to borrow train fare and a new blouse to wear once she arrived. On the morning of her meeting with Harding, she took her daily ice-cold bath and fastened her hearing aid, on which she’d increasingly depended over the previous few years while straining to hear witnesses and the mutterings of opposing counsel. The bathroom mirror reflected her face, unpainted and unpowdered and dominated by her eyes: large and deeply set, absorbing everything but reflecting little back, collecting secrets while betraying none of her own. For one hour she painstakingly styled her hair so that it concealed the hearing aid and then tucked the batteries into her bosom.
Willebrandt had several misgivings about the position. For one, she had never planned to become a prosecutor, always having enjoyed “being on the other side.” Her long-term ambition was to practice civil law, not criminal. She would have to disengage entirely from her private practice, leaving her partners to fend for themselves. Disquieting questions took root in her mind: What if she were a mere token, a woman meant to do nothing but check a box? Would she find herself in a vacuous, toothless government post, catering to cronies rather than upholding the law?
Harding managed to put her at ease. She liked him immediately, finding him “tall, benevolent, interested, and gracious.” His “irrepressible friendliness” appeared to be both his greatest strength and most evident weakness. She sensed that he preferred privacy and quiet to the bustle of public life, an inclination she well understood.
* * *
—
The job of assistant attorney general would be like none she’d ever held before; in fact, like no job anyone had held before, as it involved an entirely new division of the Justice Department focusing on an entirely new law. She would be in charge of federal income taxes, prisons, and, most important, all issues relating to the Volstead Act. That she herself had not supported Prohibition—and, before its passage, had enjoyed the occasional glass of wine—would not deter her from ruthlessly enforcing it.
She had to prepare herself for the scale of the task. The United States had two long, craggy borders and eighteen thousand miles of coastline, all of it unnervingly porous. Airplane fleets smuggled gallons of liquor from Mexico to San Antonio, Texas, where it was hidden beneath bales of hay and transported by truck. From Canada, eight to ten fleets landed each night at different spots on the Michigan peninsula, guided by searchlights. During their daily dumps in the Atlantic Ocean, New York garbage scows met with rum ships and hauled spirits back to shore. There were liquor-filled torpedoes landing on Long Island, liquor in bottle-shaped buoys waiting to be collected, ships hauling liquor in dummy smokestacks, specialized “liquor submarines” that raised and lowered out of sight, and seagoing tugs with compartments hiding enough liquor for thirty New Year’s Eve parties—all of them slipping past the Coast Guard, whose men were paid to look the other way.
The illicit liquor trade thrived equally within the borders, owing to the staggering quantities of pre-Prohibition alcohol available across the country: More than five hundred distilleries had boasted an annual output of 286 million gallons of spirits of all kinds; more than 1,200 breweries had produced hundreds of millions of gallons of beer. How easy it was to pinpoint loopholes in the law and exploit its exemptions, to re-create your own home as a small-scale distillery, to deliver your product to thousands of thirsty customers through any subversive means. The term bootlegger, originally applied to liquor dealers who concealed flasks in their boot tops while trading on Indian reservations, grew in popularity and scope. Now anyone could be a bootlegger, and boots were far from the only vessel employed.
Amputees hid booze in their hollowed wooden legs. Women tied pints to each string of their corsets. Barbershops stocked whiskey in tonic bottles on their shelves. A raid on a soda parlor in Helena, Montana, uncovered squirt guns with a two-drink capacity. Farmers hid stills in goat barns, cowsheds, and cesspools, with entrances through tunnels. Professional bootleggers, worried about a glut in the market, dropped the price of a pint from $4 to $2.
Competition in the liquor trade was surging—and violence along with it. In Chicago, longtime gangster James “Big Jim” Colosimo was executed in his own restaurant. In Douglas, Arizona, four agents were shot within a week. In Cincinnati, whiskey pirates preyed upon the bootleggers, confrontations that erupted into gun battles and resulted in a significant number of