Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [21]
I mean, what a lame story.
Capone made thousands of barrels of non-alcoholic beer and delivered them to the speakeasy on Wabash Street, among others. As soon as the police had inspected the non-alcoholic hooch, Al’s mates would show up with big veterinarian syringes – the type that you usually shove into a cow’s bum – full of ethanol. Pure alcohol, in other words. The ethanol was sourced from all over America, but the bulk of production took place in the countryside. Capone used Route 66 to transport the moonshine from rural areas to Chicago in false petrol tanks. The ethanol would be injected into the barrels and – Ta da! Off we go! – happy days were back again. If the cops turned up when the speakeasy was in full swing, there were escape routes through which the VIPs could make a swift exit. The rest of the clientele would have to face the music. And probably stop dancing.
Prohibition was hugely counter-productive. It actually increased alcohol consumption and promoted crime by igniting the bootlegging moonshine and beer wars fought by the Chicago gangs. Capone became the biggest and most notorious gangster in America when he took over the running of the Outfit – the syndicate of Chicago organised crime gangs. He was a major villain – in addition to bootlegging, he was involved in prostitution and bribery of government figures – yet he didn’t lurk in the shadows. On the contrary, he became a highly visible public figure. Many Chicagoans even admired him, seeing him as a self-made success story. And Capone responded by giving some of the money he made from his illicit activities to charity, creating the image of a modern-day Robin Hood.
He kept plenty of the cash for himself, though, and lived ostentatiously. He held meetings in the Jeweler’s Building, a forty-storey neo-classical office tower in the heart of Chicago with an automated car lift that jewellery merchants used to make safe transfers of their merchandise. Capone would drive his car into the lift, rise to the top floor, and enjoy a few drinks in Stratosphere, the speakeasy with the best views in town.
But on St Valentine’s Day 1929 Al Capone made a big mistake. He sent his boys down the road to wipe out seven Irishmen. Disguised as policemen, Capone’s gang showed up with machine-guns and mowed down their Irish rivals. (Curiously, one of the Irish gangsters wasn’t a gangster at all, but a doctor. He was a kind of hoodlum groupie – he liked to follow the gangsters around town and act tough.) When the press published pictures of the massacre, the people of Chicago thought Big Al had gone too far and started to turn against him. Eliot Ness and his ‘Untouchables’ in the Bureau of Prohibition took a look at Capone’s activities, but they found it impossible to link him to any serious crime, let alone the massacre. He’d covered himself pretty well and had the police in his pocket. Then they had the bright idea of taking a look at Capone’s tax records.
Here’s a thing. In 1927 Capone had made $106 million, but he hadn’t filed a tax return. So they hauled him in for that. He was fined fifty thousand dollars and sent away for eleven years, most of which he served in Alcatraz. While in prison, he contracted syphilis, which affected his physical and mental health to such an extent that he was no longer able to run the Outfit. By 1946, he had the mental capacity of a twelve-year-old. Eventually, at the age of forty-seven, he died following a stroke and a heart attack brought on by the syphilis.
Amazingly, Al Capone left us with a legacy that has nothing to do with booze. One of his charitable donations was a million dollars to provide milk for schoolchildren. But he insisted that a use-by date must be put on each bottle because he’d always hated the sour milk he’d been forced