PROHIBITION GANGSTERS: THE RISE AND FALL OF A BAD GENERATION
Marc Mappen
Rutgers, 2018, 258
pages.
★★★
There’s something about outlaws that many people find
attractive—even when those outlaws are bloodthirsty murderers. Maybe it’s
because they appeal to the darker impulses of law abiders who dream of setting
their own ids free to roam. Or maybe it’s the lingering suspicion that laws and
economic systems are not really designed for the prosperity and well-being of the
proverbial Average Joe, so we admire those who machine gun their way fortune
and infamy. Still, public curiosity is odd given the fact that most gangsters
and outlaws were not Robin Hood types that shared their ill-gotten wealth. For
every Pretty Boy Floyd, there were dozens of Mafiosi more likely to run
protection rackets on Joe than to look out for his interests.
By nature gangsters thrive on vice, which is why historians usually
see the Prohibition era (1920-33) as the golden age of American crime. The
great Western experiment with outlawing booze quickly shed its utopian skin and
revealed the inner sinners. In the United States, urban officials and
journalists such as H. L. Mencken warned as early as 1925 that the 18th
Amendment outlawing the manufacture, transportation, or sale of alcohol was a
failure; had Al Smith won the 1928 presidential election, it might have been
repealed five years earlier. As it was, many cities only half-hardheartedly tried
to enforce Prohibition. Who could blame police and politicians—even those not
on the take—for treading warily? Much as in the case of battling today’s gangs
and drug kingpins, law enforcement was out-gunned. Consider the cast of
characters that come to mind when we think of Prohibition era gangsters: Al
Capone, Meyer Lansky, Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano, Bugs Moran,
Frank Nitti, and Bugsy Siegel are enough to strike fear into any heart. Moreover,
as writer/editor Marc Mappen argues in a chapter titled “Smaller Cities,” the
famed crime waves we associate with Chicago, New York, and Atlantic City were
merely the tip of the iceberg.
As Mappen notes, many gangsters lived short and brutish
lives; their partners in crime often meted out what passed for justice.
However, he also draws our attention to the fact that just one Prohibition era crime
racketeer, Louis Lepke Buchalter, was executed for his crimes. A few, most
famously Al Capone, were brought down by methods that did not involve mano e mano battles between cops and
gangsters; Capone went to jail for tax evasion and several others fell prey to
new racketeering laws. For the most part, though, those who survived inter- and
intra-gang violence died in their beds. As Mappen puts it in his concluding
chapter, “For them, crime did pay” (213).
Mappen gives context for Prohibition era crime, but the deep
background is not the main focus of his book. He is clearly one of those who are
fascinated by gangsters. That’s not to say he admires them; as his subtitle
suggests, he sees them as part of a “bad generation” driven by greed and
violence. But he’s also a chronicler of the minutiae that surrounds his central
figures. If, like me, the details of who attended what syndicate conference and
who pulled the trigger on whom does not satisfy some innate curiosity, you may
find yourself skimming sections of the book. As a social historian, I was more
drawn to themes that are largely glossed in Prohibition
Gangsters, such as the fact that Jewish and Italian mobsters often assumed
Irish surnames in twisted assimilation attempts. I also wanted much more
discussion of race and gender, two topics that were (if you will) little more
than drive-bys in Mappen’s study. In like fashion, I found his suggested
connections between pre- and post-World War Two organized crime to be more dotted
lines than solid ones. I was left unconvinced that the links are as
straightforward as he suggests, but maybe he has more in mind than he showed in
discussions of postwar mobster figures such as Frank Costello and Vito
Genovese.
These, however, are critiques of Mappen’s fascinations as
refracted through my own. If you share his desire to peel the inner lives and
details of infamous prewar thugs, Mappen is a go-to source. His text is concise
and lively, and his research is sound. He doesn’t glamorize his subjects, but
he does make them interesting. That alone is a delicate balancing act upon the
running board of a speeding car.
Rob Weir
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