Nucky Johnson: The Real Atlantic City Boss Who Never Fired a Shot

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Enoch L. Johnson stepped out of a powder blue limousine in a raccoon coat with a fresh red carnation on his lapel, and he ran Atlantic City for 30 years without, as far as the record shows, killing anyone or ordering a hit. Born in 1883 to a county sheriff, he studied English literature before joining the family trade of machine politics. When boss Louis Kuehnle went to prison in 1911, Johnson was acquitted in the same sweep and simply stepped into the vacancy, eventually adding county treasurer, bank director, and newspaper publisher to his titles.

His method has been called a velvet hammer. Gambling, prostitution, and Sunday drinking were permitted as long as operators paid the organization, and when Prohibition arrived in 1920 he ran the resort like a tollbooth, taking a cut of every gallon that came ashore. His income passed half a million dollars a year. This episode follows the Czar of the Ritz from his ninth floor hotel suite to a federal tax conviction, and then to a quiet second life that no gangster film would dare write.

• In 1916 Johnson struck a cross-party deal with Democratic boss Frank Hague to deliver the Republican primary for governor to Walter E. Edge.
• He drove construction of the Atlantic City Convention Hall, begun in 1926 and opened in 1929, to turn a summer resort into a year-round convention town.
• He hosted the 1929 Atlantic City Conference of national crime leaders, including Al Capone, though the famous boardwalk photo of the two is doubted by historians.
• William Randolph Hearst's 1930 newspaper attacks, reportedly sparked by a grudge over a showgirl, put federal investigators on his trail.
• Convicted of tax evasion in July 1941, he married Florence Osbeck on August 1, entered Lewisburg ten days later, was paroled in 1945, and died in 1968 at 85.