Capone Medium Font Driver In ILLUMINATION

Born of my upbringing in Chicago, reinforced by The Untouchables, and tweaked by the true crime books and gangster pictures that have followed in the wake of The Godfather, I decided to write I, Capone, a novel predicated on the idea that Capone secretly dictated his memoirs to a Miami reporter.

In fact, Capone had tried to persuad e a number of writers to write his biography or ghost-write his autobiography.

But they had wisely turned him down, not only because of the dangers involved, but because Al Capone was an ingenious manipulator and bald-faced liar.

In I, Capone, he is out of prison and more or less recovered from his incarceration and the grueling treatments for tertiary syphilis to which he had been subjected by penitentiary doctors.

When a young reporter writes a letter denouncing Miamis attempts to prevent an ailing Capone from returning to his Palm Island estate, Capone invites him over and proposes that they undertake writing the gangsters memoirs, with the sole stipulation that the result cannot be published until after the death of Capones son.

After Capones own death, the reporter is terrified when Als family and the Chicago Organization get wind of the existence of Capones tell-all.

But he bequeaths his one surviving copy of Capones memoirs to his son, who finally gets it into print.

I have tried to employ Capones voice as he might have spoken after a boyhood in Brooklyn, a spotty education, his elocution lessons in Chicago, the company he kept that ranged from prostitutes and gunmen to celebrities and the founding fathers of Organized crime, his years in prison, and the medical treatments that I believe resulted in his derangement.

Writing his ostensible memoirs gave me a chance to try to fill in the gaps in Capones historical record.

But recent scholarship has illuminated some of his life as a gangster, a family man, and, for a time, the wealthiest criminal in American history.

So I have tried to stick to the facts and semi-facts about Capones life, and to fill the gaps with as well-founded speculations as I could devise, based on three years research in everything from his biographies to FBI and federal penitentiary files.

The result, I hope, is a voluminous but fast-paced, startling, authentic, and disturbing account of historys most infamous gangster.

Former Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, Columnist at Washington Post, Commentator on All Things Considered.

Follow 75 75 75 Al Capone Chicago Crime Historical Fiction More from Andrew Ward Follow Author of nine books, the latest: I, Capone.

Capone Medium Font Driver In ILLUMINATION

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