NARRATOR: Going into the 1920s many people
believed banning alcohol would make America more peaceful.
They were wrong.
Violent murders, widespread corruption,
and the dawn of organized crime defined the decade and beyond.
In the years leading up to the 1920s,
antialcohol activists, such as Carrie Nation,
had been hard at work building a case against the demon drink,
and they had some legitimate arguments.
Prohibitionist women advocated for temperance
as a means of combating their abusive alcoholic husbands.
Industrialists got behind the movement
because they thought alcohol was limiting the potential output
of their average worker.
But temperance was also used by racist organizations
as an outlet for their xenophobic views
against the millions of European immigrants
coming to the United States.
The Germans and Irish in particular
were scorned for their alleged drunkenness.
Whatever their reasons, 46 states ultimately
ratified the 18th Amendment with only Connecticut
and Rhode Island dissenting.
Prohibition officially took effect
at the very start of the decade, enforced by the language
of the Volstead Act, named for House Judiciary
chairman Andrew Volstead.
Within a year, Americans' alcohol consumption
had already dropped to historic lows,
but the drop was temporary.
Americans didn't stop drinking.
The 18th Amendment allowed for some loopholes--
fermenting grapes at home, prescriptions from doctors,
and religious exemptions.
A lot of people found God.
But the eradication of a corporate structure for alcohol
production and distribution left a huge opportunity
for a large-scale, organized, and insanely
profitable black market.
Existing small-time street gangs took
advantage, quickly evolving into vast bootlegging
criminal enterprises.
They employed everyone from warehouse workers to truck
drivers to accountants.
Gang leaders would bribe politicians, cops,
even the Prohibition agents themselves, nicknamed Prohis,
to ensure their businesses ran smoothly.
Some relied on rum running, illegally importing liquor
from other countries and storing it in warehouses across the US.
Sometimes they would simply distill
liquor in private homes.
Other gangsters bought abandoned breweries
and operated them in secret.
They worked in the shadows, but one part of the business
was very public, the violence.
Gangs fought for territory in the streets of major US cities.
Chicago was especially violent.
729 people were killed by gangs in Cook County
alone during Prohibition.
The most famous of these incidents
was the St. Valentine's Day massacre in 1929.
Men working for Al Capone, dressed as policemen,
gunned down seven rival members of Bugs Moran's gang against
the wall of a parking garage.
No one was ever charged for the crime.
Realizing cooperation could lead to greater profits,
many gangs agreed to treaties that
allowed them to operate peacefully
in their respective territories.
Johnny Torrio attempted to organize the gangs in Chicago
with Al Capone as his right-hand man.
When Torrio retired to Italy and handed the reins
to his protege, Capone inherited a business
pulling in more than $1 billion a year in today's terms.
Charles "Lucky" Luciano organized
the Italian and Jewish gangs in New York
under Joe "The Boss" Masseria before Luciano had Masseria
killed in 1931 and had his successor, Salvatore Maranzano,
killed the same year.
Luciano went on to found The Commission, a national crime
syndicate composed of New York's five mafia families
and the controlling families in Chicago and Buffalo.
Prohibition ended with the ratification
of the 21st Amendment in 1933, but the mafia
kept rolling along.
These crime families had already entered the worlds
of loan sharking, prostitution, and illegal gambling,
just to name a few, and continued
to grow throughout the country on the backs of their profits
from Prohibition.
INTERVIEWER: You must have in your mind something
you've done that you can speak of to your credit
as an American citizen.
If so, what are they?
Paid my tax.
[laughter]