1920s and Prohibition

By Parker Dryden

  • The Good Bottlegger

    Roy Olmstead bootlegged alcohol while serving as a police lieutenant. By 1920, Roy Olmstead had become King of the Puget Sound Bootleggers.

  • The Circle

    In 1920, Lawyer George Remus moves to Cincinnati to set up a drug company to gain legal access to bonded liquor. And he built this enormous octopus of a bootlegging operation. And most cleverly, he started a drug company a wholesaler to drug stores. And then he would send his trucks out, his own men would hijack those trucks and put it into the illegal liquor trade.

  • Rum Row

    William McCoy, a Florida skipper, pioneered the rum running trade by sailing a schooner loaded with 1500 cases of liquor from Nassau in the British colony of the Bahamas to Savannah and pocketing $15,000 in profits from just one trip.

  • Kentucky Stills

    In 1922, Frank Mather signs on with treasury department to scour Nelson County, Kentucky for moonshiners, arresting them and dumping their whiskey into local streams.

  • Scofflaw

    In 1924, four years after Prohibition was first imposed, the Boston Herald offered $200 to the reader who came up with a brand-new word for someone who flagrantly ignored the edict and drank liquor that had been illegally made or illegally sold. Twenty-five thousand responded. Two readers split the prize. Each had come up with the same word scofflaw.

  • Beer Wars

    In 1926 Alphonse 'Al' Capone is blamed for murder of prosecutor, Billy McSwiggin. So all the gangsters who had their own neighborhoods in Chicago started vying for work in their territories. Well, the strong won out and they ended up with the district. And the weak ended up in the cemetery.

  • Purple Gang Trial

    In 1928, the Purple Gang of Detroit, Michigan, goes to trial for bootlegging and highjacking.

  • Gang Violence

    By 1929 gang violence is on the rise in nearly every city in the United States.

  • The Great Depression

    The Great Depression hits the country's economy hard. and people had no money or jobs

  • The Saint Valentines day massacre

    What happened in the streets of Chicago during Prohibition made that city synonymous with murder and mayhem for a generation. On February 14, 1929, Al Capone has seven of Bugs Moran's men murdered in Chicago, the so-called "Valentine's Day Massacre.