Author: Daniel
Posted: 28 February 2008, 11:59:00

'He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way. And that's how you get Capone.'

So swore Sean Connery in his Oscar-bagging turn in The Untouchables as Jim Malone, Prohibition-era America's only Irish cop with a Scottish accent.

But he was wrong.

Big Al was eventually banged up in 1932 for income tax evasion, serving six-and-a-half years of an 11-year sentence that had been handed out in '31.
Plus, he was forced to pay fines and court costs totalling $80,000.

Now the States' IRS has released details of the case against the corpulent mob leader known as Scarface.

Documents include letters and reports by Frank Wilson, a special agent of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, who worked alongside the Treasury Department's Eliot Ness and his team known as... well, you know. (Yes, they were real.)

Wilson tells of 'a tortuous trail through the crooked ramifications of underworld intrigue'.

How different, one wonders, is that to the experiences of modern-day tax investigators?

HMRC employees are invited to let us know.

Taxation Team blog

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