Background
Yellowley was born on August 12, 1873 in Ridgeland, Mississippi, the son of James Brownlow Yellowley, a lawyer and planter, and Jessie Perkins.
federal administrator statesman
Yellowley was born on August 12, 1873 in Ridgeland, Mississippi, the son of James Brownlow Yellowley, a lawyer and planter, and Jessie Perkins.
Yellowley entered a military academy in 1888.
Yellowley managed his father's Mississippi plantation. He later joined the Internal Revenue Bureau, which was then primarily engaged in catching moonshiners. In 1910 he was promoted to agent in charge and served in several cities, including Philadelphia, St. Paul, San Antonio, Nashville, Atlanta, and San Francisco. He was a superb administrator.
In 1919, Yellowley was transferred to Washington, D. C. , to reorganize the field audit division of the income and estate tax units of the bureau, and in 1920 he became the bureau's regional supervising agent in San Francisco. In 1921, after the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment, outlawing the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, Internal Revenue organized a nationwide enforcement unit. Yellowley was placed in charge of special agents who were to be deployed wherever local-level federal Prohibition officials, mostly patronage appointees, were not enforcing the law.
In 1921, Yellowley went to New York City, which he vowed to make a Sahara. Within two months, twenty-six local agents had been dismissed. Yellowley systematized the office and changed the procedures by which physicians could write prescriptions for alcohol for their patients. He arrested rabbis whom he suspected of selling wine to unauthorized persons. As a result of his work, the price of a quart of illegal whiskey rose from $8 to $20.
Two of Yellowley's policies were particularly harsh. People who visited hotels or restaurants where liquor was served or brought in by customers were arrested as material witnesses. Still more alarming to businessmen was his insistence that any hotel or restaurant that had two liquor violations be padlocked for one year. A master of strategy, Yellowley disguised agents as truck drivers, as garment workers, or even as society figures dressed in formal attire. He hired the legendary Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith. He developed a reputation for honesty and incorruptibility at a time when such a reputation in the Prohibition service was almost unique. And he uncovered several scandals. For example, much of the liquor seized in New York City in 1921 was imported. He could not understand how so much alcohol got into the United States until he learned that U. S. Customs routinely admitted liquor upon which the duty had been paid, without notifying the Prohibition Office. In one week raids netted more than $3 million of imported liquor.
From 1923 to 1925, Yellowley and his special agents operated out of Washington, and he visited nearly every state. In 1925 the local units were replaced by regional ones. Yellowley was assigned to San Francisco, but the situation in Chicago was more serious, and he was soon put in charge of the office there. From 1925 to 1930 he applied in Chicago the policies he had used in New York. He even raided the Fish Fan Club, the hangout of Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson. But the city remained largely "wet, " for Yellowley was stymied by the power and influence of Al Capone, who had built a crime empire based on bootlegging that was reputed to be making more than $100 million a year. These profits were ensured by threats, thugs, and bribes. Yellowley himself is said to have turned down $250, 000. His chief aide, Alexander Jamie, asked agent Eliot Ness to recruit special agents who would be immune to Capone's influence. Thus, the "Untouchables" were born.
In 1930, Yellowley left Prohibition enforcement to become supervisor of liquor permits for the Chicago region. In 1934, after Prohibition had ended, he became the Chicago regional supervisor of Internal Revenue's alcohol tax unit. He designed a system for collecting federal liquor taxes that was a model for the rest of the United States. When he retired in 1946, he was supervising 300 agents. In his later years Yellowley enjoyed an occasional glass of wine with dinner, but he stated that he had never had a drink during Prohibition. He died in Chicago.
About 1896 Yellowley married Mary Helms; she died in 1898. On December 29, 1912, he married Callie H. Gibbons, who died in 1927. Each marriage was childless.
