As of the morning of January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment began to be enforced throughout the United States. It prohibited the transportation, sale, and manufacturing of intoxicating liquors (defined by the Volstead Act as any beverage with an alcohol content of 0.5 percent or more). This political move had historical roots in the nineteenth-century temperance movements, which aimed at improving the US population's ethical values by removing all social vice (Sinclair 1962; Rorabaugh 1979; Kobler 1993; Pegram 1998). During the first decades of the twentieth century, Republican members of Congress proposed a series of “dry” bills, despite opposition from Democrats and important labor union leaders who declared the laws unenforceable and bordering on unconstitutional.1With the passage of the National Prohibition Act, also called the Volstead Act, in October 1919, some one hundred thousand workers had lost their jobs in New York City, including glassmakers, carpenters, plumbers, drivers, workmen, bartenders, and waiters (New York Times1919, 3). The unemployment wave spread over the entire country to California, where it adversely affected immigrants from Northern Italy who had contributed to the economy by setting up several wine companies in the San Francisco area dating from the middle of the nineteenth century (Cinotto 2012; Pinna 2018, 23–46). In New York City, Prohibition was not just an economic issue but also a social and cultural one; alcoholism-related problems wreaked havoc among the city's many urban ethnic communities, although the degrees of severity varied. If the “thirsty Germans and Scotch-Irish” (Alsworth Ross 1914, 442) immigrants used to drink whiskey and display widespread drunkenness, the same did not apply to either the Italian or the Jewish communities, steeped as they were in wine traditions, with Italians enjoying moderate and daily wine consumption and both groups making use of the fruit of the vine for religious purposes (Woolston 1909, 274; Anbinder 2002, 232; Okrent 2010, 109; Davis 2012, 155).The passing of Prohibition caused an increase in the number of places where liquor could be obtained. According to the New York police commissioner, Grover A. Whalen, if during the early 1920s there were about sixteen thousand saloons or nightclubs, by 1929 the city's drinking places numbered thirty-two thousand (New York Times1929a, 1), since alcohol could be found in open saloons, restaurants, night clubs, bars behind a peephole, dancing academies, drugstores, delicatessens, cigar stores, confectioneries, soda fountains, behind partitions of shoeshine parlours, back rooms of barbershops . . . in express offices, in motorcycle delivery agencies, paint stores, malt shops, cider stubs, fruit stands, vegetable markets, taxi drivers, groceries, smoke shops, athletic clubs, grill rooms, taverns, chophouses, importing firms, tearooms, moving-van companies, spaghetti houses, boarding-houses, Republican clubs, Democratic clubs, laundries, social clubs, newspapermen associations. (Asbury 2018, 211)As it happened, saloons, bars, and nightclubs played an important role in the Democratic, Irish-controlled Tammany Hall's political machine. These were meeting places for party functionaries, favor-seekers, and rank-and-file workers, and sometimes Tammany-connected ethnic gangs used them to coerce the Irish, Italian, and Jewish votes necessary to win the local elections (Kibbe Turner 1909, 117–133; Asbury 2008, 82–86; Golway 2015, 147–148). The owner of the Clover Leaf Inn, Abraham Rabinowitz, after having been arrested for possession of whiskey in June 1920, was forced to pay police a monthly bribe of $150 until, burdened by his debts, he decided to sell his nightclub to a “businessman . . . connected with the Police Dept.” (“Police Department” 1920, 17), Pasquale Cuoco (alias Patsy Griffo), a gambler close to the political circles of Tammany Hall.When New York City became “dry,” several local gangs, some of them Italian American, got the chance to take charge of the new illegal alcohol market through moonshining with homemade stills or smuggling liquor from abroad. Unfortunately, both moonshining and smuggling negatively impacted New Yorkers’ sense of safety, due to an increase in the number of victims of gang-related crimes and of poisoning by wood alcohol, which was often sold by bootleggers as ethanol (or grain alcohol) (Wilson and Pickett 1923, 77; Lynch 1932, 26). This article examines the history of New York City's Italian community as it relates to Prohibition, principally the effects on that community of its opposition to the dry laws. Italian American cultural attitudes toward alcohol consumption informed their opposition to Prohibition and help contextualize their lack of concern about the crime of bootlegging as well as their willingness to be involved in it. Italian American opposition to Prohibition benefitted from a local New York City political class that was ambivalent about the law and its enforcement (Lupo 2008, 50). Through the consultation of archival sources at the New York Public Library, the National Archives at New York City, the New York City Municipal Archives, as well as the reading of newspapers such as the New York Times, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Il Progresso Italo-Americano, a picture of widespread impunity emerges that law enforcement agencies could not control. Primary sources seem to confirm an urban scenario openly against Prohibition, a situation made more frustrating by the fact that the city was awash in non-Prohibition-related crime, such as an increasing number of robberies and larcenies (Annual Report of the Police Department of the City of New York 1920, 338–341; 1930, 196–199). For Italian Americans in particular, who were still not fully integrated into New York society and faced the challenges of overcrowding and disease in addition to an increase in assaults, robberies, and homicides, adherence to the Prohibition law was simply not important.Even before the mass migration wave in the late nineteenth century, Italian immigrants from all regions of the country brought with them to the US culinary traditions encompassing the religious, secular, and cultural spheres of Italy's rural families. The cultivation and the use of wine was a crucial means of social aggregation for the Italian ethnic community as it began to engage with the urban modernity of New York. For this reason, the New York Italian American ethnic community never saw Prohibition positively, since they considered it a violation of individual freedoms regarding peasant cooking, fundamental to those for whom food and drink remained a contact point with their homeland (Zanoni 2014, 71–82).Homemade wine produced in the apartments of Little Italy was not intended for bootlegging. As the sociologist Constantine Panunzio underlines, this wine was basically used for personal consumption and served to prepare the recipes from the family's own Italian village of origin: “As is generally known, immigrants to the United States have come from countries which for centuries have used wine or beer as part of their dietary patterns. [Italians] . . . use [wine] with their meals, proffer it in token of hospitality, and serve it at christenings and betrothal or wedding feasts, in what is to them a perfectly normal manner” (Panunzio 1932, 147).For most Italian Americans wine was an integral part of their cultural identity and relatively harmless to public health. In part because of the limited consumption of wine at Italian restaurants, there were vastly fewer arrests for intoxication and disorderly conduct than occurred at Irish-run saloons. Prohibition's equivalence between Italian restaurants and Irish saloons was considered an injustice by New York City's Italian restaurant, bar, and grocery store owners, who decided to turn their businesses into speakeasies, some of whom looked to organized crime for their stocks of alcoholic beverages (Cinotto 2013, 189–193).The Italians of New York considered Prohibition an unnecessary act of social control by federal politics that undermined the very essence of their identity of origin. The Little Italies had never experienced serious episodes of violence of the kind Irish and German immigrants had due to drunkenness (Woolston 1909, 94): “Since the practice is normal, heavy drinking among them [Italians] is exceptional, excess is rare, and drunkenness is virtually unknown, except among the whisky-drinking people from Northwestern and Northeastern Europe” (Panunzio 1932, 147). Josephine Cataldi, an Italian member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Suffolk County, wrote: “The Italians are not a bunch of drunkards, as many of you might suppose. . . . The Italians think wine is a part of their food. Good and religious families use wine, and in nearly every home there is that famous picture that shows monks drinking. Drinking is ‘perfectly’ all right there” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle1924, 2LI).In the early 1930s, reference is made to some Italian wedding banquets that started to be prepared without serving wine to the guests (Panunzio 1932, 150). That meant that part of the Italian ethnic community began to get used to the dry American tradition over time as they assimilated naturally into their host society and became Italian American. As the historian Simone Cinotto has emphasized, Prohibition led to the conversion of the “immigrant peasants into citizens, immigrant women into dependable mothers and housewives, and immigrant men into disciplined and efficient workers” (2014, 12).In addition to the cultural issue, Prohibition was also seen as an economic question involving especially the wineries in California founded by immigrants from Northern Italy such as Andrea Sbarboro (Pinney 2012, 75–89) starting in the mid-nineteenth century. These companies sold their products in those US towns where the Italian ethnic communities were most numerous, including New York City (Cinotto 2012; 2013, 145–146; Piñeiro and Maffi 2018, 186). This proved to be a real economic tragedy for all those retailers that were starting to widen their market nationally and instead were forced to go out of business or else violate the Volstead Act in order to survive (Cinotto 2013, 145–146). Consequently, many honest Italian American wine sellers and restaurant owners became wine bootleggers until the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933. Even the Italian restaurant industry was dramatically damaged by the dry wave. However, many New York restaurant owners were not discouraged at having their businesses padlocked for violating the Volstead Act and rather enjoyed bootlegging to satisfy the wine demand.Although there is a vast amount of literature about the history of the Italian ethnic community in the United States, American historiography has not been able up to now to clearly highlight the difficult relationship Italian Americans had with the Prohibition era, particularly in this arena of viticulture as a key factor of Italian cultural and food traditions. Cinotto has emphasized this topic, identifying Prohibition as “a moment of profound caesura” (2012, 207) but also as an opportunity for the Italian restaurateurs to make their businesses a suitable place for any kind of customers (not just Italians) through the upgrading of Italian-style cafés or restaurants in Midtown into international nightclubs or cabarets. The latter were able to attract most of the non-Italian customers (even female) who had up to that point been frequenting the old-time saloons (Cinotto 2013, 189–191). The large number of non-Italian customers was fundamental for the success of the nightclubs. At the same time, these customers were committing most of the crimes, especially intoxication and disorderly conduct. According to the national statistics, in 1930 about 81 percent of convictions for violations of the Volstead Act were of American-born people, whereas Italian immigrants were responsible for just 5.6 percent (Cinotto 1932, 152).2 It is clear that both the wholesale and retail Italian bootleggers were only a minimum percentage of the New York ethnic community.Of this percentage, some Italian restaurateurs ran the risk of arrest by continuing to sell liquor, as in the case of the unlucky Joseph Delponto, owner of a restaurant in Midtown. Delponto called some bootleggers who, unbeknownst to him, had just been arrested and thus found himself talking with a federal agent who had just taken part in the raid and asking him for “a case of claret [wine] immediately” (New York Times1925a, 15). When Delponto came to collect his order, he found not bootleggers but federal agents who arrested him in flagrante delicto.New Yorkers living the nightlife in town always had a “general tolerance” (Sinclair 1962, 282) toward the bootleggers who provided the supply of a commodity nobody was willing to renounce. The alcohol available typically included Scotch whiskey or French champagne smuggled from Europe or else homemade moonshine whiskey from one of the several denaturing plants in Long Island, New Jersey, or upstate New York. These liquor transactions were intended for New York City's upper classes who favored expensive drinks over the wine of the Italian working class. Bootleggers connected to organized crime sought to satisfy the “popular passions” (Demleitner 1994, 622) of a multiethnic citizenship. Also, they unconsciously enabled the rise and growth of the Italian underworld thanks to the huge economic power achieved through the bootlegging racket.The sudden abolition of a whole economic sector linked to the sale and manufacturing of alcoholic beverages directly damaged the retail activities run by Italian immigrants. As soon as Prohibition was enforced, organized crime (not just the Italian version) saw in bootlegging the chance to increase its wealth and its power. At the same time, the Italian mob found fertile ground in its own ethnic community, which was always against the ban on wine, and so built consensus among purchasers and retail dealers.3In a city like New York, the illegal alcohol smuggling business was equally split among the organized ethnic gangs through the partition of the city into areas of influence. There was the Irish mob on the West Side of Manhattan, the Jewish one in the Bronx and the Lower East Side, and the Italian mob in East Harlem and Brooklyn, running underground distilleries located upstate or in Long Island and smuggling alcohol from Canada and Europe (Willoughby 1964; NicKenzie Lawson 2013, 1–17).In Italian organized crime, before the notorious Five Crime Families of New York established themselves after the Castellammarese War (1930–1931), bootlegging was divided among three main factions. The first of these, headed by the Sicilian-born boss Joseph Masseria, ran the downtown clubs located around Little Italy, and some luxury nightclubs on the Upper East and West Sides and Midtown. The Masseria gang tended to kill their competitors, as in the case of the bootlegger Alberto Altieri, who ran a “whisky ‘curb market’ near Police Headquarters” (New York Times1921a, 6). At the end of 1921, even Sicilian immigrant Carlo Gambino joined the Masseria group and was engaged “in the unlawful manufacturing and sale of illicit alcohol” managing a “distillery at North Great River, Long Island” (“Carlo Gambino, was., Carlo Basso” 1957, 26). Italian American John Burello was an affiliate of the Masseria gang's dealings in alcohol smuggling and speakeasies. According to reports by the Committee of Fourteen, a private dry association, in 1926, Burello owned an apartment where “parties are held” in the company of “young girls . . . and a great deal of liquor drunk” (Lonegren 1926, 1).4 Another famous criminal character, Francesco Saverio Castiglia (also known as Frank Costello), along with his brother Eduardo, mediated between the smugglers coming from Europe and the Coast Guard, whom they bribed. Costello kept in touch with the smugglers who unloaded cases of alcohol from the Canadian port of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon to Montauk Point, while his brother was responsible for paying the Coast Guard officers in order to transport, with impunity, cases of alcohol from the Long Island docks to the nightclubs in Manhattan (New York Times1925b, 1; Clark 1946, 16). Originally from Calabria, Frank Costello started his criminal career in William “Big Bill” Dwyer's Irish gang because, according to the Sicilian crime tradition, only Sicilian immigrants could be affiliated with the racket. Others could only be associates, who enjoyed lesser privileges than the Sicilian mobsters; after Dwyer's fall in 1925–1926, Costello became associated with Masseria (FBI 1958, 49; New York Times1926c). Even the Sicilian immigrant Salvatore Lucania (alias Charlie “Lucky” Luciano) joined a non-Italian gang—in his case, the Lower East Side Jewish gang the “BUGS and MEYER Mob” (Tolson 1946, 3), headed by Meyer Lansky (born Suchowljansky) and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, because Masseria restricted his affiliates to family or close friends. The Bugs and Meyer Mob maintained close ties to the Masseria group because of “rum running and bootlegging” (Lumbard 1953, 1; Nicaso 2018, 488), and their specific task was to “convoy guards for alcohol trucks from New York City to Chicago” (“Benjamin Siegel” 1946, 6), where Alphonse “Al” Capone from Brooklyn was in charge.Until 1928, Capone was a great friend of the Calabrian immigrant Francesco Ioele (alias Frankie Yale), a boss who headed the second Italian gang in Brooklyn. According to a letter addressed to Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, in the early 1920s Yale became “the ring-leader of a Rum Running Gang of Italians in the Bay Ridge Section of Brooklyn,” managing “enormous Bootlegging transactions which cover 2 States and many near-by cities” (Nelli 1976, 160) between New York and New Jersey. Yale was the owner of the Harvard Inn at Coney Island, while some of his mobsters, such as Antonio Doto (alias Joe Adonis) and Jack “Stickem” Stabile, led the Adonis Social Club, which became infamous on Christmas Eve 1925 as the site of a fatal shooting between Yale's gang and the White Hand Gang's Irish mob that resulted in the deaths of three people (Moses 2015, 189). In addition to Adonis and Stabile, the fruit dealer Joseph La Monica was involved in a “‘whisky curb’ in Cherry Street” (New York Times1921b, 5) in Flushing, though by August 1921 he had already been a victim of gang feuds over the partition of turf. Another prominent figure was the complex criminal Gandolfo Curto (alias Frankie Marlow), who was described by the New York Times as a “nightclub proprietor, fight manager, race horse owner, gambler, racketeer” (New York Times1929b, 1) and who lived in Boston, owned a brewery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and very often visited New York to run two well-known Broadway nightclubs, the Silver Slipper Club and the Rendezvous Club (Thompson and Raymond 1940, 105). Like La Monica, Curto was one of the many gang feuds’ victims in June 1929.With Yale's having been slain the previous year, his gang's criminal power began to falter in favor of a third racket found all over East Brooklyn and also from Williamsburg to Brownsville and in western Queens. This gang, unlike those of Masseria and Yale, consisted exclusively of immigrants from Castellammare del Golfo (province of Trapani), all bound together by mutual family kinship (Ianni and Reuss-Ianni 1972). The gang, led by the boss Vito Bonventre and his underboss Salvatore Maranzano, took over the alcohol bootlegging racket that Yale ran until the late 1920s, using Bonventre's garage in Greenpoint as a depot. Maranzano ran an alcohol denaturing plant north of the city in Wappingers Falls, New York, comprised of two stills with a capacity of 2,500 gallons each, and from there the moonshiners could take their alcohol to New York City via the Hudson River (Brooklyn Daily Eagle1930, 1; Critchley 2009, 180). Another underground still run by Joseph Masino and Giovanni Romano was discovered in August 1925 by law-enforcement officers after it exploded, killing both mobsters (Brooklyn Daily Eagle1925, 1; Critchley 2009, 143). The gangster Francesco Garofalo supplied the illicit distilleries with denatured alcohol that was necessary to manufacture liquors (Lupo 2008, 77). However, the Bonventre group did not only make moonshine, since, thanks to Antonio “Tony” Romano Sr. and Michelangelo and Antonio Romano, Jr. (Giovanni's father and brothers, respectively), the gang from Castellammare was able to establish a so-called rum row, which shipped eight thousand whiskey and champagne cases weekly from Havana to Columbia Heights on the Brooklyn waterfront (Asbury 2018, 270–271). Whiskey supplies also arrived from Buffalo through affiliates Stefano Magaddino and Joseph Bonanno, who kept operative connections with the Calabrian bootlegger Rocco Perri of Hamilton, a small Canadian town overlooking Lake Ontario (Critchley 2009, 145–146; Nicaso 2016, 103).Within the Italian community, alcohol bootlegging was run not only by organized crime but also by many immigrants with no criminal record and who never affiliated or associated with New York City's numerous ethnic gangs. These immigrants saw “bootlegging as a quick means of illicitly acquiring wealth” (Sassone 1921, 31). Starting from 1920 the arrests of Italians for drinking wine during meals according to their cultural traditions proved to be much more frequent than expected. As Cinotto (2013, 146) has pointed out, “Household winemaking [was] an activity in which New York Italian Americans excelled.” Some, like Vito Poverono, Frank Porco, Giacomo Ponzo, and Peter Fortin, were prosecuted for offering the Prohibition officers a glass of whiskey or a gallon of wine (US District Court 1920e, 1920h, 1920i, 1920k). So many others, like Michael Fierro, Giuseppe Giustiniano, and Anthony Solitore, were found in possession of small amounts in keeping with private family consumption (US District Court 1920b, 1920c, 1920d). The United States Attorney in Manhattan, Francis G. Caffey, recognizing the harmless nature of these “offenses,” signed a long list of nolle prosequi for most of these cases, so as to cancel a possible sentence for violation of the Volstead Act.On this point it bears repeating that not all the violators of the Volstead Act were connected to organized crime. In fact, based on the minimal amount of alcohol seized inside Italian American stores or houses, most of the purchasers used wine just during meals with their families. In 1931, New York Times reporter Michael Di Liberto wrote that the tradition of drinking wine from California or Italy continued in East Harlem's Little Italy through religious feasts and celebrations, implying that local law enforcement turned a blind eye to such consumption: The natives of Naples, of Sicily, and of Bari will take one by the arm and declaim the glories of Moscato, Zinfandel, Gragnano, Alicante and Barbera. At times their voices have an almost lyric quality. Does the signor wish to make a good, strong wine? Then Malaga is the most desirable. The feste, signor, will soon be here. And he proceeds to enumerate them on the fingers of a tanned hand: “San Martino” (St. Martin), “Immaculata” (Immaculate Conception), “Santa Lucia” (St. Lucy), “Natale” (Christmas), “Capo d'anno” (New Year's) and “Carnavale” (Carnival). It is well to be prepared with the generous wine for such joyous occasions. Does the signor prefer a wine which does not intoxicate so readily? Lagrima Madonna is the grape which produces such a wine: the speaker grimaces as the eddying crowd threatens to engulf him. (Di Liberto 1931, 16)New Yorkers of all ethnicities never really embraced the Volstead Act, and the demand for alcoholic beverages never flagged, even though provided by makeshift bootleggers or through organized crime's affiliates. After just two years, New York's Mullan-Gage Law, the state's heavy-handed supplement to the Volstead Act, was repealed in June 1923 under the new Democratic governor and Tammany Hall stalwart Alfred E. Smith (Fowler 1949, 103–106; Lerner 2007, 94–95; Murchinson 1994, 62).Alongside such prestigious and expensive Broadway nightclubs as the Club Durant, owned by the famous Italian American actor James F. “Jimmy” Durante, there were actual speakeasies, like the one owned by Rank Buffone and Sam Natale, which was located at the rear of their store and was accessible to customers only with the password “Ladies’ Silk Underwear” (New York Times1924, 4; Variety1925b, 41). Speakeasies could also be found inside private apartments and offices, as in the case of the Dr. Arcabasso's medical office; Arcabasso, according to an anonymous letter addressed to the soon to be mayor of New York, Fiorello H. La Guardia, had organized a crime ring along with his brother and two grandsons, and bootlegged “at the rate of 150 gallons of alcohol a month” (Republican Voter 1927, 1).If nightclubs and speakeasies could be considered retail outlets for alcoholic beverages, it is also important to underline where they obtained the alcohol without being directly involved in organized crime. The alcohol supply chain was basically divided into two main parts: smuggling and moonshining. New York was geographically located in a strategic location for alcohol smuggling, since it was the convergence point for bootleggers from the North, who came from Canada by navigating the Hudson River to Manhattan, as well as smugglers from the East and South who came respectively from Europe and the Caribbean and could easily unload the alcohol on the Brooklyn shores (NicKenzie Lawson 2013, 19–38).In one case, for instance, the Coast Guard was able to arrest the smugglers John Sarno, Armando Belli, and Giovanni Hammond off lower Manhattan's Battery by seizing a load of “Bay-Rum” (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1922d, 4), denatured alcohol originally intended for cosmetic companies. A further episode took place off Coney Island, where the sea chase between the Coast Guard and Enrico Bera, Antonio Moresco, and James Santaga ended up with the smugglers throwing the load of liquor overboard in order to avoid being arrested (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1923e, 3). The most sensational alcohol smuggling case came to life during the trial of Antonio Cassese, a tobacco-shop owner from Ozone Park who, in November 1922, was sentenced by the Brooklyn Federal Court to two years in prison for unloading twelve thousand whiskey bottles from the Bahamas onto Long Island, with a profit of sixty thousand dollars, by transporting them aboard his yacht (Il Progresso Italo-Americano 1922c, 3). In relation to this court case, it is interesting to notice the view point of Il Progresso Italo-Americano's journalists, who seemed to disapprove of such a sentence for being far too strict: “Senza dubbio Cassese aveva le sue colpe, ma bisogna pure notare che la Corte Federale, nel dargli il massimo della condanna, esagerò” (No doubt Cassese had his faults, but it should also be said the Federal Court went too far by giving the maximum sentence; Il Progresso Italo-Americano1922c, 3). After serving his time in prison, Cassese was again arrested in January 1927, although by the time of his second trial, all traces of him had been lost. This may suggest that Cassese had been eliminated by organized crime figures with whom he was in business (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1927, 3). As in Cassese's case, other defendants such as Gerard Cauco, Patsy Patanella, Gino Notarile, Joseph DePalma, Michael Ferrari, Silvie Corrado, and Harry Corrila were arrested and sentenced for hiding or transporting such large amounts of denatured alcohol, brandy, or whiskey, which caused the investigators to suspect connections with the underworld (US District Court 1920a; 1920f; 1920g; 1920j; 1920l; 1921a; 1921b).Moonshining, on the other hand, constituted a safer way of supplying alcohol by avoiding raids or seizures by the Coast Guard. However, it was also very dangerous since often the homemade stills could explode during the distillation process. Il Progresso Italo-American reported a series of episodes that occurred in Manhattan and Brooklyn's Little Italies where, for instance, two Italian families risked being buried alive because of a distillery explosion that completely wrecked their house in Bath Beach (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1923b, 3). Although in this case the local authorities were not able to find the culprit, the same problem took place elsewhere in Brooklyn when nineteen-year-old Andrea Coracci was tasked with hiding a whiskey still that then exploded and wrecked his family pasta factory (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1923d, 3). Peter Caproni, instead, was surely dealt a worse hand as he was left severely burned from the blast of his still in the Lower East Side (New York Times1921c, 5). Similarly, Augusto Bagaro was burned after an explosion of his still in an East Harlem basement, where he had decided to set up his booze workshop (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1923a, 3). At times the skill and organization of the improvised bootleggers could beggar imagination, as in the case of the real estate agent Pasquale Pulvino who, in order to supplement his income, arranged an illicit distillery made out of four stills, with the capacity of one hundred gallons each, inside an empty house his agency owned in Staten Island (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1924, 3). In addition to apartments, moonshiners used garages as illicit distilleries, like in the case of Jack De Luca, who was able to hide a still with the capacity of three hundred gallons inside his garage in Coney Island (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1929, 3).In other instances, the illicit distilleries were located inside buildings. Such was the case of Francesco Giarranita, who was stopped in Red Hook by dry agents while driving a hearse carrying 25