Al Capone Prohibition Quotes

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.

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.

Prohibition had long been repealed (1933), but in a strange congruence Andrew J. Volstead, the Minnesota congressman who gave his name to the act, died on January 20, 1947, just five days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