Capone Stories from the Tour: Capone's Dentist

Yeah I was Capones dentist. I had just finished my speech and was shutting down my computer. The man held onto his wifes arm. The woman nodded. He was Capones dentist. What was that like I asked. The man grinned. Dangerous He always came in with his goons. They were big guys in loud suits and they always had their guns out. It didn't matter how many people I had in the waiting room they  just walked in and nobody said a thing and Capone he just put himself in the chair. It didn't matter what I was doing. His goons would pull the guy out of my chair and Capone would sit down.

The woman nodded. Nobody wanted to mess with him. The man shrugged. Yeah. So Capone would sit down and his goons would take out their guns and hold them in front of him while I worked on him. And every time I had to do something I would say to the goons. This is going to hurt. The would look and then say to Al Capone. This is going to hurt Al. And then I would work on his teeth and the whole time they had their guns out.

So then I finished up. The woman nodded. He worked real fast on Capone. Yeah. So I finished up and then the goons would walk out in the waiting room and look around and then Capone would leave and the goons would give me a big fat envelope of cash. The woman shook her head. Just like that they would leave the money. The man shrugged again. It was a lot of money and those were hard times. It was the woman said. But I was Capones dentist. The woman nodded. He was Capone's dentist.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

How the Thompson and Valentines Day made Chicago get rid of Capone

It was Valentines Day in 1929 that sealed Capones fate. The German Shepherd tied to a bumper was the only witness and he wasn't talking. The smell of gunpowder still lingered in the air when the cops arrived. The Thompson Machine gun fired .45 ACP cartridges and fired them one after another. General Thompson wanted a gun to kill the Germans in World War I and so he invented The Annihilator. That's what he called it but everyone else called it The Thompson. Soldiers called it a trench sweeper. 

Whatever the name the angry gun fired one bullet after another from the gas of the last one. The war ended and the annihilator was very rarely used and it was expensive for civilians at 400 per gun. The British thought it was too loud. But a new group of men really liked it. The cost wasn't a factor and it fit nicely in a violin case. Just like a man going to a recital of death. So the Thompson did its dirty work in that garage on Clark Street on St Valentines Day and killed off seven of Bugs Moran's men. 

The brick wall behind the men would be sold to a restaurant in Indiana so people could sit and stare at the chipped brick. The Annihilator fired like a garden hose and that's how the two men dressed as cops fired it. One low and one high so they could be sure each man was shot at least a dozen times. And that is what made Chicago realize Capone was out of hand and had to go. The Annihilators rendezvous with Americas holiday of love. 

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Great Booklist Review of Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Reviews
Booklist Reviews 2017 September #1
In the years leading up to 1933, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two rich Chicago kids, murdered another boy for fun; the U.S. was mired in the Great Depression; Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped and murdered; Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany; and Al Capone, who had used Prohibition as a way to expand his criminal empire, was the de facto mayor of Chicago, even though he was, technically, a prison inmate.

 Amid all this turmoil, the Chicago political powers that be thought it would be a great idea to throw a World’s Fair. But how do you fund a $20 million extravaganza when the city is broke? How do you keep the gangsters from running rampant? The fair’s planner promised the people of the city that gangsters “will be gone” by the time of the fair, but how could he possibly follow through? 

Enter the Secret Six, a group of businessmen who joined forces for a most dangerous mission: to eradicate organized crime in Chicago by the time the fair opened. This is a thrilling and frequently surprising story about larger-than-life people and their larger-than-life ambitions. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.

Echoes of World War II

Those Goddamn Japs. I have heard that before from the Greatest Generation. You cant blame them. They fought the Japanese for four years after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec 7 1941. The Japanese embodied everything that Americans hated for those war years. They attacked us and assumed we would cower and that they could consolidate their gains in the Pacific before we could fight back. A few of our carriers were not at Pearl and that happened to save us for that scenario. But what still echoes today is that Americans hated the Japanese yes because they attacked us, but there was a racial component.

Imperialist Dogs. That leaked out of Kims mouth recently. Close your eyes and listen to the the hyperinflammatory rhetoric and the racial component of the Korean Crisis  hits you between the eyes. The Americans are the aggressors and the Koreans are the pure people who have been wronged. North Koreans believe they are the purest race and that Kim is divinely chosen. In World War II we had the Emperor who was divinely chosen. The problem was that the Japanese were willing to fight to the last man woman and child for the Emperor. It took two atomic bombs to get him to tell his people it was over and even then the military wanted to fight on.

The North Koreans view us the same way we view them. Different. Odd. Dangerous. This was World War II thinking that allowed us to drop those two bombs. This is the racial component. Somehow the Japanese were not human. They had done inhuman things and so that allowed us to not treat them that as humans. We are drifting quickly to this same thinking. Hopefully, people will not be saying sixty years on...those Goddamn North Koreans.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Lady Godiva Rides into the Second Worlds Fair

Sally Rand wanted to be part of Chicago's Second Worlds Fair. The young dancer who had an act at the Paramount on State Street where she danced naked behind giant ostrich feathers but she knew this was her last chance. So she did what any self respecting woman would do she hired a boat and got hold of a horse and covered herself with body paint with nothing on but a cape and headed for the opening ceremonies. It was a warm night for May and Sally Rand put the horse on the boat and had her boss from the Paramount drive her along the Lake front.

She could hear the crowd and see the lights. Her career in Hollywood had fizzled when the talkies came and her lisp resonated like a bad cymbal. Cecil B Demill didn't have to tell her it was over and that's when she headed for Chicago with nothing but a bus ticket. She ended up sleeping in alleys until she hooked the job at the Paramount. But working on State Street didn't compare to the glittering lights of Hollywood and Sally Rand wanted to climb back and she saw the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1933 as a way to do it.

So now she is on that horse heading toward the waters edge. The horse is restless as the boat bumps up against the cement retaining wall and then Sally digs her heels into the warm sides of the creature who just wants to run. It  is a dead gallop through the fair turning one way and then the other. The naked woman on the horse heads for the bright lights instinctively. It will be her last chance to be a star.

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Thank Al Capone for the Date on Your Milk

You always think that date on the milk came from some company who thought it was a great idea to let people know when their milk was going to spoil. And that date is pretty accurate and once it expires your milk goes sour. What most people don't know is that you can thank Public Enemy #1 for keeping your kids milk from tasting like the inside of an old shoe. Al Capone aka Bottles is the man who thought it would be a good idea to put a date on the bottle of milk so mom would know when to buy the milk and if it was going bad the next day.

So how did a gangster in the twenties make this change to bottling milk and just about every other perishable that we now take for granted. Capones bootlegging operation was vast and not only  did he bottle booze and beer he bottled milk. And he remembered as a boy many sour bottles of milk and one thing Capone was and that was inventive. In a different time he might have been a very successful manufacturer or run a corporation. He saw problems and solved them and ran a vast network of breweries, bottling operations and oversaw a transportation network that involved employing thousands.

So he saw it as logical to time stamp a date on a bottle and give a consumer an idea of how old hte milk was. The early dates were just the date of the actual bottling but of course this gave way to what he now have and that is an expiration date. Capone of course would not live to see his legacy in the from of a plastic jug of milk in a supermarket but it is one of the few things that transcend the murder and mayhem we associate with the man who went by the nickname "bottles."

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair