In my gig as a tour director for student groups, I take a lot of other peoples’ boat tours, bus tours, and walking tours. One thing I’m always curious to see is how they’ll tell the story of Al Capone throwing parties in the dome of the Jeweler’s Building at Wabash and Wacker. According to…
Tag: al capone
Detective John W. Norton: From H.H. Holmes to Al Capone
Back when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in his second term as president, an old pickpocket named George Summers spoke to the Tribune about the old days. “You know what’s the matter with the cannon (pocket picking) racket today?” he asked. “Stickups! These young punks ain’t willing to go through a long apprenticeship anymore, like we…
Capone’s Underpants
All over Chicago, people will point to fur dealers, suit shops, and any number of places, saying that Al Capone was once a regular customer. Sometimes it seems that there’s hardly a third or fourth generation Chicagoan around who doesn’t have a story about their grandfather selling Al Capone his suits. At his October 1931…
An Al Capone Mystery Quote
“They call Al Capone a bootlegger. Yes, it’s bootlegging while it’s on the trucks, but when your host at the club, in the locker room, or on the Gold Coast hands it to you on a silver tray, it’s hospitality.”The above quote shows up in several Al Capone bios, and was paraphrased in the film…
Al Capone Meets the Cops
Ninety years ago this month, in late August of 1922, Al Capone was involved in the first dust-up big enough to get his name into the Chicago paper. They referred to him as Alfred Caponi (they’d keep calling him “Caponi” for years) in the brief item describing an altercation in which he comes off as…
Al Capone: Songwriter
A song by Al Capone has been recorded; the manuscript is up for sale. Apparently he wrote a lot of music while in Alcatraz, where he served several years for tax evasion (and being a colossal jerk, of course). The whole story is right here. It’s a bit heavy on the “Capone was really a…
The Death of Machine Gun Jack McGurn (and an era)
The imprisonment of Al Capone and the end of prohibition pretty much spelled the end for the gangster era in Chicago (at least for the time being), but there were still scores to be settled. Capone’s favorite hit mad, Machine Gun McGurn, fell onto hard times and began to receive anonymous valentines in the mail,…
The Death of Hymie Weiss: Al Capone’s revenge
With Torrio out of the way, the trio of Weiss, Drucci and Moran made Capone their target and launched one attack after another on him. Capone was repeatedly lucky to escape with his life. Naturally, he fought back. Weiss, somewhat remarkably, lived for nearly two years after the gang war started before being shot right…