Al Capone Prohibition Quotes

And you know how no prohibition in history has ever worked out? Not in the twenties with Al Capone, not the war on drugs. It makes it worse. You can't stop people doing what they want to do. They'll find a way.

Thunder Road” became a codename for particular routes everyone knew through the main thoroughfares. Numerous drivers ended up risking their lives for a truckload of whiskey. Ike Costner, one of the original mobsters alongside Al Capone, became one of the biggest moonshine distributors in Tennessee, having perfected his moonshining skills in a government-run distillery before Prohibition started. Criminal

Neither, it turned out, was politics. His views on government were strong, if a trifle simplistic. The cause of the Depression, he felt, was Al Capone. “The trouble with the nation’s economy,” he declared, was simply Prohibition, which “makes it possible for large-scale dealers in illicit liquor to amass tremendous amounts of currency”; the “present economic crisis,” he explained, was due to the “withdrawal of billions of dollars from the channels of legitimate trade” by these bootleggers.

Prohibition had long been repealed (1933), but in a strange congruence Andrew J. Volstead, the Minnesota congressman who gave his name to the act, died on January 20, 1947, just five days before the outlaw who arguably profited most from it.

A block of pale granite across from the White House, the Treasury headquarters was guarded on its south side by a bronze statue of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who designed America's system of money and gave birth to the forerunner of the coast guard in 1790 by launching a fleet of ten small "revenue cutter" ships to catch smugglers and pirates. Fifteen thousand people in Washington now worked for the Treasury Department, and another forty-six thousand in field offices across the country, doing all kinds of tasks: minting coins and paper bills; collect-ing taxes and customs duties; tracking the output of factories, the price of gasoline, the size of the annual wheat harvest. Elizebeth didn't have anything to do with these bureaucratic and economic functions. She was involved with the side of Trea-sury that investigated crimes. The department contained no fewer than six separate law en-forcement agencies: the Prohibition Bureau, the Narcotics Bu-reau, customs, the coast guard, the IRS, and the Secret Service. The six agencies had broad authorities to probe financial fraud and most any product or person that moved illegally across a border-guns, liquor, drugs, migrants, counterfeit money. The Treasury detectives were known as "T-men" in the press, as op-posed to the "G-men" of the FBI, part of the Justice Department. And although the G-men of the FBI tended to get the glory when famous gangsters went down, thanks to the publicity genius of J. Edgar Hoover, it was then the T-men but the Treasury, more often than not, who made the cases. Treasury was the center of the fight against organized crime. It was T-men who eventually mailed Al Capone for tax fraud. It was T-men who caught the kidnappers of the Lindbergh baby.