Chicago often resembled a war zone during the 13 years of Prohibition, when Al Capone and a host of other hoodlums fought over control of gambling, prostitution and labor unions, but especially beer.
The Chicago Crime Commission counted 729 gangland-style slayings in Cook County, Illinois, including Chicago, from 1919 to 1933.
Furthermore, Prohibition led to creation of the Chicago Outfit, which rose to domination of organized crime in the Chicago area and extended its tentacles into several other states, including Oklahoma.
John J. Binder spells out the details in “Al Capone’s Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago During Prohibition” (Prometheus Books, 414 pages, 2017).
Prohibition was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages. Alcoholism, family violence and saloon-based political corruption prompted activists to seek an end to the alcoholic beverage trade in an improbable effort to cure the ills of society. Prohibition was imposed via the 18th Amendment, which was ratified Jan. 16, 1919, officially went into effect one year later, and ended Dec. 5, 1933, after adoption of the 21st Amendment.
Alcohol “has long been a part of American life,” Binder writes. “On the frontier, it was treated as almost a staple, beginning in the colonial period.”
Chicago, in particular, was “a hard-drinking town,” the author reports. The Lager Beer Riot, which occurred in 1855 when the city sextupled the fee for saloon licenses and tried to enforce a law against saloons being open on Sundays, escalated into a full-scale gun battle along the Chicago River.
In 1906, Chicagoans’ consumption of hard liquor was almost three times as much as the national average. Even after ratification of the 18th Amendment, the citizens of Chicago voted in 1919 against a local ordinance closing saloons – by a margin of 3-to-1.
Immediately after Prohibition went into effect, retail prices for alcoholic beverages rose dramatically. That was due in part to “the monopoly position of gangsters in the market,” but also because regardless of the new law, alcoholic beverages remained in demand.
The “speakeasy” – an illicit establishment where alcoholic beverages were sold – proliferated. So did bootleg beer and “bathtub gin.”
‘Bootleg’ beer, public corruption
Gangsters quickly entered the beer brewing business and monopolized the sale of the product in specific areas in Cook County. By 1928, for example, a Capone operation in the suburb of Melrose Park had 119 illegal stills producing a million gallons of illegal alcohol annually.
Public corruption associated with “bootlegging” was widespread. As an illustration, the owners of one Chicago brewery included several aldermen (i.e., city councilmen) and state legislators, a congressman and two gangsters. A Chicago Tribune crime reporter murdered in 1930 was found to be a “bagman” for Chicago’s police commissioner. Al Winge, known as Chicago’s toughest policeman, moonlighted as a bootlegger.
In 1924, Chicago had a dozen major bootlegging gangs.
The number of hoodlums affiliated with those gangs cannot be tallied with any certainty, but the John Torrio – Al Capone gang had 700 members in late 1923, and Capone reportedly had 500 gunmen in his employ at the height of his power. In late 1931, the Capone mob had separate men in charge of brewery construction, alcohol production, beer production and sales, plus an enforcement group that included “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Capone’s chief executioner.
The North Side gang, meanwhile, had 200 toughs, and Earl “Hymie” Weiss had 200 gunmen on his payroll when he was shot to death in 1926.
Gangsters were violent men
These were nasty characters.
James “Fur” Sammons, for example, was demented. After his parole from prison for raping an 11-year-old girl, he murdered a Chicago saloonkeeper during a robbery. Paroled again, he joined Capone’s gang. Capone made sure Sammons was accompanied by bodyguards when he went out on a gangland hit.
“The goal was not to protect Sammons,” Binder writes.
Instead, Capone was “trying to shield the public” from Sammons “because he liked to shoot at pedestrians with his submachine gun as a form of target practice” when driving around Chicago.
In the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, several men masquerading as Chicago police officers executed seven men, including five members of George “Bugs” Moran’s North Side gang.
Chicago’s international reputation for gangland violence “was firmly established during the 1920s,” Binder notes. In 193,2 a textile weaver ran an advertisement in Chicago newspapers that announced: “Bullet Holes in Damaged Clothes Rewoven Perfectly – Low Price.”
Several Prohibition-era hoodlums “received training in violence … during World War I, as evidenced by their war records and by their later funerals, where full military honors were provided,” Binder reveals.
Cook County was hotbed of crime
A “virtual breakdown” of law and order in Cook County “made it a perfect breeding ground for all types of crime,” Binder writes.
Although the main focus of Chicago’s bootlegging gangs was the production and sale of beer, wine, pure alcohol and hard liquor, almost all of them were involved in gambling “to one extent or another…”
Chicago police counted no fewer than 1,500 gambling sites in late 1927, and gambling there “flourished” in 1928, the author reports. A bank in Cicero, a Chicago suburb, installed an after-hours deposit chute for gambling house proceeds.
In 1923, only five of Chicago’s 6,222 policemen were assigned to the suppression of vice. Consequently, “it was running rampant in the city, accompanied by venereal disease,” the author writes. The city was estimated to have approximately 2,000 brothels “and other vice dives” by mid-1930.
The end of Prohibition “would take away gangland’s crown jewels, the bootlegging racket,” Binder points out. So the criminals concentrated on other enterprises, such as gambling and illegal narcotics, and the underworld also “made deeper inroads into organized labor and … business racketeering” in the early 1930s.
Capone’s tentacles reached into Oklahoma
By the late 1920s, a Capone ring sent alcohol to bootleggers throughout northern and central Illinois and to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Wisconsin, Binder reports.
As for Capone, he was never convicted of murder but was convicted in 1931 of income tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. (Ironically, almost 5,000 bootleggers across the nation paid income taxes in 1923 on their ill-gotten gains, Binder writes.)
Since the end of Prohibition, the Chicago Outfit created by Capone and his henchmen has “tainted northern Illinois and many other parts of the United States with crime and corruption.”
It was active in Oklahoma and Dallas by the mid-1940s, Binder says.