Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (27 page)

Haynes — who was not entirely the paragon of virtue he made himself out to be, for it was later learned that he had been paid a monthly retainer by the ASL while commissioner — preferred to lay the blame elsewhere,
outside
the Prohibition Bureau and related law enforcement agencies: “There are large communities where the entire machinery of government, municipal, county and state, is such that federal enforcement officials can get little if any cooperation whatever.” In a large number of cases, judges systematically sided with the accused and against the law enforcers. “In some cases it is difficult for an observer in the courtroom to tell whether the bootlegger or the Prohibition agent is on trial.” This would not be the case, he said, “if some of our better citizens would attend the courts. Friends of bootleggers throng the courtroom but friends of the law stay away.”

The complicated predicament of some judges, caught between their need to be seen upholding the law and their loyalties to those who had voted for them, can be gauged from this Haynes anecdote: Some Prohibition agents were stopped for speeding while chasing a bootlegger along a highway, hauled into court, and heavily fined. The judge then called them into his chambers, returned the fine, and told them: “I’m in politics and I can’t afford to let you fellows off.”

Not all Prohibition agents were corrupt or intimidated by proof of collusion at the highest levels. Izzy Einstein and his partner, Moe Smith, rapidly became the two most famous Prohibition agents in America. Einstein, “the man of a thousand disguises,” accounted for 20 percent of all arrests for violations of the Volstead Act in Manhattan from 1920 to 1925.

Einstein was a postal clerk on Manhattan’s Lower East Side when he volunteered his services. His superior, Chief Agent James Shevlin, said he “didn’t look the type.” Einstein was five feet tall and weighed
225 pounds. “There might be some advantage in not looking like a detective. I could fool people better,” Einstein told him. He was hired, given a gun (which he never used) and a badge, and immediately became a star.

As he later wrote,
⁵
he made his first arrest dressed as a working man. He went into a bar serving soft drinks and legal near beer. “The barman asked: would I like a little lollypop on the side. There was quite a laugh. I told the bartender I was a stranger who didn’t know the ropes but I’d buy a pint of whiskey if it wasn’t too expensive. He sold me a pint and I arrested him.”

In order to keep evidence intact, Izzy invented a device, a small glass funnel easily concealed in a pencil pocket, connected by tube to a bottle hidden in the lining of his coat. Despite his unforgettable appearance and build, he fooled thousands — dedicating his book “To the 4,932 persons I arrested.” His gimmicks included a straightforward proposition: “Would you like to sell a pint of whiskey to a deserving prohibition agent?” But there were also elaborate disguises involving crutches, fishing gear (in Long Island), and German, Polish, Hungarian, and Italian impersonations. Fluent in Yiddish, with unmistakably Jewish features, Einstein had great fun conning fake rabbis out of their stocks of sacramental wine.

He soon became notorious. One suspicious bartender said: “Eat this ham sandwich with the compliments of the house, and then I’ll give you a drink.” Izzy got rid of the ham, ate the sandwich, ordered the drink, and made the arrest. In a speakeasy with a sports clientele, he arrived in football clothes, smeared with fresh mud. In a musicians’ club, he was asked to play an instrument. “I’ll play you the revenue agents’ march,” he said. He wrote that one Pole offered him his wife in exchange for ten barrels of whiskey he had seized. He often made twenty to thirty arrests in a single day. The Brooklyn
Eagle
wrote: “Izzy does not sleep. He’s on the job day and night and accomplishes more for the drys than half a dozen anti-saloon leagues.” Wayne Wheeler wrote him: “The bootlegger who gets away from you has to get up early in the morning.”

“By becoming a character I popularized prohibition,” Einstein wrote. In fact, Izzy the showman had no strong objections to liquor. An irrepressible extrovert and a born character actor, who realized early on in life the futility of his father’s ambition — that he should become
a rabbi — he was never happier than when impersonating a socialite (he posed as the judge in a beauty contest before making an arrest), a southern colonel (at a Democratic convention) or a foreign dealer. So successful was he that a whole school of impersonators sprang up, pretending to be Izzy Einstein and demanding $25 shakedowns from saloon keepers.

Although Izzy later fell out with his partner, Moe, he owed much of his success to him. A favorite gimmick was for Moe Smith to pose as a rich out-of-town businessman, and Einstein as his fawning New York subordinate. The two men would sit through a meal in a fashionable New York restaurant, Einstein talking loudly about the Broadway shows Moe should see, and Moe telling him, making sure the waiter was in earshot, that what he really wanted was to find something decent to drink. Einstein would take the waiter into his confidence, the liquor would be produced, and the arrest made. Since both men were easily recognizable — Moe Smith was even fatter than Einstein, weighing in at close to 300 pounds — the naivetç of their victims seems, in retrospect, unbelievable. Their record number of arrests was due, first and foremost, to the laziness, passivity, and corruption of almost all of their Prohibition Bureau colleagues.

Izzy and Moe’s out-of-town exploits were less successful. In New Orleans, a local paper carried Izzy’s picture on the front page on the day of his arrival, warning that the dreaded agent provocateur was in town. Disguise apart, he and Moe Smith were capable of solid detective work. In true gumshoe fashion, they hired a room overlooking the premises of the Pure Olive Oil Company in Lower Manhattan, observing the comings and goings of its trucks for days at a time, eventually seizing a cargo of rye whiskey worth $50,000. Einstein also arrested a dealer who had imported hundreds of cases of liquor into the city who turned out to be the commercial attaché at the Peruvian consulate in New York. Because he enjoyed diplomatic immunity, Izzy recalled, “we had to give him back his liquor.”

Although the Peruvian consul’s dealings may have been an exception, diplomatic immunity meant that liquor could be imported for diplomats’ private use, and was even served at official parties. Few ambassadors were as respectful of the law as Sir Esmé Howard, British ambassador in Washington in 1929, who not only banned the serving of wine or champagne at cocktail parties but told his staff that, out of
respect for the Constitution, anyone caught ordering liquor through the “diplomatic bag” would be sent back to London in disgrace. His staff staged a huge party when his successor was named.

The trade in fake sacramental wine for religious purposes gave Izzy and Moe unlimited opportunities to perfect their provocation techniques. Practicing Jewish families were allowed one gallon per adult member per year, and sacramental wine was rationed — amounts determined by the number of registered worshippers in New York’s synagogues. Needless to say, the system led to monumental abuse. As Izzy and Moe discovered, a 600-member synagogue turned out to be a laundry; a delicatessen was another. A thousand gallons of wine had been drawn for a synagogue that was no more than a postal address in a Lower East Side tenement building. They also exposed an entirely fictitious “Assembly of Hebrew Orthodox Rabbis of America,” whose members consisted of one person, who, it turned out, was neither orthodox nor a rabbi, nor even Jewish, but an Irishman called Sullivan.

There were innumerable other scams. American cigar makers — among those officially entitled to alcohol for the manufacture of their products — also took advantage of the Volstead Act and the ignorance of the civil servants who administered the Bureau of Industrial Alcohol responsible for delivering it. A Philadelphia cigar maker who had spent $480 on alcohol in the previous eighteen years obtained an official permit for 420,000 gallons of alcohol a year — more than enough to soak all the cigar tobacco leaf in the world, the Prohibition Bureau later claimed. Prohibition agents also fought a losing battle with thousands of fly-by-night manufacturers of hair restorers, skin conditioners, and other toilet preparations smelling of whiskey, gin, or rum.

Hardly surprisingly, there is no mention of Izzy and Moe in Haynes’s book. The reason is that their career came to an abrupt end. They had been too successful, offending too many people in the upper echelons of the police, state, and federal agencies — and in Congress. In November of 1925, pretexting an “administrative reorganization,” Haynes, himself under considerable political pressure, abruptly fired them both.

For all his official optimism, Haynes’s discouragement emerges in his long catalogue of prominent citizens battening onto bootleggers’ bribes. In one “mid-Western industrial city” (unnamed, but probably
Cincinnati) “the mayor, the sheriff, the judge of the city court, a former prosecuting attorney, a detective sergeant, a justice of the peace, lawyers, deputy sheriffs and cabaret staffs and singers were all involved,” and proprietors of places where liquor was sold illegally were “systematically protected by the police in cognizance of higher officials.” A mayor of Atlanta was sentenced to eighteen months for participating in a bootlegging ring. New Jersey was “a stamping ground for bootleggers doing volume business.” In a case involving 100,000 gallons of impounded wine and property worth $2 million, “the wine growers, a prominent citizen and the ex-Governor of the state of California all testified in favor of the accused.” On the West Coast, one bank president, fourteen wholesalers, a lawyer, and a deputy collector of internal revenue aggregated 31 years in jail and $167,000 in fines in a case involving liquor worth $4 million.

In the face of evidence of this type, “The Federal Government,” Haynes insisted,
“is
reaching big operators, the ‘higher-ups,’ with ever-increasing success.” At the time of his writing, as later statistics would show, liquor was America’s biggest industry. Americans were consuming 200 million gallons of hard liquor, 684 million gallons of malt liquor, and 118 million gallons of wine a year, and the bootleggers’ overall income amounted to four billion dollars a year.

Rather than expose in detail instances of corruption among politicians, the Justice Department, the police, and the state judiciary all over America, Haynes preferred to lay the blame for his bureau’s failures on a powerful international wet conspiracy. He quoted Lord Astor, who claimed in a speech in 1923 that “people are working in England to misrepresent the attitude and actions of America.” He attached great importance to a (1922) “anti-Prohibition Congress” in Brussels attended by politicians from Belgium, Canada, Spain, Finland, France, Britain, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, which, he said, was plotting to undermine American institutions under the pretext of “defending individual and commercial liberty.” He claimed there was a powerful movement in France, headed by Count Albert de Mun, to “provide wets” with ample funds “and the active support of a hundred million European advocates.” Hardly coincidentally, Haynes noted, Count de Mun was “president of one of the largest champagne companies in France and was formerly an extensive exporter to the U.S.” Tourist and advertising agencies
boosted France as a tourist haven and a drinker’s paradise, “appealing to the comradeship that existed between Yank and poilu
⁶
in war days” and asserting that “in all our cities throughout our entire wine-growing region, you will not meet a drunken man.”

In America itself, Haynes wrote, no fewer than forty-two organizations had been set up to fight Prohibition. The most powerful, the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, got massive financial support from former liquor manufacturers and dealers associations. It “practically paralleled in organization method the Anti-Saloon League”; that is, it systematically backed wet congressional candidates (with considerable success, in that Volstead himself would lose his seat as a result of their efforts).

In the last resort, for all the occasional fascinating glimpses he gave of his real problems, Haynes’s book never dared explore in depth the crucial problem at hand: that for all the infrequent incorruptibles, law enforcement officials’ hands were tied and the Prohibition Bureau doomed because of a web of collusion — a tacit conspiracy to batten onto Prohibition involving politicians, the judiciary, the banks, and the police extending from Washington to every state of the Union and even involving the attorney general himself from 1921 to 1924.

Instead, Haynes preferred to repeat, Coué-like, the conviction that “Prohibition has come to stay” and highlight the perils of drink in any form. “Who drinks bootleg drinks with death,” he wrote, citing the example of a promising actress who killed herself “because the effects of the liquor drunk at a party had caused her to seek death as a relief,” and the case of the “young woman on a Hoboken ferryboat who took a drink from a flask, almost immediately staggered to the stern, plunged into the Hudson and died.” That such deaths were directly attributable to Prohibition, and the nonavailability of quality liquor, seems never to have occurred to him.

But perhaps Haynes, who knew all about the drinking habits and corrupt practices of the Harding administration, deliberately wrote his book tongue in cheek. He was, after all, a Daugherty appointee, and was well aware of the latter’s appalling reputation, though he did pay a somewhat ambiguous tribute to him in his book. “There can be no doubt as to the attitude of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Daugherty,” he wrote, “to whose department is entrusted the task of prosecuting violators of the prohibition laws.”