Chicago Phone Directory

Chicago, also known as “the windy city” is the biggest city in the state of Illinois and the third biggest in the United States, after New York and Los Angeles. It has about 2,9 million inhabitants and it is famous for its ethnical diversity. It is one of the most important financial and industrial centers of the United States and it is an important part of the transportation network, having the second most important airport, after the one in Atlanta.

The 1920s and 1930s brought Chicago the reputation of the city of crime, everybody remembers the notorious Al Capone and his story. If you look know in the Chicago phone directory you will still find a few people bearing that name. Al Capone lived in the time of prohibition, a time when you could easily make illegal business with alcohol because he was prohibited by the state, thus giving smugglers the occasion to earn money from selling it on the black market. He was a child from a numerous family, he had eight brothers and sisters, so Al knew from his early years that he had to struggle to make ends’ meet. Unfortunately he chose the wrong side of the law. He was born in Brooklyn and he dropped out of school at the age of fourteen, so he started working , first at a candy store and then at a bowling club.

This is the time when he met Johnny Torio, a local gangster who will become his mentor. Later he started working at a night club, and this is where he got the three scars from the left side of his face, and the nickname “Scar face”. He got married very young, at the age of twenty, and then he moved to a suburb of Chicago, with his wife and new born son.

He started doing his dirty business in the town of Cicero, which was not so supervised by the police as Chicago. He got so powerful that he managed to fraud the town elections and get his own mayor. After just a few weeks, the mayor intended to get him out of town, so his revenge was cruel: he killed him, but this is the time that one of his brothers was killed too. Capone got his fame from controlling the underworld business of Chicago during the Prohibition era and got his money from smuggling alcohol and prostitution. They say that the profit of his operations, was about 100 million dollars a year, which meant a lot more money than as they do now. He was imprisoned in 1931 for tax evasion and imprisoned in Alcatraz and got out of jail in 1939 and he died in 1947 of a stroke.