1986. Geraldo Rivera, as part of his Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault TV special, poses a poignant question to the current president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Martha Edgar. Did the enactment of prohibition contribute to the spectacular rise of organized crime? We discover that it certainly helped the criminal career of some gangsters, including Al Capone.
The WCTU lobbied heavily for prohibition laws, which were enacted as the Volstead Act on January 16th, 1920. The law was broken within an hour of coming into effect, with $100,000 of ‘medicinal’ whiskey stolen from two freight train cars. In the 13 years before it was repealed, prohibition inadvertently became a huge financial component of criminal gangs and groups across the country as they dominated the illegal market for alcohol.