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For over a century, the Lexington Hotel on South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, saw it all. A US President regaling crowds from its balcony. Genteel 1890s salons for the respectable citizens of its Prairie Avenue locale. Businessmen on the make as the 'Windy City' became a vast hub for the American Midwest's meatpacking, stockyard and transportation industries. Cheering guests on news of America's victory over Japan in August 1945. Then, a painful post-war decline into the decayed haunt of vagrants, prostitutes and addicts driven in off the mean streets of the city's South Side. By the early 1990s, the Hotel's shocking neglect pointed to its inevitable fate. In 1996, just over a hundred years after its construction, this dilapidated testament to the optimism of a previous age was pulled down to be replaced by a modern glass apartment block. But scratch the surface of today's South Michigan Avenue and uneasy memories of the Lexington linger. Above all of the guest most associated with the Hotel's ornate, degenerate story. For at the height of the Prohibition Era the Lexington hosted one of history's most notorious criminals: Al 'Scarface' Capone.
Alphonse Gabriel Capone's bequest to history is a well-known catalogue of brutal racketeering, bootlegging, gangland murders (most infamously the St Valentines Day Massacre of 14 February 1929) and the corruption of both American public morals and her elected officials, including the US Judiciary, Chicago mayoralty and city police force. Born in New York in 1899 to an Italian immigrant family, Al Capone began his criminal career in Brooklyn as a nightclub bouncer, acquiring his trademark left cheek scar in 1917 and a reputation for ruthlessness and extreme violence, before moving to Chicago in 1919. The failed experiment of Prohibition (1920-1933) gave Capone his chance to graduate from simple street thuggery to major organised crime. Eliminating rivals, he built a criminal empire - 'The Outfit' - staffed by thousands of employees and worth over US$120 million by 1929 ($1.5 Bn today). Its tentacles extended from New York to Miami with Chicago as its vicious centre. Brewing and smuggling huge shipments of illegal alcohol, Capone profited from a bewildering array of Chicago protection rackets, gambling joints, speakeasies, illicit saloons and brothels. He controlled the whole supply chain, from consumer...