The new definitive history of gangster-era Chicago-a landmark work
that is as riveting as a thriller. Now featuring a new preface,
plus 115 photographs and a map of gangland Chicago.
A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year
"Gripping. ... Reads like a novel." --Chicago
"Revolutionizes our understanding of Al Capone and Eliot Ness."
*--*Matthew Pearl
In 1929, thirty-year-old gangster Al Capone ruled both Chicago's
underworld and its corrupt government. To a public who scorned
Prohibition, "Scarface" became a local hero and national celebrity. But
after the brutal St. Valentine's Day Massacre transformed Capone into
"Public Enemy Number One," the federal government found an unlikely new
hero in a twenty-seven-year-old Prohibition agent named Eliot Ness.
Chosen to head the legendary law enforcement team known as "The
Untouchables," Ness set his sights on crippling Capone's criminal
empire.
Today, no underworld figure is more iconic than Al Capone and no lawman
as renowned as Eliot Ness. Yet in 2016 the Chicago Tribune wrote, "Al
Capone still awaits the biographer who can fully untangle, and balance,
the complexities of his life," while revisionist historians have
continued to misrepresent Ness and his remarkable career.
Enter Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz, a unique and vibrant
writing team combining the narrative skill of a master novelist with the
scholarly rigor of a trained historian. Collins is the New York Times
bestselling author of the gangster classic Road to Perdition. Schwartz
is a rising-star historian whose work anticipated the fake-news
phenomenon.
Scarface and the Untouchable draws upon decades of primary source
research--including the personal papers of Ness and his associates,
newly released federal files, and long-forgotten crime magazines
containing interviews with the gangsters and G-men themselves. Collins
and Schwartz have recaptured a bygone bullet-ridden era while uncovering
the previously unrevealed truth behind Scarface's downfall. Together
they have crafted the definitive work on Capone, Ness, and the battle
for Chicago.
