Scarface and the Untouchable Al Capone Eliot Ness and the Battle for Chicago Review

A deep and detailed dive into a staple of American pop mythology.

It's an archetypal showdown: the virtuous outsider facing down a dark antagonist. The Earp boys throw down against the Clantons. Chief Brody goes eye-to-eye with Jaws. Woodward and Bernstein stand to the Nixon agglomeration.

This same fateful aureola has fastened to Eliot Ness' much-celebrated clash with Al Capone. Thanks to the incessant output of their journalist contemporaries — plus the flick and Goggle box aggrandizements of both men — Capone has become the embodiment of gangland evil, and Ness has emerged as Scarface'south primary challenger: stalwart, righteous, and incorruptible.

They're a dream team of antagonists in the popular imagination, going mano a mano for the hereafter of America's Second Urban center. This is surely fertile ground for a dual biography.

Authors Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz enthusiastically tackle this opportunity in Scarface and the Untouchable, and literally make the most of information technology, turning out a massive tome bristling with footnotes and weighty as a pair of cement shoes. Fans of bibliographic notes and citations will detect 150 pages of them here, including the index.

For the general reader, septuagenarian author Collins is certainly the more than familiar of the two collaborators. He'south produced several dozen conventional besides as graphic novels, screenplays, and flick novelizations. By reason of output alone, you could call him the Joyce Carol Oates of crime-related fiction in all its forms: shamus sagas, righteous-hitman adventures, whodunits, even comic strips. (Collins took over the Dick Tracy strip from original author Chester Gould, who, it's said, had modeled his crime-fighting hero on Eliot Ness.)

In this book, Collins has teamed with historian A. Brad Schwartz, apparently as indefatigable a researcher in assembling the facts of this saga as Ness' stalwart band was in digging out the incriminating omissions in Big Al'southward elusive account books.

Scarface and the Untouchable is bulky because it is thorough and detailed — almost devotionally so. It'due south certain to get a valuable resources for historians of Prohibition-era America, amateur and professional akin. At the aforementioned time, it's an undertaking by enthusiasts for enthusiasts and not an easy read, owing largely to its sheer density of reportage — oft week-past-calendar week, sometimes twenty-four hours-to-solar day — every bit the interlocking halves of its saga take shape.

Make no fault, Collins and Schwartz certainly produce vivid stretches of narrative, notably as they chronicle the lawless milieu of Prohibition-era Chicago and the blasé corruptibility of civic authorization as the nation slides into the Depression.

They reveal, in compelling detail, how Ness championed the merits of scientific criminology, shepherding the introduction, for instance, of ballistic analysis in cases involving firearms. And this reader was absorbed by the many scenes where the Ness team, axes in paw, smashes thousands upon thousands of kegs of illegal brew, only never come close to directly implicating the grin, ebullient Capone in its production and sale.

The amiable Capone, well earlier '30s Hollywood weighs in with its own variations on the type, skillfully portrays himself as a man of the people, a philanthropist, insulating himself from the bloody violence unleashed by his minions to maintain the gang's grip on millions in illegal profits.

Capone'south dominion ultimately sputters to a finish, only non in a blind alley echoing with auto-gun fire. Big Al goes down when the Yard-men, relying more than on dark-green eyeshades and wiretaps than tommy guns, get the goods, somewhat tentatively, on his tax-evading skullduggery.

And so Al Capone is sent off to prison, and Eliot Ness is among the righteous cadre escorting him to the train that will take him there. The authors handle this moment somewhat offhandedly, but there'due south a telling factoid hither that lets a fleck of the air out of their "fateful showdown" premise, at least equally it figures in a dual biography.

What takes identify on the train platform is the only documented occasion when Ness and Capone really encounter each other face-to-face.

After this moment, much of the momentum drains out of this book as it steadfastly follows through on its promise, shadowing both men through the remainder of their lives. Capone, out of stir by 1939, dies quietly in Florida eight years later, in the advanced stages of syphilis and, in the words of i crony, "nutty as a cuckoo."

Eliot Ness, only 29 when Capone goes behind bars, lives a relatively uneventful life out of constabulary enforcement. He dies of a heart set on in 1957, past then on his third wife and reputedly struggling with alcohol. He never sees the release of his Untouchables memoir, nor the subsequent TV series that was to conduct his name into our times.

Bob Duffy is a Maryland author and a working consultant in branding and ad.

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