Murder, Prohibition, and the Violence of a “Forbidden Fruit”, Essay Example

Question: Discuss the impact of Prohibition on organized crime. Within your response “very briefly” include the public’s view of the Prohibition Bureau.

Answer: Prohibition was one of the most disgraceful and shameful periods of time in all of American history. It was a time when Detroit became the murder capital of the nation, due to bootlegging criminals who kept crossing the Detroit River into Canada in order to bring molasses into the United States in order to manufacture liquor. This period of time (the 1920’s) also saw the rise of the Cosa Nostra, or Mafia—organized crime as we know it today. The illegal profits from bootlegging sales were controlled by early “gangsters” such as Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Al Capone, and Meyer Lansky. Federal Police measures against such men were in their infancy at this time, as the only “federal” crime force fighting against the Mafia was an organization then known as the “Bureau of Investigation”. The Bureau of Investigation was brand new as a crime fighting agency in the 1920’s and it was, as most people already know, the precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which eventually became the top criminal investigation agency in the entire world under the man of dubious and controversial distinction, Mr. J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover was Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) from 1923 until his death in 1972. His tenure as Director of the F.B.I. included Presidents Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. The people of the United States suffered much under his leadership because throughout his entire career he refused to investigate or even admit that the Mafia existed, and because of this, the Mafia gained an essentially impenetrable stronghold in an Underworld Crime Syndicate that almost no one, with the exception of Robert F. Kennedy as U.S. Attorney General from 1961-1964, had the courage to confront. The public’s opinion of the crime that arose from Prohibition was one of anger, one of outrage, but mainly…one of regret. There is an old saying that Forbidden Fruit always tastes the sweetest. Never has this held more tragically true than during the Age of Prohibition.

References

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Copyright 1987 by Doris Kearns Goodwin; All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form;; Published by Simon and Schuster; Simon and Schuster Building; Rockefeller Center; 1230 Avenue of the Americas; New York, New York; 10020

Robert Kennedy: His Life. Copyright2000 by Evan Thomas; All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form

Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy. Copyright 2001 by Amanda Smith; John F. Kennedy Library Foundation; All Rights Reserved