Some of the most notorious criminals in U.S. history were brought down by a law enforcement leader who remains almost as overlooked today as he was when he died 60 years ago. He nailed the real bad guys: not your run-of-the-mill burglars and stick-up men but the big fish—guys who seldom did the dirty work themselves, instead commanding small armies of criminals on the street and keeping a hand in every cookie jar in town. Guys who used a team of lawyers and brute intimidation to keep their illegal acts, and millions of dollars in profits, quiet. Guys like Al Capone.

But few people know the real story behind the fall of “Scarface”—who and what really brought him and many other infamous criminals down. Elmer Irey, chief of the Special Intelligence Unit of the Internal Revenue Service, and his group of “T-Men” uncovered well over $475 million in tax deficiencies, and one of his most famous cases was built against Capone in the mid- to late 1920s.¹ Irey and his team meticulously tracked approximately five years of Capone’s unpaid taxes, from 1924 to 1929; in 1931 that evidence, along with Eliot Ness’s case documenting Capone’s violations of the Prohibition Law, finally brought the infamous gangster to trial.