Abstract
Fresh Perspectives on Old Stories
Beer Wars
Prohibition encouraged the establishment of a nationwide network of criminal organizations that became embedded in the political, economic, and social environments of major U.S. cities. Chicago’s crime family (the Outfit) was among the most successful of these organizations. Two recent books have shed a bright light on Capone and Ness, the principal players in the turbulent history of Chicago during the Prohibition Era. They are well written and exhaustively researched, contributing new knowledge and insights into the lives of Capone and Ness as well as Chicago crime and corruption during Prohibition. The first book is a meticulously documented chronicle of the intergang struggles to gain hegemony over illicit alcohol markets. John Binder’s treatise, entitled Al Capone’s Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago during Prohibition, elucidates events without romanticism or fanfare while dispelling myths and misinformation along the way. With original newspaper accounts, photographs, data tables, indexes, and maps, Binder presents an abundance of facts about Chicago’s dozen major bootlegging gangs, which battled for alcohol-selling territory across the city, suburbs, northwest Indiana, and beyond. The war raged sporadically from 1922 to 1934 and quieted, but did not cease, with the St. Valentine’s Day massacre and an ensuing peace accord among the gangs in 1929 (Binder, 2017).
In painstaking detail, Binder observes that organized crime’s (OC) infrastructure in Chicago (most notably gambling and vice) was firmly in place long before Capone set foot in Chicago (ca. 1920). A transplant from Brooklyn, Capone arrived in a city that was ripe for saturnalia and greed. “The first Frenchman to step out of a canoe and permanently reside in Chicago…immediately violated the ordinance against selling alcohol to Native Americans in France’s colonies” (Binder, 2017, p. 19). Chicago’s name and stench arose from its origins as an onion patch. The smell of the city also stemmed from its reputation for being a haven for unabashed purveyors of illegal goods and services. Its nefarious roots were formed as early as the 1830s with prostitution and gambling. The latter became rampant in the 1880s (Binder, 2017).
Binder’s book reveals the depth and breadth of public corruption that created a conglomerate of law-breaking politicians, gamblers, and gangsters. Indeed, the primary beneficiaries of Prohibition were bootleggers, gang leaders, and corrupt government officials. The pervasiveness of political venality waxed and waned with changes in mayoral leadership and anti-vice public sentiments. Corruption reached a pinnacle in 1927 with the unholy triumvirate of Thomson (mayor), Crowe (state’s attorney), and Small (governor; Binder, 2017; Collins & Schwartz, 2018). Political pundits argue that a “combine” of greedy politicians at every level are still in control of finances, jobs, and favors.
Binder’s recitation of facts consists of a continual barrage of names, aliases, dates, times, and places, which are documented in 50 pages of footnotes. However, Beer Wars offers encyclopedic details without a consistently coherent, naturally flowing narrative structure. The main chapters (four through six) are delineated by temporal intervals, but Binder often digresses from linear chronology and topical cohesion. The book would have benefited from a substantive or thematic reorganization and a headings-based sectioning of the chapters. Nonetheless, this stylistic shortcoming is a relatively minor flaw, as the book will long stand as the definitive compendium of gang crimes in Chicago during the 1920s. No other author is ever likely to match Binder’s thorough and rigorous reportage of gangsters’ affiliations, names, aliases, criminal exploits, and premature deaths during this decade in Chicago.
Scarface and the Untouchable
The second book, Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago, by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz (Harper Collins 2018; US$29.99), covers roughly the same period and several of the same topics as Binder’s contribution to OC studies. In Beer Wars, the fights are between gangsters and gangsters (bad guys vs. bad guys); in Scarface and the Untouchable, they are between Capone’s gangsters and Bureau of Prohibition agents (bad guys vs. good guys). Collins and Schwartz transform two fabled figures into real-life, complex individuals who are antithetical to each other with respect to the law but similar in their single mindedness, fearlessness, and faithfulness to their families. However, in Capone and Ness’s lives, fidelity did not extend to marital relationships. Also based on primary source materials, Scarface and the Untouchable is masterfully written, assiduously researched, and riveting in its storytelling.
The tenor and style of these books are quite different, which is reflective of the backgrounds of the authors. Binder is an associate professor emeritus of business. His book is replete with contemporary newspaper accounts, census reports, crime statistics, indexes, tables, and facts about encroachments on bootlegging territories and their corollary shootings. Binder enumerates profits and losses in terms of dollars, land grabs, and dead bodies. In contrast, Collins and Schwartz’s book reads like a fast-paced, page-turning crime novel. The authors (a prolific novelist and academically trained historian, respectively) paint highly nuanced and multicolored portraits of the two legends of the Roaring Twenties.
Challenging Myths and Stereotypes
As with most legendary figures, Capone and Ness have been rendered two-dimensional throughout the decades in a variety of depictions. Nonetheless, stereotypes contain kernels of truth. Capone was a burly, cigar-chomping, publicity hungry executive who led a large crew of disciplined sociopaths. Binder reanalyzes old data to show that at least 60% of the Capone gang was of Italian descent (Binder, 2017). Their loyalty, shared ethnicity, and adoption of Jim Colosimo and Johnny Torrio’s (Capone’s predecessors) business model led to the gang’s ultimate triumph when the beer wars’ dust settled (Binder, 2017).
Capone was also a generous and protective friend, local hero, public benefactor, national celebrity, and astute warlord who helped marshal and guide his troops to an eventual victory in Chicago’s beer wars (Binder, 2017). “In short, [Capone] professionalized crime, placing himself at the head of a new kind of big business” (Collins & Schwartz, 2018, p. 526). Like Capone, Ness was also quite fearless. He and the Untouchables cut deeply into Capone’s profits and garnered 5,000 Prohibition violations against the Capone Gang (Binder, 2017; Collins & Schwartz, 2018). Ness was also a pedantic bureaucrat who was highly introverted and ironically succumbed to heavy alcohol use, which complicated his childhood heart disease (Collins & Schwartz, 2018).
Collins and Schwartz reveal a lot about the principal subjects of their book and their relationships with each other and the members of the corrupt political apparatus. Comparable to Binder, the authors dispel misinformation regarding the people and events of 1920s gangster lore. For example, contrary to the 1987 Untouchables movie rendition, no evidence suggests that Capone ordered the murder of Ness and his family. Ness called Capone on the phone, taunting him to glance out of his office window to view the parade of his confiscated beer trucks. They never talked or met in person. Nevertheless, Ness was in the phalanx of law enforcement officers in 1932 who escorted Capone to board the Dixie Flyer bound for the U.S. federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Rarely discussed by other authors, Ness was born, raised, and educated in Chicago and lived fairly close to Capone during the time they were on opposite sides of the Volstead Act (Collins & Schwartz, 2018). In addition, Collins and Schwartz refute in some detail the claims of Ness’s ineffectualness against Capone, noting the major inroads the Untouchables achieved against bootlegging gangs in the cities and suburbs. They also suggest that Capone’s inept criminal defense team purposely lost the case at the behest of Capone’s closest compatriots. Capone’s notoriety became a tremendous legal and financial liability for the gang, and his compari wanted him out of the way.
Binder’s book also debunks several misconceptions about bootlegging and its practitioners. For example, he points to the fact that gangs carved up the city into several territories for criminal pursuits. The characterization of the battles for barrels as the North Siders against the South Siders was a gross simplification of the beer wars from the outset to culmination. In many of the gangs, loyalties and memberships were often fluid, and drive-by killings with the renowned Thomson submachine gun were exceptional, not commonplace, contrary to what has been depicted in the movies for dramatic effect (Binder, 2017).
According to Binder, many of the 729 (mostly) young men who were casualties during the beer wars were not members of the bootlegging gangs or killed because of gang-related, economically driven conflicts (Binder, 2017). With cogent arguments and evidence, Binder also refutes claims that Capone was not the boss of his gang during the latter half of the 1920s or the orchestrator of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which Binder asserts did not signal the dissolution of the Moran Gang. Moreover, Binder notes that OC families, including Chicago’s, were major drug traffickers and sellers, which flies in the face of The Godfather’s focal point for conflict among the film’s fictitious OC families.
Conclusions
Binder’s documentation of bloodshed in the 1920s foreshadows the gang-related drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s. The mayhem had many parallels. The violence that roiled during these very different periods of the city’s history was partially the consequence of drug-law enforcement policies. Prohibition and the War on Drugs fueled both the growth of criminal organizations and the murder rate, which rose in the 1920s and 1980s because of the systemic violence associated with the alcohol and drug trade and the flooding of communities with illegal guns into the hands of young men immersed in a violent subculture. In the 1920s and beyond, criminally inclined young men in Chicago gravitated to structured social groups (gangs) for an identity, employment opportunities, and protection from rival criminals.
Mobsters are subjects of public fascination. In the case of the traditional gangster, that fascination borders on glorification. The aura and mystique of the gangster has lost little of its luster since the 1932 premier of Scarface, which was loosely based on Capone’s exploits. The modern gangster culture created a genre of clothing, music (gangsta rap), and films that has promoted violence and the conspicuous displays of wealth (cars and jewelry). Despite commercialization, unlike celebrated old-school mobsters, latter-day gang members are scorned, feared, and vilified.
In conclusion, the books featured in this review have greatly advanced knowledge about politics and crime in Chicago during one of the most tumultuous decades in the city’s history. The competition for profits from the sale of illegal alcohol changed the city in fundamental ways that persist today. The image of the city as a lawless and violent place is deeply imbedded in its international reputation, beginning with the gangs of the 1920s and perpetuated by the unending violence in Chicago’s minority communities. Binder and Collins and Schwartz will appeal to a broad interdisciplinary audience of academic readers. For example, the books could become standard supplementary texts for courses on a variety of topics including organized crime, urban history, Chicago studies, big-city politics, Prohibition, mala prohibita laws, and drugs and crime. Binder’s contribution is a source book for Prohibition mob history. Finally, these books will also be well received by the public, which by a range of measures contains an abundance of gangster aficionados.