The silence has gone on long enough. It is time to acknowledge a chapter in Johnson City's history that generations of residents may have desired to suppress which quite truthfully is understandable. Johnson City, the storied railroad town, was also a town with a colorful reputation for activities involving bootlegging, gambling, and general disobedience of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (known as "Prohibition") which prohibited the manufacture or sale of intoxicating beverages.

Due to its location as a railroad crossroads in the Appalachian mountains - where a talent for manufacturing alcoholic beverages is a long tradition, Johnson City was stopover point and occasional hideout for some legendary gangsters most notably Al Capone. Located between Chicago and Miami, Johnson City was dubbed "Little Chicago" and the Montrose Court Apartment complex (constructed in 1922; destroyed by fire in 1928) was reputed to be the headquarters for Capone and his friends. The John Sevier Hotel constructed in 1925 also has been associated with organized crime figures, including Al Capone, but the Windsor Hotel (1909-1975) led the way as a reputed melting pot of various types of vice including activities not necessarily involving alcohol. Stories of underground passage ways and elaborate escape routes underneath the streets of Johnson City have not been documented, although the discovery of secret access points to former "speakeasy" locations has. Read news article of the 1929 speakeasy shakedown in Johnson City.

What proof is there that Johnson City is linked to Al Capone? Obviously Al Capone kept no diary so oral history is the primary source available with "Little Chicago" stories and folklore handed down for generations. Newspaper accounts during the 1920s support Johnson City's reputation as a "wide-open city" with operating characteristics similar to Big Chicago. The range of allegations against the city's police department and public officials in the time period January through March 1926 alone, is downright amazing. A series of local Chiefs of Police gave up trying to deal with the situation. Read carefully the Johnson City Staff News editorial attesting to the local conditions and Editor Carroll King's call for citizen support for the police force given the challenges at hand.

Telling proof also exists of Johnson City's reputation relative to vice conditions nationally. In the February 26, 1952 issue of Look magazine, Johnson City was one of 25 cities listed as"a hotbed of vice conditions." Knoxville and Chattanooga were listed in Tennessee as well, both of which were also major railroad junctions. For the record, Johnson City's neighboring town of Bristol, Virginia received a "poor" rating. Ironically Bristol, Tennessee (the state line between Tennessee and Virginia divides the two towns) received a "good" rating as did Kingsport.

In 1958 a movie titled "Thunder Road" was made in which Robert Mitchum stars as a backwoods bootlegger in Appalachia, getting squeezed by both the federal government and organized crime. This movie was a cult classic playing at drive-in theatres for years and is a relatively accurate portrayal of the underground movement of alcoholic beverages through the mountain regions of East Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Film producers have made numerous movies featuring moonshine transport adventures and these traditions are said to be the origins of NASCAR. The "Dixie Highway" (named Kingston Pike in Knoxville) was noted as one of the top Copperhead Road/bootlegging routes in the south.

A local businessman recently stated "Maybe it's my imagination but it seems to me that people who know an awful lot about JC don't know anything about "Little Chicago" and yet I heard about it from a former employee back in Atlanta before our first visit here." Although the code of silence has been broken, no family names of existing Johnson City residents will be associated in any way with either the reality or legend of "Little Chicago" so folks can rest easy. More information is being brought forward on this topic and will be made available later by Henry Johnson Associates once permission is obtained to use selected excerpts from taped oral testimonies.

In the 1980s noted Johnson City playwright Jo Carson authored a play titled "Little Chicago" which stirred considerable interest into the legends surrounding the town's association with gangster activity. An extensive interview by Polly Salvati in 2001 resulted in Ms. Carson describing her research into Johnson City's association with Chicago crime bosses. Several sources, now all deceased, only spoke with Jo on the condition of total anonymity. One source, an elderly lady from Nashville (who had seen the play on tour), called Jo and requested a private interview. The lady, then living in a nursing home, reported seeing Al Capone in Johnson City at the home of a henchman the night of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and said her father actually had participated in the murders. Capone was not in Chicago at the time of the event and court testimony during the trial later placed him in Miami. Whether or not Capone was in Johnson City that day or not, oral history strongly suggests the "Appalachian wing" of Capone's illegal alcohol network was in Johnson City, Tennessee during the Prohibition era.

As was true in Hot Springs, Arkansas (his Ouachita Mountain outpost) Capone was known to personally visit his territorial headquarters to strike deals with bootleggers and organize rail shipments back to northern distribution points. Concealment of illegal alcohol among the many other freight items shipping northbound via the Clinchfield Railway would not have been a difficult undertaking during the 1920s and the public attitude toward the Prohibition laws was largely indifference. Nationally Prohibition was a dramatic failure. Because liquor was no longer legally available, the public turned to gangsters who readily "organized" the bootlegging industry. With the industry being so profitable, criminal groups were handed on a platter a steady source of income provided by the basically unenforceable laws. The only actual "victims" were persons guilty of consuming alcohol. Al Capone was the acknowledged master of the national organized crime syndicate resulting from Prohibition.

Several leaders in Johnson City's Black community have important oral history documentation of activities in area hotels as well as the Montrose Court complex involving Al Capone and his entourage. These sources report some of the Capone gang's travels including trips to French Lick, Indiana's "French Lick Springs Resort and Spa" a luxury hotel linked with Capone. Many of the Black service workers from the 1920s and 1930s in restaurant and hotel employment as well as railway porters also were hired for other assignments as runners between gambling operations and card games. These young men were far more knowledgeable about who frequented Johnson City and the comings and goings among the hotel guests than the White community would or could have been at the time. An entire industry of service sector employees existed handling incoming freight from Johnson City's three railway depots, luggage deliveries to the hotels downtown, and providing the "eyes and ears" of illegal operations involving alcohol transport. Some of their descendents with strong historical and academic credentials are compiling a rich oral history related to the "Little Chicago" era. Any historical documentation of this nature in which first hand participants are no longer living has an undetermined margin of error and obviously relies upon the memory of the succeeding generation.

The stories related to "Little Chicago" include a mixture of fact and fiction and this chapter in local history is commemorated annually with the Little Chicago Blues Festival which is a fund-raiser for WETS Radio.

MONTROSE COURT Montrose Court was a luxury apartment house when it was built in 1922 on land owned by railroad magnate, George L. Carter. The Tudor-style structure was designed by architect D.R. Beeson, Sr. The completion of the building was heralded by a special edition of the newspaper on May 28, 1922, called the "Montrose Court Edition." The building burned on November 13, 1928 (causes never fully resolved) and was rebuilt housing 30 residences which are now condominiums. Completely renovated during the 1990s, this historic complex in the Tree Streets neighborhood (across from South Side School) has a long and storied history - much of which can never be fully documented. This property was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. View ad from 1930. Montrose Court postcard from Capone era. Historic Montrose Court - The Legendary Hideout? Front South Side Sign 1 Building Date Rear Entrance Sign 2 Front - 2nd View 1920s Postcard 1922 Ad for the New Luxury Apartments

Map showing the "Hot Spots" for Vice in U.S. - Look Magazine, 1952

"Bootleggers" were named after the practice adopted by smugglers in the 1800's, who concealed liquor in their boots when trading with Indians.