| Al Capone ranked among the most fearsome gangsters of his era, but he was done in, famously, by his finances. Ninety-two years ago today, the mobster known as Scarface was convicted not for his acts of underworld violence but for tax evasion, receiving a sentence of eleven years in prison. (The court also required him to pay back taxes, plus interest.) Three years before he faced justice, Capone appeared in The New Yorker, in an article sparked by a brazen shooting in Manhattan. The incident couldn’t be traced directly to Capone, but the author, Alva Johnston, saw the killing as imported from Chicago, the gangster’s adopted home. Organized crime, fuelled by Prohibition-era bootlegging, had shifted power to the Midwest, Johnston reported ruefully, tongue thoroughly in cheek. “Chicago is the imperial city of the gang world, and New York a remote provincial place,” he wrote. If that weren’t bad enough, Johnston went on, “even Philadelphia has passed New York in importance in the gunman’s universe.” True, perhaps—at least temporarily—but Johnston needn’t have worried. Capone may have achieved infamy in Chicago, but he was born and raised in Brooklyn. | 
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