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Films
Al Capone: The Untouchable Legend. Written and directed by Rike Fochler. Langbein and Skalnik TV, 1998. DVD.
Doubtful Dollars. Affiliated Aetna Life Companies, 1945. 15:55. Prelinger Archives, https://archive.org/details/doubtful_dollars (accessed July 22, 2016).
“Eliot Ness.” The Real Untouchables. Written and directed by John Fothergill. Thousand Oaks, CA: Goldhil DVD, 2001. DVD.
Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life (2006). Written and directed by Max Allan Collins. Tulsa, OK: VCI Entertainment, 2007. DVD.
“Eliot Ness: Untouchable” (1997). Biography. Directed by Michael Husain. New York: New Video, 2001. VHS.
Gabriel over the White House (1933). Directed by Gregory La Cava. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2009. DVD.
Little Caesar (1930). Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010. DVD.
The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults, April 21, 1986. 1:33:22. Geraldo, http://www.geraldo.com/page/al-capone-s-vault (accessed March 9, 2017).
The Public Enemy (1931). Directed by William A. Wellman. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010. DVD.
“The Road to Repeal.” Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America. Written by Marius Brill, directed by Clive Maltby. New York: A&E Television Networks, 1997. DVD.
Scarface (1932). Directed by Howard Hawks. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2003. DVD.
The Secret 6 (1931). Directed by George Hill. Burbank, CA: Warner Archive Collection, 2012. DVD.
T-Men (1947). Directed by Anthony Mann. New York: Sony Wonder, 2005. DVD.
The Undercover Man (1949). Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. In Glenn Ford: Undercover Crimes. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2013. DVD.
The Untouchables: Season 1, Volume 1 (1959–1960). Directed by various. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 2007. DVD.
The Untouchables: Season 2, Volume 1 (1960–1961). Directed by various. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 2007. DVD.
The Untouchables (1987). Directed by Brian De Palma. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 2004. DVD.
The Untouchables: The Complete Collection (1993–1994). Directed by various. Toronto: Visual Entertainment Inc., 2017. DVD.
Note on Sources
Al Capone’s credo is often summed up by his most famous quote: “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”
But Capone never said this: “Professor” Irwin Corey did. As “Quote Investigator” Garson O’Toole has shown, Corey came up with the phrase in the 1950s and first attributed it to Capone—as a joke—in 1969.
But as soon as the gangster’s name became attached to it, the line took on a life of its own. It eventually found its way into the Yale Book of Quotations—not to mention Robert De Niro’s mouth, by way of David Mamet’s screenplay for the 1987 film The Untouchables. Jonathan Eig accepts the quote as genuine in his 2010 book Get Capone, writing that Capone “best captured the essence of the gangster life” with this line he never used.
Much conventional wisdom about Al Capone and Eliot Ness has a similar pedigree—lies, errors, and half-truths repeated so often they became accepted as fact. Further muddying the record is a rising tide of revisionism from those authors “who,” as the writer Loren D. Estleman once observed, “in their fanatical pursuit of Truth often gallop straight past the facts.” Between these two conflicting trends, the real Capone and Ness have nearly been lost in the shuffle.
To find them, we returned to contemporary primary sources, synthesizing as many different accounts as we could and drawing upon multiple (and often conflicting) versions of events. We have listed the sources most useful in writing each chapter below, with the caveat that they sometimes disagree with each other, and with our own text. We often found it necessary to use a few credible details from one source while ignoring others contradicted elsewhere, or to break with the conventional wisdom if a reliable source told a more convincing story. Explaining each judgment call would take another volume, but some of the major ones are outlined in brief below.
Readers familiar with previous works on Capone and Ness will find ours differs from them frequently, and sometimes starkly. Time and again, we have uncovered evidence contradicting earlier books on basic matters of character and chronology. Halting the narrative to explain each disagreement would be undesirable and impractical. We believe the depth of our research, as outlined below, speaks for itself.
Source Notes
Epigraph
Williams, Mysterious Something, p. 95 (“There is something”).
Introduction (“Untouchable Truth”)
THE UNTOUCHABLES: LAT, April 20, 1959. “The Surprised Mr. Stack,” TV Guide, December 5, 1959, p. 10, in FBI-DA. For a detailed overview of the Untouchables TV film and series, see Tucker, Eliot Ness and the Untouchables, pp. 98–191.
NESS AND FRALEY: Oscar Fraley, “The Real Eliot Ness,” Coronet, July 1961, pp. 26–27. William J. Ayers, “As I Knew Eliot Ness,” The Potter Enterprise Sportsmen’s Special, November 24, 1971, PCHS. Scott Martell, “ ‘Untouchable’ Memories,” News-Press, December 7, 1994, PWH. “Bill Ayers,” n.d., PWH. “Virginia Kallenborn Interview,” March 25, 2000, PWH. Nickel, Torso, p. 204. John Rigas, personal interview with ABS, November 15, 2016.
As an example of attempts to debunk the Ness/Fraley Untouchables, Eig (Get Capone, p. 239) falsely claims that “almost nothing in Fraley’s book checks out.” Our own research (and the independent work of Scott Leeson Sroka, grandson of Untouchable Joe Leeson) reveals that the vast majority of incidents described in Ness’s memoir are in one way or another verifiable.
HOOVER AND MA BARKER IN THE UNTOUCHABLES: Director, FBI to SAC, Los Angeles, October 16, 1959; M. A. Jones to Mr. DeLoach, Re: “ ‘The Untouchables,’ Telev
ision Program Produced by Desilu,” October 23, 1959; SAC, Los Angeles to Director, FBI, October 20, 1959; J. Edgar Hoover to Redacted, October 27, 1959, all in FBI-DA.
EIG’S GET CAPONE: Eig (Get Capone, pp. 223–224) and Bair (Al Capone, pp. 149–151) both cite Burns’s One-Way Ride (1931) and Murray’s Legacy of Al Capone (1975) as the sources of the baseball bat story, even though at least two printed sources (X Marks the Spot, p. 55, in FBI-AC; and Pasley, Al Capone, pp. 329–332) predate Burns by a year. Eig’s misguided theory of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (Get Capone, pp. 250–253) is thoroughly debunked in Binder, Al Capone’s Beer Wars, pp. 190–197. See also Allen Barra, “Getting Caponed,” Birmingham Weekly, July 8, 2010, http://bhamweekly.com/birmingham/print-article-1663-print.html (accessed July 10, 2010).
BAIR: Bair, Al Capone, p. 211 (“sure the press”).
BURNS AND NOVICK: Esther Cepeda, “ ‘Prohibition’ Gives Lie to Era’s Myths,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 26, 2011, http://www.suntimes.com/news/cepeda/7827740–417/prohibition-gives-lie-to-eras-myths.html (accessed September 29, 2011) (“Eliot Ness had”).
ALFORD: Nathaniel Popper, “The Tax Sleuth Who Took Down a Drug Lord,” NYT, December 25, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/dealbook/the-unsung-tax-agent-who-put-a-face-on-the-silk-road.html (accessed May 28, 2016) (“They don’t write”).
WILSON AND UNDERCOVER MAN: Frank J. Wilson and Howard Whitman, “Undercover Man: He Trapped Capone,” Collier’s, April 26, 1947, pp. 14–15, 80–83. Joseph D. Brady to the William Morris Agency, July 28, 1947; Frank J. Wilson to Joseph Donald Brady, July 30, 1947; John Weber to Judge Lester Roth, August 5, 1947; Joseph D. Brady to Frank J. Wilson, August 5, 1947; Frank J. Wilson, undated memo; C. E. Erkel, memo to Lester Wm. Roth, Re: “Undercover Man—He Trapped Capone,” August 7, 1947; Frank Wilson to Joseph Brady, August 15[, 1947]; Columbia Pictures Corporation Agreement, August 20, 1947; Memorandum of Agreement, July 11, 1947; Frank Wilson to Joseph Brady, September 23, 1947; Frank J. Wilson to Joseph D. Brady, September 30, 1947; Frank Wilson to Joseph D. Brady, October 18, 1947; Frank Wilson to Joseph D. Brady, October 20, 1947; Joseph D. Brady to Frank J. Wilson, October 22, 1947, all in Box 5, “Auctorial—Contract, The William Morris Agency 1947” Folder, FJW. Helen Alpert, “Uncle Sam’s Tough Guy,” Miami News, May 1, 1949, in Box 18, “Scrap Book #1—Secret Service Stories,” FJW. The Undercover Man (1949), directed by Joseph E. Lewis, in Glenn Ford: Undercover Crimes (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2013), DVD. Wilson and Day, Special Agent, pp. 28–56.
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