Some crimes are increasing due to Trump’s tariffs. Criminals are not all dumb; they realize what has become valuable and resort to the more rewarding crimes, kinda like becoming president or a Supreme Court justice.
Just as with Prohibition, there is an unintended increase in crime.
Before Prohibition started in 1920, members of criminal gangs in large American cities existed on the periphery of society. Since the 19th century, there was, as sociologists call it, a social hierarchy with big-city “bosses” of political machines financing their control of votes in neighborhoods with payments from criminals running gambling and prostitution rackets and bribing police to look the other way. Under them were many local gangs of various ethnic groups, such as Irish, Italian, Jewish and Polish, focused on street-level crimes such as extortion, loansharking, drugs, burglary, robbery and contract violence.
In cities such as New York and Kansas City before 1920, the Sicilian Mafia, whose members were among the four million people who immigrated from southern Italy to America starting in about 1875, made money through the “Black Hand” racket — sending cryptic letters demanding payments from ethnic Italians with threats of violence or death. New York’s Tammany Hall political machine sanctioned gambling and brothel rackets by crime groups such the Five Points gang before Prohibition. But activities by the Mafia and criminal gangs generally were not coordinated under an organization, and in fact terms such as “organized crime” and “syndicate” would not enter popular use until after Prohibition began.
Prohibition practically created organized crime in America. It provided members of small-time street gangs with the greatest opportunity ever — feeding the need of Americans coast to coast to drink beer, wine and hard liquor on the sly. Organized racketeers dominated the illegal “bootlegging” industry as well as the urban machine “bosses” and the vice kings. They understood banking and other legitimate business and bribed policemen, judges, juries, witnesses, politicians and even federal Prohibition agents as the cost of doing business.
By the early 1920s, profits from the illegal production and trafficking of liquor were so enormous that gangsters learned to be more “organized” than ever, employing lawyers, accountants, brew masters, boat captains, truckers and warehousemen, plus armed thugs known as “torpedoes” to intimidate, injure, bomb or kill competitors. They bought breweries closed because of Prohibition and hired experienced brewers. They ran boats out into oceans and lakes to buy liquor from Great Britain and Canada, leading to the term “rum running.” They paid individual citizens to operate stills at home to make gallons of bad-tasting booze. They sold illegal beer, watered-down whiskey and sometimes-poisonous “rotgut” booze in thousands of Mob-owned illegal bars known as “speakeasies.” Often, to screen customers at these illegal bars, a bouncer would look through a peephole in the front door before refusing them or letting them in.
Since that time, it had been almost entirely a white-run criminal enterprise. I wonder if that history will also be changed in the Trump History Books?
Maybe they should consider bringing illegal drug making back to the USA—no profits for the cartels or drug companies producing the chemicals. Criminals can be homegrown and do not need to blow up small boats off the coast of Venezuela.
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