Scarface and the Untouchable

A CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Featuring a new preface and bonus material

The definitive history of gangster-era Chicago—a landmark work that is as riveting as a thriller

In 1929, thirty-year-old gangster Al Capone ruled both Chicago’s underworld and its corrupt government. To a public who scorned Prohibition, “Scarface” became a local hero and national celebrity. But after the brutal St. Valentine’s Day Massacre transformed Capone into “Public Enemy Number One,” the federal government found an unlikely new hero in a twenty-seven-year-old Prohibition agent named Eliot Ness. Chosen to head the legendary law enforcement team known as “The Untouchables,” Ness set his sights on crippling Capone’s criminal empire.

Today, no underworld figure is more iconic than Al Capone and no lawman as renowned as Eliot Ness. In Scarface and the Untouchable, Max Allan Collins, the New York Times bestselling author of the gangster classic Road to Perdition, and A. Brad Schwartz, a rising-star historian whose work anticipated the fake news phenomenon, draw upon decades of primary source research, including the personal papers of Ness and his associates, newly released federal files, and long-forgotten crime magazines containing interviews with the gangsters and G-men themselves.

Recapturing a bygone bullet-ridden era while uncovering the previously unrevealed truth behind Scarface’s downfall, Collins and Schwartz have crafted the definitive work on Capone, Ness, and the battle for Chicago.