Prohibition
In 1928, gangster Joey Noe set up the Hub Social Club, a hole-in-the-wall speakeasy, in a Brook Avenue tenement and hired Schultz to work in it. While working at the club, Schultz gained a reputation for brutality when he lost his temper. Impressed by Schultz's ruthlessness, Noe soon made him a partner. With the profits from their speakeasy, Noe and Schultz opened more operations. To avoid the high delivery cost of wholesale beer, the two men bought their own trucks. Frankie Dunn, a Union City, New Jersey, brewery owner, supplied Noe and Schultz with beer. Schultz would ride shotgun on deliveries to protect the beer trucks from hijackers. Noe and Schultz then decided that they would also furnish the beer for their rival speakeasies. If a speakeasy owner refused to buy beer from the Noe-Schultz combine, he would pay a very steep price.
The Rock brothers, who had established a territory in the Bronx while Noe and Schultz were still hanging out on street corners, did not appreciate incursions on their turf and decided to play hardball. However, the Rock brothers underestimated the newcomers. Eventually, elder brother John Rock agreed to step aside, but younger brother Joe refused to give in. One night the Noe-Schultz gang kidnapped and brutalized him. The gang beat him and hung him by his thumbs on a meat hook and then allegedly wrapped a gauze bandage smeared with discharge from a gonorrhea infection over his eyes. His family reportedly paid $35,000 and he was released. Shortly after his return, he went blind. From then on, the Noe-Schultz gang met little opposition as they expanded to control the beer supply for the entire Bronx.
Dutch Schultz was defended by the prominent attorney James Noonan from Albany, where he was acquitted of tax evasion.
Read more about this topic: Dutch Schultz
Famous quotes containing the word prohibition:
“No political party can ever make prohibition effective. A political party implies an adverse, an opposing, political party. To enforce criminal statutes implies substantial unanimity in the community. This is the result of the jury system. Hence the futility of party prohibition.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“During Prohibition days, when South Carolina was actively advertising the iodine content of its vegetables, the Hell Hole brand of ‘liquid corn’ was notorious with its waggish slogan: ‘Not a Goiter in a Gallon.’”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may be even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)