Working together they posed as everything from firemen to farmers, gas meter inspectors, street cleaners, gravediggers and truck drivers. One of their two-man shows in New York was for Moe to masquerade as an out-of-towner and Izzy as his loudmouthed sidekick. While at a restaurant, Izzy would quietly tell the waiter his traveling friend was looking for some liquor, then arrest the server when he produced it.
They also arrested bootleggers who obtained wine meant for Jewish sacraments and for industrial alcohol sold for manufacturing tobacco. They even blackened their faces to raid a deli in the African-American district of Harlem.
They used a device Izzy invented, a rubber hose hidden in a small coat pocket leading to a flask sewn into another pocket. They would buy a bottle of illegal liquor at a speakeasy and discretely pour the contents into the hose, catching the liquor for use as evidence, then arrest the seller.
Izzy never packed a gun, but Moe did, although he never fired it at anyone. After the barman produced the liquor, Izzy would arrest him. Louis and Cleveland. While Izzy and Moe were the most famous, there were other agents whose actions garnered them nicknames in the press — M. As the years went by, what Prohibition agents and state and local police found daunting to enforce would evolve into a virtually impossible task later, even after the feds expanded to 3, agents late in the era.
First was the sheer scope of the challenge. The unit received assistance from the U. Coast Guard on seas and lakes and Customs and Immigration agents at borders, but they still could not keep up with bootleggers. Agents had to police the million gallons of industrial alcohol — exempted by Volstead — produced in the national annually, tens of thousands of commercial stills making spirits and potentially 22 million American households able to churn out home-fermented wine, beer and hard liquor.
Yet another challenge was greed in the ranks of agents. Many agents could not resist the opportunity to accept payoffs from cash-rich bootleggers.
As early as the end of , the Prohibition Unit terminated of its agents in New York alone for taking bribes after issuing permits to obtain legal alcohol.
Some had direct ties to bootleggers or were bootleggers themselves. Making the jobs of honest Prohis harder were the many local police officers who took payoffs from bootleggers in exchange for looking the other way and tipping them off about federal raids.
With so many Prohis tainted by graft, and Al Capone having his way with the liquor rackets in Chicago, the Hoover administration shook things up in what would be a two-pronged attack on bootleggers, using Volstead and federal tax laws. In , Elmer Irey, the head of the Enforcement Branch of the then-named Bureau of Internal Revenue, started investigating criminal evasion of federal incomes taxes by Capone and other booze runners.
The U. In , Capone took control of the Torrio operation and quickly rose to fame because of his ostentatious lifestyle and the acts of violence carried out under his name. Claiming all he was doing was meeting a demand, he talked of business efficiency and the elimination of competition to justify violence. Weiss was shot and killed in In Capone moved to Florida from where he continued to run his Chicago operation.
There were hundreds of gangland killings in Chicago in the s. Although not directly involved, it was assumed that Capone was responsible. He also personally carried out a number of killings, and used violence to shape local politics. Capone was finally found guilty of income tax fraud in and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
He was released in and retired to his home in Florida where he died in Dutch Schultz, born Arthur Flegenheimer, became one of the most powerful gangsters in New York and was often compared to Capone. Attempts to convict him of tax evasion failed in , but he responded by planning to assassinate the district attorney for New York, Thomas Dewey. Another major New York gangster was Arnold Rothstein, a professional gambler who ran gambling houses in New York City, Saratoga Springs, and Long Beach — as well as operating a racing stable, a real estate business and a bail bond firm.
Rothstein used his wealth to finance other criminal activities and was at the centre of growing organised crime, but in he was shot dead while playing cards, probably over a gambling debt.
He was arrested 25 times between and , but never convicted. Luciano eventually became a target of Thomas Dewey, and in was convicted of multiple charges of involvement in prostitution and sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison. His sentence was commuted in , possibly as a result of deal with the federal government to provide Mafia links in Sicily during the war, and he was deported to his home country. Crime covered many nationalities and many cities.
They were responsible for the Milaflores Apartment Massacre in , in which three rival gangsters were shot and killed. In an internal conflict that resulted in three further murders led to the conviction and jailing of Ray Bernstein and the gang gradually declined in influence. In Remus was jailed for two years for violations of the Volstead Act. Warburton found that the quantity of alcohol purchased may have fallen 20 percent between the prewar years —14 and — Prohibition fell far short of eliminating the consumption of alcohol.
Second, consumption of alcohol actually rose steadily after an initial drop. Third, the resources devoted to enforcement of Prohibition increased along with consumption. Heightened enforcement did not curtail consumption. The fourth qualification may actually be the most important: a decrease in the quantity of alcohol consumed did not make Prohibition a success.
Even if we agree that society would be better off if less alcohol were consumed, it does not follow that lessening consumption through Prohibition made society better off. We must consider the overall social consequences of Prohibition, not just reduced alcohol consumption. Prohibition had pervasive and perverse ef fects on every aspect of alcohol production, distribution, and consumption. Changing the rules from those of the free market to those of Prohibition broke the link that prohibitionists had assumed between consumption and social evil.
The rule changes also caused unintended consequences to enter the equation. When drugs or alcoholic beverages are prohibited, they will become more potent, will have greater variability in potency, will be adulterated with unknown or dangerous substances, and will not be produced and consumed under normal market constraints. Statistics indicate that for a long time Americans spent a falling share of income on alcoholic beverages.
They also purchased higher quality brands and weaker types of alcoholic beverages. Before Prohibition, Americans spent roughly equal amounts on beer and spirits. Beer became relatively more expensive because of its bulk, and it might have disappeared altogether except for homemade beer and near beer, which could be converted into real beer. Figure 2 shows that the underground economy swiftly moved from the production of beer to the production of the more potent form of alcohol, spirits.
Fisher used retail alcohol prices to demonstrate that Prohibition was working by raising the price and decreasing the quantity produced. However, his price quotations also revealed that the Iron Law of Prohibition was at work. A number of observers of Prohibition noted that the potency of alcoholic products rose. Not only did producers and consumers switch to stronger alcoholic beverages from beer to whiskey , but producers supplied stronger forms of particular beverages, such as fortified wine.
The typical beer, wine, or whiskey contained a higher percentage of alcohol by volume during Prohibition than it did before or after. Even Fisher, the preeminent academic supporter of Prohibition, recognized the danger of such products. The reason, of course, is that bootleg liquor is so concentrated and almost invariably contains other and more deadly poisons than mere ethyl alcohol. There were few if any production standards during Prohibition, and the potency and quality of products varied greatly, making it difficult to predict their effect.
The production of moonshine during Prohibition was undertaken by an army of amateurs and often resulted in products that could harm or kill the consumer. Those products were also likely to contain dangerous adulterants, a government requirement for industrial alcohol. In the national toll was 4, as compared to 1, in Patterns of consumption changed during Prohibition.
It could be argued that Prohibition increased the demand for alcohol among three groups. It heightened the attractiveness of alcohol to the young by making it a glamour product associated with excitement and intrigue. The high prices and profits during Prohibition enticed sellers to try to market their products to nondrinkers — undoubtedly, with some success.
Prohibition may actually have increased drinking and intemperance by increasing the availability of alcohol. One New Jersey businessman claimed that there were 10 times more places one could get a drink during Prohibition than there had been before. Lee found that there were twice as many speak easies in Rochester, New York, as saloons closed by Prohibition. That was more or less true throughout the country. Another setback for prohibitionists was their loss of control over the location of drinking establishments.
The amount of medicinal alcohol 95 percent pure alcohol sold increased by percent during the same time. Prohibitionists wanted and expected people to switch their spending from alcohol to dairy products, modern appliances, life insurance, savings, and education. That simply did not happen. Not only did spending on alcohol increase, so did spending on substitutes for alcohol.
In addition to patent medicines, consumers switched to narcotics, hashish, tobacco, and marijuana. Those products were potentially more dangerous and addictive than alcohol, and procuring them often brought users into contact with a more dangerous, criminal element.
The harmful results of the Iron Law of Prohibition more than offset any benefits of decreasing consumption, which had been anticipated but did not occur. On closer examination, however, that success is an illusion. Prohibition did not improve health and hygiene in America as anticipated.
Cirrhosis of the liver has been found to pose a significant health risk, particularly in women who consume more than four drinks per day. An examination of death rates does reveal a dramatic drop in deaths due to alcoholism and cirrhosis, but the drop occurred during World War I, before enforcement of Prohibition. The death rate from alcoholism and cirrhosis also declined rather dramatically in Denmark, Ireland, and Great Britain during World War I, but rates in those countries continued to fall during the s in the absence of prohibition when rates in the United States were either rising or stable.
Prohibitionists such as Irving Fisher lamented that the drunkards must be forgotten in order to concentrate the benefits of Prohibition on the young.
Prevent the young from drinking and let the older alcoholic generations die out. However, if that had happened, we could expect the average age of people dying from alcoholism and cirrhosis to have increased.
But the average age of people dying from alcoholism fell by six months between and , a period of otherwise general improvement in the health of young people. There appear to have been no health benefits from Prohibition. As early as Clarence Darrow and Victor Yarros could cite several studies showing that moderate drinking does not shorten life or seriously affect health and that in general it may be beneficial.
Studies continue to find the same results and that problems with alcohol are associated with excess — a problem with most goods. Not all prohibitionists were blind to the potential benefits of alcohol. However, many were technocrats or Progressives, and if some benefit of alcohol were admitted they would have been forced to conclude that the government should act to encourage moderate consumption of alcohol.
At the beginning of Prohibition, the Reverend Billy Sunday stirred audiences with this optimistic prediction:.
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