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The Accountant Who Broke Scarface: Capone's Rise, Reign, and Ruin
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Al Capone controlled Chicago's politicians, police, and judges — until a tax return brought down the most powerful gangster in America. From the Four Deuces to Alcatraz, this is the complete story of how an empire built on Prohibition collapsed from the inside.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what nobody in the Chicago underworld stopped to consider: what happens when the most powerful criminal in America turns out to be beatable, not by rival gunmen, not by turf wars, not by the FBI's finest, but by an accountant? Al Capone controlled a city.
Alphonse Capone was born in nineteen ninety-nine in Brooklyn, New York, to Italian immigrant parents. He left school at fourteen.
Prohibition arrived in nineteen twenty and handed people like Torrio and Capone something they hadn't anticipated: a constitutional gift. The Eighteenth Amendment made alcohol illegal across the entire United States.
In September of nineteen twenty-six, a rival convoy drove past the Hawthorne Inn and fired more than one thousand rounds into the building and the surrounding block. Capone was inside at the time, eating lunch.
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre on February fourteenth, nineteen twenty-nine is the moment that changed public perception permanently.
Eliot Ness arrived in Chicago in nineteen thirty as a Prohibition enforcement agent with a specific mandate: go after Capone's bootlegging operation. His unit, which became known as the Untouchables because of their refusal to accept bribes, was effective at disrupting specific breweries and supply chains.
The trial began in the autumn of nineteen thirty-one. Capone's lawyers had done something that seemed clever at the time: they had reason to believe they knew which jurors would be sympathetic.
Alcatraz was designed to eliminate exactly what Capone had always relied on: the ability to manage his environment through money and relationships. The facility on San Francisco Bay offered no political connections to cultivate, no officials who wanted favors, no economy of corruption.
The house on Palm Island was comfortable. It had a pool.
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