Jonathan Eig

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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

And that may have really infuriated the judge.

It may also have infuriated the president, because we do know that one of the emissaries of President Hoover visited Judge Wilkerson just a couple of days before the plea bargain was to have been approved.

But

in all likelihood, Wilkerson was just concerned or upset that it was going to look like Capone was getting off easy.

And before the trial began, Judge Wilkerson threw out the jury and insisted on a new jury and used a handpicked jury of people who had served on other juries that had convicted bootleggers, including several jurors who had been on the case that convicted Ralph Capone of income tax evasion.

Frank Wilson got word that Capone was trying to bribe the jurors.

And that is one reason why Wilkerson may have swapped out the jury at the last minute and brought on this group that he could depend on.

They were all rural Chicagoans from the outskirts of Cook County, which prompted Damon Runyon, who was covering the trial, to say that every time the jurors came into the courtroom, it smelled like turnips and hayseed.

So this was a sign that the deck was stacked against Capone.

Yeah, his lawyers were not experts in tax law, and they were making mistake after mistake.

They were failing to object to things that they might have been able to use to file appeals later.

So they made one mistake after another.

Capone was really done in by his own lawyers as much as by the prosecution.

The government alleged that Capone made hundreds of thousands of dollars based on, in part, the fact that he had tried to make a deal to pay his taxes.

And his lawyer had said he'd made something like a quarter of a million dollars over the course of several years.

He probably made a lot more, but they couldn't prove it.

All they had was this admission made in the course of an attempted settlement, which is questionable.

And it probably should have been protected.

It probably should have been excluded as evidence because it was an attempt at negotiating a settlement.

The problem was, as we said earlier, they have nothing but one ledger that mentions Al, doesn't even say Al Capone.

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