Moonshine Research Paper

Moonshiners were in a profitable but sometimes tough business during the Prohibition. “In 1923, explaining how growing quantities of liquor were being smuggled into the United States from Canada, Roy Hanes said, “ You cannot keep liquor from dripping though a dotted line”” (Okrent, 153). The government had poisoned the alcohol that was still in rotation for non-recreation purposes, so no one could drink illegally. This caused the ‘wets’ to find a way to remove the poison from the alcohol so they could still obtain a profit. “Denver drinkers could look to cunning moonshiners who placed animal carcasses near their distilleries, thus disguising the telltale scent of sour mash with the more potent aroma of rotting flesh” (Okrent, 128). There was an account logged as to the process of the sale of Moonshine. The account uses the world ‘fish’ in place of alcohol.

One of the biggest ‘household names’ from the prohibition is Al ‘Snorky’ ‘Scarface’ Capone. Al Capone was not shy about his business, saying, “ I violate the Prohibition law---Sure,” he told a newspaper reporter in 1927, “Who Doesn’t. I provide the light pleasures to the people, public service is my motto.” It has been estimated that Capone’s illegal business would rack in an estimated $100 million dollars a year, according to government officials. Violence was nothing foreign to Capone. During the prohibition it was a “free for all, every man for himself enterprise” (Blumenthal, 92). In Chicago Capone had two bars one called the four deuces, and another the Green Mill, where he had tunnels to escape incase the cops showed up. The tunnels led to multiple different exits, and also had rooms where he would torture people for information on rival gangs and