The economic aspect of prohibition was soon to appear, but in a very different form from that imagined by Hoover. Prohibition brought the underworld into the business world. It was the most troubled time in American history. Moreover, hardly had the law been voted that a truck transporting whiskey was kidnapped by a group of bandits. It was just a simple introduction. America had embarked on the dry diet with sheer recklessness, and the man in the street soon felt the absence of his good old mug of beer.
The sudden flowering of establishments intended solely for the sale of non-alcoholic beverages, where journalists found only peaceful consumers of ice cream and mineral water, reflected, in reality, the existence of a highly profitable clandestine trade. In New York, there were only 15,000 authorized establishments before prohibition; there were soon over 32,000 speakeasies. In reality, the dry regime offered unexpected possibilities to the “middle”, proud of its heroes of crime who embodied the old traditions of the “frontier”. To satisfy the demands of millions of parched throats, the business of smuggling alcohol ends up running into millions of dollars. Chicago, the "only completely corrupt city in the United States according to the expression of one of its city officials, Robert Merriam, became a huge underground brewery, controlled by gangsters.
Around 1920, "Big Jim" Colosimo had already achieved a good notoriety as patron of the Chicago slums. After marrying the director of a brothel, he had become the grand master of a chain of these establishments, several gambling houses and nightclubs which brought him in the tidy sum of 500,000 dollars a year. He was known in the "middle" as "Diamond Jim", due to the many diamonds that adorned his impressive and ungraceful person. He was then in his fifties and looked perpetually satisfied. Unfortunately, he met a bewitching creature, Dale Winters, a cabaret singer; henceforth he devoted all his time to her and began to neglect his business. His bodyguard, Johnny Torrio, a sniper from New York, seized the opportunity to supplant his boss. Torrio simply shot "Diamond Jim" in the head and soon ruled a remarkable empire built on vice and crime. It was at this time that an excellent young man, still unknown, Al Capone, became his faithful lieutenant.