Scarface And The Untouchable

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.

"The thrilling history of the torso murderer. The tale of the ‘Untouchable’ who got Al Capone but failed to solve his goriest case." —Dan Jones, The Sunday Times In the spirit of Devil in the White City comes a true detective tale of the highest standard: the haunting story of Eliot Ness's forgotten final case–his years-long hunt for "The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," a serial killer who terrorized Cleveland through the Great Depression. “After helping to put Al Capone behind bars, lawman Eliot Ness came to Cleveland, where he did battle with a vicious killer. ... Even Ness was stumped trying to apprehend the ‘torso murderer’ responsible for a series of ghoulish killings. ... The authors have done Ness justice." —Wall Street Journal In 1934, the nation’s most legendary crime-fighter–fresh from taking on the greatest gangster in American history–arrived in Cleveland, a corrupt and dangerous town about to host a world's fair. It was to be his coronation, as well as the city's. Instead, terror descended, as headless bodies started turning up. The young detective, already battling the mob and crooked cops, found his drive to transform American policing subverted by a menace largely unknown to law enforcement: a serial murderer. Eliot Ness's greatest case had begun. Now, Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz–the acclaimed writing team behind Scarface and the Untouchable–uncover this lost crime epic, delivering a gripping and unforgettable nonfiction account based on decades of groundbreaking research. Ness had risen to fame in 1931 for leading the “Untouchables,” which helped put Chicago’s Al Capone behind bars. As Cleveland's public safety director, in charge of the police and fire departments, Ness offered a radical new vision for better law enforcement. Crime-ridden and devastated by the Depression, Cleveland was preparing for a star-turn itself: in 1936, it would host the "Great Lakes Exposition," which would be visited by seven million people. Late in the summer of 1934, however, pieces of a woman’s body began washing up on the Lake Erie shore–first her ribs, then part of her backbone, then the lower half of her torso. The body count soon grew to five, then ten, then more, all dismembered in gruesome ways. As Ness zeroed in on a suspect–a doctor tied to a prominent political family–powerful forces thwarted his quest for justice. In this battle between a flawed hero and a twisted monster–by turns horror story, political drama, and detective thriller–Collins and Schwartz find an American tragedy, classic in structure, epic in scope.

On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio listeners across the United States heard a startling report of a meteor strike in the New Jersey countryside. With sirens blaring in the background, announcers in the field described mysterious creatures, terrifying war machines, and thick clouds of poison gas moving toward New York City. As the invading force approached Manhattan, some listeners sat transfixed, while others ran to alert neighbors or to call the police. Some even fled their homes. But the hair-raising broadcast was not a real news bulletin-it was Orson Welles's adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic The War of the Worlds. In Broadcast Hysteria, A. Brad Schwartz boldly retells the story of Welles's famed radio play and its impact. Did it really spawn a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times reported? Schwartz is the first to examine the hundreds of letters sent to Orson Welles himself in the days after the broadcast, and his findings challenge the conventional wisdom. Few listeners believed an actual attack was under way. But even so, Schwartz shows that Welles's broadcast became a major scandal, prompting a different kind of mass panic as Americans debated the bewitching power of the radio and the country's vulnerability in a time of crisis. When the debate was over, American broadcasting had changed for good, but not for the better. As Schwartz tells this story, we observe how an atmosphere of natural disaster and impending war permitted broadcasters to create shared live national experiences for the first time. We follow Orson Welles's rise to fame and watch his manic energy and artistic genius at work in the play's hurried yet innovative production. And we trace the present-day popularity of "fake news" back to its source in Welles's show and its many imitators. Schwartz's original research, gifted storytelling, and thoughtful analysis make Broadcast Hysteria a groundbreaking new look at a crucial but little-understood episode in American history.

The story of Eliot Ness, the legendary lawman who led the Untouchables, took on Al Capone, and saved a city’s soul As leader of an unprecedented crime-busting squad, twenty-eight-year-old Eliot Ness won fame for taking on notorious mobster Al Capone. But the Untouchables’ daring raids were only the beginning of Ness’s unlikely story. This new biography grapples with the charismatic lawman’s complicated, largely forgotten legacy. Perry chronicles Ness’s days in Chicago as well as his spectacular second act in Cleveland, where he achieved his greatest success: purging the profoundly corrupt city and forging new practices that changed police work across the country. He also faced one of his greatest challenges: a mysterious serial killer known as the Torso Murderer. Capturing the first complete portrait of the real Eliot Ness, Perry brings to life an unorthodox man who believed in the integrity of law and the power of American justice.

The first biography of Capone to focus on his youth in Brooklyn and theevents that shaped him into one of history’s most notorious criminals.

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.

The wild, true story of the Mutiny, the hotel and club that embodied the decadence of Miami’s cocaine cowboys heyday—and an inspiration for the blockbuster film, Scarface... In the seventies, coke hit Miami with the full force of a hurricane, and no place attracted dealers and dopers like Coconut Grove’s Mutiny at Sailboat Bay. Hollywood royalty, rock stars, and models flocked to the hotel’s club to order bottle after bottle of Dom and to snort lines alongside narcos, hit men, and gunrunners, all while marathon orgies burned upstairs in elaborate fantasy suites. Amid the boatloads of powder and cash reigned the new kings of Miami: three waves of Cuban immigrants vying to dominate the trafficking of one of the most lucrative commodities ever known to man. But as the kilos—and bodies—began to pile up, the Mutiny became target number one for law enforcement. Based on exclusive interviews and never-before-seen documents, Hotel Scarface is a portrait of a city high on excess and greed, an extraordinary work of investigative journalism offering an unprecedented view of the rise and fall of cocaine—and the Mutiny—in Miami.