Hi, I'm Will Dameron, narrator for the audiobook of Daniel Stashhauer's American Demon.

If you enjoyed Case Closed, take an early listen to an extended excerpt of the book,

which is available in full now wherever audiobooks are sold.

Prologue The Last of the Good Guys

For about three years, beginning in 1936, Elliott Ness kept tabs on my grandfather, Fred

P. Stashhauer.

According to information in Ness's possession, Fred P. Stashhauer was an old egg tossing

vandal.

This, I admit, was news to me.

Elliott Ness, who rose to fame during the prohibition era as the man who got Al Capone,

kept tabs on a lot of people.

His private papers, now preserved at Cleveland's Western Reserve Historical Society, feature

a rogues gallery of bootleggers, rum runners, racketeers, and gangsters of all stripes.

Scrap books from his Chicago days chronicle his storied career as the leader of the untouchables.

The legendary team of prohibition agents who smashed up Al Capone's illicit breweries.

Edgens caught Capone.

Reads one clipping.

Elliott Ness, on the spot, escaped death.

There are also images of their famous battering ram truck rigged up with a heavy steel plow

to crash through the doors of the Alky Kitchens that fueled Capone's multi-million-dollar

empire.

There's even a newspaper artist's rendering of an enraged Capone swinging a baseball

...