NARRATOR: Going into the 1920s many people

believed banning alcohol would make America more peaceful.

They were wrong.

Violent murders, widespread corruption,

and the dawn of organized crime defined the decade and beyond.

In the years leading up to the 1920s,

antialcohol activists, such as Carrie Nation,

had been hard at work building a case against the demon drink,

and they had some legitimate arguments.

Prohibitionist women advocated for temperance

as a means of combating their abusive alcoholic husbands.

Industrialists got behind the movement

because they thought alcohol was limiting the potential output

of their average worker.

But temperance was also used by racist organizations

as an outlet for their xenophobic views

against the millions of European immigrants

coming to the United States.

The Germans and Irish in particular

were scorned for their alleged drunkenness.

Whatever their reasons, 46 states ultimately

ratified the 18th Amendment with only Connecticut

and Rhode Island dissenting.

Prohibition officially took effect

at the very start of the decade, enforced by the language

of the Volstead Act, named for House Judiciary

chairman Andrew Volstead.

Within a year, Americans' alcohol consumption

had already dropped to historic lows,

but the drop was temporary.

Americans didn't stop drinking.

The 18th Amendment allowed for some loopholes--

fermenting grapes at home, prescriptions from doctors,

and religious exemptions.

A lot of people found God.

But the eradication of a corporate structure for alcohol

production and distribution left a huge opportunity

for a large-scale, organized, and insanely

profitable black market.

Existing small-time street gangs took

advantage, quickly evolving into vast bootlegging

criminal enterprises.

They employed everyone from warehouse workers to truck

drivers to accountants.

Gang leaders would bribe politicians, cops,

even the Prohibition agents themselves, nicknamed Prohis,

to ensure their businesses ran smoothly.

Some relied on rum running, illegally importing liquor

from other countries and storing it in warehouses across the US.

Sometimes they would simply distill

liquor in private homes.

Other gangsters bought abandoned breweries

and operated them in secret.

They worked in the shadows, but one part of the business

was very public, the violence.

Gangs fought for territory in the streets of major US cities.

Chicago was especially violent.

729 people were killed by gangs in Cook County

alone during Prohibition.

The most famous of these incidents

was the St. Valentine's Day massacre in 1929.

Men working for Al Capone, dressed as policemen,

gunned down seven rival members of Bugs Moran's gang against

the wall of a parking garage.

No one was ever charged for the crime.

Realizing cooperation could lead to greater profits,

many gangs agreed to treaties that

allowed them to operate peacefully

in their respective territories.

Johnny Torrio attempted to organize the gangs in Chicago

with Al Capone as his right-hand man.

When Torrio retired to Italy and handed the reins

to his protege, Capone inherited a business

pulling in more than $1 billion a year in today's terms.

Charles "Lucky" Luciano organized

the Italian and Jewish gangs in New York

under Joe "The Boss" Masseria before Luciano had Masseria

killed in 1931 and had his successor, Salvatore Maranzano,

killed the same year.

Luciano went on to found The Commission, a national crime

syndicate composed of New York's five mafia families

and the controlling families in Chicago and Buffalo.

Prohibition ended with the ratification

of the 21st Amendment in 1933, but the mafia

kept rolling along.

These crime families had already entered the worlds

of loan sharking, prostitution, and illegal gambling,

just to name a few, and continued

to grow throughout the country on the backs of their profits

from Prohibition.

INTERVIEWER: You must have in your mind something

you've done that you can speak of to your credit

as an American citizen.

If so, what are they?

Paid my tax.

[laughter]