Untouchable Lawmen

[Vickiana Sconyers]

JungJin is a criminal profiler and he came from the FBI in the United States. Yoo-Min is a detective and he graduated from the top police university, but he is more interested in women then arresting criminals. Jung-Jin and Yoo-Min are called to the special investigation headquarter for a secret meeting. There, Jung-Jin and Yoo-Min receive an order to take down the boss of a criminal organization. The crime boss, with the help of people in power, appears untouchable.

In the early 1980s, while I was documenting East Hampton's traditional fishing community, several baymen shared with me that, during Prohibition, they had been hired at times to help carry cases of liquor off the beach to waiting trucks. One Springs bayman shyly admitted that he was able to purchase his first automobile with his pay, and one Amagansett bayman confided that many men wore long overcoats with multiple inside pockets where bottles of liquor were stashed after being "separated" from the cases being carried off the beach.

And in Water Mill I remember several old-timers recalling one gang of bootleggers ambushing another gang's liquor-loaded truck at the curve on Montauk Highway just west of where now stands a row of businesses.

It's been said that Prohibition was created and imposed on the nation by a committed minority, perhaps explaining why, in much of the country during this period, it was willfully, routinely, and perhaps joyfully violated. In many communities, law-breaking became the new norm. With legal alcohol sales forbidden, a large underground economy developed to supply the demand, and much of this was run by organized crime groups.

These illegal activities stretched even into the realm of Suffolk County, Long Island. Prohibition may have been the law of the land, but for many people it was also a great, albeit illegal, opportunity to make money.

Prohibition in the United States, beginning in 1920 with the passing of the Volstead Act and ending in 1933, was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. The era conjures up for many Americans images of "untouchable" lawmen, gangsters "shooting it out" with both bootlegging competitors and lawmen, and hidden speakeasies.

This is in large part thanks to the dozens of movies, novels, and even television series that were inspired by the Prohibition era. The 1931 film "Little Caesar," starring Edward G. Robinson, was one of the first films loosely based on a Prohibition gangster, Al Capone, and helped create a gangster genre. "The Untouchables" was a popular television show that ran from 1959 to 1963 and fictionalized the experiences of Eliot Ness as a Prohibition agent, fighting crime in Chicago in the 1930s with the help of a special team of agents nicknamed the Untouchables.

Amy Kasuga Folk begins her new book, "Rumrunning in Suffolk County," by briefly discussing the historic notion that humans found that drinking alcohol was safer than drinking potentially bacteria-filled water. She then goes on to briefly discuss the 19th and 20th-century temperance movements, and how some temperance crusaders gained followers by incorporating biased language against new immigrants into their arguments.

The author then presents a year-by-year compilation of reports, from 1921 through 1932, largely gleaned from local newspapers throughout Suffolk County, describing government successes and failures in pursuing and sometimes capturing those involved in transporting liquor from throughout the county to, usually, New York City.

At one point, Ms. Folk quotes a local minister distressed by the amount of liquor being smuggled across Long Island: "Liquor was flowing like a river from east of the Shinnecock Canal to New York City."

Using approximately 50 historic black-and-white photos that enhance the newspaper accounts (all notated), personal oral accounts from community members, and a bibliography, Ms. Folk adds to her story one additional section: a bootlegger's code book that had been recovered by a fisherman in Peconic Bay. A rumrunner's boat was being chased by a Coast Guard boat when something flew out of the speedboat and landed in the fisherman's net as he was hauling it in. The code book shows landing sites for smugglers and various messages meant to aid in the smuggling of liquor.

"Rumrunning in Suffolk County" is an easy and pleasant read. Ms. Folk is the collections manager for both the Oysterponds Historical Society and the Southold Historical Museum and serves as the Southold Town historian. She is also a past president of the Long Island Museum Association.

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Jung-jin is a criminal profiler and Yoo-min is a detective. They are called to the special investigation headquarter for a secret meeting, where they receive an order to take down the untouchable boss of a criminal organization.

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Special Agent Eliot Ness is one of the most famous federal agents in the history of law enforcement. As a supervisor of an ordinary team of agents, he did the extraordinary. Against all odds, he and his Untouchables broke the back of organized crime in Chicago, a city that was dubbed the "Crime Capital of the World." Ness performed brilliantly as both a crime fighter and a leader in a time of national distress.

When Ness and his Untouchables emerged as the enforcers who had put away Al Capone after he had maintained a decade-long empire in Chicago, they became so ingrained in the American psyche that cartoonist Chester Gould launched a new comic strip based on the crime stories publicized in the daily headlines.

The real Ness' success was no accident. During his 10 years of federal law enforcement service with ATF's legacy agencies[1] he faced organized criminal elements flush with huge sums of cash. All the while, he demonstrated that he possessed intelligence, ability and above all else, honesty and integrity which he undisputedly maintained throughout his federal law enforcement career.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about Ness is not that he and his squad sent Capone packing for the penitentiary; but that he later went on to lead two additional teams of agents in the cleanup of two equally crime-ridden cities protected by corrupt law enforcement agencies, Cincinnati and Cleveland.

After fighting organized crime for 10 years as a federal agent, he resigned from his position to become the Cleveland Public Safety Director, in charge of the police and fire departments where he, again, successfully headed a campaign to clean up corruption and modernize both public service institutions.[2]

From the enactment of the Volstead Act, prohibition agents hunted down bootleggers who were growing enormously powerful and rich by smuggling liquor into the United States primarily from Canada and Europe. By the time Ness entered the service in 1926, three of Treasury's six law enforcement arms - the Prohibition Unit, the Coast Guard, and Customs - were working together, sharing information, and conducting joint operations against what would be described today as a transnational organized crime threat.

Criminal syndicates completely controlled the liquor industry. Assassinations, bombs, bullets and corruption were routine; every industry paid tribute, directly or indirectly, to bootleggers and gangsters who had forged such close ties with local authorities that anonymous prohibition enforcement squads became necessary in some cities. Chicago was one of those cities.

Chicago belonged entirely to Al Capone. The collective force of 3,000 police officers and 300 prohibition agents failed to bring down Capone's empire. The lack of prohibition convictions in a city as "wet" as Chicago only cemented the fact that Capone was buying protection from law enforcement.

In 1930, two events not only changed the course of Ness' career, but also redirected federal law enforcement's trajectory, in general, and ATF's legacy, in particular. First, the Bureau of Prohibition was transferred from the U.S. Department of Treasury to the U.S. Department of Justice. The Bureau's mission increasingly focused on fighting violent crime. This dangerous new mission began to clash with the Treasury Department's responsibility (since 1791) of ensuring tax compliance. This burgeoning enemy and increasingly treacherous terrain necessitated a more effective and coordinated law enforcement strategy - Treasury Department no longer had the means to direct this new focus. The Justice Department was the organization better suited to lead the Bureau of Prohibition in the fight against organized crime.

The second event, simultaneous with the first, was President Herbert Hoover's directive "to get Capone." Fed up with Capone's brazen and far reaching arm of power and corruption, Hoover declared war against Capone and his "Outfit." This Presidential declaration set in motion Chicago's U.S. Attorney, George E.Q. Johnson's two-pronged investigative attack on Capone. One effort, led by the Bureau of Prohibition Investigative Division's newly appointed Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Eliot Ness and his team of agents, who were ordered to disrupt Capone's operations and gather evidence of prohibition violations. The other, led by lawmen Elmer Irey and Frank Wilson of the Internal Revenue Service, investigated Capone's finances for evidence of money laundering and tax evasion.

Agent Ness' team of specially trained agents damaged the Capone organization's ability to carry out its illegal activities and ultimately led to the indictment of Capone on over 5,000 prohibition violations under the Volstead Act. That indictment was handed down 1 week after his indictment for tax evasion. Prohibition was extremely unpopular, and there was an enormous risk that jurors would be sympathetic toward a bootlegging defendant. On the other hand, no honest taxpayer liked a cheat; U.S. Attorney Johnson took the tax case to trial and secured a conviction on those charges. After the verdict, not wanting to risk the gangster's release on appeal, the Federal government re-indicted Capone on additional prohibition violations as a security measure. His team of incorruptible agents, later given the moniker "the Untouchables" not only wreaked havoc on gangster Al Capone's criminal empire, but also went on to successfully apprehend many of Chicago's notorious gangsters and bootleggers.

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