My apologies for making light of what is, for you, a serious situation. I should have resisted the urge to make light of what most people think of as an incessant annoyance. My attempt at humor fell flat.
AOL has some help for this issue, available here:
AOL Mail: Spam and Privacy - AOL Help
AOL keeps a Spam folder with identified spam in it. You can access that folder through their webmail interface. If an item in it has been mis-identified, you can mark it as Not-Spam, and it will be moved to your inbox. items in this Spam folder will be retained for five days, then automatically deleted.
It appears you can also turn the AOL SPAM filter completely OFF, by unchecking this box in the AOL WebMail interface:
... unchecking this box this should result in your receiving each and every email in your Mail.app inbox, and dealing with them in Mail.app instead of having AOL intervene on your behalf.
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I have both a direct AOL email and a converted Verizon email (now hosted by AOL). It is interesting that every other provider (including AOL mail) seems to make emails already tagged as "Junk", appear in my Mail.app top-level "Junk" mailbox, sorted by email account. Except one.
Verizon does not seem to do this, and there is no sub-mailbox for verizon under the "Junk" heading in Mail.app.
On inspecting the Spam folder directly under WebMail for my Verizon account, I do see one spam item there, from four days ago, about which I was never notified. There do not seem to be obvious additional options in AOL Webmail [that I could find] that would allow or prohibit identified Spam from being delivered as such to Mail.app.
