PROHIBITION IN THE USA: HOW GOVERNMENT ACCIDENTALLY FUNDED MAFIA

In January 1920 the United States did something no large industrial nation had attempted. It took a commodity that half the country drank and roughly a third of the federal budget depended on, and it withdrew the law from it. We have been telling the story ever since as a costume drama. The fedora, the violin case, the raid on the speakeasy, the man with the scarred cheek smiling for the newspapers. It is a wonderful story and it has kept us from noticing what actually happened. What actually happened was a transfer. A legal market quietly consumes three things that nobody thinks to name until they are gone: a court that makes agreements binding, a label that tells you what is in the bottle, and a tax that gives the state a stake in keeping the whole arrangement orderly. Prohibition withdrew all three and left the thirst exactly where it was. The three jobs did not disappear. They were picked up by whoever remained. That is the argument of this book, and it explains a great deal that the costume drama cannot. It explains why the shooting was not a symptom of criminal temperament but a substitute for the courthouse. It explains why fame became an asset worth paying for. It explains why the corner outlets multiplied while the warehouses consolidated, both at once, under the same statute. It explains why beer nearly vanished and the hard stuff did not. And it explains the thing that no account of the period has properly explained: why the organizations built during those thirteen years were still there half a century after the law that created their business had been repealed. There is a second story running alongside the first, and almost nobody tells it. The mafia was not the only institution that grew in the 1920s. So did the federal government - the wiretap, the tax prosecution, the seizure, the whole architecture of national criminal law. Two institutions rose together, each supplying the other's justification, and that is why neither came down when the statute did. Nobody unwinds alone. >KEYWORDS Prohibition, organized crime, American history, public policy, institutions, unintended consequences, law enforcement