Jonathan Eig is an author, most recently of Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster (and yes, there's an app for that). The booksite has quite a few review excerpts, mostly with links. Here's from the NYTimes:
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!
Um?
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.
Ah, right. Next?
Chicago, as any proud city official will tell you, is known for many things: its stunning architecture, its extensive green spaces, its hapless yet beloved sports teams. It likes to sell itself as America’s 21st-century city, defined not by its often sordid past, but by its relatively glamorous present and future.
Right. Try telling that to the child in a remote village in West Africa, who, when he spotted a foreigner clambering out of a mud-splattered four-wheel drive vehicle, approached shyly and asked "Where are you from?"
"Chicago," was the reply, to instantaneous effect. Smiling broadly, the child folded his fingers into guns and took aim. "Rat-a-tat-tat!"
Alphonse Capone has been gone for 60 years, but his legacy — and his inextricable link to Chicago — refuses to die. Mention Chicago almost anywhere in the world, and you might hear the occasional "Michael Jordan!" or, more recently, "Barack Obama!" But you are far more likely to find yourself staring down the barrel of a loaded-finger machine-gun.
And that drives Chicago’s civic leadership crazy, said Jonathan Eig...
Really? I guess the Chicago News Coop would know. I would've placed the blame elsewhere, but hey. This sounds more like it:
Al Capone, when he’s thought of at all in Chicago these days, is reduced to caricature.
He’s the mobster every tourist has heard of but knows little about, as they gawk out the windows of a gangster bus tour of the city. He’s Robert De Niro, hair thinned back, belly bulging out, hammering the head of an underling with a Louisville slugger in "The Untouchables." He’s the pathetic punch line of a Geraldo Rivera television special — where the mobster’s vaunted vault turns out to be full of nothing but junk...
There are reviews out there which avoided the ack-ack-ack-movie!-ack-ack-crook city! treatment, and they're all (even the cliche-ridden) pretty positive. Here's Library Journal:
Former reporter Eig has brought new life to the story of Al "Scarface" Capone, reporting on the life, crimes, and fall of America's most notorious gangster. Eig accessed newly discovered material to produce this fresh take on Capone, including the papers and never-released IRS files of Chicago's U.S. attorney, George E.Q. Johnson. He also discovered a letter that contains a plausible solution to the never-solved Valentine's Day massacre. (William "Three-Fingered Jack" White may have led the massacre to avenge the gangster killing of his cousin, a cop's son.) Wrapped in this biography is an engrossing account of Prohibition, Chicago, and legal history (Johnson's innovation of charging suspected criminals of lesser crimes to get a conviction is still in use today). Eig is a fascinating storyteller who throws in the occasional bon mot ("It was cold and gray, as if February had knocked off May and taken its place") that readers will enjoy. While the book would have benefited from a "cast of characters" to help readers keep track of the many players, the accompanying web site (getcapone.com) is a treasure-trove of material, including links to FBI and IRS files.
Should I have spoilered that one sentence? There's a bit more detail in this NPR interview, in which Eig manages to talk about Capone's celebrity ego without falling into that "most famousest Chicagoan ever" ego trap:
"We have this image now of him as this overlord who was in control of every bar, every casino, every speakeasy and brothel in Chicago." But Capone had a lighter business touch, and Eig says that made a difference. "He didn't try to micromanage. He let the bar owners [and] the gambling house operators do their thing, and collected his portion. And his big job was to make sure everybody stayed happy." He paid off the courts and the cops, Eig says, to keep his crew out of jail.
A People Person
How did Capone rise to such heights? Eig doesn't credit the gangster's smarts — Capone "was of average intelligence," with an IQ of 95. "But he had a real gift for organization," Eig says, "and he was a terrific people person, very gregarious, very well liked. This is not the popular image we have of him, but in fact he was a lot of fun to be around. I think that was really more the key to his success than his intellect....
... "The media certainly made him famous — made him infamous," Eig says. Capone loved giving interviews, and the reporters loved him right back. They weren't alone. Even in his lifetime, Eig says, movies were made that were clearly based on the gangster's life, and Capone — the charming gangster — was the star of the show. "So very quickly, he could see that the public was becoming obsessed with him."
But as he was elevated to an icon, Eig says, some of the nuance of Capone's character disappeared from our understanding of him.
"I think that Capone was a complex man. I think that he was a two-bit thug who almost accidentally found himself in this position of power and extraordinary power and wealth," Eig says...
And on the topic of the Celebrity thing, that NPR interview has this, too:
The hunt for Capone also made a star out of the lawman Eliot Ness, the Chicago-based federal agent whose team of "Untouchables" went after Capone's illegal breweries. But according to Eig, Ness gets too much credit for Capone's downfall, and a better nickname for his crew would have been "The Inactives."
"He broke up a few stills and raided a few brothels," but never contributed any real evidence to the case, Eig says. "Ness was really more of a nuisance to Capone than a serious threat."
In Get Capone, the real hero of the investigation is U.S. Attorney George E.Q. Johnson, who was tasked by President Herbert Hoover with bringing Capone to justice.
Johnson may have lost out on the popular celebration for Capone's downfall because his influence brought the criminal to famously prosaic justice: Instead of focusing on Capone's most dramatic crimes, like murder and bootlegging, Johnson went after him on tax evasion.
I found a couple different excerpts out there, if you're interested. Sounds very much like a beach/airplane/whaddoIgetDad book to me. Also, probably an interesting interview.
|