Examines the St. Valentine's Day Massacre when killers dressed as cops gunned down seven men. While the massacre was commonly thought to be ordered by Al Capone, it was actually the work of group from St. Louis known as the "American Boys." The book examines how law enforcement officials worked not to solve the crime to avoid retaliation by corrupt politicians.
Capturing one of the most outrageous stories of the Capone era, this is the twin biography of a couple who defined the extremes and excesses of the Prohibition Era in America. ";Machine Gun"; Jack McGurn, a babyfaced Sicilian immigrant and Al Capone's chief assassin, and Louise May Rolfe, a beautiful blonde dancer and libertine, paired to represent the epitome of fashion, rebellion, and wild abandon in a decade that shocked and roared. Detailing McGurn's suspected role in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and his sensational alibi, this biography shows how the couple captured the headlines in every newspaper in the country, had their hipster speech copied by Hollywood, and were the spellbinding poster children of the new jazz subculture. More than a look at the joie de vivre of two lovers caught in history's spotlight, this work examines the continuing allure of the Roaring Twenties and the characters who inspired America's love affair with gangster literature and crime cinema.
★★★ A Valentine's Day not soon forgot ★★★ The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre is one of the most notorious murders of all time. In the crime-ridden Chicago of the Prohibition era, gangsters like Al Capone battled for power, but few went to the extreme lengths that Capone did on that fateful day in 1929. This short book gives you an exciting look at one of the most notorious criminals of all time, and the massacre he masterminded to finally gain control of the bootleg liquor trade. Pray he has chocolates in that box and not a Tommy gun! This is one Valentine's Day you will never forget.
The real story of how the federal government finally apprehended and convicted America’s most notorious criminal, Al Capone. Drawing on recently discovered government documents, wiretap transcripts, and Al Capone’s handwritten personal letters, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Eig tells the dramatic story of the rise and fall of the nation’s most infamous criminal in rich new detail. From the moment he arrived in Chicago in 1920, Capone found himself in a world with limitless opportunity. Within a few years Capone controlled an illegal bootlegging business with annual revenue rivaling that of some of the nation’s largest corporations. Along the way he corrupted the Chicago police force and local courts while becoming one of the world’s first international celebrities. Legend credits Eliot Ness and his “Untouchables” with apprehending Capone, but Eig shows that this wasn’t so. In Get Capone, the man known as “Scarface” emerges as a complex man, doomed as much by his ego as by his vicious criminality. This is the real Al Capone.
The new definitive history of gangster-era Chicago–a landmark work that is as riveting as a thriller. Now featuring a new preface, plus 115 photographs and a map of gangland Chicago. A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year “Gripping. ... Reads like a novel.” —Chicago “Revolutionizes our understanding of Al Capone and Eliot Ness." —Matthew Pearl In 1929, thirty-year-old gangster Al Capone ruled both Chicago's underworld and its corrupt government. To a public who scorned Prohibition, "Scarface" became a local hero and national celebrity. But after the brutal St. Valentine's Day Massacre transformed Capone into "Public Enemy Number One," the federal government found an unlikely new hero in a twenty-seven-year-old Prohibition agent named Eliot Ness. Chosen to head the legendary law enforcement team known as "The Untouchables," Ness set his sights on crippling Capone's criminal empire. Today, no underworld figure is more iconic than Al Capone and no lawman as renowned as Eliot Ness. Yet in 2016 the Chicago Tribune wrote, "Al Capone still awaits the biographer who can fully untangle, and balance, the complexities of his life," while revisionist historians have continued to misrepresent Ness and his remarkable career. Enter Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz, a unique and vibrant writing team combining the narrative skill of a master novelist with the scholarly rigor of a trained historian. Collins is the New York Times bestselling author of the gangster classic Road to Perdition. Schwartz is a rising-star historian whose work anticipated the fake-news phenomenon. Scarface and the Untouchable draws upon decades of primary source research—including the personal papers of Ness and his associates, newly released federal files, and long-forgotten crime magazines containing interviews with the gangsters and G-men themselves. Collins and Schwartz have recaptured a bygone bullet-ridden era while uncovering the previously unrevealed truth behind Scarface's downfall. Together they have crafted the definitive work on Capone, Ness, and the battle for Chicago.
Bloody Chicago was the name given to Americas most corrupt city after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. The masterminds behind the massacre escaped. Ten months later on December 14, 1929, St. Joseph, Michigan Police Officer Charles Skelly came face to face with a killer. Shots were fired, the assailant escaped and the dying Officer Skelly identified his murderer before taking his last breath. The trail led to a home in Stevensville, Michigan which belonged to Fred Burke, a highly sought suspect in the St. Valentines Day Massacre. The backwash of bloody Chicago had made its way into the rural neighborhoods of Southwestern Michigan and Northern Indiana.
A beloved romance that offers a distinctive—and distinctly entertaining—take on Valentine’s Day. The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was supposed to be the end for Al Capone’s rivals. Instead, it turned out to be a second chance. For James Sheridan Rafferty, it’s turning out to be an eternity of second chances, one year after another. Assistant prosecutor Helen Emerson is plagued by a bad dream she can never quite remember, a nightmare that seems to be part of someone else’s life. Then a man who calls himself Rafferty comes knocking on her door… Just like he’s had every Valentine’s Day since 1929, Rafferty has fortyeight hours in which to fall in love and redeem himself. This former gangster thinks that Helen might just be the gal for him, but he has to find out who’s trying to kill her if either one of them is going to have any kind of chance at all. Previously published.
This is the revised edition, March 2015. The untold story from inside his family. Dramatic, unyielding, and provocative, Uncle Al Capone by Deirdre Marie Capone, Al Capone's grandniece, is a fascinating memoir and engaging biography. This moving, highly readable portrait of the Capone family and its mob trade examines what it has meant to survive the storied legacy of the family's forbearers. As Capone traces the arc of regret and what fuels the Capone myth, she finds redemption and a way to coexist with her legacy. In seventeen chapters with titles like "The Making of the Mafioso," "Trading the Chicago Outfit for the Chicago Cubs," and "The Saint Valentine's Day Truth," Capone outlines organized crime in Chicago and offers vignettes of American history during the early and mid-twentieth century. Using years of research and exhaustive interviews with her aunts, uncles, and cousins, she weaves an engaging anecdotal narrative of what it meant to be a Capone, what it meant to lose her father to suicide, and what it meant to have a mother who lived in constant fear. She offers compelling evidence that Al Capone was specifically targeted for prosecution by law enforcement agencies assisted by the media, which made gross exaggerations of her uncle's exploits and fueled a phenomenon of half-truths and utter falsehoods. From the family's roots in Angri, Italy to the author's ongoing investigations today, this debut offers a comprehensive and moving portrait of an iconic American family and one woman's efforts to make peace with the past.
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.
As a preteen Black male growing up in Mount Vernon, New York, there were a series of moments, incidents and wounds that caused me to retreat inward in despair and escape into a world of imagination. For five years I protected my family secrets from authority figures, affluent Whites and middle class Blacks while attending an unforgiving gifted-track magnet school program that itself was embroiled in suburban drama. It was my imagination that shielded me from the slights of others, that enabled my survival and academic success. It took everything I had to get myself into college and out to Pittsburgh, but more was in store before I could finally begin to break from my past. "Boy @ The Window" is a coming-of-age story about the universal search for understanding on how any one of us becomes the person they are despite-or because of-the odds. It's a memoir intertwined with my own search for redemption, trust, love, success-for a life worth living. "Boy @ The Window" is about one of the most important lessons of all: what it takes to overcome inhumanity in order to become whole and human again.
