ALL ABOUT AL CAPONE

They called him Scarface a name he hated so much that men were beaten for saying it to his face. For a few short years he was the best-known American alive: more photographed than film stars, cheered at the ballpark, mobbed for autographs at the races.

On a January night in 1947, in a villa on Palm Island, a blood vessel bursts in the ruined brain of a heavyset man in pajamas who once ran an empire grossing tens of millions a year — and now, the doctors say, has the mind of a boy of twelve. To understand how the master of Chicago ends his days talking to men dead for twenty years, you have to go back: to a cold-water tenement by the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and to a barber's son who never really stopped wanting to be liked.

ALL ABOUT AL CAPONE is a fast, immersive, and richly detailed portrait of the most famous gangster who ever lived: the sixth-grade dropout who built a business empire with the revenues of a major corporation, the host who dined his enemies before killing them, the tyrant who opened soup kitchens for the Depression poor.

Inside, you'll discover:

- The Brooklyn streets and the mentor, Johnny Torrio, who turned a wharf rat into a CEO of crime

- How Prohibition handed him a city — and how he took the suburb of Cicero at gunpoint

- The truth about the scar, the war stories he invented, and the name he could not escape

- The bootleg wars, the funerals of roses, and the rise to Prince of the City at twenty-six

- Publicity as armor: the interviews, the tips, the opera box, and the danger it hid

- The syphilis he ignored, the tax case that caught him, and the slow death of a king in exile

Part of the ALL ABOUT collection: short, modern biographies for readers who want the full story of a remarkable life without reading 800 pages to get it.

One coffee. One sitting. One unforgettable life.