How Prohibition Gave Birth to the Most Dangerous Mafia in America HT
Picture a government that hands organized crime the greatest business opportunity in human history. Not metaphorically, literally. The United States Congress drafts the legislation. The states ratify it. The president signs it into law. And on the 17th of January 1920, at midnight, the most powerful nation on Earth makes it illegal to manufacture, sell, or transport alcohol, a product that approximately 100 million Americans want to consume and are going to consume, regardless of what any law says about it. The men who understand what
just happened are not in Washington. They are in the back rooms of pool halls and tenement apartments in Brooklyn, Chicago, and Detroit reading the morning papers and doing arithmetic that would make a Wall Street banker weep with envy. Before 1920 is over, the arithmetic produces a simple conclusion. The government has just created a market worth billions of dollars and handed it free of charge to anyone with the nerve to supply it. The mob had the nerve.
What follows is 13 years of the most audacious, most profitable, and most transformative criminal operation in American history. Not just a story about bootleggers and speak easys. A story about how a handful of men in their 20s and 30s built financial empires so large, so sophisticated, and so deeply embedded in American civic life that the institutions designed to stop them, the police, the courts, the federal government itself became part of the operation.
and how the money those 13 years generated created the modern American mob, not the cartoonish gangster of the movies, the real thing. The structure, the power, the reach, all of it built on a single commodity that the American government made priceless by making it illegal. This is how they did it. On the 16th of January 1919, the 18th amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified by the required 36 states.
The Volstead Act, passed the same year to enforce it, goes into effect at 12:01 a.m. on the 17th of January, 1920. From this moment, any American who manufactures, sells, or transports beverage alcohol is committing a federal crime. What the architects of prohibition do not fully account for is economics. Specifically, the economics of a black market created overnight in a country of 106 million people, the majority of whom have no intention of stopping drinking.
The demand does not go away. It goes underground. And underground demand, by definition, belongs to whoever is willing to supply it illegally, which means whoever is already operating outside the law. Before prohibition, organized crime in America is real, but fragmented. Small-time street gangs run protection, gambling, and prostitution in their specific neighborhoods.
Irish gangs control certain blocks. Jewish gangs control others. Italian immigrant communities have their own networks. They are local. They are limited. They occasionally kill each other over territorial disputes that amount in the scale of things to very small sums of money. They are in the specific assessment of Howard Abodinsky, a criminal justice professor at Saint John’s University, whose work documents this period in detail, essentially thugs in the employ of political machines.
The machinery of modern organized crime does not yet exist. Prohibition builds it. Within the first six months of 1920, bootlegging operations are running in every major American city. Within the first year, the men running them realize something that changes everything. This is not a street corner operation.
This is a supply chain problem, a logistics problem, an interstate commerce problem. Alcohol has to be sourced, either manufactured domestically in hidden distilleries or imported from Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe. It has to be transported across state lines without detection. It has to be stored in warehouses guarded against both law enforcement and rival operators.
It has to be distributed to thousands of individual retail points, the speak easys, the private clubs, the restaurants still serving wine under the table across hundreds of square miles of American city. And all of it has to happen invisibly, continuously, and profitably, despite the constant friction of police raids, federal agents, hijacking by rivals, and the ongoing cost of bribing everyone in the chain who can disrupt it.
This is not a job for a street gang. This is a job for a corporation. And the men who figure this out first are the men who get rich. Chicago, 1925. Alapone is 26 years old. He is a stocky moon-faced second generation Italian American from Brooklyn who has been working for Johnny Torio’s Chicago operation since 1920. When Toriel is nearly killed in an assassination attempt in January 1925 and retires to Italy, he hands everything to Capone.
the entire Chicago bootlegging network, the 10,000 speak easys, the breweries, the distilleries, the distribution routes, the political relationships, the police relationships, the judges. Capone does not inherit a gang. He inherits a functioning industrial enterprise that is generating revenues his predecessors never fully mapped. Capone maps them.
His criminal operation at its height in the late 1920s reaches an estimated $100 million in annual revenue. Nearly $1.4 billion in today’s terms from liquor distribution, speak easys, beer brewing, gambling, prostitution, and other rackets. He is spending half a million dollars a month in bribes alone to police, politicians, and federal investigators.
His payroll includes lawyers, accountants, brew masters, boat captains, truckers, warehousemen, and an army of armed enforcers. He controls the mayor of Cicero, Illinois so completely that when the mayor attempts to assert independence, Capone drags him down the front steps of city hall and kicks him in the street in front of voters on election day. He owns judges.
He owns aldermen. He owns entire precincts of the Chicago Police Department. His operation works because he understands something that previous mob operators did not. Violence is expensive. Violence attracts attention. Violence disrupts supply chains. The optimal business model minimizes violence by making cooperation more profitable than resistance for every player in the system.
You do not shoot the alderman, you pay the alderman. You do not shoot the federal agent. You pay the federal agent. You do not shoot the rival bootleggger. You offer him a territory agreement. When he declines, as the North Side gang under Bugs Moran declines repeatedly throughout the 1920s, then you shoot him. But shooting is the last resort, not the first.
The business logic is identical to any legitimate monopoly strategy. Eliminate competition through negotiation where possible and through force where necessary. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre on February 14, 1929, when Capone’s men, dressed as police officers, execute seven members of Morren’s gang in a North Clark Street garage is the most famous moment of the prohibition era.
It is also, in pure business terms, a failure. It generates the kind of public outrage and federal attention that Capone’s operation cannot absorb. The specifically visible, specifically brutal public nature of the execution turns the press from reluctant admiration to active hostility and begins the process that ends with Capone’s federal tax evasion conviction in 1931.
The lesson of the Valentine’s Day massacre is the same lesson every subsequent generation of organized crime bosses will learn. The more visible the violence, the shorter the tenure. But in Chicago from 1925 to 1931, the violence is mostly invisible and the money is very real. Capone at his peak is generating revenues that dwarf every legitimate corporation headquartered in the state of Illinois.
1,000 mi east in New York City, a different kind of operation is being built. Larger, more sophisticated, and built to last considerably longer than anything Capone constructs in Chicago. The architect is Charles Lucky Luchiano. Born Salvatore Lucania in Lara Freried, Sicily in 1896. He arrives in New York at age nine, joins the Five Points gang as a teenager, and is working for gambling boss Arnold Rothstein by the early 1920s.
Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1,919 World Series, who runs illegal alcohol shipments through Lake Ontario down the Hudson River into thousands of New York speak easys, teaches Luchiano something more valuable than any specific criminal skill. He teaches him how to think about criminal enterprise as a business. How to apply the logic of investment, risk management, and organizational structure to operations that happen to be illegal.
By the mid1 1920s, Luciano is a multi-millionaire. He is making and importing alcohol with associates including Meer Lansky, Benjamin Bugsy Seagull, Lewis Lepka Buck Halter, and Abe Longis Wilman. What makes Luciano different from every other bootleger of the era is his specific willingness to work across ethnic lines.
Italian gangsters work with Jewish gangsters. Irish gangsters work with Italian gangsters. The specific tribalism that has previously kept each ethnic criminal community contained within its own territory is under Luchiano an operational inefficiency to be eliminated. If Meer Lansky’s financial sophistication makes the operation more profitable, Lansky is in.
If Frank Costello’s political connections open doors that pure muscle cannot open, Costello is essential. The best people for the job get the job regardless of their last names country of origin. By the early 1920s, profits from the illegal production and trafficking of liquor are so enormous that gangsters learn to be more organized than ever, employing lawyers, accountants, brew masters, boat captains, truckers, and warehousemen, plus armed enforcers to intimidate, injure, bomb, or kill competitors.
The specific supply chain Luciano builds for New York is documented in remarkable detail in the federal records from his eventual prosecution in 1936. Rum running ships anchor in international waters beyond the standard 3mile territorial limit, transferring their cargo to faster, smaller boats that can outrun coast guard patrols into the harbor.
Trucks with false compartments move shipments through police roadblocks. Warehouses in Brooklyn and the Bronx store product between distribution cycles. The distribution network reaches every burrow simultaneously through a tiered wholesaler system that insulates Luchiano from direct contact with any individual transaction.
The money it generates is almost impossible to absorb cleanly. This is the specific problem that makes prohibition’s financial legacy so significant. The hard part was figuring out what to do with all the cash. You cannot deposit $100 million in illegal alcohol revenue in a bank account without attracting the specific attention of the federal government that ultimately destroys Capone.
You need legitimate businesses to absorb the cash. Laundromats, restaurants, construction companies, trucking firms, and you need men sophisticated enough to manage the movement of money between the illegal operations and the legitimate fronts without creating a paper trail that federal accountants can follow. The specific financial infrastructure that organized crime builds during prohibition to solve this problem becomes the template for money laundering that the mob uses for the next six decades.
George Reis, a pharmacist turned criminal defense attorney who becomes one of the era’s largest bootleggers, identifies a specific legal loophole in the Volstead Act and exploits it with extraordinary precision. The act permits the sale of medicinal alcohol. Remis establishes a drug company, purchases legal distilleries, acquires the permits to sell alcohol for medical purposes, and then has his own trucking company hijack his own shipments before they reach thearmacies, diverting the product into the illegal market while collecting the
insurance on the stolen shipments. He is making tens of thousands of dollars a day. Bootleggers and rum runners travel to his hidden and strictly guarded whiskey distribution center in Ohio at all hours. He employs thousands of workers. He makes millions. He is eventually convicted in the mid1 1920s and serves 2 years.
He is out and operating again before the decade ends. None of this operates in a vacuum. The specific cost structure of a prohibition bootlegging operation includes line items that no legitimate business has to account for. Bribes. Bootleggers use speedboats to outrun coast guard patrols, trucks with secret compartments to slip past police roadblocks and bribes to ensure that customs agents, judges, and local politicians look the other way.
In Chicago, the bribe infrastructure is so comprehensive and so well organized that it functions as a parallel city government. Police captains receive monthly payments. Judges receive case-bycase fees. Aldderman receive annual retainers. Federal prohibition agents paid $35 per week by the government receive supplemental income from the bootleggers that can reach 10 times their official salary.
The specific documented corruption of the prohibition era is not incidental to the mob’s success. It is structural. It is the operating system on which the entire enterprise runs. Competition. Gangs hijack each other’s alcohol shipments, forcing rivals to pay for protection to leave their operations alone. And armed guards almost invariably accompany the caravans that deliver the liquor.
The murder rate in America rises from 6.8 8 per 100,000 individuals to 9.7 during prohibition. More than 1,000 people are killed in New York alone in mob clashes during prohibition. The violence is real, constant, and expensive both in lives and in the political attention that each public shooting generates. Then there is the tax problem.
The federal government’s position established in law and eventually tested in court through the Capone prosecution is unambiguous. All income is taxable. The source of that income, legal or illegal, is irrelevant to the tax obligation. In 1931, Al Capone is convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.
The prosecution that destroys the most powerful bootleggger in American history does not use evidence of bootlegging, murder, or corruption. It uses his bank records and the documented testimony of his own accountants. The government cannot prove what Capone did with the money. It can prove he received it and did not pay taxes on it. That is enough.
The Capone prosecution teaches every subsequent generation of organized crime operators the single most important operational lesson of the entire prohibition era. The money is not the danger. The paper trail that the money leaves is the danger. Managing that trail, keeping the cash moving, keeping the books clean. Keeping the legitimate businesses generating enough documented revenue to explain the lifestyle becomes the central discipline of organized crime.
From 1931 onward, December 5th, 1933, the 21st Amendment is ratified. Prohibition ends, the legal sale of alcohol resumes. The specific market that has been generating $100 million a year for Capone, comparable fortunes for Luchiano and the New York operators, and documented millions for bootleggers in every American city from Boston to San Francisco is closed overnight.
What happens next is what makes prohibition’s legacy permanent rather than temporary. The organizations do not dissolve. The money does not disappear. The infrastructure, the trucks, the warehouses, the distribution networks, the political relationships, the police relationships, the court relationships, the moneyaundering systems, all of it remains intact and available for the next opportunity.
When the highly profitable bootlegging period ends in 1933 with the repeal of the 18th amendment, organized crime syndicates focus on other criminal activities including gambling, lone sharking, prostitution, and drug distribution, a natural extension of bootlegging. Luciano moves immediately. In 1931, two years before repeal, he has already orchestrated the murders of the two remaining oldworld Sicilian bosses, Joe the Boss Maseria and Salvator Marenzano, who stand between him and the reorganization of New York’s criminal landscape. He creates the commission
comprised of the bosses of the top five Italian-American crime families in New York to make consensus decisions on rackets, settle disputes, and authorize gang slayings. The five families, the Bananos, the Gambinos, the Genevaces, the Columbus, and the Lucases are formally constituted. The structure that will govern organized crime in America for the next six decades is built directly on the financial and organizational foundation that prohibition money created.
The speak easyy’s number 200,000 at their peak in 1933. They employ hundreds of thousands of Americans. They introduce jazz music to white audiences, create the modern American cocktail culture, and establish the nightclub as a social institution. They also generate across their entire operation a cash flow that the men running them use to buy the infrastructure of American civic life, real estate, unions, construction contracts, trucking companies, garbage collection, garment factories, wholesale food distribution. When prohibition
ends, the mob does not go back to being street gangs. It goes into business. The 13 years between 1920 and 1933 do not merely make the mob rich. They transform it from a collection of neighborhood criminal networks into a national institution with the financial resources, the political connections, and the organizational sophistication to operate in plain sight for the next half century before anyone in the federal government takes it seriously enough to actually fight it.
The government handed them the market. They build everything else themselves.
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Rasputin’s Forgotten Daughter
Before he died, Rasputin reportedly ate sweet cakes laced with cyanide. But the autopsy showed no poison in his system. Shockingly, it was Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, who held the key to this unsettling mystery. Maria Rasputin grew up in the eye of the storm. While her father, Gregory Rasputin, remains one of history’s greatest mysteries, Maria had a privileged look into his notorious life, and she was right there with him in both his rise to infamy and his brutal downfall.
But in the end, Maria would also pay dearly for her forbidden knowledge. When Maria was born, notoriety had yet to hit her family. Rasputin had married her mother, the peasant girl Prescovia Duplovina, at a young age, and they lived in a remote village far away from any drama. Soon they had three children, Maria, her older brother Dimmitri, and her younger sister Vavvara.
While Maria was still in her mother’s womb, her father made a historyaltering decision. Prodded by some emotional or spiritual crisis, Rasputin had a religious reawakening and went on a pilgrimage. Though some say his reasons for this trek were as earthly as evading punishment for stealing a horse. Regardless, it was the beginning of Rasputin as we now know him.
When Maria’s father came back to see his newly born daughter, he was a changed man. After staying with monks at the St. Nicholas Monastery, he appeared disheveled and strange. He also, seemingly temporarily, became a vegetarian and reportedly swore off drinking. Yet though he now repelled some of their neighbors, Rasputin’s effect on others was much more disturbing.
By the early 1900s, when Maria was a toddler, Rasputin was running his own makeshift chapel in a root cellar, holding secret meetings where reportedly his avid female followers would ceremonally wash him before each congregation. Just as Maria began walking and talking, Rasputin began gaining a reputation in the larger cities of Russia, and he traveled to places like Kazan.
Dark rumors followed him. Despite Rasputin gaining powerful friends during these trips, there were persistent whispers even then that he was sleeping with his followers. For now, though, the gossip hardly seemed to matter. Rasputin headed to the then capital of St. Petersburg, and nothing would ever be the same again.
In late 1905, thanks to his friendships with the black princesses, cousins to the imperial royal family, Rasputin met Zar Nicholas II and his wife Zarina Alexandra in person. In a very short time, he was a close confidant of the entire royal family, particularly since the Zarina believed that he was the only one who could heal her hemophiliac son, Alexi.
With such power swirling around him, Rasputin brought Maria right into the fray. At this point, Rasputin began not only to have a high opinion of himself, but also started to dream bigger for his own family. And in 1910, he brought Maria and her sister to St. Petersburg to live with him in the hopes that they would turn into little ladies and eventually do credit to his rising fame.
Maria’s given name was actually Matriiona, but her father evidently felt this was too backwoods and unsophisticated for the more European St. Petersburg. When he brought his daughter to live with him, he changed her name to the more French and worldly sounding Maria. For the Rasputin, any price seemed worth the entrance into the glittering world of the Romanoffs. It just didn’t work out.
When Rasputin sought to enter his girls to study at the legendary Smoly Institute, the school refused Maria and her sister enrollment on no uncertain terms. Instead, Rasputin was forced to settle for a second choice preparatory school. Then again, Rasputin’s list of enemies was building. Many relatives of the Zaran Zarina were appalled at the power Rasputin had over the rulers and were especially disturbed at the liberties he took with the young Romanoff princesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia.
At one point, a governness even complained that he was romping around the nursery with the girls in their night gowns. Strangely, Maria’s home life was much different. In contrast to the playful, even inappropriate energy Rasputin brought to the royal family, he treated his daughters something like inmates.
As Maria later described, “We were never allowed to go out alone. Rarely were we permitted to go to a matinea.” In addition, Rasputin would insist they kneel in prayer for hours every Sunday. And when he did let them go out, he chose their company very carefully. Maria and her sister were of an age with the Romanoff daughters, and they soon met the young princesses.
As Maria recalled, the girls were almost unbelievably graceful and often entered rooms so quietly that Maria couldn’t even hear their feet on the floor. With these companions, Maria and Vavara were soaring far beyond their station, and Rasputin was obsessed with ensuring they didn’t fall. As Maria turned into a teenager, young man began showing interest in the holy man’s daughter, and Rasputin’s response was control.
Maria, even in her nostalgic recollection of her father, called him the strictest of mentors. And after just a half an hour of any conversation with a boy, he would burst into the room and show the poor lad the door. Rasputin’s hold over the Zar and Zarina grew with the supposed miracles he was performing on Alexi.
But so too did civil unrest. Soon rumors about his intimate relationships with his followers grew to include accusations that he had seduced Zarina and even the four young Romanoff girls. The reality though was even worse than all that. Maria later admitted that as a young girl, she didn’t always have a clear idea of what was happening in her father’s adult world.
The truth may have broken her. There’s evidence that Rasputin’s religious worship was little more than drunken realry, and that if the rumors about the royal family weren’t true, he was nonetheless carrying on affairs with women from every corner of society. Indeed, several women who knew him accused him of assault.
In the face of this, Rasputin only clung harder to his control. To the extent that Maria was aware of the controversy around her father, it was mostly from Rasputin himself, insisting that he wouldn’t have people uttering the filth about you that they do about me. Rasputin took refuge in making his daughters unimpeachable and continued controlling the minutiae of their existence and reputations.
Yet even he couldn’t stave off disaster. In the summer of 1914, a woman acting on the hatred of Rasputin spreading through Russia stabbed him in the stomach while he was leaving his home. It took seven long weeks for Rasputin to recover enough to go back to St. Petersburg, but he could never be completely healed. According to Maria, her father was permanently affected both mentally and physically from the attempt on his life.
She claimed that the stress on his nerves also made him develop acid reflux to the point where he began avoiding sugar. But Rasputin would get little peace from now on. The year of Rasputin’s attempted assassination was also the year Russia entered World War I, hurling the country into turmoil. This did Rasputin no favors.
Over the coming months, Russia’s economy plummeted and it lost soldier after soldier to the conflict, further stirring the opposition to the Romanoffs and their adviser Rasputin. In December 1916, the single worst event of Maria’s young life took place. Prince Felix Yusupov, one of Rasputin’s acquaintances and it would turn out his most bitter enemy, lured the holy man to his house and then assassinated him with the help of several other discontented Russian aristocrats.
The manner of Rasputin’s end is now the stuff of legend. Yusupov later claimed that he first poisoned Rasputin with cookies laced with cyanide to no avail. Shocked at Rasputin’s otherworldly constitution, Yusupov had to resort to beating him with his co-conspirators, then shooting him and dumping him finally in a frozen lake.
As we’ll see, it may have been more complicated than this, but with her father gone, it was Maria who had to deal with the fallout. The day after Rasputin went over to Yusupovs and never came home, Maria knew in the pit of her stomach that something was deeply wrong. She and her sister went right to the royal family, reporting him missing to one of Zarina Alexandra’s closest confidants.
By now, all of St. Petersburg was a buzz with the supposed murder of the evil Rasputin. But Maria was simply missing and worried for her father. As the investigation started, her dread increased. Officers found traces of blood on the Bojoy Petroski bridge, indicating the point where the conspirators had thrown him off, and showed Maria a boot that she identified as her father’s.
From then on, it was just a matter of confirming the worst. A couple of days after Rasputin’s brutal end, they finally found his body in the frozen river below the bridge. When the city’s surgeon performed the autopsy, he found traces of that night’s trauma on Rasputin’s body, including three gunshot wounds, a slicing wound, and other injuries, some of which the surgeon believed happened postmortem.
Incredibly, there was no evidence that he’d been poisoned, but this was cold comfort to Maria, and so was her father’s funeral. Maria maintained that she attended Rasputin’s funeral, and her memories are harrowing. She claimed that many places in the little chapel were empty, for the crowds that had knocked at my father’s door while he still lived to ask some service of him neglected to come and offer up a prayer for him once he was dead.
However, other accounts suggest that neither Rasputin’s children nor his wife were permitted at the service. If so, they did get one consolation. Whether or not Maria attended her father’s funeral, the Imperial family did rally around the remaining Rasputans. After the small service, which took place in a lady in Wading’s garden, Maria and her family met with the Romanovs in the lady’s home, where they offered their friendship and protection.
The trouble was the Romanoff’s protection was about to mean nothing. Within months, the simmering unrest throughout Russia boiled over into a civil war, forcing Zar Nicholas to abdicate in March of 1917. Even Maria wasn’t safe. That April, she was locked up in a palace for questioning. She eventually gained release thanks to one of her father’s old followers, Boris Solovv.
But this was no mere altruistic act. After her father’s death, Boris, who was considered by many to be Rasputin’s spiritual successor, seemed like a natural option for a husband. He likewise considered her the smart option to be his wife, despite the fact that neither of them even liked the other. But in these last days of the Russian Empire, bizarre forces began drawing them together.
Maria and Boris, like good students of Gregory Rasputin, often participated in seances with a group of other like-minded people in an attempt to commune with the dead. Naturally, Maria sought to speak with her late father. And when she finally got him, according to Maria, Rasputin’s ghost kept insisting she love Boris. Eventually, Maria gave in.
trying to survive in her rapidly decaying world, Maria married Boris in October 1917, making good on her father’s seance predictions. In his diary, Boris would go on to note that Maria wasn’t even really that useful to him in the bedroom since he was so much more attracted to women who weren’t her. The die was cast, however, and it was only going to get darker from there.
The next months of Maria’s life passed by in a blur, and she clung to the imperial family and her home of St. Petersburg as best she could. It was all just delaying the inevitable, and everyone knew the end was near. On her final visit to the Romanoffs, Maria recalled the last words the Zarina would ever speak to her. Go, my children.
Leave us. Leave us quickly. We are being imprisoned. But it was Maria’s own family who would help hand over the Romanoffs to their tragic fate. With Russia falling apart at the seams, Maria’s husband began scrambling for power. And he hit devastating lows. Believing him to be a trusted friend, the royal family went to Boris and asked him to take some jewels for safekeeping in the event they needed quick cash for an escape.
He promptly proved he wasn’t worthy of that trust. In the most generous interpretation, Boris lost the funds, but according to some, he outright embezzled them. By the time that news came out, he made sure he was far, far away. By 1918, not even Boris Solovv could stand to be in St. Petersburg anymore. And he and Maria fled first to her hometown where her mother currently was and then hopped around various other out of the way towns, hoping to wait out the storm of civil unrest that was now fully raging through Russia as the Bolevixs took
over. Still, this wasn’t enough for Maria’s husband. In choosing to lose the Romanoff jewels, Boris had made a bet on himself, and it was a bet he kept making no matter who it hurt. Some even accused Boris of turning in some pro-Imperial officers who had been planning to help the Romanoff’s escape, apparently deciding that if he wasn’t going to save the royal family, no one was.
To add insult to injury, Boris soon paraded Romanoff imposters around Russia, ironically asking for money to help them escape, a feat he refused to perform for the real Romanoffs so he could keep lining his own pockets. It was a hint of what was to come in the next decades with Romanoff impersonators popping up everywhere. But it was no less cowardly.
If this upset Maria, it was nothing compared to what was to come. In the summer of 1918, she received devastating news. The Romanoffs never did make it to safety, and the Bolevixs eventually imprisoned them. Then, one July night, the revolutionaries brought royal parents and children alike into a basement to face a firing squad, killing them all.
In a further tragedy, both Maria’s mother and brother disappeared into the Soviet gulogs. With her old world gone, Maria knew she needed to start again. Barely 20 years old at the time of the Romanoff’s end and half of her family’s disappearance, Maria now tried desperately to build her life back up. By 1922, she and Boris had two daughters, Tatiana and Maria, who were named after the Romanoff princesses.
They ended up settling in Paris and for a time took on a mundane existence with Boris working in a soap factory and doing various odd jobs around town. But Maria Rasputin was never meant for a normal life. And in the mid1 1920s, tragedy caught up with her again. In 1924 or 1925, her younger sister Vavara died while still in Moscow.
Then just a year or two later, so too did her husband Boris, slipping away in a Paris hospital of tuberculosis. Alone, except for her two girls, she was forced to plunge back into a life of danger. After her husband’s death, her infamous name got her a job as a cabaret dancer, where she traveled around as the daughter of the mad monk.
Her dancing act was biographical, and Maria described the anguish she felt every time she had to go on stage and confront the tragedy of my father’s life and death. Her itinerate performing life soon led her to a job in the circus. And not just any job. She took up work as an animal trainer, taming lions and performing with bears.
As she Riley told an interviewer, “They ask me if I mind to be in a cage with animals, and I answer, why not? I have been in a cage with bolshviks.” Her life as a performer lasted until 1935, and it ended with a horrific moment. While traveling with an American circus, she was mauled by a bear.
Although she held it together for most of the rest of the run, she eventually quit by the time they reached Miami, Florida. She had, after all, already swallowed enough trauma to last a lifetime. Maria settled in America in 1937 without her daughters who were denied entry and married her childhood friend Gregory Burn a few years later, taking up residence in Los Angeles.
However, when they divorced in 1946, Marie admitted to a judge that Gregory had verbally bered her, hit her, and then just deserted me. Her final years weren’t any less dramatic. She became a US citizen in the 1940s and even worked as a riveter during World War II to help support the American effort.
for all that and despite her imperial Romanoff background, when the Red Scare came, people began whispering she was a communist, prompting Maria to write to the Los Angeles Times and unequivocally deny the rumors, which went against her entire upbringing. By the late 1950s, Maria was too old for her machinist work and instead cobbled together money from hosting Russian lessons, babysitting, and giving interviews to people still interested in her past.
In these conversations, although possibly to keep people interested, she would sometimes make bizarre admissions, including her confession that she was a psychic and that Richard Nixon’s wife had come to her in a dream. As rumors swirled in the next decades that one or more Romanoffs had survived the firing squad, Maria was asked to weigh in on whether Anna Anderson, perhaps the most famous Romanoff impostor, was really the Grand Duchess Anastasia.
Maria initially supported Anderson, but later recanted. It has since been proven that Anderson was not Anastasia and that all the Romanoffs did perish in July 1918. Anastasia was not the only ghost from Maria’s old life to come back to haunt her. Much of her life in exile was devoted to remembering her father and reinstating his image.
So when Felix Yusupov, her father’s asalent, came out with a memoir in 1928 detailing Rasputin’s end, Maria unsuccessfully sued him for damages. Soon after, she presented her own memoir, The Real Rasputin, and would follow it up with two more, in addition to sneeringly naming her dogs, Yuso and Pov, after Yusupov. It was in these writings that Maria put forward a bombshell accusation.
According to Maria, the motive behind Rasputin’s demise was nothing like what they teach in history class. In one of her memoirs, Maria insisted that her father’s murder was personal, not political. She claimed that Yusupov had made romantic advances toward her father and that the prince had lashed out and killed the monk because Rasputin had spurned these attempts.
Although most historians dismissed this claim, Maria stood by it. Maria also disputed the common account of her father’s death, which claimed that he had eaten cyanide lace sweets and been eerily completely unaffected by the poison. Instead, according to Maria, her father didn’t like sweet things and would have never eaten the offered cakes, meaning he was never poisoned in the first place.
This may have seemed like a small point to some, but it meant everything to Maria. Instead of some superhuman evil being, Rasputin was just a man, and he was murdered like one. Maria Rasputin lived to nearly 80 years old, dying in 1977 in the Russian-American Silverlake community of Los Angeles. She kept going until the very end.
Her third and last book, Rasputin: The Man Behind the Myth, which continued her efforts to humanize her father’s legacy, was published right around her passing. Through blood and exile, Maria Rasputin was nothing if not a survivor. Thanks for watching History Expose. If you love uncovering the best stories in history, hit like and subscribe to keep exploring with us.
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