Titans of History

The introduction of Prohibition in 1920 endowed America’s gangsters with a gold mine of opportunities. Trade in smuggled alcohol became big business, and speakeasies where bootlegged liquor was readily available became the defining image of the era. But behind the relaxed jollity of the speakeasy and the gangster glamour lay violence, wanton sadism and psychopathic brutality.

In 1923 a reform-minded mayor, William E. Dever, was elected in Chicago on a platform of reining in the mobsters. As a result, Torrio and Capone opted to relocate much of their business to the satellite town of Cicero. The following year, with council elections scheduled for Cicero, Capone was determined to ensure that his candidates won, by whatever means. In the resulting violence, his brother Frank was killed and an election official was murdered, amid a wave of kidnappings, ballot-box theft and general intimidation. When it was all over Capone had won in Cicero, in one of the most dishonest elections ever seen.

Within weeks Capone, apparently believing himself impregnable, shot dead a small-time gangster called Joe Howard who had insulted a friend of his in a bar. The crime made Capone a target for William McSwiggen—the “hanging prosecutor”—and though he failed to pin any charges on Capone, McSwiggen did succeed in putting the gangster firmly in the public spotlight, setting Capone on the road to becoming America’s public enemy number one.

In 1925 Torrio retired after an attempt on his life by a rival concern, the North Side Gang run by Dean O’Banion, George “Bugs” Moran and Earl “Hymie” Weiss. Capone now took over from Torrio as the leading figure in the Chicago underworld. Thereafter, he developed an increasingly public persona, ostentatiously attending major sporting occasions, such as baseball games, and even the opera, presenting himself as an honest, successful businessman, with a flair for the common touch. In truth everyone knew the real source of Capone’s wealth.

Protection rackets, illegal gambling, bootlegging and prostitution—wherever there was a quick buck to be made, Capone had a hand in it. His eye for profit was combined with a ruthless approach to dealing with possible rivals—and the greatest threat to his hegemony, in Capone’s view, was the North Side Gang, the hoodlums who had earlier attacked Johnny Torrio.

The result was the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Disguising his men as policemen, Capone sent them to Moran’s warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, where they lined seven of the North Siders up against a wall and machine-gunned them in cold blood. Several of the victims were also blasted with a shotgun in the face. The gang leader, Moran, escaped, but with his key lieutenants dead his operation went into steep decline. Capone was left as Chicago’s undisputed Mr. Big.

But outrage over the killings generated pressure for more action on the part of the authorities against Capone. It was this that led the FBI to launch its ingenious bid to pursue Capone for income-tax offenses. Aware that he was unlikely ever to be indicted for any of his more violent activities (both because of the distance he now kept between himself and specific actions and because of the fear of reprisals that kept any potential witnesses from testifying), the federal government appointed a Treasury agent, Eliot Ness, and a hand-picked team of agents—the Untouchables—to go after Capone.

As a strategy it proved to be a stunning success. In June 1931 Capone was formally charged with income-tax evasion, and that October he was found guilty and sentenced to eleven years in prison. Initially sent to Atlanta penitentiary, in 1934 he was transferred to the maximum-security facility at Alcatraz. In 1939 he was released early, owing to ill health. But he was never able to regain control over his criminal empire. A shadow of his former self, Capone retreated into obscurity—finally dying of syphilis in 1947, a forgotten figure.

BERIA

1899–1953

Let me have one night with him and I’ll have him confessing he is the King of England.

Lavrenti Beria

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a sinister Soviet secret policeman, psychopathic rapist and enthusiastic sadist who ordered the deaths of many and took a personal delight in the torture of his victims. The personification of the criminal monstrosity of the Soviet state, he was a coarse, cynical intriguer, a vindictive cut-throat, a deft courtier and a perverted thug. Yet he was also a highly intelligent, enormously competent and indefatigable administrator with the vision ultimately to reject Marxism and propose the sort of liberal program that Mikhail Gorbachev brought to fruition years later.