“Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago”, by Max Allan Collins & A. Brad Schwartz

 

736 pages, William Morrow, ISBN-13: 978-0062441942

I have been told that there are two kinds of biographies: thumbnails and portraits. The thumbnails are pithy and to the point – think Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey – and rarely dig too deeply into the subject at hand; the portraits, meanwhile, delve deeper than the Mponeng gold mine – think The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro (reviewed on February 18^th, 2013) – and uncover everything imaginable about the subject and bring it all to light.

I bring this up in relation to Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago by Max Allan Collins & A. Brad Schwartz because we get both: a thumbnail biography of Eliot Ness, the agent with the Bureau of Prohibition tasked with enforcing the Volstead Act, and a portrait biography of Alphonse Gabriel “Scarface” Capone, the boss of the Chicago Outfit and Ness’ Enemy Number One. Perhaps it is because there is more information on Capone than on Ness, or that as a criminal Capone’s actions have been documented to such a degree that there is just more information to plum from…ah, hell, we both know it’s because the crook is always more interesting than the hero, which is why I’d say that Capone probably receives maybe 75% of the author’s attention because, ultimately, he is a more interesting character than Ness. Nice guys really do finish last, y’know.

But there is more to it than that, for Capone went out of his way to portray himself as a Robin Hood-type gangster, a kind of super-successful hustler trying to make a buck during difficult times while undermining an unpopular law. Ness, meanwhile, by necessity worked behind the scenes and under the radar to gather information to convict Scarface, keeping out of the public eye as much as possible. Not until Capone was indicted did people even learn of the identity of the investigators who a newspaper reporter dubbed “The Untouchables”. In strictly chronological fashion, Collins and Schwartz detail the Ness/Capone feud as they advance inevitably, so it would seem, towards the showdown in a federal courtroom in Chicago where the gangland overlord – who was responsible for murders, prostitution, racketeering and any other exploitation of other people’s vices – would infamously be put away for…tax evasion.

Collins and Schwartz make the interesting point early on that there were a number of similarities between Scarface and the Untouchable: both were first-generation Americans, the sons of immigrant fathers who were bakers in their respective countries of birth; Capone’s father became a barber while Ness’ remained a baker, both becoming successful businessmen; Capone and Ness sought to modernize their respective professions, with Capone adapting the methods of the corporate world to organized crime and Ness bringing modern technology and scientific techniques to police work; both men were hard-working and successful at young ages, Capone becoming Capo dei capi of a multi-million-dollar crime organization at only 26 while Ness took charge of a taskforce that was formed to bring Capone to justice at 27. History truly does make some strange bedfellows.

The saga of the battle between Ness and Capone has been well-documented in books, movies and television (most of which are caca; indeed, the authors open their book by informing us that much of what we think we know about this particular War on Crime is, in fact, wrong). Collins and Schwartz’s account, at more than 700 pages, is, I think, the definitive work on this battle, one without unnecessary drama or meaningless diversions. They make clear that the effort of law enforcement to bring Capone to justice was more than simply proving that he failed to pay his income taxes; it was a vigorous effort to bring an evil criminal to justice and, in the end, it succeeded brilliantly in that goal.