Eliot Ness Read Online Free PDF Page B

temptation—the brewery-owned saloons on almost every commercial corner of every decent-size town in the country—would cause the desire to fade away, like smoke from a dying fire. Never mind that the booze business was—or had been—the fifth largest in the country, or that to millions of Americans drinking was as culturally significant as marriage. Never mind that the timing was particularly poor. The World War, finally ended in 1919, had brought about a most unexpected lucidity. Millions of Americans suddenly seemed to accept that life was short and ugly, and that maybe there was nothing to come after it. The war had changed everything—art, music, politics, literature. The old world had been swept away completely, as if it never existed. Americans in the 1920s wanted to listen to jazz and to dance, and they did. They wanted to buy automobiles and drive them fast, and they did. Most of all, they wanted to drink. Prohibition—a strange remnant of that old world, somehow renewed—had to be defied. They might not have been able to articulate why, but legions of Americans felt a kind of moral imperative to defy it. No law had ever inspired such contempt across the country.
    Instead of the tranquility and good will the prohibitionists had expected, the Eighteenth Amendment brought turmoil and violence. And, somehow, alcohol. It was everywhere, more so than ever before. The Volstead Act hardly worried anyone. Indeed, for the right kind of entrepreneur, the possibilities of Prohibition proved endless. A huge, long-established industry had been wiped off the books with the arrival of the constitutional amendment, but the trucks, equipment, supply chains, relationships, know-how, and other accoutrements of the liquor business were still there in the real world, waiting for a new breed of men who didn’t mind taking new kinds of risks. The spoils would go to those who thought big—and showed no mercy. In Chicago, the country’s second largest city, vice king Johnny Torrio was such a man. Torrio brought in a twenty-one-year-old hood from Brooklyn named Al Capone shortly before the Volstead Act went into effect. Torrio’s gang took control of many of Chicago’s breweries, whose owners at first saw the gangsters as saviors. Without theunderworld’s intervention, the brewers would have had to produce yogurt or soft drinks to stay in operation, and where was the self-respect in that?
    Few members of Congress—or managers in Washington’s Prohibition offices, for that matter—had anticipated this. Gangsters were now industrialists. The new economic landscape meant hoodlums suddenly did everything on a much bigger scale than they ever had before. Such was especially the case in Chicago, which overnight became the headquarters of Prohibition resistance. Once upon a time the city’s hoods ducked into alleys when they saw a copper. Now they greeted him warmly and slipped him an envelope. They had no other choice; any half-competent patrolman with a functional nose could find beer being brewed in the city. Next came payoffs to judges and politicians.The notoriously corrupt William “Big Bill” Thompson, Chicago’s mayor since 1915, had primed the city for the gangland takeover of its police department and judicial system. By 1923, as much as a million illicit dollars a month were going into the pockets of Chicago officialdom.A visit the following year showed Mabel Willebrandt just how bad things were. In the nation’s second-largest city, she sneered, police suffered from “sleeping sickness”—her picturesque way of saying they were taking money to look the other way. When Prohibition agents conducted raids on speakeasies, they usually found cops happily drinking at the bar.
    This scared Willebrandt.Trying to enforce the law, she said, was “like trying to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter.” The assistant attorney general hadn’t been a prohibitionist before she joined the Justice Department.She freely