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

Written by Max Allan Collins, A. Brad Schwartz
Read by Stefan Rudnicki, Max Allan Collins, A. Brad Schwartz
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: HarperAudio
Release date: August 14, 2018
Duration: 18:36:24

A Mystery Writers of America “Grand Master”—author of the gangster classic Road to Perdition, long-time Dick Tracy writer, and multiple Shamus Award winner—teams with an acclaimed rising young historian, in this riveting, myth-shattering dual portrait of Al Capone, America’s most notorious gangster, and Eliot Ness, the legendary Prohibition agent whose extraordinary investigative work crippled his organization. Written with novelistic pacing and underpinned by groundbreaking research, Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz’s Scarface and the Untouchable delivers—at last—the definitive account of the “Battle for Chicago,” the iconic struggle between the mythic yet real combatants who have captivated the world for 90 years.

Drawing on a trove of sources, including Ness’s scrapbooks, the authors look at the parallel arcs of these men in the 1920s and 1930s as Capone gained notoriety and status as Chicago’s greatest public enemy while Ness climbed the ranks of law enforcement to head a squad devoted to bringing Capone to justice. The general contours of this real-life drama are familiar, including the irony that Capone was eventually convicted of tax evasion, rather than the hundreds of murders he orchestrated; the authors add depth to their depiction of both men with colorful details such as the fact that, prior to becoming adversaries, Capone and Ness both lived on South Prairie Street for a period in 1923.

Collins and Schwartz present a balanced view of the role of Ness in capturing Capone, which accounts such as Jonathan Eig’s Get Capone (2010) and Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary Prohibition (2011) have largely dismissed. The result is an informed and valuable addition to the numerous books about Capone and Ness.

This audiobook is a fascinating examination of the terrible times when the Mob ruled Chicago, with Stefan Rudnicki doing a pretty solid job of substituting for Walter Winchell’s staccato “Untouchables” delivery. Thoroughly researched and expertly executed, the story’s most surprising revelation is how little Eliot Ness and Al Capone had to do with each other. They met only once, and that was momentary. Yet the super-straight-shooting Ness made it his life’s work to take down the illegal bootlegging operation that Capone headed but operated from a distance. The most revealing part of the audiobook is the incredible corruption that was rampant in Chicago at all levels of government during Prohibition. The chronological work follows the lives of the two men and is impossible to turn off. M.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2018,

An interesting thing in the Introduction is Max Allan Collins describing how real crimes were the basis for his crime novels.