[ominous music] BILL KURTIS: The Mafia is a
basic part of American life, deny it or not. Every generation has had
its underworld kings, unforgettable personalities
that commit unspeakable crimes. The Mafia, it's a name that
speaks fear, representing the fascinating,
appalling underside of our national experience. [interposing voices] Often, they've been glorified. We call them names like Al
"Scarface" Capone, Lucky Luciano, or the Dapper Don. Many meet their fates
in undignified ways. It's not surprising. They're playing a
high stakes game. The Mafia is a business
that turns over more money than America's 10 largest
industrial corporations. How did they get this big? Who runs the show? To understand, one has to
go back to a quieter, more peaceful time. Back at the turn of
the century, America was still a largely
White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country. But the face of America
was changing dramatically. A new wave of immigrants
jostled the sense of stability of the White Anglo-Saxon
Protestants, known as WASPs. Many cities became clusters of
ethnic neighborhoods, populated by the Irish, the Jewish,
the Italians, and others. Most immigrants arrived in
the US with very little money. They lived in poverty,
in cities slums. And their lifestyles seemed
improper to some WASPs. Local crime was on the increase. Street thefts, prostitution,
gambling, and burglaries. And crime was also
becoming more violent. Well, it's been said, in the
defense of ethnic groups that feel slighted by their
association with crime, particularly the Italians,
that crime is not an ethnic phenomenon, which
it certainly isn't. It certainly goes across
all ethnic groups. But one must understand that
extreme criminality is often found among groups which
are, let's say, the hungriest when they arrive. BILL KURTIS: There was
also another side to it. Many immigrants brought
with them a hostile attitude toward the law. The Irish had been
oppressed by the British. And for them, opposition
to British law was heroic. The Italians from southern Italy
felt that the law was unjust. And the Jews fled Eastern Europe
because they'd been persecuted and denied the right
to own property. So for many, getting around the
law was an honored activity. The WASPs feared the
changes they were seeing. They wanted to
establish more control. They were particularly worried
about the drinking habits of the new immigrants. The Anti-Saloon League and
other temperance movements were already making
their opinions known. Alcohol is a detriment to you. I with that all the
youth of the Americas would see that in the
same light that I do. [jazz music] BILL KURTIS: On
January 16TH, 1920, the 18th Amendment
to the Constitution became federal law. Enforced by the Volstead
Act, it banned liquor sales, production, and consumption. Most just called it Prohibition. STEPHEN FOX: Prohibition
was foisted on this country by white Protestants
who were worried about the new immigrant groups,
worried about social control. And they saw the abolition
of the liquor traffic as a way of imposing a
kind of social control on these new immigrant groups. BILL KURTIS: However,
many Americans did not want to stop drinking. They'd suffered
through World War I and they wanted
to have some fun. A strong demand was created that
needed someone to supply it. For many immigrants who were
looking for ways to make money, Prohibition was a
dream come true. An illegal, but
highly profitable career as a bootlegger
proved irresistible. The Irish were the
first bootleggers. In many cities, they were the
saloon keepers and bar owners. And they had close ties to the
police and the politicians. Very soon, however, the
Irish met fierce competition. Then, when you come down
to bootlegging, of course, this would be at
precisely the time that the young Italians
and the young Jews raised in American slums would
be coming to manhood. And there was an opportunity to
move quickly into an expanding business activity. BILL KURTIS: Most
newly arrived Americans played the game straight,
committed no crimes, and rose by their own
legitimate efforts. Gangsters decided
to steal and kill, not because they were
Irish, Jewish, or Italian, but because they were criminals. Ironically, for the WASPs,
however, criminal circumstances actually worsened as a
result of Prohibition. No one could predict what
would happen with Prohibition. People expected it to work. It's an example of the
inscrutability of history. Often, consequences
are unintended. And Prohibition is a
classic example of it. No one thought that it would
produce an organized crime institution, like it did. BILL KURTIS: The WASPs believed
they could use Prohibition to control the
recent immigrants. What they didn't know was
that a new defiant attitude toward American justice
was taking root. Some Italians believed
more in the Mafia code than in any United States law. And soon, Italian criminals
would begin to dominate the other ethnic gangs. But as we'll see, the 1920s were
still a time when all the gangs needed each other. Bootleggers connected coast
to coast moving booze. The underworld was
becoming coordinated and organized crime,
the Mafia, was born. In turn, the Mafia helped
organize American justice. The onset of Prohibition
proved an enormous business opportunity for the underworld. What it really spawned
were the criminal gangs that we know today. With the passage of
the Volstead Act, modern organized crime
came together and developed its web-like structure. It was like an event
waiting to happen. Many of the early
bootleggers had been involved in the newspaper wars. Major newspapers hired gangs
of thugs to force news dealers to carry their paper and
not the opposition's. It was a natural graduation into
the Prohibition liquor trade, where making money and
violence went hand-in-hand. The most violent and the
most successful bootlegger in New York was the Irishman
Owney Madden, a convicted murderer and gang leader. When illegal bars or speakeasies
opened all over New York, many of them served
Madden's beer, a brew called Madden's Number One. Like other successful
bootleggers during this time, Madden went from being a nasty
small-time killer to running a major underworld
business empire. STEPHEN FOX: Owney Madden of
New York was a stone killer. He ran that town. Ed Sullivan, who was a Broadway
columnist in the 1920s, says that knowing Owney
Madden in the '20s was like knowing the mayor. BILL KURTIS: The story
was the same in Boston, a city with a strong
Irish community and a history of
resistance to Prohibition. Most of the
bootleggers had names that we've forgotten today, with
one notable exception, Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder
of the Kennedy Dynasty. During Prohibition,
he was already a bank president and making
money on the stock market. STEPHEN FOX: So many
of the Boston Irish were involved in
bootlegging in the 1920s. I think, perhaps, Joe
did it on one level just to be one of the guys,
to have this connection to the old community
from which he had sprung and which he had, frankly,
long ago left behind. It's a way of returning to his
ethnic roots in East Boston, to become a bootlegger. I think Joe Kennedy did have
a natural affinity with people who-- other people, who saw themselves
as fighting the establishment. I don't think there's any
doubt that Joseph Kennedy was in contact with a number
of Mafia characters during the 1920s. BILL KURTIS: Kennedy kept
quiet about his underworld associates, although he
would maintain contacts with organized crime
figures all his life. His public associates
were more refined. When the Harvard class of 1912
had its 10th alumni gathering, Joe played a critical role in
making it a roaring success. Ralph Lowell of
the Boston Lowells, who was the secretary
of the class of 1912, later described Joe as our
decennial Santa Claus, the man who had provided the booze. Joe's operatives brought the
booze ashore in Plymouth, just as the pilgrims
had come ashore in 1620. And it was great stuff. The Harvard reunion
in 1922 was very grateful for this high class
booze provided by Joe Kennedy to the class. BILL KURTIS: Most of his
bootlegging activities weren't so altruistic. Bootlegging was a
business for Joe. And it helped him launched
the Kennedy fortune. It was, of course, also illegal. And the federal government
was doing its best to stop the bootleggers. It was a difficult task. Many people didn't
respect the law. And their determination
to keep drinking demonstrated that creativity
was alive and well in the 1920s American. Much of the alcohol came
across the Canadian border. Much of it came from another
famous family, the Bronfman, of Canada. Sam Bronfman used
the Prohibition trade to build the Seagram's Empire,
which he ran from an office in Montreal. PROF. MARK HALLER: The
Bronfman Group were able to set up trans-shipping
companies in the West Indies and even in Mexico. So that what they really did
was to set up a transportation system all the way
around the United States. west coast, east coast,
West Indies, and so on. BILL KURTIS: All of this took
sophisticated organization and it was a major reason
why Prohibition eventually led to the creation
of organized crime. Moving large amounts
of liquor around was quite different from robbing
banks or petty extortion. You had to ship the liquor. You had to get it
past the Coast Guard. You had to store
it in warehouses and sell it to customers. This was big business. And it became the business
of organized crime. One of the main masterminds
was Arnold Rothstein, who was aptly called The Brain. Rothstein is significant,
because his complete-- I can only say, intellectual
involvement as The Brain marked the emergence
of organized crime as a complete business entity. The further elaboration of the
syndicate along business lines is generally due to him. BILL KURTIS: Arnold
Rothstein didn't have a gang, as most bootleggers did. He was the money man, fronting
money for various enterprises and then being owed money. Rothstein came from a
comfortable Orthodox Jewish family on the Upper
West Side of New York. He was an inveterate gambler. And legend has it that the
notorious 1919 World Series was fixed by Rothstein. It's the greatest scandal in the
history of American baseball. Eight members of the
Chicago White Sox were bribed to throw the
series to the Cincinnati Reds. But it's one fix that
Rothstein didn't do. He just heard
about the tampering and made a fortune
betting on the right side. Rothstein has a pupil,
the young Meyer Lansky. Lansky will eventually
take over from Rothstein, as the mastermind
behind the Mafia. Lansky is one of the contacts
between the bootleggers in New York and Seagram's
Liquor in Montreal. He's one of the ways that the
Bronfman's moved their booze into the United States. Much of the booze came
from Canada or Europe. And one of the most
important stepping off points for this flow of alcohol was a
small island about 20 miles off the coast of Newfoundland,
the island of St. Peter, a vestige of the
French empire was outside the legal jurisdictions
of both the United States and Canada. It proved enormously useful
to bootleggers like Rothstein and landscape. STEPHEN FOX: Legal booze
would come into St. Pierre from Canada and Europe,
be offloaded there, and get fraudulent papers
for shipments somewhere else. So the legal
manufacturers could say, we just sent it to St. Pierre. We don't know what
happened to it after that. BILL KURTIS: The liquor would
then make its way to the US coasts, where the large
ships would anchor three to five miles off shore,
outside US coastal limits. PROF. MARK HALLER: So
every summer, you would have what were called
mother ships off the coast of anywhere from
Boston to south Jersey. And small ships would go
out and take the booze off. It was so common, of course,
that you could go to New York and-- and tourist ships
would take you out. And you could watch the
bootleggers at work. BILL KURTIS: The Coast Guard
would send high speed boats out to try and intercept
the bootleggers. But sometimes, the corruption
of Prohibition reached them too. Once, Owney Madden's partner
bribed a Coast Guard cutter to bring in 700 cases of
booze to a Manhattan dock. For the bootlegger who
got his shipment ashore, the challenges weren't over. Anybody who wanted to hijack
his booze could do so. It was frequently known
where the booze was going, even what truck it was on. And this in turn meant
that rivaled bootleggers had to hire gunmen to protect
their trucks, which proved yet another step in fostering
the armed mobsters who would control organized crime. Prohibition had been
meant to herald an era of sobriety and clean living. Instead, it was the dawn
of unprecedented violence in American life. Gangsters were
becoming a way of life. And few cities would prove to
be more tainted, more corrupt, and more violent than
the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia. It was a town where the
politicians were bootleggers, the cops were criminals,
and the good times rolled. Philadelphia, in the 1920s,
America's second largest city. The rivers ran
murky in this town. February, 1927, the city
witnessed its first machine gun slaying, a murder
worthy of the movies. That night's evening
bulletin used a photo diagram to show how it happened. Racket chieftain Mickey
Duffy was the target. Badly wounded, he
escaped with his life. His bodyguard died. So what was going on in
the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia? This was one of America's
oldest, most respected cities. It called itself the
Workshop of the World and led the nation in producing
locomotives, streetcars, textiles, and even hats. It was a proud place with a
blueblood upper class that lived on historic Chestnut
Hill and along the so-called Mainline. But there was another side
to Philadelphia, less proper, more seamy. Philadelphia didn't
just lead the nation in industrial production. It was a leader in corruption. It was a one-party town. The Republican machine had
run the city since the 1870s. The politicians ran
a protection racket, being paid off by the gambling
houses, the prostitutes, and the saloon keepers. Philadelphia's best known
mobster was Boo Boo Hoff. He had grown up in a Jewish
immigrant neighborhood in South Philadelphia. Boo Boo Hoff, who was the
most important bootlegger in Philadelphia, was a
relatively small man. Looked, really, very much
like any small business man. That is, nobody would have mis-- mistaken him for a
criminal, or certainly for a guy who may have
been behind violence. He didn't look much like a
gangster, had no reputation himself for violence. Although, obviously, his
bootlegging operations involved occasional
killings and beatings. Any major bootlegging
operation, necessarily, had to include such things. BILL KURTIS: Boo Boo Hoff had
an office at a downtown bank building. It was here that he
ran his unique blend of legal and
illegal enterprises. PROF. MARK HALLER: He had good ties
with some of the top police officers, probably, in part, not
so much through his bootlegging as through a shared
interest in boxing. I mean, this was a guy
who owned boxers, who-- who was part of the sporting
world of Philadelphia and would've gotten to know lots
of politicians and policemen at fight. STEPHEN FOX: It's a crooked
enterprise, in large measure, in those days. There were many fixed fights. There were many fixed odds. Bets are often smelly. It's a natural place
for the gangsters. But it also gives them a cover. If they're in another
city, away from their base, to have a meeting
with a gangster, they can say they're just
there for a boxing match. And obviously,
there's a connection between the violence of
boxing and the violence of the underworld. The gangsters, of
all people, we're not going to object the--
the violence of boxing. They like it. It's blood. It's something they're used
to and comfortable with. It's a natural place of them. BILL KURTIS: Boo Boo Hoff
used his political connections to move into a number
of profitable areas. With the onset of Prohibition,
he turned his attention to Philadelphia's massive
industrial alcohol industry, to companies like Publicars
and Quaker Industrial Alcohol. PROF. MARK HALLER: What
they're doing then is redistilling the
alcohol, to make it palatable, consumable
in beverages. Unfortunately, they typically
don't do a very good job of this. And the city coroner reports
that 10 to 12 people a week are dying from
alcohol poisoning. And it's probably an
undercounting, because, of course, if-- if dad has-- has died
from tainted gin, his family doesn't want the
neighbors or the minister to find out about it. [inaudible] if you want to
come and have a good drink of this, before lunch time. BILL KURTIS: Only part
of Philadelphia's alcohol was doctored. Most of the rest arrived
via Europe and Canada. Sometimes it came
straight up the Delaware, through the docks. And sometimes, just
sometimes, the Coast Guard caught the bootleggers. But more often than not,
Philadelphia's booze made its way in via Rum Row. Philadelphia's bootleggers had
a perfect area for smuggling, among the vast stretches
of tidal salt marshes, on the Delaware Bay. There were a few people
there, just isolated fishing and farming families. PROF. CHARLES HARDY: So the
mobsters from Philadelphia would go down to south Jersey. And they would
hire, particularly after the Depression hit, they
would hire these oystermen, fishermen, who couldn't make a
living anymore at their trades, and stick them on a power boat. They'd run out to the
ships waiting ships from Canada or whatever. They'd fill it, the rum
running boat, with booze. Often, in steel cases, in
case they had to dump it, if a revenue or
cutter came along, you can pick it up later. And then, they'd run this stuff
into these isolated rivers, creeks, and inlets along
the-- the Bay and-- or estuary. The farmers then
warehoused the stuff. And it could stay there for a
week, a day, or-- or months. And it became a very important
part of the local economy. BILL KURTIS: The mobsters
didn't just hand over the drink to their clients. They wanted a bigger
piece of the action. They moved into entertainment. There's a natural connection
between the bootleggers and the nightclubs, because
where do the nightclubs get their liquor? Obviously, from the bootleggers. So the bootleggers
become partners with many of the people running
the nightclubs at that time. And ultimately, they
owned many of the clubs. BILL KURTIS: Boo Boo Hoff ran
The Turf Club in the Sylvania Hotel, and several other clubs,
which attracted the city's upper class. At the speakeasies, the
elite could rub elbows with the underworld. RICHARD LINDBERG: The speakeasy
was the daring, in place to go. Anybody who was
anybody wanted to be seen in these kinds of places. You had to have a
business card to get in. You had to know the owner. There was daringness to it. There was a bravado. In a sense, it was kind
of a voyeuristic thrill. You were doing something daring. You were tweaking the
nose of Uncle Sam, while at the same time
experiencing a great new art form in jazz, socializing
with the high brows of society and the literati and-- and the-- the Gold Coast Mavens. It was a wonderful
time to be alive. [jazz music] [singing] (SINGING) Now, here's
a very entrancing phrase. It will put you in a daze. But to me, it
don't mean a thing, cause it's got a
very peculiar swing. [singing] BILL KURTIS: Many of America's
most famous musicians played in the speakeasies, also
rubbing elbows with mobsters. STEPHEN FOX: There was a certain
affinity between the gangsters and the jazz men. They have a certain common
ground, nocturnal habits, a style of dressing, disapproval
by the straight world, things to hide,
glamorous women, secrets. They understood each
other in interesting ways, at a time when blacks and
whites had very little contact as social peers. BILL KURTIS: There was no
question of who ran the show. Take New York's Cotton Club,
one of the fanciest nightclubs in the country. Its ownership was concealed,
but the boss was Owney Madden. Owney Madden wants
the best entertainers. He wants Duke Ellington. And he's distressed
when, in 1927, the Duke goes to play at Philadelphia's
Standard Theater. PROF. CHARLES HARDY: So
Owney Madden calls down to his buddy in Philadelphia,
Maxie Boo Boo Hoff. And Boo Boo Hoff sends his
associate, Charlie "Yankee" Schwartz, over to the
manager of the Standard, who delivers his famous
line, "be big or be dead." And Ellington and the
orchestra pack up their bags, head back to New York, and
begin their famous engagement at the Cotton Club. STEPHEN FOX: Thereafter,
anytime Ellington wants to take his
band on the road, he has to pay Cab
Calloway's band to take his place at the Cotton Club. The connection is that tight. Essentially, Madden
owns Ellington's band in those years. BILL KURTIS: In Philadelphia,
the sound of music was turning ugly. And the bell began
to ring for reforms. When the city elected a new
mayor, Freeland Kendrick, he asked President
Coolidge to send someone to clean up the city. Marine Brigadier General
Smedley Darlington Butler arrived and started
a determined campaign to stomp out crime and
enforce Prohibition. Butler discovered
that nearly everyone was on the take, the police, the
politicians, and the mobsters. PROF. CHARLES HARDY: Butler becomes
increasingly frustrated. He goes public with
his frustrations. He gets in arguments
with the mayor. And finally, before
leaving after the end of his second year, in a speech
before a group of-- of women in Pittsburgh, he
calls Philadelphia a "cesspool on the
edge of the state" and says that Philadelphia
simply lacks the will or resolve to
enforce Prohibition. Philadelphians are
upset about the situation. So in 1928, Judge Edwin
Lewis convenes a grand jury to look into the matter. He takes lots of evidence
from lots of witnesses. And the story is grisly. The extent of the graft, he
estimates that about $2 million a year is being paid to
the Philadelphia cops and politicians by
the bootleggers. BILL KURTIS: In August 1928,
the jury announced its findings. It was a damning indictment
of the Philadelphia Police. They had discovered 24
high-ranking officers with bank accounts worth
about three-quarters of a million dollars. Not bad, when the average
policeman's salary was only about $2,000 a year. The policemen came up
with some weak excuses. Some said they had been
lucky in crap games, others that they had bet
on the right horse. In the end, 138 policemen
were found unfit for service. STEPHEN FOX: Boo Boo Hoff, the
grand jury's final statement says, is probably behind all of
this, but we can't indict him. He's too insulated
by fronts and covers. And so the grand jury really
amounted to not very much. Some interesting
information, but no arrests, no prosecutions came from it. They could not
touch Boo Boo Hoff. BILL KURTIS: Boo Boo
Hoff survived Prohibition without going to jail. But there were crime fighters
who refused to give up and one was an extraordinary
young woman, at the time, a rare figure in
American justice. Alcohol is hindering
the coming of world peace, because it is befuddling
the thinking of humanity. It is no laughing matter
today, when the National Survey of Education in-- on Alcoholism
state that six out of-- that one out of every
six boozers are women. BILL KURTIS: It was the women's
movement, the Suffragettes, the Women's Christian
Temperance Union, and the powerful
Anti-Saloon League that had been the driving
force behind Prohibition. So it was logical,
if somewhat radical, for a woman, Mabel
Walker Willebrandt, to be asked to
enforce the new law. PROF. DOROTHY BROWN: A woman
was very important to be in that position, because
Prohibition was looked at as a woman's issue. Women had just gotten the vote. So it was a high
visibility position. It was a moral crusade
to many people. BILL KURTIS: Mabel
Walker Willebrandt was an unusual woman. She was born in Kansas,
began school at 13, was a principal by
22, a lawyer at 27, and was just 32 when President
Harding appointed her Assistant Attorney General, in 1921. She became the enemy
of the bootleggers and of what would
become organized crime. MABEL WALKER WILLEBRANDT:
For all of my life, I've had the most uncanny
feeling that always seems to say to me, you are
marked to step into a crisis some time, as the
instrument of God. It seems that it may mean danger
or disgrace or, in some way, cause me agony of heart,
but I can't escape it. With recurring frequency,
I've had the feeling so often, all my life, since I
was a very little girl. Lately, I've quit fighting it." Apparently, trying
to enforce Prohibition was that special mission
that God had in mind for her. That gave her the strength
she needed to persist, but it also gave her a
kind of fanatical edge. PROF. DOROTHY BROWN: Willebrandt
believed in upholding the law of Prohibition. She had-- had wine
certainly before, whiskey sours before
she came into office. She didn't drink at all
while she was in office. And she worked fiercely
and was viewed as a zealot to enforce the law. BILL KURTIS: It's often said
that drinking actually went up during Prohibition. But that wasn't the case,
the only thing that went up was the price. Name brand whiskey,
for instance, went from a dime a
shot to as much as $3. People may have just thought
there was more drinking, because it was more daring,
more celebrated, more extreme. One drink's recipe from the
time captured the atmosphere. BARTENDER: Take three
chorus girls and three men. Soak in champagne til midnight. Squeeze into an automobile. Add a drunken chauffeur
and a dash of joy. And shake well. Serve at 70 miles an hour. Chaser, a coroner's inquest. BILL KURTIS: The saloon had
been replaced by speakeasies, some of which lived
up to their Hollywood image of secret peoples,
breathless passwords, and fantastic decor. Many of the best known
people in society visited the speakeasies. STEPHEN FOX: So you have
millions of lawbreakers, perfectly law-abiding
citizens otherwise, who now are breaking a
federal law by drinking. And so the line becomes
blurred and organized crime is much more intertwined
in American life, because of Prohibition, in a
way that it had not before that. PROF. DOROTHY BROWN: She kept
saying that the upper class, the Kennedys of this world, had
a particular responsibility. She felt that was
very important. And she pressed that and said,
there seemed to be, sometimes, just, then the working class
that was out there, made prey of the bootleggers. BILL KURTIS: But she found
herself with few true allies in the Justice Department. STEPHEN FOX: She was surrounded
by older, skeptical men, who were doubtful about
the whole enterprise. She got very little cooperation
from the Attorneys General Harry Daugherty, for
example, Harding's is notoriously crooked
Attorney General, gave her no cooperation. BILL KURTIS: The Justice
Department made a great song and dance about clamping
down on bootleggers, calling in the
newsreel cameramen to show their dramatic
raids to the public. When I was appointed
to this office, I stated publicly
and promised myself that we would enforce the
national Prohibition policies honestly and earnestly
and lawfully. I do not like spectacular
methods or anything that may be described as a crime. Steady, relentless pressure,
intelligently applied to the maximum of our
resources, at all times and in all seasons, is
our aim and intention. BILL KURTIS: The truth was
that the feds frequently turned a blind eye. The Prohibition bureau
agents were poorly paid and easily bribed. 1 in 12 was dismissed
for corruption. And many quit to
become bootleggers. But Willebrandt
refused to give up. She began a campaign in
Florida, where much of the booze was coming in via
the Bahamas and Cuba. Willebrandt was
determined to clamp down. PROF. DOROTHY BROWN: The most dramatic
was in Florida, where she really got all of the government
agencies, the Navy, which sent down 11 destroyers,
the Coast Guard, you had 30 vessels, 2 airplanes,
and then a gigantic attack. You really had them
make tremendous raids. BILL KURTIS: It was something
of a personal triumph for Willebrandt. But when she turned
her attention to padlocking New
York's speakeasies, she stirred up criticism. PROF. DOROTHY BROWN:
People did call foul, because they thought it was
a little unfortunate that you were having all of these raids. And the raids were
highly publicized, because there were so many
of them, plus which the US Attorney obviously was
not agreeing with Mabel and was giving out adverse
stories that there was a sort of Roman
Holiday going on there. But great great was flapdoodle. She just blew it
off and said, this is something we've been doing. And in her annual
report that year, she pointed out that 7,000
padlocks, injunctions had been actually instituted that
year and she was pleased, because after the
headlines went, they'd take taken 18 to court
and they'd indict-- they'd found guilty 15 of them. BILL KURTIS: But Willebrandt
was getting worn down by the constant struggle. PROF. DOROTHY BROWN: Mabel's great
frustration was, you always got the little fish. It was very hard
to get the big fish and she wanted the big fish. She had a cartoon that
she kept, which showed her with a mop trying to mop
it up and keep it back, the incoming waves. And it was obvious that there
was this inundation coming. When she left office, in
1929, she wrote to her parents that she felt very often
like a little boy who put his arm in the dike. And so she'd stopped
a lot of things, she said, but it's a
wearing way to be a hero. BILL KURTIS: Years later, a
judge said of Willebrandt, if Mabel had worn trousers,
she would have been president. But despite her good work,
some of the worst criminals in American history were
beginning to emerge. The most important
legacy of Prohibition was the creation
of organized crime. But it wasn't the Irish
gang or the Jewish mob that would ultimately rule. It was the Cosa Nostra, better
known as the Italian Mafia. Italians had the Mafia. No one else had that secret
criminal brotherhood net, because the Italians had an
extraordinary cohesiveness and a kind of natural--
national organization that the Irish and Jewish
gangs did not have. BILL KURTIS: From the quiet
dark alleys of Little Italy to the flamboyance of Al
Capone, the Italian criminals have survived and
flourished like no others. But to understand their
dominance in the underworld, one must go back. After World War I,
powerful Irish gangs controlled the lucrative
Brooklyn waterfront, collecting tribute,
about $1,500 a week, from each of the more
than 60 dock owners. Those who declined saw
their wharves and vessels looted, burned, or
wrecked, or worse. STEPHEN FOX: The East
Coast Longshoremen had been a mobbed up union
for most of this century. It started even
before Prohibition. Originally, with Irish
guys on the Brooklyn docks, it was a very
dangerous occupation to be head of the Longshoremen's
Union on the Brooklyn docks, because you had a
short life expectancy. Six or eight guys, in a single
decade, would take this job, be killed off, someone
else would get the job, be killed off. BILL KURTIS: The Brooklyn
Bridge area was traditionally Irish territory. The White Hand Gang, or shall
we say, the Irish Mafia, they were a-- an underworld superpower. They had control,
literal control, over-- over 60 piers in operation
in Brooklyn at the time. It was a gold mine. BILL KURTIS: But the White Hand
would soon meet their match. The Italian gangs,
known as the Black Hand, wanted the riches
for themselves. From 1920 to 1925, a grim war
raged along the waterfront for control of the
lush extortion rackets. For a time, the leader
of the White Hands, "Wild Bill" Lovett, held
off the Italian Black Hand. WILLIAM BALSAMO:
Well, Bill Lovett was the most spectacular gang
leader the White Hand ever had. On the waterfront, everybody
knew that this man will so-- soon as look at you,
blow your head off. Man was a very
dangerous man, really. BILL KURTIS: No less fearless
was the Italian leader of the Black Hand, Frankie Yale. He retained an iron-fisted
control over his men. Frankie Yale was-- was the first
celebrity godfather. No question about it. Yale was the first of the
openly flamboyant gangster, as he was known as the--
the Prince of Pals. He was an extremely popular
person, not least for the fact that he liked to cultivate
a sort of Robinhood image of taking from the rich
and giving to the poor. BILL KURTIS: For instance,
during the Coal Strike of 1922, Yale's men delivered
coal to hundreds of families who were freezing. This was the paradox
about Frankie Yale. He was vicious and yet
he was also sympathetic. WILLIAM BALSAMO: The reason
for Frankie Yale's generosity, in my personal, opinion, was he
was born into abject poverty. He knew what it was to be poor. And he-- you know, his heart
went out for the poor people. BILL KURTIS: But still,
the bloody feud went on and Yale needed tough henchmen. He was introduced to Alphonse
Capone at a very young age. And he took a liking to Al. He tutored Al in the
ABCs of the underworld. BILL KURTIS: Yale
put Capone to work as a bartender and a
bouncer in his dance club. From his humble
beginnings in Brooklyn, Al Capone would carry a nickname
for the rest of his life, "Scarface." One night, while
Capone was working, he told a female customer,
you got a beautiful ass. Her brother, Frank
Galluccio, took out his knife, aimed
for Capone's throat, but instead slashed
his face three times. Gangsters live dangerously. And before long, Capone savagely
beat up a member of the White Hand Gang. Their leader, "Wild Bill"
Lovett, came looking for him. WILLIAM BALSAMO:
Frankie yelled that word that "WIld Bill" Lovett was
trying to track down Capone. He says, Al, look, the best
thing I could tell you, you know, this man is gonna-- sooner or later, with the scars
and all for identification, he's gonna-- he's gonna get you,
sooner or later. BILL KURTIS: So Frankie
Yale sent Al Capone to work with Johnny Torrio in Chicago. It proved a lucky move. When Prohibition
began, Frankie Yale mobilized his Black Hand
troops into bootlegging, using his links in Chicago. What Prohibition did was it
took rather loosely organized neighborhood gangs
and it put them into transnational
communication with each other. Because what was involved was
the shipping of various liquors from one part of the
country to another, even from outside the
country, it did enormous-- was of enormous benefit
towards making this a sort of national combination. BILL KURTIS: The White
Hand's power was waning. Their leader,
"Wild Bill" Lovett, was gruesomely murdered
by the Black Hand. When Richard "Peg Leg"
Lonergan took over, Al Capone returned to Brooklyn
to get rid of this Irish gang once and for all. WILLIAM BALSAMO:
Sylvester [inaudible] was the man chosen to
start the ball in motion. He was to whack a top lieutenant
of the Irish, White Hand guy, across the head
with a meat cleaver. That was a signal. The lights went out and the
gunfire erupted immediately. The outcome was the murder,
a triple gangland murder, as a matter of fact. Al Capone had finally murdered
a man, Richard Lonergan. It turned out to be the
most important murder of his whole career. His reputation throughout the
Italian underworld, naturally, really zoomed, because
what he actually did was hand over the entire
Brooklyn waterfront to the Italian underworld. And after-- soon--
very soon after, the-- the White Hand Gang evaporated
into nothing at all. You know, just died out. BILL KURTIS: Now Frankie
Yale controlled the New York waterfront and was Al Capone's
chief liquor supplier. Capone quickly became
Chicago's crime boss. It was the beginning of the
rise of the Italian Mafia. [italian singing] The Prohibition era created
many underworld criminals. But ultimately, the Italians
would reign supreme. In the years to come,
the Italian Mafia would take aim at
many other targets. But in turn, they would become
the crime fighter's main target themselves. I'm Bill Kurtis. [music playing]
