The Mental Floss History of the United States by Erik Sass
Author:Erik Sass [Sass, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062014344
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-02T16:00:00+00:00
PROFILES IN SCOURGES
“Scarface” Al Capone (1899–1947)
Today Prohibition is regarded as the single biggest failure in the history of American social reform. But on one front, it was a huge success: without Prohibition, we never could have had Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit.
When Prohibition was enacted in 1920, it had plenty of popular support. The Christian temperance movement had been calling for legal limits on the sale of alcohol as far back as the seventeenth century, and while proposed bans on tobacco and theaters(!) fell flat, banning alcohol seemed to make more sense. By 1919, 33 states had enacted their own Prohibition laws, bolstered in part by a new surge of women voters showing their muscle at the ballot box.
The South is dry and will vote dry. That is, everybody sober enough to stagger to the polls.
–Will Rogers, 1926
This was all well and good, but the fact is people like booze. Although there are no statistics on alcohol consumption during Prohibition, the rate of cirrhosis of the liver didn’t waver one bit during Prohibition or afterward. So what did banning alcohol accomplish, if people were still drinking just as much? Well, it drove the whole business underground, into the hands of enterprising criminals.
Enter the Sicilian Mafia, also known as cosa nostra, “our thing.” With massive profits to be made, these shady characters would stop at nothing to protect their business, leading to wholesale corruption and a steady increase in the murder rate from 1920 to 1933. Although the early American Mafia was predominantly Sicilian, non-Sicilian Italians were sometimes given (or just took) important positions. In Chicago, a nascent Mafia was established by Giacomo “Diamond Jim” Colosimo, an Italian immigrant from Calabria (the “toe” in the Italian boot) around the turn of the century. In 1909 Colosimo brought in his nephew Giovanni “Johnny the Fox” Torrio from Brooklyn to serve as his enforcer, and a decade later, Torrio’s old second-in-command–an ambitious 20-year-old thug named Al Capone–followed. Like Colosimo and Torrio, Capone was not of Sicilian extraction: his parents were from the area around Naples, and he was born in Brooklyn. But he made up for it with his willingness to employ utmost brutality.
By 1920 it was obvious to Torrio and Capone that Prohibition was a potential bonanza, but Colosimo, an old-fashioned whoresn-numbers guy, was nervous about taking on the federal government. Torrio and Capone had Colosimo “rubbed out,” then jumped into the illegal alcohol trade feet first, making the most of Colosimo’s network of 200 brothels–a ready-made distribution network for illegal booze with preexisting connections with corrupt cops and politicians.
This American system of ours … call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.
–Al Capone
From 1920 to 1923, Torrio and Capone saw their business grow by leaps and bounds as the good people of Chicago flocked to speakeasies (the word comes from the barkeep’s advice to “speak easy” to avoid police attention).
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