Ford wrote his twelfth chapter on Jewish involvement in liquor just as Prohibition took effect (January 1920). Ford cited figures — which he credited to industry trade papers and testimony before the Wickersham Commission — claiming Jews had owned about 80 percent of the wholesale liquor distribution network in the United States before Prohibition. Ford argued this came from the same community business organizing he described across the series: Jewish-owned distributors favored Jewish-owned retailers, Jewish-owned importers worked through Jewish-owned wholesalers, and the result was a network that largely shut out non-Jewish competitors.
Ford then argued that the Jewish liquor trade, facing Prohibition, simply shifted to control illegal liquor — bootlegging. Ford listed bootleggers and organized crime figures with Jewish surnames as evidence. Ford wrote before the full shape of Prohibition-era organized crime was public, but he was getting ahead of arguments later made by investigators like Elliot Ness and in Senate hearings on organized crime: that Jewish criminal groups — especially in New York, Chicago, and Detroit — were central to bootleg liquor distribution.
Ford gave a large section of Chapter 12 to what he called the 'white slave traffic' — the organized prostitution and human trafficking networks that state and federal investigators had studied in the 1900s and 1910s. Ford cited the Rockefeller Bureau of Social Hygiene investigation (1910), the Lexow Committee investigation, and the New York Kehillah's own Bureau of Social Morals investigation — led by Abraham Schoenfeld — as sources for his claims about Jewish involvement in organized prostitution. Ford stressed that the Kehillah's own investigation had found significant Jewish involvement in New York's vice networks, and that Schoenfeld's reports had named specific Jewish crime figures.
Ford's use of the Kehillah's own investigations made for a sharp rhetorical move: the organized Jewish community had documented the problem itself, and Ford cited that internal record to back his broader argument about Jewish business organizing and the vice trade. Ford did not claim most Jewish people took part in prostitution or organized crime. But he did argue that the same solidarity that drove Jewish success in legal industries also shielded Jewish criminals from exposure and prosecution — that the community's habit of closing ranks against outside criticism made it harder for police to break into Jewish criminal networks.
On sport, Ford focused on the 1919 World Series fix — the 'Black Sox scandal' — in which eight Chicago White Sox players were accused of losing games on purpose for money from gamblers. Ford named Arnold Rothstein (a prominent New York Jewish gambler and crime figure, widely suspected of funding the fix though never indicted) as the central figure, and argued that Rothstein's role showed a broader pattern of Jewish involvement in sports gambling and corruption. Ford also cited boxing, where Jewish promoters and managers held major positions, as another case of Jewish business organizing reaching into American sport.