Free Eliot Ness by Douglas Perry

no dummy, he quickly pivoted to where the real action was.
    If Capone had simply wanted to make a nice, crooked living, he could have stuck with hookers, gambling, and shakedown rackets. These were tried-and-true businesses, mature businesses. But bootlegging, particularly in the big cities, was for men of ambition. Bootleggers wanted more than a big wad of cash at the end of each day. They wanted status, too. “We’re big business without high hats,” said Dean O’Banion, a flower-shop-owning gangster who controlled the Northside liquor trade—until he took a spray of bullets in 1924. Thugs finally could offer a service that respectable men wanted, and they were becoming wealthy beyond all conception byoffering it. (Another local bootlegger, Terry Druggan, liked to show off his solid silver toilet seat.)
    More than any of them, Capone became an object of fascination.The social worker Jane Addams despaired over how boys were “tremendously aroused” at the very sight of Capone and his cohorts. When his bulletproof black sedan rumbled through a neighborhood—any neighborhood—kids would crane their necks “as eagerly as for a circus parade,” wrote the journalist Fred Pasley. “There goes Al,” they’d say, and whistle in admiration. How could they react any other way? The man had style. The man had money and power. It wasn’t as if kids—or anyone else—could look to the city’s hard-hearted industrialists for inspiration. The economy was booming, but for average Chicagoans, the boom was the sound of an anvil coming down on their heads. “Morally,” the writer Nelson Algren said of bootleggers, “they are sounder than the ‘good’ people who run Chicago by complicity.” To young toughs around the city, the 1925 changing of the guard at the city’s biggest gang—from the forty-three-year-old Torrio, heading off into semi-retirement, to the twenty-six-year-old Capone—represented something special, proof that merit could be rewarded, even in America. Twelve-year-old Louis Terkel, a student at John McLaren Elementary School on the West Side (he would later become known as “Studs”), listened raptly when two older classmates schemed for membership in the Forty-twos—“junior members of the Syndicate . . . What the Toldeo Mud Hens are to the New York Giants.”
    They dream of the Forty Two’s as North Shore matrons dream of the Social Register. An older brother of one and a young uncle of the other, Forty Two alumni, are in the employ of Al Capone, one of our city’s most highly regarded citizens. The uncle, a few years later, was seen floating down the drainage canal. And no water wings. It was a strange place for him to have gone swimming. The waters were polluted even then.
    Such swimming jaunts had become rather commonplace. Capone—the Big Fella or Number One to his men, Scarface Al to the press—sought to lock down his new standing and expand his domain the only way he knew how: through terror. In 1926, seventy-six hoodlums were killed in Chicago as rival gangs fought it out over turf and hurt feelings. The following year, fifty-four more mobsters fell. Many of these killings happened in public, in drive-by machine-gun attacks. That meant civilians were falling, too—including an assistant state’s attorney, William McSwiggin. Anyone walking in the Loop began to flinch, or outright panic, whenever they heard an automobile sliding around a corner at a decent clip. Many a man dived for cover only to have a taxicab scream past. The tension in the popular image of the bootlegger—glamorous modern-day prince, ugly cold-blooded killer—divided Chicagoans into two distinct classes: the romantic and the realistic, the stupid and the street-smart.One night at the Paramount Club downtown, the actress and vaudevillian Mildred Harris, Charlie Chaplin’s ex, introduced a handsome young patron to fellow performer Sally Rand. “I want you to meet a sweet and lovely man,” Harris purred. Rand, a