Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (29 page)

Furthermore, the federal judiciary, as Willebrandt well knew, was often even more reluctant to convict Prohibition offenders than the state judiciary was. Haynes had hinted that this was so, but Willebrandt gave instance after instance of federal judges and prosecutors openly mocking Prohibition law enforcement efforts, siding with the accused they were supposed to prosecute, either because they disagreed with the law, had been bought, or were actually in business partnership with the bootleggers and speakeasy operators. “With the right kind of prosecutors the bootleggers will go out of business,” she wrote, but “during my eight years as Deputy Attorney General a large part of my time and energy was devoted to prosecuting prosecutors.”

She cited examples of assistant attorneys responsible for enforcing the Prohibition laws being convicted of association with bootleggers, sometimes as co-owners of illicit breweries or stills, and of how judges had in court openly attacked the integrity of Prohibition Bureau officials, quoting one of them as saying: “I want to instruct the witness
that a prohibition agent is not the law and most of them whom I have seen are about as far away from it as could be imagined.”

There was an additional impediment to justice. U.S. commissioners were the “middlemen” who decided whether the accused should go before a grand jury. Whether they handled one case a day or ten, they were only paid a fee for the one case, which scarcely made for speedy procedures. But worse than that, many of them were unbelievably corrupt, tipping off speakeasy operators in advance so that when federal officers went on raids, all they discovered were innocuous soft drink bars with church music playing in the background. Some commissioners were known to receive monthly fees of between $50 and $75 from each speakeasy operator in town. Jury selection being their other prerogative, some deliberately selected for jury duty men and women whose anti-Prohibition bias was well known to them, or else intimidated juries to acquit accused bootleggers.

And even when speakeasy owners
were
fined, these sentences were usually excessively low (except for notoriously dry states such as Kansas), and what was even a $10,000 fine to millionaires such as George Remus and Willie Haar? In some cities and counties, bootleggers and speakeasy owners came up before local courts every month, their fines going straight into municipal accounts — barely disguised, pre-Prohibition era saloon license fees.

It was partly because state law enforcement agencies no longer handled Prohibition offenses in urban centers such as New York and actively wet states such as New Jersey that the federal authorities devised new, sophisticated techniques to convict offenders, many of them anticipating those later used by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

In 1925, for example, a speakeasy called the Bridge Whist Club opened at 14 East Forty-fourth Street in New York. It was an undercover operation, entirely financed by secret federal funds, the purpose being to obtain incriminating evidence about bootleggers and their supplies.

Surveillance techniques were primitive but effective: there were no automatic recording devices in the 1920s, but wire-linked microphones, built into the club’s lampshades, were connected to the earphones of a battery of stenographers working around the clock on a shift basis. Thanks to these taps, agents did apprehend a major bootlegger, but owing to informers within its ranks, clients soon knew all
about the operation. Also, much of the information gathered was deliberately planted disinformation, including references to the drinking habits of well-known politicians, clergymen, and even senior Prohibition officials.

The Justice Department also tapped Remus’s phones. Many years later, in a
Collier’s
article, Bill Mellin, a former agent, described how he did this. He was sent to Columbus, Ohio, where Remus had booked into a hotel suite. For nine days, Mellin waited in vain to be contacted by special agents. In the
Collier’s
piece, he noted that he was probably followed during this period to make sure he was not secretly in league with Remus or his associates: “They were suspicious of some of their own agents in that city.” He was given a duplicate key to Remus’s suite (room 707), and a room next to it was booked for Mellin.

Mellin proceeded by stages. First, he connected the 707 extension to his own room telephone so that he could listen in on all of Remus’s telephone conversations. Learning that he would be away for twenty-four hours, Mellin entered the Remus suite, picked a suitable spot on the wall and, boring a hole, inserted a mike, using soap to fill in the drill holes and painting the surface to match the wall. “It was a smooth, perfect job.” In his own room, Mellin connected the wires from the mike to a handset, and installed a device that switched on a red light every time a conversation started in Remus’s room. “That way, you don’t have to keep the headphones on your ears all the time.”

Two government stenographers were then sent in. They worked in shifts in Mellin’s room, recording all of Remus’s conversations with his visitors. They learned a good deal about Remus’s bootlegging operations, including the fact that eighteen freight cars would soon be discharging liquor for Remus at a railroad siding in Covington, Kentucky (near Death Valley Farm).

But the operation also revealed the degree of corruption prevalent in Columbus. “One day alone, Remus had forty-four people in, and some of them were Federal prohibition agents or deputy marshals,” Mellin wrote. “He paid them an average of $1,000 apiece. When I had summarized all the information, I went to a United States official in Cincinnati, and said: here’s the dope. He looked at me for a full minute without talking. Then he said: ‘My boy, come back tomorrow.’ “

I went back the next day. He said: “Son, where is your home office?” I told him it was in New York. He said: “Son, there are times when a man has to be practical in this business. It’s only a few weeks to election, and the information you’ve dug up is political dynamite. The men you spied on — the agents and marshals — are political appointees. Go back to New York and forget it.” I didn’t go back to New York. I went to Washington and squealed. But it didn’t do me any good. Nothing ever happened on the Remus information.
⁶

There were equally flawed government-funded speakeasy operations in Washington (where a banquet for major bootleggers was sponsored by the Prohibition Bureau in the Mayfair Hotel) and Norfolk, Virginia, and one curious aspect of the New York “Bridge Club” operation was that long after surveillance had ceased, it continued to function without ever being raided.

In light of all this, was Willebrandt’s contention that “Congress remained overwhelmingly dry” a tenable proposition? The answer is that, in 1924 at any rate — for all the grotesque law enforcement failures, the open secession of New York State (the other five were still to come), the disgust shown by honest people at blatant corruption, and the consequent growing damage to the American body politic itself — the mood of the country was such that repeal was not just unlikely, but impossible.

A crucial test came that year with the Democratic presidential nomination. Al Smith, the popular governor of New York State, was the Democratic front-runner. Despite the fact that he was a Catholic, and therefore deeply suspect to Southerners and the Ku Klux Klan, he was the only candidate who stood a chance of beating Calvin Coolidge. The latter, though Harding’s vice president, had been one of the few totally honest members of the Harding administration, and, because Harding had died while still in office, was already a temporary White House incumbent — almost always a considerable advantage for a presidential contender.

Al Smith had the backing of Tammany Hall, that network of largely corrupt politicians and entrepreneurs who ran the city, but there was no hint of major scandal in his own political past — and the fact that the 1924 Democratic Convention was being held in Madison Square Garden was a huge plus. But convention proceedings not only
revealed an element of schizophrenia among grass-roots representatives as far as Prohibition was concerned, but dramatically underlined the veto powers of the Anti-Saloon League — its ability to ensure that any American president continued to do its bidding.

Both Wayne Wheeler and Izzy Einstein made notable appearances at the convention. It was yet another pretext for Izzy to disguise himself as a goateed Southern colonel, though by now he was so well known that his presence was not so much a disguise as a warning that those attending the convention had better moderate their drinking, at least in public. (They did not: according to witnesses, some of the delegations openly drank out of paper bags during the proceedings, and the galleries stank of whiskey.)

Wheeler had a far more serious purpose: to prevent Al Smith’s nomination. As a committed Republican, he wanted Coolidge, a “sound” Prohibitionist, to become president, and knew this was a foregone conclusion unless Al Smith became a contender. Wheeler had done his homework: he controlled one-third of all the delegates (mosdy from southern and midwestern states) who would never vote for a wet. But Franklin D. Roosevelt, a rising star in the Democratic party, made a keynote speech nominating Al Smith that had a galvanizing effect. “Ask your Republican friends whom they would least like to see nominated,” he told the delegates, and got a huge ovation.

Al Smith himself was well aware that his real opponent was not his likeliest rival candidate William Gibbs McAdoo — a nonentity dry whose strongest credential was that he happened to be the late president Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law — but Wheeler himself. While the convention proceeded without them, the two men met secretly in a New York club.

Their long discussion was surprisingly cordial. Smith asked Wheeler why the ASL had been so adamant in banning real beer, and told Wheeler that if elected, he would probably increase its alcoholic content. But he said nothing about repealing Prohibition, hinting that he was perfectly aware of the extent of dry sentiment outside New York State, especially in the South and Midwest. He told Wheeler that “being President of the United States would be quite different from being Governor of New York.” But Wheeler had the last word. When Smith made an allusion to his own possible future presidency, Wheeler told him: “Governor, you will never enter the White House.”
⁷

In the contest that followed, Al Smith’s supporters wrecked McAdoo’s chances, but Wheeler’s dry delegates effectively blocked Al Smith (there were over a hundred ballots). In the end, as Wheeler had both anticipated and planned, the Democratic delegates selected a lackluster compromise candidate for the nomination — an obscure West Virginian political hack named John W. Davis. Coolidge won easily, and Prohibition was given a new lease on life.

Al Smith was not the only impeccably honest wet politician whose anti-Prohibitionist views stemmed solely from moral convictions. New York Congressman Fiorello La Guardia, who would become New York’s mayor in 1929, replacing the arch-corrupt Tammany Hall figure Jimmy Walker, was another.

A brilliant media manipulator, La Guardia was almost as much of a showman as Izzy Einstein. In 1926, after tipping off the press, he marched into Room 150 of the House Office Building in bartender’s uniform and proceeded to demonstrate how easy it was to make real beer, mixing near beer with malt extract, which could be bought legally. Inside Congress, he knew he was immune from prosecution, but when the news came from Albany, where the headquarters of the state’s Prohibition Bureau was located, that anyone caught making “La Guardia” formula beer would be arrested, the
New York Times
announced that “Representative La Guardia will walk into a drugstore at 95 Lenox Avenue, purchase the necessary ingredients and mix his brew with a kick. Then he will stand by to be arrested.” Little Flower, as he was known, was exceedingly disappointed when no Prohibition agent showed up, and a city policeman refused to arrest him. Newspapers all over America carried stories of his exploit, and one city editor wired him: “Your beer a sensation. Whole staff trying experiment. Remarkable results.”
⁸

Although such antics seemed at the time to make him out to be a political lightweight, his opposition to Prohibition was no mere electioneering gimmick but stemmed from his conviction that it was destroying the nation. As early as 1919, he had told Volstead that “this law will be almost impossible of enforcement. And if this law fails to be enforced — as it certainly will be as it is drawn — it will create contempt and disregard for the law all over the country.” Excessive drinking, he insisted, could be curbed only by education, not legislation.

A born iconoclast, he openly proclaimed what other politicians
believed but dared not even whisper. Consequently, he attracted a large number of enemies in Congress from the dry Midwest and the South. Southern congressmen, he told the House, knew full well that the moonshiners down south favored Prohibition because it increased their business “. . .if the people from the dry states would keep out of New York City, we would have no drunks there.” And if they were all for Prohibition, he told a constituent, it was because Prohibition “was only enforced among the coloured population,” whereas “the white gentleman openly and freely can obtain and consume all the liquor he desires.” He could in fact have expanded on this theme. A detailed survey of “police blotter” cases involving Prohibition offenses in the
Easthampton Star
from 1920 to 1933 reveals that no socialites, or even “respectable” wealthy householders, were ever arraigned in the Hamptons: the victims of local Prohibition agents’ zeal were invariably working-class artisans or small potato farmers, often recent immigrants with exotic Polish names.