Get Capone by Jonathan Eig

Author:Jonathan Eig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

While Ness was beginning his work and Johnson continued pondering his strategy, the third important member of the team assigned to target Capone, Frank Wilson, was plowing ahead. He was a stark man, pale as a sheet of typing paper, with a square jaw and a cleft chin. He was of average height, but with broad shoulders and a bullish chest. Ever since he was a boy he had wanted to be a cop, like his old man, who had served for years on the streets of Buffalo. Wilson had the right demeanor for it but, to his everlasting disappointment, he didn’t have the eyesight : His vision was so poor that he would never be licensed to carry a firearm.

Wilson didn’t talk much, but he had already earned a reputation within law enforcement circles as one of the toughest and most aggressive revenue investigators in the country. He didn’t mind the monotony of the work, didn’t mind the loneliness, didn’t mind the long hours staring through thick corrective lenses at bank ledgers and canceled checks. But whenever the opportunity presented itself for Wilson to act like a street cop, he leaped at it. He loved getting out of the office and interviewing witnesses. He would never carry a gun, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t carry himself the same way his father had, straight up and stern as a two-by-four. Once, he’d been assigned to check out allegations of corruption concerning one of the bureau’s own agents—and a high-ranking one, at that. When he was informed that the accused agent’s wife had just died and that it might be best to postpone his initial interview by a few days, Wilson refused. “Wilson fears nothing,” wrote his boss, Elmer Irey. “He will sit quietly looking at books eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, forever, if he wants to find something in those books.” Wilson’s only vice, so far as anyone could tell, was his taste for cheap cigars.

Wilson left Washington for Chicago in the late part of 1928 or early in 1929, setting up a tiny office in the Old Post Office Building downtown at Dearborn and Adams. It was more like a janitor’s closet than an office, really, with no windows, no ventilation, and peeling green walls. Wilson filled it quickly with a huge, flat-topped desk and file cabinets. “I could hardly scratch my head without sticking my elbow in somebody’s eye,” he recalled.

He brought with him from Washington a small team of revenue agents. One of them began hanging around the lobby of the Lexington Hotel, pretending to be a midlevel gangster from Philly, looking for action. Wilson and the others began visiting the speakeasies, casinos, and brothels said to have been operated by Capone. They also visited nearby banks, looking for financial records that would establish Capone’s income. Wilson heard all about Capone as he made the rounds. He heard that the boss took a slice of the profit on every case of whiskey brought

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