Dad wasn't the smartest man in the world,
but he wasn't the dumbest one either.
[The Mills Brothers' "Fiddlin' Joe" playing]
Just soon as he got into the bootlegging business,
the first thing he bought was a brand-new Cadillac,
a great big Cadillac touring car.
Boy, that was fancy thinking.
We rode around through Washington
like we owned the place.
As a kid, I'd just assumed this was everybody,
everybody was doing this,
but dad said, "Don't ever ask anybody because they're gonna
ask you what I do, and it's nobody's business."
I said, "OK."
I just assumed, you know, that this was a way of life
for everybody back then.
NARRATOR: Donald Ward's father Paul had once worked
in a mill that manufactured the special paper used
by the Treasury Department to print dollar bills,
but when Prohibition went into effect,
he discovered a more direct way of making money.
He often took his son with him when he made deliveries.
WARD: Got his suitcase with him.
He carried 6 quart jars of booze in that.
The biggest place that we went into
was right in the Capitol.
Right in the Capitol of the United States,
believe it or not.
I was surprised as much as anybody else would be,
but we went in under the front steps,
take an elevator, go up one or two floors,
and go either to the right-hand side,
which was the Senate office,
or to the left-hand side,
which was the House office.
He'd go in the anteroom.
He'd be gone 10, 15 minutes.
Come out. He said, "Let's go."
get in the car, drive on down East Capitol Street.
Then he'd pulled over the curb,
and he'd take an envelope out of his pocket,
$ 100 bills is what it was.
Right in there, these Congressmen,
they're passing the law, but they're still buying
the booze from the bootleggers.
[Gavel bangs]
MAN: I think there are really two reasons
that people obey the law.
One is when they just understand from the world
around them, from their parents,
from the traditions of their culture,
from their neighbors,
that this is the rule and everybody follows it.
I think for laws that have been around for a long time
and seem to have the power of moral suasion behind them
this is a powerful reason that people follow the law.
The second reason is that they're afraid of getting
caught and getting punished.
This is much more important when you have a brand-new law
and where people are not completely convinced
that the law is inherently moral.
NARRATOR: On January 16, 1920, Prohibition,
the 18th Amendment to the Constitution,
went into effect.
It was intended to stop the scourge of alcoholism
that afflicted millions, devastating families
and ruining lives.
It had been supported by most Americans,
including the crusading women who had done so much
to bring it about and who had now won
the right to vote.
Prohibition was the answer to their sincerest prayers,
offering the promise that government could make
society better.
And at first, there were signs that Prohibition was working.
Alcohol consumption went down by at least a third,
alcohol-related deaths fell.
So did arrests for public drunkenness.
Some California wine-makers began planting plums
and apricots instead of grapes.
Most distillers shut down, forced to padlock
their vast warehouses filled with barrels of whiskey.
Anheuser-Busch and a handful of other surviving brewers
turned to making soft drinks and ice cream,
cheese and yeast,
and nonalcoholic near beers
with brand names like
Hoppy and Quizz,
Pivo and Bevo.
Coca-Cola stock more than doubled.
Most small-town Americans, who lived in regions that
had long since voted to limit alcohol,
would find their lives unchanged.
Few would ever see an illegal whiskey still
or encounter a Prohibition agent,
and they all celebrated the death of the saloon.
But other Americans defied Prohibition from the first,
some simply because they thought it absurd,
that the government had no business interfering
in their lives.
Still others saw that there was money to be made.
Their defiance would soon be everywhere
and unmistakable,
from the illegal speakeasy down the block
to the network of bribery and corruption
that eventually stretched all the way
from the cop on the beat
to the corridors of power in Washington,
from the home brew that families began to sell
to their neighbors
to the bloody gang wars over liquor distribution
that increasingly filled the morning newspapers.
[Crowd screaming]
[Siren]
Many seemingly law-abiding citizens,
including an up-and-coming young police officer
from Seattle and a celebrated defense attorney from Chicago,
would exploit the inherent inconsistencies in the law
and transform themselves into some of the country's
most successful criminals.
A 32-year old federal official,
a pioneer defender of the rights of women,
would zealously prosecute those violators,
even as her own superiors were routinely flouting the law.
In its eagerness to show that the new rules
really could be enforced, the government did not shrink
from bending and sometimes even breaking
long-established laws, threatening rights
and freedoms embedded elsewhere in the Constitution.
In 1924, 4 years after Prohibition was first imposed,
the "Boston Herald" would offer $200
to the reader who came up with a brand-new word
for someone who flagrantly ignored the edict
and drank liquor that had been illegally made
or illegally sold.
25,000 responded.
Two readers split the prize.
Each had come up with the same word, "scofflaw."
[Indistinct chatter]
MAN: Prohibition is not a matter of abstract morals.
It is a matter of social welfare.
Viewed in this light, it is the greatest
and most interesting experiment that has ever been tried
in the history of civilization.
It is certainly worth trying fairly and honestly.
We believe that a substantial majority
of Americans want that trial made.
"The Outlook."
FELDMAN: No one could mistake the idea
that there was a national condemnation of alcohol.
I think that was crystal clear,
but the question of what it would mean in practice
was going to have to be worked out through the legal system,
through laws passed by congress and perhaps
even more importantly than that through the way
that local and federal authorities
would enforce those laws.
Because to pass a law in the real world means nothing.
To enforce the law means everything.
NARRATOR: The actual law the government used
to enforce the 18th Amendment was named the Volstead Act
after the taciturn Norwegian immigrants' son
who introduced it in congress,
Minnesota representative Andrew Volstead.
Wayne B. Wheeler, the shrewd general counsel
of the Anti-saloon League,
had written the act's first draft.
Wheeler had been the chief architect of the league's
long, successful campaign for the 18th Amendment,
and he had insisted the Volstead Act
be as strict as possible.
The amendment had banned the manufacture and sale
of what it called "intoxicating beverages,"
but the Volstead Act was something altogether different.
The congressmen and senators who voted
for the Prohibition Amendment,
the 37 or 38 states that endorsed
the Prohibition Amendment did it with many of them
having an understanding that beer would be allowed.
Well, the Volstead Act was so much more severe
and draconian than anything that had ever been
Prohibition in the United States up to that point.
MAN: What's an intoxicating beverage?
Many, many people presumed that beer and light wines
would be OK under the 18th Amendment,
but the Volstead Act defined intoxicating
as anything more than 1/2 of 1% alcohol.
That would have made German chocolate cake
or sauerkraut illegal
or Worcestershire sauce probably,
or god knows how many other things.
NARRATOR: But Wayne Wheeler had had to agree to some
exceptions to the total ban he'd hoped for.
Drinking alcohol was not itself illegal.
Nor was making wine at home for one's own consumption.
Individuals and private clubs were also allowed
to keep any alcohol they had purchased
before the amendment went into effect.
With an entire year to plan, the wealthy had had
plenty of time to stock up before the deadline.
The Yale Club in Manhattan hoarded enough bottles
to slake its members' thirst for a prophetic 14 years.
Congressmen from apple-growing areas made certain
that hard cider would always remain available,
insisting that farmers' wives needed to
"conserve their fruit."
the makers of patent medicines that included alcohol
were allowed to stay in business.
So were the few distillers of hard liquor still operating,
licensed by the government to make whiskey
allegedly meant only for medicinal purposes.
MAN: The prescription was the legal way of bringing
whiskey into your home.
So for those that could afford to go through the doctor
and get your one pint every 10 days...
that was all you were allowed, 3 pints a month,
not enough to get by on.
So a lot of members of the same family got sick.
So an epidemic broke out, and by the time Prohibition
was done, doctors had written
over 6 million prescriptions.
NARRATOR: Manufacturers of industrial alcohol,
needed for everything from aftershave to antifreeze,
felt hats to embalming fluid, could stay open, too,
provided they obtained a license from the government.
Sacramental wine, used by churches and synagogues,
was permitted, as well, and orders for it quickly
increased by millions of gallons a year.
"Not more than 1/4 of this is sacramental,"
one churchman admitted.
"The rest is sacrilegious."
OKRENT: A Jewish household was allowed a certain amount
of wine per adult per year,
but you had to have a certification
from your rabbi.
So congregations grew in size from 1920 to 1921
by a factor of 10,
from 80 families to 900 families.
Another manifestation of it were people who declared
themselves rabbis.
Of course, unlike in the Catholic church,
if you said you were a rabbi, who was going to say you
weren't a rabbi?
And there were rabbis with names like
Kelly and O'Shanahan, and there were black rabbis.
It was a real racket.
["Hail to the Chief" playing]
NARRATOR: When Republican Warren G. Harding
was inaugurated President of the United States in 1921,
it seemed to Wheeler and the drys
that their cause would have a friend in the White House,
but privately, Harding was not convinced Prohibition
could ever be made to work, and while no alcohol was
officially served in his White House,
the twice-weekly meetings of his "poker cabinet"
were fueled by whiskey provided by a bootlegger.
MAN: This law will be obeyed.
We shall see to it that liquor is not manufactured,
nor sold, nor given away, nor hauled in anything
on the surface of the earth or under the earth
or in the air.
John f. Kramer, Prohibition commissioner.
NARRATOR: Federal responsibility for enforcing
the Volstead Act was divided between two departments.
A freshly created Prohibition Bureau
within the Treasury Department was meant to arrest violators,
gather evidence, and destroy it,
but Congress authorized only 1,500 agents
to cover the whole country,
just 1 for every 70,666 Americans.
The Justice Department was to handle
the prosecution of violators.
To head it, president Harding named his close friend
and campaign manager Harry Daugherty,
who preferred dispensing patronage
to practicing law.
Daugherty's Ohio Gang, the circle
of hard-drinking old friends he rewarded with federal jobs,
quickly came to see the enforcement of Prohibition
as a potential profit center,
selling bootleggers pardons, paroles, and protection
from arrest and prosecution.
FELDMAN: When you have a crusade,
you generate a lot of energy and attention for the issue,
and it all culminates in this big symbolic moment
when you pass the law,
and after that, you can go home.
The activists aren't there pushing day in and day out,
demanding further enforcement,
and since government has to spend resources to enforce,
unless you have an interest group demanding that
those resources to be spent,
the government will spend them on something else.
OKRENT: People who supported Prohibition
also didn't believe in government spending.
One of the things that enforcement was up against
was the nature of politics in America in the 1920s.
This was a time of small government,
Republican, stingy administrations.
One of the things you needed to enforce a law
was to spend a great deal of money.
The last thing that the Republican-controlled
Congresses of the 1920s wanted to do was
appropriate more money for law enforcement.
Because of the way the Prohibition Amendment
was written, it said that there was going to be
a concurrent enforcement between the states
and the federal government.
That was written into the federal amendment
in the hopes that the states would enforce it.
The states, of course, said, "Hey! Now the feds
are on the job, we don't have to do it."
They all ducked it.
NARRATOR: The federal government wanted the states
to enact their own equally strict dry laws.
A third offense in Michigan was supposed to result
in an automatic life sentence.
But one state, predominantly Catholic Maryland,
passed no Prohibition law at all,
and others, including Michigan, eventually weakened theirs.
Meanwhile, governors and state legislators,
mayors and city council members were often reluctant
to enforce the new statutes.
If the federal government wanted Prohibition,
they argued, it was up to the federal government
to pay for it.
MURDOCK: You can create laws as extreme as you want,
but unless someone's going to enforce them,
it's not going to work,
and so if you're sheriff of, you know, Podunk, wherever,
and you have a speakeasy running
and the banker, the chief of police, the mayor,
and all the doctors go to that speakeasy,
you don't want to crash it and break it up
because you're not going to be elected sheriff next time.
MAN: The tension between the federal government
and local governments who had to go out and spend money
policing this thing,
and in a large extent, they gave up.
They said, "This is what the people want.
"Let them have it, what the hell?
Let's go catch murderers."
NARRATOR: The governor of New Jersey said that as far
as he was concerned his state would remain as wet
as the Atlantic Ocean.
The governor of Washington State announced he would not spend
so much as a postage stamp on enforcing Prohibition.
One year, the legislatures of all 48 states would vote
a grand combined total of $698,855 for enforcement,
less than 1/8 of what they authorized
for the protection of fish and game.
Despite all the difficulties of enforcing Prohibition,
millions of Americans voluntarily gave up alcohol
in the interest of living up to the spirit
as well as the letter of the new law.
New cookbooks offered alcohol-free recipes...
spaghetti sauce without wine, brandy peaches without brandy.
Newspapers and magazines urged hostesses to serve
grape juice highballs and non-alcoholic mint juleps.
MAN: In my family, in my surroundings,
there was no temptation to disobey the law
because everybody in the family was a teetotaler
and we were taught from our earliest years
that this was a very unwise thing to get involved in.
My mother used to say many, many times,
"Lips that touch wine will never touch mine."
My mother felt very strongly that it would
cause people a lot of harm if you consumed too much alcohol
and just thought it was a dangerous substance
to get involved with.
That's just something that well-bred young men
should not do. Ha ha!
HAMILL: I think it goes way back to Robin Hood
and things like that,
that there was there was a myth of the person
who breaks the law when it's a stupid law
to give people what they want.
Once the government begins forbidding things,
then somebody will come along and say, " I got it.
Step around the corner."
NARRATOR: On March 22, 1920, two months after Prohibition
went into effect, at an isolated dock
a few miles north of Seattle, Washington,
11 men labored to load sacks of Canadian whiskey
from a speed launch into 6 waiting automobiles.
They didn't seem to have a care in the world,
but when the little convoy started up the steep road
that led inland, they found their route blocked
by a dozen federal Prohibition agents,
who opened fire.
[Gunshot]
Two cars managed to roar around the blockade.
The agents recognized one driver as he hurtled past
and arrested him at his home the following afternoon.
[Siren]
He was himself a lawman,
the youngest and most promising lieutenant
on the Seattle police force, Roy Olmstead.
He had a wife and children and a personality
so pleasing he was called "The Baby Lieutenant."
Olmstead was fired from the force,
pled guilty to a federal charge,
paid a $500 fine, and then was free to go,
able now to devote himself full-time
to becoming the "King of the Puget Sound Bootleggers."
As a police officer, Olmstead had seen
first-hand how disorganized most
of the small-time liquor smugglers
trying to take advantage of Prohibition were.
He knew he could do better.
With financing from 11 silent partners,
he hired bookkeepers, dispatchers,
warehousemen, lawyers, sailors, truck drivers,
so many men that he became one of the biggest employers
in the Seattle area.
Olmstead also recruited a few trusted friends
from the police department,
including a young stenographer named Edwin Hunt.
MAN: Roy Olmstead hand-picked everybody.
He picked people who were good at what they did,
and Dad was his close advisor,
but Roy was the boss, and everybody looked up
to Roy and liked him.
They were well-paid, and they were very good
at what they did.
NARRATOR: Olmstead's illicit cargo, brought down
by boat from Canada, where alcohol was still legal,
was unloaded on tiny D'Arcy Island,
as many as 4,000 sacks at a time,
and stored until the next stormy night
when Olmstead's fleet of small, swift vessels
could transfer it to one or another
of the wooded beaches that lined Puget Sound.
From there, it was trucked to his main distribution point,
a remote 10-acre farm Olmstead called "The Ranch."
Before long, he was making more in one week
than he would have earned in 20 years as a policeman.
He kept some of it at home, heaped in a laundry basket
he called his safe.
Olmstead bought local officials wholesale...
sheriff's deputies, members of the police department's
so-called dry squad, city council members,
the chief of police, even the mayor... Doc Brown.
Ed Hunt made sure things went smoothly.
HUNT JR: My dad thought that Prohibition
was an immoral law.
So he had no compunction about breaking that law,
and Dad's particular job was the bagman
for the police department.
He decided that patrolmen would get so much
and no more per week, sergeants would get so much,
lieutenants, captains, and so on.
So he was the paymaster for the Olmstead Gang.
NARRATOR: With the cooperation of the officials
on his payroll, Olmstead sometimes
had his men bring shipments ashore in downtown Seattle
in broad daylight and then load them into trucks
labeled "Fresh Fish," "Choice Meats,"
"Pastries, Pies, Cakes, and Cookies."
[Foghorn blows]
Olmstead had standards.
Even when rivals tried to hijack his wares,
he forbade his men from carrying firearms.
No amount of money was worth a human life, he said.
HUNT JR: When you've bribed all the officials
up and down the Washington coast,
you didn't need violence
because who is going to use violence on you when you've
got the full force of the Seattle Police Department
behind you?
NARRATOR: Customers all over the city,
including the aviation industry pioneer
William F. Boeing,
could depend on the quality of everything Olmstead sold.
None of his whiskey was ever adulterated.
Thirsty Seattle citizens began calling Roy Olmstead
The Good Bootlegger.
HUNT JR: They had the world in their palm of their hands.
It was just a romantic time.
Dad had no sense of shame about Prohibition
and about being a bootlegger.
In fact he was proud of it,
and he talked to me about it.
And as a little boy he'd say, "Eddie, if there's...
"if Prohibition ever comes back, you and I are going
into the bootleg business."
MAN: You asked about my father?
I never saw fear in his face.
He was running a business like Prohibition
hadn't happened, you know.
And he was supplying a need like Macy's
and Bloomingdale's today.
They're supplying a need, they're supplying product,
and that's how he looked at it.
NARRATOR: Zeke Alpern's father Lou had been
an army cook in France during the Great War,
then a fight manager and a grocer in Queens
before Prohibition provided him
with a far more lucrative calling.
ALPERN: He had, at one time, 5 what you'd call
cordial stores,
but they were actually liquor stores
right in Midtown Manhattan.
It was on 49th Street between Broadway and 7th.
In the window there would be lithograph bottles
of ginger ale, Coca-Cola,
but if you went in, you could buy
a bottle of liquor.
Now these 5 cordial stores produced a lot of income,
and in the morning, I would come into the dining room,
and there would be money, money, money all over
the dining room table, and I knew we were rich.
I said, "Pop, how were you able to operate right in Midtown?"
he says, "Son, every cop knows what's going on,
"and every cop gets a little something from me
"on a weekly basis,
and that's how it is."
MAN: You know, arguably New York is
the wettest city in the country.
It's the place where there are bars on every block,
where everyone, every culture, every heritage had
some strong connection to alcohol.
If this was going to work, you had to make it work
in New York, or the whole thing was worthless.
NARRATOR: Everyone had always understood that
New York City represented Prohibition's
biggest challenge, the ultimate battleground
between wets and drys.
As soon as the city's licensed bars, saloons,
and nightclubs had closed down in compliance
with the new law, thousands of illegal speakeasies
had opened up.
[Car horn honks]
[Indistinct chatter]
[Knock on door]
Methodist Bishop James Cannon Jr. of Virginia,
one of the most ardent drys in the country,
called the city "Satan's seat."
"In order to enforce Prohibition,"
Harlem congressman Fiorello La Guardia predicted,
"it will require a police force of 250,000 men
and a force of 250,000 men to police the police."
LERNER: You had 200 agents for the entire state.
So that's all of New York City,
the entire Long Island coastline,
the entire Canadian border,
where you had people bringing stuff in from Canada.
There was no way 200 agents could do this.
There was no way 2,000 agents could do this.
NARRATOR: Wayne Wheeler had successfully insisted
that the Prohibition Bureau be exempt from civil service laws,
that top officials be able to choose agents
he assumed would be dedicated to the cause.
It didn't work out that way.
LERNER: Any politician with any pull
suddenly had dozens of jobs to hand out and handed them out
to all the wrong people.
So you had soldiers, baseball players, cooks.
Anyone who wanted a government paycheck
could sign up for a job with the Bureau of Prohibition,
and they got a gun and a badge
and a pretty meager paycheck
and not a lot of training,
and they were expected to get rid of alcohol completely.
NARRATOR: Trigger-happy agents wounded
innocent bystanders and killed people
who may not even have broken the law.
Agents also demanded bribes from bootleggers.
During one shakedown, 4 agents were so angered
by the disappointing size of the payoff
the speakeasy's owner had provided that they passed
a hat among the customers.
LERNER: You could easily bribe an agent,
and very quickly in New York, you saw in the first year
they had to fire about half of the agents.
They're coming to work with fur coats and diamond rings
and new cars, things they clearly couldn't
afford on a bureau salary.
NARRATOR: The New York City Police Department,
filled with people from the same neighborhoods as those
they were supposed to arrest, did its best to stay out
of the way of the federal Prohibition agents.
HAMILL: Well, the rebellion in New York was also fed
by the police department, which was in those days
overwhelmingly Irish, and they were in a city
where there was enough trouble to deal with,
and they defied the federal government.
They said, "We don't have either the time, the money,
"or the resources to go after some guy who looks to...
looking to score a shot of whiskey."
NARRATOR: It was becoming increasingly clear
to Wayne Wheeler and the Anti-saloon League
that the mounting chaos in New York
had to be cleaned up.
They pressed the state legislature into passing
the Mullan-Gage Law, which was even stricter
than the Volstead Act.
It levied heavier penalties on offenders.
Carrying a hip flask in New York State became
the legal equivalent of carrying an unlicensed handgun.
"The whole country," Wayne Wheeler told
the police commissioner of New York City, "is watching."
The citizens of the city were watching, too,
and they didn't much like what they saw.
Hundreds of officers were taken off the beat to raid
apartments and pat down passersby.
"Men are being stationed in restaurants to see
no one buys a drink," a state judge complained,
"while around the corner a hold-up man is breaking
into a jewelry store."
Nationwide, 44% of U. S. Attorneys' time
was spent working Prohibition cases.
In New York alone, 50,000 cases were brought
into the federal building each year,
mostly petty violations.
[Gavel banging]
The federal courts were quickly overwhelmed.
To clear their calendars, judges were forced to hold
bargain days, offering light fines
provided the accused pled guilty.
LERNER: Judges would walk in and look at this crowd
and say, "What in the world am I gonna do?"
They thought, "I spent my whole life
"hoping to become a federal judge,
"and now I'm hearing liquor cases day in and day out,
"so anyone who wants to pay a fine and plead guilty,
you're out today."
NARRATOR: And now that the New York City Police found
themselves on the front lines of Prohibition enforcement,
they, too, became susceptible to bribes and payoffs.
HAMILL: It brought every institution under suspicion.
Nobody believed judges anymore. Nobody believed cops anymore.
Nobody believed investigators anymore.
Everything felt corrupted.
NARRATOR: Within a few months, statistics suggested
that defiant New Yorkers were actually drinking more,
not less, than they drank before the 18th Amendment
went into effect.
In America's biggest city at least,
Prohibition was not working.
WOMAN: I think Prohibition was worth every effort
that was put into it.
I really do because it did have some
real, real good results about the home
and a better way of life for people.
Well, I think it was a better culture to live in
at that point, but there was still liquor around,
and if you wanted it bad enough, you could get it.
Prohibition, it didn't eradicate the alcohol,
but it helped a great deal.
I really do think it did,
but you cannot legislate morals.
That has to come from within. That's all.
NARRATOR: Many Americans continued to do their best
to honor Prohibition,
and despite poor pay, poor training,
and constant temptation, there were honest
federal Prohibition agents.
Some even put their lives at risk to uphold the law.
MAN: I guess it was about 1922 when my dad got into it.
My father went into the Prohibition part of it
because... well, partly because he didn't approve
of alcohol and partly because he needed a job
because we were living there on the farm,
and we didn't make very much,
so he always had to have a different job some place.
NARRATOR: Frank Allen Mather had been a subsistence farmer
in Nelson County, Kentucky, until Prohibition began
and he signed on with the Treasury Department.
Mather's job was to scour the hills and hollows
in his county for signs of moonshiners.
MATHER: I went with him at times,
and we would hunt the stills.
Sometimes if you'd see smoke coming up out
of the woods, why, you would know something
was going on there.
We would find these stills back in the woods,
and they would have all the mash and everything.
It was fermenting.
NARRATOR: In the spring and summer, Mather and his sons
dumped any mash or whiskey they found
into the nearest stream.
In winter, they sometimes poured confiscated whiskey
into the radiator of their truck
to keep it from freezing.
Frank Mather's efforts as a Prohibition agent won him
few friends among his neighbors.
MATHER: Prohibition turned a lot of people against each other,
there's no doubt about that.
One night, I woke up and looked out my bedroom window,
and I saw my dad over by the barn trying
to pull things out of it, and the barn was on fire.
It had been set on fire by someone who just wanted
to retaliate against him.
And then another time, my sister kept a dog
for a friend of hers, and somebody took the dog
over in the woods and shot it.
Kind of frightening to have that happen.
NARRATOR: Frank Mather was sent all over the state.
One mission took him and several other agents
to the little town of Russellville
in Logan County to arrest some moonshiners.
The local deputy, who may have been on the take,
was protecting their still.
Mather and the lawman each went for his gun.
MATHER: As I understand it, the deputy sheriff shot first,
and then my dad shot him,
and the deputy sheriff died instantly there, they say.
My dad was taken to the hospital
at Bowling Green, Kentucky,
where he lived till the next day.
He was shot through the chest and apparently bled to death.
We got there just before he died.
When the Prohibition law was repealed,
I felt like it had just been kind of a waste of everything,
but I was also, in a way, glad that my dad didn't
have to go through that.
He would have been very much against it.
He would have felt like that his time had been
pretty much wasted also.
MAN: If there ever has been a bigger bootlegger
than Remus, the fact remains a secret.
Remus was to bootlegging what Rockefeller was to oil.
In the sheer imagination of his plan,
in the insolent sweep of his ambition
and the power with which he swept upward
toward his goal, Remus can bear comparison
with the captains of industry.
"St. Louis Post-Dispatch."
NARRATOR: George Remus was one of the best-known
criminal attorneys in the Midwest.
A self-made man, he had arrived in America
with his German immigrant parents at 5,
was forced to leave school at 15
to support his family, became a pharmacist at 19,
put himself through law school at night and then spent
20 years as a defense attorney in Chicago.
In his most celebrated case, he had tried but failed
to win acquittal for a man who had murdered
his wife on the then unusual grounds
of temporary insanity.
When Prohibition began, Remus found himself
defending bootleggers in a courtroom presided over
by a federal judge named Kennesaw Mountain Landis.
Remus was angered at the size
of the judge's arbitrary fines but also intrigued by the ease
with which his clients peeled off $ 1,000 bills to pay them.
MAN AS GEORGE REMUS: I was impressed by the rapidity
with which those men, without any brains at all,
piled up fortunes in the liquor business.
The more I studied the Volstead Act,
the more I was convinced
of its frailties, and so I decided to get in
on the ground floor, strike while the iron was hot.
NARRATOR: Practicing law had already made Remus rich.
Like Roy Olmstead in Seattle, he would discover
that breaking the law would make him far richer,
and he would do it on a scale beyond anything
Olmstead could have imagined.
Remus knew that millions of gallons of liquor
manufactured before Prohibition
were locked away in bonded distillery warehouses.
If their owners could get government withdrawal permits,
they could sell it legally but only to drug companies
and only if they promised to dispense it
for purely medicinal purposes.
By buying up distilleries and creating
his own drug company, Remus could become
both buyer and seller
and then cook the books to lose shipments in between.
He called his system The Circle.
In June of 1920, after marrying Imogene Holmes,
the secretary who had broken up his first marriage,
Remus left Chicago and moved to Ohio to begin a new life.
He picked Cincinnati because nearly 80%
of America's bonded liquor was stored
in distillery warehouses within a 300-mile radius.
George Remus intended to buy up as many
of them as he could.
OKRENT: And he built this enormous octopus
of a bootlegging operation,
and most cleverly, he started a drug company,
a wholesaler to drug stores,
and then he would send his trucks out,
his own men would hijack those trucks
and put it into the illegal liquor trade.
NARRATOR: Remus set up his own bogus Kentucky drug company
in Covington and bought up the Fleischmann
and Edgewood distilleries in Cincinnati,
as well as the Pogue and Hill & Hill distilleries
in Kentucky.
He created his own trucking firm,
the American Transportation Company,
to carry whiskey to his distribution center,
an isolated 50-acre Ohio farm hidden in a hollow,
whose house, barns, and outhouses could hold
tens of thousands of cases of whiskey.
Because hired gunmen commanded every inch
of the lone road that led down into it,
his men liked to call the farm Death Valley.
Customers ventured down and back up the road all day.
MAN AS GEORGE REMUS: They came from all over the country
and included the fashionable club man,
the hotel keeper, the whiskey jobber,
the petty bootlegger.
They were as anxious to buy as I was to sell,
and there was never a day that the demand was not
70% greater than the supply.
NARRATOR: Sales were strictly cash,
sometimes as much as $79,000 a day,
all of it tax-free.
As Remus' wealth grew, so did his self-confidence,
and he began to refer to himself in the third person.
MAN AS GEORGE REMUS: Remus was in the whiskey business,
and Remus was the biggest man in the business.
Cincinnati was the American Mecca
for good liquor, and America had to come
to Remus to get it.
George Remus.
NARRATOR: Remus soon had 3,000 employees working
3 shifts a day and was doing millions of dollars
worth of business a year.
He bought an elegant mansion in Cincinnati's
best neighborhood and filled it
with beautiful things.
To keep it all going, he paid off an army
of local, state, and federal officials.
"I went on the theory that every man has a price,"
he said, "and I could afford to pay it."
But to obtain the thousands of government permits
required to withdraw all of the whiskey
from his own distilleries, Remus needed direct access
to Washington, as well.
To get it, he went right to the top.
In may of 1921, he checked into the Commodore Hotel
in Manhattan for the first of several secret meetings
with Jess Smith, friend, confidant, and fixer
for President Harding's attorney general
Harry Daugherty.
Smith was blunt... Remus could have all the signed
federal withdrawal permits he wanted
for $2.50 per case.
Smith also promised that for another $50,000
Remus could be protected from punishment.
Even if he were arrested and indicted,
he would never have to go to jail.
Remus paid him on the spot in $ 1,000 bills.
Over the following months, Remus would meet Smith
again and again in Columbus and Indianapolis,
Washington and New York
and later claim to have paid him a total
of more than a quarter of a million dollars in bribes.
MAN AS GEORGE REMUS: You must understand that I was spending
much time on the road.
Today I could be in New York, opening a new drug company,
conferring with certain gentlemen,
if I may call them so, on matters pertaining
to the conduct of our business without interference
from the government.
On the train between cities, I was busy studying
the new Prohibition regulations and devising means
to circumvent them as fast as they were issued.
You will pardon me for saying that it was
a very strenuous life.
NARRATOR: George Remus and Roy Olmstead were not
the only Americans building fortunes
by getting around the law.
William McCoy, a Florida skipper,
pioneered the rumrunning trade by sailing a schooner loaded
with 1,500 cases of liquor from Nassau
in the British colony of the Bahamas
to Savannah and pocketing
$ 15,000 in profits from just one trip.
Smuggling was not difficult.
The 48 states had a total coastline of more than
5,000 miles, more than 35,000 if every tidal bay
and twisting inlet, salty creek
and river mouth was counted.
At first, the United States Coast Guard had only
55 vessels capable of patrolling more than
a few miles from shore.
Soon scores of other seafarers were following
McCoy's example, sometimes outfitting their boats
with powerful aircraft engines so that they could
easily outrun any Coast Guard ship.
The trade transformed the Bahamian economy.
When the United States government complained
to Britain that American law was being undermined
by Nassau officials, the man in charge
of the British Colonial Office refused to intervene.
Winston Churchill believed that Prohibition was
"An affront to the whole history of mankind."
From the tip of Florida all the way north
to the coast of Maine, a permanent picket line
of rusting freighters, tramp steamers,
and converted submarine chasers tossed
at anchor just beyond the 3-mile limit
of U. S. jurisdiction.
This chain of floating liquor warehouses
was called Rum Row.
Every evening after dark, fast-moving little boats
carried cargo to drop-off points onshore.
OKRENT: And people would go to the beaches
on the south shore of Long Island
or on Virginia beach, on Cape Cod,
you could see it.
You'd just see these enormous boats.
A person remembered, said it was like... at night,
seeing the lights of the boats was like seeing
a city out there, they were that thick.
WOMAN: Bootleggers, they would dump cartons of liquor
that floated somehow and then came ashore,
and then the owners would have been notified,
and they would come down to the beach and wait
for the liquor to come in,
and it would be marked in some way that meant
it was for them.
I know I had friends who lived on that shore
who said if they got up early enough they could get liquor
and take it to their house and steal it
from the man who was waiting for it.
NARRATOR: Rum Row was busiest at what was called
the rendezvous, off the southern coast
of Long Island, where New Yorkers
in motor launches moved from ship to ship,
comparing prices before deciding what to buy.
"It was like going to a supermarket,"
one schooner captain recalled.
"We had a good reputation and lots of customers.
"They would carry your mail ashore
and bring you anything you wanted."
WOMAN: The 18th Amendment is doing one thing
which is of sobering importance.
It is putting democracy on trial.
It is testing whether this government
can withstand the militant discontent
of organized minorities.
Therefore, as I see it, the struggle
is not whether or not Prohibition will survive
but whether the United States is equal to the task.
Mabel Walker Willebrandt.
OKRENT: Mabel Walker Willebrandt,
in the Twenties if you had mentioned her name,
it would be like mentioning Sandra Day O'Connor's name
today in terms of renown.
She was undoubtedly the most famous woman
in America who wasn't in the movies,
and she was an incredibly serious, determined,
totally honest person who was told she had
to enforce the law.
So she was going to enforce the law.
NARRATOR: When President Harding named Mabel Walker Willebrandt
Assistant Attorney General of the United States
and put her in charge of Prohibition enforcement
policy in august of 1921, she seemed an unlikely choice.
She was "a young lawyer, just 32 that summer,"
she remembered, "much too young
for the responsibilities heaped on me."
but her life had already taught her what hard work
and independent thinking might accomplish.
She was born in a sod house on the Kansas prairie.
Her earliest memories were of riding in the covered wagon
in which she and her pioneer parents traveled
from one failed farm and hapless business venture
to the next.
She was taught at home till the age of 13,
got herself expelled from a Presbyterian college
for questioning the doctrine
of the virgin birth, became a teacher,
and married the principal of her school.
She worked to put them both through law school,
cared for his widowed mother, and then, when he seemed
unwilling to shoulder his share of the burden,
walked away from the marriage.
She became a public defender in Los Angeles,
representing some 2,000 prostitutes
in police court and doing her best to see that
their male clients were forced to appear
before the judge, as well.
She launched a successful private practice, too,
and quickly attracted attention among progressive
Republican leaders in California,
who pressed President Harding to put her in charge
of Prohibition cases.
"Nobody wanted that job," a friend recalled.
"It had no political advantages at all.
So of course they gave it to Mabel."
Willebrandt had never been a member
of the Women's Christian Temperance Union,
never voted dry, even enjoyed an occasional drink
until she joined the Justice Department
and instantly became a teetotaler.
For her, the law was the law,
and there was something else, too.
WOMAN AS MABEL WILLEBRANDT: For all of my life
I have had the most uncanny feeling
against which I have often struggled,
that seems always to say to me, "You are marked to step
into a crisis sometime as the instrument of God."
It seems that it may mean danger or disgrace
or in some way cause me agony of heart,
but I can't escape it.
NARRATOR: Willebrandt, now the highest-ranking woman
in the government, had few illusions.
The Volstead Act itself, she said, was
"Puerile, puny, toothless."
She believed her boss, Attorney General Daugherty,
was "a politician in sheep's clothing,"
and "manifestly, utterly unqualified."
The Prohibition agents gathering the evidence
she would need for her prosecutions,
she complained, were either "preachers"
or "ward heelers"
and of little use in either case.
Nonetheless, she went on the attack.
She organized her own flying squad of lawyers
meant to replace inept or corrupt U. S. Attorneys
wherever they were needed.
She lobbied hard for a flotilla
of Navy and Coast Guard vessels to intercept smugglers
off the Florida coast,
and she worked closely with the treasury department
to infiltrate two of the most notorious
rumrunning outfits in the country:
the Big Six, who ran operations around Mobile;
and the Big Four, who controlled things
around Savannah and who had, until they were arrested,
been so unconcerned about federal interference
that they fielded a baseball team
called the Bootleggers.
When she got a telegram from Savannah announcing
that 72 rumrunners had been convicted there,
she wired back, "Thank the Lord."
It was just the kind of victory she wanted,
big-time traffickers put behind bars,
plenty of headlines attesting to the fact that
the Justice Department was on the job,
that despite the odds, Prohibition could
be made to work.
OKRENT: You know, in an odd way,
Mabel Willebrandt, it was like she wasn't
in on the joke.
She took her job absolutely seriously,
and she wanted to enforce the law.
She had no support from the Secretary of the Treasury,
Andrew Mellon.
She had very little political support
from the Harding White House,
but Mabel, she chugged on.
She was going to dry out this country.
WOMAN AS MABEL WILLEBRANDT: I refuse to believe that out
of our 120 million population, 35 million eligible adults
of whom can be reasonably counted as favoring
Prohibition, it is impossible to find
4,000 men in the United States who cannot be bought.
[Glass shatters]
OKRENT: The noblest idea of Prohibition,
to protect people from the ravages
that alcohol can indeed bring,
is really undercut horribly
by some of the consequences of Prohibition.
This is commonplace of people really going off
the deep end with it.
NARRATOR: Millions of Americans may have
stopped drinking, but those who did still drink,
women as well as men, drank more.
In some areas, arrests for public intoxication
and drunk driving actually began to climb.
So did the incidence of cirrhosis of the liver,
and what people drank at the hands of inept
or unscrupulous bootleggers only added to the risks.
Bootleg liquor was often extended with wood alcohol,
rubbing alcohol, or other toxic chemicals
that could cause blindness, paralysis, even death.
In just 4 months, 15,000 Midwesterners
developed a severe neurological disorder
called jake leg, the result of drinking
an illicit fluid, Jamaica Ginger,
laced with a chemical used to thin paint.
OKRENT: Periodically in nearly every major city
there would be stories in the newspapers...
suddenly 30 people, 19 people, 45 people,
poisoned from a bad batch of wood alcohol.
People were buying from suspect sellers,
and suspect sellers were cutting corners,
and this happens throughout Prohibition,
and it happens everywhere.
MAN: Prohibition was a joke.
You cannot legislate morality, number one.
Number two, in legislating and attempting to legislate
morality you create opportunities for people
who do not follow the law.
MAN: If you were a thug, if you were a pickpocket,
a safecracker, a yegg as they called it
at the time, you were making a little bit
of money here and there at great risk,
but you were never gonna get rich.
Suddenly Prohibition comes along,
and you can do the same thing you were doing before,
just delivering some illegal goods
from one place to another, supplying somebody
with something they weren't supposed to have,
but now you're making a fortune,
and once they start making this fortune,
they've got power, they've got money
to start buying politicians, which means they can make
greater fortunes.
So Prohibition was the greatest thing
that ever happened to the goons.
[Indistinct chatter]
NARRATOR: In cities big and small,
Prohibition created opportunities.
Small-time criminals became big-time bootleggers
and fought one another to gain control
of the illegal liquor trade.
In the cities, the hoodlums were mostly immigrants
or immigrants' sons...
Polish and Russian Jews, Italians, Irish...
with big ambitions and little to lose.
HAMILL: They're a sort of baroque form
of capitalism, a lot of shadows in there,
but these original guys also had immigrant energy.
Bigotry had been directed at them
by the so-called establishment.
They said, "OK. We'll do it our way."
And they did.
OKRENT: It was a Jewish mob that controlled
Philadelphia, that controlled Newark,
that controlled big hunks of New York.
Detroit, the Purple Gang, among the most vicious.
NARRATOR: Two pairs of brothers, Joe and Beeny Bernstein
and Harry and Louis Fleischer,
ran the Purple Gang in Detroit.
Charles "King" Solomon made himself the racket boss
of New England.
Philadelphia was run by a sometime boxing manager
Max "Boo Boo" Hoff.
Vito Di Giorgio had the final say in Los Angeles
until he was murdered and his underboss
Rosario DeSimone took over.
Johnny Lazia ran things in wide-open Kansas City, Missouri,
in partnership with the courtly
Democratic boss Tom Pendergast.
New York was too big for any single mobster to run
on his own, although Arnold Rothstein,
Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz,
and Frank Costello all tried,
waging a 12-year gang war that cost hundreds of lives.
[Siren]
But it was what happened in the streets of Chicago that
made that city synonymous with murder and mayhem
for a generation.
On a hot august night in 1922, the Chicago police
arrested a drunken young man for brandishing a pistol
after a traffic accident.
He didn't seem worried.
"I'll fix this thing so easy, you won't know how
it's done, " he said.
He was right.
The charges against him were quickly dropped.
The newspapers spelled his name wrong,
but he had produced his first headline.
Alphonse Capone was just 23 years old and was suspected
of murdering at least two men in his native Brooklyn
before coming to Chicago.
A violent confrontation with the knife-wielding brother
of a young woman he had insulted had left him
with 3 cuts on his cheek that would earn him
the nickname "Scarface."
Capone had become the chief enforcer
for the boss of Chicago vice Johnny Torrio.
Torrio had seen right away how to capitalize
on Prohibition, and he now presided
over an unlikely federation of neighborhood gang leaders.
They came from nearly every ethnic group in the city.
Dion O'Banion, a former altar boy,
was a safecracker and sometime florist whose
Irish North Side Gang specialized
in smuggling liquor down from Canada.
The Sicilian Genna brothers had a network of stills
installed in dozens of private homes
on the Near West Side that earned them
hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
"Polack Joe" Saltis was the leader
of the Southwest Side Gang
and was said to be the first gangster
to settle his business disputes with a Thompson submachine gun.
Everyone would prosper, Torrio had promised them,
provided they agreed to stay out of one another's
territory and refrained from hijacking
one another's product.
Anyone who violated the rules could expect
to be targeted by the others.
They all signed on as charter members
of what came to be called the Chicago Outfit,
and they had the enthusiastic support
of Chicago's long-time Republican mayor
Big Bill Thompson.
Red-faced, shameless and permanently on the take,
he made sure Torrio and Capone had little
to fear from the law.
The Chicago chief of police himself admitted
that 60% of his officers were in the bootlegging business.
By the spring of 1923, Torrio's syndicate was
grossing a million dollars a month from beer and liquor,
gambling and prostitution.
Al Capone got 25% of the profits.
He moved his wife and son and whole extended family
from Brooklyn to a 15-room house
at 7244 South Prairie Avenue in a quiet neighborhood
that was home to workers in the meat-packing business.
Capone and his 4 brothers seemed to fit right in.
When a Democratic reformer was elected mayor of Chicago,
Torrio and Capone just moved their headquarters
to a hotel in the working-class suburb of Cicero,
and when it seemed possible the Democrats might oust
Cicero's compliant Republican mayor
in the next election there,
Capone and more than 100 armed thugs
terrorized voters, beat up poll watchers,
and knocked the candidate for town clerk senseless.
At one point, shots were exchanged
with sheriff's deputies, and Capone's
brother Frank was riddled with bullets.
When the votes were counted, the Republicans
had been reelected by an understandably large margin.
Later when the president of the village board dared
tell a newspaperman he was thinking of acting
more independently, Al Capone himself
hurled him down the steps of city hall.
[Tires squeal]
[Crowd screaming]
Americans were becoming more and more concerned
about the growing lawlessness in Chicago
and other cities,
but Torrio, Capone,
and the thousands of other increasingly violent criminals
vying for control of the bootlegging business
were just getting started.
CLARKE: Prohibition gave the average criminal,
extortionist, bank robber, bank thief, murderer,
pickpocket... gave him a cover.
Now instead of saying that he's a thief or he's a thug
or he's a slug, they'd say,
"He works on the Prohibition trucks.
"He serves beer.
How bad can the guy be?"
It gave them a cover for just about everything.
FELDMAN: There's a strange phenomenon in laws,
that I myself first saw with the streetlights
in Cairo in Egypt.
One person starts by running the red light.
Then a hundred, then a thousand,
then a million people are running the red light,
and at a certain point, the policeman may be standing
there and waving his arms in the air,
but the streetlight is irrelevant.
The policeman is irrelevant.
The principal is that everyone is breaking the law.
If everyone is breaking the law or almost everyone,
then there's just no way the government
can actually enforce it.
To a remarkable degree, this is what happened
with Prohibition.
MAN: I remember vividly when I was a small kid
my sister and I trampling on grapes in big washtubs
to make my father's wine, which he bottled and kept
and made at home at 93rd street.
He used to call it Chateau Quatre-vingt-treize,
Chateau 93, and terrible wine,
but that's what we drank.
I remember once I, myself, had a little trouble.
I was living with a fellow classmate
as a graduate student in Cambridge.
We had an apartment and had found a recipe for making beer,
so in our kitchen, we set it up,
and it was churning away, and the next thing we knew
it exploded all over the place.
So that was the end of our beer-making program.
NARRATOR: Under the Volstead Act,
it was not illegal to make wine for home consumption.
Countless Americans did,
but if they decided to sell their wine
or make beer or whiskey, they were breaking the law.
Countless Americans did that, too.
A simple still cost just $7.00.
Recipes were available at the local library.
People could pick up ingredients at any grocery,
including blocks of grape concentrate
bearing the thoughtful warning, "Do not add water and leave
in a dark place, or it will ferment and turn to wine."
Struggling California grape growers were delighted.
They saw the prices of their harvests soar
from $9.00 to as much as $375 a ton.
From dawn to dusk each day in San Francisco,
fleets of trucks delivered grapes to be crushed
for local consumption.
"What happens to it after you take it away
ain't our business," one driver said.
The surviving brewers found a way to profit, too.
Near beer had never really caught on.
Beer drinkers wanted the real thing.
To provide it, brewers like Pabst and Anheuser-Busch
began selling malt extract.
Perfectly legal in its unfermented form,
it was easily turned into homemade beer
with a satisfying kick.
"We ended up," August Busch remembered,
"as the biggest bootlegging supply house
in the United States."
Boy, that's good!
It didn't take a lot of brains to make a lot of booze.
Then you just had to get the people to buy it.
First you invited in your neighbors.
If you ended up with a pretty good product,
more neighbors came,
and then the police came, and you provided them
with some whiskey and with some money,
and everybody was happy.
MAN: Chicago had probably a lot more immigrants
than most cities.
It was difficult for them to make a decent wage
to raise a family.
The Italian community was two blocks
from where I lived,
and they knew how to make good wine, you know,
and they used to call it Dago Red.
And they'd also make dandelion wine.
These women would bring their little babies out.
They'd have them there in a basket.
Then they'd pick dandelions all day long.
Can you imagine bending over for 8 hours a day?
But they turned that into money.
And, see, there's no substitute for money
because then they had money for church,
for communions, for weddings.
NARRATOR: Illegal liquor was made in every one
of the 48 states,
in chicken coops and abandoned coalmines,
privies and parking garages.
In the mesas and canyons of the Southwest,
cowboys and farmers alike distilled their whiskey
in remote caves far from the prying eyes of the law.
A secret still that yielded 130 gallons of moonshine
a day was found on a ranch owned by the man who had
introduced the 18th Amendment in the Senate,
Morris Sheppard of Texas.
In northern California, Prohibition agents
discovered a still hidden within the hollowed-out base
of a giant redwood and padlocked the tree
with a sign that read, "Closed for one year
in violation of the National Prohibition Act."
in Philadelphia, citizens bought up homemade drinks
with names like Happy Sally, Jump Steady, and Soda Pop Moon.
Chicagoans liked Yack Yack Bourbon,
raw alcohol flavored with burnt sugar and iodine.
And in the countryside, Americans drank
White Lightning, Straightsville Stuff,
Goat Whiskey, Jackass Brandy.
NARRATOR: Men had been making their own whiskey
in the hills and hollows of Kentucky
since the 18th Century.
Everybody was making whiskey, you believe it.
Here in Kentucky... I don't know about where you come from.
Charlie PO OLE: ♪ If the river was whiskey ♪
♪ And I was a duck ♪
♪ I'd dive to the bottom ♪
♪ And I'd never come up ♪
♪ Oh, tell me how long ♪
♪ Have I got to wait ♪
♪ Oh, can I get you now? ♪
♪ Mustn't hesitate ♪
♪ If the river was whiskey... ♪
CALDWELL: My father on the weekend,
go down to the river over the hill,
back of our house, and he'll call,
and he say, "Hey, hey!"
Here comes this boat across the river,
and I'm peeping, I'm watching.
I seen my father take two quarters out,
and he come up the hill, and he hand my father
two pints of whiskey.
My mother would get the glasses.
She'd get her sugar out.
They sat around there and enjoyed
bootleg whiskey, moonshine, and they was happy,
and on Sunday, they got up and went to church,
and on Monday they got up and went to work,
and that's the way life... life was for them.
JOHNS ON: For a lot of the whites that were affluent,
they didn't want to be seen within their neighborhoods
going to get the product, so they would go
into the black communities, and they knew who
within the black community could get some,
and so that would go on for a while,
and then someone would hear, get wind of it.
Well, that was taking money away from the folks
in the white communities that were making the product.
So you knew that every now and then somebody
was gonna get busted.
You just hoped it wasn't you.
So there was one family that came up with a system
that was based on the delivery of milk in the mornings.
Their little truck was painted just like a milk truck.
Their uniforms were white, and the jugs, they painted
them up just like milk in the jar.
And so they would fill it up with moonshine
so that way the milk got delivered,
and so did the moonshine, and everybody was happy.
NARRATOR: Americans everywhere liked to argue
over which of their cities was the most defiantly wet.
Whenever Prohibition agent lzzy Einstein arrived
in a strange town, he liked to see how quickly
he could get a drink.
His own candidate for America's wettest city
was New Orleans.
It took just 35 seconds before the taxi driver
who picked him up at the railroad station
offered him a swig from a bottle under the seat.
MAN: June, 1924.
When the white, Protestant, Nordic delegates
from the Christian Endeavor regions
of the South and Middle West arrive
in the big town, their tongues hanging out,
they will get all that they have dreamed of
all these months.
It will cost them somewhat more than the dreadful
corn liquor of their native steppes,
but they will quickly get too much aboard
to bother about money.
In brief, I formally prophesy that
the Democratic National Convention will be
as wet as Democratic National Conventions
have always been and that the Prohibitionist delegates,
as always, will do more than their fair share of guzzling.
H. L. Mencken.
NARRATOR: In late June of 1924, the Democrats began
arriving in Manhattan for their nominating convention
to be held at Madison Square Garden.
It would be one of the most fiercely fought in history,
a 16-day battle between two Americas,
the old rural, Protestant country
and the new diverse world of the big cities.
MAN: The Democrats in 1924, tried to show
their hospitality to the rest of the country.
One of the efforts at hospitality was to erect
a huge sign of Father Knickerbocker
over the Hotel Astor.
The only problem from the point of the view
of the drys was that Father Knickerbocker was holding
a conspicuous huge beer mug in his hand.
Prohibition wasn't the biggest issue
at the 1924 convention, but the division
between the wets and drys mirrored
the split between the cities and the countryside.
NARRATOR: The candidate of the Protestant countryside
was the frontrunner, Woodrow Wilson's
Georgia-born son-in-law, William Gibbs McAdoo.
He was nominally a reformer, committed to the rights
of women and workers, but he was also
a Confederate sympathizer and resolutely dry.
His chief challenger was another, far more committed
progressive, the governor of New York,
"The Happy Warrior," Al Smith.
LERNER: Al Smith is a good example of a politician
in the 1920s who has the courage to stand up
to the Prohibitionists, and he has the courage
to be honest and open about what he thinks about Prohibition
and why he thinks it's not working.
I mean, he was a guy who liked to have a martini himself.
So that probably helped.
NARRATOR: Alfred Emanuel Smith was born in a tenement building
on New York's Lower East Side, the son of a freight handler.
His forbears were immigrants from Ireland,
Germany, Italy, England.
He learned his politics on the corner
of Oliver and Water Streets at the local Tammany headquarters
Tom Foley's Saloon.
LEUCHTENBURG: He was born under the shadow
of Brooklyn Bridge.
He worked in the Fulton Fish Market.
He said, "Ain't."
He represented the mores of the big city.
He made no attempt to relate to the rest of the country.
He once said that " I would rather be a lamppost
on park row than governor of California."
NARRATOR: Smith was everything the drys despised...
Catholic, citified, and wet.
"Wouldn't you like to have your foot on the rail
and blow the foam off some suds?"
he'd once asked a reporter when he thought he was
talking off the record.
And just under one year earlier, he had signed
a bill repealing the hugely unpopular Mullan-Gage Law
that had strengthened Prohibition enforcement
in the state of New York.
With that single stroke of his pen,
Al Smith had made himself the arch-villain
of Wayne Wheeler, the Anti-saloon League,
and all those allied with them.
The governor's action was nothing less than
"perfidy," Wheeler said.
"It will stir the nation," he warned,
"as did the shot on Fort Sumter."
At the convention before the balloting could begin,
delegates found themselves in the midst of a bitter battle,
not about Prohibition but between those Smith supporters
who wanted a plank in the party platform denouncing
the newly revived Ku Klux Klan by name
and those who wished no mention of it at all.
The Klan, which strongly supported Prohibition,
had two million members now, and there may have been
as many as 300 Klansmen among McAdoo's delegates.
HAMILL: A movie called "Birth of a Nation"
came out in 1915.
It was the greatest recruiting poster
in the history of the country for a terrorist organization.
After that movie, the Klan expanded everywhere.
They were in Indianapolis, they were in Westchester.
OKRENT: They have in their platform,
such as it is, the fostering of America
as a white Protestant, native-born nation
that doesn't allow liquor,
and they were very adamant in their support of Prohibition.
NARRATOR: Unwilling to criticize the Klan,
McAdoo refused to take sides.
Smith called the Klan "un-American" and declared
he'd rather be denied the nomination than shrink
from denouncing it.
There were fistfights in the aisles.
In the end, Smith's anti-Klan forces lost by one vote.
Then, the struggle for the nomination began
and stretched on for 103 ballots
in the stifling heat with neither Smith
nor McAdoo able to command the 2/3 majority he needed.
MAN: Smith supporters were yelling, "Ku Klux McAdoo."
McAdoo supporters were yelling, "Booze, booze, booze,"
because to them Smith suggested everything
about urban immigrant America that was bad.
NARRATOR: Hopelessly deadlocked,
the weary delegates finally settled instead
on a colorless conservative, the attorney
for the banking house of J. P. Morgan
and former ambassador to great Britain John W. Davis.
"The two factions lost everything they
had fought over," wrote H. L. Mencken,
who was covering the convention for the "Baltimore Evening Sun."
"It was as if Germany and France had fought
"over Alsace-Lorraine for centuries,
then handed it over to England."
Davis didn't have much of a chance.
The economy was booming, and he and the Democrats
would be crushed by Republican Calvin Coolidge in November.
For the time being, despite growing discontent
with Prohibition and its consequences,
it would remain the law of the land.
MAN AS GEORGE REMUS: A few men have tried to corner
the wheat market only to find
that there is too much wheat in the world.
I tried to corner the graft market,
but I learned that there isn't enough money
in the world to buy up all the public officials
who demand a share in the graft.
George Remus.
NARRATOR: Confident his many payments to Jess Smith
had immunized him from punishment,
George Remus had continued to expand his business.
In less than a year, he had made
some $6 million.
He had established a new supply depot in Ohio
and owned 9 distilleries,
had interests in others scattered
from Buffalo, New York, to Glendale, California,
and was on the lookout for still more,
but eventually he went too far.
He had bought the Squibb Distillery
in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and found himself operating
in the jurisdiction of a capable and incorruptible
Prohibition director Bert G. Morgan,
whom Remus would later come to call
"The stumbling block of the Middle West."
Morgan's suspicion was first aroused when his men
began seizing trucks and automobiles filled
with bottles wrapped with newspapers from Cincinnati.
Then they traced a shipment of Squibb whiskey
to Remus' headquarters at Death Valley.
Morgan's agents arrested everyone and confiscated
a small arsenal of weapons, $40,000 worth of alcohol,
and Remus' business records, as well.
Remus wasn't unduly concerned.
His government withdrawal permits covered
all of the whiskey that was seized,
and besides, Jess Smith had assured him
he would never go to prison.
On New Year's Eve, Remus gave a memorable party
to inaugurate the vast Roman-style swimming pavilion
he'd built on the grounds of his Cincinnati mansion.
He had named it the Imogene Baths in honor
of his beloved second wife.
Every guest received a gift...
specially made diamond stick-pins for the men
and diamond earrings for the women.
Remus drank only water that evening.
He was a lifelong teetotaler.
[Glasses clink]
[Gavel bangs]
A few months later, the government indicted Remus
for violating the Volstead Act 3,000 times.
Mabel Walker Willebrandt herself decided
to supervise his prosecution.
The evidence the government presented at the trial
was overwhelming.
It took the jury less than two hours to find Remus guilty,
and he was sentenced to serve two years
in federal prison.
Remus appealed and hurried to Washington
to see Jess Smith.
As always, Smith was reassuring.
He promised that Remus would never have to serve
a day behind bars.
Just to make sure, the bootlegger handed over
another $30,000.
A few weeks later, someone handed Remus a newspaper.
Jess Smith had shot himself
in the bedroom of his suite
at the Wardman Park Hotel
in Washington.
He had been named
in an investigation
of corruption in the old
Harding administration.
Remus was still so confident
that no serious harm would come to him
that while awaiting his appeal he bought
the Jack Daniel's Distillery at St. Louis and ordered
his men to siphon off every drop of whiskey.
MAN AS GEORGE REMUS: The court of appeals affirmed my sentence.
The Supreme Court refused to hear my case.
The game was over.
I had nowhere to turn.
[Cell door clangs]
NARRATOR: George Remus was on his own and eventually
found himself in handcuffs and on the way
to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta,
but he quickly adjusted, bribing officials to make
his life in prison as comfortable as possible,
and he consoled himself with the thought that
while many of his old friends had deserted him,
he could always count on the love and loyalty
of his wife Imogene in whose hands he left his fortune
and the opulent Cincinnati home
they'd lived in together.
MAN AS GEORGE REMUS: In all the pain and humiliation
of the thing, my one consolation was my wife.
She had been my partner in everything.
She knew the inside of all my deals.
She kept books on transactions which could
not be entrusted to the office force.
There was nobody in the world whom I trusted so fully.
We agreed that when my term was out we would take
a long trip around the world
and then settle down where the disgrace
would not follow us.
NARRATOR: Concerned about rumors of bribery
at the prison, Mabel Walker Willebrandt sent
one of her best agents Franklin L. Dodge
to investigate.
The warden and chaplain lost their jobs.
Remus lost all his privileges,
and then he lost his wife.
In the intervening months, Imogene Remus had begun
a romance with Agent Dodge.
Together, they set about systematically looting
her husband's assets.
They sold off his distilleries,
his stocks of liquor,
and the liquor withdrawal certificates
for which he'd paid more than $200,000.
She also filed for divorce.
"Dodge is taking everything that is most precious
to me, " Remus said.
"He has ruined my life forever."
He brooded for months behind bars,
and when he was finally released and went back to Cincinnati,
he found the home he and Imogene had shared stripped
of every stick of furniture.
He collapsed.
MAN AS GEORGE REMUS: It was the supreme double-cross.
Remus had been betrayed by everybody he had trusted
and now, at last, by the one who owed him the most.
NARRATOR: On the way to his final divorce hearing,
Remus spotted his wife and stepdaughter driving
through Eden Park in a taxicab.
He ordered his driver to force them off the road,
jumped out with a revolver, and shot his wife.
Then he turned himself in.
MAN AS GEORGE REMUS: It was a duty I owed society.
She who dances down the primrose path
must die on the primrose path.
I'm happy.
This is the first peace of mind I've had in years.
NARRATOR: The murder trial was a national sensation.
Remus' defense was the same one he'd tried
unsuccessfully to present in Chicago
back before he'd gone into the bootlegging business,
temporary insanity.
He acted as his own co-counsel,
sometimes conducting skillful cross-examinations,
sometimes weeping or moaning incoherently,
and he made sure everyone understood
how his late wife and her lover had betrayed him.
The jury deliberated just 19 minutes
before it returned to the courtroom
and declared Remus not guilty
"On the sole ground of insanity."
The courtroom erupted in cheers.
"American justice, I thank you," Remus shouted.
A juror explained that since Remus had had
"such a rotten Christmas last year,"
they had decided to "make him happy this year."
[The Mills Brothers' "Fiddlin' Joe" playing]
WARD: It was on M Street in the commercial area
of Georgetown.
It was a real good front.
The basement went right out through the back and out
to the alleyway.
Now dad would mix his alcohol there,
and I siphoned a many quart jar full of alcohol.
I'd suck into it, and I'd get a mouthful.
He'd say, "Swallow it!"
Oh, man!
It was like swallowing firewater is what it was.
NARRATOR: As his business expanded,
as the demand for illegal alcohol grew,
Donald Ward's father Paul found a neighborhood cop
willing to warn him
whenever their house was about to be raided.
WARD: This one night, a knock come to the window.
Dad opened the window up, and they said,
"10:00 tomorrow morning."
Dad set a quart of booze out and a $ 100 bill,
closed the window, and that was it.
He sent me upstairs to tell my mother
to call George, my uncle.
He worked for Wise Undertaking.
He brought the hearse up into the back alley,
and they put everything in the hearse,
and where did they go?
The safest place that could be, the Arlington Cemetery.
And he had a guard stand by,
and he paid him money to watch it.
Who's gonna stop him?
There's a hearse going into Arlington Cemetery.
They gonna stop a soldier from being buried?
No way.
NARRATOR: In June of 1924, the life of Seattle's
Bootleg King Roy Olmstead got a lot more complicated.
On the 25th, two middle-aged men talked
their way into the basement of the Henry Building.
One of them was a private detective.
The other said he was a repairman
for the telephone company,
but Richard Fryant was actually something new
in America, a professional wiretapper.
He had been hired by the enemies
of Seattle's mayor Doc Brown to gather
evidence against him and his associates,
including Roy Olmstead,
whose offices were on the second floor.
The mayor was out of town that week.
In his absence, the acting Mayor Bertha Landes,
a passionate supporter of Prohibition,
fired the corrupt Chief of Police William Severeyns
and then set about trying to close
every speakeasy in the city.
Encouraged by this rare show of local support,
federal Prohibition agents went into action, too.
[Indistinct chatter]
[Siren]
Meanwhile, as the wiretapper listened in,
a friendly policeman telephoned John McLean,
the former taxi dispatcher who handled liquor
deliveries for Olmstead,
to warn him of the coming crackdown.
MAN: Get this.
Captain Bannick is taking 50 men at 4:00,
and he's going to clean the town.
Comstock just told me.
Comstock's out now closing everything up.
You'd better call the boys and tell them to close.
I've told some, and you tell the rest.
NARRATOR: The Fourth of July was only days away.
So were thousands of thirsty sailors
from the Pacific Fleet,
slated for holiday shore leave in Seattle.
Frantic calls for liquor came in
from all over the city.
Olmstead's men had to turn everybody down
until his friend the mayor hurried home and put
Chief Severeyns back in charge of the police department.
By then, Olmstead's backlog of orders was so great
that the bootlegger himself rushed around the city
with his men, helping make deliveries.
MAN AS McLEAN: You're going to be unlucky
one of these days, Roy, doing that.
MAN AS OLMS TEAD: No, I don't think so.
The federals will slip up on you.
No, the city won't, and those other
sons of bitches are too slow to catch cold.
NARRATOR: A few days later, the private detective
who'd been helping to eavesdrop called Olmstead
and told him what he had been doing
and offered to destroy the transcripts for $ 1,000.
Olmstead told him to get lost.
His confidence was understandable.
His lawyer assured him that wiretaps were illegal
in the state of Washington and could never be used
in a courtroom.
Besides, no actual recordings existed.
The transcripts were created only from notes taken
by the wiretapper.
OKRENT: Olmstead was perfectly aware
that it was going on,
but he was also talking to the most powerful people
in town on the phone.
So he made no effort to disguise anything at all.
It is also true
that nobody had yet used wiretaps
to convict somebody of a crime that was committed
through telephonic communication.
FELDMAN: When there's new technology,
nobody knows what the law is.
The government's view, as it always is
when there's new technology,
is to be as aggressive as possible.
"If it's out there, we're gonna listen to it."
The telephone wires are not private was their view.
"We don't need a warrant to check into it,
"and so we'll feel free to listen however
we think is appropriate."
[Ring]
NARRATOR: The wiretapper Richard Fryant went
to William Whitney, Assistant Prohibition Director
for Washington State, and showed him his transcripts.
He was instantly made a federal agent and put back
to work, tapping Olmstead's home, as well as his office,
again without a warrant.
Thanks to the new wiretaps, federal agents were able to
raid Olmstead's ranch and confiscate 151 cases
of whiskey, gin, and champagne.
Olmstead wised up.
He began giving deliberately misleading orders
over the telephone, sending cars filled
with armed agents careening toward vacant warehouses
and empty beaches.
Several months later, Olmstead and his wife were
entertaining guests at dinner when William Whitney
and 16 Prohibition agents armed with shotguns
banged on the door and demanded to be let in.
Although they found no liquor, they seized papers,
keys, receipts, and took over the telephone.
Pretending to be the Olmsteads,
Whitney and his wife then made call after call
to Olmstead's accomplices, asking them to bring whiskey
to his house right away.
As each one arrived, he was arrested.
A few weeks later, a grand jury indicted
Roy Olmstead and 90 other defendants
for conspiring to violate the Volstead Act.
Some of Olmstead's associates agreed
to testify against him, but his bagman Ed Hunt
tried another tactic.
HUNT JR: My dad, he told the federal prosecutors,
"If you try me, I will talk,
"but I'm not gonna talk about things that
"you want to hear.
"I'm gonna talk about everything.
"I'm gonna name everybody that I paid bribes to,
"the dates and the amounts.
Now if you want to hear that, put me on trial."
They didn't.
NARRATOR: Olmstead posted $50,000 bail,
sued the telephone company for permitting his wires
to be tapped and ordered up more liquor
from his partners in Canada.
He still thought he could win, and when his trial began,
he laughed aloud when he recognized
the assistant United States attorney as one
of his steadiest customers,
but the federal judge ruled the government could use
transcripts of the wiretaps as evidence.
The newspapers called them the "Whispering Wires."
Olmstead was found guilty, fined $9,000,
and sentenced to 4 years of hard labor.
MAN AS RO Y OLMS TEAD: You can't tread on live coals
without getting your feet scorched.
I know that, always have,
and I'm not complaining now.
I violated the law.
That is always wrong,
and now I am going to pay the penalty.
It is my own fault.
Every bootlegger goes into the game for the same thing...
the dollar.
NARRATOR: Olmstead and his lawyers were still
confident that wiretapping violated
the Constitutional ban
on unreasonable search and seizure and appealed
the verdict all the way to the Supreme Court.
A violation of the Volstead Act
had turned into something far larger.
WOMAN: He's the one who decided to take it
to the Supreme Court, and it's the whole question
of means and ends.
And he was fighting every inch of the way,
and he spent all his money on that.
NARRATOR: Mabel Willebrandt asked to be excused
from personally making the government's argument.
She had no doubt of Olmstead's guilt, she said,
but she believed wiretapping
an unjustified invasion of privacy.
The court upheld Olmstead's conviction, 5 to 4,
but in his dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis
acknowledged Willebrandt's concerns,
and for the first time in a federal judicial proceeding
asserted that embedded in the American Constitution
was a right to privacy, and then he went on.
MAN AS LOUIS BRANDEIS: The greatest dangers to liberty
lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding.
To declare that in the administration
of the criminal law the end justifies the means,
to declare that the government may commit
crimes in order to secure the conviction
of a private criminal would bring terrible retribution.
NARRATOR: The supreme court eventually reversed itself,
and Olmstead received a presidential pardon,
but by then, he had already served out his sentence.
HUNT JR: Prohibition was called the noble experiment.
I think it created more problems than it solved.
It brought crime into the country,
it brought a disregard for laws.
I think it turned us into a nation of scofflaws
in many ways.
NARRATOR: By the mid 1920s, Prohibition seemed to be
on everyone's mind,
seemed to affect every aspect of daily life
from what you drank with dinner
to how federal laws were being enforced.
To many, it looked more and more like a terrible mistake,
and the question now was what, if anything,
could be done about it.
Some wets believed the Volstead Act could simply
be altered to allow Americans access
at least to beer and wine again.
Others began to argue that only repeal
of the 18th Amendment would end the escalating
crime and corruption and hypocrisy
that had followed in its wake,
but the drys continued to believe that Prohibition
could be made to work.
They pointed out that despite widespread defiance
of the law drinking and alcoholism had declined,
and they insisted that increased enforcement
was the answer.
Wayne Wheeler and the Anti-saloon League
still wielded enormous power over both political parties,
and the drys took additional comfort
from the fact that no Constitutional amendment
had ever been repealed.
"There is as much chance of repealing
the 18th Amendment," said senator Morris Sheppard,
who had introduced it, "as there is
"for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars
"with the Washington Monument tied to its tail."
[Siren]
[Tires squeal]
[Door slams]
[Submachine gun firing]
[Pistol shot]