misfires

There’s a cathedral on Chicago’s North Side that I liked visiting as a kid. In its cornerstone, a bullet hole still lingers nearly a century after it shattered the rock: a leaden forget-me-not of the day Al Capone’s gunmen executed Earl “Hymie” Weiss on the church steps. Growing up, it was like communing with a mythological past. But then the less you know about wiseguys and gangsters, the grander they can appear. The real Al Capone was obviously not a mythic figure or a comic book supervillain; he was a thug with a gun and a big mouth who died…