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

No, he obviously vastly underestimated his income, but that's sort of human nature, right?

Like he didn't have any idea how much money he was making.

He wasn't keeping books on this.

So he's just trying to figure out how to get out of this mess.

Frank Wilson was one of the internal revenue agents, and it was really the Revenue Bureau that did the heroic work here.

They were the ones digging up books, looking for accounting ledgers, looking for proof of Capone's empire, proof of his income.

And it was very hard to do.

As I said earlier, he didn't keep books.

So they were very fortunate, and they found one ledger that indicated payments to Al.

It was handwritten, and it didn't say Al Capone.

It just said Al Capone.

So they had some evidence that he was receiving income from brothels and casinos and from speakeasies.

But even then, the case that they ended up bringing relied mostly on proof of his spending.

It was a very circumstantial evidence, but the IRS agents were cobbling together everything they could.

And Elliot Ness was of no help.

The indictments that he brought for bootlegging never really factored into the attempt to put Capone away.

Well, Elianess, like Al Capone, turned out to be really good at marketing himself.

Late in life, after Elliot Ness served as a police commissioner in Cleveland, he went to work on a memoir with a terrific ghostwriter.

And the ghostwriter actually ended up completing the book after Ness had passed away and just spun this fabulous fable, much of it fictionalized, about Elliot Ness's confrontations with Capone and his breaking down doors and busting speakeasies and brothels and breweries.

But much of it was fictionalized.

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