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Fall of the Untouchable: Tax, Alcatraz, and Capone's Broken End
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Al Capone survived a thousand machine gun rounds and ran Prohibition-era Chicago's $100 million empire — but it was a tax evasion charge that finally brought him down. From the St. Valentine's Day Massacre to Alcatraz and a syphilis-ravaged death in Miami, this is the full arc of America's most notorious mob boss.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When a thousand rounds of machine gun fire tear through a building and the man inside walks out alive, something shifts. Not just for him.
To understand what the Hawthorne attack meant, you need to understand the ground Capone had already covered to get there. He wasn't a Chicago native.
By nineteen twenty-four, Capone was no longer an apprentice. The Cicero takeover that April demonstrated what he'd become.
The attack came from the North Side Gang, the Irish and Polish outfit led by Hymie Weiss. The rivalry had been building for years.
For Capone, surviving a thousand-round attack on his own headquarters reinforced a belief that he was operating above the consequences that applied to ordinary men. He'd already bribed police.
The North Side Gang never stopped being a problem. After Hymie Weiss was killed in October nineteen twenty-six, Bugs Moran took over leadership.
Capone's mistake was assuming that his money and his influence made him legally untouchable. Every gangster of that era shared that assumption.
Prison revealed what money and power had been holding back. In Atlanta, Capone initially tried to operate the way he always had, using cash and influence to soften his conditions.
He was released in nineteen thirty-nine. The final years were spent at his home on Palm Island in Miami, a waterfront estate he'd bought at the height of his power.
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