For sale: Al Capone’s bulletproof car

Been sat in your bedroom thinking up plans for a Prohibition-era style crime syndicate, but lacking a suitable car? You're in luck. Professional naughty boy Alphonse 'Al' Capone's bulletproof car is about to roll (slowly) onto the auction block.

The 1928 Cadillac V-8 Town Sedan is one of the earliest surviving bulletproof cars. It's fitted with inch-thick glass and lined with nearly 1,360kgs of armor plating. Being made of asbestos-wrapped steel plate with pieces of lead embedded, it's heavy-duty stuff - just the job for bug deflection as you drive down the M1.

"So, what's powering this monstrous brute?" you ask, re-adjusting your fedora and scrambling for the cheque book.

Well, it's a 90 bhp, 341 cubic inch L-head V-8 engine, so it's not exactly going to be fast. But that power goes through a three-speed manual transmission, and you've got beam front axle and full-floating rear axle with semi-elliptic leaf springs, and four-wheel mechanical drum brakes - so handling should fall into the field of ‘interesting'.

But check the gangster gadgets. Things like a rear window that can drop quickly allowing occupants to shoot baddies. It's also got a circular cutout large enough to accommodate the muzzle of a machine gun for when things get serious. And to top it all off, we've even seen a photograph from 1933 that shows the car equipped with a tow bar, so you can even take your Buccaneer caravan with you.

If you fancy this chunk of gangsters paradise, you'll need somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000, as that's what it's expected to go for when it will go under the hammer in Monterey, California, next month...