Warren G. Harding was a terrible president, but he did get two things right. He freed an ailing Eugene Debs from federal prison, where Debs had been locked up for criticizing World War I, and he appointed Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Los Angeles’ first female public defender, as assistant attorney general of the United States. Harding gave Willebrandt the thankless task of enforcing Prohibition.
She served for eight energetic years, pioneering the no-holds-barred “Willebrandt doctrine” that sent Al Capone to Alcatraz and has been used today to turn Donald Trump into our first indicted ex-president. Briefly put, the Willebrandt doctrine encourages prosecutors to use any available crime, even if relatively trivial, to assert the rule of law over a dangerous crook.
During the roaring 1920s, Capone ran the rackets in Chicago — gambling, booze, prostitution — each on a massive scale. Capone wasn’t just a successful entrepreneur of human frailty. He was widely believed to have ordered the murder of seven rivals in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and was implicated in numerous other violent crimes. Although Capone was convicted of a couple of relatively minor offenses, he was protected from effective prosecution in Chicago for his more serious crimes by a wall of corruption and intimidation.
