Jonathan Eig

You're not going to find checks.

You're not going to find invoices that have Capone's name on them anywhere.

Yeah, the Pony Inn shooting is the closest Capone comes to really getting in serious trouble.

That was 1926.

Up until that point, Capone has been operating...

almost completely free of risk.

He owns the police department.

He owns the courts.

He's paying off people in every corner of government so that he's protected.

He even laughs about it one time when he gets pulled over for drunk driving.

He says, you know, I'll be out before you can finish your paperwork.

And he is.

He's released almost immediately.

But the Pony Inn shooting becomes a different story because one of the victims is actually an assistant state's attorney, a prosecutor.

So, you know, if gangsters are shooting each other, nobody gets too upset about it and nobody gets charged.

In all of the cases of gangland shootings, there are virtually no convictions in Chicago.

But the Pony Inn shooting, you've got Billy McSwiggan dead.

He's a state prosecutor.

And suddenly there's serious pressure to investigate this crime, to solve it.

And Capone recognizes that this is a kind of heat that he hasn't faced before.