Jonathan Eig

speaker

434 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 18 Feb

Jonathan Eig’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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American History Tellers · St. Valentines Day Massacre: Closing In On Capone | 3 · 18 Feb 2026 podcast

He's one of the few honest men in the judicial system in Chicago that the feds think they can count on.

So the U.S.

Justice Department says to George Johnson,

Get Capone.

Go after him.

Whatever it takes.

We don't care what kind of case you make.

Obviously, it'd be great to get him on a murder charge or on a bootlegging charge.

It's going to have to be some kind of a federal crime.

What can you do?

And Johnson struggles with this.

He really can't find any proof that Capone is bootlegging, can't tie him to the Valentine's Day massacre or any other crime, and finally settles on income tax evasion.

And it's controversial.

They're worried that it'll look weak.

Here's this guy who's bragging about all his crimes, and the only thing you can get him for is not paying his taxes.

But George E.Q.

Johnson makes the decision that it's more important to get him off the streets, to get him behind bars, than it is to worry about how you do that.

Georgie Q. Johnson's boxes, which had not yet been archived, his papers were still just sitting in cardboard boxes in a professor's office in Nebraska.

They're fascinating because they reveal how difficult it was to make a case and how the government had to really bend over backwards and sometimes even cut corners.

I think, you know, today, if Capone had the right lawyer, the entire case would have been thrown out because the feds made so many questionable calls in trying to put him away and the trial itself was...

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