Download or read book Deadly Valentines written by Jeffrey Gusfield and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing one of the most outrageous stories of the Capone era, this is the twin biography of a couple who defined the extremes and excesses of the Prohibition Era in America. ";Machine Gun"; Jack McGurn, a babyfaced Sicilian immigrant and Al Capone's chief assassin, and Louise May Rolfe, a beautiful blonde dancer and libertine, paired to represent the epitome of fashion, rebellion, and wild abandon in a decade that shocked and roared. Detailing McGurn's suspected role in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and his sensational alibi, this biography shows how the couple captured the headlines in every newspaper in the country, had their hipster speech copied by Hollywood, and were the spellbinding poster children of the new jazz subculture. More than a look at the joie de vivre of two lovers caught in history's spotlight, this work examines the continuing allure of the Roaring Twenties and the characters who inspired America's love affair with gangster literature and crime cinema.
Download or read book Chicago Assassin written by Richard Shmelter and published by Cumberland House Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The city of Chicago led the nation when it came to gangland violence during the Prohibition era. As a result, many infamous, unforgettable personalities became a part of America's criminal history. Chicago Assassin is the story of "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, one of the people responsible for putting much of the roar into the Roaring Twenties. His family immigrated to Chicago from Sicily in 1906, as he grew up in the city's slums and later took up boxing as "Battling" Jack McGurn. After avenging his father's death by killing the three hit men responsible, he came to the attention of Al Capone, who invited him into his organization, known as the Chicago Outfit. There he rose to power and was one of the most feared members Capone's organizations, with more than twenty-five known kills for the mob. "Battling" Jack McGurn became so adept with the Thompson submachine gun that he quickly became known as "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn.
Download or read book Young Al Capone written by William Balsamo and published by Skyhorse Publishing Inc.. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on interviews and never-before-published documents to explore the life of Al Capone in New York from 1899 to 1925, discussing his relationships with mobsters Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale, events that shaped his criminal career, why he left the city, and other topics.
Download or read book Guns and Roses written by Rose Keefe and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2003-09-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on information compiled from police and court documents, contemporary news accounts, and interviews with O'Banion's friends and associates, Guns and Roses traces O'Banion's rise from Illinois farm boy to the most powerful gang boss ...
Download or read book Crossing Over the Line written by David J. Langum and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crossing over the Line describes the folly of the Mann Act of 1910—a United States law which made travel from one state to another by a man and a woman with the intent of committing an immoral act a major crime. Spawned by a national wave of "white slave trade" hysteria, the Act was created by the Congress of the United States as a weapon against forced prostitution. This book is the first history of the Mann Act's often bizarre career, from its passage to the amendment that finally laid it low. In David J. Langum's hands, the story of the Act becomes an entertaining cautionary tale about the folly of legislating private morality. Langum recounts the colorful details of numerous court cases to show how enforcement of the Act mirrored changes in America's social attitudes. Federal prosecutors became masters in the selective use of the Act: against political opponents of the government, like Charlie Chaplin; against individuals who eluded other criminal charges, like the Capone mobster "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn; and against black men, like singer Chuck Berry and boxer Jack Johnson, who dared to consort with white women. The Act engendered a thriving blackmail industry and was used by women like Frank Lloyd Wright's wife to extort favorable divorce settlements. "Crossing over the Line is a work of scholarship as wrought by a civil libertarian, and the text . . . sizzles with the passion of an ardent believer in real liberty under reasonable laws."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
Download or read book Ugly Prey written by Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ugly Prey tells the riveting story of poor Italian immigrant Sabella Nitti, the first woman ever sentenced to hang in Chicago, in 1923, for the alleged murder of her husband. Journalist Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi leads readers through the case, showing how, with no evidence and no witnesses, Nitti was the target of an obsessed deputy sheriff and the victim of a faulty legal system. She was also—to the men who convicted her and reporters fixated on her—ugly. For that unforgiveable crime, the media painted her as a hideous, dirty, and unpredictable immigrant, almost an animal. Featuring two other fascinating women—the ambitious and ruthless journalist who helped demonize Sabella through her reports and the brilliant, beautiful, 23-year-old lawyer who helped humanize her with a jailhouse makeover—Ugly Prey is not just a page-turning courtroom drama but also a thought-provoking look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class within the American justice system.
Download or read book The Candy Butcher written by William Karl Thomas and published by Media Maestro - Book Division. This book was released on 2018-03-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Candy Butcher" is an old fashioned term for the guy with a basket full of candy, fruits, magazines, and newspapers he sells walking through your train to make your journey more enjoyable. Frank Ray Perilli's first job was as a Candy Butcher, and his show biz career began in his teens as a nightclub comedian and film actor, and continued through Hollywood as a screenwriter and film producer. Almost all of his offbeat Felliniesque films cross the threshold of bizarre and are richly flavored with comedy: "The Doberman Gang," "Little Cigars," "The Other Cinderella," "Adult Fairy Tales," "Dracula's Dog," "The End of the World," "Laserblast," "Alligator," "Invasion of the Star Creatures," but to name a few. Even his more serious films, such as "Harlow," and his plays, such as "Stompin' at he Oval Office," touch upon aspects of history uncharted by others. With a weird offbeat perspective, Frank Ray Perilli enriches our journey through life with the sweetness of comedy and the challenge of thinking outside the box.
Download or read book The True and Complete Story of machine Gun Jack McGurn written by Amanda Jayne Parr and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2005 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once described by crime boss Sam Giancana, as the 'archetypal movie star gangster,' 'Machine Gun' Jack McGurn, not only offers a unique insight into the life and mind of the most flamboyant gangster of his time, but also explores his close relationship with crime czar Al Capone and the extraordinary history of Chicago's criminal underworld.
Download or read book Al Capone written by Deirdre Bair and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of Prohibition, Al Capone loomed large as Public Enemy Number One: his multimillion-dollar Chicago Outfit dominated organized crime, and law enforcement was powerless to stop him. But then came the fall: a legal noose tightened by the FBI, a conviction on tax evasion, a stint in Alcatraz. After his release, he returned to his family in Miami a much diminished man, living quietly until the ravages of his neurosyphilis took their final toll. Our shared fascination with Capone endures in countless novels and movies, but the man behind the legend has remained a mystery. Now, through rigorous research and exclusive access to Capone’s family, National Book Award–winning biographer Deirdre Bair cuts through the mythology, uncovering a complex character who was flawed and cruel but also capable of nobility. At once intimate and iconoclastic, Al Capone gives us the definitive account of a quintessentially American figure.
Download or read book The Wisdom of Al Capone written by William J. Helmer and published by . This book was released on 2017-07-21 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of Al Capone's infamous quotes with gangland crime photographs from Chicago during Prohibition. The author provides a new and revised account of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, photographs and story from a first time ever published location of a secret Al Capone roadhouse, with more history on the `Chicago Typewriter¿ a.k.a. the Thompson submachine gun, Machinegun Jack McGurn and Doctor Reinhart Schwimmer who was the seventh victim in the massacre.
Download or read book Mysterious Chicago written by Adam Selzer and published by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Chicago historian Adam Selzer, expert on all of the Windy City’s quirks and oddities, comes a compelling heavily researched anthology of the stories behind its most fascinating unsolved mysteries. To create this unique volume, Selzer has collected forty unsolved mysteries from the 1800s to modern day. He has poured through all newspaper, magazine, and book references to them, and consulted expert historians. Topics covered include who really started the great Chicago fire, who was the first “automobile murderer,” and even if there was actually a vampire slaying at Rose Hill cemetery. The result is both a colorful read to get lost in, a window to a world of curiosity and wonder, as well as a volume that separates fact from fiction—true crime from urban legend. Complementing the gripping stories Selzer presents are original images of the crime and its suspects as developed by its original investigators. Readers will marvel at how each character and crime were presented, and happily journey with Selzer as he presents all facts and theories presented at the time of the “crime” and uses modern hindsight to assemble the pieces.
Download or read book The Man who Got Away written by Rose Keefe and published by Cumberland House Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the life of George "Bugs" Moran, the last of Chicago's North Side gang leaders, discussing his childhood in Minnesota, his early years as a horse thief, his rise and fall in Chicago's Prohibition-era underworld, his life as an outlaw in the 1930s and 1940s, and other related topics.
Download or read book Capone written by Laurence Bergreen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant history of Prohibition and its most notorious gangster, acclaimed biographer Laurence Bergreen takes us to the gritty streets of Chicago where Al Capone forged his sinister empire. Bergreen shows the seedy and glamorous sides of the age, the rise of Prohibition, the illicit liquor trade, the battlefield that was Chicago. Delving beyond the Capone mythology. Bergreen finds a paradox: a coldblooded killer, thief, pimp, and racketeer who was also a devoted son and father; a self-styled Robin Hood who rose to the top of organized crime. Capone is a masterful portrait of an extraordinary time and of the one man who reigned supreme over it all, Al Capone.
Download or read book Uncle Al Capone written by Deirdre Marie Capone and published by Recaplodge LLC. This book was released on 2010-10-27 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the revised edition, March 2015. The untold story from inside his family. Dramatic, unyielding, and provocative, Uncle Al Capone by Deirdre Marie Capone, Al Capone's grandniece, is a fascinating memoir and engaging biography. This moving, highly readable portrait of the Capone family and its mob trade examines what it has meant to survive the storied legacy of the family's forbearers. As Capone traces the arc of regret and what fuels the Capone myth, she finds redemption and a way to coexist with her legacy. In seventeen chapters with titles like "The Making of the Mafioso," "Trading the Chicago Outfit for the Chicago Cubs," and "The Saint Valentine's Day Truth," Capone outlines organized crime in Chicago and offers vignettes of American history during the early and mid-twentieth century. Using years of research and exhaustive interviews with her aunts, uncles, and cousins, she weaves an engaging anecdotal narrative of what it meant to be a Capone, what it meant to lose her father to suicide, and what it meant to have a mother who lived in constant fear. She offers compelling evidence that Al Capone was specifically targeted for prosecution by law enforcement agencies assisted by the media, which made gross exaggerations of her uncle's exploits and fueled a phenomenon of half-truths and utter falsehoods. From the family's roots in Angri, Italy to the author's ongoing investigations today, this debut offers a comprehensive and moving portrait of an iconic American family and one woman's efforts to make peace with the past.
Download or read book Mr Capone written by Robert J. Schoenberg and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-06-06 with total page 843 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All I ever did was to sell beer and whiskey to our best people. All I ever did was to supply a demand that was pretty popular. Why, the very guys that make my trade good are the ones that yell the loudest about me. Some of the leading judges use the stuff. When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality. -- Al Capone
Download or read book Murder City The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties written by Michael Lesy and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-02-17 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Vivid, laconic, and crisp. The bodies fall like dominoes, and every word sounds like it was shot from a gun. And as you might expect from Lesy, the photographs are extraordinary." —Luc Sante Things began as they usually did: Someone shot someone else. So begins a chapter of Michael Lesy's disturbingly satisfying account of Chicago in the 1920s, the epicenter of Murder in America. Just as Lesy’s first book, Wisconsin Death Trip, subverted the accepted notion of the Gay Nineties, so Murder City exposes the dark side of the Jazz Age. Revisiting seventeen Chicago murder cases—including that of Belva and Beulah, two murderesses whose trials inspired the musical Chicago—Lesy's sharp, fearless storytelling makes a compelling case that this collection of criminals may be progenitors of our modern age.
Download or read book The St Valentine s Day Massacre written by William J. Helmer and published by Cumberland House Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the St. Valentine's Day Massacre when killers dressed as cops gunned down seven men. While the massacre was commonly thought to be ordered by Al Capone, it was actually the work of group from St. Louis known as the "American Boys." The book examines how law enforcement officials worked not to solve the crime to avoid retaliation by corrupt politicians.
