The Historic Connection of Gambling and Organized Crime
After the war, Chicago's sporting circle was dominated by Mike McDonald, the purported originator of the phrase 'There's a sucker born every minute'.
As a young man in New Orleans in the 1850s, McDonald had become enamored with the glamour of gambling and resolved to take part.
By the 1880s, McDonald had also achieved considerable political influence. He engineered the campaign of Mayor Carter Harrison and became the leader of the Cook County Democratic machine.
Despite his part in the graft of city building contracts and scandals involving his two wives, McDonald successfully combined the two roles of gambling czar and political broker until his death in 1907.
Organized crime did not originate with bootlegging during Prohibition. Rather, it began with gambling syndicates in American cities after the Civil War.
As illustrated by the career of Mike McDonald, gambling had close links with urban politics.
One reason for this connection was the common Irish background of the gamblers, police, and politicians of the late nineteenth century.
A more important reason, however, was that the gambling syndicate and the political machine were often part of the same neighborhood organizations.
Gambling operations such as numbers, depended upon a large number of runners who cultivated friendships with the local citizens in much the same way that a precinct captain did.
Thus, organized crime was entrenched in Chicago and other American cities long before the passage of the Volstead act in 1920.
The Irish, for example, dominated gambling and racketeering, and the Blacks controlled policy.
Bootlegging gave Italians their opportunity, but not all bootleggers were Italian. In fact, there were twice as many Jews as Italians involved in the distribution of illegal spirits.
Whatever their ethnic background, however, bootleggers were almost all newcomers to the underworld--- young men in their twenties who had grown up in urban slums.
Once Italians and other bootleggers made their entry into organized crime, they branched into their areas, particularly gambling. Almost from the beginning, bootleggers invested in gambling operations and continued to expand long after repeal.
Since Prohibition lasted only 13 years, most bootleggers were still only in their thirties and has amassed extensive capital when alcohol became legal again.
In most cases, the bootlegging entrepreneurs invested in the existing gambling structure, but seldom replaced the gamblers already there.
The system could absorb these newcomers, although not always without muscle and violence, because gambling opportunities expanded during the 1920s and 1930s.
Increased use of the telephone altered bookmakers' methods of operations, and the legalization of pari-mutuel horse racing gradually eliminated the bookmaker's role at the track.
Many bootleggers also found it convenient to go into soot machines as a sideline.
Since the machines were often placed in speakeasies, it was easy to service them as trucks went from place to place delivering liquor.
In the years after the repeal of Prohibition, ex-bootleggers also played a significant part in the creation of regional gambling centers: Miami, Florida; Hot Springs, Arkansas; and most notably, Las Vegas, Nevada.