St. Valentines Day Massacre: Closing In On Capone
2/18/202636 min
In the aftermath of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, authorities faced mounting pressure to clean up Chicago and take down the violent mobsters who overran the city – most notoriously, Al Capone. The federal government took on the challenge, pursuing Capone relentlessly. In the end, Capone did go down – not for murder, but for tax evasion. And since Capone’s conviction in the 1930s, this unorthodox charge has been used repeatedly to bring down otherwise “ungettable” criminals.
To discuss how the feds finally closed in on Capone, Lindsay speaks with Jonathan Eig, the Pulitzer Prize–winning...
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First 90 secondsLindsey Graham· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Wondering. [upbeat music] From Wondering, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers: Our History, Your Story. [upbeat music] On the morning of February 14th, nineteen twenty-nine, seven men were gunned down in a Chicago garage. To this day, the so-called Saint Valentine's Day Massacre remains officially unsolved, although at the time, most involved in the investigation suspected Al Capone had ordered the killings. Although he was never charged with ordering the murders, by the end of the Roaring Twenties, Al Capone had become the exemplar of the Prohibition-era gangster, and the Feds set out to get him any way they could. In the end, Al Capone went to prison on charges of tax evasion. My guest today will help us unpack the story of how the Feds closed in on Capone and what became of him in the years after his imprisonment. Jonathan Eig is the author of Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster. Eig also won a Pulitzer Prize for his two thousand twenty-three biography of Martin Luther King. Our conversation is next.
Unknown speaker1:25
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