Hi I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love
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There's a good chance as you've heard of Eliot Ness and his Untouchables, the prototypical
square-jawed straight-laced revenue agent who brought down Scarface Al Capone. And well because
of Hollywood you probably remember Ness, you might not know that he was not by any means,
the most successful or the most well known of the revenue agents of his day. In fact there
were two detectives in New York City who racked up thousands of arrests in the era
of prohibition and had an astounding 95 percent conviction rate. And they were the very opposite
of the prototypical revenue agent that Eliot Ness was. Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith were
nearly folk heroes in their day, but they're nearly forgotten today. And that is too bad,
because two of the best detectives, in the history of the world, deserve to be remembered.
When the 18th amendment passed in 1919, followed by the Volstead Act in 1920,
it became illegal to manufacture or consume alcohol in the United States of America. At
the time the Anti-Saloon League had assessed that Americans would be so very happy with prohibition,
that Congress would only need to allocate about 5 million dollars a year to enforce
the law. Congress only allocated enough money for about 1500 new prohibition agents,
then a unit of the Department of Internal Revenue, at a salary of a whopping two
thousand dollars a year. And those 1,500 agents were supposed to stop 125 million
Americans from manufacturing, transporting, or consuming anything stronger than root beer.
Isador “Izzy” Einstein was born around 1880 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Part of a Jewish
family he grew up speaking Yiddish, but also was fluent in Hungarian, Polish and German.
He immigrated to the United States around 1901. He married another Austro-Hungarian emigrant and they
started to raise a large family. He made a living as a pushcart salesman, and eventually as a postal
clerk. But when, in 1920 the government created the Bureau of Prohibition to enforce the Volstead
Act, Izzy Einstein decided that that sounded more interesting than being a postal clerk.
And so with no background in law enforcement, Isador Einstein walked in and signed up to be
Revenue Agent Number One at a salary of $40 a week. At first the agent in charge looked at
the 5-foot five-inch 220 pound Einstein and said you don't look the part, but Einstein
argued that that was an advantage, that no one would suspect that he was a revenue agent,
and that he knew people's nature and so he could get in places where someone who looked the part,
could not. And as an added advantage, he spoke four languages and was passable in three others,
which would give him an even better ability to hide his identity.
And the method of “Doesn't look like a revenue agent” actually worked out surprisingly well.
In one case Einstein was asked to get into a speakeasy that the bureau had been unable to
crack, and so Einstein's method was simply to walk up to the door, pound on the door and say,
“Izzy Einstein, I need a drink”. When the guy guarding the door looked through the peephole and
said “what's your business here?” Einstein flashed his revenue badge and said “I'm a revenue agent,
I need a drink” and the guy looked Izzy Einstein up and down and let him in saying “that's the best
gag I heard, all week”. Another time Einstein really used the “doesn't look like a revenue
agent” by bringing two agents with him who look like revenue agents. He instructed them to stand
outside for a while and then just walk away, and while they were standing there he went in
and talked to the bartender. Bartender was suspicious, but he looked out and he said,
“See those two guys out there. they're revenuers. I can see him a mile away” and so when they walked
away his suspicions went away and he served Izzy a drink, quickly followed of course by handcuffs.
In short order Einstein procured a job for his good friend Moe Smith, who at the time
was running a cigar stand. Reportedly the two of them had been brothers in the same Masonic
Lodge. Smith's only qualification apparently was that he also did not look like a revenue
agent. Taller and even heavier than Einstein, Smith and Einstein were quite a pair. He was
Watson to Einstein's Holmes, or maybe Abbott to his Costello, but whatever the case,
the two embarked upon a stunningly successful career. Creating a host of schemes and disguises
that got them into speakeasies and uncovered stills that the bureau thought were uncrackable.
One of their best inventions was a device they built that built a funnel into their shirt collar
that took a tube down to a flask in their pocket, and thus they could appear to be sipping whiskey,
which would give them authenticity, while at the same time they were preserving the
evidence. Even as their prey became more savvy and their faces became known from the newspapers,
they still managed to concoct schemes that got them in where no one else thought they could. One
of their best gags was to masquerade as a pickle salesman or a fruit salesman. As both of them had
been push cart salesmen, they could do that quite believably. They would sell their wares slightly
below market price, not so low that it would raise suspicion, but low enough that the bartender,
happy to get cheap pickles, would often offer them a drink in compensation and end up of course,
behind bars. They masqueraded as all sorts of things, as football players, as violinists,
as Kentucky delegates to the Democratic National Convention. As a Polish Count.
Einstein even famously made arrests in speakeasies where his picture was literally
hanging on the wall to warn people. One famous time he sat down at the bar and asked for a
drink. And the bartender looked him up and down and said, “I think you're that famous
prohibition agent Izzy Epstein.” Izzy looked at him and said “don't you mean Izzy Einstein?”,
and the two got into such an argument over the name that he bet the bartender a drink
that the name was Izzy Einstein. And of course as soon as the drink was poured Einstein came
out with his signature line, “there's sad news, you've been arrested”. The two became folk heroes
in New York where they very frequently made the papers, not just the tabloids,
but the New York Times. And they reveled in it. They would actually schedule their arrests
around the news. Realizing that Monday was the day that the paper had the most room for news,
one Sunday they scheduled a record 71 raids in 12 hours just to make the Monday newspaper.
But ultimately they became victims of their own success. In 1925 Izzy Einstein and Moe
Smith were laid off in a reorganization of the New York City Bureau. Officially the
argument was that the bureau didn't like agents making the news, they thought it was untoward,
but unofficially it seemed clear that the real complaint was that Izzy and Moe got
more attention than their superiors. The New York Times mourned their loss. Saying that
the public which viewed them with as much delight as Robin Hood, were now denied their adventures.
Adventures as thrilling as Sir Lancelot, as Richard Lionheart, as Don Quixote De La Mancha.
And if this all seems like just some crazy vaudeville act, understand that in five
years they made an astounding 4,932 arrests, and confiscated more than 4 million gallons of illegal
alcohol. With a 95 percent conviction rate, they put thousands of violators of the Volstead
Act behind bars. And in what is maybe a supreme irony, these two great detectives, the two most
successful prohibition agents of the era, never carried guns. Never once shot a person, and unlike
their fellow revenuer Eliot Ness, they never caused any collateral damage in some shootout
with the mob. In fact they were both ambivalent towards prohibition, I just thought people should
follow the law. When he wrote his autobiography in 1932, Isidore Einstein dedicated it to the people
he had arrested, hoping he said, that they would bear him no grudge for having done his duty. And
for doing their duty, with such success, Isadora Einstein and Moe Smith, deserve to be remembered.
I'm the History Guy. I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series,
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