These brains are like none other, because they combine the shrewdness and unscrupulous ruthlessness of high-powered criminals with the hired skill and concentration of first-line lawyers, accountants, business sharks and tax specialists. Their operations and their holdings now run into the multimillions. And they range from the filthy numbers swindle in the Negro sections of most large cities to chains of America's finest and biggest hotels, a building of their own in the heart of Wall Street, distilleries, breweries, real estate worth up to $5,000 a front foot, blue-chip stocks and bonds galore, night clubs and restaurants and the structures that house them. At the same time, they juggle the Italian lottery, a gold mine which has had comparatively little publicity, and which flourishes in every city that has slums; call-girl vice, the last survivor of the woman traffic in New York and a prolific source of profit; the international narcotics trade, with a world-wide organization for supply abroad and distribution in the United States, which probably turns over more than $1,000,000 a day here; almost complete monopoly of American bookmaking, the slot-machine business where they can put on the fix, and the lion's share of the gambling in Florida and Saratoga in season, in Nevada all the time and in various large centers where and when they can operate with comparative safety through political connections. This strange hybrid of respectability and lawless monopoly was really born of Al Capone's conviction on income-tax frauds. It shocked the mobsters, who had thought themselves immune, into a realization that any one of them, without an hour's notice, could be tapped for Alcatraz. Capone's defense was childish and completely without preparation for a man who had proven himself not only big and bold, but crafty and cautious, when he had weighed the odds for and against himself. There was in plain relief a record of big expenditures which he could not controvert and against which he could not prove income--that is, income which he had reported--and this was no trial for bootlegging or murder, but strictly a tax-evasion indictment. It is an axiom accepted by thieves that you can't do business with Uncle Whiskers. There were a number of meetings, in Chicago, New York and elsewhere, and the principal subject was: "How can we beat that Treasury rap?" The government does not usually prosecute where there is a confusion or a possible one as to tax liability. It reviews a return, examines books, asks questions, snoops around and notifies the subject that his questionnaire was faulty and that he owes so and so much on such and such findings. He then pays up, or sometimes settles and is even given a leeway of time to make restitution. The worst that happens to him is that he kicks in.