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admitted that she’d “had liquor in my own home in California.” But she and her allies believed that if the government allowed the Volstead Act to go unenforced, terror and violence would take over society. Criminal gangs would run the country. That was why, in the middle of the decade, she had helped run Hopley and other temperance veterans out of the bureau and replaced them with a force of professionally trained law-enforcement agents. Of course, by then it was too late. Gang control had already arrived—again, especially in Chicago. “The skies were black with smoke from ‘alky’ cooking plants, beer was as easy to get as water, and it was a foolhardy policeman who dared molest a citizen peddling whiskey that would eat a hole in a battleship,” noted Elmer Irey. No place in America took to illicit drinking like Chicago. Songwriter Fred Fisher called it “that toddlin’ town,” and he meant it literally. Hundreds of men stumbled and twirled around the downtown Loop every evening, looking for a taxi or thesteps to the elevated trains. The booze that inspired most of these late-night interpretive dances came from Torrio’s so-called Outfit, which dominated the bootlegging scene from its headquarters in the western suburb of Cicero. “Chicago, the world’s Fourth City, has fallen,” a local reporter wrote of the Outfit’s sudden and extreme rise to power. This news quickly spread far beyond the Chicago metropolitan area.When Torrio’s forces, led by young Capone, took over Cicero’s elections in 1924, the
New York Times
highlighted the Chicago Problem on its front page, declaring that “bullets, bricks, blackjacks and fists were used generally instead of ballots to decide the issue.”The election, wrote another paper, was the underworld “announcing that it realized its power.”
    Chicago had become the symbol of all that had gone so wrong in the war on liquor. Willebrandt understood that the federal government
had
to take a stand there. She had sent Golding because the city needed her best general. And when he flamed out, poisoning public opinion, she decided to keep the special agency squad in place, even with three of its members facing murder charges. The fight would go on. For Prohibition, it was Chicago or bust.
    ***
    It really couldn’t have worked out better for Eliot. He was one of the few special agents on Golding’s team to be kept on in Chicago. He’d received valuable experience under a daring leader but not so much that he’d ended up in the dock. And now he would serve under his own brother-in-law, who was more careful and professional than Golding, and who took Eliot’s best interests to heart.
    It was far from certain, however, that Alexander Jamie would be able to remain in his new position for long. Before returning to Washington, Golding had done his best to destroy the man who was his logical successor.Jamie “is lazy and takes three hours to do that which another man would do in fifteen minutes,” Golding wrote in a memo to Yellowley. “He is sort of Bolsheviki, all the time expressing to other agents statements relative to his political power . . . and how he could have the Administrator’s post or mine whenever he desired.” The attack almost worked. Yellowley fired Jamie, only to have Johnson intervene on the assistant administrator’s behalf. Jamie was unemployed for twenty-four hours before he was returned to the bureau’s ranks and given the promotion—albeit without additional pay—to acting special agent in charge. Though he probably never saw Golding’s memo, Jamie knew Hardboiled had gone around the officeslandering him. Already he was self-conscious about having only a grammar-school education and having gotten his start as an investigator by informing on union efforts for the Pullman Company, the Chicago maker of railroad cars and a notorious union buster. (When Eliot was in college, Jamie helped him land second-shift work at the Pullman plant as a