County and included a bit of Riverside County. Its 35 miles of coastline seems like it could have been   perfect for expanding Capone’s Chicago-based bootlegging operation into California.

Sounds like the stuff of urban legend, doesn’t it? That’s pretty much all the Capone speculation was up until recently, and little-known outside of a few students of local folklore, such as Orange County historian Chris Jepsen.

“Nobody took that seriously,” Jepsen, president of Orange County Historical Society, said. “The thing about Capone is every place you go in the country has some story about him – it’s like George Washington slept here.

“You have to take them all with more than a grain of salt.”

But a 1931 article in the now-defunct Liberty weekly magazine about Capone’s supposed intention to move to Southern California caught Jepsen’s eye.

It took Jepsen a lot of sleuthing over 12 years to turn a grain of salt about Capone’s anonymous interest in the rancho into a pearl of a story.

Jepsen unveiled his discoveries on his OC History Roundup blog in March, complete with citations and footnotes. He also gave a well-attended lecture at Mission San Juan Capistrano.

On Thursday, Sept. 14, he’ll detail his research at a gathering of the historical society in Orange, a talk that is open to the public.

“It’s a series of pieces that fall into place,” said a pleased Jepsen, who dug into the Capone legend on his own time, outside of his day job for two decades as an assistant county archivist.

“It’s pretty exciting because you realize so many people had looked at this before and I’m seeing something that they didn’t.”

A convenient location

Here’s a caveat: Jepsen makes it clear that he has not uncover “absolute proof” of a Capone-Rancho Santa Margarita land pursuit.

It’s a “preponderance of evidence” that gives Jepsen a sense of certainty.

The real estate broker – Ed Fletcher – that Jepsen says Capone enlisted to negotiate on his behalf never documented who his client was.

“Can we say with absolute 100% certainty, yes, he was doing this for Capone? I suppose we can’t because Capone wouldn’t put his name on it. Fletcher wouldn’t put Capone’s name on it either,” Jepsen said.

“But at the very time that Capone is going to San Diego is about when all of this kicks off, with Fletcher trying to buy this ranch.”

Jepsen said he painstakingly gathered information from multiple sources: local news accounts of the time; relatives of Capone’s female traveling companion, who also signed the mission guest book; and correspondence between Fletcher and then-ranch manager Charles S. Hardy – both men of influence in San Diego.

He also made inquiries with other historians and researchers in the area, including at Camp Pendleton, San Diego State University and Mission San Juan Capistrano.

“I was able to gather up a great deal of evidence for a story that had been largely dismissed for over 90 years,” Jepsen said.

“All that skepticism was understandable, both because Capone was careful not to share what he was up to, and because the number of false ‘Al Capone Slept Here’ stories is staggeringly enormous. I was frankly shocked to find that the evidence ultimately pointed where it pointed.”

And, the vast and sparsely populated ranch land seems a logical prospect for Capone, quoted in news accounts about wanting to buy property somewhere in California.

Jepsen wrote in his blog: “As a base of operations for bootlegging and other criminal activities, the ranch was comfortably remote, yet conveniently located. It was within easy reach of boats from Mexico and a relatively short drive from Los Angeles. And if things got hot, it was a short run to the border.”

First the dead ends

While existing bootlegging and moonshining exploits in Southern California couldn’t rival that of Chicago, organized syndicates and individuals in the area were managing to skirt the Volstead Act and provide illicit liquor.

A 2015 story in the Daily Breeze describes various landing spots between San Pedro and Ventura for running rum, with the Palos Verdes Peninsula a destination for booze bootlegged from Mexico and Canada. Also popular: Crystal Cove, the Catalina isthmus, the Port of Los Angeles, the Channel Islands.

Inland, local operators manufactured booze in the hills of Inglewood and the high desert of Victorville.

But Capone had the capacity to out-moonshine them all.

Jepsen said he initially blew off the bits and pieces of rumor floating around.

“Why would you take it seriously unless you see all the dots connecting?”

He ran into plenty of dead ends.

At one point, Jepsen decided to focus on telling the tale of how local farmers and townsfolk had gotten “riled up” over the story in Liberty magazine that talked about Capone’s desire to buy the rancho land. He was sparked by a 1977 Santa Ana Register interview of Dan Rios, from San Juan Capistrano’s legacy Rios family and a retired investigator for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Jepsen summarized the scenario: “… these old farmers around the area were polishing up their hunting rifles and taking to the hills, bracing to get ready for Al Capone and his gangsters to hit town.

“It was going to be all-out war.”

Wanting corroboration, he went hunting for a local paper of the time called The Missionite. He checked library systems, archival collections around Southern California, newspaper databases, and multiple historical associations.

Couldn’t find a trace of The Missionite, not even at the mission.

Jepsen also pursued the rumor of Capone’s visit by contacting the mission’s Museum Registrar Jennifer Ring, hired in 2011 from the Bowers Museum by Executive Director Mechelle Lawrence Adams in her ongoing effort to curate and preserve the mission’s vast store of archival material and artifacts, and promote its significance as a historical site.

Adams, who spent six years as an Orange County Historical Society commissioner, had never heard anything about Capone visiting the mission.

“That’s the thing about history,” she said. “If people don’t write it down or pass it along, things get lost in time.”

But at the time of Jepsen’s inquiry, she and her team were knee-deep in major renovations at the mission.

“Guest books were the least of our worries,” Adams explaines.

So, the Capone search sat on the back burner. For more than a decade.

There in ink

Then, something Adams read last year in author Susan Orlean’s “The Library Book” about the great collection of famous signatures on old Los Angeles Central Library cards, got her to wondering who might pop up in the mission’s guest books.

Adams tasked Ring to look through the rarely opened logs, which resemble big, thick journals and hold the signatures of daily visitors from 1913 to 1934.

“She came in one day and said, ‘You’ll never believe what I found. Al Capone!’”

On a line near the very bottom of a 1927 page appeared a terse “Al Capone Chicago,” penned in a style of cursive that Adams said is indicative of the 1920s.

Mission San Juan Capistrano, which Adams believes is the most visited among the remainder of the 21 Catholic missions established between 1769 and 1823, has had other famous visitors.

Names such as Richard Nixon, Marilyn Monroe and Gov. Edmund G. Brown – Jerry’s father – jump out.

Capone, however, is an unrivaled attention-getter.

Raised a Roman Catholic, in retrospect maybe it isn’t all that surprising that he would visit the mission, a short walk from the train depot.

But the authenticity of the signature needed to be documented.

Who signed above and below it, Adams asked Ring. The signature beneath Capone’s turned out to be that of Marion Karvelis, also of Chicago, who apparently was mistaken for Capone’s wife by members of the press upon his train’s arrival at Union Station in Los Angeles in early December 1927.

“It just led us down a rabbit hole of ‘Wow,’” Adams said.

The Capone signature would match those verified by other entities. Karvelis, 23, was a vaudeville dancer and apparent paramour of the mobster. (His wife had been back in Chicago with the Capone children.)

Jepsen found out more about Karvelis by researching her family tree on Ancestry.com and locating relatives. He messaged them.

“Someone got back and said their great aunt was friends of Al Capone,” he said. “So now it’s ding, ding, ding, we have a winner.”

He read Associated Press accounts in the Sacramento Bee and Santa Ana Register that referenced reports of a $200,000 offer by purported representatives of Capone, intended as an option on the Rancho Santa Margarita.

The trickiest part is tying Capone to Fletcher, the real estate agent.

The correspondence between Fletcher and ranch manager Hardy, archived in special collections at San Diego State’s library, convinced Jepsen of the connection, despite the absence of Capone’s name on any paperwork.

Hardy publicly denied any overtures by Capone to buy the ranch. But in one letter from June 1930, Fletcher informed Hardy that his client could pay $10.5 million. Who had that huge sum in the middle of the Great Depression?

Capone did, Jepsen said.

But in March 1931 Capone was charged with income tax evasion and convicted seven months later.  Coincidentally, this is when Fletcher’s efforts for the sale of the Rancho Santa Margarita property abruptly halt, Jepsen said.

Who knows what south Orange County – or the county as a whole – would be like today had such a huge chunk of it landed in the hands of Al Capone.

“You can play the what-if games all day,” Jepsen said, “and it’s really interesting to do that with this story.”

Hear more on Thursday, Sept. 14, at 7:30 p.m. when Jepsen addresses a meeting of the Orange County Historical Society at the fellowship hall of Trinity Episcopal Church, 2400 N. Canal St., Orange. Attendance is free, but donations are accepted.