Scarface (1932)
The kind of gradual rise and abrupt fall you’ve seen before, but probably worth crediting this for doing it first, or at least the earliest version I can think of. Hawks would have lost his mind over Goodfellas. The Scarface in question is Tony Camonte, who starts out as a second in command for mob boss Johnny Lovo, but he’s really one of those guys with initiative, who gets things done, like killing many, many people and starting wars with the north side of Chicago to try and take over their territory.
It’s interesting that Tony’s criminal activities are mostly very successful: he takes over Lovo’s bootlegging business, as well as the rest of the city. He kills O’Hara, who runs the north side, he kills his successor - a non-monster Boris Karloff - in a bowling alley, and gets very rich in the process. His imagination remains limited, as now that he can do anything he wants, he still just tries to emulate Lovo, copying his lifestyle, his bathrobe, stealing his girlfriend. He’s kind of delightfully fruity in this regard, he wants to go out and have people approve of his fancy clothes.
Even when his enemies are trying to assassinate him, he remains unruffled, and very excited to find out that someone has invented a new kind of gun he can use. He only loses his cool when he sees his sister Francesca (an adult) out and about in the company of men, and repeatedly freaks out over it. She marries his henchman, and Tony, thinking it’s just a regular affair, kills him. Francesca comes to Tony’s heavily fortified apartment just in time for a police raid and gets killed by a stray bullet, leaving Tony to wander dazed outside to get killed by the police himself. I guess he remains undefeated vs gangsters.
There are several scenes of cars driving by buildings and riddling them with bullets, while the actors hide behind walls or duck out of sight. I learned that they achieved this special effect by just shooting real machine guns at the walls, and hiring people who probably wouldn’t kill anyone in the process.