The very able author Jonathan Eig, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, who has written books on baseball legends Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig , has now written about another type of legend, and a ruthless one at that: Al Capone. It details his colorful life and how the feds brought him down. Here’s the New York Times review.
Tell people in Belfast or Melbourne you’re from Chicago and some of them are still apt to mimic a tommy assault, spraying you with 400 rounds of hot lead per minute.
Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! A tommy, of course, is a Thompson submachine gun, the weapon of choice for Al Capone’s ”outfit,” which deployed the guns to dominate the hooch and protection rackets in and around Chicago for most of the Roaring Twenties. Old associations die hard.
In ”Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster,” Jonathan Eig vividly retraces the efforts of President Herbert Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. and the United States attorney George E. Q. Johnson to bring Scarface to some sort of justice. Despite the gaudy subtitle, though, fully half the book covers Capone’s rise to power and the grip, drenched in blood, with which he maintained it for almost a decade.
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