One Summer: America, 1927

was then that the legends began.
    A reporter for Time magazine colourfully and imaginatively claimed that Capone had been ‘branded on one swart cheek’ – Time really couldn’t get enough of that word ‘swart’ – ‘by the razor memento of the Neapolitan Camorra’. In fact, Capone got his scars one evening at a Coney Island bar when, drunk, he leaned across to a girl and said, ‘Honey, you have a nice ass, and I mean that as a compliment.’ Unfortunately, the young woman was with her brother, who felt honour-bound to do something emotional, and he slashed Capone across the face with a knife, leaving him with two livid scars on his left cheek and a fainter one along the neck. Capone was always self-conscious about the scars and did all he could to disguise them, including coating his face in talcum powder.
    Capone was no doubt capable of violence, but it is perhaps worth noting that the well-remembered scene in which he beats to death two dinner guests with a baseball bat was entirely made up. It appeared in a 1975 book called The Legacy of Al Capone by a writer named George Murray. In half a century, no one else had ever mentioned it – and beating guests to death at a dinner table is not something other guests would forget to mention. Capone has also many times been credited with the line ‘You can get a lot farther with a smile and a gun than you can get with just a smile,’ but it appears he probably never said that either.
    Chicago in the 1920s was not really as violent as reputation has it. With 13.3 murders per 100,000 of population, it was indubitably more homicidal than New York with 6.1, Los Angeles with 4.7 or Boston with just 3.9, but it was less dangerous than Detroit at 16.8, or almost any city in the South. New Orleans had a murder rate of 25.9 per 100,000, while Little Rock’s was 37.9, Miami’s 40, Atlanta’s 43.4, Charlotte’s 55.5, and Memphis was miles ahead of everyone with a truly whopping rate of 69.3. The average in America today, you may be surprised and comforted to hear, is 6 per 100,000.
    One thing Chicago did have was a special attachment among its gangsters for the Thompson submachine gun, or Tommy gun as it was more affectionately known. The gun was named after General John Taliaferro Thompson, director of US arsenals, who spent much of the First World War developing it. His idea was to make a portable machine gun light enough to be carried by a single soldier. Thompson’s gun was wondrously lethal. It could fire up to a thousand rounds a minute and drill holes through armoured vehicles. In a demonstration, it cut through quarter-inch steel plate and felled a tree almost two feet thick. Unfortunately, by the time Thompson had the gun ready for production the war was over and the army didn’t want it. Police forces didn’t want it either because it was so lively that it was impossible to aim accurately. Fire from a Thompson was all but randomly distributed, which made it ideal for hoodlums – and made hoodlums very scary people once they started pulling the trigger. Illinois imposed no restrictions on the sale of Tommy guns, so they were available to the general public in hardware stores, sporting goods stores and even drugstores. The wonder is that the death tolls in Chicago weren’t higher.
    What Chicago also had in unusual abundance throughout Prohibition was beer. Most cities didn’t. Beer required corruption on an epic scale. You can’t hide a brewery, so to produce and distribute beer without attracting legal enquiries required the disbursement of a great deal of hush money, and there was hardly a uniformed city employee who didn’t share in the benefits. A steady stream of police and officials visited Capone’s headquarters at the Metropole Hotel each day to pick up their payoffs and instructions. The police force of Chicago became in effect Capone’s private army. Goodness knows what Kenesaw Mountain Landis would have made of that if he had been left in his position as a federal judge.
     
    Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A caseof spirituous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90 – and all this without taxes. By 1927, Capone’s organization – which, interestingly, had no name – had estimated receipts of $105 million. The scale of his operations unquestionably makes him one of the most successful businessmen in American history.
    Many people, it