Get "Mr. Big": Law Enforcement Efforts to Counter the Emergence of Organized Crime

In Episode 14, Pettengill examines the intersection of organized crime and law enforcement. Previous episodes have noted the importance of alliances between gangsters, like Lucky Luciano, and law enforcers. But by the end of the Prohibition years, many of those alliances had begun to fray. Violence and open corruption had raised the attention of prominent citizens in centers like New York and Chicago to the harm organized crime was doing to their home cities. As Pettengill notes, the result of this increased attention was the assemblage of Eliot Ness' "Untouchables" - a collection of elite Prohibition agents dedicated to taking down Al Capone. New York City had a similar story with the emergence of attorney George E. Dewey, who led a special investigation into the city's political corruption. In the end Ness and Dewey got their respective "Mr. Big" but neither did much to uproot organized crime as an institution. Due to their lack of understanding of what the Mafia was, how it operated, and what it hoped to accomplish, the government was unsuccessful at really eradicating organized crime as an institution in American life.