But that was before Joe (it was "Honey Fritz").
Joe made his money in the market - and as someone noted above, he was chosen by FDR to close all the loopholes that screw the little guy by being the guy who started the SEC and set down the needed rules.
Joe as bootlegger may well have been an avocation - or even a vocation - at some point - but it certainly was not with the Mafia (does this fellow know anything about the Mafia? - my family were friends of some in Chicago - including Big Al - referred to not by name but as the "big man" :-) but the rules stopped non Sicilian from getting executive positions!) - and it certainly was not the way Joe made his fortune.
From:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/politics/kennedy_fortune.htmlJoseph P. Kennedy was the ambitious son of a prosperous Boston saloonkeeper and ward boss. He married the mayor's daughter, went to Harvard, and generally made the most of his ample connections and talent. He ran a bank at twenty-five and was number two man at a shipyard with more than two thousand workers during World War I. At thirty he became a stockbroker and made a fortune through insider trading and stock manipulation. He was a master of the stock pool, a then-legal stunt in which a few traders conspired to inflate a stock's price, selling out just before the bubble burst.
Kennedy may also have traded in illegal booze, although the evidence is circumstantial. His father had been in the liquor business before Prohibition, and Joe himself got into it (publicly, that is) immediately after repeal. Some believe the family business simply went underground during the dry years. He may have been strictly a nickel-and-dimer; Harvard classmates say he supplied the illicit booze for alumni events. Kennedy's real strength wasn't his alleged criminal ties but his business smarts, notably an exquisite sense of timing. In the mid-1920s he became a movie mogul (taking time out for a celebrated dalliance with Gloria Swanson), then organized a merger anda sold out just when the industry was consolidating, clearing $5 to $6 million all told. He pulled out of stocks early in 1929 and sold short following the crash, actually making money while others got creamed. Just before Prohibition was repealed he lined up several lucrative liquor-importing deals.
By the 1930s Kennedy was rich, but he didn't make serious money by modern standards until he got into real estate in a big way during World War II, raking in an estimated $100 million.
From copy of _JFK:Reckless Youth_ (By Nigel Hamilton, ISBN 0-679-74880-6) After the war (WW1), he joined the firm of Hayden, Stone and Company in Boston as a stockbroker. The investments that he had made during the war had been mixed, so now "...he set about mastering the secrets of insider trading, management pools, and selling short. Soon he was hhead of the stocks department and on his way to his first million..."
"Joseph P. Kennedy had made his first big killing in the winter of 1923. For an outlay of only $24,000---on credit---he'd used insider information given him by Galen Stone and had reaped a profit of more than a half a million dollars---$675,000---in fact---on Pond Creek Coal Company shares. <...> Sitting in his office, <...> Joe Kennedy now indulged in financial larceny on vast an unseen scale, manipulating share pricess with other hands in secret stock pools designed specifically to hoodwink investors. His growing expertise neeted him a second fortune in the spring of 1924..." Joe's further dealings are many and varied, including film deals, and not all as profitable as the insider trading. He also tried to become a wire-puller in politics, and helped to elect Roosevelt president in 1932. However, he often overrated his talents and achievements.
The next quote is the only on in the whole book that actually mentions liquor at all: "...November 1933. Mr. Kennedy had abandoned plans to see Mussolini. Instead, having used Jimmy Roosevelt to open doors that would have otherwise been closed to him, Kennedy managed to obtain the exclusive United States distributership for Haig & Haig, Gordon't Dry Gin, Pinchbottle, and other British liquors in anticipation of the repeal of Prohibition."
And finally, a little irony:
"On June 28, 1934, President Roosevelt finally rewarded Kennedy for his work in the 1932 election campaign. Countering all objections with the words "it takes a thief to catch a thief," he appointed Joeseph P. Kennedy the first chairman of a new regulatory agency to tidy up the nation's stock market: the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. To the consternation of all, the notorious stock-market swindler Joeseph P. Kennedy would become stock-market reformer."
In short, Joe Sr. was a pretty ruthless and unethical businessman who made his pile with shady stock deals. He later tried to buy respectability in the political scene. He, however, never appears to have smuggled liquor, and, quite frankly, as he was making money hand over fist with the stock market (in many cases quite legally doing what the SEC was later set up to stop from happening) it seems unlikely that he would have bothered with something so patently illegal.
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