Al Capone
“By 1923, the Chicago Crime Commission listed Alphonse Capone, also known as Scarface Capone and Al Brown, at the top of a list of twenty-eight so-called public enemies,” - Karen Blumenthal, Bootleg, 2011
|
"I got nothing against the honest cop on the beat. You just have them transferred someplace where they can’t do you any harm." - Al Capone in response to officer bribery, Money Laundering: A Guide to Criminal Investigators, 1999.
"This brewery, I soon saw, was capable of turning out one hundred barrels of beer daily, a production quota which we were to discover later was the general rule in the Capone breweries" - Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley, The Untouchables, 1957
Despite Capone's occupation, he was viewed as a modern day Robin Hood. “[H]e made daily trips to City Hall, opened soup kitchens to feed the poor [during the Great Depression], and even lobbied for milk bottle dating to ensure the safety of the city's children” (Alcatraz History).
|
Eliot Ness
2011, A&E's Biography
"If Eliot Ness and his small band could cripple Capone financially, Capone would lose his powerful web of police and political protection and become vulnerable to the law. Ness eagerly went to work choosing his men. He searched the personnel records of the Justice Department for men with impressive arrest records and no apparent Achilles' heels. From a list of fifty possibilities, he narrowed the field to fifteen men and finally settled on nine... By mid-October of 1929, the special unit was ready to begin its war on Capone's bootlegging empire." - Steven Nickel, Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer, 1989
|
"I learned a lot from him," [Agent George Mulvanity] said. He called Ness "a real eagle eye" — capable of spotting booze-laden cars and trucks on the road that, to the untrained eye and even to Mulvanity's, appeared to be completely ordinary. Another member of his team... said Ness "was a very great person. He really had wing — that is, inspiration and vision." - Douglas Perry, Chicago Tribune, 2014
|
Raiding Speakeasies
|
"For two and a half years, the unit harassed the Capone organization and collected evidence for prosecution. Relying on information from anonymous tips, paid informants, wiretaps, and other surveillance, the agents raided and destroyed over two dozen breweries and distilleries, including one whose capacity Ness estimated at 20,000 gallons of alcohol per day." - Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2004
|