Capone: The Man and the Era

They just don't make crooks like they used to. The legendary figures of the Roaring Twenties and Depressing Thirties continue to fascinate us today. They tend to fit into two groups: the lone wolf robbers such as Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde, or the gangsters. Among the gangsters, none were more famous than Al Capone. Of course, legend and reality tend to often conflict with each other, and Laurence Bergreen's highly readable biography Capone separates the fact from the fiction.Capone was the son of Italian immigrants who lived an impoverished existence in Brooklyn. There were not a lot of options for a youngster like Capone, who would soon get involved with minor league criminality. It would take an eventual move to Chicago (following his mentor, Johnny Torrio) before Capone would became a major crime figure, one who'd pretty much control the city for several years. The grand irony for Capone was that he'd not be brought down because of his bootlegging or murders, but the more mundane crime of income tax evasion (and even that may have not done him in if he'd had better lawyers).Bergreen portrays Capone as a complex individual, neither fully bad or good, but a hero to some and a villain to others. There were a lot of factors that made Capone the way he was, including a virulent anti-Italian feeling that vilified anyone with that descent, the vast hypocrisies of Prohibition and a police and press force that was inherently corrupt. More than anything, however, was the syphilis (exacerbated by a cocaine addiction) that would lead to mood swings that at first helped give him the aggressiveness he needed to succeed but would soon enough destroy him. Capone would be in his twenties when he reigned supreme. By his early thirties, he'd be in prison and he'd be dead before he was fifty (a relatively long life for a man with his career, but almost all the last decade-and-a-half would be hellish for him).The key events that Capone is most noted for are detailed in this book, including the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and Capone's infamous baseball bat assault. Bergreen, however, goes beyond just Capone to detail the lives of the folks around him, from his family to his associates (such as the infamous Frank Nitti) to his pursuers (most notably Eliot Ness, who was better at publicity stunts than actually stopping Capone). Bergreen also describes the world Capone occupied, particularly the Chicago that would be the center of his activities.Capone the book is a pretty comprehensive biography and tops 600 pages plus notes and an index. From my previous experience with Bergreen (with a book about Magellan), I knew he was a good writer and Capone shows the first book wasn't a fluke. If you want to know the truth behind the legend (and it's nothing like The Untouchables), Capone is an entertaining and illuminating read.

Capone: the Man and the Era, by Lawrence Bergreen, is a lengthy and extensively researched biography of Chicago gangster Al Capone, full of interesting details. Alas, all of this work has essentially been negated by the author's own credulousness and his repeated construction of edifices of the sheerest flights of fancy based on the flimsiest--or complete non-existence--of evidence. As a result, the reader is left questioning the accuracy of almost everything in the book--especially as it is not well sourced.Let me give you some of the most egregious examples.First, based solely on a single piece of circumstantial evidence, Bergreen decides that Al Capone was a long-term cocaine addict. The evidence? A medical examination upon his entrance into prison revealed a perforated septum, which sometimes occurs with cocaine abusers. Based solely and completely on this one fact, Bergreen not only concludes that Capone must have been a heavy user of cocaine, but he repeatedly refers throughout the book to Capone's cocaine use, even though he does not have a single eyewitness account (out of the tens of thousands of people who wrote or talked about Capone) of Capone ever, even once, taking cocaine. Now, when you realize that a number of conditions can create a perforated septum, including even "aggressive nose picking," the idea that it had to have been cocaine is simply ridiculous. By the way, apparently syphilis--which Capone infamously had--can also sometimes cause a perforated septum.It would have been entirely justified for Bergreen to have speculated on the possibility that perhaps Capone had been a cocaine user, and left it at that. Instead, based on very poor evidence, he repeatedly states it as absolute fact.Second, and worst of all, Bergreen comes to the conclusion that Al Capone was merely a pawn, and that the real racketeering boss in Chicago was a minor Chicago Heights mobster, Frank LaPorte. According to Bergreen, Capone was just the public face, and that it was LaPorte who gave the orders. Upon what evidence does Capone base this outrageous promotion of LaPorte (generally considered one of Capone's henchmen, though in later years, after Capone was kaput, he rose to more prominence)? ABSOLUTELY NONE. It is sheer invention, which Bergreen repeats as fact. I have read thousands of biographies and works of history, and this utter fabrication strikes me as one of the most egregious self-deluding fantasies I have ever come across. Does anybody think that if Al Capone had been taking orders from Frankie LaPorte that it could have somehow remained secret? Bergreen has no evidence on which to back up this theory, which is frankly beyond bizarre.Third, Bergreen engages in some pretty outrageous medical determinism. It is well known that Capone developed neurosyphilis, which resulted in a significant degradation of his mental faculties from the late 1930s onward. Unfortunately, knowing some of the symptoms of neurosyphilis, Bergreen cannot restrain himself from attributing all sorts of actions and reactions on Capone's part in earlier years to the debilitating effects of this disease. He doesn't speculate that the syphilis may have played a role; time and again, he simply blatantly asserts it. This is quite unfortunate, given that the first documentable symptoms exhibited by Capone occurred only after his arrival at Alcatraz. In other words, Bergreen literally has no way of knowing at all, yet this does not even slow him down a bit.The book is full of other, more minor examples of this same thing. Bergreen repeatedly exudes a credulousness--especially with interview subjects--that suggests no critical faculties were engaged at all. He seemingly makes no effort to confirm or deny the accounts that people tell him or that he reads (with the exception of Elliot Ness, whose overblown accounts were already very well known). As a result, he whitewashes Capone's "lost" brother, who became a crooked lawman in Nebraska, accepting a relative's account of the man as a sort of latter day hero, while other biographers have noted his bad reputation and criminality. With an infamous figure like Capone, any biographer must be doubly skeptical at accepting the accounts of people who claim to have known or interacted with him, but Bergreen left his incredulity at the door.This is all unfortunate, for the book is well-written and does represent a lot of research. Alas, it simply cannot be relied upon. For people interested in a more reliable account of the life of Al Capone, I recommend instead Robert J. Schoenberg's "Mr. Capone."

I thought it was an excellent book that detailed both his professional life as well as his personal life. It starts with his family immigrating from Italy and how as a child nobody saw any indication of what was to come. I found it rather interesting how his brother went on to become a prohibition agent responsible for catching guys like Al. Capone was rather good with numbers and could have had a career as a bookkeeper, which he actually did for a short while. I caught a few typos but that is to be expected in a book that's 600+ pages long. The part I found the most interesting was towards the end when he was convicted and it detailed his time in Alcatraz where he was treated the same as all the other inmates, as opposed to his previous stints in jail where he was given preferential treatment. In the end it wasn't the gangster life that did him in, as he always thought it would, of all things it was an STD.

The most complete, detailed work available on the life and times of the original Public Enemy Number One, the infamous Al Capone. Lawrence Bergreen has written the definitive biography of this complex, violent, yet fascinating man and the era in which he lived. It's packed with detail, including many never-before-revealed details of the man, his family, the beginnings of organized crime in America, and the aftermath as Capone, his mind gone, his body ravaged by syphilis, died quietly in a lone bed in his Florida home....if one wishes to learn more about the Roaring Twenties and its principal characters, this is the book to own and read. Highly recommended.

Das Buch ist absolut weiter zu empfehlen! Es schildert detailliert den Aufstieg eines armen Einwanderersohnes zum wohl bekanntesten Gangster aller Zeiten. Sehr detailliert wie ein Geschichtsbuch sein soll und dennoch spannend wie ein Krimi

Everything was perfect, can't wait to order from this outlet again!

Super