The Serial, Part One: Wilson Traps Al Capone
This blog post is the first of three that explains Frank J. Wilson's efforts to fight crime by utilizing his intelligence in accounting and currency studies.
Unless a person is an infant or senile, they know of this Chicago mob boss. His story has been published, produced, broadcast, done and redone countless times for the sake of entertainment.
It's only minutely noted in those stories who brought him down and how. In this post, I will briefly go over the infamous Scarface Al Capone and highlight the works of the great Frank J. Wilson.
Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born on January 17, 1989, in Brooklyn, New York. He was one of nine children born to Italian immigrants. Capone got his nickname, "Scarface" from an altercation with a man and his knife. Capone hated the nickname, but obviously, it stuck.
Capone wasn't born into the ways of the mob, but stepped into the mob world and worked his way up to dominating it. After learning the ways of crime and taking advantage of opportunities with the prohibition, Capone eventually became Public Enemy No. 1.
Crooked cops and politicians didn't stop the mob boss, they only widened his reach and boosted his income. It was a lot of back-and-forth, in-and-out of jail and accusations for Capone, the justice system couldn't pin him down for good.
...That is, until this man.
Frank J. Wilson, a former accountant joined the US Treasury Department's Intelligence Unit in 1920. After nine years of being considered a tough and thorough investigator for tax income and returns, he was tasked with finding the smallest flaw that would bring down the biggest mob boss in the country.
Wilson and his team investigated Capone for years, looked through millions of documents, offered safety for numerous witnesses (with little to no luck), and risked their lives to go undercover. What seemed like another dead end became a monumental turning point in getting Capone for good, Wilson found ledgers from a past investigation.
The ledgers were in a mislabeled envelope in the back of a filing cabinet. This discovery created a whole new journey for Wilson. The ledgers didn't give away Capone or anyone specific, it took Wilson comparing the handwriting and rumors of Capone's interest in dog racing to finally get some headway.
Frank Wilson and his team worked very hard and didn't cut any corners on Capone's investigation. It took a lot of intelligence and patience to take down the Chicago mob boss. Capone was a smart criminal, but Wilson was a smarter investigator.
The information for this brief summary was provided by the Rocky Mountain Online Archive.