Organised Crime - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1919: Congress Overrides a Veto and Unleashes Prohibition: the Volstead Act Becomes Law

President Woodrow Wilson vetoed it, warning that banning alcohol while rationing wartime grain made no sense now the war was over. Congress disagreed, and on this day in 1919 the Senate and House of Representatives overrode his veto, pushing the Volstead Act into law and setting a date to enforce the newly ratified Eighteenth Amendment.

The Act gave Prohibition its teeth: it defined any drink over 0.5 percent alcohol as illegal and handed federal agents the power to raid, seize and prosecute. Within months, that vacuum would be filled not by sobriety but by bootleggers, speakeasies and the organised crime syndicates who built fortunes smuggling what the law had just made forbidden.

New York City Deputy Police Commissioner overseeing the disposal of confiscated liquor during Prohibition, c. 1921. Source: Library of Congress.

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1927: Laid Up with Influenza, Snowy Cutmore Was Shot Dead in His Sickbed by Squizzy Taylor

Snowy Cutmore had spent months hiding in Sydney after the gangland killing of an ally, but by late October 1927 he was back in Melbourne, lodging with his mother in Carlton. At the races he ran into his old rival Squizzy Taylor and the two traded threats in public; within days Cutmore came down with influenza and took to his sickbed.

On 27 October 1927, Taylor and an accomplice hired a car, drove to the house and walked straight into Cutmore's bedroom. Gunfire erupted between the bedridden man and his visitors: Cutmore was hit five times, his mother was wounded by a stray bullet as she rushed in, and Taylor himself staggered out mortally wounded, dying in hospital within the hour.

Snowy Cutmore dual portrait image from 1920

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1927: The Last Gamble of Squizzy Taylor: a Bedroom Shootout in Melbourne

Squizzy Taylor, Melbourne's most infamous gang leader, walked into a Carlton sickroom on 27 October 1927 to settle an old score with his bedridden rival, John "Snowy" Cutmore. Within minutes, gunfire tore through the small house and both men were mortally wounded.

Taylor was rushed to St Vincent's Hospital in nearby Fitzroy, where he died that evening, aged 39, without ever naming who had fired the fatal shot.

The inquest returned an open verdict. One enduring theory holds that it was not Cutmore but his mother, standing over her dying son, who pulled the trigger that finally brought down Melbourne's most feared gangster.

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2003: Framed for a Killing He Did Not Commit: Carl Williams Ordered This Melbourne Hit

Michael Marshall was gunned down outside his luxury home in South Yarra, shot four times in the head in front of his five-year-old son on this day in 2003. The hit was part of the gangland war that tore through Melbourne underworld circles through the early 2000s.

Carl Williams ordered the killing, but the real twist was the setup behind it: Williams had first framed Marshall for the murder of Willie Thompson, manufacturing a motive and a target in one stroke. Victor Brincat and Thomas Hentschel carried out the shooting and were later convicted of Marshall's murder, two more names drawn into a war where loyalty counted for nothing and innocence was no defence.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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Australia Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Trial VIC

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