From United States Senator Tom Harkin - Monday, June 25, 2007

Cost of Booze
(Bergreen, Capone, pp130 31)

The Gennas easily overcame the restrictions of Prohibition by acquiring government authorization to produce "industrial alcohol." Permission in hand, the Gennas became "alky-cookers," that is, they paid impoverished Sicilian families in Chicago's Little Italy to brew whiskey at home in small copper stills, easily moved to avoid detection. The Sicilian families had been accustomed to brewing at home in Sicily, and it was natural for them to continue to do so in the United States. The Gennas paid their Sicilian home brewers the astonishing amount of $15 a day, and all they had to do in return was to mind the still and siphon off the residue. Meanwhile, the Gennas' fee for the homemade whiskey quickly became a necessary supplement to each household's meager income. Each week the Gennas gathered the results of the week's alky-cooking, which they stored in a giant warehouse located at 1022 Taylor Street, only four blocks from the Maxwell Street police station. This proved to be a convenient arrangement for the police and the Gennas alike, and the sight of cops entering and exiting the warehouse as they collected their bribes became so common that people in the neighborhood referred to the warehouse as "the police station." The arrangement was so profitable that police from distant districts came by to collect bribes -- until the Maxwell Street police gave the Gennas a list of their men, the only cops to pay off.

It was dreadful stuff, the Gennas' homemade brew. It stank, it was raw, and it was dangerous. Brewed quickly, on the cheap, the Gennas' whiskey teemed with toxins. Real whiskey acquires its golden hue from the wooden casks in which it is slowly and patiently aged. But the Gennas had no time for the careful distillation of whiskey; instead, they colored it with caramel, or coal tar, and flavored it with fusel oil, a noxious by-product of fermentation normally removed from whiskey lest it cause severe mental disturbance or even insanity. These chemicals were not the only hazards to the health of the consumer. Confiscating a hundred casks of the home brew, the police discovered dead rats in the whole lot.

Nor were the Gennas the only ones selling home brew. Alky-cooking was ubiquitous in Prohibition-era Chicago; the streets of Little Italy reeked with the sickeningly sweet vapors of homemade booze. The phenomenon was repeated all over Chicago, all over the country, in fact. Good liquor, manufactured by traditional distilleries, was scarce and extremely expensive; in its place cheaply made substitutes flooded speakeasies, poisoning drinkers. As Prohibition wore on, Americans forgot what real liquor was like, how it tasted, the subtle ways it affected the mind and body. Instead they became familiar with the far more potent effects of bootleg booze. If any type of alcohol deserved to be prohibited, it was this poisoned fruit of Prohibition. The Gennas put their homemade poision in a bottle labeled brandy or whiskey, or bourbon, and this disguised it was extremely profitable. Three dollars a barrel: half the price of O'Banion's [imported] high-class whiskey. Each still produced as much as 350 gallons of high-proof poison a week with ingredients costing less than a dollar a gallon. The Gennas grossed over $300,000 a month, of which $7,000 went toward payoffs to the police, who also had the opportunity to purchase the alcohol, wholesale, if they wished.

From United States Senator Tom Harkin - Wednesday, April 25, 2007