Izzy and Moe
Have the students read the following selection and answer the questions listed below:
1.
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Why was it difficult to enforce Prohibition?
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2.
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Why were Izzy and Moe so successful as Prohibition agents?
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3.
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How difficult was it for an ordinary citizen to find someone or someplace to buy liquor?
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4.
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Why were Izzy and Moe so popular with the public despite the fact that they were Prohibition agents?
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5.
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Izzy and Moe were successful Prohibition agents; why were they fired?
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When the nation went dry in 1920, all that stood between millions of thirsty Americans and alcohol, besides their consciences, was a thin line of enforcement agents, only fifteen hundred strong. And since the dry agents were paid the noble sum of $2,500 a year, it is not surprising that many soon lost their sense of dedication and could be induced for a sum to look elsewhere when beer or liquor was being moved or served in their vicinity.
But there were exceptions, and none more outstanding than a pair of agents whose appearance and names seemed better fitted for a vaudeville team than for a couple of gumshoes: Isadore Einstein and Moe Smith—Izzy and Moe. If all agents had shown as much energy and initiative as they did even the small band of fifteen hundred might have done much toward drying up the country. Izzy demonstrated his unusual ability on his first assignment, a suspected speakeasy in Brooklyn, which other agents had been unable to enter. He knocked boldly on the door, and when the peephole was opened, he loudly demanded a drink, identifying himself as a newly appointed prohibition agent sent by his boss. The door swung open and the doorman laughed and slapped Izzy on the back in appreciation of his sense of humor. But then the new agent made a mistake. When the bartender poured him a drink, he downed it before trying to make an arrest. The bartender grabbed the bottle and escaped out a back way, and Izzy was left without evidence. Thereafter, he carried a small funnel in a vest pocket, from which a rubber tube ran to a flask inside his clothing. On future raids most of his drink would go there, to be used as evidence.
Both Izzy and Moe were fat men. Izzy was not quite five and a half feet tall and weighed more than two hundred and twenty-five pounds. He was forty years old and was almost bald when he became a liquor snooper. Moe outweighed his partner by about ten pounds, but did not look as fat because he was a few inches taller. Izzy was the more talented of the two. He could speak Yiddish, Polish, German, and Hungarian fluently, French, Russian, and Italian well enough to get along, and even a bit of Chinese. And he played the violin and trombone.
Izzy had entered the Prohibition service first. He talked his old friend Moe Smith into joining the service and becoming an agent. They received a salary of forty dollars a week. The men usually worked as a team, although Izzy often made raids alone. Their ingenuity was endless. To get into a speakeasy whose suspicious owner refused to open to anyone he did not know personally, they waited until a cold night. Then after Izzy had stood outside in light clothing until he was blue and his teeth were rattling, Moe pounded on the door and shouted, “Give this man a drink! He’s been frostbitten.” The owner, caught off guard, let Moe drag his partner inside and came forward with a bottle of reviving whiskey, which Moe grabbed and then made the arrest.
The stories about the pair multiplied, especially the tales about Izzy, who became a master of disguises. More often than not, his principal concealment was that he looked too friendly to be a dry agent. On more than one occasion he repeated the same act that had worked on his first assignment. Once he gained admittance to several bars carrying a large pail of dill pickles. Who would ever think a fat man with pickles was an agent? At Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, he was admitted without question to several speakeasies because he carried a string of fish. And more than once he entered a place with the musicians carrying his trombone or violin.
The pair was sometimes borrowed for difficult raids in other cities. During his travels Izzy made a survey of the difficulty of getting a drink in various cities. It took only thirty-five seconds in New Orleans; he got into a taxi at the railroad station, asked the driver where he could buy a drink, and the driver at once produced a bottle. In Pittsburgh he had to wait eleven minutes; in Atlanta he found hard liquor in a candy store seventeen minutes after he got off the train. In other cities theater ushers, streetcar conductors, and other helpful souls saw that he did not have to wait more than half an hour to find a drink. Washington was more difficult. There he could not find a speakeasy or anyone to direct him to one. As a last resort he asked a policeman, who gave him directions. Exact time—one hour.
Izzy and Moe served a little more than five years and in that time they made 4,392 arrests of which more than 95% resulted in conviction. They seized fifteen million dollars worth of hard liquor and beer, and a tremendous quantity of stills and fixtures. It would seem that they would have been valuable men to retain in the Prohibition service. But Izzy and Moe had a failing in the eyes of their bosses. They were not only effective, but were interesting and funny. Their exploits made good newspaper stories. They delighted the public, but this did not charm Prohibition officials. They were warned not to be so conspicuous, but this was no longer possible. On November 13, 1925, they were fired “for the good of the service.” “The service must be dignified,” an official said in explaining the firing. “Izzy and Moe belong on the vaudeville stage.”
Izzy and Moe probably would have been a fair success in vaudeville; as dry agents they were super and no other pair of agents equaled their record of arrests, convictions, and seizures of bootleg booze.
Both men went into the insurance business and did well. Izzy wrote a book about some of his episodes that had so caught the fancy of the public and had kept the reporters on their toes. It was published as an autobiography and was called
Prohibition Agent Number 1
. The public which had once hung on his every exploit had turned to new interests, and the book sold only five hundred and seventy-five copies.