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Fort Collins passed its own prohibition ordinance in 1896, twenty years before the state followed. Enforcement pushed the trade into the foothills west of town, where the stills were run largely by Mexican immigrant laborers, by the account of longtime resident Walter Salisbury.
Colorado voters approved statewide prohibition by a narrow margin, 129,589 to 118,017. The coalition behind it was the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Saloon League, and local Protestant clergy, backed financially by industrialists like John D. Rockefeller Jr. Wartime suspicion of German American brewers helped tip the final vote.
The amendment took effect on January 1, four years ahead of national Prohibition. Colorado was dry a full state at once, with almost no force built to enforce it.
Salvatore and Pietro Carlino, known as Sam and Pete, had immigrated from Sicily as children and were farming sugar beets in Vineland, outside Pueblo, when the new law hit. They started distilling whiskey from their own surplus beet sugar instead of grain, a shortcut that gave the drink its local name, sugar moon. That year they moved the operation east to Sugar City in Crowley County, hiding stills through the countryside and in caves as demand grew.
Distilling spread through the mining towns of the high country, from Cripple Creek to Georgetown. Colorado had no real statewide police force during Prohibition, and its prohibition agents were responsible for more than 100,000 square miles between them, so bootleggers simply crossed county lines whenever a local sheriff closed in. By the early 1920s the Carlino brothers controlled most of the black market liquor trade south of Denver.
Denver police swept through Globeville, the city's Italian American neighborhood, and arrested at least eighteen bootleggers in a single week. More than half were women, many running stills from their own kitchens, one of the few paths to real economic independence open to them at the time.
Prohibition agent Dale Kearney was shot and killed in Aguilar on July 6, after leading a string of bootlegging arrests across southern Colorado.
The Carlino brothers pushed their territory north into Denver, into ground controlled by bootlegger Joe Roma, and the conflict turned fatal. On September 10, Pete Carlino was shot twice in the back and once in the head; his body was left under a bridge outside Pueblo. Sam Carlino was dead within the same year.
Joe Roma, a Denver bootlegger known as Little Caesar who ran his trade out of his own North Denver grocery stores, was shot seven times in his home on February 18, six bullets to the head. No one was ever charged, though suspicion fell on Clyde and Eugene "Checkers" Smaldone, who took over his operation and led Denver's Italian bootlegging trade for decades after. National Prohibition ended with repeal that December.
Colorado's own prohibition had ended with national repeal in 1933, but Fort Collins kept its local ordinance on the books for another thirty six years. The city council finally repealed it in October, seventy three years after it began, the last dry holdout in the state.
Craft distilling is legal again in Colorado. Small producers carry the tradition forward, off the still, into the jar.
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