I wonder if they are are going to bring Zwillman and Moretti into the storyline at some point in the future.

2nd episode much better than the first.

It was no surprise it's getting a 2nd season already. They sunk so much money into it already.

The Making of Boardwalk Empire. This is about 13 minutes long and has 1 or 2 mild teasers/spoilers about future events. I had forgotten that Mark Wahlberg was an executive producer. It's always fun to hear Scorsese talk about how he works.

HBO Video

The interesting thing about Prohibition was that it reversed the power relationships between the local machine politicians like Nucky Johnson and the criminals. By the time Prohibition had ended you can make a good argument that it was the criminals and not the politicians, who were the dominant partner in the relationship.

Yes, Lilo, that is the key point about Prohibition and politics:

Before Prohibition, organized crime was small-time and local. Every burg had a "red light district" or a "levee" where drugs, gambling, prostitution and booze (many cities and counties were officially "dry" before the Volstead Act) flourished. "Ward heelers"--minor elected officials and party hacks--took payoff money from the racketeers, gave some to police captains, judges, etc., and kept the rest for themselves.

But bootlegging and rum-running generated so much money that the racketeers were able to organize the payoffs directly--and not just judges and cops, but entire city councils, state legislatures, mayors, governors, senators and (in the Harding Administration) the US Attorney General. That legacy of high-level corruption continued to this day, putting the Mafia and other organized crime on the map permanently.

I never heard the story about the guy swallowing pool balls and being tricked into swallowing the cue ball in reference to Rothstein. I did see that story on "1000 ways to Die".

Pretty upset I haven't watched this yet, what channel is it on?

HBO

Thanks Lilo, Ill check it out!

Anyone watching now? Refresh my memory? Who's guy is in the hospital that they're trying to bump off?

Edit: Ok, it's one of the guys that was shot in the woods.


On a humorous note, Eddie Cantor (nice touch that adds to the era) singing about girls, "the dumber they come the better I like them." Ha ha ha.....Can you imagine that going over today.

The scene with Luciano at the doctor's office was pretty nasty.
I think it's just a matter of time before Nucky puts the moves on the widow.

That's what I'm thinking too Lilo!



TIS

What was the deal with Jimmy's "wife" using the vacuum cleaner once Jimmy was gone?

Is the boy not Jimmy's son?

Well she was telling Jimmy about "being alone" (more or less) while he was gone.......so, yea, something is brewing I think.



TIS

Yeah, it was sort of a non-denial denial...
I like how they established the creepiness and rigidity of the federal agent.

That federal agent is annoying as hell. And what was the exact matter with Lucky Luciano at the hospital?

He had the clap and was receiving the final treatment for it-thus the pain.
Also he decided to tell the doctor that his soldier wasn't always standing at attention but immediately regretted doing so-thus the threat..

I'm getting the feeling that Jimmy is Nucky's son.

Great show, my wife loves it too.

Seeing the low birth weight baby thing in episode 1 was tough for me.

Yeah I'm suspecting the same thing.

Nice to see so many Sopranos faces showing up in the show too.

LN,

Yea, what was that about? It was like a side show or something. Did they really do that back in the 20s?


TIS

If Jimmy is Nucky's son that would explain the comment that Nucky's brother made and also why they just didn't take the easier option of making Jimmy disappear permanently.

Although it IS getting suspicious, and sounds like the child may not be Jimmy's, I'm not seeing (yet) a convincing connection between Nucky and Jimmy's wife (sorry, I don't remember all the characters names yet).

On a side note, I am still enjoying the 20's backdrop. It seems there is great effort put into detail...right down to Eddie Cantor's performance.


TIS

I meant Nucky as Jimmy's father. Not Jimmy's son.

This is a show that makes you think about it after you watch it (like Sopranos, The Shield, etc). It's really very good.

So, how is it that Rothstein can threaten with seeming impunity a made guy like Yale right in front of another made guy - Luciano?

Hmm. Perhaps because at that time Luciano worked for Rothstein and wasn't really "made" in the way we know the word today?

Also Rothstein was more powerful than either Luciano or Yale in 1920-21 and had a larger organization.

In his "autobiography", Lucky downplayed the idea that he worked FOR Rothstein and spoke of the relationship more as a sort of partnership/independent contractor sort of deal. Sifakis disagreed. Lucky certainly had his own interests independent of Rothstein.

Btw, is it true that Luciano was really such a hot tempered guy? He always seemed to me as the more sophisticated and tolerant one.

Yeah, I think much of that is just creative license. We don't really know a whole lot about Luciano's violent tendencies in his early days. His autobiography neatly elides all of that. Certainly compared to men like Siegel, Buchalter, Anastasia and Genovese he was less violent and more level headed. And no simple hothead could wait for long periods of time to play both Masseria and Maranzano against each other and wind up eliminating them both.

But this is supposed to be the early days, in which he is barely removed from the Lower East Side. I've read different stories about how Luciano met Siegel and Lansky but they all involved Luciano threatening or committing violence.

IIRC Luciano and other biographers did say that Rothstein had a calming and scholarly effect on Luciano, who remember would have only been around 22-23 at the start of Prohibition.

Luciano was a protege of Rothstein, as were Lansky and Costello. He praised Rothstein lavishly in his "autobiography." Certainly he was cool and levelheaded by the time he formed the Commission (ca. 1931), but who knows what he was like ten years earlier?

So it's a little bit like Vincent's tranformation (which happenend unrealisticly in just one year).

I think so Sonny. Rothstein smoothed out Lucky's rough edges and put him and his friends in touch with more upperworld people, which would have been very useful for corrupters like Lucchese and Costello.