One Summer: America, 1927

bonfire would be lit by the Cook County executioner.
    Remarkably, all this got a lot of support. William Randolph Hearst’s Herald and Examiner backed Thompson’s campaign, and hoped that other cities would clear their library shelves, too. The Ku Klux Klan likewise saluted the clear-out and suggested that the citynext turn its attention to any books that were favourably inclined towards Jews or Catholics. The head of the Municipal Reference Library announced that he had independently destroyed all books and pamphlets in his care that struck him as dubious. ‘I now have an America First library,’ he said proudly.
     
    In such a world as this, Al Capone looked sane and practically respectable. He liked to insist that he was really just a businessman. ‘I make my money by supplying a public demand,’ he said at a press conference in 1927. (And it is notable that Al Capone held press conferences.) ‘Ninety per cent of the people of Cook County drink and gamble, and my offence has been to furnish them with those amusements. Whatever else they may say, my booze has been good and my games have been on the square.’ In 1927, he headed an organization that turned over $100 million a year. He may have approached matters from a wayward angle, but Al Capone was one of America’s great success stories.
    He was born Alphonse Capone in January 1899 in Brooklyn. His father was a conscientious citizen and never, as far as is known, broke the law. He was a barber and eventually owned his own shop – a proud achievement for a poor immigrant. He never learned English.
    Al was the Capones’ fourth son, and the first one born in America. His eldest brother, Vincenzo, ran away to the west in 1908 at the age of sixteen. The Capones got one letter from him the following year, from Kansas, then heard nothing more from him ever again. In fact, Vincenzo had become a Prohibition agent known as Richard ‘Two Gun’ Hart. He had named himself after the cowboy star William S. Hart, and dressed like him, too, in outsized Stetson, with a tin star on his breast and a pair of loaded holsters around his waist. In the summer of 1927, extraordinarily enough, he was in South Dakota and working as a personal bodyguard to President Coolidge.
    Young Al, needless to say, followed a rather different careerpath. Expelled from school for striking a teacher (she hit him first, he always carefully explained), he became a protégé of a Brooklyn racketeer named Johnny Torrio. A mild, delicate person, Torrio was the man who put the organized into organized crime. He was adept at gaining control of particular trades or businesses. All the ice deliverymen in a borough, say, would pay a commission to Torrio and in return would be granted a monopoly in a particular district, allowing them to raise their prices. Anyone who challenged their monopoly was likely to find his office dynamited, his legs broken, his building condemned by the city, or any of a number of other undesirable outcomes. Torrio at his peak controlled two hundred separate associations, from the Soda Dispensers and Table Girl Brotherhood to the Bread, Cracker, Yeast and Pie Wagon Drivers’ Union. Even shoeshine boys paid him $15 up front and $2 a month thereafter.
    In 1920, for reasons that have never been convincingly explained, Torrio decided to leave Brooklyn and start all over again in Chicago. As a first move, he knocked off a mobster there named Big Jim Colosimo (who in some accounts is described as Torrio’s uncle and in others simply as an associate) and took over his operations. Things went well for some time, but then territorial tensions arose. On a cold afternoon in January 1925 Torrio was helping his wife carry bags of shopping from their car into their house when two men from a rival gang approached and shot him five times at close range. Torrio survived, but decided he had had enough. He turned all the Chicago operations over to Al Capone. And so began America’s most famous era in lawlessness.
    The two most striking features of Capone’s reign were how youthful he was and how short it was. Capone was just twenty-six – Lindbergh’s age at the time of his Paris flight – when he took over from Torrio, and his career as a top mobster really only lasted from the spring of 1925 to the end of 1927. As late as early 1926, newspapers in Chicago were giving Capone’s name as Caponi or Caproni. A Chicago Tribune reporter in the summer of1926 dubbed him ‘Scarface’, and it