No survey could determine the wettest city in the country, but there were several contenders for the title. New York was an obvious claimant, but Emory Buckner would develop a few new law enforcement strategies that actually paid off from time to time. After Chicago’s wet, corrupt, and mob-backed Big Bill Thompson was returned to the mayor’s office in 1927 (“When I’m elected,” he promised, “we will not only reopen places these people have closed, but we’ll open 10,000 new ones”), the nation’s second-largest city might well have become its wettest. But during the four-year tenure of mayor William E. Dever and police chief Morgan A. Collins—“these people,” in Thompson’s phrase—the mob’s base of operations had been pushed into suburban Cicero, periodic sweeps had temporarily put a stopper in parts of the booze trade, and Collins could receive a letter like this one, from an officer of the Mid-City Trust & Savings bank: “This has been the cleanest, soberest day (Monday) that we have enjoyed in this Bank for four years. Every Monday we have from 50 to 100 drunks after their money. To-day we had only two partially drunk customers. Now spike the rest of the Bungholes for keeps. Yours for a clean city, C. L. Sayler.”
Like Emory Buckner, Dever thought Prohibition a bad idea but felt duty-bound to enforce it. Politicians and prosecutors of similar inclination held office in most American cities at one time or another during Prohibition, forcing long stretches of uncontrolled wetness to yield periodically to recurring bouts of at least nominal dryness. Usually the outcome resembled what had happened in New Jersey, where Colonel Ira L. Reeves had been responsible for a burst of intensified Volstead enforcement. Reeves’s bitter self-evaluation was concise. He hadn’t gotten rid of liquor at all. Instead, he wrote, “I had raised the price of alcoholic beverages and reduced the quality.” But in at least four major cities—Baltimore, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Detroit—not once was there a lull in the wet storm that blew in on the heels of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Baltimore had all the ingredients. It was a port city, with a large Catholic population, no state enforcement law, a semiofficial bootlegger operating inside the State House in Annapolis, and a famously corrupt police department that also happened to be a model of collective efficiency: speakeasy operators who made regular payments to a “fund for disabled policemen” were excused from any court proceedings. Baltimore also had H. L. Mencken leading the wet cheers in his column in the Sun and spreading the word to his prominent friends. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was living in Paris at the time, Mencken wrote, “Baltimore is now knee-deep in excellent beer. I begin to believe in prayer.” To Bishop James Cannon, with whom he had struck up an unlikely friendship, Mencken explained that no, it wasn’t true that a stranger could walk off the street into a bar anywhere in Baltimore and be served instantly. “You would have to be introduced,” Mencken said, “by a judge, a policeman, or some other reputable person.”
San Francisco was a contender for many of the same reasons: working port, large Italian and Irish populations, corruption that reached into the highest echelons of the federal enforcement effort, and a you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me disdain in the local version. Colonel Ned M. Green, federal Prohibition administrator for northern California, was a self-professed drinker eventually indicted for diversion of seized liquor. (Although he was known for the whiskey- and champagne-laced dinners he hosted at his suite in the Whitcomb Hotel, Green insisted that the incriminating evidence had actually been provided him by “friends with a mistaken idea of kindness.”) Judge Sylvain J. Lazarus was known to order police to return confiscated bottles to their original owners, and the San Francisco County district attorney did double duty as an officer of the local branch of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. The city’s proximity to the nation’s most fecund grape-growing regions added to the moisture. According to Sonoma County winemaker Antonio Perelli-Minetti, San Francisco was “the only place in the United States where the distribution of wine was practiced without guns,” because trash collectors had taken on responsibility for delivering demijohns brimming with California red and picking up the empties. No less an expert than General Smedley Butler, visiting San Francisco on New Year’s Eve 1926, observed the partying crowds tumbling out of the city’s big hotels and said he had “never before witnessed such an orgy.”
Sociologist Martha Bensley Bruere, who collected data from ninety-two cities for her 1927 book, Does Prohibition Work? (conclusion: sort of), placed the crown for wettest city on another heavily Catholic port, New Orleans. “There is general disregard of the law and scorn for it,” Bruere wrote. “Most of the men drink something every day.” Izzy Einstein, who always measured how long it took him to procure liquor in any city he visited, would have agreed; the cabbie who picked him up at the New Orleans train station offered to sell him a bottle just thirty-five seconds after pulling away from the curb. When Georges de Latour divided up the market for sacramental wines and hired agents to represent Beaulieu in various parts of the country, he made sure to keep the lucrative Louisiana market for himself. Much of the hard stuff in New Orleans came from neighboring St. Bernard Parish, where Sheriff L. A. Mereaux—a graduate of Tulane Medical School who lived in an 1808 mansion with its own private racetrack—collected a toll on all the bootleg booze passing through his jurisdiction. Visiting New Orleans in 1927, Michigan lawyer Lloyd T. Crane sent a postcard of the landmark Old Absinthe House to his friend Judge Arthur J. Tuttle: “From appearances,” he wrote on the back, “it is the only place where liquor is not sold here.”
But the champion had to be the heavyweight in Tuttle’s own jurisdiction, Detroit. By the time the Board of Commerce designated bootlegging the city’s second largest industry, Detroit had already lived through ten years of experience as the “City on a Still,” as historian Larry Engelmann called it. The two years of state Prohibition that had preceded the federal variety had accelerated a process that would become familiar in most other American cities: a brief period of law observance followed by a spasm of illegal importing, a futile tremor of enforcement, and finally a sustained deluge inundating the entire city. From across the river in Windsor came as many as half a million cases of liquor a month, most of it either dispatched by the Bronfman brothers in sealed railroad cars bearing forged documents, or ferried over in the hundreds of small boats that made up the so-called Mosquito Fleet. The Mosquitoes were more dangerous than the name might suggest. The boatmen were often armed and willing to shoot it out with the understaffed and underequipped Detroit branch of the U.S. Customs Service, which for a time had responsibility for patrolling a hundred miles of waterway, from Lake Erie to Lake Huron, with just three boats and twenty men. There were reports of a pipeline leading directly from the Hiram Walker Distillery on the Canadian side to some unknown spot in Detroit (probably untrue), and of a motorized cable pulling a pair of sled-mounted containers from an uninhabited Canadian island at the northern end of the river to a waterside house in Grosse Pointe Park (almost certainly true). The Ambassador Bridge, spanning the Detroit River, and the automobile tunnel beneath it opened in 1929 and 1930, respectively, both of them privately financed creations of Prohibition. “In less than three years,” wrote Malcolm Bingay of the Detroit News, “around $50,000,000 was spent so that people could get back and forth—quickly—between Detroit and our ever-kind liquor-supplied neighbors of Windsor.”
For a lot of the booze flowing across the river, Detroit was only a way station. An estimated 1,500 to 2,000 cases of liquor went on to Chicago daily, mostly under the auspices of an intercity criminal alliance forged between Al Capone and Detroit’s infamous Purple Gang. What stayed behind, plus what emerged from the hundreds of illicit distilleries and breweries scattered around southeastern Michigan, was sufficient to stock the back bars of the speakeasies, blind pigs, and beer flats that multiplied like mushrooms—Detroit had 7,000 of them by 1923, three times as many by 1928 (one journalist counted 150 on a single, soaking block). On New Year’s Day 1924, the front page of the Detroit News reported that 100,000 dri
nkers had clogged the city’s downtown business district in a “carnival of drunkenness” the night before, their “ribald cries and profanity” a sure sign that “it was drink, drink, drink everywhere.” Soon Detroit’s legitimate restaurant business began to collapse in the face of the untaxed, unregulated competition. In time, so many waiters, waitresses, cooks, and other restaurant workers fled for jobs in the prospering speaks and pigs that the AFL-affiliated Hotel and Restaurant Employees union had to shift their organizing efforts to places that, under the law, did not exist.
Local judges yawned at the liquor laws. In the summer of 1923 a prosecuting attorney showed up in a Detroit courtroom to tell Judge Edward J. Jeffries that the evidence in a bootlegging case—a large quantity of seized liquor—had mysteriously disappeared from police headquarters. “That’s a poor place to bring liquor,” Judge Jeffries told the prosecutor as he dismissed the case. Clarence Darrow, in Detroit two years later to defend a black man in a controversial murder trial, spent his lunch hours drinking with judges and other officials at Cohen’s speakeasy near the courthouse. Unwilling to leave the building on the day the case went to the jury, Darrow and his colleagues waited for the verdict while sharing a supply of Scotch in an adjacent courtroom that had been unlocked by an obliging court officer.
Enforcement did take place in Detroit; it just didn’t have anything to do with drinking. A succession of mayors and police chiefs would occasionally crack down on places that were disorderly, or fostered criminal activity, or belonged to an ugly category known as “school pigs,” sleazy operations set up near high schools. But any establishment that obeyed the rest of the criminal code—all the laws that had nothing to do with Prohibition—was left alone. Mayor John W. Smith was a progressive, good-government Republican who came to believe Prohibition was “a tragic joke.” Running for reelection in 1927, he openly declared he would not enforce any wet laws, yet he won the support of some of the city’s most notable citizens, among them architect Albert Kahn, auto magnates Fred J. and Charles T. Fisher, and the city’s greatest athletic hero, Ty Cobb. Smith ended up losing to a dry, John C. Lodge—but in Detroit “dry” was a relative term, which Lodge made clear when he said he intended to be “practical” in his enforcement policy. Which meant Detroit stayed wet.
To Judge Tuttle, trying to keep up with an exploding docket in federal court, the situation in southeastern Michigan was an outrage made worse by the indifference of local officials. The federal presence in Michigan was limited to just three federal judges, two U.S. attorneys, two federal marshals, and a local office of the Prohibition Bureau that was underfunded and wracked by corruption. A note from a woman complaining about bootlegging in her neighborhood provoked Tuttle to spill out his frustrations in a lengthy letter. There were hundreds of state judges, hundreds of state prosecutors, and thousands of local cops, he told her, yet everyone seemed to expect him to enforce the law on his own. “The people seem to be turning to the Federal Government and expecting Uncle Sam to do everything,” he wrote. Why didn’t she ask her local police to do their jobs? To Michigan’s attorney general, he bitterly complained that Volstead cases had been “crowding all other classes of business out of my court.”
At least Arthur J. Tuttle’s frustrations never approached those that afflicted his Minnesota colleague, federal district judge John F. McGee—the “bootleggers’ terror” who had commandeered sightseeing buses to ship Volstead violators off to jail. “The fact is that the United States District Court has become a Police Court,” McGee wrote from his chambers in 1925. Eighty percent of the cases brought before him were Prohibition related, he added, “with the end not in sight. I started, in March 1923, to rush that branch of the litigation and thought I would end it, but it ended me.” Then McGee put down his pen and blew his brains out.
THE TENSION BETWEEN federal and state enforcement programs could not be resolved. Nor could the burden on the federal courts be relieved. Emory Buckner’s friend Felix Frankfurter proposed that the federal system confine its efforts to interstate violations and illegal imports, “leaving to the states all intra-state violations of the law.” This sort of federal focus might have imperiled, or at least diminished, the cross-border smuggling business. But the medicinal alcohol market, the sacramental wine scam, the booming wine grape business, the malt syrup bonanza, and large portions of the enormous industrial liquor racket would have enabled New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, et al., to remain exactly as they were: open cities with open taps. Yet even if a plan like Frankfurter’s could have been effective, it could never have pleased the drys, who remained as committed to notional enforcement as they were to the authentic variety.
The disharmony created by federal effort at its most earnest and local resistance at its most craven resounded most strikingly in Mobile, Alabama. Its status as a port with a majority Catholic voting population had long made Mobile an exotic presence in Alabama. During the push toward state Prohibition in the first decade of the century, Mobilians made what a contemporary journalist called “a spectacular but ineffectual threat” to secede from the state rather than submit to a dry law. They really needn’t have bothered; until 1923 state and federal Prohibition disturbed the liquor trade in Mobile about as much as it disrupted the caribou business in the Yukon. A version of Rum Row operated offshore in the Gulf, moonshine from stills scattered across the southern Alabama countryside flowed straight downhill to the black part of town, and members of the city’s political and commercial establishment profited from a protection racket that would have been impressive in Detroit or Chicago. Dry resistance, such as it was, was centered in the St. Francis Street Methodist Church, where in 1924 members of the Men’s Club heard a visiting politician chastise them for their inaction against corruption and liquor. “Wrong cannot exist when men and women take up the banner of Christ,” the visitor said. He challenged them not to “sit supinely” while depredation ravaged their city.
The speaker was thirty-eight-year-old Hugo Lafayette Black, brought to town as a special prosecutor by Mabel Willebrandt. He had not yet begun his passage from loyal member of the Ku Klux Klan to champion of individual rights on the U.S. Supreme Court. Dry both personally and politically, he had been the scourge of Birmingham at the onset of statewide Prohibition nine years earlier, when as the chief prosecutor of Jefferson County he had subdued bootleggers and saloon operators by summoning moralistic passion and exceptional legal skills. As a local judge, he handed out maximum sentences as if they were business cards. Like Gifford Pinchot’s enforcement agents in Pennsylvania, who were paid by the WCTU, on this new assignment Black had to get his first few paychecks from the Mobile Citizens’ League until the Justice Department figured out how to compensate him.
Black arrived in Mobile on the heels of another unlikely character dispatched by the attentive Willebrandt: Izzy Einstein. During his extended stay in the city, “the Sherlock Holmes of the prohibition enforcement officers,” as the Mobile Register called him, penetrated every aspect of the city’s liquor business. He rolled out his usual set of disguises—in his career he’d posed as a farmer, a streetcar conductor, a gravedigger, an opera singer, and countless other types—but the Mobile assignment didn’t require his usual subterfuge. “Izzy believes that his Hebraic personality and his foreign accent are invaluable assets in his work,” the Register reported. “In nine cases out of ten,” Einstein told the newspaper, “I am taken for granted as a traveling salesman. I just happen to be that type.” The worst part of his stay in Mobile was gathering the evidence. “This is just my first experience with southern shinny,” he said. “Just tasting it made me violently ill.” But he never had the opportunity while in Mobile to utter the famous words he always used when revealing his identity to an unsuspecting bartender or beer peddler: “There’s sad news here. You’re under arrest.” Given the length of the investigation and the size and influence of the quarry, Einstein had to stay under cover until the task was complete.
That happened on November 13
, 1923, when a regiment of federal agents armed with eighty-five search warrants swept across Mobile. A month later, U.S. attorney Aubrey Boyles obtained indictments against 117 people, among them a bank president, a prominent shipbuilding executive, the Mobile County sheriff, five deputy sheriffs, one state legislator, several lawyers, at least one physician, a member of the county revenue board, and Mobile police chief P. J. O’Shaughnessy, who on the day the indictments were handed down tried to escape to friendlier environs. O’Shaughnessy said he’d decided to take a train to New Orleans because he wanted a drink.
Bringing in a prosecutor with Hugo Black’s talent, experience, and dedication to the dry cause was a smart move on Willebrandt’s part, but she didn’t do it because she was dissatisfied with Boyles, the sitting U.S. attorney. She had no choice but to import legal talent after the Mobile political establishment came up with a clever way to derail the federal prosecution: they arranged for local officials to arrest Boyles for attempted bribery.
Following nine months’ effort on the part of Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, the ludicrous charges brought against Boyles were vacated. But so was the conviction of one of the Mobile ringleaders, Frank W. Boykin, a businessman and political fixer who would later serve fourteen terms representing Mobile in the U.S. House of Representatives. When a telegram that Black sought as evidence turned up missing, the future congressman told the court, “I ate it.” After two trials, a jury heavy with Klansmen finally gave Black sustainable convictions of several key figures in the Mobile case—a feat that led directly to his election to the U.S. Senate and in turn to his eventual elevation to the Supreme Court.
TO EMORY BUCKNER, New York City’s police department could be less cordial or cooperative than some of the bootleggers he tried to shut down (one of those he convicted, a large-scale operator named “Big Bill” Dwyer, told Buckner while the jury was out, “You know, while you were speaking, I thought to myself, I really should be convicted”). Mabel Willebrandt, who was sympathetic to Buckner, figured that each of the thirty-two thousand speakeasies in New York probably paid a beat cop five dollars a day to keep the taps and the cash register open. Her estimate was wildly low for speaks located in midtown Manhattan, where protection money could run to $150 a week, leading the operators of the Bath Club and other upmarket spots to form a sort of bribery collective, paying off the authorities from a common pool of money. But even so, Willebrandt’s calculations were eye-popping. “It is clear,” she said, “that if the police of New York City, and some of the politicians who control their appointments, are not collecting at least one hundred and sixty thousand dollars a day or sixty million dollars a year from the speakeasies alone, they are either very honest or very stupid. Take your choice!”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 35