Rise of a Gangsta Pt. 1 (Gangsta Chronicles)

There, on the second floor, high-heeled women paraded in varying states of undress, their movements lit by a bare bulb on the ceiling. A madam urged the customers to hurry up and choose. When the place got busy, Capone would head inside to warm himself and to make sure the customers behaved. He was a dark-haired fellow, not quite big enough or ugly enough to scare anybody at first glance. He stood five feet ten and a half and weighed about two hundred pounds, with a powerful chest and hands as big as a grizzly's. His hairline was already beginning to recede.

His eyebrows were thick and wide, and the two horizontal scars on his cheek were light purple and still raw-looking. His eyes were a changeable greenish gray. He charmed people with his broad smile. Capone cared deeply about his image.

He asked photographers to capture his portrait from the right, avoiding his scarred cheek. He wore the finest clothes and, despite his girth, looked comfortable in them. It is nearly impossible to find a photograph in which he is not the best-dressed man in the room, even when he was young and poor. He had style, but he walked a fine line. He would wear suits in bright colors such as purple and lime that other hoodlums would never dare, and pinkie rings with fat, glittering stones that would put to shame many of Chicago's wealthiest society women.

But he would never be seen in an ascot.

Smashwords – Rise of a Gangsta Pt. 1 (Gangsta Chronicles) - A book by Crystal Rayne - page 1

At the Four Deuces, he slid his body through the crowd with grace. He was a good host: The men in the bar enjoyed his company. When he finished his shift, he would walk back to the dumpy little apartment he shared with his wife, Mae, and their one-year-old son, Albert Francis. The place wasn't much, but it was better than anything he'd ever had growing up. Capone was born and raised in Brooklyn, part of a big Italian family.

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His parents were immigrants. Capone grew up poor, one of nine children, and dropped out of school in sixth grade. He ran with street gangs as a boy and young man, and worked a series of menial jobs as a teenager that made good use of his size, strength, and bravado. He found his true calling as a bouncer at a dive bar on Coney Island, where he mixed with some of New York's toughest thugs. He had come to Chicago to work for Johnny Torrio, once one of the legends on the Brooklyn gang scene and now a rising force in the Chicago underworld. Some accounts suggest that Torrio recruited Capone to join his organization because he spotted talent in the young man.

Others suggest that Capone fled Brooklyn after a bar fight in which he nearly killed a man with his fists. And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again. Chicago city hugged the lower edge of Lake Michigan, spreading in every direction it could. In , the city had been home to only thirty thousand hardy souls. By the population had shot up to three hundred thousand. Without the watery boundaries of New York, people felt no need to jam themselves into cramped, unforgiving spaces. Neighborhoods lined up one after another along the crescent-shaped coast, wooden shanties and muddy streets stretching on into the prairie.

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The city grew quickly and uncontrollably. Immigrants came in search of work: The police department—a mere afterthought in the city's earliest days of development—could never catch up. The city burned to the ground in The Great Fire burned for days and left seventy-three miles of streets a wreck of embers and soot. Nearly a third of the city's residents were rendered homeless. But Chicago rose again, with even more speed and vigor. This time, buildings of iron, granite, and steel filled the landscape.

And of course, the vice world came back stronger than ever, too. In the first eight months of , the city issued an astonishing 2, licenses for saloons. If anything, the fire proved a great boost to the economy, setting off a kind of Gold Rush. The opportunities were limitless, and men of energy and ambition sought to take advantage.

Great architects, great salesmen, great lawyers, great artists, and great criminals would forge the city's new identity. In , the World's Columbian Exposition brought another spurt of population growth, and with it, more vice. By , a special commission reported that five thousand full-time prostitutes and ten thousand part-timers worked the city, and that, combined, they were responsible for more than 27 million sex acts a year. If anyone even mentioned it, they were either dreaming or joking. By the time of Al Capone's arrival in , the population had climbed to 2.

And still it felt uncrowded and untamed. New neighborhoods attached themselves to old. The city just kept stretching: The sprawling geography allowed ethnic groups to cling to their old languages and customs to a greater extent than they ever could in New York.

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The wealthy lived mostly on the city's near West and near North sides. The working class lived mostly on the South and the far West sides. New arrivals could tell in an instant from the odors if they were in one of the city's poorer sections. Small steel mills coughed soot, and tanneries leached chemicals.

But the strongest and foulest stench came from the Union Stockyard: The smell buckled legs. The work was worse. Millions of cattle, sheep, and hogs moved through the stockyards, their throats slashed, their carcasses split and sliced, their entrails washed into the Chicago River. An army of seventy-five thousand men and women did the work. This was the work of Chicago. At the hub of the city sat the Loop, the city's central business district, where elevated trains screeched on metal tracks, and trolleys and trucks jammed the streets.

Here, the city felt like a city: Chicago was the nation's first city of skyscrapers. Buildings rose higher here than anywhere else, stabbing at the clouds in handsome shades of green, gray, brown, and blue.

It is inhabited by savages. Chicago welcomed the strong and spat out the weak. If you couldn't hack it, there was always a train leaving for Des Moines. That's why it attracted men such as the scorching jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong; the crusading lawyer Clarence Darrow; and the meatpacking titan Philip Armour, who treated his workers shabbily but gave generously to charity and once said, "I do not love the money, what I love is the getting of it. When he wasn't working the door or tending bar at the Four Deuces, Capone decorated. In an empty storefront adjoining the saloon, he arranged some bookshelves, a broken-down piano, and some old tables and chairs to make the place look like an antiques store.

It was Johnny Torrio's idea. Torrio wanted Capone to learn to carry himself with the air of a legitimate businessman. Capone printed cards that read:.

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The Levee District had always been home to entrepreneurs. Though it was only two miles from the elegant hotels and skyscrapers of the Loop, the district operated within its own special universe, with its own special rules. Movie stars and titans of industry had visited the parlors of the neighborhood's elegant whorehouses, including the famous Everleigh Club, where they spent great fortunes on wine, food, and women. Politicians had not only put up with the debauchery, they also had participated in it. But things began to turn during the years of World War I.

A wave of temperance swept the country. Americans were expected to sober up and sacrifice for their nation. Even Chicago cleaned itself up a little. The high-end whores and drug dealers, fearing arrest, quit working in bordellos and dance halls and moved to hotel lobbies, where they could be more discreet. In time, the Levee District became the exclusive domain of ripened prostitutes, customers who couldn't afford better, and the low-level pickpockets and jackrollers who preyed on anyone dumb enough to wander the streets alone and unarmed.

This was where Capone got his start. His timing was perfect. In , Congress asked every state in the union to vote on the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, banning the sale, manufacture, and transportation of intoxicating liquor nationwide. We want to know what makes them tick, to understand their world and to see it in all its bloody reality.

I never set out to write about gangsters. The sequel, Black Night Falling , saw my protagonist, Charlie Yates, drawn back to Arkansas, to the town of Hot Springs — a real-life mob town in the s where illegal gambling and prostitution flourished. The Godfather by Mario Puzo An obvious choice, perhaps, but a reflection of how seminal it is to the genre.

The book set the template for all that followed - from Casino and Donnie Brasco right through to The Sopranos. It still amazes me that in pages, the closest thing to a hero is a hitman who by his own reckoning has killed more than people. Epic in every sense, the book lays bare the violence, futility and hypocrisy of the policy, and is made all the more striking by its grounding in true events. That and the fact that it features the villainous Dudley Smith at his absolute zenith.

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Woodrell has never wasted a word, and this is no different: By turns a gritty mobster epic, a coming-of-age story and a cautionary tale about the price of success, at its heart this is a story of love and loss — and one that seems constructed to deliver an inevitably happy ending only to sidestep it, twice, in a manner probably only Lehane could pull off.