Al Capone Famous Quotes

Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself—she would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn’t Story’s problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life—Girl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit—but zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one uniquely humiliating breakup later, Story still had not tasted success, and with a shriveled-up writing career as her latest disappointment, she realized no magic slippers or fairy dust was going to rescue her from her Anti-Midas Touch. No Happily Ever After was coming. So she had learned to find a certain comfort in failure. In addition to her own screw-ups, others’ mistakes became cozy blankets to cuddle, and she snuggled up to famous failures like most people embrace triumph. The Battle of Little Bighorn—a thing of beauty. The Bay of Pigs—delicious debacle. The Y2K Bug—gorgeously disappointing fuck-up. Geraldo’s anti-climactic Al Capone exhumation—oops! Jaws III—heaven on film. Tattooed eyeliner—eyelids everywhere, revolting. Really revolting. Fat-free potato chips—good Lord, makes anyone feel successful.

Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, often regarded as the most famous decorated US army officer of the early twentieth century, wrote a book after World War I aptly called War Is a Racket. Upon retirement in the 1930s, he gave speeches around the country to spread his message—a message that sheds light upon the hidden internal dialogue underlying US military history. In 1935, Butler boldly stated: I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

That rare combination of "friendly" persuasion, extortion, blackmail and murder always worked for the KGB at home. Why would we expect it to fail abroad? As Al Capone famously said, "You can get much farther with a smile, a kind word and a gun than you can with a smile and a kind word." So the legislative reality, under the corrupt pedestrian surface, is something most people haven't fully grasped. It is not only the legislatures of the former Warsaw Pact countries that face hidden Soviet-era structures, amplified by the usual tendencies to corruption. The United States Congress was targeted by Russia a long time ago, and the level of KGB success may be measured by the total and absolute failure to detect activity that could not have failed to take place. J.R.Nyquist

A block of pale granite across from the White House, the Treasury headquarters was guarded on its south side by a bronze statue of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who designed America's system of money and gave birth to the forerunner of the coast guard in 1790 by launching a fleet of ten small "revenue cutter" ships to catch smugglers and pirates. Fifteen thousand people in Washington now worked for the Treasury Department, and another forty-six thousand in field offices across the country, doing all kinds of tasks: minting coins and paper bills; collect-ing taxes and customs duties; tracking the output of factories, the price of gasoline, the size of the annual wheat harvest. Elizebeth didn't have anything to do with these bureaucratic and economic functions. She was involved with the side of Trea-sury that investigated crimes. The department contained no fewer than six separate law en-forcement agencies: the Prohibition Bureau, the Narcotics Bu-reau, customs, the coast guard, the IRS, and the Secret Service. The six agencies had broad authorities to probe financial fraud and most any product or person that moved illegally across a border-guns, liquor, drugs, migrants, counterfeit money. The Treasury detectives were known as "T-men" in the press, as op-posed to the "G-men" of the FBI, part of the Justice Department. And although the G-men of the FBI tended to get the glory when famous gangsters went down, thanks to the publicity genius of J. Edgar Hoover, it was then the T-men but the Treasury, more often than not, who made the cases. Treasury was the center of the fight against organized crime. It was T-men who eventually mailed Al Capone for tax fraud. It was T-men who caught the kidnappers of the Lindbergh baby.