Speakeasies, gangsters and steak: What it’s like to take a tour of Al Capone’s Chicago

Chicago’s received a captivating crime-filled historical past (Image: Tamara Hinson/ Getty/ Brettman Archive)

For seven members of the booze-smuggling North Aspect Gang, it wasn’t flowers they have been provided at a abandoned Chicago storage on February 14, 1929, it was a hail of bullets.

Who was behind this unromantic gesture?

Rival gang chief Al Capone, head of the Chicago Outfit, who died 75 years in the past final month.

In the present day, a bit of bullet-riddled wall is displayed in Las Vegas’s Mob Museum.

The storage was bulldozed however locals nonetheless sometimes get folks asking for instructions to the positioning.

Al Capone is without doubt one of the most well-known gangsters of the twentieth Century (Image: Bettmann Archive)

Downtown Chicago appears to be like fairly totally different to the way it did again in 1929 (Image: Getty Photos)

One other reminder of the thirst for data about Chicago’s bloodiest period is the trinkets repeatedly left on Capone’s headstone, in a cemetery on Chicago’s outskirts.

It’s a thirst quite a few fedora-wearing tour guides are completely satisfied to quench.

‘Chicago was the epicentre of an period romanticised by folks like F Scott Fitzgerald, creator of The Nice Gatsby,’ says Jonathan Knotek of Chicago Prohibition Excursions, illuminating a interval in America’s historical past the place alcohol was successfully outlawed for 13 years.

The gangster died 75 years in the past from complication from syphilis (Image: Tamara Hinson)

Holy Title Cathedral in Chicago the place mobster Hymie Weiss was killed (Image: Tamara Hinson)

However Knotek delves deeper, exploring points such because the influence on girls’s rights.

‘Earlier than Prohibition most girls in Chicago’s bars have been prostitutes,’ he says. ‘Immediately being there was unlawful anyway so girls have been welcomed.’

I meet Knotek on the Exchequer pub, as soon as a Capone-controlled speakeasy and brothel.

‘The again places of work have been rooms the place patrons took the women,’ he says, whereas the memorabilia masking the pub’s partitions contains photographs of Prohibition protesters armed with ‘we wish beer’ placards.

Additionally on the tour is the Inexperienced Door. Chicago’s oldest pub, a former speakeasy, is full of architectural options relationship again to the Twenties. Why all of the inexperienced? ‘Throughout Prohibition, one thing inexperienced indicated a speakeasy,’ says Jonathan Knotek.

Different websites embrace the Inexperienced Mill jazz membership, frequented by Capone. Guests can sit in his favorite sales space, chosen as a result of it provided a number of escape routes.

The Inexperienced Door is Chicago’s oldest pub (Image: Tamara Hinson)

Harry Caray’s Steakhouse is in a constructing as soon as owned by Capone’s cousin (Image: harrycarays.com)

Hymie Weiss — the one man Capone feared — is the explanation the Holy Title Cathedral options on many mobster excursions. The bullets that killed him in a gang battle nonetheless scar the brickwork.

My closing cease is Harry Caray’s Steakhouse, in a constructing as soon as owned by Capone’s cousin, Frank Nitti, who used it as a base for his liquor distribution enterprise.

Within the lobby, Knotek factors out framed cost sheets issued to Nitti, and Nitti’s phonebook, retrieved from a secure present in considered one of a number of bricked-up rooms within the basement. It’s normally off-limits however options on Chicago Prohibition Excursions.

There are framed clippings too. ‘Capone thought being bigger than life — and being in newspapers — meant safety,’ says Knotek.

How ironic, then, that weakened by the syphilis he’d caught from a prostitute, Capone died from a stroke. No romance in that.

Chicago Prohibition Excursions begin at £33, prohibitiontours.com. Doubles on the Pendry Chicago from £165pn, pendry.com, flights from London to Chicago begin from £440 return, ba.com