Ford's twelfth chapter on Jewish involvement in the liquor industry was written at the moment when Prohibition had just taken effect (January 1920). Ford cited statistics — which he attributed to industry trade publications and testimony before the Wickersham Commission — claiming that Jews had owned approximately 80 percent of the wholesale liquor distribution network in the United States before Prohibition. Ford argued that this concentration was the product of the same communal commercial organization he had been describing throughout the series: Jewish-owned distributors favored Jewish-owned retailers, Jewish-owned import houses worked through Jewish-owned wholesalers, and the result was a commercial network that effectively excluded non-Jewish competitors.
Ford then argued that the Jewish liquor industry, faced with Prohibition, simply repositioned itself to control illicit liquor distribution — bootlegging. Ford cited names of bootleggers and organized crime figures with Jewish surnames as evidence for this claim. Ford was writing before the full structure of Prohibition-era organized crime had become public knowledge, but he was anticipating arguments that would later be made by investigators like Elliot Ness and in Senate committee hearings about organized crime: that Jewish criminal organizations — particularly in New York, Chicago, and Detroit — played central roles in bootleg liquor distribution.
Ford devoted a substantial section of Chapter 12 to what he called the 'white slave traffic' — the organized prostitution and human trafficking networks that had been the subject of multiple state and federal investigations 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 noted with some emphasis that the Kehillah's own investigation had found significant Jewish involvement in New York's organized vice networks, and that Schoenfeld's reports had named specific Jewish crime figures.
Ford's use of the Kehillah's own investigations created an interesting rhetorical dynamic: the organized Jewish community had itself documented the problem, and Ford was citing that internal documentation as confirmation of his broader argument about the relationship between Jewish commercial organization and vice industries. Ford did not argue that most Jewish people were involved in prostitution or organized crime, but he did argue that the same communal solidarity that enabled Jewish commercial success in legitimate industries also protected Jewish criminals from exposure and prosecution — that the Jewish community's instinct to close ranks against external criticism made it harder for law enforcement to penetrate 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 intentionally losing games in exchange for money from gamblers. Ford cited Arnold Rothstein (a prominent New York Jewish gambler and organized crime figure who was widely suspected of financing the fix, though he was never indicted) as the central figure, and argued that Rothstein's role illustrated a broader pattern of Jewish involvement in sports gambling and corruption. Ford also cited the boxing world, where Jewish promoters and managers held significant positions, as another example of Jewish commercial organization extending into American sport.