A small squad of honest agents takes on the man who owns Chicago. The squad was real — but the men who actually brought Capone down never fired a shot.
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Work through the four short activities. Each word is shown in a situation that gives its meaning away — no need to know the film yet. Say your answer out loud first, then reveal.
Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987), written by David Mamet. Read each part, try the quick check from memory, then discuss. (There are spoilers ahead — that's the point; we're here to talk about it.) The film deals with real killings, and we'll treat them as killings, not as thrills.
Chicago, 1930. Alcohol has been illegal across the United States for a decade, and the ban has made one man extraordinarily rich: Al Capone, who gives interviews to friendly reporters while his organisation supplies the whole city. The film establishes his reach in the ugliest way it can — a bomb left in a small shop kills a child. Nobody is charged. Nobody expects anyone to be charged.
Into this arrives Eliot Ness, a young, upright Treasury agent with a warrant and a plan. His first raid is a disaster: acting on a tip, his men smash open a warehouse in front of the press and find nothing but umbrellas. Humiliated in the morning papers, he is ready to give up when he falls into conversation with Jim Malone, a weathered Irish beat policeman who has spent twenty years not being promoted because he would not take money.
Malone agrees to help, on one condition: Ness must understand what he is starting. They pick their own men rather than trust the corrupt department — Malone chooses George Stone, a sharp young recruit still at the police academy, and Washington sends Oscar Wallace, a mild accountant in spectacles. Their first honest raid works. The newspapers give the four men a nickname: the Untouchables. And it is Wallace, not the gunmen, who quietly points out the one route that might actually work — Capone has never filed a tax return.
1. Why is Ness humiliated at the start, and who agrees to help him?
2. What is the accountant Wallace's idea, and why does it matter?
1. His first raid, staged for the press, finds only umbrellas — the tip was worthless or he was set up. Jim Malone, an old beat policeman who has stayed honest and unpromoted, agrees to help him.
2. Capone has never declared his income, so he could be prosecuted for tax evasion — an offence that can be proved on paper, without needing anyone to testify about the murders.
The four begin to hurt the organisation: they ambush a whisky convoy coming over the Canadian border and, more importantly, they capture a bookkeeper who knows what the ledgers mean. Getting him to talk involves Malone doing something genuinely shocking — frightening the prisoner with an execution that is not what it appears to be. It works. It is also the moment the film quietly stops pretending its heroes are clean, and Ness lets it happen.
Capone's organisation answers in the only language it has. Wallace, the accountant, is murdered in a lift alongside the witness he was escorting, and the killer leaves a one-word insult written in blood. Then Malone is hunted down in his own flat and shot; he survives just long enough to drag himself across the floor and tell Ness where the last bookkeeper can be found — a train, leaving at midnight.
That leads to the film's most famous sequence. Ness and Stone wait in the marble hall of Union Station. A young mother is struggling up the long staircase with a pram. Ness helps her, the shooting starts, and the pram bounces down the steps one at a time in slow motion while the two men try to hit the gunmen and catch the pram at once. They get the child. They also get the bookkeeper alive — the man who can testify to what the numbers mean.
1. Which two members of the squad are killed, and what does Malone do before he dies?
2. What are Ness and Stone trying to achieve at Union Station?
1. Oscar Wallace, the accountant, is shot in a lift with his witness; Jim Malone is shot in his flat, and with his last strength tells Ness where and when the remaining bookkeeper will be leaving.
2. They are trying to seize Capone's bookkeeper before he is taken out of the city — the only witness who can explain the accounts in court.
The trial begins, and it is immediately clear that Capone is not worried: the jury has been bought. Worse, Ness discovers that Capone's enforcer, Frank Nitti, is armed inside the courthouse and has been carrying the address where Malone was killed. Ness chases him up onto the roof, and after a struggle he throws Nitti off it — the film's hero, killing a man in cold anger, and being allowed to enjoy it.
Back downstairs, Ness confronts the judge with evidence of his own name in the organisation's accounts, and the judge, cornered, orders the entire jury exchanged with the panel of another courtroom. Capone's lawyer, seeing everything collapse, changes the plea to guilty without asking his client. Capone, who has been smiling all week, loses control in front of the room. He is convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to eleven years.
The ending is deliberately flat. Ness packs Malone's things. A reporter tells him that Prohibition is about to be repealed — the entire law he has been enforcing, and that people have died over, is going to be cancelled — and asks what he will do then. He gives a short, dry answer about having a drink, and walks out. The victory is real; the cause has already expired.
1. What two things go wrong for Capone during the trial?
2. Why is the film's final exchange with the reporter a strange note to end on?
1. Ness forces the judge to swap the bribed jury for another courtroom's panel, and Capone's own lawyer then changes the plea to guilty.
2. Because Prohibition itself is about to be repealed: the law that all the killing and all the police work was about is on the point of disappearing.
The vocabulary of crime and accountability is full of verbs and adjectives that are locked to one particular preposition. You cannot reason your way to it and you cannot choose freely: it is fixed by the word, not by the meaning. Get it wrong and an educated listener hears it instantly — which is exactly why this set is worth owning.
Complete each sentence with the preposition the word demands.
1. The newspapers accused the young agent enjoying the publicity more than the work.
2. A grand jury charged the boss twenty-three counts of tax evasion.
3. He was convicted five of them and sent to a federal prison.
4. Nobody was ever prosecuted the killings in the garage.
1. of (accuse somebody of + -ing)
2. with (charge somebody with an offence)
3. of (convict somebody of a crime)
4. for (prosecute somebody for a crime)
Two of these are the same idea in a different order. Say each one aloud before you write.
1. For a decade the city blamed its violence a single family.
2. For a decade the city blamed a single family its violence.
3. He was widely suspected ordering the murders, but no witness would speak.
4. The court held the company liable nine years of unpaid duty.
5. Who was really responsible bringing him down?
1. on (blame something on somebody)
2. for (blame somebody for something — same meaning, reversed order)
3. of (suspect somebody of)
4. for (liable for)
5. for (responsible for)
Fill every gap with a single preposition, then read the whole thing aloud in one go.
The squad was never accused dishonesty — that was the entire point of the nickname. But when the government finally charged the boss tax offences, it was a bookkeeper, not a gunman, who could testify what the entries in the ledger meant. He was found guilty evasion rather than murder, and the men the film holds responsible his fall are not the men who were responsible it in life.
of · with · to · of · of · for · for
Notice the pattern: of attaches to accuse / suspect / convict / guilty; with only to charge; for to prosecute, responsible, liable and blame-somebody; on only to blame-something.
Carry all of these into the Speak tab — the whole argument of this lesson is about who should be held responsible for a victory, and who has been accused of stealing it.
Almost everyone knows the answer to that question, and almost everyone is wrong. Eliot Ness existed. The Untouchables existed. They did real and dangerous work. But they did not convict Capone, and the film's own hero would have been the first to be surprised by how completely history handed him the credit.
Ness was a Prohibition Bureau agent in his late twenties who read his way through the personnel files of every agent available and picked a small team — around ten men — on the single criterion that they had never been caught taking money. When Capone's people tried to buy them and failed, a Chicago reporter began calling them the untouchables, and the prosecutor George E. Q. Johnson happily pushed the name to the press. From March 1931 they raided breweries and distilleries, tapped telephones, and drove a truck with a steel ram through brewery doors. Within about six months they had destroyed plant worth roughly $500,000 and cost the organisation an estimated $2 million in lost income. That is genuine damage. It is supply disruption — and it is not a conviction.
The case that ended Capone was built by the Treasury's Intelligence Unit, headed by Elmer L. Irey, and run on the ground from May 1930 by a meticulous special agent called Frank J. Wilson. Wilson's team worked through more than two million documents, questioned hotel clerks and bartenders and shopkeepers, and pursued the only thing Capone could not intimidate: a paper trail. The breakthrough was a seized ledger of gambling profits containing an entry reading "Frank paid $17,500 for Al", and then the identification of the bookkeeper, Leslie Shumway, who could testify to what "Al" meant. Wilson also ran an informant inside the organisation, Edward "Easy Eddie" O'Hare — later shot dead in his car in 1939, in a murder never solved; his son Butch is the man Chicago's airport is named after.
On 17 October 1931 the jury convicted Capone on five of twenty-three counts — three felonies for evading tax in 1925, 1926 and 1927, and two misdemeanours for failing to file. On 24 October Judge James H. Wilkerson sentenced him to eleven years — ten in a federal penitentiary and one in the county jail — plus $50,000 in fines and court costs. It was, at the time, the longest sentence ever handed down for tax evasion. Ness's evidence did produce a separate indictment on more than five thousand Prohibition violations, but that was not the case that took Capone off the street. Accountancy was.
Jim Malone does not exist. The old Irish policeman who teaches Ness how the world works, wins Sean Connery an Academy Award and dies on his own floor is a creation of the screenwriter, David Mamet. There was no shootout on the steps of Union Station — no pram, no slow motion; the sequence is De Palma's open homage to the Odessa Steps of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925). And Frank Nitti was not thrown off a courthouse roof. Nitti outlived the trial by twelve years, took over the organisation while Capone was inside, and on 19 March 1943, facing a grand jury the next day over the extortion of the Hollywood studios and dreading another prison term, walked into a railway yard in North Riverside, Illinois, and shot himself.
The jury-swap scene is the interesting one, because something like it genuinely happened — with a different hero. The government was warned that Capone's people had the jury list and were buying names on it; the warning came through O'Hare to Wilson. On the morning of the trial Judge Wilkerson sent his bailiff to another courtroom and exchanged his entire panel for theirs. It is a real and remarkable moment of judicial nerve. Ness had nothing to do with it.
None of this was a caper. Between 1919 and 1933 there were 729 gangland killings in Cook County. On 14 February 1929 seven men were lined up against a garage wall on North Clark Street and shot dead by attackers, some dressed as police officers — the St Valentine's Day Massacre. It is universally attributed to Capone's organisation; Capone was in Florida, and was never charged with it. That is the real shape of the era: an enormous body count, and prosecutions that could only ever reach the edges of it.
Ness's later life was not a triumph. He ran public safety in Cleveland from 1935, made real reforms, then damaged himself with a drink-driving crash he tried to conceal; he lost a run for mayor in 1947 and drifted through jobs, at one point selling frozen hamburger patties, and was close to broke. He died of a heart attack on 16 May 1957, aged 54, in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. He met Capone in person, as far as anyone can establish, exactly once — escorting him to a train in 1932.
Months after Ness died, the memoir he had written with the sportswriter Oscar Fraley was published. The Untouchables sold around a million and a half copies, became a television series, and thirty years later this film. Fraley's book embellished; the series embellished further; Mamet and De Palma built an opera on top. Ness never saw a page of the fame — it is entirely posthumous — and Frank Wilson, who actually did it, is a name almost nobody can produce. That is the real story here: not that the film lies, but that a story well told will beat a case well built, every time.
This is the heart of the lesson — do it all out loud. The timer keeps you going; fill the time with detail.
Tell the story of The Untouchables in your own words, as if to someone who has never seen it. Move through the arc: a city where a criminal operates openly → the failed first raid and the old policeman → the four men and the accountant's idea → the killings, and the price of the methods they choose → the station steps → the courtroom, the swapped jury, the sentence.
Work in at least five key words (incorruptible, impunity, meticulous, ledger, clandestine, embellish, indict, posthumous, bootlegger, testimony), and use dependent prepositions throughout: "he was finally charged with tax offences and convicted of five counts, but nobody was ever prosecuted for the murders."
The film's moral centre is an old policeman's advice: against a man who obeys no rules, a man who obeys them cannot win — so break them. Ness accepts it, terrifies a prisoner into talking, and later kills an unarmed man on a roof. Build an argument. Does a state that fights crime by breaking its own laws still have the right to convict anybody of anything? Bring in cases you know — interrogation, surveillance, informants, undercover work — and take a side.
A memoir and a film gave a Prohibition agent the credit for a conviction built by accountants. Is that just how stories work, or is it a kind of theft? Make your case.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: