Izzy and Moe
From the moment Prohibition went into effect in January 1920, New Yorkers from top to bottom, from the mayor to the immigrant laborer, from its hoodlums to its largely Irish constabulary, set out to ignore the new law, get around it, or profit from it in some way.
The market for both large, industrial stills and small home models boomed. New York newspapers ran ads for one-gallon home stills, and hardware stores displayed them in their windows. The shelves of any public library held books and even helpful government pamphlets on how to use them. As every backwoods moonshiner knew, stills sometimes blow up, making them dangerous appliances to have cooking away in apartments all over New York. Periodically through the 1920s a still explosion would make the news, including one in a West Eleventh Street kitchen that killed the owner’s baby son.
In Italian neighborhoods like the South Village, people had always made wine for home use. Now they amped it up into a thriving cottage industry. “In the fall of the year, truckloads of grapes might be seen being unloaded in front of tenements or stores, the remains of mash purpled the gutters, and women grocery-store keepers apologized for the condition of their hands as they weighed their vegetables,” a sociologist reported. Every kind of store in the Italian Village – grocer, bootblack, cigar store, barber shop – sold wine. Everyone in New York knew that if you wanted wine with dinner, shop in the Village.
When roughly four of five of New York City’s fifteen thousand licensed taverns and saloons shut down, an estimated thirty thousand speakeasies rose up to replace them. They ranged from the classic dingy hole-in-the-wall of lore to lavish hot spots like Jack and Charlie’s “21” Club, where Mayor Jimmy Walker had his own booth. Some speakeasies were so far from secret that they were world-famous, their addresses were listed in every tourist guide, and the only people the lug behind the door refused to admit were those he had very good reason to suspect were law enforcers. Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village was thick with speakeasies geared for the tourist trade, early examples of the theme bar. At the Pirate’s Den a doorman dressed like a buccaneer let tourists into a gloomy place hung with chains and rigging and lit by ship’s lanterns, where staff costumed like eye-patched sea dogs periodically staged mock fights with their cutlasses and pistols. Nearby were the zany Nut Club, something like a forerunner to today’s comedy clubs; the Indian-themed Wigwam; and the Village Barn, a basement on West Eighth Street featuring square dances, hoedowns and live turtle races. Poisoning from the bad alcohol served in many joints – often just grain alcohol colored to look like whiskey – could be deadly. By the end of the decade more than six hundred New Yorkers a year were dying from it.
In 1925 the perpetually broke and peripatetic Henry and June Miller moved to Greenwich Village to try running a speakeasy of their own. It was in a tiny basement apartment they rented in the brick house at 106 Perry Street, where Henry had to make himself scarce when June brought her wealthy admirers over. June, the bisexual wild child, had been a taxi dancer when they met in 1923. It was at her prompting that he quit his job at the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company – Western Union – to try to make it as a writer. In their time together they lived in, and were often thrown out of, numerous apartments in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. The speakeasy-and-sugar-daddies arrangement on Perry Street was one of her many failed moneymaking schemes. In Plexus Miller writes, “To run a speakeasy… and to live in it at the same time, is one of those fantastic ideas which can only arise in the minds of thoroughly impractical individuals.” The apartment was two small rooms and a kitchen. One room held a pool table, with windows always shut and heavily curtained against law enforcement’s prying eyes. By morning, when they tried to get to sleep, the stench of stale beer, spilled wine and tobacco smoke were awful. “No doubt about it, if the enterprise proves a success we’ll have tuberculosis,” he mused. It wasn’t a success. They thrived briefly at first, mostly because June’s well-heeled admirers were customers. But they soon drifted off and within a few months the clientele was mostly Henry’s impoverished bohemian pals. “On the kitchen wall is a long list of names,” he records in Plexus. “Beside the names is chalked up the sums owed us by our friends, our only steady customers.” By 1926 they’d been evicted.
The federal Prohibition Unit mandated with stopping all the illicit drinking in the nation was chronically underfunded and understaffed throughout its existence. The agency fielded a mere fifteen hundred agents expected to watch the nation’s vast borders, police its roads, find and shut down an expanding universe of illicit distilleries and breweries, go undercover into its thousands of speakeasies and clubs, and spy on the daily consumption habits of its one hundred and six million citizens. Many agents’ hearts weren’t in it from the beginning, and corruption was rife. An agent made less than two thousand dollars a year in salary; he could make five hundred a day from his local bootlegger just for looking the other way when a shipment went out. In New York City, the hiring of federal agents was just another Tammany Hall patronage trough, and half the federal agents in the city had to be let go under accusations of bribery and extortion. Meanwhile, the New York City police who were supposed to assist the feds were often on the take as well. In one instance, cops swooped down on federal agents who were preparing to bust a bootlegger’s warehouse and arrested the agents as “suspicious characters,” giving the bootlegger time to clear the place out. At the end of the workday many cops went off to throw around some of their ill-gotten gains at their speakeasies of choice, including the one connected to Police Headquarters via a tunnel under Centre Market Place, where they bent elbows with judges, district attorneys and other slack upholders of the new law. By the start of 1925 New York had bowed to the obvious and removed the police from Prohibition enforcement, leaving just the badly outgunned and graft-riddled feds.
Encouraged by the lazy enforcement, New York’s Italian, Irish and Jewish street gangs took to bootlegging, rum-running and opening speakeasies with a will. They became in effect an entire underground liquor industry. They imported enormous quantities of labeled alcohol from England and Canada (which encouraged, and happily taxed, its boom market for distilleries). Much contraband whoopee entered the city of New York through the Irish-run waterfront of Greenwich Village, Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen. Gangsters built their own breweries and distilleries, ran their own trucking and shipping industries, figured out how to launder the cash and evade taxes, opened their own speakeasies, fought off competitors and paid off everyone they had to. It was all a great learning opportunity for the neighborhood gangs, who grew into the organized crime syndicates that flourished in the 1930s.
Of course not all law enforcers were on the take, and some diligently pursued the job of prohibiting their fellow citizens from wetting their whistles. The two most celebrated and successful federal Prohibition agents in the country were in New York City: the portly team of “Izzy and Moe,” Isidore Einstein and Moe Smith. They came from the Lower East Side, where Izzy, who’d emigrated from Austria, was a postal worker, and Moe, a New York City native, had been a U.S. marshal and ran a cigar store. According to Masonic records they were lodge brothers and likely met there. When Prohibition went into effect Izzy thought that handing out summonses sounded like more fun than handling mail, and talked Moe into applying with him.
Izzy and Moe went about their work with a crazy zeal. It’s said that Izzy was the brains, the Holmes to Moe’s Watson. They’d disguise themselves as a Jewish couple (Izzy in a fake rabbinical beard, Moe in drag), milkmen, gravediggers, judges, longshoremen, football players – anything to get in the speakeasy door. They put on blackface to get served in Harlem. One frigid day Izzy stood outside a speakeasy in his shirtsleeves until he turned blue, then Moe hustled him in the door calling for a drink to save the frostbitten man. The kindhearted bartender poured it, and was handed a summons. Several times, according to Herbert Asbury, Izzy actually got into speakeasies by telling the lugs guarding the doors that he was a federal Prohibition agent. Looking at the round-bellied little man and thinking that was a pretty good joke, they would let him in, and he’d bust the joint.
From 1920 to 1925 Izzy and Moe made more than four thousand busts, and almost all of them brought convictions. They reputedly hit forty-eight speakeasies in one night alone. The media loved their antics, and Izzy and Moe loved the attention. They often informed reporters in advance of the time and location of their next bust, which they would schedule for Sunday if they could, because Monday was a slow news day. The New York Tribune called Izzy “the master mind of the Federal rum ferrets.” The Brooklyn Eagle observed that if more federal agents pursued their jobs with the same enthusiasm, “the U.S. would be bone dry, parched, and withered.” An article in the New York Times for October13, 1922, “Izzy and Moe Seize ‘Sacramental Wine,’” reported activities all over the city. Izzy and Moe, posing as cigar salesmen, seized thirty cases of wine that “were supposed to be sacramental wines for religious use at home” in a cigar store on the Lower East Side. Meanwhile, over in the Village, a trio of federal agents made arrests in three venues, where they posed “as artists of the village and then as vaudeville actors from out of town.” They busted the Moulin Rouge on Washington Place and the Village Star on West Fourth Street. In the speakeasy next door to the Star, they were ushered into a “prohibition agent-proof room,” where they promptly handed out summonses. Meanwhile, up in the Bronx a fifty-gallon still behind an auto supply store exploded, leading to the owner’s arrest; Ike Berkowitz sold a drink to a detective in his tailor shop on East Twentieth Street and was hauled into the nearest station; and over in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, an assistant district attorney seizing “a large quantity of alleged poisonous liquor” in an Italian man’s apartment was nearly killed by an ax thrown at his head.
In 1925 the bureaucrats of the Prohibition Unit decided that Izzy and Moe were getting too much press – one sneered that they belonged on the vaudeville stage – and besmirching the dignity of the agency. They relieved them of their jobs. The nation’s newspapers and magazines bemoaned the loss of a favorite and dependable source of wacky copy.
Without Izzy and Moe on the job, Prohibition enforcement in the city went even slacker. Mayor Walker was as fond of speakeasies and nightclubs as anyone in the city. When federal bureaucrats periodically leaned on him to make a better show of enforcing the law, his response was at best half-hearted. Pressed by the Prohibition Unit, his police commissioner proposed a 2 a.m. closing time for nightclubs, which stayed open until 4 a.m. or later. New York was the city that never sleeps decades before Sinatra sang about it. During World War One a previous mayor had enforced a 2 a.m. curfew so young men wouldn’t be too pooped if called upon to defend the city from the Hun, but as soon as the war ended the all-night whoopee started up again. Now club and cabaret owners, many of them personal friends of the mayor, howled. Mayor Walker offered a Solomonic compromise: a 3 a.m. closing time.
Undercover federal agents tasked with infiltrating and observing the nightclubs became some of their best patrons. Buying champagne, cocktails and orchids for their dates in their assiduous efforts to blend in with the crowd, they ran up a federal bar tab of seventy-five thousand dollars in 1928 alone, without a single conviction to show for it. Mayor Walker cracked that it seemed a high price to pay “to learn facts which are known to virtually everyone.”
by John Strausbaugh