WAUSAU, Wis. — The buyers of a scenic property in northern Wisconsin will get more than just its bar and restaurant: They'll have a former hide-out of Chicago mobster Al Capone.
The 407-acre wooded site, complete with guard towers and a stone house with 18-inch-thick walls, will soon go on the auction block at a starting bid of $2.6 million.
The bank that foreclosed on the land near Couderay, about 140 miles northeast of Minneapolis, said Capone owned it in the late 1920s and early 1930s during Prohibition.
Local legend says shipments of bootlegged alcohol were flown in on planes that landed on the property's 37-acre lake, then loaded onto trucks bound for Chicago.
"He spent a lot of time there," Chippewa Valley Bank Vice President Joe Kinnear said. "It is an incredible property."
People are also reading…
The property was more recently used as a tourist attraction. It includes Capone's two-story stone home with a massive fireplace, two guard towers — reportedly manned with machine guns whenever Capone visited — a caretaker's residence and other outbuildings.
Kinnear said the bar on the property was built from what was originally Capone's eight-stall garage and still includes some portholes built to shoot through.
The bank will auction off "The Hideout, Al Capone's Northwoods Retreat" on the steps of the Sawyer County Courthouse in Hayward on Oct. 8.
