![]() Dean O’Banion, Capone’s main rival, was said to have made $1 million annually on bootlegged liquor, but only at his peak. Al Capone was said during his tax-evasion trial to have made $1 million in 19 combined, a time when the bootlegging business was better established. After paying his employees, legal and transportation costs, and giving a split of his proceeds to Meyer Wolfsheim, his business partner, it’s unlikely that Gatsby’s personal profits in 19 would have amounted to megamillions.Įven the most famous bootleggers in America rarely made millions during the early years. If we assume that Gatsby began selling liquor in Chicago several months after the Volstead Act’s passage (with a several-month lag to buy up drug stores and establish his business), that gives him roughly two years to have built up a fortune.īootlegging was a fairly low-margin business, since so much of every dollar made was spent on bribes, lawyers, and mob protection, and Gatsby’s start-up costs would have eaten into his first-year profits. The Volstead Act, which officially prohibited the selling and manufacture of alcoholic drinks, was passed in late October, 1919. In the summer of 1922, when The Great Gatsby is set, Prohibition was only two and a half years old. We are told that Gatsby came up from essentially nothing, and that the first time he met Daisy Buchanan, he was “a penniless young man.” His fortune, we are told, was the result of a bootlegging business – he “bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago” and sold illegal alcohol over the counter. It turns out that, far from accumulating vast stores of wealth, Jay Gatsby might have been spending beyond his means.įirst, let’s start by examining Gatsby’s incoming cash flows. So I pulled every nugget from The Great Gatsby related to Gatsby’s personal wealth and income, and every passage that detailed his spending, and - with the help of some experts - tried to re-create a historical ledger that might have shown the state of Jay Gatsby’s fortune, if he had been a real person and not a figment of F. But an over-the-top party every weekend? Even hedge-funders don’t live like that. He’s described as a wealthy man, but he’s still living a very tony lifestyle for someone who made most of his money bootlegging. Upon rereading the book recently, I took special note of Gatsby’s spending habits. Nothing, it seemed, was too expensive for Jay Gatsby. These parties were all-weekend affairs, filled with luxury accoutrements: live music, gourmet meals, free-flowing liquor. Gatsby-themed parties are popping up around the country, in somewhat misguided homage to the over-the-top shindigs Gatsby held at his West Egg mansion. Baz Luhrmann’s screen adaptation of The Great Gatsby has already inspired new interest in the lavish lifestyle of Jay Gatsby, the book’s mysterious millionaire protagonist.
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