“Do I do business with Canadian racketeers?” the mercurial Al Capone once said, when questioned about the source of the bootlegged liquor that was making him the king of the Chicago underworld. “I don’t even know what street Canada is on.”
Capone was joking, of course. In the Roaring Twenties, everyone in bone-dry America knew who was supplying much of the illegal booze flowing into the nation’s speakeasies and blind…
Dean Jobb
Dean Jobb is the author of Empire of Deception (HarperCollins Canada), the true story of a brazen 1920s Chicago swindler and his escape to Canada. He teaches in the MFA in creative nonfiction program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Articles by
Dean Jobb
Slow-Motion Disaster
Isolation and a tight-knit community caused men to risk their lives for a paycheque October 2008
David Lambert’s father-in-law died digging fluorspar in the Newfoundland outport of St. Lawrence. So did two of his uncles and more friends than he cared to count. Yet when a British company, Minworth, announced plans to reopen the community’s notoriously dangerous mines, Lambert was among the 400 men who applied for one of the hundred or so jobs being…