Morris Barney Dalitz was born on December 25, 1899, in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Jewish family. He grew up in Michigan.
He worked in his family’s laundry business early on, but began his career in bootlegging when Prohibition began in 1919, and capitalized on his access to the laundry trucks in the family business. Additionally he developed a partnership with the Maceo syndicate which ran Galveston and supplied liquor from Canada and Mexico. Though he admitted under oath that he had been a bootlegger and had operated illegal gambling houses, Dalitz was never convicted of a crime. During Senator Estes Kefauver’s committee hearings (investigating organized crime) questioned his bootlegging, Dalitz said, “If you people wouldn’t have drunk it, I wouldn’t have bootlegged it.”
With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Dalitz turned to gambling and operated illegal but protected casinos in Steubenville, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky. For part of its ten year run, Dalitz ran The Pettibone Club, an illegal gambling hall that operated in far southwest Geauga County, Ohio from 1939 to 1949. He enlisted in the Army in World War II and rose in rank from private to first lieutenant.
