Academy Award winner Rod Steiger stars the most notorious gangster in United States history, in this hard-edged true story of Al Capone. Chicago, 1920s. During the era of Prohibition, when alcohol was illegal in the United States, gangsters gained enormous power by controlling the illicit drink. The most infamous and ruthless of these men was a small-time street thug from Brooklyn who murdered his way to the top of the Chicago crime underground and was, for a time, one of the most powerful and feared men in the United States.