This Miami Beach lot was once home to gangster Al Capone. It just sold for $21M

Real Estate News admin August 15, 2026 0 Comments

This Miami Beach lot was once home to gangster Al Capone. It just sold for $21M

Crime boss Al Capone lived his final years in a Miami Beach waterfront mansion after his release from federal prison. The gangster would throw lavish parties at his Palm Island home during the Prohibition years.

The house at 93 Palm Ave. is gone, demolished in 2023. But the empty lot just sold for $21 million in a transaction that closed on Thursday, according to the South Florida multiple listing service.

Owners Albert and Karise Claramonte sold the 30,000-square-foot lot, which has 100 feet of waterfront. Brokers Jordan Karp of Jordan Karp LLC and Joel Lusky of The Brokerage represented the seller, and Albert Justo and Mirce Curowski of One Sotheby’s represented the buyer.

The buyer was a developer, according to a person with knowledge of the transaction.

Albert Claramonte is a co-founder of Casamonte, a Fort Lauderdale company that sells luxury wall coverings. The Claramontes bought the house in 2021 for $15.5 million and put it in a trust.

MORE: See photos of Al Capone’s house through the decades

The lot was home to a century-old mansion that was Capone’s final residence. In 2023, the Claramontes tore down the house, despite protests from civic leaders who sought to maintain the area’s heritage. At the time of demolition, almost 26,000 people had signed an online petition to keep the house standing, the Miami Herald reported at the time.

Capone bought the Palm Island home for $40,000 in 1928, six years after it was built. He died there in 1947, and in 1952, Capone’s wife sold the house. It has since changed ownership multiple times.

Palm Island is a wealthy residential enclave on a manmade island just off the MacArthur Causeway. It’s connected to Hibiscus Island, another affluent community of high-end homes. Karp, along with Dora Puig of Luxe Living Realty, sold another waterfront property on Hibiscus Island this week, a $51.5 million estate that broke the home price record for Palm and Hibiscus islands.

Prices for prime waterfront real estate have risen dramatically in Miami-Dade in recent years. Empty lots and teardowns in the most desirable parts of Miami and Miami Beach have been fetching multimillion-dollar prices.

Earlier this year, for instance, a home on La Gorce Island, previously owned by Broadway legend Harold Prince, sold for $31.5 million. But the 9,024-square-foot home, built in 1937, likely won’t survive the sale. . The agent representing the buyers said at the time that his clients planned to tear down the home and redevelop the North Bay Road site.

Sky-high land prices drive the cost of homes on that land even higher, said Jorge Castellano, a Miami-Dade developer who builds luxury spec homes, often on the sites of teardowns. To make up for the high cost of land, developers are building homes that sell for prices previously unseen in Miami-Dade.

“Depending on what your entry price is,” said Castellano, “that determines what your exit price has got to be.”

This story was originally published August 14, 2026 at 6:57 PM with the headline “This Miami Beach lot was once home to gangster Al Capone. It just sold for $21M.”