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.