This section contains 323 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |
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The discovery off the New Jersey coast of a flexible pipeline used to connect the bootleggers' boats to the bootleggers' fleets of trucks spoke volumes not only about their ingenuity and brazenness but also about the extent to which local and national prohibition agents had become powerless to do anything meaningful about it. In 1921 Mabel Walker Willebrandt was appointed an assistant to the United States attorney general. Assigned the task of overseeing the Justice Department's efforts to enforce the newly passed Volstead Act, she discovered that few of her colleagues took this responsibility seriously. Worse still was the fact that her authority did not extend to local police officers upon whom the brunt of the enforcement burden fell. In New York, where a state prohibition law had been in effect since 1921, sixty-nine hundred arrests had been made during one three-year period, but only...
This section contains 323 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |
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