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.

"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' psycho-physical 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"--

In 1919, the United States made its boldest attempt at social reform: Prohibition. This "noble experiment" was aggressively promoted, and spectacularly unsuccessful, in New York City. In the first major work on Prohibition in a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city, Lerner describes a battle between competing visions of the United States that encompassed much more than the freedom to drink.

A provocative history of criminal procedure, focusing on our perplexing overregulation of searches and seizures and underregulation of confessions and eyewitness accounts

The unknown inside story of the NYPD’s Italian-born detectives who fought both powerful gangsters and the deeply ingrained prejudice against their own beloved immigrant community The story begins in Sicily, on Friday, March 12, 1909, at 8:45 p.m. Three gunshots thundered in the night, and then a fourth. Two men fled, and investigators soon discovered who they had killed: Giuseppe Petrosino, the legendary American detective whose exploits in New York were celebrated even in Italy. The Italian Squad, by veteran New York City journalist and historian Paul Moses, explores the lives of the nationally celebrated detectives who followed in the slain Petrosino’s footsteps as leaders of the New York City investigative squad: Anthony Vachris, Charles Corrao, and Michael Fiaschetti. Drawing on new primary sources such as private diaries and city, state, and federal documents, this dramatic narrative history follows the Italian Squad across the first two decades of the twentieth century as its detectives battled increasingly powerful gangsters, political obstacles and deeply ingrained prejudice against their own beloved Italian immigrant community. Vachris, Corrao, and Fiaschetti became, like Petrosino, famous for meting out tough justice to criminals who comprised the “Black Hand.” Beyond trying to prevent horrific crimes—nighttime bombings in crowded tenements, kidnappings that targeted children at play, gangland shootings that killed innocent bystanders—the Italian Squad commanders hoped to persuade society of what they knew for themselves: that their fellow immigrant Italians, so often maligned, would make good American citizens. In this explosive story, Moses carefully strips away the mythology that has always enveloped the Italian Squad and offers instead a nuanced portrait of brave but flawed men who fought the good fight for their people and their city.

“[This] fine history of Prohibition . . . could have a major impact on how we read American political history.”—James A. Morone, New York Times Book Review Prohibition has long been portrayed as a “noble experiment” that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes. Its targets coalesced into an electoral base of urban, working-class voters that propelled FDR to the White House. This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny. The War on Alcohol is history at its best—original, authoritative, and illuminating of our past and its continuing presence today.

From Samuel Tilden's fight against Tammany Hall to George Bush's references to Willie Horton, politicians have routinely exploited issues of crime to achieve success at the polls. Nowhere has this been more evident than in New York City in the 1930s. Fighting Organized Crime brings to life the dramatic interplay between crime and politics in New York City during this period, and in the process provides the first major examination of how politicians manipulate the justice system for their own ends - all in all a colorful saga of major New York figures jockeying for headlines and political gain in their battles against notorious gangsters.