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Scar Tissue: How the IRS Brought Down the Man Who Owned Chicago
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Al Capone owned Chicago's police, judges, and politicians — yet it was a tax ledger that finally brought him down. From Brooklyn streets to Alcatraz to a Florida deathbed, this is the full arc of America's most infamous crime boss.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's the thing that nobody in the Chicago underworld took seriously. The federal government had been watching Al Capone for years.
Alphonse Capone was born in nineteen ninety-nine to Italian immigrants who had settled in Brooklyn. He was out of school by fourteen, expelled, and from there he moved through the only available education in his neighborhood.
By the mid-nineteen twenties, Capone's formal education was complete and his practical one had paid off. Torrio survived an assassination attempt in nineteen twenty-five, decided he'd had enough, and handed his empire to Capone.
February fourteenth, nineteen twenty-nine. Seven members of the North Side Gang were brought to a garage at two thousand one hundred and twenty-two North Clark Street.
Two separate federal efforts were closing in by nineteen thirty. Eliot Ness led a unit of Prohibition agents pursuing Capone's bootlegging operations.
In nineteen thirty-one, Capone was indicted on twenty-two counts of tax evasion covering the years nineteen twenty-four through nineteen twenty-nine. The IRS case covered a period when his operation was at its peak, when the money was flowing in volumes that no one had properly concealed.
Capone served the early part of his sentence in Atlanta. He attempted what had worked in Philadelphia, paying for preferential treatment and trying to maintain influence from behind the walls.
He spent his remaining years in Miami, largely confined to the property. His wife Mae cared for him.
The question this episode has been building toward is the one the criminal world refused to take seriously until it was too late. The answer has a few layers.
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