Effect of no nation-wide prohibition on organized crime in the US

I have read extensively about organized crime, and I think we all can agree on the fact that prohibition helped the various organizations greatly, now I want to ask u, how would crime develop in the us without prohibition? Would the situation be much better than in OTL?
 
I would think so. Admittedly organized crime also had prostitution, gambling, extortion and loan-sharking but bootlegging formed the bulk of their trade. Without that they won't be nearly as big...
 
Organized crime rises in WWII due to rationing instead.
OTL most what they did in WWII was to counterfeit Rationing Stamps, and black market activities.

The latter, that was from they were already in distribution networks for booze, so that's not here. Due to their existing control on most East Coast Ports, Authorities would turn a blind eye to their activities as long as war cargoes were left alone

In this TL, they won't have control of the Longshoreman Unions as they did OTL. So they would have the the profits of the other vices (Numbers,Drugs, Prostitution, tax free Tobacco and tax free Alcohol), but that wasn't the money printing machine that Prohibition enabled.

While it would be somewhat 'organized' wouldn't be close to OTL levels
 
There was an alternative to liquor for gangs like Capone's--milk!

"After a few weeks, Capone turned the operation [the soup kitchen for the unemployed he established on South State Street in 1930] over to United Charities. But the experience of (briefly) running the soup kitchen convinced him real money was to be made ... selling milk.

"'You gotta have a product that everybody needs every day,' he would say. 'We don't have it in booze.... But with milk! Every family every day wants it on the table.'

"By the following spring, the Outfit had begun establishing its own business, which in later years would come to control a large portion of the Chicago milk market. While forcing its competitors out of business, it got the city to adopt higher quality standards and labels for dairy products-—though Capone, and his supposed concern for Chicago's milk-drinking children, would retroactively get credit.

"As Al would often remark to his close associates, 'Do you guys know there's a bigger markup in fresh milk than there is in alcohol? Honest to God, we've been in the wrong racket right along.'"

Max Allen Collins and A. Brad Schwartz, Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago, p. 305

(The Outfit's involvement in the Chicago-area dairy industry didn't really flourish though until Al was on his way to prison, and had at least as much to do with Ralph Capone as with his more famous brother: "In the early 1930s, he [Al Capone] extended his Midwestern empire by making moves to acquire a milk processor, Meadowmoor Dairies, Inc., along with his brother and other gangsters. According to the Douglas County Museum of Illinois, the hustle was that Ralph Capone would ship in milk from neighboring Wisconsin, which was cheaper. They then bottled it in Meadowmoor’s facilities. That way, the Capones could bypass local fixed dairy pricing and also halt the milkmen’s union from distributing only local milk. Former Chicago police officer and mafia associate Fred Pascente corroborates this in his memoir, detailing how Meadowmoor “was actually a Capone front organization designed to undercut the city’s reigning milk cartel.” https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/al-ralph-capone-dairy-industry-milk-cheese)

So here's my what-if: A no-Prohibition 1920's where the Capone brothers make their big money in milk from the very beginning--and Eliot Ness becomes famous for chasing down illegal milk trucks from Wisconsin and busting up dairy plants as fantastic amounts of milk flow into the sewers...
 
I have read extensively about organized crime, and I think we all can agree on the fact that prohibition helped the various organizations greatly, now I want to ask u, how would crime develop in the us without prohibition? Would the situation be much better than in OTL?

Not really. Murder rates were already on the rise prior to Prohibition and were already coming down by 1930.
 
As long as people want stuff not sanctioned by society, somebody will be there to supply it. (1) Protection, loan sharking, prostitution, drugs will be a more prominent source of income. Absent the huge amount of money prohibition brought in, organized crime will be "smaller" but still be there. Part of the problem with prohibition was it engendered an attitude among a lot of Americans about law enforcement/law abiding, if so many folks routinely broke the law about alcohol, well being a "criminal" was no big deal, and as long as the killings were among gang members, who cares...

(1) Even now in countries like Iran and Singapore where drug dealing can and does result in execution, there are addicts who want to buy and criminals who want to sell. Supply and demand, econ 101.
 
There was an alternative to liquor for gangs like Capone's--milk!

"After a few weeks, Capone turned the operation [the soup kitchen for the unemployed he established on South State Street in 1930] over to United Charities. But the experience of (briefly) running the soup kitchen convinced him real money was to be made ... selling milk.

"'You gotta have a product that everybody needs every day,' he would say. 'We don't have it in booze.... But with milk! Every family every day wants it on the table.'

"By the following spring, the Outfit had begun establishing its own business, which in later years would come to control a large portion of the Chicago milk market. While forcing its competitors out of business, it got the city to adopt higher quality standards and labels for dairy products-—though Capone, and his supposed concern for Chicago's milk-drinking children, would retroactively get credit.

"As Al would often remark to his close associates, 'Do you guys know there's a bigger markup in fresh milk than there is in alcohol? Honest to God, we've been in the wrong racket right along.'"

Max Allen Collins and A. Brad Schwartz, Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago, p. 305

(The Outfit's involvement in the Chicago-area dairy industry didn't really flourish though until Al was on his way to prison, and had at least as much to do with Ralph Capone as with his more famous brother: "In the early 1930s, he [Al Capone] extended his Midwestern empire by making moves to acquire a milk processor, Meadowmoor Dairies, Inc., along with his brother and other gangsters. According to the Douglas County Museum of Illinois, the hustle was that Ralph Capone would ship in milk from neighboring Wisconsin, which was cheaper. They then bottled it in Meadowmoor’s facilities. That way, the Capones could bypass local fixed dairy pricing and also halt the milkmen’s union from distributing only local milk. Former Chicago police officer and mafia associate Fred Pascente corroborates this in his memoir, detailing how Meadowmoor “was actually a Capone front organization designed to undercut the city’s reigning milk cartel.” https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/al-ralph-capone-dairy-industry-milk-cheese)

So here's my what-if: A no-Prohibition 1920's where the Capone brothers make their big money in milk from the very beginning--and Eliot Ness becomes famous for chasing down illegal milk trucks from Wisconsin and busting up dairy plants as fantastic amounts of milk flow into the sewers...
Liquor is easier hide than cows but cows are easier to get. It actually would be so intrusive to get into the dairy market to try to regulate it and police it he would make the War on Drugs look like a minor inconvenience of your civil rights. Who probably bring out a backlash against cow milk and to other substances or other animal milk.
 
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So here's my what-if: A no-Prohibition 1920's where the Capone brothers make their big money in milk from the very beginning--and Eliot Ness becomes famous for chasing down illegal milk trucks from Wisconsin and busting up dairy plants as fantastic amounts of milk flow into the sewers...

Way back when when I lived near Chicago as a kid, my parents would 'smuggle' tinted yellow Margarine up to folks we knew(and friends of friends) in Wisconsin who didn't want Butter for everything Even in the '50s, it was thought that too much Butter was bad for you, if you had heart trouble. Coleman Coolers and dry ice packed in the back of the old Station wagons, with a bit of other camping gear ontop for the disguise
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Originally before WWI, Margarine could only be sold if tinted to a dark brown(to discourage sales)or sickLY pink, and by WWII, could be only be its natural off white color, but never yellow, that was reserved for real Butter, even though that was also tinted yellow, as Cows with a heavy Corn diet will have a very pale looking Butter.

That law wasn't overturned till 1968 or so, the last holdout of all the Dairy producing States that had similar laws.

Dairy was serious business.
 
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I have read extensively about organized crime, and I think we all can agree on the fact that prohibition helped the various organizations greatly, now I want to ask u, how would crime develop in the us without prohibition? Would the situation be much better than in OTL?

They would still have the unions and the gambling and those are the best things to have.
 
So here's my what-if: A no-Prohibition 1920's where the Capone brothers make their big money in milk from the very beginning--and Eliot Ness becomes famous for chasing down illegal milk trucks from Wisconsin and busting up dairy plants as fantastic amounts of milk flow into the sewers...

 
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