One Summer: America, 1927

of Quebec and Newfoundland. His hope now was to steal a march on the Roosevelt Field aviators by getting across the Atlantic ahead of them. He couldn’t qualify for the Orteig Prize because he needed to refuel in the Azores en route, but it would still be a glorious symbolic triumph for fascism if he were waiting at Le Bourget, fists on hips, to greet with an air of cheerful condescension the first American flyers to get there.
    Happily there were no anti-fascist demonstrations in Chicago – though ironically Pinedo faced serious injury from the exuberant backslaps and crushing embraces of several hundred black-shirted supporters who greeted him at the dockside of the Chicago Yacht Club.
    One of those waiting to welcome Pinedo at the official reception was Chicago’s leading Italian-American businessman, Al Capone. Even in Chicago, the most corrupt city in America, it was a little striking to see the nation’s most notorious hoodlum mingling with the mayor, the local head of the Coast Guard, and several judges and other civic dignitaries. It was the first time Capone had been invited to take part in an official ceremony in his adopted city – the first time any gangster had been invited into society. So it was a proud moment for Capone. In fact, though he had no idea of it yet, he was just one day away from the start of his downfall.
    The person responsible for this unexpected turn of events was a slight, very remarkable 37-year-old woman named Mabel Walker Willebrandt. Until only a little more than a decade earlier,Willebrandt had been an anonymous housewife in California. But, growing bored with that life, she enrolled in night classes at the University of Southern California and in 1916 emerged with a law degree. For the next five years, she represented battered women and prostitutes – an unusually noble use of a law degree in the 1910s. (She also at some point shed Mr Willebrandt in a divorce.) She so distinguished herself that in 1921 she was brought to Washington and made assistant attorney general in the Harding administration. This made her the most senior woman in the federal government. She was given special responsibility for enforcing Prohibition and income tax laws. It was a wonderfully prescient, if inadvertent, combination of roles because it led her to hit on an ingenious way to tackle organized crime.
    Until now, mobsters had seemed invincible. They couldn’t be prosecuted for murder or other serious crimes because no one was ever brave enough to testify against them. It was almost impossible to connect them to their illicit businesses because they never put their names to contracts or other incriminating documents. Willebrandt, however, was struck by the thought that mobsters were always demonstrably rich and yet never filed an income tax return. She decided to go for them on those grounds. Prosecuting criminals for tax evasion is such a common ploy now that it is easy to overlook how brilliantly original – how completely, stunningly out of left field – the idea was when she first came up with it. Many judicial authorities thought it was completely insane.
    The man she targeted, as a kind of specimen case, was a bootlegger in South Carolina named Manley Sullivan. Lawyers for Sullivan argued that criminals could not file tax returns without incriminating themselves, and that would be a breach of their Fifth Amendment rights. The lawyers also maintained that in claiming a share of the illegal profits the government would make itself an accessory to the original crime – a breach of its fiduciary responsibilities. The person most implacably opposed to Willebrandt’s strategy was a federal appeals court judge named Martin ThomasManton. ‘It is hard to conceive of Congress ever having had in mind that the government be paid a part of the income, gains, or profits derived from successfully carrying on this crime,’ he wrote. ‘It is incredible to believe that it was intended that a bootlegger be dignified as a taxpayer for his illegal profit, so that the government may accept his money for governmental purposes, as it accepts the money of the honest merchant taxpayer.’
    Despite Manton’s objections and those of many others, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Formally known as ‘United States vs Sullivan, 274 U.S. 259’, it was scheduled to be decided by the court on 16 May 1927 – the day after Capone met Pinedo in Chicago. Mabel Walker Willebrandt would argue more than