Times, and Division Street.  He says the last time the streets were this full of dead bodies, he was a teenager, and the man calling the shots was a punk from Brooklyn known affectionately as Big Al.

Alphonse Capone was born in the shadow of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the last year of the Nineteeth Century. His parents, a young immigrant couple from a village on the Bay of Naples, were unable to deflect him from the allure of street life and by the time he was sixteen he was an enforcer for the Five_Points gang.  In the summer of 1919,  he suddenly needed to get out of town for health reasons, so he took a train to Chicago and got work as a bouncer at the Four Deuces, a famous saloon-whorehouse on South Wabash.

The Four Deuces was owned by Johnny Torrio, a dainty little immigrant from Naples with tiny hands and chipmonk jowls—hardly the image of a gangster. But his head, too large for his body, housed a first rate criminal mind. Torrio may have been the first mobster of the modern era, the first real gangland businessman.  He hated violence—“There’s enough for everybody, boys.” But if push came to shove, he always had a cage full of gorillas like Alphonse Capone to handle the pushing and shoving.

The event that would transform these two men from local pimps to international icons had taken place a few months earlier when Nebraska became the 36th state to ratify the 18th Amendment to the Constitution: “... the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation therof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States... is hereby prohibited.” It would take effect just after the new year in 1920. “For John Torrio,” writes biographer Robert Schoenberg, “Prohibition was an answered prayer.  He always strove to turn crime into a regular business; now the fools had obliged him by making a regular business criminal.”^[7]

By erecting an artificial barrier between alcohol producers and consumers, the government had created a potential bonanza that can only be likened to the Gold Rush. No talent or capital