Mr. Capone

Description

In 1930 Al Capone was arguably the most famous American alive--both here and abroad. Today, forty-five years after his death, his name recognition is still the envy of any celebrity or presidential candidate. Few men have achieved such notoriety, but who was the man behind the legends? Now, in Mr. Capone, Robert J. Schoenberg shows us, for the first time, the real Al Capone--where he came from, how he moved to the top rank of organized crime, and how he ran "the outfit." The portrait that emerges is certainly of a calculating and at times brutal man, but also one of surprising wit and charm. Capone was a rational man who built his bootlegging empire with guns but who managed it with a "genius for organization," a businessman of crime. Schoenberg reveals new information about Capone's adolescent delinquency and gang membership in pre-World War I Brooklyn. Capone then served his apprenticeship in organized crime to Brooklyn bar owner and. Racketeer Frankie Yale, while getting into scrapes on the Brooklyn waterfront and acquiring his famous scars. When Capone left Brooklyn for Chicago, he thought it was only a temporary move arranged by his boss to avoid the wrath of one Bill Lovett. But the Chicago of 1920 proved very congenial to Capone--it was a thirsty city with a thirsty mayor. Schoenberg lays out, again for the first time, the dynamics of power and corruption among Capone's allies and enemies. Throughout Chicago's "beer wars" and shows the meaning, strategy, and reason behind each killing. We see events from the participants' points of view. From an unpublished police report, we get new insight into the St. Valentine's Day Massacre with a theory to explain a mass killing that one expert says "never made sense." Capone was in Miami at the time, where the local oligarchy--itself fond of his wares and hardly above corruption, but preferring to keep it. Local--carried on a comic opera struggle with him. Mr. Capone also details for the first time all the issues and maneuverings on both sides in the tax situation Capone faced, including modern commentary by three principals in the American Bar Association's August 1990 mock retrial of Capone (in which he was acquitted). Mr. Capone also explodes numerous myths that have surrounded the Capone legend, the most important being that Capone was an irrational man who was unable. To control his temper. Al Capone was not an obscure drone for his first years in Chicago; gangster Dion O'Banion was not an altar boy and was not murdered for his alleged aspersions against Sicilians (Capone's own parents hailed from a village outside Naples); there was not a party at Capone's Palm Island mansion on the night of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre; and the killing of Assistant State's Attorney William McSwiggin had absolutely nothing to do with Klondike. O'Donnell's alleged bad-mouthing of Capone's beer. Scrupulously researched, Mr. Capone includes much never-before-published material and is the most penetrating and complete account ever written of Al Capone's colorful and extraordinary life. It is both a biography of a famous--and infamous--American legend and a brilliant portrayal of an earlier but hardly more innocent America. Schoenberg places Capone in his cultural and historical context, shows us how the world. Looked through Capone's eyes, tells us what made him tick, and reminds us how America lived under Prohibition.

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