Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith: Prohibition's Masters of Disguise

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A rotund, unarmed man walks into a 1920s New York speakeasy, points at a wanted poster of a federal Prohibition agent, and bets the patrons that he is the man in the picture. They take the bet. He collects his winnings and arrests the room. That was Izzy Einstein, a multilingual former postal clerk born in 1880 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who talked his way into a badge after the 18th Amendment and recruited his friend Moe Smith, a retired boxer and cigar shop owner. Neither man was a temperance crusader. They simply believed a law on the books should be enforced.

This episode explains why two middle-aged men with no police training outperformed everyone around them. They did not walk or talk like cops, so bouncers scanning for a threat never saw one. Between 1920 and 1925 they used more than a hundred disguises, staged Sunday raids timed for Monday front pages, and built cases careful enough to hold up in court. Their fame was their undoing: in November 1925 a reorganization under General Lincoln C. Andrews laid them off along with other New York agents, because Washington wanted enforcement to look dignified, not funny.

• Izzy posed as a streetcar conductor, a grave digger, a fisherman carrying raw fish, an ice man, and an opera singer, and the pair's disguises were never detected.
• He sometimes knocked on a speakeasy door and announced that he was Izzy Einstein, Prohibition agent, and the bouncer would laugh and let him in.
• The duo made 4,932 arrests with a 95 percent conviction rate, helped by a funnel in Izzy's pocket that drained each shot into a hidden flask as evidence.
• With reporters and photographers in tow, they reportedly carried out 71 raids in just over 12 hours on a single Sunday.
• After their firing both men thrived selling insurance for New York Life, and Izzy's 1932 autobiography, Prohibition Agent Number One, reached almost a million readers.