Yet another book I’ve got a hankering to read is Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
A sample:
By 1926, [Al Capone] and his fellow gangsters were making $3.6 billion a year—in 1926 money! To give some perspective, that was more than the entire expenditure of the U.S. government. The criminals could outbid and outgun the state. So they crippled the institutions of a democratic state and ruled, just as drug gangs do today in Mexico, Afghanistan, and ghettos from South Central Los Angeles to the banlieues of Paris. They have been handed a market so massive that they can tool up to intimidate everyone in their area, bribe many police and judges into submission, and achieve such a vast size, the honest police couldn’t even begin to get them all. The late Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman said, “Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempts at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one.”
