Prohibition and the Rise of Organized Crime

It’s all about cause and effect…

The 18th Amendment

• Prohibition of all alcoholic beverages became the law of the land in 1920.

• The main goals of Prohibition:– Eliminate drunkenness and the resulting abuse of

family members and others.– Get rid of saloons, where prostitution, gambling,

and other forms of vice thrived.– Prevent absenteeism and on the job accidents as a

result of drunkenness.

Rural and Urban Contrast

• The law was largely ignored, especially in the large cities along the coasts and in the upper Midwest.

• A 1924 report showed In Kansas 95% of the people followed the law.

• New York only 5% of the people did.

Speakeasies

• Speakeasies were bars that operated illegally.

• The whole state of Massachusetts had 1,000 saloons before Prohibition, while during it Boston had 4,000 speakeasies!

The Cotton Club: Harlem

A Flapper gets her drink

Sometimes, they did get busted

Speakeasies cont’d

• In major cities, speakeasies were often quite elaborate, offering food, live music, floor shows, and other forms of entertainment.

• Corruption was rampant — speakeasy operators routinely bribed police to leave them alone or to give them advance notice of raids.

Blind Pigs• The operator of an establishment (such as a

saloon or bar) would charge customers to see an attraction (such as an animal) and then serve a “complimentary” alcoholic beverage, this helped them get around the law.

• The difference between a speakeasy and a blind pig was that a speakeasy was usually a higher-class establishment that offered food, music, live entertainment, or even all three.

Bootlegging

• Liquor, beer, and wine could no longer be manufactured, sold, or transported in the United States.

• If Americans wanted to defy this law they had to turn to a new type of criminal: the bootlegger.

• Bootleggers used to refer to people who simply hid flasks of liquor in the leg of their boots.

• Some bootleggers made their own liquor with things called stills that would produce alcohol from things like corn, grain, potatoes, or even fruit.

• A smuggler’s ship might anchor off the coast where the stuff would be loaded on speedboats.

• The speedboats would head to secluded harbors where trucks were waiting to carry it to warehouses.

Organized Crime

• Supplying illegal liquor was a complex operation.

• The difficulty, and bootlegging’s huge potential for profit helped lead to the development of organized crime.

• Independent bootleggers found that by joining forces they could create an organization that was large and efficient, which would make all of them money.

Gang Violence

• When these organizations tried to expand their territory, they clashed with other gangs.

• As rival groups fought for control with machine guns and sawed of shot guns, gang wars and murder became an everyday thing.

Bootleggers branch out

• The fact is gangs were conducting illegal activities such as gambling, prostitution, and racketeering (bribing police, making business owners pay for “protection”, etc.) before prohibition.

• Prohibition allowed the gangs to get more powerful, however and expand their influence.

• Terrified citizens went along with the gangsters’ demands.

Capone and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

Al Capone

• Capone murdered his way to the top of Chicago’s organized crime at the young age of 24.

• Bootlegging added a great deal of wealth to an already successful gambling, prostitution, and racketeering business.

• He made 60 million a year in bootlegging alone, so it was easy to pay off the police and politicians.

Elliot Ness: American Hero• Al Capone’s crimes were obvious to everyone.• He avoided arrest through bribery and

intimidation.• A Prohibition Agent named Elliot Ness was

relentless in trying to take him down.• There were a number of assassination attempts

on Ness, and one close friend of his was killed.

Capone Goes Down

• Al Capone avoided arrest for a while but eventually the federal government got him.

• The crime he was convicted of was not murder, stealing, bootlegging, gambling, or racketeering…instead it was TAX EVASION!

• He “forgot” to pay taxes on his 60 million a year income and the government convicted him and sent him to Alcatraz.

The Detroit Connection and the “Purple Gang”

It was a well-known fact that if you were bringing a load of hooch across the Detroit River that you had better show up armed to the teeth. Because in the 1920s, Detroit belonged to the Purple Gang, a group of killers and thugs as vicious and bloodthirsty as any racketeer in New York or Chicago.

Immigrant Gangs

• Like most other big cities around the turn of the century, Detroit's ghettos were a breeding ground for crime and violence.

• The Purple Gang's evolution isn't much different from a dozen similar stories from any American city.

• They were really no different than the Five Points Gang in Brooklyn, the Northside Gang in Chicago or the Boiler Gang in Philly.

Background

• In the beginning, the "gangsters" were nothing more than the sons of Russian Jewish immigrants who had come to the New Country in search of a better life.

• But like so many others, the immigrants found life in the United States wasn't that different and that the streets really weren't paved with gold.

• The Purples, growing up in almost unimaginable poverty, began to prey on their fellow immigrants.

How’d They Get That Name?

• Rumor had it that the gang received its colorful name as the result of a conversation between two Hastings Street shopkeepers of the era.

• One day in disgust one of the shopkeepers exclaimed, "These boys are not like other children of their age, they're tainted, off color."

• "Yes," replied the other shopkeeper. "They're rotten, purple like the color of bad meat, they're a Purple Gang."

Technically Hijackers not Bootleggers

• The Purple Gang always preferred hijacking to rumrunning and their methods were brutal, wrote Paul Kavieff in his book on the gang, Off Color.

• "Anyone landing liquor along the Detroit waterfront had to be armed and prepared to fight to the death as it was common practice for the Purples to take a load of liquor and shoot whoever was with it.

Purple Gang Handiwork

The Detroit River

• During Prohibition, rumrunners and bootleggers used the Detroit River as an easy way to get booze from Canada into the United States.

• From Detroit liquor went to Chicago where Capone sold it under his "Log Cabin" label.

• The Detroit River was a highway for Canadian liquor during Prohibition. A Detroit News photographer hid in a coal elevator to get this picture of rumrunners loading their cars at the foot of Riopelle in 1929.

From Canada to Detroit

• With the Detroit River less than a mile across in some places, and 28 miles long with thousands of coves and hiding places along the shore and among the islands, it was relatively easy to smuggle alcohol from Canada to the U.S.

• Cargo was towed beneath boats, old underground tunnels were built, sunken houseboats hid underwater cable delivery systems.

• A pipeline was constructed between a distillery in Windsor and a Detroit bottler.

• Google Earth

Capone Can’t Stop Them!

• Detroit may not have been New York, but make no mistake: the Purple Gang was tough.

• They were strong enough to tell Capone to keep out of eastern Michigan and managed to hold on to control of most of the state.

• U.S. 31 was the territorial line. West of 31 was Capone's territory but east belonged to the Purples

• Capone wanted Detroit, with its huge number of hardworking, hard-drinking laborers, but wisely decided it was better to buy booze from the Purple Gang than to fight them.

Prohibition was Great for Detroit’s Economy!

• Illegal liquor was the second biggest business in Detroit at $215 million a year in 1929, just behind automobiles.

• During Prohibition, the trade in alcohol employed about 50,000 people in the Detroit area, according to The Detroit Free Press.

• There were as many as 25,000 blind pigs operating in the Detroit area, and authorities were not only helpless to stop it, many were part of the problem.