Gangsters — Jon Lee Clay

By the start of 1921, Rocco and Besha DeLuca, and their growing organization, had shipped several million dollars of liquor to the prohibition-stricken United States. Young men were constantly knocking on the door of their two distilleries, looking for product to bootleg in the surrounding community or into the United States. But the Glen Gael Distillery and the DeLuca Distillery, both in Hamilton, Ontario, were running at full capacity, most of it smuggled in boats across Lake Erie to provide the gangster organizations run by Baby Face Monterosso in Buffalo and Black Sam Todaro and his brother Big Joe in Cleveland. The rest was ‘short-circuited' back into Ontario for their own bootlegging operations. Despite the dangers of rival gangs looking to muscle in, despite the constant threat of arrest by the local coppers or federal agents, Rocco, Besha and their two partners, Tony Genovese and Machine-Gun Tommy Giachetti, were carving out a life for themselves and those working for them. Rising from the grinding poverty of the old Italian neighborhood they all lived in, they fought shoulder to shoulder to spit in the eye of a system they felt was rigged against them