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Summary
Summary
Drawing on thousands of pages of recently discovered government documents, wiretap transcripts, and Al Capone's handwritten personal letters, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Eig tells the dramatic story of the rise and fall of the nation's most notorious criminal in rich new detail.
From the moment he arrived in Chicago in 1920, Capone found himself in a world of limitless opportunity. He was an impetuous, affable young man of average intelligence, ill prepared for fame and fortune, whose most notable characteristic was his scarred left cheek. Yet within a few years, Capone controlled an illegal bootlegging business with annual revenue rivaling that of some of the nation's largest corporations. Along the way he corrupted the Chicago police force and local courts while becoming one of the world's first international celebrities.
A furious President Herbert Hoover insisted that Capone be brought to justice because the criminal was making a mockery of federal law. Legend credits Eliot Ness and his "Untouchables" with apprehending Capone. But it was the U.S. attorney in Chicago and little-known agents working on direct orders from the White House who compromised their ethics--and risked their lives--to get their man.
The most infamous crime attributed to Capone was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, a crime that Capone insisted he didn't commit. Using newly discovered FBI records, Eig offers a surprising explanation for the murders.
Get Capone explores every aspect of the man called "Scarface," paying particular attention to the myths that have for so long surrounded and obscured him. Capone emerges as a worldly, emotionally complex man, doomed as much by his ego as by his vicious criminality. This is the real Al Capone.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"Not since the hunt for John Wilkes Booth... had so many sources been brought to bear in an attempt to jail one man," writes former Chicago magazine editor Eig (Opening Day). But Al Capone eluded them all-even J. Edgar Hoover. In a page-turning account, Eig details the chase for the elusive Capone, dissecting both the man and his myth. Born in Brooklyn in 1899, Alphonse Capone came to a booming, bustling, corrupt, and very thirsty Chicago in 1920, just as Prohibition began. Rising swiftly through the underworld ranks, Capone soon headed a crime syndicate he dubbed "the outfit," which dealt in bootleg alcohol, racketeering, drugs, and prostitution. Eig traces the largely unsuccessful efforts by various law enforcement agencies to bring him down. He focuses on U.S. Attorney George E.Q. Johnson, who finally saw Capone convicted in 1931 for tax evasion and conspiring to violate Prohibition laws, leading to an 11-year prison sentence. Using previously unreleased IRS files, Johnson's papers, even notes he discovered for a ghostwritten Capone autobiography, Eig presents a multifaceted portrait of a shrewd man who built a criminal empire worth millions. 16 pages of b&w photos. (May 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
TELL people in Belfast or Melbourne you're from Chicago and some of them are still apt to mimic a tommy assault, spraying you with 400 rounds of hot lead per minute. Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! A tommy, of course, is a Thompson submachine gun, the weapon of choice for Al Capone's "outfit," which deployed the guns to dominate the hooch and protection rackets in and around Chicago for most of the Roaring Twenties. Old associations the hard. In "Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster," Jonathan Eig vividly retraces the efforts of President Herbert Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I, and the United States attorney George E. Q. Johnson to bring Scarface to some sort of justice. Despite the gaudy subtitle, though, fully half the book covers Capone's rise to power and the grip, drenched in blood, with which he maintained it for almost a decade. Part of what Eig calls Capone's "genius" as a businessman was his refusal to keep paper records or flaunt his outfit's profits, which government estimates put as high as $95 million a year, this when a chicken dinner could be had for 5 cents. He was more than willing to slaughter competitors, as they often tried to kill him, but when his influence grew he began to favor subtler ways of making a point. He understood, Eig says, that "he had to spend money to make money, and he never tried to cut back on the lavish bribes to cops and public officials." Nor did he pretend not to be a bootlegger. Instead, he used the unpopularity of the 18th Amendment to justify his profession to a thirsty public. "I violate the Prohibition law - sure," he admitted to a reporter. "Who doesn't? The only difference is, I take more chances than the man who drinks a cocktail before dinner and a flock of highballs after it." It was the officials accepting his bribes who deserved scorn or worse: "Even a self-respecting hoodlum hasn't any use for that kind of fella. He buys them like he'd buy any other article necessary to this trade. But he hates them in his heart." What about someone who commits murder? "Well, maybe he thinks that the law of selfdefense, the way God looks at it, is a little broader than the lawbooks have it. ... Maybe it means killing a man in defense of your business, the way you make your money to take care of your wife and child." It was better, Capone proposed, to think of him as a "public benefactor," a man who had "given people the light pleasures, shown them a good time." In these and other passages, Eig illuminates the predictable spiral of widely reviled prohibitions. Righteous legislators pass unenforceable laws banning alcohol, marijuana or wagering. Entrepreneurial "benefactors" compete to supply the banned pleasures. No taxes are collected on the proceeds, while a newly minted criminal class is enriched and emboldened. Unable to summon the authorities when disputes arise, suppliers are forced to police themselves, making violence inevitable. The top suppliers become so rich, so well armed (tommy guns in the '20s, jet aircraft and antitank rockets today), they compete with the police on even terms, sometimes to the point where the original prohibition is no longer tenable. After numerous efforts to prosecute Capone in Cook County, he was abruptly arrested in Pennsylvania on a concealedweapons charge in 1929. Though he served a year in prison, many cops and gangsters back home believed he had arranged his time away to short-circuit federal prosecution and escape assassination attempts. Once he was released and had returned to Chicago, it was back to racketeering as usual. Enter Eliot Ness. This quintessential G-man was perfectly satisfied with his salary of $50 a week, which made him "untouchable." He and a dozen fellow agents began shutting down Capone's speakeasies, casinos and brothels, choking off much of his income. Yet Ness couldn't corner his quarry without the dreary diligence of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Capone never filed a tax return and took care to minimize any paper trail from his beer to his bankroll. Even so, the emerging art of financial forensics - which, like ballistics, developed as part of the comprehensive effort to indict Public Enemy No. 1 - enabled George Johnson to take what Ness and Internal Revenue gave him and "stack one piece of evidence atop another, like bricks, until he built an inescapable set of walls." In the end, it wasn't bullets, but paper (interview transcripts, a letter from his tax lawyer, Western Union money orders, butcher and telephone bills) that got Al Capone. In 1931, he was convicted of tax evasion, fined $50,000 and sentenced to 11 years in prison. His forest-green armor-plated limousine was seized by the government and later used to provide security for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Tax dodging was hardly the reason Capone had been singled out; it was merely one of the more benign side effects of a career that would not have existed were it not for Prohibition, which would be repealed in 1933. Americans overwhelmingly favored repeal. Without condoning murder, many came to sympathize with Capone's constitutionally ambiguous plight. As Eig notes: "It seemed perverse to some that the government had failed to charge him with more serious crimes. Few could relate to a coldblooded killer, but everyone could relate to a tax cheat." Capone served eight years, more than half of them on Alcatraz, where he learned to play the mandola. It was during his incarceration that the ravages of syphilis, contracted in his youth, began to destroy his mental health. By the time he was paroled in 1939, his control of the outfit was effectively over. He lived quietly in Florida until he died after having a stroke, at 48, in 1947. Much of this tale is familiar from earlier books, with Robert J. Schoenberg's "Mr. Capone" (1992) thought to be the cream of the crop. Yet Eig's is a welcome, even necessary, update. He stretched similarly spacious canvases for his well-received portraits of Lou Gehrig ("Luckiest Man") and Jackie Robinson ("Opening Day"). For his third book, he sketches fresh profiles of scores of Italian, Irish and Polish mobsters, and of three presidents, three Chicago mayors and dozens of minor officials. And he dramatically details the game-changing impact of Gen. John Thompson's light submachine gun, a "trench broom" designed - about a year too late - to mow down the Germans. Panoramic yet sharply focused, "Get Capone" is as much a dark history of urban America between the world wars as it is another mobster's life story. Did Capone order the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929? That he was in Miami being interviewed by a prosecutor certainly didn't preclude him from having ordered a tommy-and-shotgun assault on Bugs Moran's crew in the garage at 2122 North Clark Street. Weighing newly available evidence, Eig makes a convincing case that - well, that no reviewer should spoil. He also persuaded the I.R.S. to turn over its files on the 1931 prosecution. This material, together with Eig's discovery of boxfuls of notes kept by two separate would-be biographers, makes "Get Capone" both a gore-spattered thriller and a more nuanced upgrade over previous takedowns and hagiographies. Having said that, we may still be tempted to put the judiciously weighed 75-year-old evidence aside for a moment, if only to flex our itchy trigger fingers and say Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Eliot Ness couldn't corner his famous quarry without the dreary diligence of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. James McManus's most recent book is "Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker."
Kirkus Review
Scrupulously researched account of the men who made the 1920s roar, and the straight-arrows who stopped them. Former Chicago magazine executive editor Eig (Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season, 2007, etc.) rescues the narrative of Al Capone from the realm of pop melodrama, offering vibrant historical storytelling and a nuanced, enigmatic portrait of Capone and his Chicago milieu. The author discovered several long-forgotten archives of key documents, including unreleased IRS files and "Untouchable" Eliot Ness' wiretap transcripts. Eig constructs a plausible, often surprising narrative of criminality, but he also fleshes it out into a colorful urban social history. The Capone that emerges here is certainly a ruthless criminal, but far from the psychopath portrayed in films. He appears to be more a natural product of his time, a bemused immigrants' son who, in the brutal environment of working-class Chicago, intuited that Prohibition offered an opportunity to leap from tavern hustler to major profiteer. Capone was loyal to associates and devoted to his family, apparently tried to broker truces with other gangs before the inevitable internecine bloodbaths and loved nightlife, gambling and women so much that his nickname was "Snorky," meaning ritzy. The backdrop for Capone's evolution was a Chicago so chaotic and corrupt that its citizens actually returned the outrageously crooked mayor William Thompson to office, following a seemingly futile reform administration. Capone loved talking to the press, which thrilled people but infuriated the Feds. While "Secret Plot" seems an overstatement, Eig argues that Herbert Hoover was determined to make an example of the gangster, a preoccupation that persisted even as the Depression grew deeper. The flawed Ness' contributions were minimal, but a little-remembered state's attorney and IRS agent doggedly built an intricate case against Capone over several years. Their work seems compromised due to the interference of a vengeful judge, who threw out a plea agreement in order to send the gangster to trial and, ultimately, Alcatraz. An impressive, accessible history of a troubled time. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Former reporter Eig has brought new life to the story of Al "Scarface" Capone, reporting on the life, crimes, and fall of America's most notorious gangster. Eig accessed newly discovered material to produce this fresh take on Capone, including the papers and never-released IRS files of Chicago's U.S. attorney, George E.Q. Johnson. He also discovered a letter that contains a plausible solution to the never-solved Valentine's Day massacre. (William "Three-Fingered Jack" White may have led the massacre to avenge the gangster killing of his cousin, a cop's son.) Wrapped in this biography is an engrossing account of Prohibition, Chicago, and legal history (Johnson's innovation of charging suspected criminals of lesser crimes to get a conviction is still in use today). Eig is a fascinating storyteller who throws in the occasional bon mot ("It was cold and gray, as if February had knocked off May and taken its place") that readers will enjoy. While the book would have benefited from a "cast of characters" to help readers keep track of the many players, the accompanying web site (getcapone.com) is a treasure-trove of material, including links to FBI and IRS files. VERDICT This book should be very popular with true crime and Prohibition history buffs; highly recommended. [See "Prepub Exploded," BookSmack!, November 5, 2009.]-Karen Sandlin Silverman, Ctr. for Applied Research, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Part 1 Capone Rising | |
| 1 The Getting of It | p. 3 |
| 2 Good-bye, Diamond Jim | p. 10 |
| 3 A Little House on South Prairie | p. 18 |
| 4 "I'm Sure It Was Capone" | p. 24 |
| 5 Funny Notions | p. 32 |
| 6 A Man of Destiny | p. 38 |
| 7 Heat Wave | p. 45 |
| 8 "He Will Knock You Flat Just for Fun" | p. 50 |
| 9 The Peacemaker | p. 57 |
| 10 Q Is for Quincy | p. 66 |
| 11 Sorry About That, Hymie | p. 73 |
| 12 A Smile and a Gun | p. 81 |
| 13 The Grinder | p. 85 |
| 14 The Better Element | p. 92 |
| Part 2 King Capone | |
| 15 "There's Worse Fellows in the World than Me" | p. 101 |
| 16 Uneasy Lies the Head | p. 115 |
| 17 Deepest in Dirt | p. 126 |
| 18 Pineapples and Coconuts | p. 130 |
| 19 The Graduation of Frankie Yale | p. 143 |
| 20 Hooverization | p. 153 |
| 21 "I Do Not Stay Up Late" | p. 160 |
| 22 The Enforcer | p. 163 |
| 23 The Formidable Alphonse | p. 173 |
| 24 Little Caesar | p. 180 |
| 25 St. Valentine's Day | p. 187 |
| Part 3 Capone Falling | |
| 26 "An Unsolved Crime" | p. 197 |
| 27 "The Most Sore Necessity of Our Times" | p. 203 |
| 28 The Brightest Days | p. 211 |
| 29 "Have You Got Capone Yet?" | p. 219 |
| 30 Locked Up | p. 226 |
| 31 Elegant Mess | p. 234 |
| 32 The Napoleon of Chicago | p. 247 |
| 33 The Big Fellow Chills | p. 254 |
| 34 Silent Partner | p. 260 |
| 35 "Lady, Nobody's on the Legit" | p. 266 |
| 36 Public Enemy Number One | p. 278 |
| 37 "There Is No Friendship Among Hoodlums" | p. 294 |
| 38 Contempt | p. 303 |
| 39 Death and Taxes | p. 311 |
| 40 United States Against Al Capone | p. 320 |
| 41 The So-Called Untouchables | p. 336 |
| 42 "Who Wouldn't Be Worried?" | p. 343 |
| 43 Big Spender | p. 353 |
| 44 The Verdict | p. 360 |
| Epilogue | p. 369 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 399 |
| Sources | p. 403 |
| Notes | p. 407 |
| Index | p. 451 |
