Now Playing
The Bookkeeper Who Built the Mob: Prohibition's Opening Chapter
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before Al Capone's gunmen or Eliot Ness's raids, a teenage bookkeeper named Meyer Lansky saw that Prohibition wasn't a moral crusade — it was a business opportunity. This is how the Volstead Act handed organised crime its founding charter.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's something that tends to get lost in every Al Capone story ever told. The man who actually built the modern American mob wasn't a gunman.
The law that changed everything wasn't handed down by reformers in some sudden moral awakening. It was engineered.
In New York, the man who saw that opportunity first was Arnold Rothstein. He was known as the Brain of Broadway, a financier and fixer who'd allegedly helped fix the nineteen nineteen World Series.
Luciano and his associates operated what became known as the Broadway Mob, headquartered at the Hotel Claridge in midtown Manhattan. Their business model was straightforward in principle and intricate in execution.
Lansky's contribution was methodical rather than dramatic, which is part of why it took so long to fully appreciate. He kept accounts.
Not everyone ran their operation the way Lansky did. In Chicago, Al Capone ran a different kind of empire.
Federal attention arrived in Chicago in the form of Eliot Ness and a small team of agents who became known as the Untouchables. The name itself told the story.
While the syndicates fought over high-end supply chains, a separate and more dangerous economy was operating at the bottom of the market. Bathtub gin wasn't quite as literal as the name suggests, though home production was common.
Out at sea, a different kind of enforcement battle was underway. Rum-runners operating large vessels anchored in international waters, beyond the reach of American law, supplied a network of smaller, faster contact boats that would run the product to shore at night.
By the late nineteen twenties, the bootlegging economy had generated something new. Wealthy criminals with political interests.
The Great Depression had done the political work that enforcement never could. By nineteen thirty-two, the country needed jobs and it needed tax revenue.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.