Due to this, the number of pharmacists in the state of New York more than tripled during the Prohibition era. For people unable to get a hold of medicinal whiskey and such, there were illegal ways to drink during Prohibition. Organized crime began to flourish in large cities where crime bosses, such as Al Capone, had noticed the incredibly high demand for alcohol and the extremely limited access for the average citizen. This presented lucrative opportunities for gangsters to take over the import, manufacture, and distribution of liquor. Al Capone, and many other criminal groups during this time, were able to build their criminal empires mainly on profits from illegal
He made a name for himself during the Prohibition era. In 1925 after taking over a notorious gang in Chicago, Capone expanded this operation and now controlled hundreds of speakeasies, distilleries, and breweries. To keep the operation afloat, Capone had the city officials and policeman on his payroll. He was tabbed as “Public Enemy number One, and lived up to his name. Until the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, Capone made millions from racketeering illegal alcohol.
Instead of disappearing totally, the liquor trade simply ‘went underground’. These illegal rooms were called ‘Speakeasies’. Moonshine, which was illegally made alcohol, was easily bought, and booze was also ‘bootlegged’ into the US. In 1933, there were at least 200,000 speakeasies nationwide. The adverse effects of prohibition were dangerous.
The legal drinking age in the United States is 21 years old. That means anyone younger then this is breaking the law and a lot of bad things can happen to them. One bad thing that can happen to them is getting caught with the liquor and having to deal with the police. There are four underage drinking laws that the cops follow: possession, purchase, use and lose and zero tolerance (“Underage Drinking” 1). Each one of these laws can make someone go to jail and pay a huge fine.
However, to a large extend the figures in the two sources do show that prohibition was not successful. The public were producing more and more alcohol as a result of the restrictions placed on them. Prohibition went against the previously accepted way of life and restricting this only helped to push the production and drinking of alcohol underground. People became very clever at finding ways to obtain recipes for producing their own alcohol and the 25% increase in illegal stills seized by the government proves this. If the police were doing their job properly, the figures should be decreasing not increasing.
In hindsight we know this is true. Like wise in source B the writer agrees prohibition was bound to fail to an extent when the writer says “ there’s more than 30,000 speakeasies by 1928”. This shows prohibition failed because people were still buying and drinking alcohol. The message in this source is saying what went wrong with prohibition such as gangsters like Dutch Schulz and Al Capone, were Al Capone ran loads of speakeasies and turned the avoidance of prohibition into a big violent business, for example the Saint Valentine Massacre, and overall led to an increase in crime. I think both sources agree with each other, by agreeing that prohibition was bound to fail to an extent.
Crack cocaine --as much a creature of prohibition as 180-proof moonshine during alcohol prohibition--became the drug of choice in most inner cities. AIDS spread rapidly among injecting drug addicts, their lovers, and their children, while government policies restricted the availability of clean syringes that might have stemmed the epidemic. And prohibition-related violence reached unprecedented levels as a new generation of Al Capones competed for turf, killing not just one another but innocent bystanders, witnesses, and law-enforcement
Wanted Al Capone Reward; 6,000,000 million dollars "Scarface" Al Capone was paroled and released from Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco, California, in 1939 due to the ravages of syphilis, which he had caught earlier while running whorehouses. For many years, he was considered the most notorious gangster in the world, managing Chicago's gambling, prostitution and bootlegging rackets with impunity. . Nicknamed “Scarface” In 1918, Capone got into a bar fight over a girl with a hood, who slashed the left side of his face three times with a knife, resulting in Capone's nickname, “Scarface,” by which he would be known for
Dillinger and his gang robbed over 24 banks and all together killed a total of 10 people. Dillinger had also escaped from jail 3 times, injuring guards and killing one sheriff at his attempt to flee (“John Dillinger.bio”). Over time, Dillinger became America’s number one public enemy. After a long year of trying to arrest the
Rum running started with importing rum from the island of Biminis in the Caribbean to small speakeasies in Florida. As the players of organized crime saw the amount of profit that could be made they expanded the playing field. Gangsters quickly realized that rum was cheap and by importing other types of alcohol could triple their money. “They soon moved on to smuggling Canadian whiskey, French champagne, and English gin to major cities like New York and Boston, where prices ran high. It was said that some ships carried $200,000 in contraband in a single run — at a time when $50 a week was considered a good wage for an honest worker”.