This had to be read of course, after being a fan of the film for so long I couldn't resist this book when i found it in a charity shop. Its been a while since I read it, so this review might not be so helpful, but I remember it being quite nicely written and still intriguing historically.

Awesome

read this after seeing the movie with costner/connery... movie was quite good, but the book is always better. :)

Great Law Enforcer Story! What a determination, and courage!

I found this book easy to read and well told, it’s short and never boring, it was very interesting in addition to having seen the movie a few years ago, but now I want to watch it again.

J’ai vu le film il y a quelques années, je ne sais pas quelle partie vraie et quelle partie est romancée comme je ne m’en souviens plus très bien, mais j’ai trouvé ce livre très intéressant, pas de longueurs dans l’écriture, ce que je reproche parfois dans les mémoires/biographies, bien raconté et facile à lire, et il est court donc il se lit rapidement.

I gave this book 5 stars even though it had a lot of language. It was an incredible read; I would have thought it was a fiction action-thriller if I didn't know better. Absolutely amazing that this is all true.

UPDATE: still just as good the second time around :)

Read very much like a crime report. Very dry. Had a few stories that I think were more inside jokes to Ness and his gang than the book.

Jacob Wirth

tThis book is about Eliot Ness when he was just getting started into the Prohibition Bureau. It started out with him and his friend talking what to do about how to stop all the bootlegging and they came up with ideas. Eliot Ness came up with a great idea and his friend went to the chief and later on. “ I’m sorry, I can’t do that because the leader of this squad is going to have free hand-and not even I am going to tell you whom you should choose.”(Eliot Ness, 22) This quote show the first time they made the decision on who is going to be the leader of the team.

tI think the Author did a great job with this book because he gave great detail into every plot that was going on in the book. It make it easily to tell what was going on in the book at the time. I learned how it was like to be an officer during the Prohibition era. There was a few parts in the book I didn’t generally like because there wasn’t much going on. But all together this was a good book to read.

t I would rate this book a 4 out of 5 because it had great detail and a good plot. I would recommend this book to my other police cadets because they would like to know how crime was and how it was like to be an officer during the 1920’s. It shows that gang violence is just has bad now as it was then, it hasn't changed much.

I guess I've always been a bit of a sucker for crime shows, and especially those that have the true stories behind them. I remember quite well trying to make sure I got to see every episode of "The Untouchables" way back when it was on the air.

In my yard sale book finds this past weekend was this book, "The Untouchables" by Eliot Ness/Oscar Fraley and I just had to have it. Got it for a song -no dance even required, ya know.

Well today, I had started reading another yard sale selection book by Joseph Wambaugh (can't even remember the title right now)and this evening, when I was going to sit down and read some more of that book, I couldn't find it. Apparently it has gone among the missing here in this house. So, wanting something to read, I pulled the book -"The Untouchables" out and started reading it then.

Boy, each chapter seemed like I was reading the dialogue from that old tv show as many stories in the book I remember seeing them when they played out on the tv!

It really was an interesting read -a slice of history -to learn much more about this man, Eliot Ness, and his work as a government agency on a mission to bring down Al Capone and various other gangsters of the Prohibition Era!

Definitely was extremely well worth what I paid for this book, which was a tremendous bargain to me and a very enjoyable one at that.

I started the book about 9 p.m. Wednesday nite and here it is now, almost 4 a.m. and I have already finished it! Excellent!

The Untouchables movie from 1987 has been one of my favorites since my first viewing. I've been interested in reading the book the film was based on for years, and picked up Elliot Ness/Oscar Fraley's 1957 The Untouchables at a used book store recently. While historical sources would indicate that some level of exaggeration or fabrication made its way into the novel, the story of young Elliot Ness' drive to address graft in the Chicago PD and Treasury Department's ranks, and subsequent targeting of Al Capone's criminal empire was fast-paced and gripping. Step by step, first-person accounts of raids on distilleries call to mind Robin Moore's French Connection, and Ness' interactions with police recall Serpico. Recommended.

Good story that has the feel of authenticity and reads quickly. Loaded with plenty of action and characters that come across well.
Eliot Ness does a great job of helping the reader visualize the time and the Chicago mood.
An enjoyable read.

I liked the 1987 Brian De Palma movie, so when I saw this old paperback going for a few dollars at our local second-hand bookstore I couldn't resist. It is in fact terribly written, and other people say it's not very accurate either - apparently the ghostwriter has improved the story a good deal. But assuming that the basic figures reported are roughly correct, here's the thing that surprised me.

We're told that Al Capone, at his most powerful, was pulling in about $1.5M a year from his various rackets, the most important of which was selling bootleg beer. How much is $1.5M in 1929 money? I wasn't sure and had to look it up. It turns out, according to the inflation calculator, that it's only the equivalent of $23M a year today. This is so little that the first time I saw it, my mind added some more zeroes - it just didn't make sense that someone operating on this kind of paltry budget could control a major city, paying off crooked cops and politicians and killing anyone he wanted with impunity.

But apparently that was the case. And to bring him down, all that was necessary was for a dozen honest citizens to decide they weren't taking this shit anymore and call his bluff, even if it did mean risking their lives for a couple of years. One of them, again assuming this account is correct, was in fact killed. But the rest of them made it. They smashed Capone's operation and put him behind bars for the rest of his life.

You know, that is kind of heartwarming. These evil people who seem so powerful are actually much weaker than they'd like us to believe.