prospective juror told the judge straight out he wouldn’t vote guilty because he didn’t want to get beaten to a pulp.

In January of 1925 a serious attempt was made on Torrio’s life. Remnants of the O’Banion gang, rightly convinced that Torrio had signed off on the murder of their erratic leader, waited for Torrio outside his house with shotguns. They blew four holes in him as he was getting out of his car. Somehow he survived, but for a man who liked to hum opera to himself, this was no way to make a living.  He turned the operation over to his less sensitive sidekick, Big Al.

At this point Capone took total command of an army of some 500 men, and his ruthless approach to marketing soon eliminated or co-opted almost all of his competitors. He travelled through the city of Chicago in a seven-ton armored Cadillac with cars ahead and behind full of young men openly displaying submachineguns.  Aldermen, senators and judges took orders from Capone over the telephone, and his annual tax_free income was about to make him one of the richest men in America. 

He was 26 years old.

And that is the striking thing about these Prohibition-era public enemies that jumps out at you from the old photographs.  All the faces are so young.  Street punks with machineguns.

But there’s one other thing that resonates with our time. If you look at a gangland map of Chicago from the 1920s, you find a chilling similarity with the map of today. On the Near North Side where the O’Banion gang once slugged it out with the Terrible Gennas, you now find the Vice Lords facing off with the Latin Kings. And where Terry Druggan and Frankie Lake once peddled synthetic scotch whiskey and needled beer, the Mexican Mafia now provides cocaine and heroin. And there can be no doubt who is the successor to Big Al. The vast territory that sweeps from the South Side and arcs around the Loop to the West is owned and operated by Larry Hoover and the Black Gangster Disciples.^[16]