Le documentaire Bugsy Siegel, Dutch Schultz et Al Capone, The Gangsters, 1991

Bugsy Siegel, Dutch Schultz & Al Capone, The Gangsters, 1991.

This documentary deals with a few famous gangsters of the Prohibition era (1919-1933). During the Prohibition era  the sale and consumption of alcohol was prohibited in the United States of America. As a result, gangsters and mobsters grabbed the opportunity of making easy money by trafficking « moonshine booze and mountain dew ». Bugsy Siegel, Dutch Schultz and Al Capone controlled and corrupted the American Dream with their ruthless and bloody syndicated crime organizations. Running speakeasies, brothels, extortion and illegal gambling houses they infiltrated government and police force and threatened the entire nation.

The document opens with the life story of Al Capone who had come from Italy as a child and who became famous as a bootlegger (trafficking alcohol) in Chicago, Illinois. His nickname, Scarface, was due to a knife cut he had received as a bouncer, in a fight in the bar he was working in. He got arrested several times but no crime could be proved against him except tax evasion. He finally was caught and arrested by Eliot Ness and his Untouchables (i.e. policemen that could not be corrupted) and sentenced to life imprisonment. He tried in vain to bargain for a release after Charles Lindberg’s son’s kidnapping, and he died from a sexual disease soon afterwards.

Then the document shows a bootlegger who was very famous in New York City, New Jersey, where he ran many speakeasies where people came for alcohol and prostitutes. After a while, Schultz tried to assert his domination over other « turfs » (or gang territories) through gang war and he was finally shot down by his rivals, who resented people being gunned down openly in the streets, which was bad for business.

Last but not least, we can see « Bugsy » (or crazy) Siegel, who was a mobster, a mafioso, from the East, charged with recruiting Hollywood celebrities for the mob – actors like George Raft and Gary Cooper, or singers like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin – and who founded the first gambling casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, « The Red Flamingo »,named after his red-haired girlfriend, and which led him to his death as he could not repay his mobsters-creditors who finally shot him down.

The whole documentary insists on the contrasts of the « Roaring Twenties » (called « les années folles » in French), when people had boundless faith in technical and scientific progress and were daredevils (see the cannon-man etc.), when some happy few became unbelievably rich while a majority of others were « dirt poor ». For instance, we can see the Bonus Army (veterans from the First World War who had been promised a bonus for fighting in Europe and who had not yet been paid over a dozen years later) camping before the White House in Washington, District of Columbia, and the jobless after the economic crash of the Black Thursday of October 1929, selling apples on street corners or congratulating and thanking Al Capone for his soup kitchen. The document ends with a tribute to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who saved the country from the slump with his New Deal from 1932 onwards, a policy based on social and economic measures, including measures to regulate banks, distribute funds to the jobless, create jobs, raise agricultural prices and set wage and production standards

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