He lost his first wife, Mabel, in childbirth and his second, Margaret, when she could no longer stand him. His closest companion for years, Eddie, killed himself. His surrogate father and son - the Commodore and Jimmy Darmody, respectively - both turned on him, and both died for it. His sister and parents, including his abusive father, are dead. However, Nucky’s conversation with Lansky in Havana, in which it’s revealed they haven’t seen each other since 1928, means the Conference never even took place in the Boardwalk universe - so it’s possible that the show’s simply playing with the timeline.Įither way, Nucky’s empire as it currently stands has narrow boundaries, and establishing them cost him everything. But given the fictional Nucky’s envy of Joe Kennedy’s legacy, cutting the real Nucky’s single greatest contribution to American history is a curious choice. Lining up the end of the show with (presumably) the final consolidation of power by Luciano and Lansky makes sense - and hey, nothing’s stopping us from deciding that Nelson Van Alden and Eli Thompson were Capone’s St. Generally, Boardwalk‘s storytelling instincts are sound, particularly in building to big climaxes, so that’s a decision worth trusting. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 – falls in Boardwalk‘s seven-year gap between its fourth and fifth seasons. This in turn was a crucial step on the road to the establishment of New York’s “Five Families” and the nationwide governing body called the Commission by Luciano and Torrio several years later, following the bloody resolution of the war between Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano.īut the Atlantic City Conference – like Arnold Rothstein’s murder in 1928, like the stock market crash and the St. As the host of the 1929 Atlantic City Conference, a multiethnic gathering of crime bosses from across the country whose ranks included such Boardwalk Empire characters as Meyer Lansky, Charlie Luciano, John Torrio, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Waxey Gordon, Jake Guzik, and Owney Madden, Johnson was a pivotal player in the organization of the criminal network known as the National Crime Syndicate. Ironically, the underworld is the one place where our antihero’s real-life inspiration - Nucky Johnson - made a legacy that lasted. Establishing a legitimate business is the only life raft he has left if he wants the journey to have mattered at all. Nucky swam through “oceans of blood” to get where he is, but unlike the powerful patriarch from Boston, he has no family to protect, no dynasty to preserve. “I want to leave something behind.” So says Nucky Thompson to Joe Kennedy when the latter – a better class of Irish-American crook, his weapon the stock market rather than the shotgun – demands to know what drives the boss of Atlantic City to expand his empire.
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