The Outfit

with Alana Hope Levinson and Dan O'Sullivan

Al Capone All American: Prohibition

1/22/2026

Description:

This week, on the next installment of "Al Capone All-American," Dan and Alana turn to the greatest gift Al Capone could have asked for on his 21st birthday: the national prohibition on the sale and manufacture of alcohol. From the Ku Klux Klan, to poisoned rotgut liquor, to the singularly forgotten political genius behind the law, prohibition would come to define an entire era of American history--a story freshly relevant today.

Sources

• Historian Mario Gomes's excellent website, My Al Capone Museum ( https://www.myalcaponemuseum.com/)
• The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State by Lisa McGirr
• Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition by Karen Blumenthal
• Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America by Edward Behr
• Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition by Mark Lawrence Schrad
• One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s by Thomas R. Pegram
• Prohibition: A Very Short Introduction by W.J. Rorabaugh
• Alcoholics Anonymous
• Al Capone’s Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago During Prohibition by John Binder
• The Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America by Gus Russo
• Gangland Chicago: Criminality and Lawlessness in the Windy City by Richard C. Lindberg
• Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation by Marc Mappen
• The Wicked City: Chicago From Kenna to Capone by Curt Johnson with R. Craig Sautter
• Mr. Capone: The Real - and Complete - Story of Al Capone, by Robert J. Schoenberg
• Young Al Capone: The Untold Story of Scarface in New York, 1899-1925 by William and John Balsamo
• Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone by John Kobler
• Capone: The Man and the Era by Laurence Bergreen

Newspapers and Magazines:

• The Buffalo News, The Daily Item, the Springfield News-Sun, the Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times, Washington Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune.