It's 1921 on Lower Folsom Street in San Francisco.

The streets are thronged with people, sidewalks so crowded and chaotic that an older woman

draped in a red bear plaid shawl is all but invisible as she melts into a nondescript doorway.

What happened next sounds like something straight out of Hollywood, but this is no movie.

And that was no timid old lady in that plaid shawl.

Her name was Daisy Del Simpson.

And that doorway led into one of San Francisco's sedious bootleg establishments.

Daisy was an undercover federal agent, and this is prohibition. That wild chapter in American

history when we thought that promoting virtue was as easy as outlawing booze.

Boy, were we in for an ugly surprise.

And so were the five rough and tough bootleggers that Daisy backed up against a wall and held at gunpoint.

Just another day at work for one of the baddest bad girls that no one seems to have ever heard of.

Let's fix that.

And they got a small beam of light against the mirror.

True. Prohibition Prohibition was such a weird and frankly hopeless idea that it's hard to believe it really happened. But it did

happen and in the biggest possible way with an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 18th Amendment.

It was ratified on January 16th, 1919, after nearly 100 years of tireless campaigning by the temperance crowd.

The temperance movement saw alcohol as the catalyst for everything reckless and ruinous

and godless in American society.

And to be fair, excessive consumption of alcohol was a problem for sure in 1800 when the movement began.

Back then, there were no laws regulating the age at which a person could consume or purchase alcohol.

And by 1830, the average American man, 15 years and older, was throwing back more than seven gallons per year of the stuff.

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