Thanks to Steve Boatti, and H-ITAM
From the New York Times, February 8, 2004
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CAPONE, THE LAWMAN

Q. Somebody told me Al Capone had a brother who was a Prohibition agent and Western lawman named Two-Gun Hart. I know that the Capone brothers grew up in Brooklyn, but is it true about the lawman?

A. Believe it. Here's the account, much of it from "Capone, the Man and the Era" (1994, Simon & Schuster), by Laurence Bergreen.

In 1919, a 27-year-old rail-rider who called himself Richard Joseph Hart hopped off the train in the town of Homer, Neb., saying he was a native Oklahoman and discharged World War I Army veteran.

Tall, strong and handy with fist or gun, he rescued several people in a flash flood that
year and married one of the survivors. In 1920, he became a Prohibition enforcer in Nebraska, and had a penchant for attracting newspaper photographers to record his raids on moonshine stills. "State Agent Hart Cleans Up Cedar County" was a typical headline.

He moved up the law enforcement ladder to the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he specialized in liquor raids on Indian reservations. Indians began calling him Two-Gun (he always carried a pair), and the name stuck.

But his real name was not Richard Hart. It was Vincenzo Capone, and he was born not in Oklahoma, but in Italy. In 1894, Gabriele and Teresina Capone immigrated to New York with Vincenzo, who was born in 1892. They settled near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, first at 95 Navy Street, then at 69 Park Avenue, where Gabriele had a barbershop, and later on Garfield Place in Park Slope.

Alphonse was the fourth son, born in 1899. In 1908, Vincenzo ran away from home. A year later, his family got a letter from Wichita, Kan.; he had joined the circus as a roustabout.

That was the last the Capone family heard of him for 15 years. He later adopted the name Hart after the movie cowboy William S. Hart.

But in 1924, after his law enforcement career was sidetracked by a finding of excessive force, Vincenzo read in a newspaper what had become of his younger brother Alphonse. He visited the family in Chicago, but the news never filtered back to his family in Homer, where he kept the secret for many years.

Two-Gun Hart moved to various Indian reservations, often posing in dramatic pictures, revolvers in hand. When President Calvin Coolidge visited the Black Hills in 1927, posing dourly in an Indian chief's war bonnet, Agent Hart was one of his bodyguards.

The Depression and the end of Prohibition were hard on Vincenzo, who began accepting money from brother Ralph (Raffaele). In 1940, he drove from Homer to see Ralph in his new home in Wisconsin and introduced his sons to Uncle Al, who had been released from Alcatraz. Al Capone died in 1947. Vincenzo died in Homer in 1952.