The biggest gangs shifted their operations away from alcohol and into secondary businesses like drugs, gambling and prostitution. They also profited greatly from the Great Depression.

When gambling was legalized in Nevada in 1931, loads of Prohibition-era mob money was funneled into the new casinos and hotels. Underworld accountants like Meyer Lansky wired money to brokers in Switzerland who would cover the mobster’s tracks and reinvest the cash in legitimate business.

They had to hire lawyers and accountants to launder the millions in ill-gotten cash piling up each month. They had to start thinking about strategic partnerships with other gangs and shipping logistics and real estate investment.

it wasn’t the mobsters who ran the most organized criminal schemes in America, but corrupt political “bosses,” explains Howard Abadinsky, a criminal justice professor at St. John’s University and author of Organized Crime. “The gangs were thugs in the employ of the political machines,” says Abadinsky, intimidating opposition candidates and funneling votes to the boss. In return, the politicians and police chiefs would turn a blind eye to illegal gambling and prostitution rings.

Criminal gangs had run amok in American cities since the late 19th-century, but they were mostly bands of street thugs running small-time extortion and loansharking rackets in predominantly ethnic Italian, Jewish, Irish and Polish neighborhoods.

Before Prohibition, criminal gangs were local menaces, running protection rackets on neighborhood businesses and dabbling in vice entrepreneurship.

Prelude

As the preeminent Athenian historian, Thucydides, wrote in his influential History of the Peloponnesian War

Ancient Greek warfare, meanwhile, originally a limited and formalized form of conflict, was transformed into an all-out struggle between city-states, complete with atrocities on a large scale. Shattering religious and cultural taboos, devastating vast swathes of countryside, and destroying whole cities, the Peloponnesian War marked the dramatic end to the fifth century BC and the golden age of Greece.[6]

The Peloponnesian War reshaped the ancient Greek world. On the level of international relations, Athens, the strongest city-state in Greece prior to the war's beginning, was reduced to a state of near-complete subjection, while Sparta became established as the leading power of Greece. The economic costs of the war were felt all across Greece

Thucydides

Historians have traditionally divided the war into three phases.

The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC)[2] was an ancient Greek war fought by the Delian League led by Athens against the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta

Their ability to rapidly devour waste has inspired a number of commercial applications. A pilot program at Louisiana State University deploys a small colony of soldier flies to consume the food its students toss out at one dining hall. The entomologist overseeing the project hopes it will be expanded to eliminate all campus food waste by the end of the year. In China, giant facilities owned by a company called JM Green process at least 50 tons of food waste a day with the help of black soldier flies.

After they’ve mated, the females deposit clutches of several hundred eggs into small pieces of corrugated cardboard. Evo employees collect the cardboard and deposit them into glass Mason jars to incubate.

The idea is to take pressure off traditional sources of protein meal, such as fish. About one-quarter of the harvest from marine fisheries is turned into food for farmed animals, including fish, hogs and poultry. More than 90 percent of those fisheries are either fully exploited or overfished, meaning that as the world’s population grows, there will be more demand for alternative protein sources.

An acre of land used to raise soldier fly colonies can produce more than 130,000 pounds of protein per year, according to various peer-reviewed estimates. That’s several orders of magnitude greater than the per-acre protein yield of cattle (about 40 pounds), soybeans (950 pounds) or chickens (1,800 pounds).

The larvae at Evo feast on spent grains from a handful of Texas distilleries and breweries, as much as 15 tons of it each month. Nathan Barkman of Rio Brazos Distillery said Evo eliminates close to half of his company’s weekly output of waste. It’s hot, sopping wet, highly acidic and sticky — “like lava,” he said — making it difficult to dispose. Local sanitation companies won’t take it. Pig farmers sometimes will, but the closest farms are miles outside of town, and nobody wants to be driving molten grain mash that far.

They had to lock down the proper grub-to-feed ratio, as well as the precise temperature, lighting and humidity, needed to ensure larvae reached the desired size. If any variable is out of whack, the entire colony can crash. Another challenge for soldier fly farmers is that larvae are surprisingly mischievous. A wet grub can scale any surface, from wood to glass, so growers have to maintain specific humidity levels to prevent them from getting damp, escaping their confines and generally running amok. A group of dry larvae left alone in an enclosure without food will congregate in a corner, piling up “World War Z”-style until they’re tall enough to allow their compatriots to escape. Symton solved this problem, in part, by piling wet mash in the center of their bins with a moat of dry material along the edges to prevent escape.

Using larvae to eliminate food waste at this scale could be an ecological game-changer. A 2011 U.N. report detailed how rotting food emits millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accounting for about 7 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. But when maggots consume food waste, they take all that carbon with them.

That changed in 2002 with the publication of a paper by Tomberlin, his adviser D. Craig Sheppard and others, which described a system for raising the insects in captivity. The key, they found, was finding the precise mixture of temperature, humidity and, especially, lighting to stimulate the flies to breed.

Entomologists have known of the soldier fly’s promise for decades. Researchers proposed using them to convert manure into protein as early as the 1970s.

When the LED lights are flipped on in the fly-breeding room at Evo Conversion Systems, the whir of thousands of tiny wings fills the air as flies careen about their screened-in enclosures in search of a mate.

In one year, a single acre of black soldier fly larvae can produce more protein than 3,000 acres of cattle or 130 acres of soybeans. Such yields, combined with the need to find cheap, reliable protein for a global population projected to jump 30 percent, to 9.8 billion by 2050, present big opportunity for the black soldier fly.

That’s because of the black soldier fly larva’s remarkable ability to transform nearly any kind of organic waste — cafeteria refuse, manure, even toxic algae — into high-quality protein, all while leaving a smaller carbon footprint than it found.

Taranow is the president of Symton BSF, where the larvae of black soldier flies are harvested and sold as food for exotic pets such as lizards, birds, even hedgehogs.