Playboy's History of Organized Crime

from modest beginnings and clumsy first efforts--the roots of empire

Part 1: The American Dream

In the beginning was disorganization. The world of crime--chaotic, violent, often purposeless, sometimes internecine--mirrored the society in which it grew and flourished, and in the 19th Century, American society--pushing outward in every direction with often uncontrolled energy--was chaotic, violent, sometimes purposeless and at war with itself and its nobler aspirations and philosophies.

The tone of a society is inevitably set by those at the top. And the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War One was the age of the robber barons, an age when the only goal seemed the accumulation of vast wealth and power. In that untrammeled quest, conscience played no part. Members of Presidential Cabinets--and there were rumors even about Presidents themselves--and of Congress, politicians on every level, from the local precincts to the national Government, became rich selling inside information, trading favors, using secrets entrusted to them for their own ends. Some became the servants of their corrupters and kept themselves in power and in office by corrupting those they were supposed to represent: by buying votes, by employing gangs of hoodlums to make sure the votes were cast the right way, by wheeling and dealing with absolute scorn for the public good. The man with enough dollars could buy anything: from a Senator to a railroad right of way to respectability and honor. Jay Gould and Jim Fisk went too far and eventually tumbled. But not before they had amassed millions and accumulated inordinate power, which was, of course, their goal. The Vanderbilts and Harrimans, the Carnegies and Rockefellers and the rest, though, bought and sold politicians, officeholders, ordinary people as though they were stacks of wheat, railroad ties or barrels of oil. And they bought honored places in society as well. Boss Tweed ran New York, and his counterparts around the country ran their cities, not for the people who lived there but as personal fiefdoms. Only when their arrogance and greed, which were never secret, became so overweening that the cloak of caution fell away was there any retribution--and it was always mild.

But these decades were not just the age of the robber barons. This was the age, too, of the poor, when the gap between those at the top and those at the bottom was growing ever wider, turning into an unbridgeable chasm. It was the age when the myth of the American dream was spread, nourished and magnified in every city and village of Europe. Across the ocean was the Biblical land of milk and honey, where the streets were paved with gold, where opportunities were limitless, where even the powerless had power. To escape the noose of poverty, ignorance, tradition and caste of the Old World, it was necessary only to board a ship and endure a few weeks in the misery of overcrowded steerage. At the end, there would be riches and power and respectability for all. And there were no bars; everyone was welcome:

Give me your tired, yourpoor,

Your huddled massesyearning to breathefree,

The wretched refuse ofyour teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless,tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside thegolden door.

The dream that it was possible to exchange the privations and persecutions of the Old World for the riches and freedom of the New brought, in the decades after the Civil War (until restrictive legislation was finally passed), more than 25,000,000 immigrants to the United States. They came in successive and mounting waves, led by 3,000,000 Irish and millions more from western and northern Europe, followed by 4,000,000 Italians, a similar number of Jews from central and eastern Europe and millions more from eastern and southern Europe.

But in America, the dream became little more than a nightmare for many of the new arrivals. They quickly perceived, for it was impossible not to, the gap between the philosophy of the American dream and its reality. Crammed into teeming urban ghettos along the Coast, or into new ghettos arising in the interior, piled into buildings that seemed to deteriorate into uninhabitable slums even before they were completed, bewildered by the multiplicity of strange customs and languages that beat upon them in a never-ending din, the poor of Europe became only the poor of America. Their opportunities were narrowly restricted in this strange new land by their ignorance of its customs, mores and language. And by the contempt in which they were held by those who had preceded them.

There were no golden streets. But America, they were still told, was the land of opportunity. If they lived according to the philosophy by which the nation theoretically lived, the puritan ethic--shunning gambling, liquor, loose women and all the other base and sensual pleasures, working long and hard and honestly, and saving their money--success would surely come, the dream would surely be realized. But for many who settled in the cities, the only opportunities were in the sweatshops and the only rewards were fatigue, uncertain employment, deeper poverty, disease and early death--the end of hope.

Even worse was the discovery that no one but the poor newcomer was expected to give more than a perfunctory nod to the puritan ethic, to morality, to conscience. Certainly not those who had made it or were making it. And there was no one to protect the interests of the poor. The politicians and the police wallowed in corruption and barely bothered to hide it. They bought and sold favors, votes and protection to those with the money, and for those without money, there was nothing. It was an experience from which many never recovered. Alienated from the countries of their birth, from their new country, and from their children, who adapted easily and quickly to the new ways and the new environment, many of the immigrants froze into an almost psychotic isolation and despair.

However, there were some, especially the young, who looked at the new land, recognized instinctively its hypocrisy and emulated those in society's upper strata. If violence permeated society and those at the top employed it to further their own ends, then those at the bottom would unleash their own violence--often just for its own sake, with a kind of uncontrolled exuberance and sometimes in the employ of those above them who needed violent men. If those at the top were not bound by laws and codes of moral conduct, then neither would be those at the bottom.

Across the nation, every urban ghetto--in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco and the rest, as they turned from frontier settlements into metropolitan centers--swarmed with gangs, collections of young toughs made tougher, more belligerent and violent, given more strength through unity and numbers. They were the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves forging their own paths to a share of riches and power they were certain they could get no other way. Frightened, and so enraged, the young reacted by joining gangs and giving themselves guises and names that would create around them an aura of fear. Some shaved their heads and others let their hair grow long; some wore ironlined derbies both as a trademark and as a weapon, while others wore distinctive caps; some dressed in little more than rags and others wore nearly formal clothes; some sported distinctive scarves or sashes; some wore hard-toed, hobnailed boots--the better to stomp their victims into submission; all carried knives, truncheons, guns or weapons of some kind. They called themselves by a thousand different names, reflecting neighborhood, origin, purpose: They were the Whyos, the Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits (rampaging with a rabbit impaled on a stake), the Gophers, the Short Boys, the Whitehall Boatmen (looting the waterfront from small skiffs), the Tenth Avenue Gang, the Street Cleaners, the Four Gun Battery Brigade, the Moonshiners, the Village Gang, the Rag Gang, the West Side Gang, the Wellington Association, the Gas House Gang, the Midnight Terrors, the Growler Gang, the Five Points Gang, the Eastmans, the Madison Street Marauders, the Grant Street Gang--the list is endless.

Almost without exception, they were jingoistically ethnic, restricting membership to those of similar origin and from the same small neighborhood enclave (in an age when the telephone and other devices were a restricted novelty, intercity or even interneighborhood communication, and so association, would have been almost impossible). If the Irish formed a gang, then nobody but another Irishman, and a neighborhood Irishman, at that, could join; and the same rule applied for gangs of Neapolitans, Sicilians, Jews and all the rest as they arrived in America and settled into the cities. There was no overlapping, for strangers were both feared and despised.

If some of the gangs were formed initially as a means of self-protection, to provide safety in a group of friends where such safety would be absent for the individual, that purpose did not long remain primary. In the jungle of the slum neighborhoods where they operated, the gangs became a kind of untamed beast that roved and rampaged with few restrictions. As long as they limited their activities to their own domain and did not encroach on the world outside, on the rich and the growing middle class, nobody seemed to pay any real attention or care very much. It was a social attitude that persisted. As long as they stole only from each other and maimed and killed only their own kind, why should anyone give a damn or try to do anything to stop them? The aim of the police and civic authorities often seemed to be to keep the gangs bottled up within their own territory but to permit them free license there. The victims were, after all, only the poor and the alien, whose traditions had taught them to fear and so expect the worst from authorities; they rarely complained, because they were certain complaints were useless. Besides, they had little political clout or influence to persuade or force those in power to come to their assistance.

So, in the poor neighborhoods of the cities, hardly a store was safe, hardly a home or business not a potential target, hardly a lonely pedestrian not a likely victim. The gangs robbed and pillaged, terrorized and brutalized with impunity. They made no pretense of being anything but what they were. Violence came easily, almost naturally. The Whyos, for instance, would not even enlist a new member unless he had already committed at least one murder, and this requirement was well publicized.

At first, much of the violence was indiscriminate and purposeless--or to minor purpose. The targets and the victims were chosen by whim; they could be anything or anybody that was there; and, as a result, the rewards of crime were just as uncertain. A young waiter named August Hoffman could take a rest during a work break on 11th Avenue at 28th Street in New York in 1875 and suddenly be attacked, beaten and robbed of the few cents he had in his pockets by members of the Tenth Avenue Gang who just happened to be passing by and spotted him. Twenty years later, a gentleman strolling on Fifth Avenue on the border of the poor areas could suddenly meet members of the Wellington Association on their way home from a chowder party; his eyes would be blackened and his wallet stolen. And about the same time, the Midnight Terrors could decide to form a baseball team, realize they didn't have the money for uniforms, gloves, balls and other equipment and so maraud through New York's First Ward, beating and robbing anyone they came across in hopes of getting the money. "We eat most everything," said one of the Terrors, "and what we couldn't eat, we sold; dat's de way we was to get de uniforms for de ball club."

While most gangs were narrowly local, the province of the young and concerned with small, indiscriminate depredations, some, though retaining the ethnic balance, broke the pattern. They were not native to America at all but were brought over by immigrants who had come of age at home and had received their training there. They adapted their groups to the new environment and, in some cases, even spread across the country, though until the development of fast and widespread communications, their links with one another tended to be rather hit or miss. Among them were the Mafia, the Camorra and similar secret terrorist societies brought to the States from Sicily, Naples, Calabria and elsewhere in Italy, and the Chinese tongs.

It was inevitable that in the massive wave of Italian and Sicilian immigrations in the last decades of the 19th Century, as with other waves from other areas, some of those who arrived would have been bandits at home. They carried their calling with them, setting up shop in the narrow enclaves where their countrymen settled. Almost as soon as a substantial Italian settlement was established anywhere in the United States--in New York, Chicago, Kansas City, in the shrimp and fishing areas around New Orleans and the Gulf Coast--those who had preyed on Italians at home would be preying on them here. From bitter experience in their own land, the immigrants had learned neither to trust nor to rely on official authority for protection or help, and nothing in the initial American experience persuaded them that any could be expected here. Thus, the immigrants were open to threats, extortion and blackmail, and they felt they had no choice but to pay for safety.

The technique was simple and every Italian in the United States was a potential mark. A letter would arrive bearing the imprint of a black hand--giving rise to the theory that a secret society called the Black Hand was behind it, when, in reality, it was just another operation of the Mafia brought over and adapted. In the old country, such extortion demands were common and the letters were often marked with a drawing of a dagger or a pistol or some other threatening design. The letter would demand money in exchange for protection. If the money was paid, there would be no trouble--until the next demand. If it was not paid, then the store or business of the recipient would be wrecked, a member of his family abducted or beaten, he himself assaulted or even killed. "My father," explained one Sicilian immigrant to writer Frederic Sondern, Jr., of those days around the turn of the century, "would pay. He would say, 'Giuseppe, you see, it is the same as at home. The Mafia is always with us.' Then I would plead with him to go to the police. After all, we were in America. 'No, Mother of God, no,' he would shout. 'The police here cannot do even as much as the police at home. They do not know the Mafia. We get put out of business or killed and no one will know why. They do not understand the mafiosi and they never will.' "

The price of resistance was well known, for there were numerous examples. In 1905, a wealthy Brooklyn butcher named Gaetano Costa received a Black Hand letter informing him, "You have more money than we have. We know of your wealth and that you are alone in this country. We want $1000, which you are to put in a loaf of bread and hand to a man who comes in to buy meat and pulls out a red handkerchief." Unlike most of his neighbors, Costa refused to follow instructions. He was shot one morning while working behind the counter in his store. His killers were never found, for the witnesses wouldn't cooperate with the police.

"They were panic-stricken," said one detective working on the case, "and said it would be worth their lives if they said a word."

So the victims, great and small, usually just paid. It became part of their lives. No one but a mafioso was immune. Even such as Big Jim Colosimo, boss of prostitution and vice in Chicago's Levee--the notorious First Ward--during the first two decades of the 20th Century, was not immune and, for a time, even the police on his payroll could not protect him. So he paid. The great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso was another victim. During an engagement at the Metropolitan Opera, shortly before World War One, Caruso received a Black Hand letter demanding $2000. He came across without a murmur. It was only when a second demand was made, this one for $15,000, that Caruso balked. He went to the police, who set a trap and captured two prominent Italian businessmen picking up the money where Caruso had been instructed to leave it, beneath the steps of a factory. The two were convicted of extortion and sent to prison in one of the few successful forays against the racket. But Caruso, despite his fame, was considered in grave danger and for some time required protection from police and private detectives.

Though extortion would always remain a major element in the underworld's operations--particularly in its moves into legitimate business in later decades--the Black Hand technique of looting a whole community of the poor and not-so-poor was a passing phenomenon, even among a tightly knit and easily cowed group, for it only took and in return gave nothing but protection against itself. It lasted about 20 years, from the turn of the century to the dawn of Prohibition, and roughly coincided with the rule over the American Mafia, and particularly over the organization in New York, of its major advocate, the brutal and vicious Ignazio Saietta, known as Lupo the Wolf. A mafioso in his native Sicily, he had arrived in the United States a grown man in 1899 and, almost immediately, the Black Hand terror erupted. It lasted until 1920, when Federal authorities caught up with him, not for extortion but for counterfeiting, and sent him to prison for 30 years.

Though Lupo the Wolf perfected and fostered the Black Hand extortion technique in America, the Mafia had taken root long before he arrived. It existed and ruled in most Italian communities, though known only to the residents, who would not talk about it. It established its domain among them and rarely moved outside. Within its own sphere, though, the Mafia was alternately giver and taker, protector and violator, hero and villain. Mafiosi like Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria, Ciro Terranova, Francesco "Frankie Yale" Uale, Salvatore Maranzano and others captured a monopoly on artichokes, olive oil, wine grapes and other necessities of Italian life and extracted a price for permitting their distribution. They ran Italian lotteries and other gambling games, the houses of prostitution, almost everything on which the immigrant community sustained its life. They were the bankers and moneylenders to the poor, who could borrow nowhere else, and they charged interest rates to keep the borrower forever in debt. They made arrangements for relatives to come to the United States, legally and illegally, but at such a (continued on page 166) Organized Crime (continued from page 94) cost that both the new arrival and those who had sent for him would be forever at the bidding of the "honored society." They had been evil men, parasites, in Italy and Sicily, and they were evil men, parasites, in America, but there were few who would challenge them.

For the most part, the Mafia succeeded during these years in keeping its very existence a secret. But this was not always possible. The Mafia surfaced first in America in New Orleans in 1890. Antonio and Carlo Matranga, two members of the honored society in their native Palermo, arrived in New Orleans and promptly moved in on the Mississippi River docks, seizing control and extracting tribute before a freighter could be unloaded. But the Matranga dominance was soon challenged by the Provenzano brothers, also from Sicily and leaders of a rival Mafia faction. War broke out and murder along the docks became a daily occurrence. When regular police investigation got nowhere, New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessey got into it himself and quickly discovered blocks wherever he turned. His own police force, heavily Italian, had no leads and could not develop any; the entire Italian community shrugged and played dumb. Then warnings were sent to Hennessey ordering him to lay off. When that didn't work, he was offered bribes, which he rejected. Months of hard and searching labor finally paid off and Hennessey drew a picture of a Mafia war for control of the New Orleans waterfront. He requested a grand-jury investigation, but before he could testify, he was ambushed and killed by a shotgun blast.

Hennessey's murder enraged New Orleans' good citizens, and the grand jury went to work. On the basis of the evidence that the police chief had gathered about the Matranga-Provenzano war, the grand jury found that "the existence of a secret organization known as the Mafia has been established beyond doubt." And 19 Sicilians identified as members of the Mafia were indicted as principals and conspirators in the Hennessey murder. But the trial was a farce. Many of the 60 potential witnesses were intimidated and threatened by the honored society and the jury was bribed. Despite what observers at the time called overwhelming evidence, the jury acquitted all but three of the defendants and hung on those three cases.

There was a cry of public outrage and a mass meeting was held two days later. The protesters turned into a mob, several thousand strong, and marched on the jail where the defendants were awaiting release. The doors were battered in; two of the mafiosi were pulled out and hanged from lampposts; nine more were lined up against the prison wall and shot down with rifles, pistols and shotguns. In New Orleans, for a few years thereafter, the Mafia went underground, limiting its activities to its own community. When tempers had calmed and the events of 1890 had been forgotten, it emerged once again.

• • •

Though Nicola Gentile, a member of the society in his native Sicily, would find branches wherever he traveled in the United States after his arrival in 1903, few on the outside were aware of its existence. One who became suspicious, however, was New York City detective lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, himself a native of Italy. Assigned to the department's Italian Squad to investigate rumors of the Black Hand terror, Petrosino became convinced that the organization had its roots in Italy and Sicily and that many of its members were actually criminals in their native land, liable for deportation if caught. Earl? in 1909, he persuaded his superiors to send him to Italy to investigate and to seek the cooperation of local authorities. Petrosino sent back some early reports that he was making progress. Then on March 13, while on his way to the questura--the police headquarters--in Palermo, two men came up behind him, drew revolvers and fired four bullets into his head and back. The street at the time was crowded, but the assassins escaped. However, Don Vito Cascio Ferro, the Mafia's ruler on its home ground, was charged with the murder. But the charges against him were quickly dropped. A Sicilian political leader gave him an alibi and upright Sicilians came to his defense. The Petrosino murder remains unsolved.

• • •

Just as the Mafia lived off the Italian immigrants, so, too, did the Chinese tongs live off the Oriental communities in New York and San Francisco--though there was less secrecy about their existence and power. The tongs catered to every illicit appetite among the severely restricted and persecuted Orientals. Opium was freely available and there was hardly a block in any Chinatown that did not have several opium dens. (In white society, too, narcotics addiction was widespread at the time, though legal, with millions gulping opium-laced patent medicines. It was only with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 and the Harrison Act eight years later that sale and use of narcotics were restricted and the underworld began, slowly at first, to move in.) Policy, pie-gow and other gambling games were rampant; protection was sold to Chinese businessmen and individuals. The rackets in the districts were all under the control of the tongs and the police rarely interfered, indifferent to what happened among the Chinese as long as it remained an internal affair not endangering outside society, and as long as they got their payoffs.

But in 1905 and on into 1906, a struggle for supremacy over the Chinatown rackets broke out between the rival On Leong and Hip Sing tongs in New York. In the great tong war, as it was called, bullets flew and more than 50 rival tongmen were killed and several times that many wounded. The struggle became so ferocious that the white middle class, which had often journeyed to Chinatown in search of exotic bargains and food and to marvel at the quaintness of the people, found it suddenly expedient to seek amusement elsewhere and to complain to the authorities that Chinatown had become a dangerous war zone.

Such complaints forced the authorities to take action. The New York criminal court was assigned the task of bringing peace, not by sending tongmen to jail but by arranging a treaty. Tom Lee, the unofficial mayor of Chinatown and leader of the On Leong Tong, and Mock Duck, boss of the Hip Sing Tong, were summoned with some of their followers to the court to listen to the peace terms. From that time on, the court ordered, no Chinese would carry weapons, the payoffs for protection and other favors would come to an end and neither tong would interfere with the enterprises of the other. To ensure peace, Lee and Duck each posted a $1000 bond.

Recognizing that the war was eating up all the profits, and being good businessmen, Lee and Duck did more than agree to keep the peace. By the middle of 1906, they had arranged a merger of their tongs. Both would keep their names and would share all income from all activities, but the real power would be vested in a new supergroup called the Kown Yick Tong, with Lee and Duck as joint rulers. "All of which," The New York Times commented at the time, "goes to show that mergers are convenient and harmful competition much to be deplored, even among Chinamen." It was a lesson that would take decades for the rest of the underworld to understand and appreciate.

• • •

Even as the Mafia, the tongs and the others flourished within their own ethnic spheres, leaving the world outside to those who inhabited it, there were some who had come to see that the power of the organizations, of the gangs, could be used for purposes with a broadened social significance. It was an idea developed, probably, by the Irish in the cities where they settled, but only because the Irish, made up the first massive wave of poor immigrants and because the Irish, unhampered by a language barrier, were, perhaps, more attuned to political action than other groups. A gang meant numbers and in numbers there was power. If violence or its potential were present in those numbers, then the power could be even greater. If at least some of the energy of the gangs could be channeled into politics, their power would be multiplied.

Thus, a bargain was struck that would remain a fact of urban existence, a bargain between corrupt political leaders and the underworld. The power of the gangs would be put at the disposal of the politicians to help perpetuate them in office and enrich them in the process. Through the utilization of violence, or its threat, voters could be dragooned to the polls and forced to vote the correct line; potential challengers and reformers could be cowed into submission. As payment, the power of the politicians would be put at the disposal of the underworld, to ensure its survival and prosperity without fear of arrest or official harassment. Each would be dependent on the other. Latter, the politician would become the servant, on the underworld's payroll and at its bidding, with the gangster the master. But in the early days, the politician was the master and the hoodlum his servant, on his payroll and doing his bidding.

Through the years, the leaders of New York's Tammany Hall struck a hundred such bargains that, despite scandals, revelations and occasional setbacks in the form of an election loss or a prison term, permitted the Democratic machine to rule the city almost as a fiefdom. "Boss" William M. Tweed and Richard Croker were masters of the careful balance and deal. But perhaps it was best demonstrated in the arrangement struck at the end of the 19th Century between the machine's rulers, Charley Murphy and Big Tim Sullivan, and one Monk Eastman.

Born Edward Osterman in Brooklyn's emerging Jewish ghetto about 1873, where his immigrant father had set up shop as a kosher restaurateur, Eastman (in the early stages of his career, he was also known as Eddie Delaney, Bill Delaney, Joe Marvin and Joe Morris) soon proved himself adept in the violent, hectic, criminal streets of that chaotic borough. About the only gentle aspect of this squat, massive, muscular, bulletheaded, broken-nosed, cauliflower-eared thug was his love of cats and pigeons. At one time, he owned 100 cats and 500 pigeons and he usually traveled with a cat under each arm, several more tagging at his heels and a great blue pigeon that he had tamed perched on his shoulder. Once Eastman opened a pet store on Broome Street in Lower Manhattan, but more as a home for his animals than as a place to sell them, for he would rarely part with one. "I like the kits and the boids," he said often, "and I'll beat up any guy dat gets gay wit' a kit or a boid in my neck of the woods."

Leading a gang of 1200 hoodlums called the Eastmans--which even had a youth branch called the Eastman Juniors--Monk divided his time between private depredations and those done at Tammany's bidding or the bidding of a private client to whom he sold his services. The world of crime on the Lower East Side, around Chrystie and Broome streets, was Eastman's province. He and his followers engaged in every kind of mischief for profit, from simple robberies and burglaries to protection, assault, muggings and murder. Most of the houses of prostitution, gambling dens and even the free-lance streetwalkers and hoodlums paid Eastman for the right to operate on his ground.

For Tammany, and for favored private clients, Eastman was always ready and available, in exchange for continued protection and for a fee. The Eastmans, in fact, even established a price list for their strong-arm work: "Ear chawed off: $15; Leg or arm broke: $19; Shot in leg: $25; Stab: $25; Doing the big job: $100 and up." But what Eastman did best for Tammany was to make sure that in his district the voters voted early and often and only for Tammany candidates. "He was the best man they ever had at the polls," a New York detective said some years later.

Eastman's diligence and efficiency were well rewarded. Arrested often, the charges against him were always dismissed. And his followers, because of his arrangements with Tammany and the police, rarely feared or expected trouble from the authorities. When a group of Eastmans assaulted and robbed a pedestrian on Madison Street in 1903, then took refuge in one of their nearby hangouts, a neighborhood poolroom, the victim led police to the door. It was slammed in their faces. As the newspapers of the time noted, the police "were told that if they did not go about their business they would get hurt. As they started to batter down the door, they were told that they would get in trouble with 'big fellows in politics.' There was then a fierce fight between the police and the gang members. As they waited for the paddy wagon, they laughed at the sorry sight of the bedraggled police and one said, 'Youse go to entirely too much trouble. The politicians'll bail us out. They don't want no one away at registration and election time.' "

Eastman's strong point was muscle, not brains. When he and his gang came into direct conflict with Paolo Vaccarelli, who went by the name Paul Kelly, another gang leader allied to Tammany, Eastman was doomed. Even his political masters could not--and no longer wanted to--protect him. A soft-spoken, well-dressed, educated and cultured man fluent in four languages--when his criminal days ended, he would become a real-estate broker and union business agent--Kelly was boss of the notorious Italian-dominated Five Points Gang and the Paul A. Kelly Association, supposedly a political club but actually much more than that. His sphere of influence, both criminal and political, roughly adjoined Eastman's on the Lower East Side, taking in Chatham Square, the Bowery and part of Chinatown. In the first years of the new century, sporadic warfare was common between Kelly's men and Eastman's along the border of the two provinces.

General war finally broke out when Eastman himself fell victim. One summer night in 1901, while strolling through Chatham Square, Eastman met six of the Five Pointers. Recognizing him, they attacked, with guns and blackjacks. Eastman, armed only with brass knuckles that evening, fought back, knocking three of his assailants to the sidewalk. But a fourth shot him twice in the stomach. Then the Five Pointers fled. Eastman struggled to his feet, closed the wounds in his stomach with his fingers and staggered to Gouverneur Hospital. For the next several weeks he lay critically injured, but, true to the underworld code (omertà, silence, is not the sole province of Italians), he refused to identify his attackers, saying only that he would take care of them himself.

Eastman was released and recovered. For the next two years, the Lower East Side was a battleground. There was hardly a night during which shots were not fired, during which some Kelly or Eastman operation, gambling game or even social affair was not broken up by attack from the opposition. The climax came in August 1903, on Rivington Street. A group of Five Pointers set out to raid a stuss game that was under Eastman's personal protection. But before they had gotten very far into Eastman territory, they were spotted by some patrolling sentries and shots were fired; one Five Pointer was killed. The others took refuge in doorways and around the pillars of the Second Avenue El, and both sides sent for reinforcements. Within a few hours, more than 100 gunmen were sniping at one another up and down Rivington Street. A couple of cops tried to intervene and were sent fleeing under a fusillade from both sides; after that, the police stayed away. The battle raged until dawn, and when the warriors faded back to their headquarters, they left behind three dead, seven seriously wounded and one slain pigeon.

For Tammany, which had always denied both the existence of any gangs in New York and any deals with them, the battle of Rivington Street was a major embarrassment. Peace was an absolute necessity if the public wrath was not to be felt. So Tom Foley, Manhattan sheriff, Tammany district leader and major aide to Big Tim Sullivan, the East Side Tammany boss and a prime protector of Eastman, arranged a peace conference at the Palm, a dive in Eastman territory on Chrystie Street. Kelly was guaranteed safe conduct. Foley told Eastman and Kelly that unless the war was halted, the power of the Hall would descend on both and destroy them and their gangs. With no choice, the truce was agreed upon and Foley gave a ball to celebrate it; Eastman and Kelly, as a sign of new friendship, stood in the middle of the hall and shook hands.

The truce lasted--for several months. Then one of Eastman's men was badly beaten by a Five Pointer and Eastman demanded the death of the assailant. Unless the man was handed over, Eastman sent word to Kelly, "We'll wipe up de earth wit' youse guys." It looked like war once again. But again Foley and other Tammany leaders stepped in and arranged the second Palm peace conference; again Kelly and Eastman were told that war would mean their destruction, for all Tammany support would be withdrawn and the police given free rein. Kelly and Eastman decided to settle the issue by a prize fight, with the loser to become the loyal servant of the victor. The fight took place in the Bronx, lasted two hours--Eastman's massive size and strength were offset by Kelly's science and experience; he had been a bantamweight fighter in his earlier days--and ended with both men collapsed on each other.

The issue was undecided and war seemed inevitable. But Eastman settled matters all by himself. At three in the morning of February 2, 1904, he held up a richly dressed young man, reeling from too much gaiety that evening, at 42nd street and Sixth Avenue. Unfortunately for Eastman, the young man was the scion of wealth and his family had hired a Pinkerton detective to follow and protect him while he sowed his oats. The Pinkerton fired, Eastman fled--right into the arms of a policeman, who clubbed him into unconsciousness. When Eastman awoke, he was in a police cell, charged with felonious assault and highway robbery. Seeing this as the perfect way out of its bind, Tammany remained strictly aloof. Eastman was convicted and sent to Sing Sing for the next ten years. When he was released, all his power was gone. He became a lonely thug on the streets of New York; he enlisted in the Army in World War One, fought in France, returned to pick up his old ways and, on December 26, 1920, was found dead in a back alley of his old neighborhood with five bullets in him.

The passing of Monk Eastman did not, of course, sever the links nor end the bargain between the underworld and the politicians. Eastman was a brute and while corrupt politicians had need of and could always use a brute, the day of such men as a real force was ending as society became more success complex. A Paul Kelly would have more success and last longer because he had more sophistication. More powerful still, at least for a time, would be the man who gave the orders rather than took them. A man like Charles Becker, whose friends called him Cheerful Charley.

A police lieutenant, personal assistant to the incredibly inept police commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, who placed him in charge of the department's special crime squad, and protégé of East Side Tammany boss Tim Sullivan, to whose throne he aspired, Becker may well have been one of the most corrupt policemen in the long history of New York police corruption. It was Becker who was in charge of the payoffs to the police and politicians from gamblers, prostitutes and other illegal entrepreneurs; who used both his squads of police and specially hired underworld thugs to enforce regularity and strict accounting in those payoffs; who provided the protection to those who paid and retribution to those who did not. But Becker's ambitions went far beyond the police department and the graft he could amass there. He saw himself as the new leader of the Tammany machine, or at least part of it. By 1911, Sullivan's powers were waning under the onslaught of advancing paresis. Becker was one potential candidate to succeed him on the East Side; the other was Tom Foley, protégé of boss Charley Murphy and himself the sponsor of another rising young Tammany district leader, James J. Hines.

For support, Becker turned to the underworld, which he knew well from his dealings and which owed him much. To ensure that the support for him would pour forth on primary and election days, he chose as his liaison man Jacob "Big Jack" Zelig. He gave Zelig strong-arm power to make certain that the graft from gambling and vice flowed in and flowed at an increasing rate. But Becker, through Zelig, made a major mistake. He put the squeeze too hard on a smalltime gambler, a notoriously unsuccessful one, named Herman Rosenthal. As it happened, Rosenthal was a longtime friend of Sullivan's, and that friendship, Rosenthal felt, gave him immunity from the payoffs assessed on other gamblers. Becker thought otherwise and when Rosenthal refused to ante up, his Hesper Club was twice raided and both times he was arrested and fined.

Still Rosenthal resisted. In mid-1912, Becker's personal press agent was arrested for murdering a man during a crap game. Becker set up a defense fund and assessed every gambler in the city $500. Rosenthal refused to pay and hoodlums in Becker's employ waylaid him one night, beat him and told him the beating would be repeated unless he came up with the $500. Instead, Rosenthal began to talk about his troubles wherever he went and his tale reached New York World reporter Herbert Bayard Swope, who recognized a major story when he heard one, and Charles S. Whitman, the Republican district attorney of Manhattan, who saw in Rosenthal a lever to the governor's mansion in Albany (which he would later realize) and perhaps beyond.

Though Rosenthal talked to both Swope and Whitman and fed them names, dates and details of the police-under-world ties and bribes, one of the things he lacked was discretion. He repeated his story in bars around town and the word got back to Becker, who became sure that his own safety and career depended upon closing Rosenthal's mouth. Zelig was then in jail charged with assault; Becker had him sprung, gave him $2000 and told him to use it to make sure Rosenthal stopped talking permanently. Zelig did just that. He hired a quartet of mobsters--Harry "Gyp the Blood" Horowitz, Louis "Lefty Louie" Rosenberg, Francisco "Dago Frank" Cirofisi and Jacob "Whitey Lewis" Seidenshner--to murder the too verbal gambler. A couple of attempts failed. In one, the four walked in on Rosenthal in a restaurant, surrounded his table, pulled out their guns, then didn't fire, because, they said, Rosenthal's wife was at the table and they didn't want to hurt her. The attempts, though, were enough to scare Rosenthal into silence. He sent word to Becker and Zelig that he had forgotten everything and wanted only to leave New York for safer climates. But he had gone too far and on July 16, 1912, the four killers cornered Rosenthal outside the Hotel Metropole on West 43rd Street. He had lost his final bet in a fusillade.

An investigation into the killing was ordered and, of course, Charley Becker was the man in charge. It was his final duty. Even he couldn't stop the police from rounding up the killers--whose identities were firmly established by eyewitnesses--though it took two weeks to do so. Once in custody, Horowitz, Rosenberg, Cirofisi and Seidenshner sang a long tune and Zelig was arrested; Zelig, too, decided that his only hope was to talk, and he implicated Becker, though this didn't save him--while on bail, he was gunned down as he boarded a streetcar. The killing of Zelig did not save Becker. He and his four hired killers were all convicted of the Rosenthal murder by Whitman and sent to die in the Sing Sing electric chair.

In the fall of Becker, Tammany boss Charley Murphy sensed the herald of new times. The day of the brute, as exemplified by Monk Eastman, had passed, and so, too, had the day of the official enforcer with political ambitions of his own and a power base in the underworld, as exemplified by Becker; he was just too much of a danger to the organization to which he belonged. The need for a continuing alliance with the underworld was just as great as ever and would remain so, for the gangsters could still control their districts, still bring out the votes, still provide the graft to make politicians rich. But the nation was becoming less frenetic and more business oriented in these years just before World War One. Respectable companies were doing more and more business with government at all levels and were thus becoming a new vein of graft to be mined. What Murphy realized was that in this changing society, a new type of man was needed, someone between the politician and the policeman and their allies, a man who could deal with both the underworld and the world of business but who was neither complete gangster, businessman nor ambitious politician, yet who was known, trusted and respected by all. He would have to be a man who understood money and how to get it and how to use it; who knew the value and uses of graft and the bribe; who was in all respects amoral, not shy of using muscle when needed; but who yet had a suave and polished front.

Such a man was Arnold Rothstein, nicknamed by those who knew him The Brain. The second, and prodigal, son of a middle-class Jewish family, Rothstein was born on New York's East Side in 1882. The dominant emotion of his early years was a deep hatred of his brother Harry, two years older. At three, Arnold attempted to kill Harry with a knife and, when stopped by his father, gave as his reason only, "I hate Harry." When Harry proved a brilliant student with the dream of becoming a rabbi, and a faithful son, Arnold, potentially even brighter and something of a mathematical prodigy, took to hanging around the local pool halls and gambling dens. At 16, in 1898, he abandoned any deep religious commitment, all formal schooling and home itself to seek his fortune in the world. He had learned early, at home and in his extracurricular rounds, a lesson he would never stop preaching: Money breeds money, and the more you have, the more you can make. He was determined to make it with his talent for numbers and a seemingly golden touch at games of chance. But it didn't take him long to understand that there was even more money, and a lot safer money, in running the games and taking a percentage than in playing them (though he would never stop playing, never stop risking his own and other people's money in card games and at the tables). So he branched out and soon added loan-sharking to his enterprises, advancing money at first to those who were unlucky at his tables and then spreading it around on a wider scale. Few ever welshed on a Rothstein loan, for he employed a crew of collectors who made people glad to pay; among the collectors at times was Monk Eastman.

But Rothstein's ambitions went far beyond the world of smalltime gambling and loan-sharking. He dreamed not just of wealth but of power and respectability. Money could buy some of it, and more would come from the right kind of associates and the right kind of appearance. Carefully, he watched and listened and trained himself in speech, dress and manners to become outwardly a gentleman, soft-and well-spoken, conservatively dressed in only the best clothes from the best tailors, immaculately groomed at all times. He could have passed for a banker or a respectable sportsman. And he cultivated assiduously those in power--the politicians, the businessmen, the sportsmen, the rich--doing them favors, turning them on to sure deals. He became a familiar sight in the political clubhouses of Tammany, in the best restaurants and theaters, at the race track at Saratoga and at those social events to which he could wangle an invitation. Murphy and Sullivan, older than he, became his patrons in the world of politics, giving their protection to his gambling, bookmaking, loan-sharking and other illegal activities. Jimmy Hines, the rising star in Tammany's heaven, was a close friend. From the world of elegance, Rothstein numbered as friends and frequent companions Charles Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants baseball team (and, it later developed, Rothstein's partner in several undertakings), Herbert Bayard Swope, sportsman Harry Sinclair and many others. The world of Arnold Rothstein was a limitless one, reaching from those with power in the underworld--of all ethnic backgrounds, for he dealt with them all--to the police and politicians, whom he cultivated and paid for protection, and on to the world of business and society. He was, then, the ideal choice for Murphy as Tammany's liaison with both the under- and the upper-world, the man through whom the orders and the graft would be channeled.

The choice, however, gave Rothstein a power and a potential that neither Murphy nor anyone else could have comprehended at the time. In the nether region between the world of crime and violence and the world of politics and business, he ruled supreme in the years after Becker's fall. He was the fixer extraordinary, the man who had to be seen and to whom the money had to be paid before a business contract with the city could be made, if an arrest were to be quashed, if a gambling game or some other criminal enterprise were to be permitted to operate, if the politicians and the police were to get their fair share of the take. It all passed through Rothstein and the word from him was a necessity.

But the real world of A. R., as his business associates came to call him, was always the shadowy region of the underworld, the world of the search for the fast buck. Whenever there was a deal brewing, A. R. was the man to see--to get the OK and perhaps to cut him in for a share. And so his power and his horizons grew. He was, of course, the man F. Scott Fitzgerald called Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. "He's the man," Gatsby told Nick Carroway, "who fixed the world series back in 1919."

It was Rothstein, they all said (including American League president Ban Johnson), who put up the money and who was the mastermind behind turning the Chicago White Sox into the Black Sox, causing the great Shoeless Joe Jackson to (continued overleaf) turn away from the boy who asked him, "Say it ain't so, Joe." But, in actuality, there are some doubts as to Rothstein's direct involvement. He certainly knew about it, but he always maintained that he, like millions of other Americans, so loved the game of baseball that it would be unthinkable for him to tamper with it. The real fixers, he asserted, among those who had come to him with the deal and been turned away with sharp words, were the fighter Abe Attell and some gambling friends. He had warned them they were heading for trouble. "I don't want any part of it; it's too raw," he said he told them. "Besides, you can't get away with it. You might be able to fix a game, but the series--you'd get lynched if it ever came out." Sure, he bet on the series, Rothstein said, but then, he was a gambler who bet on everything. And he pulled out a canceled check to show that he'd lost a $25,000 bet on one of the games. Of course, knowing what he knew, that wasn't the total of his wagers; he bet heavily and came away $350,000 in the black. But for Rothstein, that was as nothing.

Compared with other opportunities that Rothstein saw and parlayed into fortunes, the world series was only a side show. When the Black Sox scandal was going on, he was actually more heavily interested in that region in downtown New York called Wall Street. During the golden age of the Twenties, he would bring to a kind of perfection the bucket shop, with its sale of worthless securities to armies of the gullible. But his initial raid coincided with the American involvement in World War One. To support the war effort, the Government issued Liberty bonds, highly negotiable securities, and entrusted millions of dollars' worth to the safekeeping of Wall Street banks and brokerage houses. Over a period of about 18 months, something like $5,000,000 worth of these bonds were stolen, and the thefts all followed a remarkably simple pattern: A messenger in a bank would be handed an envelope with several thousand dollars' worth of bonds and told to take them quickly to a brokerage house (or the reverse). On his way, he would be beaten and robbed and the bonds would disappear. (Some years later, the bonds would be used to purchase whiskey in England, Bermuda and Nassau, during Prohibition and, after that, some would find their way to Cuba, France and other countries to finance the purchase of narcotics; Rothstein would be heavily involved in both.)

A break in the case came early in 1920, when a hoodlum named Joe Gluck was arrested for robbing a securities messenger. He made a deal with the authorities: In exchange for leniency, he would talk about the Liberty-bond operation, for he had been a part of it. The messengers, he said, had all been paid to take their beatings and not resist the holdups. The man behind the scheme was someone he knew as Mr. Arnold. Rothstein? Not when Gluck looked at pictures. He identified Mr. Arnold as a slick confidence man named Jules W. Arndt Stein, better known as Nicky Arnstein, husband of Broadway star Fanny Brice and, as it happened, a close friend of Rothstein's. Arnstein the mastermind? Miss Brice was aghast: "Mastermind! Nicky couldn't mastermind an electric bulb into a socket."

The authorities obviously didn't agree, for an alarm went out for Arnstein and he went into hiding. Rothstein came to his rescue. He hired counsel for his friend, including the brilliant criminal lawyer William J. Fallon, known as The Great Mouthpiece, persuaded Arnstein to surrender and then put up his $100,000 bail.

Rothstein's power was never better demonstrated than at the time of Nicky's arraignment. While the court debated, Miss Brice and some friends went to a nearby speak-easy to wait, Miss Brice parking her new Cadillac just outside. When they left, the Cadillac was gone and the owner of the speak told Miss Brice to call the cops. He was then informed that she was under the personal protection of Rothstein. That changed things. He rushed to the telephone and within 15 minutes the car was back where it had been, with nothing missing and the tank filled with gasoline. Into the speak marched Eastman, a battered shell of what he had been, in the last months of his life but still practicing his old calling. He apologized for the theft. It never would have happened, he said, had he known that the car belonged to "a friend of A. R.'s."

But even Rothstein's power, in the under- and upperworld, could not save Arnstein--or, maybe, Rothstein didn't want to save him. For it was accepted that Rothstein and not Arnstein was the mastermind behind the Liberty-bond robberies and that Nicky was just marked to be his fall guy. And that's the way it worked. Arnstein was tried, convicted and sent to the Federal penitentiary. And Rothstein marched into the Twenties with renewed power and new ideas. It was a new age and he was ready for it. The world was changing and the world of crime had to change to take advantage of the new times. What the underworld needed were men with brains, ideas and foresight to bring it from the old ways to the new ones, to an emerging world where victimless crime would flourish, providing goods and services that law-abiding society craved but could no longer obtain legally. In Rothstein, such a man existed.

• • •

Perhaps Rothstein's only equal was then in Chicago. Along with him, this man would play the major role in reshaping not just the underworld but all of American society. He was Johnny Torrio, called The Fox and sometimes Terrible John. Born the same year as Rothstein, 1882, in the village of Orsara, near Naples, he had been brought to the United States at the age of two by his widowed mother and became totally adapted to the new environment, remembering and knowing nothing about the old country except what he heard. Settling on New York's Lower East Side, he showed early promise as a gangster, leading his own gang as a boy and, when a teenager, joining Kelly's Five Points Gang and later becoming one of Kelly's major aides during the war with Eastman and the working deals with Tammany. But the peace that followed Eastman's downfall did not appeal to young Torrio. Though, like Rothstein, whom he knew slightly in these years and would get to know better 20 years later, he appreciated the value of appearance, and so cultivated a polished, soft-spoken, well-dressed, civilized veneer, and though he was small, sallow and out-wardly flabby and nondescript--anything but a threatening or imposing figure--Torrio was basically a man who craved action, who knew the uses of violence and who was not above participating himself (though in later years he would often and publicly decry violence as a threat to the whole businesslike structure of organized crime he would have so much to do with erecting).

So, in 1908, looking for more direct action, Torrio abandoned Manhattan for Brooklyn and joined forces with Frankie Yale and his gang of stick-up men, extortionists, killers and political strong-arm experts. Soon, word of his exploits began to spread and he was emerging as the dominant underworld force in the borough. But in 1909, his career took a sharp and sudden turn. A letter arrived from a distant cousin in Chicago who had heard of his fame. Her name was Victoria Moresco and she was the madam of several whore-houses. She had married Big Jim Colosimo, who had arrived in Chicago in 1872, at the age of one, from his native Palermo, had grown up in the Levee and gotten into gambling and the rackets even before he was of age. When Victoria and Colosimo married, he had taken over the management of her houses, adding them to his own, and he had expanded the business, controlling scores of brothels and moving into gambling, the illegal sale of wine grapes and other Italian delicacies, and just about every other racket that flourished. He had become one of the major bosses in the First Ward, the city's red-light district. By 1908, Colosimo's empire was in the midst of both expansion and trouble. His political deals and payoffs gave him plenty of protection, except from Black Hand extortionists. Their demands had been growing and he had recently been accosted on the street, beaten and threatened with more dire consequences unless he upped the ante Feeling he needed some outside help and having heard of Torrio and his prowess, he and Victoria decided to send for the young hoodlum, enclosing train ticket and expense money in their letter.

If the New York that Torrio left was corrupt, it could still take lessons from Chicago--there were even stories that in the 1890s a group of Tammany leaders had made the trip west to sit at the feet of their Chicago counterparts and hear how it was really done. The gateway to the West, Chicago, by the time of the Great Fire in 1871, had justly won the reputation as the most corrupt city in America, and nothing in succeeding years had tarnished that image. From the 1870s to the turn of the century, under the ironfisted control of gambler--political boss Michael Cassius McDonald, every kind of vice and corruption was rampant and protected. And McDonald's successors, in both the world of politics and the world of crime--Mont Tennes, "Bathhouse John" Coughlin (at one time, a rubber in a massage parlor, hence the nickname), Michael "Hinky-Dink" Kenna and Jim Colosimo--carried on the good works and expanded them.

What would later become the mainstay of the national betting syndicate, the racing wire to transmit to bookies instantly track odds and results, became Tennes' province. For $300 a day, he purchased a Chicago monopoly on the service from a Cincinnati man named Payne, who had conceived it, and then demanded 50 percent of the profits of every handbook in the city. Some resisted, but a few bullets and sticks of dynamite helped change their minds. By 1910, Tennes was the undisputed wire-syndicate boss, having set up his own service, General News Bureau, and having forced Payne out. He controlled the national race wire.

And the Chicago underworld found allies in and cooperated with such supposed bastions of incorruptibility as the press. This was the era of the circulation wars, with every paper bidding to control vital street corners in an effort to get its product to the reading public. Control of street corners meant high circulation and success; loss of street corners meant lost circulation and failure. In this war, Moses Annenberg, then circulation manager of the Hearst papers in Chicago (and later to replace Tennes as overlord of the racewire syndicate), sought out the underworld, hired goon squads to assault dealers handling other papers, to overturn trucks carrying them, to force the Hearst papers onto corner stands, and so, for a time, to win supremacy in the war.

But it was prostitution that really made the Chicago underworld rich and around which the other rackets orbited and prospered. It was the age of Victorian morality, when sex was something nice ladies didn't talk about and practiced only reluctantly and with their husbands. So prostitution flourished. Some girls came to the trade willingly, seeking their fortunes, for in what other trade could a woman prosper in those years? Others were forced into it, for the white slaver was in his prime, luring innocent young women from the farms and the immigrant ghettos to the cities with tales of good jobs and then seducing them and forcing them to walk the streets and to ply their trade in brothels. While prostitution and white slavery existed to a greater or lesser extent in cities around the country, Chicago was the center. It was still a raw, booming, vastly expanding city with enormous appetites. And it was the city for those to the west and south to visit to seek goods and amusement, including prostitutes. So Chicago became the center of the white slaver and the training ground for those who would eventually seek their fortunes with their bodies elsewhere but wanted to learn the business first. By the end of the first decade of the 20th Century, according to a Chicago police investigation, there were 1020 brothels in the city employing 4000 whores, while another 1000 whores walked the streets. These whores participated in 27,300,000 acts of sexual intercourse each year, grossing $30,000,000, or just over a dollar a trick. Half the money went to pay off the politicians and the police. Ninety percent of the money came from the Levee.

This was the city, then, in which Johnny Torrio took up residence in 1909. He quickly proved to Colosimo--who had doubts when he first saw the unprepossessing young man--that the vice lord and his wife had made no mistake in sending for him. Torrio quickly discovered the identities of the would-be Black Hand extortionists and had them killed. And Colosimo's troubles with them ended.

If Torrio thought that his reward for such a service would be a place at Colosimo's right hand, he was mistaken. Colosimo praised him effusively--and made him manager, male madam, of the Saratoga, the bottom rung in the Colosimo vice network, a sleazy establishment where the girls charged a dollar a trick and the customers were scarce. The ever-inventive Torrio, however, saw his opportunity. With a few cans of paint and some bolts of cloth, he brightened up the place. Then he dressed his worn-out flock in childish clothes to make them look like young virgins, raised the prices and business at the Saratoga boomed. Colosimo was impressed, enough to move Torrio up to the spot he wanted, as the chief aide and overseer.

Soon Torrio was, in fact, running the entire Colosimo empire while Big Jim dallied with some younger girlfriends. Torrio's contacts spread throughout the Levee and he attracted as allies others for whom work in the whorehouses was to be only a step to greater and wider power. Men like brothel barkeeper and financial wizard Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik. And in 1919, at the request of friends in New York, Torrio offered sanctuary and a job to a 19-year-old killer. He received urgent messages from his friends Frankie Yale in Brooklyn, with whom he had worked, and one Salvatore Lucania, later to be better known as Charlie "Lucky" Luciano, whom he had known as a boy, had sponsored in various crimes and had seen on some visits back home. Both suggested that perhaps Torrio could help out their friend Alphonse Capone, whom Yale had employed as a bouncer in his Brooklyn saloon and with whom Lucania had become friends. Already suspected of at least two murders, Capone had beaten a young man during a dance-hall brawl and his victim was in the hospital with little chance given for his recovery. This killing could be pinned on Capone and it was thought it might be expeditious if he left New York for a while. Torrio agreed, sent Capone a train ticket and, when he arrived, hired him as a $35-a-week bouncer in the Four Deuces, one of the Colosimo string of brothels. But Capone, like Torrio, was not to be satisfied with such employment.

Meanwhile, Torrio had other concerns. He had become convinced soon after his arrival in Chicago, and despite his own efforts and ingenuity in the work that Colosimo assigned him, that the day of ever-expanding vice was ending. Lurid revelations about girls trapped into a life of sin from which they were unable to escape had aroused the country and in 1910, Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act, making it a crime to transport women in interstate commerce for immoral purposes. But the nation was changing anyway, becoming more settled, and while vice would remain for years as one facet and a major one in an empire of crime, its importance as the cornerstone was fading. Torrio recognized this. While still overseeing the prostitution empire--and as long as he remained in Chicago, he would never abandon it, for it earned too much money to throw away--Torrio more and more devoted himself to studying other aspects of the criminal business and other avenues of illegal enterprise: to cultivating contacts and friendships throughout both the underworld and the worlds of business and politics, to preparing himself for the new day he was certain was coming.

For nearly half a century, the Anti-Saloon League, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and other groups had been decrying the insidious and evil influence of strong drink, had been attacking with hatchets and their own persons saloons and sellers of alcohol, had been besieging Congress and the state legislatures to turn America dry. Finally, in the moral climate brought on by World War One and its exhausted emotional aftermath, they succeeded. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, banning the manufacture, sale and transportation of all intoxicating beverages, breezed through Congress in December of 1917; by January 16, 1919, the necessary 36 of the 48 states had ratified it; one year later, on January 16, 1920, at midnight, it would become the law of the land. And then, in October of 1919, over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson, Congress passed the Volstead Act, setting up the Federal machinery to make the Prohibition Amendment work.

The nation would become dry, peaceful and prosperous with the new decade. Or so the amendment's supporters were sure. "The law," declared Congressman Andrew J. Volstead, Minnesota Republican who had written the law bearing his name, "does regulate morality, has regulated morality since the Ten Commandments." The people, he and his supporters said, would obey the law.

But in New York, Arnold Rothstein, and in Chicago, Johnny Torrio only smiled. The moment they had been awaiting had arrived.

This is the first in a series of articles on organized crime in the United States.