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Scarface Ascendant: From Brooklyn Streets to Chicago's Underworld Throne
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Al Capone's rise from a Brooklyn street kid to the undisputed boss of Prohibition-era Chicago is one of organized crime history's most extraordinary power grabs. This episode traces the education Frankie Yale gave him, the empire Johnny Torrio handed over, and the brutal calculation that placed Capone at the top of the Chicago Outfit.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people think they know Al Capone. They picture the fat man in the pinstripe suit, the carnation in the lapel, the cigar.
To understand why Capone was ready for that moment, you need to go back a few years. He was born in Brooklyn in eighteen ninety-nine to Italian immigrant parents.
Prohibition had transformed Chicago. The Eighteenth Amendment didn't stop people from drinking.
Let's come back to that question. Why did Torrio really leave?
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre is the moment most people associate with Capone's peak power.
Eliot Ness and his Untouchables were the visible face of the federal effort against Capone. The unit pursued his bootlegging operations, raided breweries, built cases against his distribution network.
Capone went first to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. His early behavior there fit the pattern.
There's a clean irony at the center of this story. Torrio left because he calculated the odds correctly.
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