Scarface and the Untouchable

<p><strong>The new definitive history of gangster-era Chicago-a landmark work that is as riveting as a thriller. </strong><strong>Now featuring a new preface plus </strong><strong>115 photographs and a map of gangland Chicago.</strong></p><p><strong>A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year</strong></p><p>Gripping. ... Reads like a novel. <em>--</em><em>Chicago</em> </p><p>Revolutionizes our understanding of Al Capone and Eliot Ness. <em>--</em>Matthew Pearl</p><p>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.</p><p>Today no underworld figure is more iconic than Al Capone and no lawman as renowned as Eliot Ness. Yet in 2016 the <em>Chicago Tribune</em> wrote Al Capone still awaits the biographer who can fully untangle and balance the complexities of his life while revisionist historians have continued to misrepresent Ness and his remarkable career.</p><p>Enter Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz a unique and vibrant writing team combining the narrative skill of a master novelist with the scholarly rigor of a trained historian. Collins is the <em>New York Times</em> bestselling author of the gangster classic <em>Road to Perdition</em>. Schwartz is a rising-star historian whose work anticipated the fake-news phenomenon.</p><p><em>Scarface and the Untouchable</em> draws 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. Collins and Schwartz have recaptured a bygone bullet-ridden era while uncovering the previously unrevealed truth behind Scarface's downfall. Together they have crafted the definitive work on Capone Ness and the battle for Chicago.</p>