What was organized crime like in the 1920s

But the largest syndicates born out of Prohibition were based in New York and Chicago, both port cities with considerable populations of downtrodden immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Poland and other parts of Europe.

Many of these mobsters were part of a generation born in the s and early s that came of age with Prohibition. The bosses engaged in a conflict known as the Castellammarese War. The year , two years before the repeal of Prohibition, would be a formative one for Luciano in New York and the future of American organized crime.

Luciano arranged for the death of his longtime boss Masseria, in April, , fearing that Masseria was out to get him. But five months later, after finding out that Maranzano was plotting to kill him, Luciano had his new boss killed, giving Luciano the role of undisputed leader of the New York Mafia. The Commission would last into at least the late s. Torrio, who toiled under brothel racketeer Big Jim Colosimo before , had Colosimo killed after the boss refused his pleas to get into bootlegging.

Torrio made deals with other Chicago gangs to share the spoils of bootlegging to avoid bloodshed. Torrio, nearly killed in a retaliatory shooting planned by Weiss in , retired and turned over the business to Capone. Huge sums were at stake. Capone was immediately suspected of orchestrating the massacre, but never charged. But Capone finally met his downfall in , when he was convicted of federal income tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Some individual entrepreneurs turned criminal and made a fortune by exploiting loopholes in the Volstead Act.

One such bootlegger was George Remus, a well-known lawyer in Chicago who at first defended bootleggers in court and figured almost right away that he would be better off being one.

Eventually, other criminal enterprises expanded and diversified from the bootlegging profits. Homicides, burglaries, and assaults consequently increased significantly between and In the face of this crime wave, law enforcement struggled to keep up.

Although three Federal agencies were tasked with enforcing the Volstead Act, bootleggers and smugglers operated with relative impunity. On the state and local levels, police were similarly overwhelmed by the power and influence of organized crime syndicates. Once in office, Roosevelt kept his promise. Prohibition was repealed on December 5, , when specially selected state ratifying conventions ratified the 21st Amendment.

For more information about the Volstead Act , organized crime syndicates, and other Prohibition-era documents, search our records using the National Archives Catalog. There were not enough agents and they were on low salaries and easy to bribe. It was impossible to persuade drinkers to change a habit of a lifetime. Was the s a decade of organised crime and corruption?

The purpose of the Volstead Act of was to implement the Eighteenth Amendment and to set punishments for breaking the new law. A number of organisations, for example, the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union , and some religious groups such as the Methodists and the Baptists put pressure on the government to prohibit the production and sale of alcohol. They claimed that alcohol was the work of the devil and that it disobeyed Christianity.