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Lingerie Football League tryouts Shore nostalgia: Then & Now Before Prohibition, he explained, state "blue laws" had long made Sunday sales of booze illegal. "But Atlantic City was selling alcoholic beverages on Sundays when nobody else was. So it wasn't a big step to go from selling alcohol illegally one day a week to seven days a week."
The Volstead Act, which codified the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcohol, was all but ignored in Atlantic City. There were, said Johnson, two main reasons for that.
One was geographical.
In the 1920s, Atlantic City was relatively inaccessible. Rail was the main conduit to Absecon Island; automobiles were just becoming a middle-class fixture, and the roads leading there weren't particularly car-friendly. State and federal agents had a hard time getting to Atlantic City and, of course, being firmly in Nucky Johnson's pocket, local cops had no interest in enforcing Prohibition.
The other reason was political expediency.
Sure, the Republicans who ran Trenton back in the day would have preferred Atlantic City be on the straight and narrow. But Nucky Johnson, who ran his "boardwalk empire" from a suite at the still-standing Ritz Hotel (it's now a condo), controlled too many votes; to antagonize him would have meant political suicide.
"Beginning with Louis Kuehnle, and even more so with [Nucky Johnson], they had significant clout within the political system. So Atlantic City sort of became hands-off," said Judge Johnson. "More important, they delivered the vote to the Republican Party for generations."
Occasional state attempts to put the brakes on Atlantic City all resulted in the same inaction, he added. "You had a couple of governors who were ignored, and you had investigative committees. But their reports always came at the end of the summer season, so nothing was done."
Perhaps the ultimate expression of Nucky Johnson's clout came in May 1929 when he hosted a gathering of the most powerful mobsters in America. Organized crime legends such as Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, Charlie "Lucky" Luciano and Frank Costello were among those who attended and pledged to end the interancine warfare that had long plagued the rackets and to conduct business in a spirit of cooperation.
Historians point to the convention as the beginning of modern organized crime.
Even after FDR repealed Prohibition in 1933, Atlantic City kept the party rolling.
Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific avenues remained lined with bordellos and betting parlors, from opulent card rooms to smoke-choked cigar stores where, for a penny or nickel, one could play the illegal numbers or bet on a horse race.
It took nothing less than the greatest conflagration in human history to at least partially close the wide-open atmosphere.
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World War II was the catalyst for something of a cleanup of Atlantic City, Johnson noted. In 1942, the Pentagon all but took over the city, turning it into a huge military base populated by thousands of servicemen.
"There were a very large number of soldiers in town, and the Army flat-out said, 'We're not gonna have our guys losing their money in your gambling joints,' " said Johnson.
Even Nucky Johnson, who would wind up convicted of racketeering in the 1940s, couldn't fight the Army. As a result, the storefront action was replaced by a slightly more discreet strategy: gambling still flourished, but behind closed doors.
"By the 1950s and '60s, nightclubs [such famed hotspots as the Club Harlem on Kentucky Avenue and Paul "Skinny" D'Amato's storied 500 Club on Missouri Avenue] had gambling rooms, but no longer had horse rooms or card rooms," Johnson said.
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