June 30th, 1931. A portly man sits before the defendant’s
stand in the Chicago Federal Courthouse, nervously wiping his brow with a white handkerchief. An employee of the Internal Revenue Service
rises to the witness stand, and begins to drone on about missing tax returns and unreported
income. Without context, this scene appears about
as mundane and boring as can be. However, millions more recognize this court
proceeding for what it is- the technicality that allowed the United States justice system
to finally catch the most notorious mobster of all time. Indeed, to many, the era of the speakeasy,
the tommy gun, and the illicit bootlegger need no introduction, but how did criminals
like Al Capone grow so powerful? Welcome to the latest video in our series
on organized crime, where we will explore the origins of the American mobsters, and
explain how the era of prohibition allowed them to become some of the most powerful criminals
in world history. Today's video is sponsored by Babbel, the
#1 language learning app in the world! For a historical channel knowing the language
of the sources used in the videos is extremely helpful and as we worked on this series on
Russian history, we decided that we need a refresher to be able to read the works of
the Russian authors. As it is impossible to work with a tutor right
now, we decided to try Babbel and that was a great experience! Ya uchu russkiy yazyk! Unlike other language learning apps, Babbel
is ad-free and it prepares you for real life. With Babbel you can count on learning from
people who have actual experience teaching languages. Studies have shown that just 15 hours of learning
with Babbel is an equivalent of a semester in college! Babbel has well-structured courses teaching
13 languages, and they are great if you want to learn a new language or looking for self-improvement. So, what are you waiting for? Support us and click the link in the description
below right now to get 50% off Babbel in 6 months for a limited time only! Our story begins in the late 19th century,
the beginning of a massive wave of immigration to the United States. As war, poverty, oppression and famine rocked
their homelands, millions of Irish, Southern Italians, and eastern European Jews crossed
the Atlantic in search of new opportunities. In 1892, the iconic federal processing station
on Ellis Island opened its doors, but as thousands of migrants passed through its crowded lines
each day, they soon found that the United States was not quite the Dreamland they hoped
it to be. Nativist sentiment was strong amongst the
upper-crust of American society, and many movements sprung up as a result. These cultural conservatives claimed that
the United States was founded upon the principles of an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant society, and
had no place for the Jews, or the Catholics. Consequently, new migrants were often denied
respectable jobs, forced to perform menial labour while being crammed into slums like
the infamous Five Points in New York, where poor families were stuffed into homes built
atop landfills amidst tanneries and glue factories. Most immigrants made the most of the hand
dealt to them, and worked hard to provide for their families. Others turned to more insidious means to make
ends meet. The story of organized crime in America begins
as early as the 1830s, with the rise of a handful of predominantly Irish gangs in the
slums of New York. The most prominent of these gangs was known
as the Dead Rabbits. Based out of the poverty-stricken Five Point,
they arose as a defiant movement against class oppression imposed on poor Irishmen. Consequently, their main rival - the Bowery
Boys gang was a xenophobic posse of protestant American-born nativists, led by Bill “the
Butcher” Poole. The gangs fought street battles with knives,
hatchets, spiked clubs, brass knuckles, tomahawks, and muskets and their conflict became an inspiration
for Herbert Asbury's 1927 nonfiction book The Gangs of New York and its movie adaptation
by Martin Scorsese. The most prominent leader of the Dead Rabbits
was John “Old Smoke” Morrissey, a professional boxer who had made his fortune in prize fights,
even becoming the “Champion of America” in 1853. Morrissey soon took his violent lifestyle
to the streets of Five Points, having his most bitter rival Bill Poole gunned down in
a broadway saloon in a morbid statement against anti-Irish activism. In the following years, Morrissey had become
the king of New York’s gambling scene, owning race-tracks and clubs that attracted such
prestigious guests as Mark Twain, John D. Rockefeller, and Ulysses S. Grant. Morrissey was soon so influential that with
the help of the Democratic Party political organization known as Tammany Hall, he was
elected into the United States Congress in 1867, where he always looked out for the Irish,
using strong-arm tactics to accomplish his goals. The story of his life left a dubious legacy:
felonious violence was a valid path to wealth for the disenfranchised immigrants. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, new waves
of Jewish and Italian migrants would arrive to carve a place for themselves in the streets
of New York and beyond. Out of Manhattans’ lower east end, a charismatic
thug named Monk Eastman knit together an insidious order made up predominantly of young Jews
from Brooklyn. His organization became known as the Eastman
Gang, and he became a local kingpin in gambling, prostitution, opium dealing, and violent extortion. Eastman’s main rival was Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli,
known better by his Americanized name: “Paul Kelly”. Styling himself as a sophisticated gentleman,
Kelly made a name as a dextrous flyweight boxer. Riding the fame of his victories in the ring
to open up several brothels and clubs, he eventually cobbled together the largest and
most vicious Italian mob in New York. By 1901, Kelly and Eastman’s cronies were
locked in a bloody turf war in the Lower East Side. Consequently, the two gangs were also in the
pocket of Tammany Hall, who used the violent mobsters to further their political goals
in the New York state legislature through bribery, extortion, and voter fraud. In order to enforce a peace between the two,
Tammany Hall organized a boxing match between Kelly and Eastman to determine the fate of
their gang war. The two mob bosses beat each other bloody
for two hours, but the match ended in a draw, and the war resumed. Not all the gangs in New York were started
by impoverished labourers. Some had deep ties to well-established secret
societies which had been formed in Italy decades earlier, and carried over to the United States
by its powerful criminals. Two of these groups were the Camorra, and
the infamous Cosa Nostra, whose rise to power in 19th century Sicily we have covered in
a previous video. Meanwhile, Irish Gangs held out against the
Jewish and Italian advance. Morrissey’s Dead Rabbit society had long
since been absorbed into the Five Points Gang, but many Irish factions that remained united
to form the “White Hand Gang”, named in juxtaposition to the Italians, who practiced
a form of extortionism known as “Black Hand” violence. It should be noted that not all these gangs
were divided entirely on ethnic lines. For example, some Jews served under the Five
Points Gang, while some Italians worked for the Eastmen. Plenty of Irishmen, alongside Poles, Slovaks
and other marginalized immigrant communities, were present in all gangs. At the turn of the century, the foundations
had been laid for an era of lawlessness in the heart of the United States. But it would be two decades later that a certain
constitutional amendment would pass, allowing the mobsters of America to explode in prominence,
and initiating an age of criminal Kings, who ruled by right of barley, hops, and rye. Dating back to the colonial era, America was
a nation that loved its liquor. In lieu of access to clean water, and unable
to afford tea and coffee, the beverage of choice for the average Yankee was a nice cool
tankard of beer. However, it was also a nation founded by puritans,
so its society had civil watchdogs, who decried the effects of the alcohol: namely the rise
domestic abuse and substance addiction, and a dive in the physical and mental health of
the average working man. In 1873, a group of disgruntled wives, who
had long suffered at the hands of their drunk husbands, formed a society known as the Women’s
Crusade, whose prayers and songs against excessive drinking rang out throughout the nation. The anti-alcohol sentiment grew in the following
decades, as temperance movements soon evolved into the total prohibition of any and all
alcoholic beverages. The leading organization in this was the Anti-Saloon
league, whose relentless lobbying soon had turned most of the United States congress
to their side. By the winter of 1919, The Great war was over,
Charlie Chaplin was rising in popularity, and lively Jazz clubs rocked America. On paper, the economy was booming, however,
the nation would soon be shaken to its core: the federal Government, under pressure from
anti-alcohol abolitionists, passed the 18th amendment to the United States Constitution. The era of alcoholic prohibition had begun. As saloons, taverns, and distilleries across
the nation shut their doors, puritans from coast to coast celebrated the beginning of
a golden age of Christian righteousness and virtues. In reality, by taking drink out of the hands
of legal businessmen, they had thrown it into the clutches of the shadowy Gangs that had
been developing in the country for nearly a century. Throughout the 1920s, almost every major city
became the home of some form of criminal organization that supplied its population with alcohol
in defiance of the law. Before long, America was full of illicit establishments
known as speakeasies, in which bootleg alcohol flowed freely. Al Capone is one of the most recognizable
names in American history, and his repeated presence in this video should surprise no
one. Born in Manhattan in 1899 to a pair of poor
Italian immigrants, he dropped out of school at 14 to join Paul Kelly’s Five Points’
gang, working as a bouncer in one of their saloons. At 18 he was savagely attacked by a knife-wielding
patron in a dispute over a woman. The assault left the young gangster with three
grotesque serrations on the left side of his face which would give birth to his infamous
nickname, Scarface. In 1919, he moved to Chicago, where he found
work under the mob boss Johnny Torrio. Torrio soon retired and handed his criminal
Empire to Capone, which the young Gangster proved to be exceptionally capable at running. By 1927, the portly mob boss was the undisputed
King of the Windy City, having made a fortune off hundreds of underground breweries, distilleries,
speakeasies, racetracks, and brothels he controlled across the entire greater Chicago area. His main rival was George “Bugs” Moran
and his Irish Northsiders gang. Back East, a new generation of ambitious crime
lords had emerged from the old Gangs and divided New York amongst themselves. Arnold Rothstein’s origin story was unlike
most mobsters. The son of a businessman of high-standing,
and the younger brother of a Rabbi-in-training, the Jewish youth took a darker path than the
rest of his family, delving into the world of gambling and blackmail. It was even alleged that he managed to fix
the 1919 baseball World Series between the Chicago Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds, by bribing
the Red Sox to throw the game. When Prohibition became law, Rothstein turned
to illegal alcohol to make his fortune. By 1925, he was one of the most powerful crooks
in the country, forging a criminal empire based out of Broadway and becoming the largest
bootlegger in the nation. Charles “Lucky” Luciano [ch] was born
in 1897 in Palermo, Sicily, as the son of a poor sulfur miner. In 1906, his family emigrated to New York. As a teenager, Luciano fell in with the Five
Points’, and came into the employ of a faction of the Cosa Nostra, led by the ruthless Giuseppe
“Joe the Boss” Masseria. Unlike other Italian-American gangs, the Sicilian
Cosa Nostra was staunchly conservative, refusing to work with non-Italians and even reluctant
to work with non-Sicilian Italians. This young, Americanized Luciano was shocked
when his old, Sicilian-raised boss referred to his good friend Frank Costello as a “dirty
Calabrian”. Calabria was right next to Sicily, and anyway,
they were both Americans now! Luciano soon began to dream of a new world
order, where Jewish, Irish, and Italian gangs alike could breach racial lines and work together,
and enrich one another in defiance of the Government. At the height of prohibition, mobsters across
the country were suddenly making exponentially more money than their predecessors. Before, the Gangs had been limited to immigrant
neighbourhoods in the poorer parts of cities, but prohibition had transformed them into
high-flying, international businessmen. It now became commonplace for every major
crook to hire lawyers, accountants, real estate investors, and shipping contractors. By the mid-twenties, the most powerful of
Kingpins were spending the equivalent of 7 million modern US dollars a month on bribes
alone. Still, they remained violent, merciless criminals,
using brutal methods to maintain control over their territory. Before long it became evident that those who
lived by the tommy gun would die by it - even the most powerful of bosses were far from
untouchable. In 1928, Rothstein was gunned down during
a meeting at the luxurious Park Central hotel over an unsettled gambling debt. In Chicago, the escalating war between Capone
and Moran reached its crescendo on Saint Valentine’s day of 1929, when seven Northsiders were openly
murdered. This brazen, borderline public execution shocked
the American public, and even though everyone knew the portly scarface Gangster was behind
it, no court had enough evidence to convict him. In October of that same year, Luciano was
ambushed and forced into a limousine, where he was beaten, stabbed, and strung up by his
hands from a wooden beam in a storehouse. Despite all this, he lived, thus earning his
moniker: “Lucky”. All these acts of violence quickly soured
public opinion of the booze-runners who committed them. No longer were the likes of Capone seen as
righteous Robin Hoods, supplying the people with alcohol in defiance of an unjust law. The veil was lifted, and everyone saw the
Gangsters for what they truly were. Nevertheless, the power of the American mobster
continued to grow. In 1931, Luciano murdered his boss Masseria,
and defected to the organization of his biggest rival, fellow Sicilian Salvatore Maranzano. Maranzano consolidated control over all the
major Italian crime families in New York, and declared himself capo di tutti capi: boss
of all bosses. However, young Luciano was not content with
second place, and that same year hired the brutal Irish hitman Vincent “Mad Dog”
Coll to take out his new boss. With Maranzano out of the picture, Luciano
became the most powerful mobster in the country, and finally ushered in his new world order,
spearheading the formation of “the Commission”, a unification of all of America’s major
Italian Crime families. For his efforts, Luciano came to be known
as the father of Organized Crime in the United States, creating a confederation of Italian
American Gangs across New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia, while also promoting open
cooperation with Jewish, and to a lesser extent, Irish outfits as well. Despite moving away from the political conservatism
of the old Cosa Nostra, the new American Mafia confederation created cultural unity by following
a strict set of rules that originated in its Sicilian heartland. This included the adoption of Cosa Nostra
initiation rituals, hierarchical structure, and the famous policy of omerta: the code
of silence. In 1931, Al Capone was finally caught and
jailed on charges of tax evasion. However, his arrest was almost inconsequential
in the overall struggle against organized crime. By now, the Mafia had tendrils in every level
of American society, and Capone was just one drop in an ocean. By the beginning of the 1930s, Prohibition
was rapidly losing support in congress and amongst the media, as it became evident that
all it had done was usher in an age of corruption that the law was helpless to combat. In 1933, the 18th amendment was finally repealed,
and Alcohol finally became legal once more. However, the criminal Empires that prohibition
had enabled continued to grow in the decades that followed, diversifying their focus into
illegal gambling, loan sharking, drug trafficking, and puppeteering labour unions. Some of these gangs are still active today,
and while Prohibition has been over for nearly a century, it is clear that organized crime
in America is here to stay. Our series on the history of the criminal
syndicates will continue, so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed
the bell button. We would like to express our gratitude to
our Patreon supporters and channel members, who make the creation of our videos possible. Now, you can also support us by buying our
merchandise via the link in the description. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and
we will catch you on the next one.
