Epilogue:
The Great American City

The summer of 1934 found Eliot Ness busting hillbilly stills in the “Moonshine Mountains” of Kentucky and Tennessee. Bootlegging remained chiefly a big-city business, however, and Uncle Sam still needed someone with Ness’s unique talent for battling the illicit alcohol trade.

In August, Ness was transferred to Cleveland to head the local office of the newly renamed Alcohol Tax Unit. His exile at an end, Ness threw himself into another flurry of raids—busting, the Plain Dealer reported, “an average of one still a day.”

His work caught the city’s attention, and in December 1935 he became Cleveland’s new director of public safety. Over the next six years, Ness would reform a corrupt, inefficient police department and lower Cleveland’s horrific traffic death rate until the city was among the safest in America. Thanks to Ness, the Cleveland Police became a model for the nation. Along the way, the Untouchable battled gangsters and labor racketeers, and personally led raids against the gambling operations of Moe Dalitz’s nationwide Cleveland Syndicate.

Drawing upon ideas he’d learned from August Vollmer, Ness made Cleveland’s Safety Department among the most progressive in the country—modernizing the police, outfitting squad cars with the latest in radio and teletype technology, and urging cops to fix the deeper social problems that created crime. He made fighting juvenile delinquency a chief priority, establishing “Boystown” clubs and a “Dick Tracy Detective Squad”—never realizing he had been the template for Chester Gould’s comic strip detective.

“Millions have been spent in efforts to cope with the problem of adult crime,” Ness declared in 1939. “I think the time is at hand when police officials, teachers, and educators should join to prevent problem children from becoming criminals.”

As Ness reached new heights, his nemesis fell farther than anyone could have predicted. On November 16, 1939, Al Capone emerged from federal prison after serving seven years, six months, and twelve days of his eleven-year sentence. Capone had spent more than half of that time at “the Rock,” a new maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island.

Model prisoner Capone posed little threat of escape, and tax evaders rarely merited such heightened security. Once again, the federal government had happily bent its own rules to make an example of Public Enemy Number One.

After years of harsh discipline, enforced silence, and attacks from other inmates, Capone’s mind finally cracked. The syphilis lying latent within him caused a psychotic break that no doctor could repair. Although he left prison a free man, Capone would always be a mental prisoner—trapped in a childlike state, subject to mood swings and delusions, terrified of strangers, and lost in premature senility.

“He is nutty as a cuckoo,” Jack Guzik said in 1946.

Capone’s family brought him back to the Palm Island estate, where walls and guards hid his condition from outsiders. Sometimes he would dream of returning to Chicago and his old haunts in Cicero. Ralph, still engaged in shady business but pushed to the Outfit’s margins, encouraged these fantasies, to the dismay of other family members, who preferred Al in his calmer moments, content to enjoy retirement as a quiet family man and forty-something geriatric.

Apart from a brief stopover at Prairie Avenue on his way to Wisconsin, Capone would return to Chicago only in his fractured mind. When his family took him to restaurants in Miami, he’d imagine himself back in a speakeasy. At Palm Island, he’d sit by the pool and carry on conversations with deceased gangsters whose passing he had bidden.

“He talked to dead people,” his relatives recalled, “and told them why they had to die. Sometimes he gave away Outfit business. We couldn’t take a chance that any of this would get out.”

The men who’d replaced Capone in Chicago would never have to worry about him reclaiming his throne. They subsidized him in his final years, giving the family a $600 weekly pension, enough to live on—just.

When Capone’s body came back to Chicago for burial in 1947, his Outfit successors all trooped dutifully to the cemetery to pay their respects.

Like Capone, Eliot Ness spent his final days reliving the battle for Chicago.

In the 1940s, Ness left law enforcement—his one true calling—first for business and then for politics, a washout in both. Broke by the 1950s, his taste for alcohol deepening, Ness found himself working for a failing paper company in the small Pennsylvania town of Coudersport, desperate to make a living for his third wife and their adopted son.

In 1956, the sportswriter friend of a business partner offered to collaborate with Ness on a book about the Capone squad. Ness reluctantly agreed, and shared with his coauthor what memories he could muster. Now dying from his childhood heart condition, Ness hoped the book might provide financial security for his family after he’d gone. But his inherent modesty made him uncomfortable with the manuscript.

“It makes me out to be too much of a hero,” Ness said. “It was the whole team that did the work, not just me.”

Ness also had doubts about The Untouchables as a title, fearing readers would mistake it for a book about India. He wouldn’t live to see its publication, nor the television series and films it would inspire.

The gangster era had just begun to fade from America’s cultural memory when The Untouchables debuted on TV in 1959. Thirty years after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Chicago seemed poised to shake the stigma of Capone. But the series, produced by Desilu, revived the struggle for the city’s reputation, its backlot Beer Wars forever making gangsters synonymous with Chicago.

As the writer Thomas Dyja put it, “Whatever else the city was responsible for would be lost in a hail of bullets from Robert Stack’s tommy gun.”

In December 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues set off a nuclear chain reaction, the first ever created by human beings, in their laboratory beneath the bleachers of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field—where Eliot Ness had once watched football. Their discovery ushered in the Atomic Age, announcing Chicago’s emergence as America’s cultural and commercial heart.

After World War II, the city projected its brand of friendly, matter-of-fact capitalism onto the country as a whole. Immigrant Ludwig Mies van der Rohe envisioned a new kind of skyscraper—sleek, modern, and spare—which soon dominated Chicago’s skyline and others coast-to-coast.

Up in the northern suburb of Des Plaines, Chicago salesman Ray Kroc built his first McDonald’s, ushering in uniform cuisine, created quickly and consumed the same way. On the North Side, around the block from Dean O’Banion’s old flower shop, the headquarters of Hugh Hefner’s upstart magazine, Playboy, mass-produced sex like Kroc’s hamburgers.

Businessmen like Kroc and Hefner were the true heirs of Al Capone—identifying the basest of human needs, from food to sex, and catering to them cleanly, efficiently, with self-interest as naked as Playboy’s centerfolds. They helped create America’s new consumer culture, while the city blossomed around them—growing up from the days of speakeasies and stockyards into Mies’s starkly modern steel and glass structures.

In 1955, with the election of Mayor Richard J. Daley, Chicago had a new boss, at least vaguely in the Capone mode. A Democrat out of Anton Cermak’s political machine, Daley ran his city like a monarchy, with power far outdistancing Scarface’s. Critics and supporters alike saw him as a throwback to the city’s corrupt past. On the night of Daley’s election, a gleeful alderman cried out, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform!”

Despite Daley’s innate pragmatism—a willingness to work with anybody, no matter how crooked—the new mayor was not just another grafter. One historian called him “Chicago personified,” somehow managing to embody both the ruthlessness of Al Capone and the public-spiritedness of Eliot Ness.

“The old bosses were not interested in what was good for the public welfare,” Daley said. “They were interested only in what was good for themselves.”

Daley appropriated Big Bill Thompson’s favored nickname—“the Builder”—repaving downtown streets, encircling the city with highways, and littering the landscape with huge office buildings and housing projects. Chicago saw the rise of its newest and most iconic skyscrapers, the John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower—the latter reigning as the world’s tallest building for more than twenty years.

The new metropolis Daley built along the lakefront looked resolutely forward instead of backward. Just as Chicago had rebuilt itself after the fire, so this new city had to destroy its former self to exist.

To that end, Daley’s administration oversaw the demolition of many brick-and-mortar reminders of the Prohibition era. Colosimo’s Restaurant was among the first to go, replaced by a parking lot in 1958. Two years later, Holy Name Cathedral leveled the entire block that included O’Banion’s flower shop, making space for parking and a playground. The church covered the bullet damage to its cornerstone, but tourists still looked for the pockmarks. The Four Deuces came down around 1964, leaving a garbage-strewn lot in its place.

That same year saw the construction of a new Federal Building, a thirty-story modernist monolith. Designed by Mies, the black skyscraper rose directly in front of the original gray granite courthouse, dwarfing its squat, compact dome.

The cold inhumanity of Mies’s new structure was no accident, according to Judge James Wilkerson’s replacement on the federal bench. He derided the old building’s “cracker box surroundings,” insisting that “pure justice” was insufficiently impressive to the public. Like a certain tax evasion conviction, the new building went beyond “pure justice” to create the appearance of justice, the better to demonstrate the government’s power.

Despite some calls to save the old Federal Building, the aging structure couldn’t escape Daley’s march toward progress. In 1965, the courtroom where Al Capone and Samuel Insull had stood trial fell to the wrecking ball, making way for a post office, where wanted posters would go on traditional display.

Like the elite men behind the Secret Six, Daley sought to make Chicago appear safe, approachable, and business friendly by scrubbing any memory of gangsterism from its streets. The city made this explicit when it destroyed perhaps the most notorious remnant of Capone’s Chicago.

For years, the owner of the garage at 2122 North Clark Street endured tourists looking through her windows, trying to talk their way inside, or even forcing themselves in, to see the wall where seven North Siders were tommy-gunned.

By 1967—the same year Roger Corman re-created The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre on film—she finally had enough, selling the building to the city for demolition.

“Generally we try to preserve buildings which are of historical significance to the city,” one official told the Tribune. “But this is something we’d rather not remember.”

Mayor Daley’s office did allow a Canadian businessman to preserve the building’s most important feature—its southern wall. The wrecking crew numbered the bricks, then shipped them to Vancouver, where the wall was rebuilt in a Roaring Twenties–themed nightclub. Covered by glass, the murder wall stood in the men’s room, where customers could line up like Bugs Moran’s boys and relieve themselves.

But it wasn’t enough to keep the nightclub in business. Eventually, the wall made its way west, where it stands today, still behind glass, but sans urinals—in Las Vegas’s Mob Museum.

Not all residents of Daley’s “city that works” enjoyed its benefits.

Chicago’s African-American population increased by the hundreds of thousands in the years after World War II, while a rigid system of de facto segregation squeezed blacks into vast swaths of slums and housing projects. The South Side—home of Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and Richard Daley—became the “Black Belt,” given over by its city to poverty and neglect.

“On Lake Shore Drive, life in Chicago is lovely—for the few,” said the Saturday Evening Post in 1960. “For the millions, life in Chicago is toil and ugliness . . . squalor and privation.”

Capone’s South Michigan Avenue headquarters, the Metropole Hotel, sat trapped within this “Second Ghetto.” In January 1975, a Tribune reporter found the halls once patrolled by pearl-hatted gangsters gloomy and still—heat, water, and electricity all shut off—as the few remaining residents stood guard against vandals. Only a dozen renters still called the Metropole home—some too old and infirm to move, others too stubborn to go anywhere else.

Conversing by candlelight in the dining room, near the gas ovens cranked up against Chicago’s typically brutal winter, one resident told the Tribune he’d grown “attached to the building,” calling it “a good old lady.”

When the city tore the Metropole down later that year, the media paid no heed. One concerned citizen wrote the Tribune months later, lamenting the loss of another landmark.

“How long will we let this wanton destruction of our heritage continue?” he asked.

Thirteen years later, Tim Samuelson of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks sought to preserve the Capone family home at 7244 South Prairie Avenue, asking the state to designate the building an official landmark—not to honor Capone, but to recognize his undeniable importance as “Chicago’s most famous citizen.”

“Chicago has vainly tried to close its eyes and run away from Capone’s ghost,” Samuelson said, “but he has remained in close pursuit, breathing down the city’s neck and tugging at its coattails.”

The proposal drew immediate protest. Other homeowners on South Prairie, already enduring regular visits from gangster-seekers, feared an even greater tourist invasion. And a local Italian-American group resented “this attempt to resurrect the fading memory of Al Capone,” which would “stereotype all Italians.” Why not honor, say, Enrico Fermi? Even if “the father of the atomic bomb” had far more blood on his hands than Capone.

“No doubt, Chicago is better known around the world for Al Capone than for its great and many humanitarians, artists, authors and scientists,” admitted the Chicago Sun-Times. “And, if the city is pleased with this image, then we suppose Capone’s South Side home ought to be declared a landmark.”

Local officials leaned toward recognizing the home, but following the bitter outcry rejected Samuelson’s proposal twice. One local amateur historian appealed to the Department of the Interior to place Capone’s home on the National Register of Historic Places. But when residents and local Italian-American groups again objected, the man behind the appeal quickly withdrew his proposal.

Despite never receiving landmark designation, Capone’s home has so far avoided the fate of many gangster landmarks. Put up for sale in 2014, its asking price dropped precipitously—from $300,000 to $179,000. The listing became an excuse for the curious to get inside and see where Capone slept. A headline in the Tribune wondered whether the building was “Untouchable.”

Almost four years later, the Capone home remains unsold.

While Chicagoans battled over the future of the South Prairie house, the Lexington Hotel deteriorated along with its neighborhood—from hotel to brothel to flophouse. By the time a court order closed its doors in 1980, the once-grand structure had become a hazard.

“It’s a monstrosity,” the local alderman told the Sun-Times. “The bricks are falling off, and the roof is falling in.”

A nonprofit foundation bought the shuttered Lexington, seeking to rehabilitate it. After workers came upon a walled-off space in the basement, television personality Geraldo Rivera agreed to host a two-hour live broadcast from the Lexington on April 21, 1986, for the opening of Al Capone’s vaults.

“I was pretty sure we would find either guns or money or dead bodies,” Rivera recalled.

The heavily promoted program confirmed Capone’s lasting hold on the American imagination. During the broadcast, a “Capone safe-cracking party” filled the nearby Hyatt Regency with guests decked out Roaring Twenties style, while the IRS—still intent on collecting Capone’s tax debt—waited to seize whatever money might be found. A crowd gathered outside the decaying hotel, harsh spotlights revealing its every crack and fissure.

“With no panes in the windows and with a huge hole in the sidewalk out front,” reported the Sun-Times, “the Lexington looked like a battle casualty.”

After exploring Capone’s old office and test-firing a tommy gun, Geraldo dynamited the supposed vault, exposing nothing but dirt and discarded bottles. He wandered off-screen singing about “that toddling town,” fully expecting he’d blown his career right along with the vault.

But some 30 million households tuned in, breaking records for a syndicated program. Rivera had not only turned his career around, he’d created a new genre: reality television.

The Lexington would never enjoy such redemption; various plans to restore and reopen it all failed. Within a decade, the building became “a stinking corpse,” according to the Sun-Times, “fouling a Near South Side community that is struggling for life.”

By then, the ownership of the Lexington had fallen into dispute. In November 1995, as both claimants battled in court, the city lost its patience and ordered the structure razed. As the Lexington fell to rubble, a local architect working for the city hoped to save Capone’s bathroom tiles.

In 1960, after eight Chicago cops were revealed to be part-time burglars, Mayor Daley fired the police chief and replaced him with a disciple of August Vollmer. The new chief instituted a series of reforms that would have made his (and Eliot Ness’s) mentor proud, cutting crime in Chicago by 15 percent.

Once again, however, these reforms were mostly for show. Daley knew wide-open police graft would delegitimize his whole administration, even as other forms of corruption persisted elsewhere. He “amputated an appendage to keep the body alive,” as one historian put it.

As for the Outfit, Daley—ever the pragmatist—chose to let the rackets operate under the radar, rather than drive them out.

“Well, it’s there,” Daley said of the mob, “and you know you can’t get rid of it, so you have to live with it.”

Organized crime helped Daley get elected, and he wasted no time in repaying the favor. He hired Outfit comrades to official posts, giving criminals “another chance.” In 1956, he closed down an elite task force gathering intelligence on Chicago gangsters.

“The police department,” declared the Chicago Crime Commission, “is back where it was ten years ago as far as hoodlums are concerned.”

Under Daley’s benign neglect, the Outfit grew to new levels of power and influence. As late as 1968, Chicago’s gangsters still obeyed the territorial divisions laid out in Capone’s day. Their organization increasingly behaved like a major corporation, extending its reach into new markets and territories—from Florida to Hollywood and especially Las Vegas, with its legal gambling.

“There’s money pouring in like there’s no tomorrow,” gangster Johnny Rosselli said in 1960.

The Outfit reached its peak in the 1960s, when the Central Intelligence Agency, through Rosselli, sought their help in its failed attempts to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Yet even as one arm of the federal government briefly became the Outfit’s allies, others worked with increasing determination toward their destruction. In 1957, after state and local police in Apalachin, New York, raided a nationwide Mafia summit, J. Edgar Hoover could no longer deny the reality of nationally organized crime, and the FBI finally went into action on that front. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy and an Untouchables-like team battled corruption in the mobbed-up Teamsters Union.

But the feds still faced the same problem Eliot Ness and his Untouchables had dealt with in 1931. Federal law remained largely concerned with criminals as individuals, giving prosecutors few tools to go after crime syndicates as organizations. Thirteen years after the Apalachin conference, that changed with the passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of 1970.

The law’s author, G. Robert Blakey, designed it to essentially outlaw membership in any criminal group, with much harsher punishments than old conspiracy statutes—no longer two years, but up to two decades in prison.

“You’ve got to go after the organization,” Blakey said. “Individuals commit organized crime, but organizations make the organized crime possible. You’re in it to destroy a family.”

RICO codified the root-and-branch approach Ness and his Untouchables had pursued against the Outfit, echoing their strategy of proving Capone’s role in the booze business by linking him to other members of the gang. Crime bosses could no longer hide behind underlings. Now every member of a criminal syndicate could be found equally guilty of any crime committed by that organization.

Blakey spent a decade urging law enforcement to adopt this new weapon, often by showing the Capone-inspired film Little Caesar to groups of FBI agents. Although he always refused to say whether the film’s protagonist—Rico Bandello—inspired the name of his law, Blakey used the movie to demonstrate the foolishness of trying to fight organized crime by targeting marquee mobsters. While the film’s flashiest, most press-hungry gangster dies in the end, his boss—the shadowy “Big Boy”—lives on after “The End.”

“What about Big Boy?” Blakey would ask. “They forgot about Big Boy . . . nothing ever happens to him. He’s still in charge. Oh sure, they got Rico. What’s the use of that?”

Beginning in the 1980s, federal prosecutors started using RICO to break up criminal syndicates. The endgame for the Outfit came in 2007, when federal prosecutors in Chicago—led by Patrick Fitzgerald, known as “Eliot Ness with a Harvard degree”—won the convictions of four gang leaders and their coconspirator, a corrupt cop.

The case, Operation Family Secrets, had been in the works for almost ten years, after an imprisoned Outfit enforcer agreed to inform on his associates. His testimony and that of dozens of other witnesses linked the Outfit to eighteen murders and decades of racketeering. By sending the four bosses to prison for life, federal officials finally completed the work begun by Ness’s Untouchables seventy-six years earlier.

Even before Family Secrets, the gang had become a shadow of its former self. Years of federal investigations and deaths of key leaders—whether by natural or highly unnatural causes—had whittled the ranks. Those who remained—“Mob Lite,” one magazine called them—retreated to Cook County, ceding the rackets in other states to local criminals.

“The Outfit is a business,” one criminal justice professor observed, “and they’ve learned that having a smaller core is good business.”

Unlike their fictional counterparts in the Godfather films, the literal descendants of Capone, Nitto, and their associates had little trouble escaping the family business if they were so inclined. By the new millennium, the children of the Outfit had entered business after business along Michigan Avenue—and not by muscling in, but by making their way honestly.

Asked at the dawn of the 2000s what had happened to the Outfit, the current head of the Chicago Crime Commission laughed and said, “They’re everywhere. They’ve become involved in every possible Chicago business.”

Descendants of Italian and Jewish immigrants no longer found their paths to prosperity blocked by prejudice. The crime and violence some of their ancestors had used to steal a slice of the American Dream had migrated south, into the region once known as Chicago’s Black Belt. Decades of predatory mortgage lending and deindustrialization have turned Eliot Ness’s old South Side neighborhood into a war zone, where street gangs battle over personal slights while innocents get caught in the crossfire.

As Ness well understood, stopping such killing requires repairing the surrounding environment, fixing the social and systemic problems that lead people into lives of crime. Local leaders have pursued that goal for years—the Ness family’s final home in Roseland stands within sight of the church where a young Barack Obama began his career as a community organizer.

In 2015, the governor of Illinois froze all funding to Operation CeaseFire, a crime prevention program designed to treat violence like a sickness, sending former gang members like antibodies into dangerous neighborhoods. Once funding stopped, Chicago saw a roughly 60 percent jump in homicides, with 762 murders in 2016—more than the 729 gang killings Cook County endured throughout Prohibition. The city’s renewed murderous reputation prompted a presidential promise to “send in the Feds.”

Yet that same year, Chicago broke its own tourism record with 54 million visitors, an increase of 15 million in six years. Most violence stayed concentrated in Roseland, Englewood, and other outlying neighborhoods, while the Loop remained what Robert Isham Randolph and the city fathers of his generation envisioned—a place where businessmen and tourists could walk without fear of catching a bullet.

So long as its most vulnerable residents are pushed to the margins, Chicago will remain “the murder capital,” as Kanye West called it, “where they murder for capital.”

In 1989, Chicago’s second Mayor Daley—son Richard M.—traveled to London, England, to promote foreign trade. When the younger Daley appeared on a BBC talk show, the host began by bringing up Al Capone and Eliot Ness.

“Are there still fellows around with mustaches, funny hats and tommy guns?” he asked. “I’m not foolish. I know the reason you’re here is to clean up Chicago’s image.”

Daley patiently reminded British viewers that Capone had left Chicago more than fifty years earlier.

“It’s a very warm, friendly city,” Daley said.

Five years later, Daley continued his father’s crusade to rewrite Chicago’s reputation by hosting the World Cup tournament. At the same time, Capone’s familiar face could be seen around town on a brewing company’s billboards, part of a series showcasing famous figures from the city’s past. Protests came from Italian-American groups and the mayor’s office, the brewery soon replacing Capone with Enrico Fermi.

Even so, Capone’s presence still hovered over the World Cup. International visitors would have their pick of Capone T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other souvenirs in the city’s many gift shops. Or they could visit “Capone’s Chicago,” a “Disney-like” museum on the North Side where guests saw an animatronic Capone—complete with cigar—sharing his life story. At Water Tower Place, an exhibit featured life-sized dummies of Capone, Ness, and the St. Valentine’s Day victims.

“Capone’s Chicago” would eventually close, as would the Water Tower Place exhibit, but Capone remains an undeniable presence downtown. Walk into any souvenir shop and you’re likely to see his face on a T-shirt or hip flask. His stylized portrait hangs in Chicago’s upscale Blackstone Hotel, where the baseball bat banquet was reenacted for the 1987 Untouchables film.

If Capone lost the battle for Chicago, his ghost won the war. That he remains the city’s inescapable face is more fitting than either Mayor Daley might ever admit. Foremost, Al Capone wanted to be loved; wealth was always secondary. Chicago, too, desires both your adoration . . . and business.

“It cannot be denied,” one Italian journalist observed, “that Chicago wants to be, and is, a lovable city.”

Perhaps that explains the loud, predictable protests raised against every visible reminder of Scarface Al. Chicago’s defenders still want to absolve their city of responsibility for Capone by branding him an outsider—an other, unreflective of their town.

As Chicago’s director of tourism said, “Al Capone was a New Yorker. He only lived in Chicago for 12 years. This city has spent millions of dollars to change its image. We have more Nobel Prize winners than any other city. More medical centers, more beach than Rio de Janeiro, the greatest symphony in the world. What we don’t need is the memory of Al Capone.”

When the question of making the Prairie Avenue home a landmark came before the city, prosecutor George E. Q. Johnson’s son wrote a letter to the Sun-Times, laying all the evils of Prohibition at Capone’s feet.

“This fiend killed, robbed, stole, murdered, corrupted public officials in such a brazen manner as to ruin the reputation of our great city,” he wrote.

Yet well before Capone arrived, Chicago was corrupt and violent, and it remained that way after he had gone. Pathologizing Capone—making of this opportunistic businessman a “fiend”—allows Chicago’s boosters to sidestep the central question: What kind of city—what kind of country—would allow such a man to exist, much less turn him into an icon?

Henry Ford considered Prohibition both morally and “economically right,” because sober workers were better workers.

“There can be no conflict between good economics and good morals,” Ford insisted. “In fact the one cannot exist without the other.”

By that logic, virtually every murder Capone committed was justified. The liquor ban offered wealth to those who couldn’t get it any other way, but bootleggers who wanted to stay in business had to defend themselves and their territory any way they could. Violence was not only “good economics” but self-defense—a necessary evil along the fastest available road to the American ideal of affluence.

“I can’t change conditions,” Capone said. “I just meet them without backing up.”

The same forces that created the assembly line also birthed the Cicero brothel whose cold, industrial efficiency so sickened Robert St. John. The laws of commerce, its system of incentives and rewards, guarantee every Henry Ford will create at least one Al Capone.

In 2007, as the Family Secrets trial coincided with a slew of local corruption scandals, the Sun-Times reflected on Chicago’s morbid fascination with its own crookedness.

“It’s not so much that we like our mobbed-up reputation,” the editorial said, “although some of us treat it as entertainment and revel in our infamous history. . . . But until we are more outraged than entertained . . . Al Capone will remain our favored forefather and unofficial mascot.”

Yet Chicago’s attitude toward Eliot Ness is strangely harsher than its love-hate relationship with Al Capone. The Transportation Building still stands, as does nearby Dearborn Station, where Ness and Capone had their one fleeting encounter; but no plaque or marker memorializes either structure. Back when Tim Samuelson was working to get Capone’s house designated a landmark, he considered registering Ness’s home at the same time, as a compromise to win the city over. But he dropped the plan after discovering Ness shared a two-flat with his parents.

“The real Eliot Ness really wasn’t that impressive a guy,” Samuelson claimed decades later, in his role as Chicago’s official cultural historian. “He gets his job through his brother-in-law. You rarely see his name in the newspapers of doing anything. He was kind of an underling.”

Ness’s true legacy and that of his Untouchables lives on in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the successor agency to the Prohibition Bureau. In 2014, Illinois’s senators—Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Mark Kirk—cosponsored legislation to name the ATF headquarters in Washington after Ness. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio introduced the bill, in recognition of Ness’s remarkable work in Cleveland.

“Chicago gangster Al Capone believed that every man had his price,” Durbin said. “But for Eliot Ness and his legendary law enforcement team ‘The Untouchables,’ no amount of money could buy their loyalty or sway their dedication to . . . Chicago’s safety. That steadfast commitment to public service is why it is so fitting that we remember Eliot Ness with this honor.”

Official Chicago quickly spoke up in protest—this time in the form of “the city’s most powerful alderman,” Edward M. Burke. A self-described “old-school” political boss, Burke became known as “the City Council’s resident historian” for his efforts to correct the record on Chicago’s past.

In 2010, Burke—having already worked to exonerate Mrs. O’Leary’s cow for allegedly causing the 1871 fire—convinced the Chicago police to reopen their investigation into the seventy-year-old slaying of E. J. O’Hare. But the alderman seemed unconcerned with actually solving the crime, telling reporters his real goal was recognizing the long-dead mob lawyer as the true hero of the Capone investigation instead of Eliot Ness.

“If nothing else,” Burke said, “O’Hare’s reputation ought to be rehabilitated and the truth ought to be known. . . . It was not ‘The Untouchables’ . . . that led to the conviction of Al Capone. . . . It’s a fiction of Hollywood.”

Four years later, Burke had lost none of his desire to write Ness out of the Capone story. After learning of the Senate proposal, Burke and another alderman immediately introduced what the New York Times called a “purely symbolic resolution” declaring Ness unworthy of such an honor.

“He’s a Hollywood myth,” Burke mistakenly claimed. “He probably never laid eyes on [Capone].”

Senator Kirk did his cause no favors by citing the 1987 film The Untouchables as his reason for honoring Ness.

“I think he did pretty well in that movie . . . ,” Kirk said of Ness. “I’m going with the Eliott [sic] Ness that was in the movie.”

At a City Council hearing over Burke’s resolution, three federal tax investigators seized the opportunity to vent their agency’s frustration with how Ness’s posthumous fame had come to eclipse Frank Wilson’s. One retired IRS official spoke of his relationship with Mike Malone, the undercover agent whose brief stint at the Lexington was spun into legend by Wilson’s and Elmer Irey’s embellished memoirs.

“Malone,” this former agent said, “told me Eliot Ness was afraid of guns and didn’t like leaving the office.”

The Sun-Times, which had ridiculed Burke’s earlier move to find O’Hare’s killer as “a lousy stunt,” now agreed with the alderman—Ness’s name had no place in Washington.

The paper opined, “Much as we love the legend of Eliot Ness . . . we can’t imagine why anybody would want to name a building for the real Eliot Ness, who just annoyed Capone.”

Even though the Sun-Times wildly understated the Untouchables’ effect on the Outfit, their editorial reflected a deeper truth about Chicago’s relationship with Ness. Today’s tourist will not find Ness’s face alongside Capone’s in the souvenir shops. If his memory survives in Chicago at all, thank Robert Stack’s late fifties incarnation and Kevin Costner’s portrayal in the Untouchables movie. While the 1959 two-part pilot film is, perhaps surprisingly, among the more accurate screen depictions, Brian De Palma’s brash, swaggering retelling of the Capone investigation bears scant resemblance to actual history.

Costner’s Ness defeats Capone only by adopting gangster methods, what Sean Connery’s character calls “the Chicago way.” Like Carl Sandburg’s “City of the Big Shoulders,” the phrase came to symbolize Chicago’s self-image—proud, tough, and defiant—even as it misrepresents Eliot Ness.

The real man, the antithesis of the Chicago way, still seems like a foreigner in his own hometown, dismissed by Burke and others as a Hollywood invention.

The American public will always prefer the fictitious, gun-toting Nesses to their mild-mannered inspiration. Writer Rick Polito’s sardonic summary of The Untouchables—“A federal agent in Chicago hampers the work of an enterprising American job creator”—suggests why.

Yet when the laws of commerce create a monster like Capone, Americans expect their government to ride to the rescue with a hero like Ness. They cheer the Dick Tracy–esque G-men who slay the most visible villains. But they don’t want the feds to stick around too long. A crusader like the real Eliot Ness, with ideas of fighting crime by rewriting the social fabric, will inevitably wear out his welcome.

Burke’s effort to kill the Senate proposal succeeded. Durbin, Kirk, and Brown abandoned it without further comment.

Though ATF headquarters remains nameless, the building displays a memorial to the Untouchables. Its central atrium, now named for Eliot Ness, greets visitors with his portrait. On an opposite wall are pictures of several real Untouchables, and an exhibit explains their importance to the history of federal law enforcement.

The symbolic battle for Chicago lives on in De Palma’s Untouchables, which rewrites the city’s geography right along with its history. Although many of the story’s real-life locations remained standing when the movie was made, the filmmakers invariably chose to exchange those buildings for more elegant and elaborate landmarks.

Thus Roosevelt University stands in for the Lexington Hotel; the Rookery replaces the Transportation Building. Ness and the Untouchables appear on the streets outside the Board of Trade, as defenders of “all the concentrated wealth of Chicago,” as one film critic put it.

The movie, while unmistakably set in Chicago, creates a fantasy landscape indulging in the myth that the Untouchables truly cleaned up the town. And as the physical reminders of Capone and Ness fade away, their very real conflict seems just another Hollywood myth.

The 1987 film inspired a television remake that ran for two seasons in the early 1990s. Christopher Crowe’s script for the pilot episode imagines a scene of Capone and Torrio, in 1919, walking along a bridge over the Chicago River—probably the Michigan Avenue Bridge, whose dedicatory plaque still bears Big Bill Thompson’s name.

Capone points out a skyscraper: the Wrigley Building, built by a man who made so much money selling chewing gum, he could afford to memorialize himself in steel.

“Johnny,” Capone says, “people want booze more than they want gum. If we make the right moves—now—there can be a building over there with our name on it someday.”

These lines didn’t make it into the finished episode, just as Capone’s fictitious dream failed to become a reality. If you stand on the Michigan Avenue Bridge today, the only name you’re likely to see (apart from Mayor Thompson’s) is trump, looming on the side of the blue-glass tower standing next to the Wrigley Building.

But walk along Wacker and over to State, up the stairs and onto the L. You may see a sign directing you to the airport, still bearing the surname of the lawyer who secretly worked to get rid of Capone, but don’t follow it. Take the Green Line instead, past the former site of a stop—Randolph/Wabash—that shared half its name with the head of the Secret Six. The train will carry you through the thicket of Chicago’s proud skyscrapers, leaving the Loop to head straight south. Get off at Cermak-McCormick Place, the stop named for the mayor who tried to have Frank Nitto assassinated and the publisher whose newspaper employed Jake Lingle and introduced the world to Dick Tracy.

Walk east along what was once Twenty-Second Street, but now bears the name of the martyred Mayor Cermak. You’ll cross Wabash Avenue half a block from the site of Eliot Ness’s first Capone raid, now an event space for weddings and other celebrations. Next door a gangster-themed dinner theater, Tommy Gun’s Garage, offers the experience of a Roaring Twenties speakeasy, complete with police raid. The menu includes a lasagna named after Big Jim Colosimo, whose famed café once occupied the parking lot.

Go one more block and stop at the corner of Cermak Road and Michigan Avenue, former site of the Lexington Hotel. As recently as 2010, an official historical marker from the Chicago Department of Transportation identified this spot as the previous residence of “one of Chicago’s most notorious citizens, Al Capone.”

Even that may have been too much for Chicago. The only historical marker in sight now prefers to mention a nearby hospital and church and all the development brought to the area by the 1893 World’s Fair, without referencing Capone.

“South Michigan Avenue,” it awkwardly reads, “has also been home to the Metropole and Lexington hotels, Chess Records, Chicago Defender and to many major car manufacturer [sic] in the world. . . . People who want to be close to the downtown area have moved into lofted apartments and condominiums, reinventing the area as a neighborhood that is just as vibrant.”

Where the Lexington once stood is a gleaming modernist skyscraper, all glass and sharp angles, the tallest south of the Loop. Built in 2010, this pet-friendly property offers more than three hundred spacious apartments, perfect for young professionals seeking their fortunes in Chicago.

Floor-to-ceiling windows provide the kind of sweeping, unobstructed views that Capone once enjoyed. If your window faces north, you may catch a glimpse of the Transportation Building, long since converted into condominiums, tucked away amid the jumble of the Loop. Only the top few floors are visible, including the one where Eliot Ness used to work.

Once or twice a day—and four times on Saturdays—a black bus full of tourists rumbles past. Photos of Capone, Torrio, O’Banion, and Moran look out from the windows as if taking a trip down memory lane, over huge white text: UNTOUCHABLE TOURS.

But when the bus is out of sight, you might look at the apartment building and never guess who lived there, more than eighty-five years ago. Not unless you notice, just above the door, the six letters making up the building’s name.

THE LEX.