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The Garage on North Clark Street: Valentine's Day, 1929
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On February 14, 1929, seven men died against a Chicago garage wall — and Al Capone's empire began its slow collapse. This episode traces the North Side war from Brooklyn to Cicero to the massacre that turned a city against its most powerful man.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
February fourteenth, nineteen twenty-nine. Seven men stand inside a Chicago garage at two thousand one hundred and twenty-two North Clark Street.
Alphonse Capone was born in nineteen ninety-nine in Brooklyn, the son of Italian immigrants. He was expelled from school at fourteen.
Chicago in the early nineteen twenties was divided territory. The South Side was largely Torrio's domain.
O'Banion's successor was Earl "Hymie" Weiss, born Wojciech Wojciechowski, one of the most aggressive gang leaders Chicago had seen. Weiss wanted blood, and he was patient enough to plan for it properly.
Capone moved fast. By nineteen twenty-five he had occupied fifty rooms at the Metropole Hotel at two thousand three hundred South Michigan.
A month after the Hawthorne attack, Hymie Weiss was dead. He was shot outside the Holy Name Cathedral on October eleventh, nineteen twenty-six.
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre was designed to end the Moran problem. The plan was to draw Moran's top people to the garage on North Clark Street under the pretense of a bootleg liquor deal.
Eliot Ness was a federal Prohibition agent who assembled a team specifically to target Capone's bootlegging network. The Untouchables, as they became known, worked to build evidence of illegal liquor operations and to identify officials on Capone's payroll who could be turned or exposed.
Capone was confident going into the process. A plea deal had been negotiated: two years, manageable, the kind of arrangement his people had managed before.
Capone went to Atlanta Federal Penitentiary first. He'd managed to maintain some comfort in a Philadelphia jail through bribes, and he attempted something similar in Atlanta.
He was released in nineteen thirty-nine. Not a free man in any meaningful sense.
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