Making Chicago safe for sin took nothing less than organizational genius. Capone raked in up to $105 million a year (over $1.3 billion in today’s dollars) and spent roughly a third of it on bribes and muscle — gangsters, judges, politicians, reporters and half the cops in Chicago crowded onto the payroll. To this day, Harvard Business School students study Capone’s strategies to reflect on the best and worst of American capitalism.

Lawbreaking on this scale required pliant government. When Chicago elected a reform mayor in 1923, the mob moved to Cicero, Ill., and pushed its favored slate of politicians into office. The violence and intimidation on Election Day grew so intense that police squadrons came racing from Chicago, and the ensuing gunfight killed Al’s brother Frank. Four years later, the Capone organization backed the notoriously corruptible “Big Bill” Thompson’s successful bid for mayor of Chicago.

Nothing sticks to the Capone legend quite like the carnage. He is said to have been responsible for some 200 corpses during the Chicago gang wars. His boys rubbed out an assistant district attorney, and when the police hauled Capone in for questioning, he cheerfully denied the charges and buried the man’s reputation: “I paid McSwiggin . . . plenty, and I got what I was paying for.” He executed his pet reporter, circled back to Brooklyn to arrange the assassination of his old mentor and organized the notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, when his men, some disguised as cops, used machine guns to mow down seven members of the Bugs Moran gang. Everyone knew who was behind these killings, but time and again Capone jauntily faced the authorities with an alibi and no witnesses willing to talk.

The violence and corruption eventually grew too hot. It humiliated Chicago’s social and business leaders; agitated rival gangs, which kept trying to kill Capone; and appalled President Herbert Hoover, who, despite mixed personal feelings (while he was secretary of commerce he regularly slipped into the Belgian Embassy for a legal sip), vowed robust enforcement of Prohibition’s “noble experiment.” The president deployed the resources of the federal government to take down Capone, and the Justice Department hit upon a fresh strategy: Indict gangsters for not paying income taxes. The Supreme Court swatted away the mob lawyers’ creative defense — reporting illegal income would violate their client’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination — and just nine years after taking over the Chicago mob, Al Capone was on his way to Alcatraz. Thirteen years later he died of syphilis contracted in his own brothels — broke, demented and helpless.

At the heart of the legend stands the big personality. Al dressed in beautifully tailored lemon-, lime- and lavender-colored suits. He dispensed wads of cash to anyone who caught his fancy. During the Depression, he opened a soup kitchen that served up to 3,000 people a day. For one of Capone’s birthday binges, his men kidnapped the jazz great Fats Waller at gunpoint and made him play for three anxious days before stuffing his pockets with thousand-dollar bills and driving him home. Capone loved Verdi and took 38 seats at the opera for himself and his gunmen. After all the books and articles and movies, what more is there to add?