Product Description

In this brilliant history of Prohibition and its most notorious gangster, acclaimed biographer Laurence Bergreen takes us to the gritty streets of Chicago where Al Capone forged his sinister empire. Bergreen shows the seedy and glamorous sides of the age, the rise of Prohibition, the illicit liquor trade, the battlefield that was Chicago. Delving beyond the Capone mythology. Bergreen finds a paradox: a coldblooded killer, thief, pimp, and racketeer who was also a devoted son and father; a self-styled Robin Hood who rose to the top of organized crime. Capone is a masterful portrait of an extraordinary time and of the one man who reigned supreme over it all, Al Capone.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #437235 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-05
• Released on: 1996-08-05
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .2 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Biography of the legendary prohibition-era gangster.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In the wake of Robert J. Schoenberg's Mr. Capone (LJ 8/92), called "the most detailed biography of Capone published to date" by LJ's reviewer, comes an even more detailed account based on extensive research and interviews. Bergreen, who has written biographies of James Agee and Irving Berlin, has "abandoned conventional assumptions of...right and wrong" in his sympathetic portrayal of the one-time Public Enemy Number One. He blames the hypocrisies of Prohibition and anti-Italian bias for creating Capone's undeserved reputation, and he is especially critical of Capone nemesis Eliot Ness. Bergreen labels the tax evasion trial that sent Capone to prison a "legalistic lynching" and tends to excuse Capone's more unsavory actions as the results of "latent neurosyphilis." However controversial, this book offers much of interest, including new information about Capone and his family. Larger crime collections will want both books.
Gregor A. Preston, Univ. of California Lib., Davis
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
People still respond to the mention of Chicago by saying, "Al Capone. Rat-a-tat-tat." But public enemy number one did not personally use the Thompson submachine gun to protect his bootlegging empire, says Bergreen, although his associates most certainly did. In fact, Bergreen sets out to dispel the hoodlum-killer aspect of Capone's career, instead focusing on the racketeer's insistence on being a businessman. For the most part, despite the Saint Valentine's Day massacre and numerous other gang killings, he succeeds. Bergreen starts out slowly, tending to blame much of Capone's later actions on a poor childhood, and concentrating on the future gangster's ostracism by fellow immigrant Irish and even Sicilians (Capone's family was Neapolitan). A side plot about a long-lost brother's becoming a Great Plains lawman is intriguing but doesn't really go anywhere, and another lawman, "untouchable" Eliot Ness, self-proclaimed Capone scourge, fares poorly; Ness is annoying to the Capone empire, but not much else. Most revealing of all are the gangster's declining years in Alcatraz, where Capone tried to teach himself to play the banjo! Bergreen's view of Capone the man is not particularly surprising otherwise, but the 1920s view of Prohibition-era Chicago is tremendously entertaining. Joe Collins