As reported in the Chicago Daily News, sister publication of the Chicago Sun-Times:
Al Capone may be one of Chicago’s biggest tourist attractions today, but in the late 1920s, souvenir shops in Miami Beach, Florida, weren’t quite ready to slap the bootlegger’s mug on a T-shirt and sell it to Fourth of July tourists.
A June 28, 1928 report in the Chicago Daily News detailed Capone’s arrival in Miami Beach just before the Fourth of July — and the city’s attempt to put the Chicago mobster behind bars to save their holiday tourism.
In a “stormy special session,” the city council passed a resolution calling on any county officer to arrest Capone for “the slightest infraction of any law,” the report said. Residents of the Palm Island neighborhood, where Capone’s house was, argued his presence was “detrimental to tourist visiting.”
Meanwhile, Capone stood by his right to be on his own property and insisted that he would “resist in the highest court any effort to oust him.”
