A decent read. I felt there was a lot of background information missing because I'm not familiar with Chicago history of Prohibition or Al Capone beyond the basics. The writing was tedious in parts and made it hard to get through. ( )

John J. Binder is an academic who has studied America’s most fabled gang war the way other scholars study economics or ancient history. This work tells the Torrio-Capone syndicate rose from one of twelve gangs to the omnipresent Outfit. I was delighted by his approach, which at last gave me an organized crime history with a minimum of speculation.
What did I love the most? I loved chapter 3, centered around a map showing the major bootlegging gangs in Chicago, January 1, 1924, areas determined by police precincts. Binder describes every one of the gangs and their bosses, providing photographs of every one of ‘em.
I enjoyed reading how he argued points: demolishing Jonathan Eig’s attempt to shift responsibility for the St. Valentine’s Day massacre from Capone to a nobody and proving that Black Hand gangs continued to operate throughout the twenties, being suppressed, not the police, but by the Outfit.
I think his tables in the penultimate chapter illustrate his approach well. They include gangland killings per annum and by cause, numbers of members of major bootlegging gangs, occupation of the victim—all killings, occupation of the victim—by cause of killing and for members of the major bootlegging gangs, method of killing, one-way rides, number of drive-by shootings, location of the killing (by type of structure, etc.); also, a map of Gangland killings in Chicago, 1922-1933,
Could you guess what he does in the final chapter? He gives the founders of the Outfit – Jim Colisimo, Johnny Torrio, and Al Capone grades. One B, two A-s. ( )