Politics, Police and Crime in New York During Prohibition: Gotham and the Age of Recklessness, 1920-1933

This book aims to highlight the causes why the Prohibition Era led to an evolution of the New York mob from a rural, ethnic and small-scale to an urban, American and wide-scale crime.

The temperance project, advocated by the WASP elite since the early nineteenth century, turned into prohibition only after the end of WWI with the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment. By considering the success that war prohibition made to the soldiers’ psychophysical condition, Congress aimed to shift this political move even to civil society. So it was that the Italian, Irish and Jewish mobs took the chance to spread their bribe system to local politics due to the lucrative alcohol bootlegging. New York became the core of the national anti-prohibition, where the smuggling from Canada and Europe merged into the legendary Manhattan nightclubs and speakeasies. With the coming of the Great Depression, the Republican Party was aware about the failure of this political measure, leading to the making of a new corporate underworld.

The book is addressed to historians of New York, historians of crime and historians of modern America as well as to an audience of readers interested in the history of the Prohibition Era.

Francesco Landolfi holds a PhD in Historical Studies from the University of Florence, Italy. His research concerns the history of crime during the twentieth century, the rise of far-left/right terrorisms in Rome in the 1970s and the making of the Irish mob in Boston between the 1960s and 1990s.