Prohibition history

Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith.

Isidor Einstein and Moe Smith were Prohibition agents in New York between 1920 and 1925 who made several thousand arrests using disguises, languages and a complete absence of menace. They were by a distance the most effective agents in the country, and the Bureau dismissed them for it.

A heavy padlock and chain across a closed timber door, with a blank official notice nailed beside it
A padlock on a door. Two agents closed several thousand places in five years, and the city had tens of thousands more. AI-generated editorial interpretation; not an archival photograph.

Who they were

Izzy Einstein was a Lower East Side postal clerk, short, heavy, and fluent in Yiddish, German, Polish, Hungarian and enough Italian and Russian to pass. He applied to the Prohibition Bureau in 1920 on the reasoning that the pay was better than the Post Office. Moe Smith, a friend and former cigar-store owner, joined him soon after.

Neither looked remotely like a federal officer, which was the entire professional advantage and which both understood perfectly.

The method

Walk in, be obviously harmless, buy a drink, produce the badge. That was it. The disguises are the famous part — they worked as gravediggers, fishmongers, musicians, football players, streetcar conductors, ice men, and in one celebrated instance Izzy stood outside in the cold until he was convincingly blue and was carried inside by sympathetic patrons who gave him a whiskey to revive him — but the disguises served a simpler purpose than the stories suggest. Speakeasy doormen were watching for a type. Izzy was never the type.

He also carried a small funnel in his waistcoat connected to a flask in his lining, so a sample of every drink bought was preserved as evidence. That detail, more than any costume, is why the convictions stuck.

The numbers

A chipped ivory-painted door in a charcoal brick alley, worn brass keyhole and a small sliding inspection hatch with warm light behind it
AI-generated editorial interpretation; not an archival photograph.

Reported figures vary by source, as they always do with this period, but the Bureau’s own accounts credit the pair with something close to 4,900 arrests and in the region of five million bottles of liquor seized, at a conviction rate above ninety per cent. That rate was the real outlier. Most Volstead arrests collapsed in court.

They were also, by every account including those of the people they arrested, entirely free of brutality. Nobody was beaten. Nobody was shot. They were funny about it, and the New York papers loved them, which turned out to be the problem.

Why they were sacked

In November 1925 both were dismissed in what the Bureau described as a reorganisation. The widely accepted explanation, then and now, is that senior officials resented two men who were far better known than the agency, who made the rest of the service look idle, and whose press coverage was affectionately comic about an enforcement effort that wanted to be taken seriously.

Izzy’s own remark — that he was let go because there is no room in the Bureau for a man who gets his name in the papers — is the version usually quoted and is plainly how he understood it.

After

Both went into insurance, successfully, selling to much the same city they had policed. Izzy wrote a memoir in 1932 that is a genuinely good read and more candid about the futility of the whole enterprise than anything an official source produced. He died in 1938; Moe in 1960.

There is a persistent story that the Bureau later tried to rehire Izzy and he declined. It is repeated widely and we have not found a solid source for it, so we file it as reported.

What they prove about enforcement

That it could be done, and that doing it changed nothing. Two men with no violence and a great deal of imagination closed several thousand establishments in a single city over five years. The city had, by every contemporary estimate, tens of thousands more.

That is the argument against Prohibition in miniature: not that enforcement was impossible, but that even exceptionally good enforcement was irrelevant at the scale involved. The Bureau’s response to its two most effective officers was to remove them, which says the rest.

How raids worked

What New York has now

Einstein and Smith made 4,932 arrests in New York, most of them in rooms like the 62 we list in the city today — except these ones are legal.

These are not the historic rooms — almost none of them is — and we say so on every listing. They are what the history turned into, which is its own thing worth knowing.

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