Nucky Johnson and the Wide-Open Town

Enoch Lewis Johnson ran Atlantic City the way certain men run certain places, by controlling everything at once and making sure that everyone who mattered owed him something. He was born nearby in Galloway Township in eighteen eighty-three, the son of a man who later became the Atlantic County sheriff. He learned the political machine from the inside as a young man and took it over around nineteen eleven, after his predecessor was convicted on corruption charges.

For the next thirty years, Nucky Johnson was Atlantic City. Prohibition arrived nationally in nineteen twenty, and in most of the country it was at least nominally observed. In Atlantic City it was not observed at all.

Alcohol flowed openly in the hotels and clubs along the Boardwalk. Rum runners brought shipments in from the ocean-side docks. Johnson took a percentage of the bootlegging revenue, the gambling rooms, and virtually every other illegal enterprise operating in the city.

By various estimates he was earning five hundred thousand dollars a year in graft alone. In May of nineteen twenty-nine, Johnson hosted what became known as the Atlantic City Conference. He invited the senior figures of organized crime from across the country to meet at the Ritz-Carlton and Ambassador hotels on the Boardwalk.

Al Capone came from Chicago. Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Frank Costello came from New York. The gathering was called, in part, to address the violence that had erupted after the St.

Valentine's Day Massacre three months earlier. What precisely was decided is still disputed. What is known is that some of the most powerful criminal figures in American history spent four days in Atlantic City while a federal administration looked the other way.

Johnson was eventually brought down by the federal government on income tax evasion. He was convicted in nineteen forty-one and sentenced to ten years in prison.