Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago

Map: Organized Crime in 1920s Chicago

Courtesy of the Newberry Library

Courtesy of Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collecton

Dedication

In memory of

MICHAEL CORNELISON,

who brought Eliot Ness to life

Epigraph

There is something tragically wrong with a system of justice which can and does make criminals of honest men and can only convict gangsters and racketeers when they don’t pay their income taxes.

—RAYMOND CHANDLER

Contents

Cover

Map: Organized Crime in 1920s Chicago

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction: Untouchable Truth

Rogues’ Gallery

Prologue: St. Valentine’s Day

Part One: Prairie Avenue Boys

One: 1895–1920

Two: 1850–1923

Three: 1920–1925

Four: 1925–1926

Five: 1925–1926

Six: 1926–1927

Seven: 1927

Eight: Spring–Summer 1928

Nine: Winter 1927–Summer 1928

Ten: August 1928–January 1929

Part Two: Citizen Capone

Eleven: January–March 1929

Twelve: February–October 1929

Thirteen: May–October 1929

Fourteen: December 1929–March 1930

Fifteen: December 1929–April 1930

Sixteen: March–June 1930

Seventeen: June–August 1930

Eighteen: June–October 1930

Nineteen: November–December 1930

Part Three: On The Spot

Twenty: December 1930–February 1931

Twenty-One: December 1930–February 1931

Twenty-Two: February–May 1931

Twenty-Three: Spring–Summer 1931

Twenty-Four: June–July 1931

Twenty-Five: Summer 1931

Twenty-Six: October 1931

Twenty-Seven: October 1931

Twenty-Eight: October 1931–January 1932

Twenty-Nine: February–May 1932

Thirty: 1932–1934

Epilogue: The Great American City

Acknowledgments: A Tip of the Fedora

An Excerpt from ELIOT NESS AND THE MAD BUTCHER

Chapter One: The Dark City

Chapter Two: An Impossible Mission

Note on Sources

Abbreviations

Source Notes

Bibliography

Index

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

About the Authors

Read On

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Eliot Ness appears in only one episode of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, which memorably portrayed many of the major figures of the Prohibition era. In the fifth season’s second episode, Ness (played by Jim True-Frost) gives a pompous speech to reporters, preening for the cameras as he vows to take down Al Capone. Meanwhile, Treasury agent Frank Wilson (played by Michael Countryman) passes silently behind him, ignored by the press, carrying one of the ledgers that will ultimately be used at Capone’s trial.

In those few seconds, the scene encapsulates what most chroniclers of Chicago’s gangsters have claimed for decades—that Ness and his Untouchables chased headlines and raided a few breweries here and there, while Wilson and the tax investigators did the real, painstaking detective work, building an airtight, escape-proof case against Capone. Far from the heroic gangbuster of television and film, Ness contributed nothing to the Capone investigation, while feeding his insatiable appetite for publicity by claiming credit for Wilson’s sterling work—so say revisionist historians beginning in the early 1960s (in response to The Untouchables TV series) and continuing to this day.

But in researching Scarface and the Untouchable, we uncovered a wealth of primary source evidence contradicting this conventional wisdom. Not only was the income tax case against Capone weaker than Wilson’s reputation suggests, but the work done by Ness and his Untouchables was far more significant than has been previously acknowledged. The headlines and raids were only a fraction of a sophisticated and innovative investigation focused on proving Capone’s place in a vast bootlegging syndicate. To gather evidence of the scale and scope of the Capone mob, the Untouchables pioneered practices used by federal agents to this day.

We based our conclusions on federal files, court documents, press accounts, and the recollections of several Untouchables—evidence that, more often than not, looked at the Capone case from the outside or in retrospect—because precious few documents produced as part of this investigation have survived. Shortly after publication of our hardcover edition, however, a copy of the final case report summarizing Ness’s work—apparently kept against Prohibition Bureau orders by Lyle Chapman, the Untouchable who compiled it—turned up for auction in the fall of 2018.

Before this important historical document was sold, we were able to examine it at length. It confirms much of what we deduced about how the Untouchables operated, while further debunking the way previous writers have characterized Ness’s investigation. We now know with certainty that the brewery raids so damaging to Capone’s cash flow were secondary to the team’s building a conspiracy case that could have seriously crippled the Chicago Outfit had it ever gone to trial. Why this case was never prosecuted, as you will see, had little to do with Ness himself, and much to do with the politics of going after America’s most famous and powerful criminal.

When the Untouchables weren’t raiding breweries or tailing beer trucks, they interviewed more than six hundred witnesses, compiled countless pieces of evidence, traced vehicle registrations and bank records, consulted with handwriting experts, and in under twenty months tied Capone and dozens of others to a decade-long bootleg conspiracy. This unseen detective work, alluded to throughout our book but never fully explored, comes into stark relief when the investigation is viewed from within.

Access to this document allowed us to make a handful of small changes and corrections throughout the text, in places where the public record failed to conform with this privately held information. But we have made no substantial revisions, because the case report does not contradict our narrative of the Capone investigation. If anything, it places exclamation points where before we could only offer periods and question marks.

Instead, we have chosen to include excerpts from the document in the P.S. section at the end of this edition, so that readers can see for themselves exactly what these agents accomplished. Popular culture remembers Ness and the Untouchables largely for refusing bribes and busting through the doors of illegal breweries, while revisionist historians have gone out of their way to discredit the team’s work as trivial press puffery. Neither portrait tells the true, full story. We hope to have finally balanced the scales of justice for these legendary—but real, and humanly flawed—crime fighters.

M.A.C. and A.B.S.

February 2019

Introduction

Untouchable Truth

by Max Allan Collins

On Monday night, April 20, 1959, the first of a two-part TV presentation called The Untouchables appeared on Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. I was eleven years old, watching in Muscatine, Iowa, and I was dumbstruck. The next day, all the kids—well, the boys, anyway—were talking about this hardhitting crime show, the fact-based story of federal agent Eliot Ness and his band of incorruptible lawmen, taking on the Al Capone gang during Prohibition.

Me, I was bowled over by how much it tallied with my obsession (which had started at age six) with Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, particularly reprints of 1930s and ’40s comic strips. When the concluding Untouchables episode aired, finally presenting Al Capone on camera (after the prior week’s crafty cliffhanger), I was struck by how much Capone resembled the ’30s Tracy villain, Big Boy.

I could hardly have imagined that less than twenty years later, I’d be writing the legendary Dick Tracy strip and hearing Chester Gould confirm my suspicions that detective Tracy had been based on Ness and the Untouchables—a fact still little noted or known.

That was the beginning of my interest in true crime in general and Eliot Ness specifically. I immediately read Ness’s memoir, The Untouchables (1957), cowritten by sportswriter Oscar Fraley, as well as Fraley’s follow-up, 4 Against the Mob (1961), about Ness’s later law enforcement career in Cleveland, Ohio.

The Ness-Fraley book has largely been dismissed as a fabrication, but one of our many discoveries while researching this book has been to confirm how surprisingly accurate it was. Fraley built his narrative on a decidedly nonboastful, fairly short memoir by Ness, amplifying it with newspaper and magazine accounts. But the ghostwriter paid no heed to chronology, and events appeared in what struck Fraley as the most effective order. Ness protested to no avail, taken out by a heart attack at fifty-four, before publication of the work that would make him far more famous dead than he’d been alive.

Fraley’s readable if creatively rearranged account led to a backlash among Ness’s contemporaries in law enforcement as well as Chicago journalists, building him (inaccurately) into a glory hound. The enormously successful TV series spawned by the Desilu Playhouse two-parter did Ness’s real-life reputation no favors, either.

Ironically, the original two-part film (released theatrically as The Scarface Mob) was the most accurate presentation on film Eliot Ness and the Untouchables have ever received. Director Phil Karlson was a master at true-crime noir, with The Phenix City Story (1955) behind him and Walking Tall (1973) ahead of him (with its similar glorification of real-life lawman Buford Pusser).

Featuring Hollywood star Robert Stack as a grimly charismatic Ness, the Untouchables two-parter boasted a semidocumentary style, Roaring Twenties nostalgia, and fast, violent action, with ’30s media star Walter Winchell’s rat-a-tat-tat narration perhaps the masterstroke.

A much-fictionalized Chicago mob was amplified by similarly fanciful episodes with Ness taking on such real-life criminals as Vincent Mad Dog Coll, Dutch Schultz, Waxey Gordon, Legs Diamond, and Lucky Luciano. J. Edgar Hoover, never a fan of the real Ness, objected so much to the Untouchable’s latter-day fame that he insisted the producers credit the FBI’s work at the end of the Ma Barker episode. Capone himself (with Neville Brand reappearing) was again featured only in the two-part episode, The Big Train.

The only other two-part The Untouchables episode, The Unhired Assassin, was loosely based on the assassination of Mayor Anton Cermak. That event also became the subject of my detective novel True Detective (1983).

In the late ’70s, while teaching mystery fiction at a community college, I happened to notice The Maltese Falcon’s 1929 copyright—the year of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. That meant Sam Spade and Al Capone were contemporaries—instead of Philip Marlowe meeting an Al Capone type, Al Capone could meet a Philip Marlowe type.

In 1981, I set out to write a period private eye story around a real crime—the Cermak assassination. I sought the help of George Hagenauer, a Chicagoan whose knowledge of the city and its mob history was considerable. I said to George, My private eye, offended by the rampant graft, will quit the Chicago PD. When he stopped laughing, George said, "Max, don’t you know? You get on the PD for the rampant graft!" In that exchange, Nathan Heller was born.

Ever since, George has been my primary research associate on the Heller novels, as well as many other historical thrillers. With Heller, the approach is to research a famous unsolved (or controversially solved) crime, and when I’m ready to write the definitive work on the subject, I write a private eye novel instead.

Early on I had the idea of making Eliot Ness the honest law enforcement contact for my somewhat shady PI—every private eye has a cop pal, after all. But I’d read in Fraley that Ness and the Untouchables had disbanded after Capone went to prison, with Ness gone from Chicago by 1933. The mandate of my novel was authenticity, so I abandoned the notion of using him.

And then he turned up in the research! Ness was right there on the scene, after two corrupt cops attempted the assassination of Frank Nitti. And into True Detective he went. Ness appears in a number of subsequent Heller novels as well, in particular The Million-Dollar Wound (1986), Stolen Away (1991), and Angel in Black (2001).

In 1986 I was asked by an editor to spin Ness off into his own novels—a good opportunity to explore his little-written-about years as public safety director in Cleveland. George and I made several trips to that city and explored the locations of potential Ness novels, from the castle-like boathouse on Clifton Lagoon, where Eliot lived, to the dreary Kingsbury Run gully, where the serial-killing Mad Butcher pursued his homeless prey.

Our research took us to the Cleveland Public Library, the City Hall Municipal Reference Library, and the Case Western Reserve Society, where the Ness papers reside. I expected to be disappointed. Noted mob expert Hank Messick’s The Silent Syndicate (1967) explored the Cleveland mob while disparaging Ness’s gangbusting role.

So when I found in the Case Western Reserve card catalog (remember those?) an entry saying, Eliot Ness Scrapbook, I held out little hope. We’d already been there all afternoon but asked to see the scrapbook anyway. A civil servant slogged off dutifully to answer our request.

Near closing, the civil servant returned, pushing a hand truck laden with perhaps half a dozen huge scrapbooks, each many inches thick and large enough for a newspaper front page of the era to be pasted in. George and I exchanged the same kind of dumbstruck look the original Untouchables broadcast had generated in me.

Actually exploring this treasure-trove find—apparently the last person to use the scrapbooks had been Oscar Fraley—meant returning the next day, and the next, and many more after that. Examining such items as Ness’s eyeglasses and a signed photo, I alerted the staff that this material should not be handed out to the general public, and soon Case Western had put the scrapbooks on microfilm.

Among that material were postcards sent from a mental institution to Eliot Ness by the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. Eerily, the front of one postcard depicted Neville Brand, insane and ranting, clutching prison bars, in a still from Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954)—years before Brand would be Al Capone on The Untouchables.

My four Ness-in-Cleveland novels—The Dark City (1987), Butcher’s Dozen (1988), Bullet Proof (1989), and Murder by the Numbers (1993)—were followed in 2004 by a play, Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. A one-man show performed by my late friend Michael Cornelison, Untouchable Life became a film of the same name in 2005, airing on a number of PBS stations.

I had written the play, and then filmed it, in part because I wanted to go on record with my version of Ness’s life. The research George and I did, particularly on Butcher’s Dozen (the first book-length work on the Kingsbury Run slayer), had been plundered without credit by other novelists and graphic novelists, and by nonfiction writers, who apparently felt that not acknowledging my work was fine because it was fiction.

I also wanted to address aspects of director Brian De Palma’s 1987 film, The Untouchables. De Palma is a director I admire, and the film is well-made and entertaining. The screenplay is another matter. David Mamet certainly created a memorable speech for Sean Connery—You wanna get Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun, and so on.

But the historical inanities—inaccuracies doesn’t cover it—are unforgivable. I have no trouble with liberties being taken with historical material for dramatic purposes. But having Mounties chase rumrunners in a country where rum is legal? Depicting a trial where a jury is changed midstream? Showing Eliot Ness tossing Frank Nitti off a building? The screenwriter displays a lack of respect not just for history but for his audience.

Untouchable Life attracted a high school student from Michigan to the Des Moines Playhouse to see Michael Cornelison perform as Eliot Ness. A. Brad Schwartz had been a Dick Tracy fan since around five years of age, having been exposed to the film of that name (on which I was a creative consultant and wrote the movie tie-in novel).

Just past age eleven—and this may sound very familiar—Brad saw a movie called The Untouchables, recommended by his mother as being "like Dick Tracy but real-life." He became enamored with that film, which led him to my work, including Road to Perdition, a graphic novel in which Eliot Ness appears. Brad was fifteen the summer he came to Des Moines for the play Untouchable Life, going to the premiere of the film in Rock Island, Illinois, in February 2005.

Somewhere along the way we got to know each other, and—while his college thesis evolved into the Orson Welles book, Broadcast Hysteria (2015)—he suggested we collaborate on a biography of Eliot Ness. I’d had several editors suggest the same, but I felt Untouchable Life was my last word on the subject.

Apparently I was wrong.

The project morphed into a dual biography of Capone and Ness. For a good long while, we hoped to follow Ness through to the end of his days, but eventually Chicago became the focus. For now.

We hope to set the record straight on any number of things. The inaccurate and unfair portrayal of Ness is one; the glorification of Al Capone is another. Jonathan Eig, in his Get Capone (2010), is guilty of both, particularly in trying to clear the mobster of the infamous baseball bat murders and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

For the former, Eig claims the baseball bat story dates only to 1975 when we have the basics in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times within two days of the murders, and Capone wielding the bat himself in print within a year of the event. For the latter, Eig ignores ballistics evidence, eyewitness testimony, and a credible confession in favor of a convoluted theory based on a single error-ridden letter to the FBI.

Deirdre Bair, in her book Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend (2016), collaborates with Capone family members to present a portrait of a loving husband and father. Typically, Bair disparages Ness, claiming he made sure the press was there to take his photograph as he struck heroic poses over gallons of illegal booze being smashed to pieces and going down the drains and into the sewers.

No such pictures exist.

A handful of diligent researchers—among them Rebecca McFarland, Paul Heimel, and Scott Leeson Sroka—have endeavored to shed light on the real Ness and his accomplishments. But even self-proclaimed Ness defender Douglas Perry—in Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero (2014)—lingers on sordid details of Ness’s supposed womanizing and drinking, with little in the historical record to back him up.

Filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick use Eig as a source for their documentary Prohibition (2011), Novick insisting, Eliot Ness had nothing to do with catching Al Capone. . . . he wrote a book in which he just made stuff up.

By dismissing Ness’s work, Eig and others seek to shift the spotlight to the Treasury agents who compiled the tax evasion case against Capone—in particular lead investigator Frank J. Wilson and his boss, Elmer L. Irey. The public has all but forgotten these men, a fact their admirers seem to blame on Ness.

For example, Gary Alford of the IRS—singing the praises of tax investigators—told the New York Times, They don’t write movies about Frank Wilson building the [Capone] tax case.

Only they did—The Undercover Man (1949), directed by B-movie master Joseph H. Lewis of Gun Crazy fame. Starring Glenn Ford as Frank Warren, the film—which plays like a dry run for the Untouchables TV series—was based on Frank Wilson’s self-aggrandizing article in Collier’s magazine in 1947 (a hardcover book followed in 1965). Wilson made a boatload of money off the film—he literally bought a boat.

Elmer Irey wrote (or a ghostwriter did, as had been the case with Wilson) his own puffed-up work, The Tax Dodgers (1948), taking credit for busting up the Capone mob. Irey also filmed a crime-does-not-pay opening scene for T-Men (1947); one wonders if he realized that Chicago gangster Johnny Rosselli was an uncredited producer on the picture, with a 10 percent piece of the action.

Neither Frank J. Wilson nor Elmer Irey even mention Eliot Ness in their respective memoirs. Read this book and see if you think that was fair. Add to that the treatment Al Capone got from the federal government, as well as the questionable conduct of the much-lauded Judge James Herbert Wilkerson.

In trying to set the record straight, we have used decades of Collins-Hagenauer research, including published sources—newspapers, books, and long-forgotten true-crime magazines—as well as newly uncovered archival documents and federal files obtained through numerous Freedom of Information Act requests. Trips have been made to libraries, archives, and personal collections in a dozen states as well as the District of Columbia, including the office of the Cook County Medical Examiner.

Coauthor Schwartz has combed through the personnel files of the Untouchables in the historic archives at the ATF’s D.C. headquarters. Brad also made a trip to the small Pennsylvania town where Eliot Ness died, speaking with the last people with living memories of the man. He also spoke with the son of one Untouchable and the grandson of another, and spent an afternoon exploring Ness’s old South Side neighborhood, later visiting Capone’s Miami mansion.

A few notes about the pages ahead. Al Capone’s famous successor is known in the popular media and most books as Frank Nitti, but the name he used was Frank Nitto. We have honored that, though when the Nitti usage turns up in a quote, we spare you the "sic. We also use Jack Guzik, as Nitto’s fellow gangster was known to his associates and family, although some media quotes will retain the more commonly seen Jake." Similarly I have taken the liberty of correcting minor spelling, grammar, and usage errors in quotes from newspapers and magazines of the day.

We do not use the Ness-Fraley book, The Untouchables, except where verified by multiple sources, with the occasional exception of drawing upon Ness’s state of mind in relation to certain incidents.

Neither of our subjects has really gotten a fair shake from history. Our hope is to balance the scales of justice on their behalf. Telling the story of Capone and Ness accurately is our goal—not only is truth stranger than fiction, in this case it’s even more compelling than the many lies and exaggerations visited on both.

Rogues’ Gallery

CAPONE FAMILY

Alphonse Scarface Al Capone

(National Archives)

Mary Josephine Mae Capone

(Cleveland Public Library)

Ralph Bottles Capone

(National Archives)

Frank Capone

Charles Fischetti

CHICAGO OUTFIT AND ALLIES

John Torrio

(Library of Congress)

James Diamond Jim Colosimo

Frankie Yale

Frank The Enforcer Nitto

(National Archives)

Jack Greasy Thumb Guzik

(National Archives)

Machine Gun Jack McGurn

Frankie Rio

Albert Anselmi

John Scalise

Tony Lombardo

Mike de Pike Heitler

Dr. Kenneth Phillips

(Cleveland Public Library)

E. J. Artful Eddie O’Hare

THE AMERICAN BOYS

Gus Winkeler

Fred Killer Burke

Fred Goetz

(Library of Congress)

CHICAGO HEIGHTS MOB

Lorenzo Juliano

Joe Martino

NORTH SIDE GANG

Dean O’Banion

Hymie Weiss

Vincent Schemer Drucci

(University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne)

George Bugs Moran

Joe Aiello

Jack Zuta

THE TERRIBLE GENNAS

Bloody Angelo Genna

Mike Genna

Anthony Genna

Pete Genna

POLITICIANS AND PRESS

Mayor William Hale Big Bill Thompson

(Library of Congress)

Mayor Anton J. Cermak

(Library of Congress)

William McSwiggin

Robert E. Crowe

(Library of Congress)

Jake Lingle

BUREAU OF PROHIBITION

Eliot Ness

Alexander G. Jamie

Albert M. Nabers

(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives)

Edna Stahle Ness

(Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University)

E. C. Yellowley

(Library of Congress)

George E. Golding

THE UNTOUCHABLES

Lyle B. Chapman

(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives)

Bernard V. Barney Cloonan

(Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University)

William J. Gardner

(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives)

Martin J. Lahart

(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives)

Joseph D. Leeson

(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives)

Paul W. Robsky

(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives)

S. Maurice Seager

(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives)

Robert D. Sterling

(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives)

Warren E. Stutzman

(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives)

SECRET SIX

Robert Isham Randolph

Samuel Insull

(Wikimedia Commons)

Julius Rosenwald

(Library of Congress)

Shirley Kub

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

George E. Q. Johnson

(Library of Congress)

Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt

(Library of Congress)

Assistant Attorney General G. A. Youngquist

Judge James H. Wilkerson

William J. Froelich

Dwight H. Green

Jacob Grossman

Samuel Clawson

Attorney General William D. Mitchell

(Library of Congress)

J. Edgar Hoover

(Library of Congress)

Melvin Purvis

(Library of Congress)

INTELLIGENCE UNIT

Elmer Irey

(Library of Congress)

Frank Wilson

(Library of Congress)

Arthur P. Madden

(National Archives)

LAWMEN AND ALLIES

President Herbert Hoover

(Library of Congress)

Pat Roche

LeRoy Gilbert

August Vollmer

(Library of Congress)

2122 North Clark Street—February 14, 1929. (Authors’ Collection)

Prologue: St. Valentine’s Day

On a frigid February morning in 1929, gangsters gathered in a garage on Chicago’s North Side, waiting for their boss.

Outside, a bitter wind pelted pedestrians with a faint dusting of snow. The garage—a narrow, one-story structure squeezed between two buildings on North Clark Street—offered shelter but no furnace. Most of the men kept their heavy overcoats on, or huddled around a pot of brewing coffee. A single dangling bulb gave off just enough light to cast a stark glow over a few trucks and cars, each registered to a fictitious address.

Nine years had passed since the start of national Prohibition, the benefits of which the men in this garage had reaped. They wore tailored overcoats over custom-made suits, jeweled stickpins on brightly colored neckties, silk shirts, and diamond rings. Most had fat wads of cash in their pockets and pistols under their arms.

Three were hardened gunmen, enforcers for the North Side mob controlling this part of Chicago. Two handled business tasks—one a financial wizard and the gang’s reputed brains, the other a speakeasy owner and labor racketeer. A sixth, a former safecracker, was employed by the gang as a $50-a-week mechanic—he wore only coveralls, and probably worked under one of the vehicles as the rest assembled. The seventh wore a carnation in his button hole—a thrill-seeking optician with no known criminal record who hung out with gangsters and bragged he could have anybody he didn’t like killed.

Just past 10:30, two armed raiders burst in through the back door. The gangsters might have felt a momentary surge of adrenaline—after years of open warfare on Chicago’s streets, they had every reason to expect retaliation from South Side rivals. But a glance at the invaders quelled their fear.

The blue-uniformed pair announced themselves as cops. The North Side gang had things well worked out with ranking members of the Chicago police. A raid like this was just a nuisance, a sham conducted by a department of unparalleled corruption. It wasn’t like any of them would ever serve time for violating the most unpopular law in the history of the United States.

The bluecoats brandished a shotgun and lined men up facing the wall. The gangsters, and the optician and coverall-clad mechanic, raised their hands and offered no resistance as one officer patted them down and took their weapons. A snub-nosed .38 clattered to the floor, nobody bothering to pick it up.

Then the uniformed pair ushered in two men in long, heavy overcoats, from under which they produced two Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the weapons were handed off to the uniformed officers; but more likely the new arrivals held on to the guns themselves. Either way, the tommy guns were raised and leveled at the backs of the seven men leaned against a cold brick wall.

One weapon was equipped with a twenty-round stick magazine, the other a fifty-round drum that wound up like a watch. Each contained .45-caliber pistol bullets, weighty rounds with a relatively slow muzzle velocity, losing much of their power flying through the air. Being shot by a .45, even multiple times, did not necessarily mean instant death.

But the Thompson could fire six hundred rounds every minute, and when the first tommy gun opened fire, all fifty of its rounds were spent within five seconds.

The harsh chatter of machine-gun fire filled the tight space as the gunman raked his Thompson back and forth, huge jets of flame leaping from the muzzle, strobing the garage as a hail of .45s caught the gangsters first in the heads, then across their backs. The shooter had to fight to keep control of the weapon, pulling down on its front grip as the movement of its heavy bolt—snapping back and forth ten times a second—pushed the barrel up toward the ceiling.

At such close range, the bullets shredded flesh, snapped bone, mutilated viscera, and spurted hot blood onto the cold concrete floor. Some slugs passed through their targets and pounded into the brick wall, shattering into fragments and ricocheting back into the dying men. The victims spun violently and fell—on their backs, on their faces, one slumping over a chair. A shotgun barked, and a burst of buckshot caught the optician in the back as he dropped.

When the tommy gun’s last spent shells rattled to the floor, the air was dense with smoke and a mist of blood and brain matter.

Some, perhaps most, victims were taking their time dying, writhing and moaning as their lifeblood seeped out. But their killers were in a hurry. They had held the second Thompson in reserve, should the often-unreliable drum mag of the first fail to fire properly. Once that drum had been emptied, the man holding the backup tommy stepped forward and fired into the men on the floor. The mechanic caught a bullet in the head, but must have still been moving, because whoever held the shotgun finished him, firing directly into his face. The charge obliterated the left side of his forehead, spilling his brains onto the cement, what remained of his eye sinking back into its shattered socket.

The gunfire attracted only scant attention outside the garage. A witness later testified he mistook the chatter for a car backfiring. But men in heavy overcoats exiting with their hands up, held at gunpoint by two apparent uniformed cops, indicated a routine bootlegging arrest—business as usual in Prohibition-era Chicago. The quartet piled into a big black Cadillac and sped off into the snowy city.

The entire operation had taken no more than five minutes.

Prompted by a suspicious housewife, a neighbor forced his way into the garage and walked into a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. Gun smoke still hung thick and heavy, but not concealing the seven bodies sprawled against the back wall, blood coursing down a central drain. Nearby, a survivor howled—a big German shepherd straining at a rope tied to a truck. Highball, the dead mechanic’s dog, appeared to be the only living thing in the room.

But one man was moving, crawling through puddles of scarlet in a hopeless bid for the door. Frank Gusenberg, younger brother of the dead man bent over a chair in the corner, had been shot fourteen times. Police arrived and took him to a nearby hospital, where Gusenberg refused to identify his killers, saying only that the raiders were dressed like cops. He died around 1:30 P.M., after defiantly telling police, Nobody shot me.

The garage on North Clark Street soon filled with police, reporters, and photographers. Many had seen their fair share of violence, but never such sickening carnage.

The Chicago Daily News described the circle of yellow lamplight, where six things that were men are sprawled. A Chicago Evening American reporter, after walking around the room, remarked, I’ve got more brains on my feet than I have in my head.

What the newsmen couldn’t describe, the cameramen captured, their gruesome photographs pushing the limits of what the newspapers dared print. The next day’s Chicago Tribune tried to shelter its readers from the horrific slaughter by covering the corpses with cartoonish images. The Chicago Herald and Examiner, however, forced its readers to view the carnage, a huge photo of the only slightly touched-up bodies next to a story beginning: Chicago gangsters graduated yesterday from murder to massacre.

On February 14, 1929, gangland sent Chicago a very bloody valentine. Like the unlucky, bullet-and-buckshot-riddled optician, many Chicagoans took a perverse pride in their city’s reputation for gangsterism and corruption. They enjoyed the bootleg liquor organized crime was happy to supply, and to the citizenry—the police included—an occasional murdered gangster or two seemed a fair trade.

But the calculated brutality of the massacre shocked the nation, and far exceeded what even the most jaded Chicagoans might shrug off. Bootleggers seemed suddenly less like daring outlaws breaking a stupidly unfair law, and more like bloodthirsty killers. Many gangsters fled the city, temporarily at least, for fear of a police crackdown.

The most notorious of gangland leaders, a celebrity criminal like none the world had seen before, was not even in Chicago that icy February morning. But he would return from a sunny vacation to a city turned cold and far less hospitable.

No one was ever charged, much less convicted, for committing the so-called St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. But almost immediately everyone in Chicago seemed to know who had given the order. Police fingers pointed at the South Side gangsters who had been at war with the North Siders since the early 1920s.

Prominent among the accusers was George Bugs Moran, the North Side mob leader whose tardiness spared him the grisly fate of his cronies. Over the preceding few years, several Moran allies had been wiped out with the same careful planning and brutal efficiency that characterized the massacre.

Now the word got around that Moran blamed his South Side rivals for these killings as well. As he was said to have put it, Only one gang kills like that—the Capone gang.

At the very hour of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Alphonse Gabriel Capone was in Miami, Florida, answering questions in the Dade County Courthouse about his financial transactions and alleged underworld connections.

As a stenographer established a beyond-any-doubt alibi for his whereabouts, Capone flatly denied ever being a bootlegger. What was he, then? A onetime antiques dealer turned professional gambler, whose losses at the racetrack far outstripped his meager winnings. How he managed to pay those debts—or to afford a $40,000 house on Miami’s Palm Island, a custom-built armored limousine, and $7,000 in tailored suits, pajamas, and silk underwear—remained between him and his wallet.

Though originally from Brooklyn, Capone embodied the ethos of his adopted hometown. As one observer said in 1931, No one is ashamed of anything in Chicago, which was too big, too busy, too powerful. . . . [It] is gorgeous and it is awful.

Al Capone fit right in. Hefty and powerful, an inch or two under six feet, he threw around more than two hundred pounds of fat and muscle. Every feature of his broad, expressive face seemed too large—big eyes under thick eyebrows, wide nose over fat lips, thick cheeks and bulbous chin, a visage encouraging caricature.

He wore his wealth literally on his sleeve by way of brightly colored, custom-tailored suits in every shade from sober blue to bright yellow. His trademark pearl-gray fedoras and fat, expensive cigars would soon be copied in films and comic strips, and by lesser gangsters. Where most criminals lurked in the shadows, Capone embraced the spotlight, becoming (as Harper’s put it in 1931) one of the central figures of our time.

This was a man whose hunger for more of everything—power, pleasure, publicity—drove him from the slums of his boyhood to the pinnacle of luxury. A conservative estimate placed Capone’s net worth in 1929 at $20 million, or more than $280 million by early twenty-first-century standards. But he cared little for dollars and cents.

Georgette Winkeler, wife of one presumed St. Valentine’s assassin, wrote Capone had no regard for money except as a business necessity and a personal convenience. He spent freely, tipped extravagantly, and gave generously, handing out $100 bills to kids to go buy some ice cream.

Like many a mobster, Capone maintained his power through fear. In 1926, famed Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow said the illicit nature of bootlegging made violence and intimidation inevitable.

The business pays very well, Darrow said, but it is outside the law and they can’t go to court . . . so they naturally shoot.

And Capone would not hesitate to pull the trigger. Stories of his capacity for violence—firing into a man’s face four times in a bar full of witnesses, or bludgeoning three men to the edge of death with a baseball bat—served the same purpose, partly fabricated or not. That fearsome reputation was essential to cement his place in Chicago’s gangland.

Yet some part of Al Capone desperately wanted to be liked, even admired, and he took pains to put up a respectable front. As an up-and-coming hood, he saw how his mentor, Johnny Torrio, lived the life of an honest businessman, even a gentleman, while thriving off vice and crime.

Everybody calls me a racketeer, Capone supposedly said. I call myself a business man. When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on the Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality.

Capone was a man perfectly fitted to his times. He rose to prominence when Americans were idolizing the great captains of industry—the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Fords—and for a while Capone assumed an unlikely place in that pantheon. The public knew Capone had killed, by proxy if not always in person, yet that seemed only to add to his roguish appeal.

As W. R. Burnett, author of the seminal gangster novel Little Caesar, observed in 1930, Capone is no monster. Far from it. He is merely a thoroughly ruthless individual, who had acumen enough to take advantage of a very unusual situation.

Capone’s ability to murder at a distance made him easier to accept. He offered himself up as a flamboyant character, known affectionately as the Big Fellow, while staying aloof from the evil done in his name. The public could look at him the way they might a lion in a zoo—a colorful killer, safely domesticated, if not yet behind bars.

His true self seemed always to hover just out of view. He tried to have press photographers take his picture from the right side, so the camera wouldn’t capture the thin white lines across his left cheek that had earned him his hated nickname: Scarface.

Those scars, a memento of his rough-and-tumble bouncer days in New York, Capone did his best to minimize—shaving three times a day, using talcum powder, turning down hat brims on the left side to keep his torn cheek in shadow. He would claim a bayonet had sliced his face during battle in the Great War, though he never actually served. But like the violence defining his career, the scars remained a part of him, famous and impossible to conceal.

On that Valentine’s Day in 1929, Capone seemed at the height of his power. He effectively controlled Chicago’s city government and had his chief gangland rivals beaten back. Whether by accident or design, the Clark Street massacre wiped out Capone’s last major opponent by shattering what remained of the North Side mob. Many observers considered Capone the undisputed king of Chicago, and he had only just turned thirty years old.

But he remained a victim of his own success. His meteoric rise to power and fame had trapped him in a kind of purgatory—the most-shot-at man in America, according to his first biographer. Surrounded by bodyguards, slipping from hideout to safe house, he seemed always on the lookout for another assassination attempt. After years of fighting to stay on top—to say nothing of fighting to stay alive—he’d grown tired and weary. He frequently announced a desire to retire, and probably spoke the truth—not that he ever could achieve that goal.

Once in the racket, you’re in it for life, Capone supposedly said in 1931. Your past holds you in it. . . . If I could go to Florida and live quietly with my family for the rest of my days, I’d be the happiest man alive. But no such peaceful life is in the cards for me.

And yet Capone’s exit would arrive sooner than he might have expected. The event cementing his hold on the city also set the stage for his downfall—although Capone would never be tried for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the court of public opinion would convict him, the media behind his national celebrity turning against him.

After the stock market crash that October, resentment grew over Capone’s conspicuous wealth. With a quarter of Americans out of work, the new U.S. president became desperate for a victory . . . and the possibility of one presented itself in taking down the nation’s most famous bootlegger.

In their search for a hero to fight that battle, the government and the media would pluck from obscurity a federal agent four years younger than Capone—a scrupulously honest man in America’s most dishonest city, working in the most corrupt law enforcement agency in the nation’s history.

This ideal G-man, with a growing record of arrests, convictions, and daring undercover work, had a dislike of guns and violence, preferring to leave his service revolver behind even when on duty. Those who met him but had never seen him in action usually found it hard to envision him going on raids or tussling with gangsters.

He was not lacking in courage or conviction; as one friend put it, I have never known a man who lived by a stricter code. But in person he seemed remarkably mild-mannered, passive, even shy. He had an easy smile and a good sense of humor, but was recalled by that same friend as extremely modest and introverted, a person who could get lost in a crowd of two people.

Yet serving as an officer of the law built up his self-confidence; having the authority of the federal government behind him gave the young G-man an inner strength he perhaps couldn’t muster on his own. Eliot Ness did not believe in Prohibition but felt it should be respected. Moreover, he understood the true danger of the ill-advised dry law was the power and influence it gave to organized criminals like Al Capone.

Physically, they were polar opposites—Capone, big and imposing; Ness, slim and retiring. Where Capone outfitted himself flashily, Ness dressed with professional care, his brown hair parted neatly down the middle. Even as a Prohibition agent he had a collegiate look, with a boyish, lightly freckled face and the broad shoulders of a student athlete.

Still, his gray-blue eyes could turn cold in an instant. Ness immediately strikes one as ‘all business,’ then smiles and winks, wrote one Chicago reporter, as if the fact that he is merely acting in a role is just between you and him.

And yet their backgrounds were more alike than either might ever have known. Both were first-generation Americans, sons of immigrant fathers who worked as bakers in the old country. Once in America, Capone’s papa chose a new trade, barbering, while Ness’s remained a baker, yet both fathers went on to build successful independent businesses in their adopted land.

While Capone and Ness had similar role models in their fathers, each learned very different lessons. Ness was proud to be the son of a man who never cheated anyone out of a nickel. Capone embraced a career in crime, the life of a struggling honest businessman not for him.

Capone and Ness shared a certain ambition, each with an impulse to turn his chosen field into a fully modern profession. While Capone applied the methods of corporate business to organized crime, Ness worked to elevate the role of the police officer in American society, urging the adoption of new technologies and scientific techniques.

Both men were willing to work hard to succeed, each in his own way—with energy, charisma, and recklessness, the assets of their remarkable youth. Capone became the head of a multi-million-dollar criminal syndicate at age twenty-six, while Ness at twenty-seven took charge of the federal squad tasked with bringing Capone down.

In the Untouchable Eliot Ness, fate and the federal government had found the perfect foil for Scarface Al.

The central irony of the now-legendary struggle between Ness and Capone is how little direct contact the two men had—one phone call, and a single face-to-face meeting when, in 1932, the convicted Capone was put on the Dixie Flyer to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

And yet they continue to do battle, each locked in the other’s terrible embrace, like Holmes and Moriarty on the cliff’s edge over Reichenbach Falls.

Part One

Prairie Avenue Boys

Diamond Jim Colosimo with Dale Winter. (Authors’ Collection)

Diamond Jim Colosimo following his murder, May 11, 1920. (Authors’ Collection)

One

1895–1920

Over the years, many would claim (falsely) that Al Capone had been an immigrant, as if they wanted to disown one of America’s most notorious native-born sons. But Capone himself insisted on setting the record straight.

I’m no foreigner, he would say. I’m as good an American as any man. My parents were American-born and so was I.

In this, as he so often did, Capone specialized in half-truths.

When Gabriele Capone moved his family from Italy to a better life in America, he chose a place called Brooklyn. Perhaps he’d been warned of New York’s overcrowded ghettoes with their rotten wooden firetraps, where cholera or typhus drove the rich from the city while corpses of the poor littered the Lower East Side. A father relocating his brood might well want to avoid crime-ridden streets where an immigrant’s meager daily wage could wind up in a mugger’s grasp.

But in 1895, Brooklyn was rife with opportunity. The Brooklyn Bridge, an engineering marvel known worldwide, had been finished in 1883. The ever-growing City of Brooklyn was annexing other towns and cities in Kings County, with talk in the air of one great emerging metropolitan area. Clearly opportunities existed in Brooklyn that did not in Gabriele’s home region.

Gabriele was born in 1865 in small-town Angri, southwest of Naples, on the edge of Salerno province in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Unlike many of his countrymen, he was literate, training outside the oral traditions of his village, working as a baker (pasta-making a specialty) and a lithographer. He married Theresa Raiola in 1891, their son Vincenzo (James) arriving the next year. And in 1895—with second son Raffaele (Ralph) also in tow and Theresa pregnant with Salvatore (Frank)—the family made its way across the Atlantic.

At first, they continued to pronounce their surname phonetically—Caponi—though that would soon change. Classified at Ellis Island as Italian, the Capones were more rudely branded as dagos or wops—low-class, unintelligent southern Italians, disposed to crime.

Thousands of Italians came to Brooklyn before the Great War, a world bordered by factories on the north and warehouses on the south, its streets mingling neighbors and kin from Campanian and Calabrian villages among bright flowers and holy imagery and sublime cooking smells. On front stoops, mothers with babies at their bosoms would oversee armies of kids in the street, while neighbors sat in sunshine and shared gossip and letters from home.

However poor the inhabitants of a tenement, a certain joy and exuberance might be found—in the Union Street marionette theater, perhaps, or a festival like the feast of the patron saint or the Assumption of Our Lady, electric-bulb-lined arches lighting up the night as statues of saints were paraded, until fireworks and explosions pronounced the proceedings at a joyful end.

But those who had known Italy were soon confronted by a generation not so tied to heritage, who studied English and spoke in the language of the streets. America, even Brooklyn itself, was their world, a world that bred restlessness in its youth.

In the neighborhoods near the Navy Yard, from Red Hook to Greenpoint, Old and New World ways came together and sometimes clashed. Here the Capone family settled, an area dominated by defense spending, relatively immune to economic recessions.

Seagulls soared above, offering a constant, cawing reminder of the nearby Atlantic. But the fresh sea air was tainted by a caustic bouquet of oil, fumes, and rot. Sailors and shipbuilders came in droves, bringing with them a wealth of gambling, prostitution, and saloons—on Sands Street, chippies prowled and dancehall girls pranced, while tattoo parlors thrived on drunken bad decisions, and cheap whiskey was often laced by the Mickey Finn that led to a mugging.

A summer’s day might bring the stench rolling in from the Gowanus Canal, a nasty gash in the marsh-like landscape, its murky green-brown waters hungry for rusty vessels, dead machinery covered in funereal snarls of green, nature in a particularly ironic mood. The canal attracted a legion of lawbreakers, who often made it home to a special kind of swimmer—a floating corpse, bloated and ripe.

The Capone family’s two-room flat had a single potbelly stove and no running water, with access to an outhouse. Theresa now had three little children to care for—cooking, warmth, and bathing required hauling up water, coal, or wood. A fourth child came on January 17, 1899. Baptized without a godfather, he was given the Latin name Alphonsus, though he would be known by its English equivalent: Alphonse Capone.

To support his growing family while saving to start his own business, Gabriel (his name Americanized now) toiled as a manual laborer, baker, and grocery clerk before taking up barbering. The shipyards made a ready market for Gabriel’s scissors and razors, with many workers and sailors passing through—the same clientele who frequented brothels, gambling joints, and saloons. While less congested and safer than New York’s East Side slums, the Navy Yard soon revealed itself as a dicey place to raise a family.

Tall, handsome Gabriel Capone made friends with ease. His literacy helped him stand out among his countrymen, who often addressed him as Don. Theresa soon had nine children: Erminio (Mimi) came along in 1901; Umberto (Albert) in 1906; Amadoe (Matthew) in 1908; Erminia in 1910 (dying the same year); and, finally, in 1912, dark-haired Mafalda, who developed a particularly close relationship with Al. The Don’s children, however, were not free from discrimination and ethnic conflict.

The active young Capone boys fled their two-room flat, making the street their major playground. On the street and in school, name-calling could escalate into violence, teachers thrashing students and debasing them racially. Children united along ethnic lines, often with older kids, forming surrogate families that taught survival.

Smoking started in primary school, crap games under a street-corner gaslight around age eight or nine. Sex had to wait for high school and a mature twelve. Childhood pursuits like flying a kite off a rooftop had their place, as did swimming in the East River, though a kid got no more than three lessons before he drowned. The Fourth of July meant single-shot pistols, a bargain at a quarter, and Election Day was about nicking barrels and boxes for the big fire—didn’t matter who won, if the fire burned high and bright.

An older youth, Francesco (Frank) Nitto, his family also from Angri, lived near the Capones at two Navy Street addresses within half a mile of Al’s family. Typically, Nitto dropped out during the seventh grade, age fourteen. The close proximity of their homes suggests the short, feisty Nitto knew the Capone boys—at least the older ones, James, Frank, and Ralph.

The whole family needed to work not only to survive but to improve their lot, one economic unit with everyone pitching in. Theresa would bake bread and the older boys would sell it on the street. The brothers hawked newspapers and shined shoes—low-income kids following their honest father’s lead. Of course, dishonesty could also help support the family—stealing food, clothing, and other necessities from pushcarts or stores.

Gabriel became a citizen in 1906, making his wife and children citizens as well. He moved the family to Garfield Place in Park Slope, and opened his own shop in the building where they lived. Young Nitto, working as a barber years later in Chicago, listed Brooklyn as the site of his professional training. He and his family moved from Navy Street to Garfield Place, even closer to the Capones, where Frank likely learned barbering from Gabriel.

The oldest Capone boy—Vincenzo, called James—became fascinated with the romanticized dime-novel West and the lure of wide-open spaces away from crowded, crime-ridden streets. Gabriel arranged a job for his oldest son caring for horses in rural Staten Island, a world and a ferry ride away. Finally, in 1907, an opportunity arose for James to work with horses, traveling with a touring circus.

James bid his little brother good-bye at the Staten Island Ferry, not to return for decades, his exit saving him from the life of crime consuming many of his brothers. Influenced by movie idol William S. Hart—whose last name he assumed—James came to work in various law enforcement capacities out west, including Prohibition agent. The oldest son leaving home, however, meant more than just family heartache, but a loss of income.

The family’s new, more predominantly Italian neighborhood bordered Irish Red Hook and a Sicilian enclave, where turf wars among youth gangs often broke out. The corner of Broadway and Flushing, near