How Al Capone and the Mafia directly influenced the making of Scarface: A lot of pressure

Al Capone was “Public Enemy No.1” and the notorious boss of the Chicago Outfit who was perhaps responsible for the St.

Valentine’s Day Massacre. He was also a movie fan.A new AMC+ documentary series, “Hollywood Crime Story: The Mob Takes Over the Movies,” premiering Thursday, recounts a surreal chapter in the early days of the motion picture industry when Capone and his Windy City thugs implanted themselves in Los Angeles and got directly involved in a landmark flick about their lives — the original 1932 “Scarface.”In the 1920s, the emerging mob and movie biz, with its booze-guzzling and drug-snorting stars, were becoming increasingly intertwined.“Hollywood is growing up and being solidified at the same time that organized crime is,” says Claire White, Sr.Director of Education at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, in the doc. Both establishments, in their own way, originated with immigrants in New York. But while the mob proliferated in NYC, many Eastern European Jews fled to LA, where they built lucrative film studios.

Those moguls included Harry Cohn at Columbia, Jack Warner at Warner Bros., Carl Laemmle at Universal and Adolph Zukor of Paramount.Hollywood was booming.And out east, it was being eyed with envy.

So, in the mid-1920s, Capone, who was born in New York but ruled the roost in Chicago, sent an associate named Johnny Rosselli to California to scope out opportunities for the Outfit. “Part of Rosselli’s ‘assignment’ in Los Angeles was to cultivate relationships with the film industry hierarchy,” Lee Server, author of “Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli: Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin,” told Vice. “He knew everybody, dated movie stars, played golf with studio heads.” A bootlegger and narcotics pusher, Rosselli was soon palling around with Charlie Chaplin and struck up a close friendship with Cohn, the co-founder of Columbia Pictures.In 1927, Capone visited Tinseltown.A kind of...