Organized Crime
The supply of illegal alcohol would start to prove that it could hold a major profit. This lead to the development of organized crime. In the beginning of organized crime, independent gangsters operated alone to supply illegal liquor. This lead to competition between suppliers and eventually helped them realize that by joining together and making larger gangs/organizations, they could make a larger profit. Once gangs combined, they would compete with other rivaling gang-groups which turned into violent blood-baths and made the streets of America battlegrounds for gangsters.
Successful gangs/organizations that were involved in bootlegging, would eventually become involved with gambling, prostitution and a very interesting type of crime called "racketeering." There were two types of racketeering that were going on within these cities. The first type was that basically the local gangs would pay off crimes/illegal activities committed by themselves to government officials or local police forces. The second way that racketeering came into place was where the gangs would force local businesses to pay a fee to the gangs for so called "Protection." The people that would refuse to pay the fee would be killed or their homes/businesses would be blown to bits. | Al Capone
The most notorious gang of them all was located in Chicago, Illinois. In Chicago, bootlegging had been extremely successful adding wealth, wealth and even more wealth to the organization. This gang ran through the blood of almost every neighborhood and police station in Chicago. There was a reason why this gang in particular was so successful and that was because of a man named Al "Scarface" Capone. He was a young gangster that was ruthless and had an excellent trait for avoiding jail. He was raking in almost 60 million dollars a year from bootlegging alone in Chicago and was able to buy out every judge, police man and government official in Chicago.
Although things seemed to be useless against trying to catch Al Capone, the government attempted to step up law enforcement. The Bureau of Investigation (later named the Federal Bureau of Investigation) was right on his tail trying to find any spec of information to try to get him in prison. Capone was able to slip away for quite some time until in 1931, a federal court convicted him of income-tax evasion which sent him to prison. |