Top 10 American gangsters and their drinks

(TDB) - Last month, American gangster Al Capone’s cocktail shaker sold at a Sotheby’s auction in London for £50,000, widely exceeding its estimate of just £1,00-1,500.

Engraved “To a regular guy from the boys, 1932”, the shaker’s high hammer price illustrates the fascination still held with Prohibition era gangsters, who have been portrayed on the silver screen by everyone from Robert de Niro and Tim Roth to Warren Beatty and Johnny Depp.

With many of America’s most feared mobsters running bootleg booze rackets, and classic cocktails reaching peak popularity during the Roaring Twenties, many of the men on our most wanted list were partial to a Gin Fizz or three.

Read on for our round up of ten of the most nefarious gangsters in history, and what they drank on their days off.

10: Bonnie Parker

The only lady in our line up, while her partner in crime, Clyde Barrow, was known to be teetotal, beret wearing, cigar smoking Bonnie Parker was a fan of American whiskey, and was known to throw empty bottles from the window of their getaway car while Clyde took the wheel.

The Dallas-born pair’s bank robbing exploits, culminating in their grizzly death in Louisiana in 1934, were immortalised in the 1967 Film Bonnie and Clyde, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in the leading roles. The same year, French chanteur Serge Gainsbourg recorded Bonnie and Clyde with Brigitte Bardot providing the female vocals.

9: John Gotti

Bronx-born John Gotti became the boss of the Gambino crime family in New York, which made millions of dollars a year from construction, hijacking, loan sharking, gambling, extortion and other criminal activities.

Beginning a life sentence in 1992 in one of America’s harshest Federal prisons, according to The New York Times, before his time behind bars, Gotti, known for his outspoken personality and flamboyant style, indulged in Rémy Martin Louis XIII Cognac, of which he spent a fortune on before he was convicted of murder and racketeering charges. Nicknamed “The Teflon Don”, Gotti died of throat cancer in 2002