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In the United States an early wave of movements for state and local prohibition arose from the intensive religious revivalism of the 1820s and ’30s, which stimulated movements toward perfectionism in human beings, including temperance and abolitionism.
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The movement spread rapidly under the influence of the churches; by 1833 there were 6,000 local societies in several U.S. states.
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Bootlegging helped lead to the establishment of American organized crime, which persisted long after the repeal of Prohibition. The distribution of liquor was necessarily more complex than other types of criminal activity, and organized gangs eventually arose that could control an entire local chain of bootlegging operations, from concealed distilleries and breweries through storage and transport channels to speakeasies, restaurants, nightclubs, and other retail outlets.
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The American Mafia crime syndicate arose out of the coordinated activities of Italian bootleggers and other gangsters in New York City in the late 1920s and early ’30s.
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Torrio turned over his rackets in 1925 to Al Capone, who became the Prohibition era’s most famous gangster, though other crime czars such as Dion O’Bannion (Capone’s rival in Chicago), Joe Masseria, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and Bugsy Siegel were also legendarily infamous.
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Capone’s wealth in 1927 was estimated at close to $100 million.
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In 1929—the year of the stock market crash, which seemingly increased the country’s desire for illegal liquor—Eliot Ness was hired as a special agent of the U.S. Department of Justice to head the Prohibition bureau in Chicago, with the express purpose of investigating and harassing Capone.
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Also in 1932 Warner Brothers released Howard Hawks’s film Scarface: The Shame of Nation, which was based loosely on Capone’s rise as a crime boss.
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Because the men whom Ness hired to help him were extremely dedicated and unbribable, they were nicknamed the Untouchables. The public learned of them when big raids on breweries, speakeasies, and other places of outlawry attracted newspaper headlines. The Untouchables’ infiltration of the underworld secured evidence that helped send Capone to prison for income-tax evasion in 1932.
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In March 1933, shortly after taking office, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, which amended the Volstead Act and permitted the manufacturing and sale of low-alcohol beer and wines. Nine months later, on December 5, 1933, Prohibition was repealed at the federal level with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment.