A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

abolitionists used it as an additional argument for prohibition; if alcohol was banned, the vices that
depended on it would wither away.
But in spite of this aggressive puritanism, America would probably never have taken the fatal step
if it had not been for the First World War, when many states banned the manufacture of alcohol
merely in order to conserve grain for food. This caused no problems, since Americans were ready
to take any measures to defeat the Kaiser. The ‘dry’ lobby in Congress saw success within its grasp
and pushed through the eighteenth amendment, banning all alcohol; Senator Andrew J. Volstead
proposed an act for its legal enforcement, and it was promptly passed. On 17 January 1920,
America became ‘dry’; the Anti-Saloon League declared that it presaged an ‘era of clear thinking
and clean living’.
What Congress had done was to create in America the same conditions that had made Italy the
most lawless country in the world. Government suddenly became the enemy of the people.
Americans had always been inclined to cynicism about politicians - the comedian Will Rogers
remarked: ‘With Congress, every time they make a joke it’s a law, and every time they make a law
it’s a joke.’ Now Congress had made a particularly bad joke, and commonsense revolted. The
gangster who was willing to defy the new law suddenly ceased to be a public enemy and became a
benefactor. By the time America realised its mistake - after ten years of murder and violence - it
was too late. Organised crime had come to stay.
The greatest mistake of the Anti-Saloon League was in failing to work out how total prohibition
could be enforced. ‘Near-beer’ - beer containing less than one half per cent alcohol - was still legal,
so breweries were allowed to continue operating. But in order to manufacture near-beer, ordinary
four per cent beer had to be brewed, then de-alcoholised. There was nothing to stop the brewers
diverting kegs of real beer, or providing their customers with some pure alcohol - distilled from the
beer - to add to their unpalatable near-beer. An alternative was to add industrial alcohol, which was
still legal - American production of industrial alcohol shot up in the 1920s from 28 million gallons
to 180 million. Drinkers who could afford it had no difficulty in buying real Scotch or brandy from
smugglers who brought it in from Canada - which was soon providing the American market with
more than five million gallons a year. Apart from these large-scale commercial concerns, thousands
of ordinary citizens were willing to take the risk of distilling alcohol on cheap apparatus - ‘alkycookers’
- and selling the results to criminal syndicates who paid up to $15 a day - a sum that
would once have represented a week’s wages for many of them.
In Chicago, ‘Big Jim’ Colosimo - also known as Diamond Jim because of his habit of carrying
pockets full of diamonds - already had the criminal organisation to launch into large-scale traffic in
illicit alcohol. (It quickly became known as bootlegging, because a boot was a good place to
conceal a bottle or a hip flask.) He already ran a chain of brothels, with the aid of his chief
lieutenant, Johnny Torrio, who was an ex-member of the Five Points Gang. Torrio was small, welldressed
and quietly-spoken; he was also intelligent enough to know that violence usually rebounds
against those who employ it. When it came to gangland disputes, he preferred diplomacy to
assassination. At the beginning of Prohibition, he was in his mid-thirties; Colosimo was fifty - too
old to take advantage of the magnificent opportunities that had been placed in his lap by the Anti-
Saloon League. Torrio chafed impatiently; but on 11 May 1920, he suddenly inherited Colosimo’s
empire when his employer was mysteriously shot through the head as he went to take delivery of a
consignment of alcohol. Rumour had it that Torrio paid the assassin - a man named Frankie Yale -
ten thousand dollars.