From the dry perspective, the power of the enforcement trope lay in its incontrovertibility: who could be against law enforcement? This was especially the case as the criminal activity that had blossomed at Prohibition’s dawn—largely local, infrequently violent—multiplied in scale and in carnage. It wasn’t as if the police sirens and the tommy guns hadn’t sounded before 1926; the New York Times wrote about the new-style gangster as early as 1923 (“He shoots from ambush, and preferably at backs”), and in 1924 Senator Frank L. Greene of Vermont was severely wounded in a crossfire between Prohibition agents and bootleggers just blocks from the Capitol Building. But by mid-decade the trials of George Remus and, later, “Big Bill” Dwyer—the New York bootlegger who claimed Emory Buckner had almost convinced him of his guilt—revealed criminal operations of a size and sophistication Americans had never known.* And as often as the drys used the rise of organized crime to underscore the need for Prohibition, the wets used it to demonstrate Prohibition’s failure.
It was true that criminal activity had been “organized” before Prohibition; in 1919 Henry B. Chamberlin, director of the Chicago Crime Commission, noted that “modern crime, like modern business, is tending toward centralization, organization, and commercialization.” But Prohibition offered a graduate course for training in the crime industry. John Torrio, originally from Brooklyn, began to bring Chicago mobsters into the illegal liquor business on a large scale (with the assistance of another Brooklyn import, twenty-year-old Al Capone). Until then the Torrio operation had largely devoted its organizational skills to running gambling operations and brothels, many of whose managerial requirements—servicing a wide range of locations, handling large sums of money, seeing to the safety of one’s allies and the discomfort of one’s foes—were identical to those required by the booze trade.
But those earlier businesses had not required the transportation and distribution networks that would make crime not only organized but interregional. First, Torrio, Capone, and similar entrepreneurs across the country needed vehicles. In New York, Meyer Lansky launched his bootlegging business from the car and truck rental operation he ran from a garage underneath the Williamsburg Bridge. Once the mobsters had wheels, they still had to build alliances with confederates in distant cities. Chicago’s supply of Canadian whiskey arrived courtesy of the efficient forwarding services of Detroit’s Purple Gang. Boo Boo Hoff needed western associates to unload and distribute the goods he shipped by rail from Philadelphia to St. Louis and St. Paul. Moe Dalitz’s operation in Cleveland, using planes as well as boats, ferried Bronfman liquor across Lake Erie—“the Jewish lake,” bootleggers called it—and distributed it through a network that included various Ohio and Pennsylvania affiliates, as well as Lansky’s New York operation. After internecine warfare and a more effective Coast Guard crippled Rum Row, Massachusetts had to get its liquor via an eight-hundred-mile overland corridor from Detroit. During his Mobile investigations, Hugo Black established that the city’s bootleggers had business relationships with mobsters in Detroit and Chicago.
These alliances were the first manifestations of a crime syndicate operating on a national scale. In time they became the foundation of multilateral “peace conferences,” such as the 1929 meeting in the Hotel President in Atlantic City, when mobsters from Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Newark, and New York granted each other territorial exclusivity, enabling them to operate unencumbered in their respective cities. Eventually this sort of arrangement would harden into formal partnerships, such as the cartel established by Lansky and his fellow New Yorker Lucky Luciano, Abner “Longy” Zwillman of Newark, Charles “King” Solomon of Boston, Daniel Walsh of Providence, and a few others who together would control the entire bootleg business from Boston to Philadelphia. They fixed prices throughout their territory, struck an exclusive distribution deal with their Canadian suppliers, and rewarded John Torrio for brokering the arrangement by granting him a fungible inventory of five thousand cases of liquor a month.
Most of the actors on this lucrative stage were young men who had seen opportunity and grabbed it. By 1926 Lansky, already running his “most efficient international shipping business in the world,” was only twenty-four years old. The elegant Longy Zwillman, who eventually would sell his legal post-Repeal distribution business to his pre-Repeal trading partner Sam Bronfman for $7.5 million, was either twenty-two, twenty-three, or twenty-seven, depending on which of his birth certificates you consulted. Luciano was twenty-seven, and so was Capone. The image of Capone refracted through decades of popular culture gets jarred somewhat when his age is factored in: he was only twenty-five when he took over Chicago from his mentor Torrio, was fundamentally gone from the city before he turned thirty, and when he emerged from his eventual prison sentence a syphilitic wreck, he was only forty.
Despite their youth, their ghetto origins, and the fact that they were by any measure engaged in criminal activities, an odd respectability accrued to many of these mobsters. In some places their ethnic loyalties and their hatred of dry vigilantes led them to take part in anti–Ku Klux Klan campaigns. They also acquired a certain glamour from their involvement in the entertainment industry; Longy Zwillman had a very public romance with Jean Harlow, and several big-time mobsters owned popular nightclubs. The New York thug Owney Madden (whose romance with Mae West led her to describe him as “sweet, but oh so vicious”) opened the Cotton Club in a nightspot he had taken over while serving a manslaughter sentence in Sing Sing.
Capone was especially mindful of his public image. Thanks to newspapermen who were either amused or seduced by his accessibility, Chicagoans knew that Capone extended charity to the poor and shared his house on South Prairie Avenue with his siblings and his widowed mother. When Chicago got too hot for him and he sought repose in Miami Beach, Capone announced that he intended to join the Rotary Club. Some might have disputed his description of himself as a “public benefactor,” but few could have disagreed when he said, “I give the public what the public wants. I never had to send out high pressure salesmen. Why, I could never meet the demand.” He had a point: if you separated the customer service aspect of the bootlegging business from the other pastimes that engaged the mobsters, they could seem about as criminal as a group of jaywalkers. The bootleggers, wrote historian Mark H. Haller, “had customers, not victims.” Whoremongers brutalized the women who worked for them, and numbers racketeers and gambling house operators took an extortionate cut off the top, but except when they were pouring colored industrial alcohol into Haig & Haig bottles, the bootleggers gave their customers exactly what they wanted, at a price no one was forced to pay.
The money to be made by violating the Eighteenth Amendment’s proscriptions against the sale, manufacture, and transport of intoxicating liquors was spectacular. Emory Buckner believed annual sales of bootleg liquor had reached $3.6 billion nationally by 1926. By way of comparison, that was almost precisely the same as the entire federal budget that year—army, navy, and every other government function included. In 1925 the Bureau of Printing and Engraving printed nearly $300 million more in large-denomination bills than it had in 1920. “What honest businessman deals in $10,000 bills?” Fiorello La Guardia asked the Reed Committee. “Surely these bills were not used to pay the salaries of ministers.” Instead, the abundant cash bought armor-plated automobiles (Capone’s cost the 2009 equivalent of $350,000), solid silver toilet seats (that was the prize possession of Chicago bootlegger Terry Druggan), and, by the truckload, cops and politicians and judges.
Political corruption had been baked into the system almost from the beginning. Early Prohibition directors for New York and Pennsylvania—a judge and a state senator, respectively—were under indictment within a year of assuming their jobs. On the very day that the director for the Ohio region, former congressman Joshua E. Russell, was telling an audience at the Sidney Baptist Church that “we are now engaged in a struggle with the forces of lawlessness in an effort to sustain the majesty of the law,” he and his top aid
e were in the process of diverting 22,416 gallons of alcohol from a distillery in Troy, Ohio.
Russell served two years in prison for his crimes. So did John W. Langley, a bone-dry congressman of expansive girth and melodious diction who was known in his eastern Kentucky district as either “Promissory John” or “Pork Barrel John,” for the vows he made to his constituents and for his ability to fulfill them. On a congressman’s annual salary of $7,500, Langley managed to deposit $115,000 in his bank account over a three-year period in exchange for arranging the release of a million gallons of “medicinal” liquor to New York–based bootleggers. He was reelected despite his conviction; then, after losing his appeal and entering prison, his wife was twice elected in his place.
Yet even if the stench of corruption did not linger around some of the politicians who extracted profit from Prohibition—a man who delivered jobs, projects, and pork to his district could be forgiven much—their coconspirators came from a shadowland filled with nightmares for dry and wet alike. The cash that went into the bank account of a popular politician was easily ignored by complacent voters, but the liquor money cascading through the bootlegging industry and into the hands of mobsters—all of it untaxed, of course—also underwrote the expansion of associated rackets like gambling and loan-sharking; created opportunities for new ones, like money laundering; and funded escalating arms races whenever treaties crafted by criminals (you take the north side, I’ll take the south) broke down and gave way to intramural gang wars.
Unable to turn to civil authorities to settle disputes, the mobsters had to find other means of conflict resolution. Seattle bootleggers sought to forestall discord when they convened in a ballroom at the New Washington Hotel in 1922; operating under Robert’s Rules of Order, they fashioned an agreement to set prices and establish other forms of self-regulation (no doubt impressing an out-of-town associate, Sam Bronfman, who had dropped in on the meeting). In Philadelphia, conflicts between rival gangs were arbitrated in a netherworld one of the local papers called “Racketville,” a sort of parallel City of Brotherly Hoodlums with its own mob-selected judges, lawyers, and others “rendering decisions which [its] vassals must obey without question.”
But in most cities such civilized proceedings were unknown. The warfare that led to 215 mob killings in Chicago in one three-year period was a direct by-product of broken contracts that did not lend themselves to polite resolution. Clarence Darrow, who despised Prohibition (and was known to represent the occasional indicted bootlegger), gave the best explanation of the bootleggers’ dilemma. “The business pays very well,” Darrow said, “but it is outside the law and they can’t go to court, like shoe dealers or real-estate men or grocers when they think an injustice has been done them, or unfair competition has arisen in their territory.
“So,” Darrow concluded, “they naturally shoot.”
SOME HISTORIANS ARGUE that our sense of epidemic violence in the 1920s is a distortion fostered by Hollywood. In fact, it did increase by quite a bit, from slightly less than twelve murders or assaults per hundred thousand population in 1920 to sixteen in Prohibition’s last year, 1933 (and then subsided to fewer than ten by 1940). But if you had been reading the newspapers of the age, you might have felt the rise in violence was even steeper. When Prohibition was inching toward birth in the summer of 1919, an institution that would grow stronger with every bloody manifestation of the liquor wars also came into being: the American tabloid press, born with the launch of the New York Daily News. Seeking to build readership on the trail of bodies that Prohibition left in its wake, “the newspapers began talking about [gangsters’] hiring of torpedoes, trigger men, gorillas, and rods,” wrote lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, and “their use of pineapples . . . and Tommy guns.” Bishop Cannon condemned the press for “the sewage which pours into our homes almost daily from the[ir] columns.” But you could move a lot of papers when the front page was painted with gun battles, sordid deaths, and mob funerals like the one that sent off Brooklyn gangster Frankie Yale. Laid out in a $15,000 silver coffin, accompanied by a cortege of more than two hundred limousines (thirty-eight of them packed with flower arrangements), and guarded by a hundred city cops, Yale starred on front pages all the way to California.
Although the papers made celebrities out of the gangsters, they did not fail to suggest the causal relationship of the Prohibition laws and the bloodshed, not least because wet papers realized that linking the Volstead Act to murderous violence could help the wet cause.* This wasn’t hard to do: from the assassination of Dion O’Banion in his Chicago flower shop in 1924 through the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre five years later, the most famous killings of the era were ignited by alcohol. With 3.6 billion untaxed dollars at stake, how could it be otherwise? Owney Madden once said, “I like an investment where you can put your money in this week and pull it out double next week, or the next.” To secure a cash flow like that, murder could seem like bookkeeping—just another thing you had to do to keep your business on track.
ON FRONT STREET in New Bedford, Massachusetts, you didn’t have to go far to find entertainment in the early 1920s. Out in the harbor most mornings, a small fleet of motorboats buzzed and roared from Pope’s Island to Fort Phoenix and back. They may have looked like bees roused from a hive, but on some days they made a sound that suggested some sort of nautical Armageddon. That was because many of the boats were equipped with full-throated Liberty V-12 engines that you could buy from the federal government for one hundred dollars each, delivered in their original crates. A few years earlier, the four-hundred-horsepower Libertys had powered American military aircraft; now, converted to maritime use by the speedboat racer Gar Wood and other entrepreneurs, the Libertys that had been on the assembly lines when the war ended had become the sine qua non of the rum-running fleet.
As the New Bedford rumrunners prepared to put on their daily harbor show, you could walk along the wharves and see them engaged in congenial conversation with Coast Guard officers. One local boy recalled a guardsman bumming a cigarette from a former fisherman. “Thanks, Charlie. See you tonight,” the guardsman said. The rumrunner replied affably, “Not if I can help it.” This was characteristic of the early days of Rum Row, just as it would have been in western border towns, or on the waterfront in Windsor, Ontario, or in the woods of northern New England. “We knew the officers and they knew us,” a Vermont bootlegger told an interviewer. “You know, the same as you know football players on another team, something like that.”
But by mid-decade the value of the goods afloat on American coastal waters had brought a vicious element into the rum-running business: nautical auxiliaries of the violent urban gangs. For crewmen on the mother ships, the days when your customers would bring you groceries or carry your mail ashore had given way to fear-filled nights. The sanguinary chill that settled over Rum Row had been signaled by the scuttling, in 1923, of the John Dwight, a 107-foot steam trawler hauling a Canadian cargo of Frontenac Export Ale (“Contains all the alcohol needed for long sea travel,” the label read) through “Rum Lane,” near Martha’s Vineyard. The bodies of eight Dwight crewmen were later found in the surf off the Vineyard hamlet of Menemsha. Three had had the skin stripped from their faces. Others had had their eyes burned out, their fingerprints scarred beyond recognition by acid. The son of the Dwight’s captain was found adrift in a dinghy, his skull fractured, his body wedged beneath a seat. One of the dead men was known to have been carrying $100,000 in cash for an impending purchase.
From the earliest days of Rum Row, there had been the threat of hijackers looking to commandeer a boat and seize its cargo. But a duffle filled with bills was much easier to handle than a hold jammed with beer, so the early breed of seagoing thieves was soon supplanted by men like those who ravaged the John Dwight, predators more interested in cash than in cargo. These pirates, known in the trade as “go-through guys,” needed to have decent intelligence sources—disloyal crewmen were prime informants—but beyond that they required only a small b
oat, a few weapons, and murderous intent.
In time these freebooters were themselves put out of business by the big syndicates, which were savvy enough to remove cash from the equation and powerful enough to scare off freelancing pirates. Contracts were consummated when the captain of the cargo ship and the men receiving the goods on shore could match the halves of a dollar bill that had been torn in two by their respective employers. “Rum running has altered almost unbelievably,” reported the New York Times in late 1924. “The rules are changed. The amateur is no more.”
Given the congenital ineffectiveness of the federal enforcement effort, the big-time smugglers could not have been prepared for the government response to the professionalization of Rum Row: for virtually the only time in the fourteen-year Age of Volstead, federal officials rose to the enforcement challenge. The fleet of fifty-five seaworthy vessels the Coast Guard had had at the beginning of Prohibition had grown somewhat, but was as able to cover 5,000 miles of saltwater coastline, plus another 1,450 miles of shoreline along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, about as effectively as a napkin could cover Nebraska. Calvin Coolidge’s unexpected request for additional funds reflected how grave the situation was. Heeding the words of the Coast Guard’s founder—the original Guard, Alexander Hamilton had said, was meant to be a “show of force” directed at “the fraudulent few”—Coolidge suppressed his chronic parsimony and asked Congress for a supplemental appropriation of $14 million to expand and modernize the fleet. Heeding the words of Wayne Wheeler (the boats of Rum Row, he wrote, had been conducting “a practical attack on our sovereignty” by “shooting actual holes in our Constitution”), Congress obliged.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 37