by Behr, Edward
Two government stenographers were then sent in. They worked in shifts in Mellin’s room, recording all of Remus’s conversations with his visitors. They learned a good deal about Remus’s bootlegging operations, including the fact that eighteen freight cars would soon be discharging liquor for Remus at a railroad siding in Covington, Kentucky (near Death Valley Farm).
But the operation also revealed the degree of corruption prevalent in Columbus. “One day alone, Remus had forty-four people in, and some of them were Federal prohibition agents or deputy marshals,” Mellin wrote. “He paid them an average of $1,000 apiece. When I had summarized all the information, I went to a United States official in Cincinnati, and said: here’s the dope. He looked at me for a full minute without talking. Then he said: ‘My boy, come back tomorrow.’ “
I went back the next day. He said: “Son, where is your home office?” I told him it was in New York. He said: “Son, there are times when a man has to be practical in this business. It’s only a few weeks to election, and the information you’ve dug up is political dynamite. The men you spied on — the agents and marshals — are political appointees. Go back to New York and forget it.” I didn’t go back to New York. I went to Washington and squealed. But it didn’t do me any good. Nothing ever happened on the Remus information.6
There were equally flawed government-funded speakeasy operations in Washington (where a banquet for major bootleggers was sponsored by the Prohibition Bureau in the Mayfair Hotel) and Norfolk, Virginia, and one curious aspect of the New York “Bridge Club” operation was that long after surveillance had ceased, it continued to function without ever being raided.
In light of all this, was Willebrandt’s contention that “Congress remained overwhelmingly dry” a tenable proposition? The answer is that, in 1924 at any rate — for all the grotesque law enforcement failures, the open secession of New York State (the other five were still to come), the disgust shown by honest people at blatant corruption, and the consequent growing damage to the American body politic itself — the mood of the country was such that repeal was not just unlikely, but impossible.
A crucial test came that year with the Democratic presidential nomination. Al Smith, the popular governor of New York State, was the Democratic front-runner. Despite the fact that he was a Catholic, and therefore deeply suspect to Southerners and the Ku Klux Klan, he was the only candidate who stood a chance of beating Calvin Coolidge. The latter, though Harding’s vice president, had been one of the few totally honest members of the Harding administration, and, because Harding had died while still in office, was already a temporary White House incumbent — almost always a considerable advantage for a presidential contender.
Al Smith had the backing of Tammany Hall, that network of largely corrupt politicians and entrepreneurs who ran the city, but there was no hint of major scandal in his own political past — and the fact that the 1924 Democratic Convention was being held in Madison Square Garden was a huge plus. But convention proceedings not only revealed an element of schizophrenia among grass-roots representatives as far as Prohibition was concerned, but dramatically underlined the veto powers of the Anti-Saloon League — its ability to ensure that any American president continued to do its bidding.
Both Wayne Wheeler and Izzy Einstein made notable appearances at the convention. It was yet another pretext for Izzy to disguise himself as a goateed Southern colonel, though by now he was so well known that his presence was not so much a disguise as a warning that those attending the convention had better moderate their drinking, at least in public. (They did not: according to witnesses, some of the delegations openly drank out of paper bags during the proceedings, and the galleries stank of whiskey.)
Wheeler had a far more serious purpose: to prevent Al Smith’s nomination. As a committed Republican, he wanted Coolidge, a “sound” Prohibitionist, to become president, and knew this was a foregone conclusion unless Al Smith became a contender. Wheeler had done his homework: he controlled one-third of all the delegates (mosdy from southern and midwestern states) who would never vote for a wet. But Franklin D. Roosevelt, a rising star in the Democratic party, made a keynote speech nominating Al Smith that had a galvanizing effect. “Ask your Republican friends whom they would least like to see nominated,” he told the delegates, and got a huge ovation.
Al Smith himself was well aware that his real opponent was not his likeliest rival candidate William Gibbs McAdoo — a nonentity dry whose strongest credential was that he happened to be the late president Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law — but Wheeler himself. While the convention proceeded without them, the two men met secretly in a New York club.
Their long discussion was surprisingly cordial. Smith asked Wheeler why the ASL had been so adamant in banning real beer, and told Wheeler that if elected, he would probably increase its alcoholic content. But he said nothing about repealing Prohibition, hinting that he was perfectly aware of the extent of dry sentiment outside New York State, especially in the South and Midwest. He told Wheeler that “being President of the United States would be quite different from being Governor of New York.” But Wheeler had the last word. When Smith made an allusion to his own possible future presidency, Wheeler told him: “Governor, you will never enter the White House.”7
In the contest that followed, Al Smith’s supporters wrecked McAdoo’s chances, but Wheeler’s dry delegates effectively blocked Al Smith (there were over a hundred ballots). In the end, as Wheeler had both anticipated and planned, the Democratic delegates selected a lackluster compromise candidate for the nomination — an obscure West Virginian political hack named John W. Davis. Coolidge won easily, and Prohibition was given a new lease on life.
Al Smith was not the only impeccably honest wet politician whose anti-Prohibitionist views stemmed solely from moral convictions. New York Congressman Fiorello La Guardia, who would become New York’s mayor in 1929, replacing the arch-corrupt Tammany Hall figure Jimmy Walker, was another.
A brilliant media manipulator, La Guardia was almost as much of a showman as Izzy Einstein. In 1926, after tipping off the press, he marched into Room 150 of the House Office Building in bartender’s uniform and proceeded to demonstrate how easy it was to make real beer, mixing near beer with malt extract, which could be bought legally. Inside Congress, he knew he was immune from prosecution, but when the news came from Albany, where the headquarters of the state’s Prohibition Bureau was located, that anyone caught making “La Guardia” formula beer would be arrested, the New York Times announced that “Representative La Guardia will walk into a drugstore at 95 Lenox Avenue, purchase the necessary ingredients and mix his brew with a kick. Then he will stand by to be arrested.” Little Flower, as he was known, was exceedingly disappointed when no Prohibition agent showed up, and a city policeman refused to arrest him. Newspapers all over America carried stories of his exploit, and one city editor wired him: “Your beer a sensation. Whole staff trying experiment. Remarkable results.”8
Although such antics seemed at the time to make him out to be a political lightweight, his opposition to Prohibition was no mere electioneering gimmick but stemmed from his conviction that it was destroying the nation. As early as 1919, he had told Volstead that “this law will be almost impossible of enforcement. And if this law fails to be enforced — as it certainly will be as it is drawn — it will create contempt and disregard for the law all over the country.” Excessive drinking, he insisted, could be curbed only by education, not legislation.
A born iconoclast, he openly proclaimed what other politicians believed but dared not even whisper. Consequently, he attracted a large number of enemies in Congress from the dry Midwest and the South. Southern congressmen, he told the House, knew full well that the moonshiners down south favored Prohibition because it increased their business “. . .if the people from the dry states would keep out of New York City, we would have no drunks there.” And if they were all for Prohibition, he told a constituent, it was because Prohibition “was only enforced am
ong the coloured population,” whereas “the white gentleman openly and freely can obtain and consume all the liquor he desires.” He could in fact have expanded on this theme. A detailed survey of “police blotter” cases involving Prohibition offenses in the Easthampton Star from 1920 to 1933 reveals that no socialites, or even “respectable” wealthy householders, were ever arraigned in the Hamptons: the victims of local Prohibition agents’ zeal were invariably working-class artisans or small potato farmers, often recent immigrants with exotic Polish names.
La Guardia returned to the theme of two-tier justice (not only concerning Prohibition enforcement) again and again. “May I remind the gentleman from Georgia,” he replied to a congressman who had urged him to respect the constitutional sanctity of the law, including its Prohibition provisions, “that there is also a 14th amendment to the Constitution? The 14th Amendment deals with human rights and liberties and it is as dead as a doornail in certain sections of the country.”
After a decade of Prohibition, he commented with some bitterness, “... politicians are ducking, candidates are hedging, the Anti-Saloon League prospering. People are being poisoned, bootleggers are being enriched, and government officials are being corrupted.”
Will Rogers, the famous American humorist, may have joked that “Prohibition is better than no liquor at all,” but to La Guardia, it was no laughing matter, for all its tragicomic undertones: as an Italian-American, he had a special reason to seek the end of Prohibition. He knew that the longer it lasted, the more the Italian-American image would be tarnished in the eyes of public opinion.
In fact, in New York at least, the underworld was by no means exclusively Italian-American. Frank Costello — one of its masterminds, and a brilliant businessman in his own right — took an Irish name, but he was born Francesco Castiglia, although he did his best to conceal the fact. However, his front man, “Big Bill” Dwyer; Tammany Hall operative Alfred J. Hines; and Larry Fay, owner of a taxi company that operated a mobile bootlegging operation, were Irish-Americans. Arnold Rothstein, one of the biggest owners of speakeasies, clip joints, and New York nightclubs (and the man who fixed the 1919 World Series), was Jewish. So were “Dutch” Schultz (Arthur Flegenheimer); Meyer Lansky, probably the most astute entrepreneur of all; and Benjamin (“Bugsy”) Siegel. Nor did the Italian-American gangsters operate in a vacuum. Albert Anastasia had an official, police-approved bodyguard who was not an Italian-American. “Lucky” Luciano trusted his Jewish underworld partners more than his fellow Sicilians. A leading Mafia hit man suspected of killing the anti-fascist refugee Carlo Tresca had a direct line to the (largely Irish-American) New York police department.
Chicago was where Italian-Americans came to dominate gangland during the Prohibition years — but the problem was not simply that Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, and the infamous Genna brothers were Italian-Americans and active in the Unione Siciliana. In Chicago, Prohibition resulted in so blatant a collusion between underworld figures and those supposed to be fighting them that during the three terms of Chicago Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson, Capone and Torrio between them “ran and directed the political, police and federal enforcement agencies of Chicago and Cook County.”9
13
CHICAGO
The Untouchables, that hugely popular TV series starring Robert Stack as Eliot Ness, with Walter Winchell’s gravelly voice-over narration, gave viewers all over the world a pretty good idea of American gangland activities during Prohibition — or so they thought. In fact, the series bore as much relation to reality as a Stalinist film of the 1950s glorifying the Soviet regime. Made with the close cooperation of the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover’s supervision (he monitored the series and the FBI had censorship rights), The Untouchables was a complete travesty — a blatant propaganda exercise eulogizing Hoover and the FBI, bending the facts to suit him.
First shown in the early 1960s, The Untouchables celebrated the triumph of the forces of righteousness over absolute evil. The FBI’s war on gangsters took place in a vacuum, with not the slightest hint that the underworld bosses were so aggressive because they knew they were aided and abetted by so many respectable individuals, including members of the judiciary and the police. Nor were there any references to politicians and elected officials on the take, to district attorneys and judges in collusion and even in business partnership with bootleggers, or to bribed, bent, or terrorized juries.
In fact, it can be argued that some of America’s biggest villains during the Prohibition era were not the Al Capones, Johnny Torrios, Gus Morans, Dutch Schultzes, or Frank Costellos but the political bosses in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere who used the underworld to their considerable advantage, and the many venal, conniving police and law enforcement officials who supplemented their incomes with mobster money.
New York’s mayor and Tammany boss James Walker — until defeated by Fiorello La Guardia in 1929 — enjoyed a cozy relationship with New York’s gangland. But nowhere was the collusion between politics and organized crime more spectacularly evident than in Chicago, where Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson’s three-term reign led to a virtual breakdown in law and order, and a situation in which — on a par with “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Port au Prince, Medellin (Colombia) in the 1980s, and Moscow today — gangs virtually ran the city. “Thompson,” wrote Fletcher Dobyns, “made Chicago the most corrupt and lawless city in the world.”1
It had been a wide-open town long before Prohibition became an issue. The old-time First Ward (district) Democratic bosses, “Bathhouse John” Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna,2 both sons of Irish immigrants, owed their clout, and their considerable wealth, to handouts from the brothel owners they routinely protected. “I always entertained state legislators free in the Everlight Club,” Minna Everleigh, owner of Chicago’s most famous and expensive brothel, told a Chicago judge after her retirement. That was the least of her favors.
“Hinky Dink” Kenna was a dour saloon owner whose generous “schooner” measures made it the most popular drinking place in town. He was also, for several decades, a hugely influential inner city Democratic party figure, who had devised a foolproof way of ensuring his partner Coughlin’s reelection.
It was called chain voting: genuine ballots were spirited away and marked for “Bathhouse John.” They were then distributed to floating voters, who were driven to the polling booths, where they voted, using the already marked ballots and picking up fresh ones, which they surrendered to “Hinky Dink’s” henchmen, collecting a small fee in return. These were then recycled, and used with another batch of voters, ensuring that “every vote paid for was really cast for Coughlin.”3
Long before 1920, the Chicago gangs had established a tacit but effective modus vivendi, sharing out their most lucrative activities — gambling, prostitution, “protection,” and strike breaking — throughout the various inner city wards. Paradoxically, the fact that local politicians (including Coughlin and Kenna) were so intimately involved in the management and protection of Chicago’s many brothels meant that violent crime was relatively rare. The politicians’ vested interests gave Chicago’s red light districts an aura of respectability — all those involved knew that bloodshed and gangland violence drove the customers away.
Prohibition brought this era to a close. The reason Chicago became synonymous with gang warfare — from 1920 to 1933, nearly eight hundred gangsters were killed in shoot-outs with other gangsters — was the irresistible profit motive. With no legitimate source of liquor left, clubs, speakeasies, and private dealers were compelled to turn to the bootleggers, and these, increasingly under the thumb of underworld bosses, became a ready prey.
From 1920 onward, a new breed of gangsters emerged to take advantage of the new situation. Underworld leaders — the term is inappropriate because they made little attempt to conceal their activities — used their links with politicians and politically appointed city officials, including the police and even the judiciary, to eliminate their rivals with virtual impunity. Given the cozy, m
utually rewarding relationship that existed in Chicago between politicians and mobsters even before Prohibition, the gangland saga that followed was eminently predictable, even though the gangsters’ political allegiances had always been notoriously fickle.
From 1910 onward, “Big Jim” Colosimo, the slot machine and brothel king (and owner of Chicago’s celebrated saloon Diamond Jim’s), had worked closely with “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse John” Coughlin — though he would campaign for Republican “Big Bill” Thompson for mayor in 1919. His demise, in 1920, shortly after Prohibition came into being 4 (Johnny Torrio, his bodyguard, almost certainly had him killed after “business differences” arose between them), marked the passing of an era. His was the first of the hugely expensive, ostentatious funerals that would later become a ritual. Congressmen; aldermen; members of the Chicago Opera Company; countless public officials, including district attorneys; and over a thou sand First Ward Democratic party stalwarts solemnly paraded through the city behind his coffin.
In pre-Prohibition days, many brewers and distillers had behaved like loan sharks, buying up saloons and then squeezing the saloon keepers for ever-increasing profits. From 1920 on, the new, younger, greedier gangs behaved far more ruthlessly, using terror as a weapon. It was, as Remus’s aide, George Conners, noted, a seller’s market: with good liquor constantly in short supply, saloon keepers and nightclub and brothel owners were now compelled to buy set quantities of liquor at set prices in return for “protection.” The purchasers knew that if they protested too much, the penalties could be fatal.
The police rarely intervened in such disputes, and underworld members, including those of non-Italian origin, respected a form of omerta: even on their deathbeds after fatal shootouts, they seldom cooperated with the police. Nor did the police intervene when rival gangs began hijacking each other’s liquor. As long as no law enforcement officers got hurt, it was a private war that did not concern them. As in Cincinnati in George Remus’s heyday, suitably remunerated uniformed police in Chicago even routinely escorted delivery vans belonging to specially favored bootlegging gangs.